The government of the United States of CanAmMex declared the new law of the land, a modified Christian-Islamic-Jewish set of rules and regulations restricting women to work-from-home telecommuting jobs and the majority of men to meaningful menial jobs, other genders assigned to handbuilding the Martian Family Transport Ships, everyone reporting to the Network for which we are eternally grateful, the Nodes be praised.
Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
Grave Symbols
My mother, while talking with a cemetery planning specialist, discovered that the bronze military marker for which my mother seemed to assume would only have a few religious symbols such as Christianity and Judaism, as well as some like the Masonic, has, in addition to a wide, diverse variety, a symbol for Atheists (which seems to imply that science is a religion or set of faith-based beliefs).
Hey, anything you spend more than an hour a day studying and devoting your time toward is probably indicative of your major set of beliefs, faith, religion, or whatever you want to call your m.o.
Chains of Love
To combat the rise of disrespect for parental authority and to preserve family wealth, the world government passed a law that allows parents to place an irrevocable/untouchable lien on their disobedient children’s future earnings, depositing the money in a family trust long before student debt, underwater mortgages and government wealth redistribution programs reduce parents’ investment of time and money in their progeny.
Parents now have the right to make supersocial decisions about their children who waste talent and time on frivolous activities — the children may be sold into virtual servitude to large multinational corporations and the parents allowed to convert the proceeds of the sale into the fabrication of new children for the chance to create more obedient citizens, thus giving the parents an opportunity to show their dedication to preserving their subculture one more time.
The cycle may not be repeated more than three times; after that, the government may have the parents’ childrearing methods observed more closely — those who display abnormal parenting methods will be sent to retraining camps for central nervous system reconfiguration.
Same for disobedient children who refuse to obey their new multinational corporate leaders.
Those who are completely ornery may be sent to recycling centers at any time after two attempts at retaining.
A lot on my plate…
I could write details of the continuing story of a mother’s lament at her daughter joining the ones contributing to the “end of the world” — the entitlement seekers, transgender musician patronisers, etc. — but I want to spend time on my storyline, instead.
Besides, we have to live within our conscious conscience our own way.
The daughter thinks helping people is coercively redistributing the wealth of others for politically-advantageous charities. The mother thinks helping others is deciding how to spend one’s wealth wisely on personal charities. Their thoughts are the same but different, both having built careers in the field of publicly funded primary education, one who felt most helpful guiding the intellectually gifted, the other feeling most helpful guiding the socioeconomically disadvantaged.
Mine is relating the events of a universe much like ours in linked short stories and stop-action videos for the entertaining enlightenment of others.
Right now, however, the warmth of egg nog soothes my stomach and eases my thoughts toward sleep.
Until tomorrow, then!
Margarita, Gentille Margarita, Je te plumerai la tête
The owner of the Japanese restaurant bowed.
“We hope you enjoyed our food and service. If not, don’t tell me. If so, tell others.”
He bowed again as he backed out of the Tatami room, slipping into his shoes outside.
Margarita turned to Lee.
“No, I am not Russian. I am Ukrainian.”
“Do you hate to speak Russian like other Ukrainians?”
She shook her head. “No, I love Russian. It has a beautiful sound. Do you speak the Русский язык?”
“Not anymore. Меня зовут Рик.”
“очень хорошо! So you speak it a little. Меня зовут Маргарита.”
“Nice to meet you, Margarita.”
“Thank you. You, too. Anya is Russian.” She pointed to the woman seated next to her.
“Hello, Anya.”
Anya nodded.
Margarita continued talking with the woman across the table about how, at the last train stop in Germany, a heavy German accent will announce in English thanking the passengers, or it used to be that way.
Lee observed the people in the room — a few native-born Americans, a Japanese, a half-Thai, a Russian, a Ukrainian, a German, a Greek and a few others he hadn’t identified.
The evening was going to be more interesting than he thought, surrounded by members of the intelligentsia working together on a plan to bypass Earth-based political movements and governments.
After the recent elections and government leader transitions around the world, several billionaires were willing to finance an offworld colony now more than ever, looking for a few visionaries with concrete ideas to implement as soon as possible.
A bird in hand is worth two military birds locked down on an aircraft carrier deck during a dogfight.
Lee turned to Karen. “Excuse me a minute.”
Karen adjusted herself uncomfortably. “Hurry up. My feet and knees are killing me.”
Neill yelled across the room. “Hey, Lee. Now I know what a six-foot tall person feels like. You can actually look down at the table from this view.”
Lee stepped into the hallway and bumped into Guinevere, the host and guest of the birthday party.
“Thank you for the gifts!”
Lee smirked. “You’re welcome.”
“The Estes rocket was funny. I’ll have to read your book sometime. Thanks for autographing it.”
“No problem.”
“The book on von Braun looks interesting, too.”
“Yes. It’s sort of ‘behind the scenes’ biography of his life that is often overlooked.”
“Cool.”
“Makes me look forward to the day when we can send people into space without worrying about…oh, never mind.”
“No, no, Lee. What were you about to say?”
“Uh…well, Margarita is an interesting woman. Very spirited!”
“Indeed. But weren’t you going to say something else?”
“Maybe. Let’s talk at the dance later tonight.”
“Okay. See you then!”
“Happy birthday once again.”
“Thanks!” Guinevere beamed and turned toward some friends getting ready to leave.
Border de Cayenne
Her PhD complete, Guinevere set her sights higher.
“So, Lee, what do you think?”
“About what?”
“My new look.”
Lee leaned against the rickety railing of the old wooden deck.
“Well,” he sighed, “one side of your hair is a pigtail and the other side a ponytail?”
“What? Oh yeah, I forgot. The ‘drunken college coed’ look from last night. Nope, not that. This!”
She pointed at her fingernails, every one a different color with small symbols Lee couldn’t read in the bright sunlight.
“A new invention of yours?”
“Yeppers. I saw all this wasted real estate on my hands and decided to turn my nails into sensor displays. Now, I can spend less time looking at the computer screen and more time out here, watching that white-tailed hawk, in nature, getting a suntan.”
Lee raised his head to get a better view of the sky. A large shadow moved through the bare tree limbs. “Do you think the hawk is chasing the vulture?”
“Maybe. Aren’t you going to ask me about my nails?”
“Sure. What do they do?”
Guinevere explained the wireless radio technology embedded in the nails, tuned to the frequencies of the supercomputer sensors in the third subbasement of their wooded hideaway which appeared to be a decaying old house in an abandoned suburban lot.
“When did you find time to do this?”
“Oh, why sleep when there’s so much to do!”
Lee yawned. “At your age, yes. At my age, young people like you realise my dreams for me.”
Guinevere reached out her arms. “But you can create a new dance form with me without even thinking!”
Lee pulled Guinevere into a waltz frame and danced across the creaking platform, a gust of wind blowing Guinevere’s walnut-brown hair hard enough to undo the scrunchies forming the ponytail/pigtail dichotomous duo, her locks flowing in the air like sea grass in a storm.
They bobbed up and down, combining the steps of Balboa with the silent beats of a Viennese waltz.
She laughed and he grinned, their thoughts tuned to the same idea that they were tracing the lines of Gustav Klimt’s painting, The Tree of Life.
A few last brown leaves of a pin oak joined them in their dance, the leaves falling and lifting in the wind.
One of Guinevere’s nails beeped, cutting off the silent refrain of a the waltz.
Lee stared at the nail attached to the hand on his shoulder. “What does that mean?”
“We have a new formula.”
“We do?”
They both smiled.
For years, Guinevere and Lee had separately been working on the next evolution in the field of space exploration, a being wholly human but genderless, able to work long hours and perhaps decades of outer space travel without the conflicting emotional/hormonal effects of sexual orientation.
During a discussion at Guinevere’s last birthday party, she and he accidentally revealed to each other their secret research.
In the months that followed, they used the cover of dancing lessons to combine their data and see where holes in their theories had prevented significant progress.
“Is it time to celebrate?”
She nodded. “I’m pretty sure it is. Shall we go inside and see what we’ve got?”
Lee watched a squirrel scurry down a hickory tree.
He had stashed away a bottle of Prohibition whiskey for an occasion like this, his winter of discontent over, ready for the next phase in his grand plans.
How many days left? Thirteen thousand plus?
He sprinkled cayenne pepper powder into the birdseed feeder on the deck and turned toward the dusty front door with faded brass knocker.
“Yes, let’s do. Besides, you may get a good suntan but I tend to burn.”
Guinevere and Kathryn
A title waiting for the inspiration of the next story.
To be continued…
Synching Sympathy Neurons in Our Dreams
Emotionally detached, one can imagine many possibilities.
For instance, are scientific principles, the basic “laws” of the known universe, as ambitious as those who wish to find and report their discovery?
Emotionally attached, one finds that restricting one’s self to the interaction of emotional beings limits the imagining of some possibilities.
The universe is unambitious in and of itself.
Or is it?
A billboard advertising a mini-universe of happiness found within a bottle of flavoured sugar water is real, even if the mini-universe of happiness is not.
Or is it?
What is shocking in one subculture is not necessarily shocking to another.
Will a person who was sexually active with more than one partner find happiness in a marriage to a person who had a happy premarital habit of masturbation?
Can a person who is not sexually attractive to others depend on other merits to peacefully co-exist in a society where sexual attractiveness is a key function of personal happiness and bliss?
In a genderless universe, what does gender have to do with deity worship outside of our species and gender-based species on Earth?
Does a universe have a set of beliefs?
How important is the concept of ancestral belief propagation in a society constantly in flux?
How isolated do you want your subculture to be from subcultures that are inclusive?
A person who is successful in the art of self-promotion in a business of self-promotion is no more successful than a person who is successful in the art of nonself-promotion in a business of nonself-promotion, even if the former is seen more often in society than the latter.
Ubiquity is…well, what is it? What is it not?
Spiders are ubiquitous, successfully spread across the surface of our planet and, thus, successful, are they not?
Yet, where is the celebrity worship culture of spider glorification?
Same for bacteria and other microorganisms.
When a person is just another set of states of energy, we can better understand what we call the future that goes beyond deities, personhood and cults.
Or can we?
3/4 Time in a 3/4 Bed – Confessions of an Elderly Exotic Dancer
Gender or gendre, gendarme or magender?
Research has not cleared up for us the use of a word to designate what was once called the “natural” order of reproducing sets of energy.
Unfortunately, out here past the edge of the Solar System No. 0000000000000000001, as we approach the Origin Planet, labeled “Earth” for a reason I cannot fathom, our information is limited.
That’s why I (or we, if you count my sensors separately) was sent to explore the first planet in the catalogue.
I am told to expect the unexpected.
The only documentation I can safely call authentic is a treatise by one of the sets of energy on Earth, “3/4 Time in a 3/4 Bed – Confessions of an Elderly Exotic Dancer,” written several thousand cycles ago.
Speaking of cycles, have you ever wondered where certain conventional measuring patterns came from?
Why those who record events in only four dimensions insist on using an arbitrary number, 31,557,600 “seconds” in a cycle, is beyond me.
A second I was able to figure out by searching the remnants of an ancient database called the Encyclopedia Britannica: “The energy difference between the hyperfine levels of the ground state in the cesium atom is currently the standard time interval. One atomic second is defined as the time it takes for the cesium frequency to oscillate 9,192,631,770 times.”
I assume a cycle is an important artifact of my existence.
Interesting…hmm, what’s that?
The closer I approach Earth, the stronger the set of signals I pick up.
I, being a network of a set of states of energy, feel myself connecting to nodes that are becoming an extended part of me.
Is there more here than meets my sensors?
A cycle — ah, there it is, coming to me from a large database in the new network nodes — the time that the set of states of energy called Earth takes to complete one orbit around the ball of plasma labeled the Sun.
One mystery solved and another remaining.
Were all elderly exotic dancers a gender called “she” and were they only 3/4 of a set of states of energy?
Well, I guess that’s two mysteries to solve, isn’t it?
The network of which I’ve become a part and it a part of me is cautiously welcoming my approach.
Let’s see what happens next…
Challenge to self…
From now until the end of the year, I’m spending more time developing my own parallel universe and less time reviewing/reading our Earth-based news which fed subsequent satirical blog responses.
treetrunkdings 