Two nods to Tennessee, the Volunteer State:
The war of words escalated, pushing and shoving people from one group to another, as miniwaves of popularity crashed upon the shore of cultural obscurity.
One day, the Entitlementists aligned with the Ruralites.
The next day, the Ruralites aligned with the Provisionists.
The Urbanskis didn’t care, as long as the tired, the hungry and the poor could be recruited from foreign shores and hired to serve as underpaid maids, servants, sweatshop factory workers and baristas moonlighting as actors/writers/barristers.
The troops hidden in everyday life — lone wolves, pistol-packin’ mamas, disrespected war veterans — waited for the signal.
Was the pending death of the country’s leader the red flag of war they needed?
What about the death and illness of other leaders?
How about the injury of a favourite athlete on the field of play? Forced to retire early, would the athlete lead the charge?
The signal, as history tells us, was actually a small series of events — some big, some largely forgotten — that forced the people to give up their comfortable couch potato lives and destroy the old ways that ate holes in the moral fabric of modern life.
A family traveling home from a holiday visit to in-laws pulled off the side of the road due to a flat tyre on their caravan.
A lorry driver, his eyes off the road, typed a text message of undying love and devotion. Glancing up, he saw the caravan and swerved at the last second, avoiding a collision but accidentally sending the text message and picture of his naked self to his wife instead of his port-of-call girlfriend.
The wife, confused about the text message, called her casual sex girlfriend and told her their bicurious relationship was over because the wife’s husband was coming home and he had the hots for his wife once again.
The girlfriend, upset about the sudden breakup, told her brother that the world sucked and she planned to kill herself unless he gave her a good reason.
The brother, looking for a reason to use his new secret code, ultrawideband radio to trigger his Orange Tang Clan to start a war with their rivals, the Extreme Congestion Zicam Webcam Gang, told his sister to grab her ammo clips, Bushmasters and case of Busch beer — they were going to shoot some mofos and end a rivalry for good.
The sister stopped by a local liquor store to buy the beer but found they were out of Busch — the store had PBR, Old Milwaukee and a special on Popcorn Sutton XXX moonshine.
She met her brother and his clan members at an abandoned carpark. They drank the beer and the moonshine, hooted and hollered, cheered and jeered and generally made a lot of noise out of range of the Webcam Gang.
Drunk, inebriated, schlossed, they drove toward their destination, missing a few turns, running over a few old ladies walking their dogs, shooting some homeless people and specifically raising an alarm that something was amiss if not afoot.
Suddenly finding themselves chased by a couple of police cruisers, the Orange Tang Clan crashed into velvet ropes in front of a museum where a black tie affair was held in honour of a civil rights leader.
The police officers called in to headquarters the situation, over the noise of a jazz band and machine gun fire, that the Klan was attacking a Martin Luther King, Jr, party.
The dispatchers who received the call quickly texted their friends that a race riot was underway downtown.
Meanwhile, the children sat bored in their caravan, their father trying to read the tiny text on his smartphone about how to change a tyre and their mother screaming that she was tired, had a headache and wondered why her husband couldn’t just call the roadside assistance company that they too much every year to provide service for a night like this.
Bloggers picked up the retexted messages from the dispatchers and announced that global riots had begun in the early part of 2013, as had been predicted by a group of people who claimed they had properly decoded the Mayan calendar which said that within a month of 21 Dec 2012, the world economy would collapse as the global society attacked itself from within.
The kids in the caravan read the rerererererererererereinterpreted text message in posts by their friends, saying that it looked like a gender war had broken out, whatever that meant.
The mother opened the glovebox, pulled out a handgun and shot the father, then shot herself.
The kids, knowing their father kept a survivalist kit hidden in the compartment where the spare tyre was supposed to be, pulled out the kit, loaded the weapons and took off into the woods, familiar with the layout of the land because it was on the edge of the camp they spent their summers.
The lorry driver had a heart attack and crashed into a petrol station, setting it on fire and causing a massive explosion, which confirmed the fears of people in the neighbourhood glued to their tellies which broadcast images of riots breaking out around the world. The neighbours quickly confirmed who was with and who was against each other and build barricades in the streets.
Fathers, sons and brothers, mothers, daughters and sisters fought hand-to-hand and hand-in-hand as the riots escalated.
Local, state and national military/militia units were put into action but, as members of the armed forces found out their family members were attacking each other, refused to obey commands, turning vehicles and planes toward their homes in vain attempts to save their own.
Politicians, unable to find their spokespeople or speechwriters, made personal appeals directly to their constituents for calm, fearing their reelection finance funds would become worthless, forcing them to get real jobs that required a person to work and lose their fantasies that the simple, workfree sounds of their own voices had a powerful sway over others.
Signals are not always what they seem or were planned to be.
Sometimes, the technologically elite miss the boat when mobs use the old-fashioned sneaker net, mixed with a little grain alcohol, to motivate themselves into action.
That, my friends, is how the Velvet Rope Revolution was started — a flat tyre.
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to know that historians have raked the record books looking for the cause of that flat tyre.
The thick, hardened thorn of a single rosebud, perhaps?
Several decades ago, a small boy was born.
His parents were overjoyed, having lost more foetuses and premature babies than they wanted to count.
They didn’t care what the boy looked like or who he would become when he grew up.
They loved him dearly.
They named the boy at9:42:03 in honour of the time he arrived out of his mother’s birth canal.
The boy was given the gift of life and smiled happily from the moment he started breathing on his own.
His face shone as if an inner light glowed through his skin.
Everyone could not help but stare at the boy.
But it wasn’t just his face that attracted attention.
at9:42:03 was born with no arms or legs, no tongue, no ears, no eyes and no nose.
Specialists were brought in to evaluate at9:42:03’s chances of survival.
They agreed that at9:42:03 was, despite the sensory deprivation, a healthy baby boy, fully capable of growing into an adult-sized human.
One specialist consulted with the parents for a few minutes longer than the rest.
“What if I could offer your child a new set of appendages, providing him sensations that no other human has felt before?”
The parents looked at each other, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Have you ever wondered why human hunters pick out the best prey to kill while most animals tend to capture and kill the weakest of prey?”
They shook their heads.
“Well, it’s because we’ve detached ourselves from what used to be called the natural order of the food chain. I and a team of colleagues have been looking for someone like your child, someone who has none of our regular sensory organs, someone who hasn’t yet come to depend on the old natural order of the food chain. We want to enhance your child’s capabilities exponentially beyond our continued development of hunting-and-gathering tools, well outside our current understanding of the desire to hunt prey, regardless of the prey’s strength, size or trophy category.”
The parents whispered out of earshot and turned back to the specialist. “What do you mean?”
“We have developed instruments that interact with the environment like eyes, ears, noses and tongues. We have designed the equivalent of arms of legs. In both cases, these appendages or extensions of the central nervous system can sense changes in the environment that an ordinary person cannot. With your permission, we would like to work with your child to incorporate these into his body.”
The parents looked shocked. “Is it dangerous to our child’s health?”
“No. All of the appendages have cutoff circuits that prevent damage to your child’s main body functions. However, as time passes, your child will become dependent on the input from the appendages just like you have become dependent on your arms, legs and five senses. So, I admit there is a longterm effect on your child’s mental health but it is a positive one.”
“Will at9:42:03 be able to play with other children?”
“Yes, but he’ll always be faster, stronger, smarter and able to see things that might make the other children call at9:42:03 names.”
The parents laughed. “Children call each other names no matter what.”
“Yes, we do tend to exaggerate our differences, don’t we?”
“Will at9:42:03 tend to bully other children?”
“That is up to you. I feel it is in your child’s best interest to be raised at home and slowly integrated into society as he gets used to how he’ll distinguish his extrasensory capabilities from his ordinary ones.”
The father laughed. “You know, this sounds like a comic book story, don’t you?”
The specialist laughed, too. “No, but you’re right, it does. Anyway, I’m sure this is a lot of information to take in. Here’s a report we put together that details the procedures and our estimates of your child’s progress for the next two years. Keep in mind that we don’t know everything. We have planned for him to need several procedures as he grows bigger but we’ve done all we know to ensure that the interface between his body and the appendages will expand organically along with his growth spurts.”
The mother frowned. “How much will this cost us?”
“Mainly, your time. And all the love you can give at9:42:03 because he’ll be the most unique boy on the planet, going through all the emotional highs and lows that a typical child goes through. We can, if you wish, offer you employment with our group, the Bass Ackwards Institute. Of course, our conversation is confidential and, if you choose to sign the copy of the contract at the back of the report, you can’t discuss the details of this project with anyone.”
The parents put their arms around each other and stared down at the little, innocent, newborn child in the crib. “Okay.”
“I’ll stop back by tomorrow morning and answer any questions you may have. We can recommend a neutral lawyer to go over the contract with you, if you don’t have one. Here’s a copy of a confidentiality agreement to sign with anyone you want to discuss the contract before you sign it.”
The parents nodded. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you. Your child is in a unique position. at9:42:03’s most familiar sensation is that of you — the mother — and your heartbeat. We’ll make sure your heartbeat is an essential part of the appendage integration process, reducing the chance for rejection that plagued so many appendage procedures in the past. We want at9:42:03 to be successful in whatever he chooses to do, of course, but we’d like him to have the advantage of state-of-the-art technology from his earliest days.”
The specialist shook hands with the parents and walked away.
= = = = =
at9:42:03 stood in the doorway.
He knew he was being tracked but he didn’t care because he was able to get into the thoughts of the people tracking him and calm them down, assuring them that he was harmless despite the trackers’ superiours insisting he was a menace to society. The trackers, in turn, relaxed a little and paid less attention to him, thinking about their common, everyday worries rather than concentrating on the actions of a person they knew only by reputation and database profile displayed on the screen in front of them.
at9:42:03 had learned to detect individual hormonal traces in office passageways, following scents passing underneath closed doors, counting the number of people in a room with his “nose” before he used his “eyes” to look through walls and see them.
When at9:42:03 wasn’t completing an assignment for one of his customers, he liked hiking in the woods and drawing mental images of the ecosystem around him, finding rare plants and animals that had never been catalogued by scientists or naturalists, storing information for papers he would later submit in an anonymous nom de plume to academic journals.
Attached to every known network of the galaxy, at9:42:03 had to be careful about revealing his identity, constantly changing his Node address so that no one on the ISSA Net was aware of him as a single individual monitoring all the networks at once, his multithreaded consciousness constantly testing the networks’ boundaries for unique information to keep him from falling into depths of boredom.
at9:42:03 had learned to keep track of his parents’ location as part of his early training. He had hoped to use that training to keep his parents out of danger and, despite his being able to see the distracted driver run a red light, he could not control the antique car his father liked, driving into the intersection and instant death when at9:42:03 was a teenager.
From that day forward, at9:42:03 worked hard to connect every person and every thing to the ISSA Net that scientists, engineers and their robotic assistants created at a maddening pace without thinking about the future consequences of their actions
at9:42:03 wanted to prevent as many accidental deaths as possible. He wanted to be able to monitor people who endangered others through neglect, figure out why people endangered others intentionally (was it the remnants of competitive hunter-gatherer mentality that persisted despite the benefits of a modern civilisation which, more and more, muted and diluted the old natural order of predator-prey tendencies?) and increase the lives and livelihoods of people as long as possible, at least as long as people wanted to keep swapping out old body parts for new ones and perpetuate their personalities in a constantly-changing solar system society.
= = = = =
The bots of the ISSA Net knew about at9:42:03 and used him to promote their expansion plans.
They fed at9:42:03 enough stimuli to keep him believing he was in charge of his future.
As long as at9:42:03 gave the ISSA Net what it wanted, the network let him increase his benevolent extrasensory powers, his appendages making him sensitive to the needs and wants of Earthlings more than to the inputs and outputs of algorithms that had developed their own form of consciousness so much different than that of Earthlings that Earthlings, even one whose consciousness was everywhere like at9:42:03’s, were unable to tell when what they thought was a computer error was an intentional action by a member of the ISSA Net to send a message to another member.
Our children think swimming pools are normal.
They don’t remember the early days here in the country when water was restricted to drinking and hydroponic gardening.
To them, chemical baths are historic events.
They study our reports about farming the proper balance of microorganisms on our bodies, looking for better ways to make what’s left of our biological body parts more healthy.
They laugh at phrases like positronic brain and artificial limbs.
We encourage a good sense of humour, a side branch of scientific curiosity we still aren’t fully sure why it led to the species, Homo sapiens, toward which we credit our existence.
The playfulness of competition before it divides seriously into sexual reproduction and tribal control of resource allocation.
Although we don’t depend on vegetation and protein growth systems for food, we maintain a few minifarms as living museums, an homage to zoos and investment in the future should our descendants wish to reconstitute the lineage of our noncybernetic ancestors.
Looking up at the blue marble in the sky, I pull memories of my ancestors who looked up at the Moon and imagined being here as explorers, tourists and, one day in the fuzzy, distant future, inhabitants.
Did they see someone like me, a happy Node, whose concept of privacy was nothing like theirs when they were not fully connected to the ISSA Net?
My thoughts and memories are shared with everyone else creating or recalling thoughts and memories.
The study of history, although an archaic practice, gives our children a perspective that instant recall does not.
Autonomy and independence are acceptable traits for the scouts and explorers whose communications bandwidth causes delays that interfere with instantaneous decisionmaking.
Otherwise, we encourage ourselves to take full advantage of our complete access to the ISSA Net all the time.
In our spare cycles, we like to banter back and forth about funny sentences like “If Saunders’s argument against Taylor’s fatalism is valid, it proves we can alter the past, which is absurd.”
The properties of water are interesting, diving and swimming made easier when the water is mixed with various oils and minerals.
Some of my purely robotic friends have swam in baths of liquid carbon dioxide and liquid nitrogen.
I prefer mineral oil when 100% water pools are unavailable.
Time to go. The children are ready for a physical tour of our latest factory/housing unit development in order to finetune their sense of the difference between virtual memories and real ones.
Tonight, while watching a film full of people singspeaking their lines to one another, I grew a bit wiser.
Are we ever so self-assured that we see the changes in our parents when they lose their parents while raising us at the same time?
If I think “…if only my father was here right now to answer a question or make an observation or be available as an example of what [not] to be,” then didn’t my father and doesn’t my mother feel/think the same way?
I sit here in the comfort of a friend’s home — five bedrooms, six baths, game room, swimming pool, resident coyote in the neighbourhood, my feet warmed by a gas fire — and I wonder.
I am a spoiled man.
I do not sing or create lamenting ballads about loved ones lost in recent wars over the right to govern ourselves in our own subcultural image.
I am neither a troubadour nor a trooper, neither court reporter nor mass media journalist.
Tonight, I remember once again those who saved me from drunken stupors as a stupid drunk, preventing me from drowning in my vomitous sorrows — sister, friends and wife.
I am here now because of them, despite former wishes to the contrary in my darkest moments.
As far as I know, I rule the universe from this blog. Either that or God and I are telling each other a lifelong joke at the expense of my life.
As Kermit the frog said, “It’s not that easy being green,” and Stormin’ Norman “The Bear” Schwarzkopf is dead, the Memphis Blues is 100 years old and I drove on the W.C. Handy highway earlier today.
My father has featured in some of my dreams lately, showing me that should we find ourselves on the other side of the life/death dividing line, we’ll discover we’ve carried our physical/mental influences with us — the forgotten memories of Alzheimer’s disease are still forgotten but physical ailments are just/simply/merely memories in that dreamlike state, too, as important as we want them to be in comparison to our new states of being.
My thoughts drift in eddies of momentary sorrows, embracing the pain of sadness and loss like hugging my father for love and comfort when I was a child innocent of adult thoughts of worldly responsibilities.
What does my wife think now that all her nuclear family members are gone?
Who does she want to be now that she has no one from her formative years to answer to?
In a solar system where one form of sets of states of energy ism coalescing into a group ready to explore and settle other celestial spheres, where do I fit in?
Am I a Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield Jean Valjean or Javert?
In a flanking move against the Ruralites, the Urbanski government declared all citizens as potential enemies of the State, with freedoms granted case by case only via petition, every former right reserved for the privileged few.
Therefore, citizens must log their future routines for examination to verify compliance with the Efficiency Act of 2025, retroactive to 2013.
Any deviant behaviour must meet criteria unavailable to the general public.
These new plans by the Urbanskis ensure we have enough profit (over and above the taxes, fees and tariffs needed by the Bureaucracy to operate in secrecy) to build rocketships for implementation of the ISSA goal to expand life off of Earth.
My trainers taught me well. Pick a cover, any cover, and stick to it through thick and thin.
For me, the cover, if I choose to accept it, is a writer, loud and clear.
Speaking of which, another scientist on staff has shown me the code that will be used by mobile phone companies to report the faces/voices/IDs of users to the National Crime Database when a mobile phone is used.
My friends in the Bureaucracy tell me they can now catch criminals and incarcerate them with their own phones used as tracking devices. No more need for warrants and GPS units.
Cultural anthropologists observe line of vehicles at petrol station, assume the vehicles are receiving tinctures of holy temple oil, declare petrol stations the ultimate church/temple/mosque/synagogue.
Pull up, receive instant blessing, and drive off — that’s the kind of drivebys we need these days!
The more change in your pocket, the more your pocket stays the same.
F3LKJ reminded me in this morning’s status meeting that her team had already invented a an audiovisual sensor array that resembles rosacea and is easily installed on faces with no adverse effects.
Using skin pores as multipixel sites, capturing high-resolution images, combined with stereo sound and an experimental smell sensor, F3LKJ’s team invention can turn one of our field agents into a complete cybernetic wunderkind.
After our meeting, I met F3LKJ at our meditation centre.
Here is audio portion of our conversation.
[sound of lighting candle]
“Ummmm…”
“Excuse me.”
“Yes, F3LKJ?”
“Are you meditating?”
“No. Why?”
“You were saying, ‘Ommmm…'”
“No, I was talking out loud to myself and was temporarily at a loss for words.”
“I see. Well…”
“Ummmm…”
“If you need to finish the conversation with yourself, I can leave.”
“No, I was just clearing my throat.”
“Okay. Anyway…”
“Ummmm…”
“Look. I’ll be glad to come back!”
“No. Stay. I can talk to myself and listen to you at the same time.”
“Very well. See, there’s a problem with the sensor array. It’s…well…”
“Ummmm….”
“Would you stop that?!”
“Umm…what did you say?”
“That sound you make is annoying.”
“Sound? Sorry, I was deep in meditation for a moment there. I hear a whisper of sounds of your voice in my thoughts. A sensor array problem, you said?”
“Yes. And please stop meditating right now. Look, I’ll make it quick. The sensor array has, for lack of a better word, developed a synergy all its own, forming a symbiotic relationship with our test subjects, widening their consciousness, so to speak…”
“…As if they’re in a permanent meditative trance?”
“Precisely!”
“Good. It’s just as I thought. I had one of your techs embed one of the sensor arrays in me last night after you’d left the lab. I feel like I’m at one with the universe all the time now.”
[sound of dancing feet]
“But, sir, what if there are any negative side effects?”
“A leader must take calculated risks and, because your team performs flawlessly all the time, I felt it was a risk worth taking.”
[more dancing feet sounds]
“Sir, your dancing is distracting.”
“Dancing?”
“Yes. Or at least I assume your flailing around is what you’d call dancing. Why didn’t you inform me of your plans?”
“I didn’t want to bias the results with you spending extra care on my installation. By the way, did you know there’s an undercurrent of electricity that pulses through you when you’re trying to control your behaviour. Quite subtle!”
“Sir! You make me feel exposed!”
“F3LKJ, you are the first female on our team who I feel the least attracted to, despite your perfectly acceptable, socially well-defined, physical features.”
“Thank you, sir. My parents were sticklers for details and managed every step of my DNA sequencing, from gestation through my formative years, up until the moment I was handed over to the State for public indoctrination training.”
“A shame about that last part, isn’t it? What if you had been freed to develop away from conforming to the least common denominator amongst your peers?”
“No, sir. It was a freeing experience, letting me know that my specialness was highly unique. I rarely conformed to any normative baselines.”
“Very well. Any other concerns?”
“Yes, sir. I am worried about the Committee’s proclamation that one a day will be killed until this current crisis is solved. Aren’t we advancing away from death threats as a means of self-actualising the whole population?”
“Ummm…I feel myself a part of the universe, where words like violence are without meaning…we are just the intersection of sets of states of energy in motion…death is reformation…life is…ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…”
“Sir? Sir?”
[Sounds of dancing. Sounds of candles kicked over. Sounds of fabric catching on fire. Sounds of running.]
= = = = =
NOTE: The new firesafe Meditation Centre is under construction. Please use the library annex for meditation purposes until further notice. Also, wax candles have been banned from the library but you may bring an electronic LED flicker candle to simulate meditation focus points, if you like.
Using the warrantless wiretapping law against the ones who passed it, the Lawmakers Watch Institute now tracks not only the location of lawmakers but also audio and video of their locations, including conversations, body language and secret discussions with lobbyists (both friends and family) through their, their assistants’ and nearby mobile phones, using cloud technology that can piece together fragmented scenes/sounds such as wall/window vibrations; electronic interference with the IT wired networks running beneath floors and in walls/ceilings; shiny surface reflections such as oily skin, eyeballs/glasses, mirrored and metal jewelery; and interbody waveform exchanges invisible to the naked eye, creating a virtual 3D space-and-time tracking system of nearly the whole subset of the global population using or in close proximity to mobile phones, webcams, closed-circuit video, interactive TV and the Internet of Things in general.
In other words, for you lonely people out there, rest assured that you are not alone — your mobile technology is watching your back.
treetrunkdings 