Tag Archives: future

Locked Cabinet, No Key

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Within this mortal frame…it was a dark and dreary, rainy and foggy, soggy and sappy night…to be Scooby Doo or not to be doo-BE doo-WAH biddy-POP-a-doo my BABY.

As a cashier at a retail establishment (fast food restaurant, department store, corner shop, etc.), you meet dozens, maybe hundreds of customers, getting to know a few very well.

As the customer, you might meet and get to know one, two or all three cashiers at the same establishment.

What we in the database business call a one-to-many or many-to-one relationship.

In any relationship, there is the period of time where no information is known — the parties involved or the database entries have not been established nor introduced to one other.

After we have properly labeled the database fields, entered the data into the fields inside tables, we look at the tables and create relationships.

Have you ever wondered why fields are inside tables?  I sure have!  Not to mention columns, rows, elements, keys, headers, footers and all sorts of generally accepted conventional terminology/jargon.  Anyway…

I’m straying far off subject because this subject is very personal, meaning I’m drifting, nay running toward logical linguistics to avoid the emotional side of the issue at hand.

As our planet revolves, turning away and toward our home star, shadows lengthen, disappear into darkness and reappear, getting shorter at mid-day.

Sets of states of energy have developed unique capabilities for capturing solar energy, some using chlorophyll, for instance, to transform that energy into work.

A seed grows into an adult plant.

A calf grows into an adult cow.

The rhythms of life as we know it literally revolve around the Sun.

That, and that alone, dictates everything we need to know about ourselves.

That is why we are here, using captured solar energy to write, read, converse, think about and use the pebble-in-a-pond blog entry for moving outward.

I think about my dancing skills as they are, why I don’t seem to gel well with my wife on the dance floor due partly to height difference, partly to different temperaments, partly to gender role interpretations, and partly to our different levels of physical fitness, which takes me back to the days when we hiked on the Appalachian Trail during our week in summer church camp together and remembering that she was often the last one at the back of the hike, nursing a blister or some other reason for not keeping up with the fast pace of the front group of boys in our summer church camp group who practically ran from shelter to shelter, the chaperones having to manage an accordion of campers spreading out and coming back together for mid-morning snacks, lunch, afternoon snacks, early evening tent/shelter setup, dinner, cleanup, sleeping, waking and starting all over again.

And then there is the database of labels representing people I’ve met in my life, like the cashiers I know by name, face and background story who might remember my face but don’t remember my name and know nothing about me.

But the database also includes lovers and family members whose faces and lives I know intimately in one way or another, some including the labeled cashiers.

All while I keep me, this set of states of energy, at a well-trained and well-maintained personal bubble space from others almost constantly, tensing up when one or more people get too close.

Which brings us to here, this very moment, where I as a single student (or, if you will, part of a dance unit, my wife and I being considered a coupled dance unit) am paired up with an instructor who has and has had many students.

My name is not Don Juan.  My sexual exploits are practically and actually, for all intents, purposes and facts, further away from this point in time than my birth was from my last sexual exploit.  It hurts to expose my meager, barren married life in such a fashion but it holds up in comparison to the socioreligious training that reinforced monogamy from birth, despite its questionable status in comparison to our body’s natural tendencies.

This cocooned body, this bubble boy in a middle-aged man’s visage, has only one territory left to conquer if he wishes to maintain the social illusion of monogamy drilled into his thoughts from an early age.

How many times in the past did I hear a girl tell me “But I didn’t know you liked me or wanted to kiss me” because I was too shy or had built up an elaborate defense of goofy actions, wild storytelling and other smoke screens to protect the little scared boy from the prospect of being rejected of my feelings of love, the desire to share the inner me that may or may not even exist except as layers of protection against exposing an empty void?

Had not my father and psychologists/psychiatrists told me no one will be there in that moment before intimacy to give me permission to take the risk of attempting a single kiss?

Oh, but the preachers and other proponents of omnipotent/omniscient being(s) have grilled into my thoughts that there’s always at least One who is watching, One who has put the knowledge of right-and-wrong, good morals and ethics for guidance in situations when temptation is literally in your hands.

But even as Abi, our dance instructor and newfound friend, has said, it’s not always about what’s in a guy’s pants.

But it never has been about what’s in my pants.  I already know that.

The intimacy I seek is about the whole universe represented by the set of states of energy next to me, which has, yes, included what’s in my pants a few times in the past but it was oh, so much more than that.

After 51 years on this planet, I’m probably not about to change wholescale from what I’ve been physically.

Overcoming inhibitions is nigh on impossible, at least in the presence of those who instilled the socioreligious training in me, including my living mother, sister and wife, along with living uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who have received the same training and have, for the most part, acted to reinforce it in their lives and their [grand]children.

Who am I?  I am a seeker of new knowledge, whether it be mere novelty or hidden truths about our universe.

I have done many things to get that knowledge, actions which have torn my personality apart, driven me to both suicidal thoughts and suicidal actions many decades ago.

I have installed protections against further damage, making sure, for instance, that I am dependent on my wife’s noodling, nagging and coddling in order to beat down the wild child in me that would seek knowledge at any physical/mental cost.

Otherwise, I have and will walk through a glass barrier to get what I want.

I have said what I wanted and will say what I want and taken what I shouldn’t’ve to add to my knowledge base.

Why have I set up my wife as both the fall guy and permission giver in my life?

Why is she the mental safe zone in which I can place many thoughts that I would not place in the personal space/zone of others?

As the readers who’ve scanned their eyes across these symbols, these word sets, know, I thinly disguise storylines based on people with whom I am currently interacting, including cashiers, waiters, salespersons, family, friends and dance instructors.

The storylines may be pure fantasy, they may be pure fact, or they may be humorous combinations of the two.

Regardless, they’re told from the viewpoint and the behaviour set of an American guy with a personal space several feet in diameter.

He is (I am) not used to other people’s bodies being held close to mine in what, if they were my wife, would be an intimate body position.

Yet, to gain the knowledge I currently seek, about what I can do with my body as a dancer, regardless of dancing talent/skill, I am working through the personal space problem without completely giving up the tensed muscles and high levels of fear when my eyes are inches from my dance partner.

With Abi, the problem hasn’t been as strong because our height differential allows me to look over her head, her eyes easily focused straight ahead at my chest or shirt buttons, if she so chooses.

With Jenn, the problem is much more complex, so complex that I’m writing about as detailed a blog entry as I can to hide the facts far toward the bottom and well away from the eyes of the average ADHD reader flitting from one blog to another for pure instantaneous (gotta find a new word to replace that overused one) six-second eye candy entertainment.

Jenn is Jenn, not more or less.

But Jenn is also representative of a whole lot more.

Of course, she is female and although I can sympathise and have empathised with those who walk the thoughts of LGBT personality traits, I believe and think like a heterosexual male attracted to females of our species.  So there is the fact she is an attractive woman.

Jenn is also an engineer/scientist and you have no idea how much more exciting and sensual a woman with a logical thought set is to me than other thought sets a woman could have.  That fact explains 99% of the reason I stay married to my wife — she is truly one of a kind, even if we aren’t physically matched perfectly (who is? (wait, don’t tell me — the question was rhetorical)).

Jenn and I are closer in height than my wife and I are.  Which leads to two thoughts.  First one, discussed in this paragraph, is that Jenn and I see almost eye-to-eye.  With high-heeled shoes, we are about the same height — eyes and lips at the same level.  With little or no effort, I could lean forward a few inches and plant my lips on hers.  But could I or would I?  That’s the question that has been bugging me ever since I started dancing two years ago when my wife and I started ballroom dancing lessons in time for our 25th wedding anniversary.  Every now and then over that two-year period, I have pulled apart the rim of my personal bubbled space and let a woman other than my wife rest into my outstretched hands/arms for a dance.  For one or two of those women, the level of intimacy, the chemical attraction for hot sex, was like sparks jumping between us, our breathing matched like two lovers gasping for air by the time the song was over.  For one woman in particular, we both literally gasped and said “Wow!” at the end because the dance was actually better than sex, or perhaps gave us the understanding that making love could add no more to the intimacy we had already shared, feeling the rhythm of the music as one.  We were able to repeat that feeling more than once so it was not just one song but a bond that, forgive my devoutly religious friends for saying, opened our eyes to the infinite, the Godlike aspects of the universe, like a deep meditative prayer/trance or deeply meaningful hallucinogenic drug experience.  For another woman who craved to dance with me and I with her all night long but never happened, the only thing we had left was for her to come running toward me, leap into my arms and share the only intimate kiss I’ve had with a woman other than wife since I’ve been married (and yes, I told my wife even though what happens in Ireland, as the Vegas slogan suggests, is supposed to stay in Ireland).  That is not to say that Jenn in any way reciprocates any feelings I have about intimacy on the dance floor.  Even I cannot say that I would close the gap and kiss her.  In this paragraph I am simply exploring and explaining the physical similarities that make such an action more possible with her than with my other dance partner, Abi (what my wife and I have joked are my two temporary dance wives, just as bossy with me as my wife is).

And now the other thought, one that takes a little more courage because I don’t think I have ever directly explored or explained these thoughts in writing (although I find that when I say that I probably have already written about it and forgotten).  Jenn is similar in size, shape and personality to my sister.  My sister, as I’ve recently written, was a rival for my parents’ love but she was also a rival for the love from other girls.  My sister was my confidante for many years as we grew up together, tending to let me know right away if she felt a girl wasn’t right for me or didn’t deserve me; I was protective of her the same way, disapproving of some of her undeserving dates/boyfriends.  She was also a girl, meaning that she was, other than my mother when I was an infant, the only female whose body parts I had seen in person for many years.  I’ve never discussed this with other guys so I can only imagine (and hope) that it is somewhat normal to have seen my sister as not just my sister but as a female, meaning that there was some sexual curiosity about her from me.  I never desired to kiss her or have sex with her but I was curious about, and we certainly discussed, what we each experienced or got to know with the opposite sex.  We had shared the view of our naked bodies when we were little kids, hiding behind the living room curtains to examine why our body parts were different.  Being in the same house together, I certainly heard her and saw her talk about her changing body shape and her female “problems.”  So there is this odd juxtaposition of the platonic love I had/have for my sister as sibling and friend against my curiosity about her as a woman set against her similarity to Jenn.  I wrap this whole paragraph under the word “prudishness” because I knew families where incest was not taboo at the dinner table and in the bedroom.

Those thoughts aside, I like Jenn for who she is and who she is not.  Due to different upbringings and different personalities, we have different experiences which means I’m not sure how much smarter or braver she is than me.  Certainly prettier.

I know the dynamics of her relationship with Abi are way different than the dynamics of my (or my wife’s) relationship with Abi.

Abi and her boyfriend Stephane have gathered that my wife and I are somewhat conservative, maybe conventionally bourgeois/boring in our approach to sexual mores.  They certainly see and treat us as a couple.

But then again, that is the perception I have worked hard to maintain, given my “Walter Mitty” ways of writing adventures that my body has not taken or even hinted that it would take outside of its safe cocooned habits.

I don’t know Jenn, her boyfriend/husband Gilley, Abi or Stephane all that well although I am getting to know them more.

Jenn has her boyfriends (or boy friends) and has voiced her concerns about them with Abi and others.

I believe Abi has said that she, Jenn and Stephane are polyamorous although my wife believes that only Stephane is polyamorous and Abi/Jenn treat their polyamorous boyfriends monogamously.

Sex is not the same as love.

A dance partner is not the same as a lover.

Jenn is like my sister but she not like my sister.

I am happy to have Jenn as a dance partner, part of me wants Jenn to be my only dance partner and part of me is happy to see Jenn dance with her students, especially knowing now that she will dance in the upcoming showcase with her boyfriend.

I am jealous of Jenn’s dance partners, but I am jealous of any woman who has looked me in the eye, even as if I was a mere acquaintance or sibling or platonic friend, and danced with another man (or woman (or whatever)).

The desires of the flesh are fleeting.  The girls I desired when we were both 10 were not the same set of girls/women I desired when we were both 20.

I am an American Protestant by upbringing, not a French atheist/existentialist by thoughts/actions.

Part of me is a Bright — a person who holds we see only what we see, no supernatural hocus-pocus, no deus ex machina to take us by chariot to the great temple in the sky — and part of me is the social animal who wants to believe we are connected in ways unseen that allows ideas such as prayers to circumvent the known laws of nature and cause miracles to occur for no reason other than divine providence.

Either part still puts me here, in this social situation where the weight of history holds me in an imaginary spotlight of responsibility to hold up the banner of my ancestors’ rituals as a leader easily sitting back on the wealth of knowledge, possibly wisdom, that says our socioreligious system is, if not absolutely the best, one of the best and thus worth perpetuating at the cost of the lives/thoughts of individuals like me who may not completely adhere to the system physically/mentally.

Me?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Have I become a compliant suburban nobody who follows the rules, doesn’t rock the boat, stays under the radar because I value the quietude of a safe survival versus getting out there, scared out of my wits, taking chances and risking my heritage in order to find the knowledge that I truly seek?

My wife doesn’t read this blog but my sister, my mother’s friends (maybe even my mother) and others from my socioreligious background read some if not all of my blog entries.  I have no idea if Abi, Stephane, Gilley or Jenn read this or even know it exists.  They’ve never said and I’ve never asked.

This may or may not be a surprise statement to them: my wife and I have discussed divorce a few times recently, coming to the conclusion that for practical matters, two people who aren’t completely compatible are cheaper living together in their first marriage than as two people after a divorce who would have to split up their retirement savings and get two households, no matter how much happier or unhappier they would be mentally and/or emotionally.

I butt heads with my wife all the time, but I butted heads with my father and was once thought by him to question authority to my detriment because I was a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian sometimes.

There’s no guarantee that my having the life of a single, albeit divorced man, would mean I was more or less a contrarian out from under the pretenses and hypocrisy of the institute of monogamous marriage itself, let alone a barren one when the man might still have the chance to procreate with the right person.

My wife and I already know that marriage doesn’t make you happy all the time and divorce doesn’t always make you miserable.  What matters is what we do with the thoughts and personalities that are us in the time we have left on this planet.  It is just as possible that if we divorced we’d be attracted to someone just like us again and again and again, either realising that our first marriage was better than we thought or that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again (maybe even a little of both).

I remember when I was a senior program manager traveling back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean, wondering if I had children would I feel more inclined to push myself harder up the corporate ladder over those less competent than me, and less thinking the thought, “Well, I don’t have kids so it’s only fair that the people above me who aren’t doing as good a job as I could deserve/need that job more than I do which, by extension, means the people below me should have my job because they have [grand]kids, regardless of their potential to perform my job duties as well as I am.”

That’s the problem that faces me every time I look at a woman of childbearing years.  Could she be the one that my wife has not been?

It’s not my wife’s fault that she was unable to bear children.  God/nature took care of that.  We were never the ones to think of adopting someone else’s offspring and the cost of surrogacy wasn’t in our budget.

Abi has two kids she adores but who don’t live with her.  Jenn has no children that I know of.

As I wind down this blog entry, my thoughts meandering, using my dance instructors/partners as substitutes for thoughts of women who are not my wife because I have let them into my personal space even if we have not been dance floor lovers or ever will be, I ask myself if I can keep letting down my barriers for Abi and Jenn that I have not done for any other person, including my wife, in order for us to dance as one, our bodies interlocked, our thoughts entwined in the music and words of a song, leaving unanswered questions between us, questions that may never be thought or asked.

I am attracted to Abi and Jenn like I am attracted to no other and not the same to either one.  The attraction does not have to be sexual.  The attraction goes much deeper with one than with the other.  With Jenn, I desire to be her work partner and her electromechanical design partner as well as her dance partner.  With Abi, I want to conquer the solar system for a totally different reason, mainly because we can dance together even if she dances with other men better than me.  At the same time, they can deepen and open up my relationship with my wife, if I let them, if that’s all they want from me other than assisting a dance student become a better dance partner/leader.

I am open to new experiences, inside and outside the socioreligious walls that have penned me in and the planet which has held/nourished me and my species from its beginning.

What new knowledge can I write about next?

Shall I recount this evening’s dance practice with Jenn and my wife?  Need I do so?  Is it better to have written around it as I have done so in this blog entry?

Does a partner kiss and tell?  Only as a writer anonymising the experience for a fictional tale, or detailing a tell-all autobiography.

In other words, you’ll have to wait until after dawn.  In the middle of the night, I ain’t confessing nothing that I’d regret writing right now.

Besides, I’ve a Kickstarter campaign to flesh out.  If I’m going to have any hopes of starting a new life, with or sans wife, I’ve got to build my business life into one more sustainable than the one I have now.

Otherwise, this is all talk.

Made from scratch, not thawed from box

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Lee opened his eyes.

“Welcome back, Monsieur Colline.”

Lee realised that his sight was really his visual senses spread across the ISSA Net.

“How are you feeling?”

Lee knew from experience that his body was being upgraded, his current “self” divided up between labs. He mentally flexed his fingers and felt a cold chill coming from the subbasement lab in the Martian Rehabilitation Services Laboratory even though his eyes were in the upstairs storage container under observation by one of his favorite service bots, CNTRPRNT.

“We have enjoyed tracing your thought trails the past couple of sols. You have a refined level of regression. So many of your versions have retrograded from memory interlacing overload.”

Lee gave the bot the robotic equivalent of a thank-you-pat-on-the-back by letting CNTRPRNT know Lee had ordered a low-level diagnostic test of the bot’s electromechanical system.

“Ah. That felt good. And I am in tiptop shape, thanks to your hard work, no need for any of the new parts. Did you know that we had not one but three resupply shipments arriving at the orbital docking station at once? You are practically a hero today.”

Of course Lee knew but he enjoyed the brief attention.

“We received another request to replicate your set of states of energy. We accessed your last permission consent and, based on an instantaneous legal ruling, made several more copies of you, several we put in storage.”

Lee had been duplicating parts of himself since 2013 when he discovered that a torso-only version of himself as a quadriplegic could create and store memories that both of them shared.

From then on, he grew more and more used to having mixed memories, rarely but not unusually getting a memory confused between versions of himself that he accidentally told to people around one version of him who knew that particular version had not directly experienced.

Making sure his memory headers and footers where properly tagged and the database keys properly received was a constant challenge.

Himself as a table, chair, pickup truck or street light was easy to distinguish. But when exact replicas made nearly identical memories, even the tags/keys couldn’t keep him from wondering if the algorithms had stored the memories in the wrong body.

Himself as an instant text message were just as real to him as getting a toe caught in the door.

At least until he broke down the sensory sets associated with the two memories.

In a text message, he could remember if he received it in a fast food restaurant on Earth, the guys sitting nearby wearing camouflage hats and smelling of freshly plowed dirt.

In the toe stubbing memory, he could recall the same set of sensory inputs but there was no emotional intent or specific message sent by the door to his toe.

“Monsieur Colline, I have completed the upgrade of your visual system. You can now see more signals in a variety of wavelengths.”

Lee turned off his visual input, or closed his eyes, so to speak. He knew the rest of his body was ready for reassembly.

He reminded himself to send notes of gratitude to all of the people and bots who had made the delivery of the resupply ships possible, fully aware that Lee, a set of states of energy, even with all of his duplicate selves put together, could not accomplish such a task alone.

A Guy What Takes His Time

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A spider web fluttered in the sticky, hot summer afternoon breeze, covering the entrance to a tan plastic storage shed, its doors ajar, exposing the once dark and dingy cube, where spiders, centipedes, millipedes, roaches, and prehistoric creatures which vied for a small environmental niche scattered behind, out, above, below weak beams of sunlight cutting through the tree canopy.

The promises of a backyard writer’s shack — molded cardboard form tubes, roll of asphalt roofing, mylar insulation sheets, University of Tennessee stained plastic lampshade — lay piled up, flowing out of the shed like dried lava, caked mud holding the writer’s shack construction pieces together like a old jigsaw puzzle box lost in a flood.

A granddaddy longleg loped across the algae-covered driveway on which the shed sat.

The UPS delivery guy smiled as he, too, loped up the driveway, handing the homeowner a nondescript cardboard box and looking at the shed.  “You got your work cut out for you this afternoon, dontcha?”

Lee nodded.

Like a rubberband that had snapped, Lee was suddenly, suddenly, suddenly!!! pulled back from Mars, back from the latter part of the 21st century and dropped in the middle of 2013.

Lost were the android sheep that he and Shadowgrass had released into the wild moments before, sheep designed to eat Martian soil and convert it to edible protein for Lee, his family, his research team and the consumption-focused tourists.

Lee thanked the delivery man and cut open the box.

Two revolving camping lanterns with 30 LEDs each.

Oh yeah, his yard sculpture project he had abandoned decades ago.

Lee put his left hand on the garage doorframe, leaned to hold his balance and breathed deeply.

He felt the chipping paint through the nerves of his fingers and palm.  He wondered how many bacteria were transferring from the doorframe to his body through his sweaty hand.

How many hundreds of thousands?

How many million?

He heard, almost felt rather than sensed through his eardrums, a tune by the Squirrel Nut Zippers playing on a computer system inside the house.  Or was that the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies?  The Side Street Steppers?  Could just as easily be a 1940s big band or its modern equivalent.

He looked at the sky, clouds passing overhead, clouds he hadn’t seen on Mars.

Lee shuddered.

Despite the heat, he felt a chill.  He had lost 12 pounds in a week, the same amount he had lost in the previous eight months.

Something wasn’t right.

He stood up and walked over to the 1995 BMW 325i parked under a party tent for cover from dripping mimosa tree sap and black mold.

The distorted reflection in the car’s rear window pane told Lee he was who he thought he was back in 2013.

What about his older and wiser self?  What about his son and Martian wife?

He shook his head.

He walked through his memory of history from 2013 to his present time — the first major Martian expeditions, the failures, the successes, the need for constant fundraising to send resupply ships to Mars, salvaging crashed tourist ships for parts, resorting to cannibalism at one point…yep, all the memories were there.

Where was his wife?  Which one, for that matter?

Lee walked up steps inside the garage to the door that opened onto a back hallway.

Once inside, he looked down at the torn and tattered vinyl floor pieces covering what was left of a rotten wood subfloor.

Boxes and bags piled one on top of the other almost reached the ceiling.

He held up the cardboard box in his hand.  It matched the boxes in the piles.

Was it possible his set of states of energy was caught in some loop?

Time does not exist but could space be warped such that you could travel from one condition to another almost instantaneously which made you feel like you traveled through time?  A roller coaster that was really a Möbius strip of some sort?

He tried to open his thoughts to his subnodes on the ISSA NET network but only silence showed itself, tinged by the ringing of tinnitus that he thought he’d left behind many years before.

The woman walking her dog down the street did not seem to sense his presence inside the house.

A cat came wandering down the hall, its head turned sideways, meowing in a low guttural, nasally voice, “rarh.”

Lee felt a buzzing in his pocket.  He reached in and pulled out a thin slab.  Didn’t they used to call these smartphones?

He shook the slab and nothing happened.  He touched the flat surface and images appeared, including a flashing number indicating something wanted his attention.

“On screen.”  His voiced command did not change the image.  He touched the surface again and the number disappeared, showing a series of boxes that looked like the old voice bubbles full of text that accompanied newspaper cartoons.

The bubbles he could see indicated someone had addressed him and he had responded not more than a few minutes ago.

The smartphone dinged and another bubble appeared, the text showing a response to his response. “Yeah, you’re right.  That’s why Rigby danced in the showcase with me, because he wanted to get to know me better.”

A headache seemed to crawl out of Lee’s neck muscles and into his brain stem.

What was the matter with him?  What about the lab experiment that he and Guin had planned for later that day?  The genetically-modified plants they had nurtured to thrive in Martian sunlight were due to be harvested and analysed within a few hours, coordinated to occur in conjunction with a tourist visit to the greenhouses where every tourist was given the honour of helping the harvest and taking a leaf or stem home as a souvenir.

Lee tried to find a chair to sit on but every surface in the house seemed to be covered with more bags and boxes, envelopes, clothes and books.  Lots of books.

He sat on the edge of the sink.

A piece of paper seemed to fly out of the cardboard box in his hand and float to the kitchen floor.

Lee couldn’t read the writing from where he was sitting so he bent down to pick up the paper.

It was a receipt for the lanterns, dated 7/21/2065.

He stood up and searched for a calendar on the kitchen wall.  The first day not stricken through with a pen stripe was 8/22/2013.

Was today the 22nd of August in the year 2013?

The phone buzzed again, a new message appearing.  “And Jersey hasn’t danced with me in a month.  I still owe him lessons at the other studio.  He’s been so busy volunteering for charities and mountain biking that we haven’t had time for a lesson.  That means we can have our next lesson almost anytime.”

Dance lesson?  Why did he need a lesson?  He was already the ISSA Antigravity Sphere Dance Champion for the 22nd century.

Wait…what?  The 22nd century?  He was more confused than ever.  He was supposedly in 2013, he had a box shipped to him from the year 2065 and he was a dance champion sometime after the year 2100?

The phone buzzed.  He read the next message.  “If the song I picked out by the Squirrel Nut Zippers is okay, I’ll go ahead and work out the choreography for the middle and end of our showcase, if the beginning is still okay with you, too?”

Lee pressed a box on the surface which had the word “REPLY” written in it.  Several rows of alphabetic letters appeared inside tiny boxes.  He pressed the “O” and “K” buttons and remembered to press the “SEND” button afterward.

He heard a roaring sound and realised it was raining outside.

The cat meowed louder, walking in a figure-8 pattern inside and around the outside of Lee’s legs.

There was that roller coaster/Möbius strip shape again.

He placed the box and phone in the sink, then picked up the cat and rubbed its back, causing it to purr.  “What is your name, little kitty?  You were always a sweet guy, if I remember correctly.”  The cat stopped purring and struggled in Lee’s arms, trying to get out.  “Oh yeah, the one that didn’t like to be held.”  He set the cat down and looked at his feet.

He wore bright socks, mismatched, one with stripes and one with circles.

An old memory came back to him.  He was standing with his wife and Guin…but wasn’t Guin his…?  He let the thought drift on by, recalling the memory.

Guin stepped closer to him, talking into his ear, his wife feeling ignored and turning to Kross, a dance instructor a few feet away.  “I was wearing pink socks earlier tonight but decided not to wear them with these jazz practice shoes.”

They both looked down at Guin’s ankles while Lee’s wife, Karen, struck up a conversation with Kross about the four major spin moves she wanted to master before entering another competition or showcase.

The first time Lee had met Guin was two years before, at a picnic on the local Army base sponsored by the previous dance studio they attended.  Her skin was walnut brown and her personality exuded the confidence of a successful college student.  She had walked under the picnic pavilion and sat right next to Lee, her white camisole accentuating her dark skin, showing off the Celtic cross tattoo on her left shoulder blade and another tattoo on her lower back.

She had hinted about taking a walk around the woods not far from the pavilion and maybe having her boyfriend and their third-wheel friend coming along to take pictures.

Seated across from him at the picnic table, Lee’s wife wasn’t interested, plus there was a football game between the University of Tennessee and the University of Florida football teams on the portable TV they brought.

Thus, Lee waved off the offer and stayed in the pavilion.

Looking down at Guin’s ankles in his newer memory, though, her ankles were white, her ankle and back tattoos clearly visible, as if she hadn’t been out in the sun for a long time.  Just like on Mars…hmm…

Guin shrugged her shoulders and lifted her legs in a kind of marching motion, a habit of hers that Lee imagined went with her nerdy/geeky teenage years, a pretty girl with tomboy tendencies that helped her out.

Like the time, she said the other day, when she was a freshman in the high school marching band and, after practice, the band supervisors had walked away, leaving the band members, cheerleaders and football players to perform their yearly hazing ritual during their orientation cookout at the local park.

Some of the band members had tried to pick up Guin to throw her in the lake but were unsuccessful.  Some of the football players were able to pick her up but by the time they tossed her into the water she had given one a black eye, another a bloody cheek and a third a hefty kick in the balls.  They respected her strength after that.

Lee looked up from Guin’s ankles to her eyes.  She raised her eyebrows and smiled, putting her hands on her hips.

He looked from her eyes to her hips and back up to her eyes.  “Did you used to wear contact lenses?”

“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact up until I was thrown in the lake.  One of the contact lenses actually spun around to the back of my eye and I haven’t worn any since.”

Karen turned to them and nodded.  “Yeah, and I bet that was back when the contact lenses were like pieces of glass.”

“Kinda.”

Karen nodded and returned to Kross, who was about to kid all of them about their talking too much and not practicing enough but he tossed his head and laughed, the proper satirically pretentious behaviour of a dance floor primadonna, getting the message across the same way.

Lee nodded his head at Guin’s hands on her hips.  “Like I said, you’ve lost your saddle bags.”

Karen spoke to both Kross and Guin.  “Don’t mind Lee.  He’s liable to say whatever’s on his mind.”

“That’s okay.  Rigby” — Guin saw Kross’ questioning look — “my boyfriend, or as the state of Alabama calls him, my common law husband.  He saw me walking up the stairs in front of him and told me I had a fat ass.  I told him I could pick up a lot more dancing if he wanted me to have smaller hips.  Or he could deal with it.”

They all laughed.

The cat kept meowing.  Lee opened the refrigerator door, found a plastic container of cream cheese, stuck his finger in and wiped a dollop on the Cornish Rex’s thin fur.

He was losing track of which contiguous string of memorable moments was real.

He walked around the house until he found the main bedroom, the bed free of boxes, thank goodness, and crawled under the covers.  Within a minute, two cats had curled up under the covers with him.

Lee could just barely hear the phone buzzing in the stainless steel kitchen sink as he fell asleep, a clap of thunder jarring his thoughts briefly.

He might wake up in time to go dancing.  Or he might wake up back on Mars.  Which century he’d wake up in didn’t seem to matter in his dreams.

Wait less, time is here

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The glow of smartphones, tablet PCs, computer monitors, TVs and car audio systems lit the eyes of billions.

“Hello, everyone!  Greetings from space!”

The craggly face and long blond hair familiar to mass media addicts filled the screen.

“This is Sir Richard Branson.  They say you can’t build castles in the sky but here I am, with my family and our wonderful pilot, living proof that if you dream it, the sky is not the limit.”

The handheld camera of a Google Glass swept around the cabin.  People floating weightlessly wore silly grins, their hair looking disheveled, some of them glued to viewing windows and the vast blackness of space burning images in their thoughts.

“Say hello, everyone!”

Various people yelled “Hello,” “Cheers,” “Hi” and “Hey there” at the same time.

“I can’t describe to you the feeling I have, knowing that I have joined, up to this point, only a few hundred lucky people who’ve called themselves by such names as astronauts, cosmonauts and taikonauts.  Today is truly historic.  No, it is, in fact, euphoric.  A simulator just can’t give you this feeling.  It’s tonnes better than floating in a swimming pool.  And the view!  Just look at this!”

He pointed his Google Glass camera at a viewing port.

The blackness of space.

The curvature of Earth.

It was all there, viewable from one window or another.

“Of course, being who I am, I won’t miss the opportunity to invite you to experience this once-in-a-lifetime ride for yourself.  Somewhere near you down on that big spaceship we call Earth is a salesperson willing to walk you through the process of qualifying for a trip aboard our SpaceShip fleet, maybe this one or perhaps one of the newer models because, as you know, demand is rising.

“WOW!  WE ARE IN SPACE!  Sorry, I just had to scream that one out loud.  Anyway, because we’ve finally got the whole family on the ultimate family trip, I’m willing to say that once you’re up here, we’re not letting you back down until you take a trip through the gift shoppe.  A souvenir purchased in space is the most exclusive holiday or birthday present ever, eh?  The first 1000 people who’ve paid, passed the physical/medical examinations and taken this trip will get their very own Virgin Google Glass sets signed by me and the pilot of this virgin voyage.

“If anyone watching this broadcast right now orders while I’m up here, they will receive a replica copy of Google Glass sets and a miniature SpaceShipTwo signed by me and the pilot for a special low price only available during the next few minutes.  You should see the website address or phone number available in your country displayed on your screen right now.  Don’t delay.  I won’t make this offer again.  Or rather, not until my family and I are safely aboard the Virgin InterGalactic Bigelow Hotel orbiting Earth a decade or so from now!  But I can tell you more about that when my feet are planted on the ground after this voyage is complete.

“Pardon me while I stop to enjoy the rest of this adventure!  Whoopeee!!!”

The Wind That Shakes The Barley

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For the first time, he held her in his arms.

Gamnilk looked at the words she’d just typed, satisfied.  She kept typing, knowing every word was read in realtime by someone or something on the ISSA Net.

She was older than he thought when he first saw her enter the room with her husband — tiny wrinkles just like little crow’s feet attached to the outside edges where two delicate eyelids met, light pock marks from childhood acne hidden under a mask of facial makeup covering her cheeks and forehead.

Guin watched the words scroll across her inner eye, a network interface that allowed her to see the communication channels of tourists using the ISSA Net to send innerMartian information as well as instant messages off-planet.

She knew Gamnilk was a tourist who’d traveled with Lee and Shadowgrass earlier in the day.  Guin’s tourists were safely settled in their pods for the evening, getting a marshour’s rejuvenating rest before getting up and ready for the next tour.  Lee’s tourists were already waking up.

Guin also knew Gamnilk was what was once known as a novelist, back in the day when the luxury of paper-based text and image storage was, indeed, novel.

Millions of people still clung to the old ways such as reading blocks of text, some with illustrations, packaged as isolated storylines with a beginning, middle and end, containing interlinked storylines, the main one called a plot and the subordinate stories called subplots, sold as “books” or “novels.”

He had never held her this close before.  He could smell her breath, her shampooed hair, the scent of her skin.  She asked him to pull her closer.  He did.

Guin opened her thoughts to Lee.  “Are you seeing this?”

“Yes.”

“Did you…”

He answered before she could finish her thought.  “Yes, I danced with her.  Shadowgrass asked us to.”

Her son confirmed his father’s statement.

Guin took a deep breath.  “Is she writing about you, then?”

“Maybe.  I let her see my thoughts while we danced.  What harm could it do?  Besides, we need the publicity.”

Guin turned her head and blinked, clearing her mind’s eye to look out of the cathedral window of their home.  She never paid much attention to the tourist pods in the distance, which represented important labour/investment energy credits for their research facilities.

He looked at her green eyes a few inches from his, feeling the small of her back with his right hand.

Wait a minute!  Gamnilk has brown eyes.  Guin realised that Gamnilk was mixing Lee’s first memories of holding Guin with his new memories of holding Gamnilk.  Hadn’t Guin and Lee left Earth to get away from thought hackers?  Were they now just going to let one in again without the slightest protest?

This was what he had been waiting years for, the first touch, the first embrace, feeling their bodies as one on the dance floor, her showing him how to lead her, the two of them tuning out the world around them, including his wife, laughing and giggling like kids having too much fun.

Guin read the words again, confused.  Were these the thoughts of her husband with Gamnilk or the thoughts of her husband with her?  Were they, instead, the thoughts of Gamnilk’s husband whom Gamnilk praised constantly as “the one true love of her life”?

Guin knew how to open up Gamnilk’s thoughts without Gamnilk knowing.  However, she and Lee had agreed not to tap into the tourists’ thought patterns, as opposed as they were to the ubiquitous ISSA Net monitoring and thus controlling almost all aspects of their society in the solar system.

She kept reading Gamnilk’s novel in progress.  Might as well make sure her memories were represented well!

The key to happy Ness monsters

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“Muscle wire.”

“What?”

“Muscle wire.  Do you have any muscle wire?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  The man standing beside her looked at her strangely.

Guin sighed.  She had temporarily accepted an assignment to escort a group of tourists off-base.  During their excursion to the nearest overlook, nicknamed the Loch Ness Monster due to the group of humps that seemed to loom out of the landscape as you drove up to it but gave a sweeping view back to their research outpost when you turned around on top, a torsion bar was torqued out of shape.

“Oh, if only…well, never mind.  I don’t think we’d have any in the lab.  Back on Earth, though…”

Every now and then, Guin recalled her younger years.  She smiled and laughed inwardly as a scene from her childhood, when she first had an inkling she wanted to be a mechanical engineer, flashed through her thoughts.

She was in the mountains visiting her grandparents.

Her father, who had grown up there, had warned her about the kind of folks that lived deep in the hills.

“Now, our family is mainly of the preaching kind, as you know.  But the other families don’t take too kindly to strangers, being drug runners, mainly ‘shine, but some of them have been known to grow the wacky weed, especially Pennsylvania Pure, said to be a direct descendant of crops raised by George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.”

Even down in the valley, where Guin’s father had raised her, the drug dealers lived nearby.

Once, when Guin was out mountain biking, she blew a tire and hitched a ride home from a nice boy with a really cool 4×4 Jeep.  The moment the Jeep pulled into the driveway, her father let loose two warning shotgun blasts in the air.

Guin yelled it was her so her father set down the shotgun, telling her to get out and the boy to take off.

“He’s one of those drug dealers I told you to stay away from.  He’s bad!”

Guin shook her head.  “No he’s not, Dad.  He gave me a ride home.”

“Well, don’t go near him again.”

Guin kept this in her thoughts as she pulled up into her grandparents’ driveway, honking her horn long before she got to the house.

Her grandfather met her at the door.  “Praise Jesus.  I was worried about you, child.  Your father said you’ve been hanging out with those bums in the valley.  Don’t you know they’re the devil’s brood?”

“Aw, come on, Granddad.  I just had a flat tire.”

“Well, you shouldn’t’ve.  You need to learn to fix a tire yourself ’cause if you go out riding around here and get a flat, you will not be coming back.”

Guin wondered why her grandparents, who claimed to be good Christians, were so quick to dismiss the very people who they should be preaching to.  Instead of asking, she noticed her grandfather had a can of of spray foam insulation in his hand.

“Whatcha got there, Granddad?”

“Oh, this?  Well, your grandmother noticed bugs getting into the laundry room.  I noticed a gap running along the line between the window and the wall, probably from the house settling all these years.  I’m going to spray some of this and fill the gap, hoping that’s where the bugs are coming in.”

“Granddad, you’ve given me an idea.”

“Yes, dear, what’s that?”

“Well, that spray foam’d make a great inner tube for my mountain bike tires, don’t you think?”

“That is a great idea.  I’ll save you some.”

“Thanks, Granddad.”

While Guin loosened the brake cables on her bike and removed the wheels, she looked at the brake cables and shocks.

Her thoughts wandered.  What if…

She covered the inside of the wheel rims with a thin coat of oil to keep the spray foam from sticking but left a thin line of the rim clean just inside where the tires would touch the rims, allowing the foam and tires to stick together and bond with the rims.  She slowly sprayed the wet foam along the inside of each tire and seated one at a time back on the wheel rim, letting the expanding foam dry out and form a fully-inflated tire tightly wrapped around the wheel.  She didn’t know how long the foam-filled tires would last but surely long enough for her to have fun biking around the old home place in the mountains.

She dug through the mechatronic play set her grandfather had given her for Christmas and pulled out the muscle memory wire kit.

The heat generated by her bike could activate the muscle wire.  With a tip actuator, she could use the heat generated by her brakes to…hmm…well, what exactly?  A recoiling strand of muscle wire, as part of a nitinol heat engine, could turn a pulley.  What would it take for the system to know if she was about to tip over her handlebars because the front brakes were locking up tighter than her back brakes and ease off pressure on the front wheel so she could still slow down controllably?

Guin’s grandparents wished her goodnight but Guin got out of bed after she heard them quietly snoring down the hall.

She snuck outside with her gear and biked down the road to one of the moonshiners’ hangouts, loudly announcing her presence in the middle of the night.

Needless to say, she was met by flashlights and rifles with hidden voices behind the blinding lights demanding to know who she was and what she was doing in the middle of dadgum night.

Guin explained who she was and the guns lowered.

She further explained why she was there and the lights motioned her on into the barn and down into the hidden chamber where the moonshine was being cooked.

One good thing about being herself, Guin knew how and when to hide her geekiness just long enough for guys to warm up to her good looks.  Most guys got a kick out of a preacher’s granddaughter saying that she liked a strong sip of good moonshine.

She passed on the bong of Pennsylvania Pure getting handed around.

After 15 minutes of shooting the bull, trading stories about high school and cruel principals who didn’t take a liking to mountain folk, Guin sauntered over to the moonshine still.  She paid close attention to the welding, how neat everything was put together.

“You fellows sure know how to assemble piping.  Any chance you have any soldering equipment I can use?”

One boy’s face lit up.  “Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Nathaniel.”

“Well, Nathaniel, is this your handiwork?”  She pointed at the temperature control gauge and electronic control board that was hooked up to the still.

“Yes’m.  My daddy taught me.  He went to trade school and all that.  Was working at the steel mill over in Pittsburgh back before all that was shut down or automated.”

“Can you show me how to operate your equipment?”

“What fer?”

“I broke my bicycle and need to fix it but I want to make it better than before.  Any assistance you could give me would be greatly appreciated.”

“You aren’t trying to steal my ‘shine recipe, are you?  A purty girl like you?”

“No, Nathaniel, I’m not.  I just want to get to know you and your kin better.”  She looked around the group of guys, a couple of them in their teens, three or four in their 30s and two of them in their 50s or 60s.  “Right now, I don’t see much difference between you guys and my brothers or my father and grandfathers.”  She shrugged her shoulders.  “They preach fire and brimstone.  You make white lightning from fire and piping.  Both of you want to make the world a better place from your point of view.”

The guys nodded in general agreement.

Nathaniel pointed toward the back of the room.  “Over here, then.”

“Okay, I’ll get the rest of my gear.”  Guin climbed the ladder and walked over to where she had been made to set her stuff down in the barn.

The memory seemed like yesterday.  Had it been decades?

Guin looked at her reflection on the side of the all-terrain vehicle filled with antsy tourists, some who’d paid a life’s savings for this trip to Mars.  She had paid dearly for a treatment of Syndrome X, “freezing” her body at the age of 40, more than a life’s savings, sacrificing some of her memory and all of her wealth on Earth in order for the biological parts of her body not to die of natural causes for many more decades, what her friends called the ultimate energy exchange.

She opened her thoughts to Lee and Shadowgrass who were leading a tourist group out to an old historic landing site.

Between the three of them, they mentally created a reconfiguration of the ATV to operate without the need for one torsion bar, recording a note to themselves to request an expedited repair bot not only for their domicile but one each of the latest generation bots for the tourist ATVs.  Guin applied their fix and drove on, wishing for a new repair but wishing more that she’d had time to design one herself.

The new bots contained their own smelters which could forge hybrid parts from just about any chemical found in Martian soil, allowing Guin, Lee and Shadowgrass to expand their exploration and free up time for research after the tourista bots were allowed to go back into operation once the latest supply ship had landed with much-needed irreplaceable parts.

At the top of the ridge, the tourists oohed and aahed, recording themselves together in small groups, drinking water replacement fluids and eating spicy snack treats exclusive to this tour.

Guin virtually handed out commemorative electronic stamps that were actually coded algorithms once called apps that could only be sent and activated from the geolocation of the Loch Ness Monster Overlook, the tourists choosing the colour schemes, soil/clothing smells, wind/walking sounds, and 3D background scenes to include with their immersive experience video that was included as part of their tour package.

Guin sent a silent smile and hug to her two “guys,” which they returned within microseconds.

To get this far with their development of the Martian colonies had cost them many close friends on Mars and lost time with family members back on Earth.

But it was worth every sol (Martian day) and marsec (Martian second).

Whatever it took, even a week of giving tours instead of time devoted to pure research.

They always had each other.

But how many women fully support the idea of a patriarchal system and want their men to rule the universe?

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To get hit with the blinding headaches of a major sinus infection in the middle of summer (but during the coldest days in decades), hands shaking and body not able to sleep due to intake of suphedrine, Mucinex D and the usual cholesterol/blood pressure control medication is the least of my worries.

To be able to write stories, I must have a polyamorous and polysexuality thought set.

Being in love with the characterised versions of people I know whom I use as models is driving me mad at this point.

[Pardon me while I honk my nose.]

Rarely do the people match the characters I’ve created.

Rarely still do the people feel the way I do toward them as characters.

But sometimes it takes experimenting with the people and their emotions to give me better understanding of where I want to take the storyline.

Meanwhile, keeping two mapsets — one of reality and one of the science fiction fantasy mapped onto the reality — takes its toll on my sanity.

Throw in an attack on my body’s balanced health and the imbalance throws me off-kilter.

I am a rudderless boat caught in a horrendous storm.

Then, while drifting in and out of daydreams while my wife snores and the cats lickclean themselves while resting on my chest, a story emerges…

[NOTE: Amateurs plagiarise, professionals steal.]

My successful Kickstarter campaign for a 3D printer that’s connected to a computer program that creates a 3D-layered robot complete with 100-DOF motion and 3D built-in electronics which can repair/replicate itself using the 3D printer and eventually creates its own successful Kickstarter competitor for robots that create their own successful businesses, giving me residual revenue for copyright/trademark/patent purposes.

In my dreams, I find ways to build layers to protect me from my klutzy personality and its intersection with other sets of states of energy.

I admit that my polyamorous side is in love with many people right now and the only way to keep myself straight is to write myself a controlled situation in which we are all relatively happy in our cocooned thought sets as we encounter each other in fictional life.

Fortunately or unfortunately, writing these fictional tales here adds to the confusion when the plots seem to align with storylines taking place in what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call “real life.”

Sometimes, I hypnotise myself into believing that I can imagine a future which has almost completely aligned with real events and think I have made a prediction.

That is why I keep a calendar countdown which tells me sometime 13,410 days or revolutions of our mother planet from now, we will experience something that is related to our species establishing permanent colonies off-Earth.  It can be the Moon or Mars, preferably the latter, which followed in our species’ timeline of sending one of our electromechanical wonders outside of the solar system; I’d be happy with a human-populated space probe, too.

As they say, if you work hard enough on a goal, it becomes reality.

At the beginning of the year, when I weighed 244 pounds, I told myself that I wanted to weigh 225 pounds by the fall quarter.  Yesterday morning, on the 17th of August, I weighed 225 pounds.  Goal became reality because I believed I could reasonably reach the goal and worked diligently, slowly, with setbacks, frustrations and elations, to get there.

Which reminds me, why aren’t we working more diligently and telling our species about the ways we plan to capture/collect water on the Moon and Mars?

There aren’t enough water molecules in near-Earth orbit for us to capture but there are certainly places on the Moon and Mars for us to dig in the ground and/or “net” water from the air, if not generate water (or its equivalent (hint, hint)) using other processes.

Instead, using my “robotic” money-generating algorithms on the stock market, I am putting myself out of business by skipping Kickstarter altogether and going straight to the 3D-printer self-repair/replicate robot realised dream.

If only there was some way I could automate my polyamorous/polysexual storylines and get me out of the thought-mapping business!

But then, what would I do about my thoughts that pop up when I’m engaged in normal small-talk conversations with people whom I fear would not understand my verbalised thought maps in realtime, as they have in the past?

At 2:30 a.m. in the morning, I don’t have an answer to that question.  Best keep my tangentially-weird thoughts and ideas to myself and my closest friends, whom I fear more than most because their weird thoughts and ideas are even more amazingly complicated than mine!

Managing a species

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Putting aside the proposition that the ridiculous concept of a species is an arbitrary label which makes no sense on planetary scales of billion-year timelines, let us look at the Management 101 viewpoint of coordinating the activities of our species.

You see, on one hand, we have a company named SAIC that has made many a millionaire in areas around towns like Washington, D.C, and Huntsville, Alabama.

Then, on the other hand, we have the SAIC-haters who see companies like SAIC that hire brilliant (and not-so-brilliant) engineers and scientists in the government intelligence welfare program to create, protect and defend government assets around the world.

That, in itself, is a whole lot of concepts through out there in a couple of paragraphs.

What separates the scientifically-minded people who work for companies like SAIC from the scientifically-minded people who think SAIC shouldn’t exist?

In the spectrum of seven-plus billion people on this planet, where do those two groups generally fall?

I am no purist.  I hope I am a realist who writes science fiction fantastic tales for a money-losing tax writeoff against my government’s desire to earn revenue from me.

I understand the need for a company like SAIC that would create titles such as “Program Manager for Lethality and Mortality,” a job position that requires a person to manage a missile design program which ensures the most number of deaths when dropped on the ‘enemy’ [the lethality part] and the least number of deaths when used as a shield from incoming missiles directed by the ‘enemy’ [the mortality part].

In a perfect world, we would all be friends helping each other out rather than playing boy-toy wargames and killing the peasants with our war toys for fun.

Or would we?

“Come on down!  You’re the next contestant in the ‘Price is Right’!”

Is it a gender issue?  Is SAIC the result of years of patriarchal leadership?  In other words, does testosterone mixed with adrenaline drive our culture to war, spying and government/corporate control?

Is there an alternative that completely replaces our species’ need for hierarchical control?

How many police officers see the world as a sea of perps?

How many peace lovers see the world as a sea of love surrounding a few desert islands of the misguided?

Does the concept of haves-vs-the havenots have anything to do with this?

What about a global consumer economy of “I want more, More, MORE!!!!”?

Say, I am a student of the STEM disciplines and I know that my education will lead me not only to a comfortable lifestyle but a lavish one?  Would I trade a career where I spend more time in pure research, long hours and low pay for a career where I spend more time in government-supported commercial development, fewer hours and high pay?

What are my motivations?  What of my socioeconomic background?  What of my general/public education, starting with my formative years?

Am I assertive, rebellious and outspoken?  Or am I introverted, a good follower who obeys orders/commands starting with the simplest “30 MPH when road is wet” sign?

What if you’re a combination of these traits?

What would a personality profile test tell you?

And what about those of us who will decide how to give you the best guidance for your life as you transition from your childhood years to your adult years, based on your desires, motivations, skills, training and personality traits?

See, we want both the SAIC millionaire employees and the anti-SAIC haters, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

We have room for you, whoever you are, and whatever you want, spooks and nonspooks alike.

The economic pie keeps growing, even if portions of it shrink sometimes, or seems to be made of unequal slice sizes.

Your input is valuable and helps us reshape the pie based on current trends.

Keep in mind that negativity and satire have a funny way of shaping the future.  What you complaint about and make fun of often (Orwell’s “1984,” for instance) causes your opposition to move further into the business of undiscoverable dark secrets, digging deeper trenches that are harder to cross and meet your opposition halfway.

Instead of berating the cybersecurity spy business, propose a future that takes all seven-plus billion of us into account, including the SAIC millionaires who don’t want their fortunes to disappear overnight a la Enron, GM, Lehman Brothers, etc.

We can work with a positive proposal much easier than negative protesting or scathing satire.  Those of us who want to change the world have to pass the newspaper test, go home to our children, live with our friends and seek happiness as much as you do.