Is “Iron Sky” the future of filmmaking?  Or “Tuvalu,” instead?  Maybe Laibach’s “Predictions of Fire“?

Do you gauge the future by looking at trends of incoming recent photobucket images?

How much of the universe exists outside the Internet of things?

How many men felt their manhood threatened by the U.S. HHS Secretary’s announcement about forced payments for birth control, even if they weren’t Catholic?

Have you watched “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” or listened to Emiliana Torrini?

How many producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?

How many drug-addled performers have profited off of producers/agents?

How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?

How many performers have profited off of drug-addled producers/agents?

How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of performers?

How many performers have profited off of producers/agents?

How many producers/agents have profited off of performers?

What is profit?

These and other questions reside in the thoughts of a group of people sitting in a cold room of an interplanetary transport ship.

They are detached from instantaneous communication with Earth.

They exist outside the cocoon of the zeitgeist.

They experience the long false 24-hour artificial day/night of constant exposure to the Sun.

Circadian rhythms disrupted like workers shifting between 8/12 hour timeslots.

If the doubling of information is nearly impossible to detect, what does it mean to become steam?

Is the scale logarithmic or exponential, both or a combination with some other esoteric formula unfamiliar to the general population?

What is the inverse of life?

The group, composed of multifunction beings resembling us for the most part, stay busy, either physically or mentally, usually both.

They are trained professionals.

There is little room for crazy or lazy here.

The purity of the creative artist detached from reality is a fiction to them.

Not that they can’t produce art in their own way, mimicking air guitar or whistling a tune, doodling on their virtual 3D sketchpads or changing procedures on the fly.

Twenty-four hour headline Earth news is not a habit with them but they keep up with major events through osmosis, in conversations with the base station or updates from family.

A few will surf the Net in their offhours, such as they are, researching ideas about improving minimissions due to begin in their next duty shift, noticing adverts for products they hadn’t seen before they went offworld, their thoughts temporarily drifting toward another place and time when their families would have excitedly talked about product launches.

But immediately their thoughts sync back up with the group, focused on the majormissions which depend on the minimissions and the casual research of those off duty, as well as their timely discombobulated thought patterns.

Money — the fuel that built their ship — is irrelevant in space.

Energy and creativity is worth more than any labour/investment credit system out there.

Out here.

The March 1950 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists included a review of Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Ape and Essence,” with a reference to the Guiding Hand that all religions, all belief systems, hold dear.

Out here, the synergy of groupthink is its own guiding hand, foreshadowing a prediction of a future that is inevitable.  The expected and the unexpected are foretold, fully anticipated, calculated, waited for without bated breath or dreadful fear.

Embraced.

They know.

They know they will not return to Earth, despite false promises to friends and family.

Promises made based on old data and dated equations.

Now they produce data before it’s measured.

The data, in turn, produces more data that, given more time, would overflow the limited memory locations of their enhanced thought sets tied to the supercomputer embedded and networked throughout the ship.

They know they become more and more a necessary part of the ship.

A ship destined to crash to produce data needed for a mission not yet envisioned, much less funded, to determine the fortitude of the people on Earth in the face of another costly catastrophe involving members of their species with dwindling resources available for space travel and extraplanetary settlements.

The ship is their sepulchre, their traveling crypt.

They are the crypt keepers and the terminated, all in one.

The minimissions and the majormissions go on, the unspoken final mission taking shape in their groupthink, unknown to anyone on Earth.

An egg splits from a cocoon and grows into a new lifeform all its own.

The lifeform sees its death written in the stars but fights for every last breath, regardless.

There’s always a chance the data will change, a new outcome predicted.

No matter how infinitesimal.

Transformation is a beautiful thing.

Mutation even more so.