Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
News you can use — Monday edition
Ever wondered what a phased array of light would look like? I sure do. Now, what about that old bucket brigade down in the basement closet? Hmm…
Next on the list: combining solar systems into a super large wavelength phased array antenna set — we’ve got work to do this year to impact schedules a few thousand years from now!
Puppet with a purpose…
Clips and Cuts: Robotic Surgeons, Inc.
The Committee of 7.5 had held off meetings for three months to avoid being seen in one place, even virtually.
Events forced them to convene ahead of schedule.
“We have a leak.”
“What?”
“Yes. The group of volunteers we had interviewed had gathered and cross-examined one another, creating a fairly accurate picture of what we’re going to do with them.”
“No way. We purposely included a lot of bogus questions so they couldn’t do this.”
“I think that’s the problem. The questions were too bogus.”
“‘Too bogus?’ You mean all the inquiries about their sports interests and fashion choices?”
“No. The ones about their computer coding skills and knowledge of mechanical design. It looked like we hadn’t looked at their CVs, when they knew we had.”
“What does this mean? Is the project on hold?”
“No. But we’ll have to come clean.”
“You mean be honest? Is that in our nature?”
“Well, it’s certainly not in our bylaws.”
After talking amongst themselves for ten excruciating minutes, I joined them via secure telecom.
“Gentlemen, ladies and child, thanks for attending this emergency meeting.”
They grunted and nodded.
“Does anyone have objections to the candidates? I still haven’t gotten yeas from all of you.”
Silence.
“Okay, what’s the problem?”
“Don’t you know? The candidates have figured out our real agenda!”
I looked at the electronic images displayed on the simulated computer screens in my ‘mind’s eye.’ The Committee members were visibly excited.
“But you assume you know what the agenda is, don’t you?”
They smiled in unison.
“That’s right. I am keeping you in the dark and I have asked to be kept in the dark so that the ISSA Net can accomplish the true purpose for this mission.”
How easily we forget that we’re never fully in control of our plans no matter how much we micromanage the minutia.
“So, what do they think?”
“They think we’re establishing a forward military base to thwart the advances of an unseen enemy they are sure we know about but aren’t telling them.”
“Very good. And they have no idea that we’re going to ask them to give up their reproductive organs to prevent accidental additions to the first wave of builders, settlers and explorers?”
Silence, the absolute sign of agreement in our group meetings.
“Excellent. Then move on to step two. Let’s transfer the candidates to the training facilities as soon as possible. Remember, we want them in place on Mars before the next 13,627 days have elapsed. Triangulating a giant antenna between Earth, Moon and Mars is tricky business, as you well know. Don’t forget what happened when the last alignment occurred thousands of years ago!”
Blank stares answered back, just as we had rehearsed, knowing we were being watched, throwing false comments into our meetings to give any persons who consider us their enemy a whole set of paranoid delusions to feed upon and leave us alone while they pondered infinite possibilities about planetary alignments and imaginary galactic foes.
“Dismissed!”
Bubble
Guinevere stood inside the entryway, looking through the portal window, admiring the view of the Martian landscape interrupted here and there by landing pods.
“What is fear?”
She rolled the question around and around in her thoughts, thinking back over the last decade of her life, the years of education, more years of training for this moment.
A terrible automobile smashup had slowed her down temporarily.
A small leg injury had lightened her steps on the dance floor once.
Missile design and rocket propulsion classes had ended.
Her new life began.
She welcomed the new change, relished the challenges, climbing the rungs of the ladder of life that disappeared into infinity.
What is fear? Fear is the type of insanity where you wanted things to remain the same when you knew they were not in your possession or in your control to begin with, subject to change without notice.
Guinevere knew no fear.
She lived on borrowed time.
Guinevere looked out the portal window and asked a question out loud to no one in particular.
“How far do you want to go exploring tomorrow?”
After thousands of hours in simulator training and millions of miles of travel, she was ready to take off right now, no moment wasted, but knew she needed to help the crew unload the rest of the gear.
After all, they had the rest of their lives to spend here on this pioneering outpost.
What was one last night together with everyone before they branched out into separate scientific teams and work crews?
Community Standards: If You Do The Crime, Can You Do The Time?
Recently, a young man notorious for breaking laws in order to make a point about monetised public information, decided to disappear from a contemporaneous timeline with his family, friends and colleagues — I honour his decision by neither mentioning his name nor saying more.
But his death brings up a problem I have with projecting back toward 2013 from 3013 — if your species continues to hide information from itself in a dog-eat-dog world, what do I care if you do or do not make it to a point 1000 years into the future?
With seven billion different views about what life should be for the individual, for the family, for the subculture, for the species, for the global economy, for the local/global ecosystem, do I spend time here in any format describing a future that encompasses our thoughts and feelings now as they expand and contract over the centuries?
Or, instead, do I return to the cabin in the woods and record observations about water dripping from gutters, flowers blooming out of season and other simple things that add to my happiness?
It is still perplexing, deciding how to change my life now that my father is gone and I’m the oldest male in his lineage to carry on his strong beliefs and wishes, regardless of them contradicting and conflicting with mine.
I am a product of the “Me” generation and want to pursue personal goals that satisfy my whims and desires in the moment, regardless of their effect on history and/or the ecosystem.
But I am also my father’s son, who was taught that our bloodline is an important thread in the fabric of our species’ place on this planet.
How do I keep these two aspects of my life, this set of states of energy, happy?
Today, I meditate upon the mysterious conundrum that is my life and leave the rest of the universe to its unobserved orderly chaos.
A break from the battlefront…
While troops on foreign shores find themselves retiring back to their home places, although home will never be the same again, let us pause for a moment.
Isn’t it time we see what this century looks like 1000 years from now, all the gadgets for home automation examined again — no longer servo mechanisms, X10 controllers, serial ports or Zigbee radios — to determine the worth of automating that which has little utility served by joining the Internet of Things?
When do solutions chase problems that barely existed, if ever?
What is the value of remotely-controlled lights in a house when no one is home?
How many people find an Internet-connected refrigerator useful?
Haven’t we chased and captured these dreams over and over, from one generation to the next, at World’s Fairs/Expositions, EPCOT, and similar exhibits of an always-on future?
What are we really gaining here other than diminishing returns on markets with high margins but little interest?
In other words, we seven billion people are here together — shouldn’t we focus on…well, what should we focus on?
We sought peace in the midst of waging war “over there” and now that peace is nearly at hand, what are we going after next?
What do you want for your children and yourselves?
We shall move into the future and look back at the answers to some of these questions, tossing out the paranoia of uninformed/fearful citizens and showing you the positive aspects of a population that makes its own destiny rather than waiting to be told what its citizens should want, love, hate and fear.
In other words, we’ll let you own your guns and ammunition as long as you let us compete against you for the same manufacturing resources that can be used for guns, missiles or rockets in order to explore the cosmos.
What if…
What if a group of armed citizens set up a protective unit around James Yeager, the protective unit gets its own concentric circular layer of protection, etc., until every armed citizen was backed and protected by every other armed citizen?
Our subsubsubsubbasement supercomputer is having a lot of fun plotting out futures with this scenario in mind.
What if a security company, in order to promote its protective services, offered protection for James Yeager and his arsenal?
What about all the trained mercenaries who have nothing better to do with their time than go to shooting ranges and gun shows?
Would they be willing to take a stand in the name of James Yeager?
Where will the line in the sand be drawn?
What was that old colonial American revolutionary saying about standing together or falling one by one?
Where’s a good buffoonish plot ploy like Janet Reno at a time like this?
What have the enclaves like the Montana Freemen learned in protecting themselves for the last couple of decades?
Who will be the next David Koresh and his Waco followers dying at the hands of an overzealous government?
Vaccinated for diplomatic immunity
SO, here’s the story so far…
The Urbanki Bureaucracy, fearing its populace, has fallen right into the hands of the Ruralites’ plan to demonstrate they’re being oppressed by “The Man.”
How?!, you might ask.
Let us look at the recent facts in the storyline and tell you what could happen next.
First, paranoid suspicion of an indefinable entity such as a large bureaucracy is, like fear of the dark, a natural reaction by many.
The imagined hierarchy of bosses in a large corporation.
The terrible police and paramilitary troops that patrol your province, their faces hidden behind uniforms and equipment.
The social hierarchy and anarchy of insects that swarm in dark spaces underneath your domicile.
These fears are as inbred in us as any tribe isolated in the densest forest.
Where there is fear, there is also the chance for escape.
Let us take two data points from the same source, for an example.
Look at this guy, James Yeager, who exercised his free right to express himself but, the local state bureaucracy, so full of itself and fearful of its people all coming to the same conclusion, decides to take away the guy’s gun ownership permit.
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum comments afterward.
James has many options.
First of all, the ACLU can step in to defend James’ rights.
Second, James can accept an offer from the “country” of NSK for immediate citizenship and a diplomatic position in its tiny bureaucracy, which leads to James having diplomatic immunity for ownership of his arsenal.
James might have to give up his U.S. citizenship and move his property into an estate or trust but…
Guess what!
As a martyred exile in his former country, James becomes a beacon of escape for his other oppressed patriots.
As more and more patriotic exiles join NSK for the sake of protecting themselves against the entrenched tyranny of bloated, overtaxing and indefinable bureaucracies, the NSK will be the first nongeographical country to declare war on a geographical country, opening up the door for the Inner Solar System Alliance to publicly announce its existence in order to declare all nonEarth territory offlimits to claims of ownership or protection by Earth-based bureaucracies, to prevent further land-based wars.
Wars based purely on ideology will continue unabated.
Meanwhile, a secret executive committee commissioned for consideration of calamities to cause after the next Urbanski Bureaucracy inauguration has released a preliminary agenda that shocked the pundits who were allowed to briefly glance at the agenda written in 2-point font.
From what they saw but cannot officially talk about, the Bureaucracy plans to incite the anger of the populace more and more and then, at the right moment, divert attention from itself by saying the primary goal of its first administrative term of office was to flush the LGBT and illegal immigrant community out into the open so that angry, armed citizens could easily identify these communities as causes for whatever problems the citizens believe are inflicted on them by the Bureaucracy. The Bureaucracy will imply but not state that no harm will come to armed citizens if they take the law into their own hands for a brief time to eliminate the “cause of their problems” as long as it’s not directed directly at the Bureaucracy.
The Bureaucracy did not detail whether NSK citizens were included in the announcement.
One of the signals they will send to signify this brief window of opportunity will appear in the classified section of one of the few profitable newspapers still being printed in the U.S.:
“In The Loop” + “Salt” = “Falling Down”
The influence of text upon history
My mother in-law was a longtime subscriber to National Geographic magazine. My wife and I have enjoyed flipping through recent copies and discovering little gems about the influence upon our “modern” times, such as:
treetrunkdings 