Today, the WTO agreed to outlaw rating agencies because the buffoons have overstepped their bounds as government/business puppets.
A thanks to the pay-coms in Huntsville – Marshall Space Flight Center is a special place.
It’s Wednesday, so it must be Tuesdy – thanks to Beauregard’s and other places I’ve fallen behind in thanking for their business and their employees’ service.
Buncar opened his eyes to stop reading the book downloaded to his optic nerve memory.
Sure, he was old-fashioned like that, preferring the linear text method to full-immersion stories.
He looked at the folding chair on which he rested his left foot.
Sensing Buncar’s mood, the chair changed the fabric pattern to cheer up Buncar.
Buncar frowned.
What happened to the days when his hunting cabin was a getaway-from-it-all?
The living room monitor upped the pheromone therapy treatment, relaxing Buncar’s tense shoulder muscles.
Buncar closed his eyes and picked up where he left off reading “It was the best of dregs, it was the worst of dregs,” pop fiction about the Great Cyclical Recession of the 2010s.
His buddies setting up blinds to hunt Terraform pseudodeer could wait for him to join them later that sol, especially since he’d already closed the business deal with Genzhou at breakfast, Buncar’s sole reason for the hunting expedition.
Despite advances in automatic technical spec generation and computerised empathetic business contract negotiation, nothing satisfied an oldtimer like Buncar as an all-expenses-paid trip to the ice cap wilds of Mars with similarly minded intuitive sales execs.
Plus, the bonus off this sale would pay for his wife and him to enjoy a second honeymoon on Ganymede.
2032 was a tough year in space exploration.
Policy and procedure writers continue to debate the decision that Terraform Corp made.
Although the company would never pinpoint who made the final call, researchers demonstrated that weeks of internal discussions led to vague conclusions.
Game designers had long ago given their players similar scenarios to work through.
If an Earth-to-Mars transportation vehicle suffers major life support damage, do you use automatic pilot to land the vehicle and give the dead passengers proper burial rites, or do you allow the vehicle to burn up in reentry as a fiery tribute to early pioneer settlers of Mars?
Terraform Corp executives, stuck with their decision – using robotic equipment to remove the dead passengers, giving them a “burial at sea” in order to preserve fuel for the remaining journey to Mars – did not endear them with the general public at the time they ran for public office.
In hind sight, their decision looks wise because the extra fuel provided early settlers an irreplaceable resource when repairs were needed after a major dust storm in 2034.
Satguar relaxed her grip on the handlebars.
“What are you doing?” Mannow, her tandem bike mate, asked.
“Trusting my sense of balance.”
She closed her eyes and felt the texture and tilt of the road surface speak to her body.
She knew the race course’s twists and turns, having driven them dozens of times.
Satguar smelled an approaching rain storm, sensing it only minutes from soaking the tandem teams competing for the Terraform Corp Grand Prize.
She pressed her torso to the bike’s frame, bending her head to reduce the bike’s friction profile and leaned hard, pedaling in unison with her partner.
She could hear the three teams ahead of struggling to exit the hairpin turn that rose thirty-five degrees for 500 metres.
Remembering the breathing techniques her parents taught her at age three, Satguar released her thoughts from attachment to external stimuli and triggered the reserve of hormones and energy solution stored in undetectable pouches surgically attached to switch neurons, nicknamed “zippers,” she had trained years to activate for a moment like this.
They sped by the three teams in rapid succession.
They crossed the finish line an hour later, ten minutes ahead of the closest team.
As they held up the trophy, Satguar broke her normal determined look and grinned.
The motto of Terraform Corp, “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” the inspiration for her name, Satguar, stood three metres high, given to her by her parents, an American female astronaut and Russian male cosmonaut, who conceived Satguar in the ISS at the same time they came up with the idea for Terraform Corp.
They had the foetus removed after the mission and raised in a surrogate mother, an astronaut trainee, to hide the pregnancy, waiting until the right moment to announce the first human child conceived in space, low-orbit or otherwise.
Suddenly I seem to see more of these abuse cases. Hmm…
As the last U.S. Space Shuttle mission EVA winds down, former astronauts and cosmonauts are clamoring to release the first “kiss and tell,” behind-the-scenes autobiography of what really took place during the 30-year span of Space Shuttle missions.
Meanwhile, I rarely lose bets and ever more rarely admit it.
Today is an exception.
A journalist friend of mine bet he could prove how banal most people’s lives are by finding an obscure murder trial where the defendant was obviously not guilty and turn the trial into a circus, causing thousands, if not millions, of people to expend emotional energy over the results of the trial.
I told him that people had important lives and would not let themselves be so easily manipulated.
I’m sorry to report I lost.
Now, back to writing the book of the Book of the Future.
In shocking news today, the U.S. president reached a compromise with Congress, agreeing to a 100% tax on all speaking fees, book royalties and presidential reelection campaign funds in order to pull his country from the edge of the economic abyss.
Murdoch’s empire claims to have Blackberry audio in which the treasury secretary says that he’s willing to sell Alaska to Russia and give up market domination rights of the Philippines and Japan in exchange for China buying all U.S. treasuries from now on, thus turning the U.S. into a regional power and a foreign freetrade zone for the Communist country.
Members of Congress will meet the compromise and allow reporters to follow them on “vacations” with donors and lobbyists, submitting all travel-related expenses and graft as 100% taxable, subtracted, of course, from their Congressional compensation packages.
This, the budget office assures us, is sufficient to put the U.S. treasury back on the plus side.
The dishwasher hums a mechanical tune,
Hanging out in the kitchen, neither gal nor dude.
Atlantis, suspended, stretching ISS’ CG,
Silent symbol of glories both hard and easy.
Ceiling tiles,
Heat tiles,
Ground wires,
Ground crews…
Shadows swirling in orbit,
Getting ready for slumber,
Looking busy on CCTV.
DPS, ACO, MMU,
Muxes and demuxes,
Banners and patches,
Lanyards and ties,
Earpieces, monitors,
Shuttle flight control team on full display.
Cleaning crew and sandwiches –
Cameos in support roles.
Tin cans in space,
Hardened modules in the hot sun.
Cats sleeping on sofa,
One snoring,
One dreaming of
Chasing mice rather than tracking solar arrays.
A study in blue.
Faces caught on camera –
Close the port or open the port?
You tell me.
A house fly, seeking the open world of a fly’s life, buzzed against the window.
Lee looked at his chewed-down fingernails.
He relished the victory of getting politicians to perform their patriotic duties to save the republic from economic doom by refusing salaries, perks or graft from government jobs.
Lee lit a candle, meditated for a few minutes and watched spider webs in the woods send silent reflective codes across the crowded airwaves to his eyes.
Only so much time left to live.
He knew that modern technology decreased the time until boredom set in.
Readers wanted an entertaining storyline that attracted their sympathies toward and/or away plots, themes and characters.
Lee wondered how much doubt and paranoia was good for competition.
He had one goal, a lifelong goal, to establish Earth-based lifeforms off this planet.
A second fly joined the first at the lip of a skylight.
Twenty minutes had passed since the candle was lit.
Lee snuffed the wick.
A thin trail of smoke, a million wisps of translucent spider threads, rose to the ceiling, chasing the flies.
He could open the airlocks to let the flies out of the room.
After all, flies didn’t understand ambient temperature, oxygen content or 3D projections that simulated a wooded backyard.
Lee had grown up in this Martian laboratory, watching the 3D imagery become more realistic – trees changing and growing through the seasons, birds and insects flying past, rain and snow falling while making the appropriate sounds/temperatures changes to the windows and skylights.
When he reached maturity, his bionic caregiver taught him about the harshness of Martian atmospheric conditions, spending weeks training Lee on the use of a full-body covering that protected him when he was ready to step into the airlocks and wander the Martian landscape.
Lee sent a house fly into the airlock.
The fly did not appear in the window view outside the airlock.
Lee opened the airlock and the fly was gone.
A hint something was amiss.
Lee decided then and there to create or find an environment on another world where he and house flies could roam freely.
His great-great grandparents had come from Earth and left him instructions not to return.
He mentally connected to the laboratory computer network to check his simulation results.
Were enough supplies available to build a gravity-defying vehicle to get him away from Mars and on to a place where his Earth-based plants and animals could thrive outside?
Another twenty minutes had passed but time had no meaning to Lee.
His virtual friends came and went without a connection to time or reason.
He logged the moment and sent it out to his impatient fans on Earth who wanted every detail of his normal celebrity life as the only living, laboratory-created person on Mars.
Or so they told him.
He didn’t know or care.
He had an outer space ship to design and build.
Or so he led himself to believe, he and his fans unaware he was a computer simulation himself.
For those who missed it, here’s a recap of the last U.S. Space Shuttle blastoff and docking to the ISS with some bonus shots recapping the 30-year span of space shuttle missions:
treetrunkdings 