I don’t know what it is about the objects in this room but some of them have a life of their own.

The crystal ball, which is not really crystal but a thin layer of glass, hummed when I walked into the study this morning.

A 60-Hz hum, as if some unseen creature — a gnome, fairy, elf, dwarf or gremlin? — snuck in and plugged in the crystal ball’s AC power source.

Ah, yes.  The crystal ball has electronic junk in its trunk.

For centuries, the crystal ball had relied on the magnetic alignment of layers of rock deposited for millions of years onto Earth’s crust as the planet’s magnetic poles flip-flopped.

But I wanted more power.

I wanted to make the future a reality, not just some foggy image forming out of the inside of a ether-filled dome.

Sing it! “Ee-thur, eye-thur, nee-thur, neye-thur,” ether-aether, “let’s call the whole thing off”-kilter.

Anyway, the crystal ball’s powered profundity projects onto the book covers, picture frames, walls, ceiling, overhead light fixture and my eyeballs a future where we ask ourselves why income inequality has become a buzzword domestically, imagined internationally but not universally.

A spinoff of Virgin Galactic, under a new shell corporation not directly tied to Sir Richard Branson in order to avoid confusion about mission statements, offers a higher boost into suborbital space for the terminally ill, taking their money but not promising them a flight in time before they die, that gives the passengers a longer time in the weightlessness of space and then an incendiary cremation upon reentry, the painlessness of sedatives a personal option, their ashes spread into the upper atmosphere of the only planet they got to know, sparking a new travel industry nicknamed “Your Final Exit” after a book written in the 20th century.

Discovering energy conversion that has nothing to do with atomic structures opened up planetary exploration and galactic travel, completely and forever changing our image and opinions of ourselves as the center of the universe — it’s not the energy level that counts, it’s how you use the paradigm shift to reinvent the way we model our sets of states of energy in the cosmos.

Spending more time nurturing our species’ children during their formative years offset our longterm investment in the spook business that tried to compensate for the messed-up mindsets of adults turned against society, which changed the way we perceived ourselves as [un]fairly-treated cogs in the wheels of the politicoeconomic conditions we used to define our place in society, including the reformation of the public/private education system that used to depend on a mix of caring/sadistic [un]tenured teaching staff and [non]motivated students.

Mapping the new global culture on top of centuries-old subcultures was as fluid as the ocean tidal currents, tide charts predictable but local tidal basins fluctuating minute-by-minute.  Protesting the advent of global branding missed the natural evolution of a species in transition from multilocal to a global set of traits.  Embracing the concept of optimising profits made the antiglobal movement an effective tool in strengthening our longterm economic sustainability — every person was encouraged to realise we are individually a laboratory of new ideas, making conformity, normality and mimicry as quaint as synergistic symmetry.

The crystal ball hummed louder and louder until I realised that the wallwart was overheating.  Time to get a new transformer before the house burns down!