Tag Archives: future

Extra pack of batteries included

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For the first time, they stood together, staring at the Martian landscape.

Xonvart, Shelmi, Lysal, Guin and Lee, together again for the very first time.

But there were new faces, faces who had teamed up to get the ball rolling. Raubine, Magdalena, Dranmoy, Nats…

Teams mesh, grow stronger, create powers from their collective consciousness, show each other that perceived flaws are illusions, Laugh, Cry, Fart, Burp, tell really bad jokes together. Everything!

“Everything?”

Lee looked from one friend to another, wondering…

When, if there was a when, when was the exact moment that the combined energy of the team gave them Synergy?

How did they go from their childhood dreams of Great Adventures, pass through Growing Pains, stretch their way from Extraordinary to Ordinary, back to Extraordinary, and end up here?

It was in the moment when they knew they didn’t always have to be happy to be successful.

It was when they were themselves, every day, all the time.

Transmission from the future transcribed on 11th Mar 2017

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Via Inner Solar System Alliance Comm

[begin transmission]

Diary of a Left Hander

Of the many sets of states of energy with which I interact comfortably and thus call a friend (yet so much more because we do not limit ourselves to human-based conventional labels), you are truly one.

I would say I miss you but you are a continual part of my thought process meaning, of course, that I miss making eye contact with you and dancing in Mars’ gravitational fields with you as a nonjudgmental partner.

We express our knowledge of each other in centuries so the days, weeks and years in between the time we spend together are not fraught with meaning.

Instead, we measure what we have together in the immeasurable ways we encourage the other to focus on staying busy, hoping that the accumulation of information through moments building on moments we call wisdom gives us a cushion to lean on when we’re up against a wall beating our heads to avoid the abyss of…well, that place, the Big S.

At this point in our careers we have overcome enough project setbacks that we calmly face work-related problems as we calculate multiple outcomes to predict the best possible solution(s) given the current working dataset.

Do you remember that one summer when I attempted to move out on my own, forgetting, as I often do, that I am unable to function without a primary caretaker? My caretaker at the time was my longtime friend and marriage partner who was always jealous of anyone getting between her and her time with me.  She never understood the levels of friendship associated with polyamory, including platonic friendships of a nonsibling nature.  Like ours.

Your dance routines are just some of the parts of your being I admire for the melding of your creativity with your body form.  From that admiration I drew inspiration to create the ever evolving backyard creation I started calling a treehouse but which branched out into the inner solar system as our sets of states of energy were adapted to extraterrestrial existence.

At times my longterm depression expresses itself more strongly such as when I eat too much to compensate for lack of faith in a longterm future with you in it.  So far I’ve always resolved that situation.  So far.

Until next time!

[End communication]

Meanwhile, off planet..

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“I miss the way it used to look when Orion shot a flaming arrow in the shape of the crescent moon during early spring on Earth.”

“Yeah, me, too. Oh, how jealous in was of the Moon when you two were alone, the moonlight looking over your shoulder when you studied for exams on the back porch.”

“Doesn’t seem that long ago, does it?”

“Unh unh. Makes me seem old yet I still feel so young!”

“Well, we are a few hundred Earth years old…”

“…but who’s counting?!” they said in unison, and began to dance.

“Do you still get jealous every time I dance with someone else?”

Lee nodded.

“Even the dance partner simulator?”

“Yes, Guin, even more so.”

“Good!” Guin pushed away from Lee and called up the dance sim, performing an elaborate ballet duet routine she’d found in old childhood memory archives recently.

A peace mint

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Jogger, wearing a headlamp on a north Alabama side road, influenced by a viral video of villagers rescuing a neighbour’s body from within a python, bobs up and down as bobolinks and robins wake up in the predawn air.

We don’t pick cotton or cut sugar cane by hand around here anymore.

No, manual labour has lost its value as far as commercially-farmed edibles is concerned.

Manual labour still exists in the form of handcrafted art and jewelery.

Workers still fill potholes with shovelfuls of asphalt, still run power cable by hand, still hammer studs and plant bushes with their arms as levers.

But the tools grow more sophisticated, the workers’ brainpower redirected, their hand-eye coordination rewired.

We look to education to solve human-machine interface configuration issues.

What are looking for, really?

Is it one person’s yacht versus a thousand persons’ robotic movements?

Are we forever doomed to be hierarchical antmound builders, some with a mountaintop view and some in perpetual darkness underground?

A recent visitor to this planet asked if we’ve always been mountbuilding social creatures, observing from space that our domiciles are primarily boxes piled on top of boxes, linked by antlike trails carrying food and supplies from domicile to domicile primarily across the surface of the planet.

Who was I to disagree?

The visitor asked if we planned to carry these habits with us as we moved on to other planets.

A good question.

Have we advanced beyond moundbuilding civilisations?

Will we ever?

Will we continue to appease our ancestors or completely reconfigure ourselves to enhance our ability to travel great distances across the galaxy?

The visitor left us with many questions, providing no answers except in the negation of our Earthbound habits.

The visitor was not humanoid or superintelligent, the visitor did not use a universal translator to communicate.

The visitor was an asteroid with a shiny surface, reflecting us back to ourselves, reminding us that the tree which drops seeds on the ground is composed of the same galactic material.

The messages we write into DNA which triggers a new species to assert itself beyond Mars orbit, that is the lesson the asteroid taught us: we already have the tools we need to successfully move away from Earth, we just need to reeducate ourselves to use the tools properly, getting beyond moundbuilding and social hierarchies in the process.

The Fourth Wall

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Lee met Shadowgrass for a moon bounce.

They’d take a hop for a couple of sols, bouncing from Martian moon to Martian moon, racing each other through suborbital traffic.

A typical parent/child venture.

They hadn’t seen each other for a long time, what between Lee hiding on Enceladus, traveling through a black hole, visiting and revisiting Earth, promoting, selling, experimenting, taking holidays,…

Shadowgrass wasn’t exactly free, either, having supervised the conversion of Lee’s and Guin’s labs and greenhouses to ensure enough tourism kept people focused on and talking about Mars, then soliciting resources for more research facilities far away from tourists.

As they circled the Northern Ice Cap, they noticed a new outpost.

“Have you been there?”

“No. It’s just another resort under construction, currently designated Outpost 14.”

“That’s curious. Why the extensive excavation?”

Shadowgrass had wondered the same thing. ISSANet records indicated special deep foundations were designed for the outpost. But why? The subsoil was firm. “I don’t know, Dad. It’s not readily apparent.”

They circled on around the planet, shooting out toward Deimos for a bite to eat.

“Shadowgrass, when you get back, can you make time to visit the outpost?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“Thanks. Your genius will figure out what’s going on in ‘know time,’ I’m sure.”

They laughed.

“Last one to Deimos buys fuel credits!”

S’iht Egneh Snots

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S’iht sat silently.

Assigned to the new outpost ten sols ago, S’iht had studied the goals and expectations of the outpost team.

This being the 14th outpost, with tourists taking up much of the old science station quarters of the First Colony, S’iht’s job importance had grown significantly as tourists put pressure on the new Martian government to provide fun, exciting places to explore safely.

S’iht knew that the first thirteen outposts were overcrowded.

The team for this outpost wanted something different, too.

After all, they has mastered all the knowledge that 200 marsyears of recent robotic exploration had accumulated. 

They wanted to be remembered.

Memory was gold in the outposts.

Being remembered by more than your teammates was priceless, rarely if ever achieved.

S’iht had once been remembered.

S’iht arrived in a group of ten excited tourists who had arrived with a shipment of permanent Martian settlers, Permartians, the first people designed to live there.

The Last Humans, S’iht’s tour group were called.

With so many returning tourists reporting major health problems the Mars Tourism Bureau declared the Red Planet offlimits to all but Permartians for next 100 marsyears.

S’iht had won the DNA lottery, surviving untold marsyears of ultraviolet and cosmic radiation exposure with little longterm damage.

S’iht was not remembered for health reasons.

S’iht has been wealthy on Earth, taking calculated but high risks investing in AI technology which turned whole planets into sentient beings, integrating many of Earth’s governments and corporations, forming the precursor to the ISSANet.

The economies of scale turned S’iht into the solar system’s first quintillionaire.

Until the ISSANet reached beyond the mere imaginings of Earthlings, converting S’iht’s wealth into a public resource for, of course, the greater good.

S’iht was erased from public memory, left to serve as a Martian Outpost Operator, unable to convince anyone of S’iht’s previous life.

Always inside the unending view of the ISSANet, the omniscient caretaker crafted to grow its existence beyond the solar system, rewriting and reinventing its connections, no longer dependent on human-based algorithms. 

But S’iht still dealt with tourists using old-fashioned methods of talking, facial movements and body postures developed over millennia of human evolution.

The fourteenth outpost was going to be remembered.

S’iht had a plan.

All while fighting off thoughts of self-hatred, dark thoughts of suicide when S’iht knew the ISSANet would please itself by keeping S’iht alive for centuries.

What if evidence of a strange alien civilisation was uncovered in the fourteenth outpost?

S’iht had new friends, including humans, Permartians and ‘bots. They formed a cohesive unit that communicated ideas without talking about them.

Together they had created a whole back story for a civilisation that had arrived on Mars billions of years ago but died out.

A civilisation that had known Earth in its early days before single-celled organisms had spread across the planet through water networks and evaporation. 

Together S’iht’s colleagues would dig out in full view of the ISSANet a civilisation that never existed.

Despite its advanced technology, the ISSANet carried within its network a series of iterative, reinforcing behaviours that mimicked humans’ sympathy networks, ever so slightly susceptible to subliminal messages.

S’iht’s colleagues spent decades of marsyears nurturing the seed of an ancient civilisation on Mars until the ISSANet convinced itself of the same possibility, doubling the duties of outpost builders to look for such.

S’iht had become an indispensable outpost crew member because of S’iht’s insistence that such a civilisation didn’t exist.

The ISSANet gambled a small portion of its galactic expansion resources on the chance S’iht was wrong.

S’iht just wanted to be remembered again.

S’iht joined the 14th Outpost crew and yelled out, “Let’s Stonehenge this place!”

A few seconds of your tone

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Guin adjusted her memory filter, choosing “Eidetic” for tonight’s star viewing.

Lee joined her in the star chamber.

Laying back on cushions, they smiled at each other, happy after an afternoon break spent dancing in the Martian gravity, never tiring, even after centuries of Earth time had passed, to spin and leap, tossing and catching hours on end.

Guin passed a memory to Lee.

“Do you remember the old mills in Huntsville?”

Lee breathed deeply, the pungent smell of raw, wet cotton filling his nostrils, his lungs feeling heavy with dust, sweat and cobwebs.

“Like it was yesterday.”

Guin nodded, watching in her thoughts the day the water tower was erected in the neighbourhood, every kid anxious to climb the tallest structure in town.

“And the day the water tower fell?”

“Which one?”

“Haha. Right!”

A shower of meteorites reflected in their eyes as they looked at each other.

They closed their forward facing eyes and stopped talking with their mouths, sharing memories more quickly through the ISSANet link they shared.

Lean

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What is love?

Is it wanting to ask you how your mother is doing, how things are with you, how well, if ever, you’ll recover your Japanese language skills?

You are always you (the individual), and the universal you (the other/not-me) –the subject/object of poetic discourses.

You are the person on whom I lean when letting my guard down because we are dance partners occasionally, not often, but often enough to know what it’s like to be student and instructor at the same time.

Tonight I lean on you because I want to write about the future and you tend to be the portal on the future through which I see sets of states of energy trillions of state changes later.

You know what I mean by saying I’m bisexual, an orientation that is outside human understanding, an association with binary programming, a reference to a gender-neutral belief structure in a time where two such as us explore Mars as quasi-approximations of the human framework but designed for Martian life, no longer Earth-based humans.

I see that future as clear as if I’m alive in it now.

It is there whether I’m surrounded by strangers on a train or reclined in bed looking up at the popcorn ceiling.

It is there in the direction our species is going, what I observe in the daily reports from professional news organisations and social media.

I do not know what love is, having spent my childhood avoiding pain, my thought set ahead of my parents’ socially prescribed punishment methods for perceived misbehaviour but unable to reason with them until I was in my mid-teens.

Love for me is more about logic and reasoning, understanding as I do that love is showing my vulnerability here to you for all to see, how I do care about your family, your recovery status in relation to your father’s death and mother’s medical condition, are primary in my thoughts but not often expressed verbally or written down.

I don’t tell you that I miss you or that I love you because I assume you know.

You are sometimes like a male friend to me and sometimes like my sister.

I lean on you now and will lean on you the rest of the week to continue the Martian tales…

Just chilling but no longer on ice

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While these words are placed here, the one who is writing the words in sequence is part of the words so should “I” step out from behind them and write a personal blog entry or a third-person story?

I step out today as I slowly awaken from a months-long slumber, stirred awake by my dear friend Jenn a month or so ago.

When I stood over the kitchen sink looking into the backyard a little while ago, I wondered how I could thank Jenn for getting my attention.

Should I sing her praises?  After all, she is a person worth writing lyrics and melodies instead of short stories and poems.

Or should I celebrate our friendship by writing what I used to write before I fell asleep, knowing as I do that my six months of snoozing directly correlated to the moment when I stood outside a Hammersmith community center in London, waiting on my wife to finish a Ceroc dance when a white male in his 30s/40s approached me (he had eyed me a few times during the evening and I had simply nodded at him in what I thought was the typical heterosexual male recognition manner) and offered to perform a sex act with my in the loo?

I had maybe 5 or 10 seconds to consider telling my wife that I had to go to the bathroom and she wouldn’t have questioned anything.

Running through my thoughts was the tube schedule and how much time we had to get to the nearest subway station to catch a ride back back to South Kensington.

Plus my natural reticence, the slight paranoia that the guy’s offer could be a setup.  Or maybe he had an STD that he would fail to mention and I would get infected.

The look of anticipation on his face told me he feared my saying no so I chose to believe that his offer was truly genuine.

In the last second when I was deciding whether to commit to “what goes on during London holiday, stays in London,” my wife stepped up beside me and interrupted the nervous gaze I was sharing with the guy.

Therefore, I thanked him for the offer and told him I wasn’t interested, upon which he literally ran off.

If I hadn’t told my wife, she wouldn’t have known what just transpired.

But I’ve told myself all this in a blog already.

What I failed to mention was the connection of this event to my failure to move out into a house rental on my own when I thought my wife might be dying of heart failure just before our London trip.

Failure, failure, failure.

Most importantly, I lumped all of this together with my love for Jenn.  And not just Jenn, but the part of me that is unashamedly polyamorous, and how many times I’ve failed to show, as opposed to tell, Jenn how much I love her.

By admitting I love Jenn, I admit I love many more, such as the only woman whose body has no personal space between her and me — Michele.

Michele and I are happy dogs in heat when we’re together, including when my wife is there.  Being bisexual, too, Michele loves my wife.  Michele is the only woman I’ve ever loved with whom we can be in full embrace and talk about our spouses at the same time. Zero jealousy in either one of us.

So, when I didn’t take the free opportunity to demonstrate to myself and myself alone that I was truly bisexual with a stranger in London, I thought my life was over and if my life was over, there was no more Jenn, Michele or others in my life and all I was left with was the monastic life that I could have led had I chosen to give up sexual relations with another person at any point before I got married 30 years ago.

I returned home and focused on the life of an asexual aesthete, telling everyone about the moments in my London trip where I had felt the greatest epiphanies, in Newgrange and Westminster Abbey.

I also started masturbating a lot more and quit writing.

I won’t say that I hated myself but simply that I felt it was no longer necessary to care about the future, every moment felt the same as the previous moment which would be the same as the next moment, ad infinitum.

Not a bad thing, really.

In fact, for most of us that’s the daily truth, the FEELING that everything is the same when it truly isn’t.

It was in the tiny realisation that no two moments are exactly the same that I lived the last six months.

My hearing loss increased and the sense of smell decreased, worrisome signs of either depression, dementia, or both.

I wasn’t dead yet.

Meanwhile, the winds of society shifted ever so slightly, something I smelled when we were on our Rhine River cruise in December 2015 and reinforced during our Ireland/England trip in August 2016 (nothing like going out-of-country to get a clearer view of your national subculture, especially as globally loud as an American one).

When I stood face-to-face with the guy in Hammersmith I was ever so slightly aware that our encounter could be recorded and used against me in an overbearing ultraconservative government intent on making examples of citizens it deemed unworthy or who would not buckle under blackmail to get in line.

For you see, as a writer I think I am my own god and as my own god I believe I have an influence on others that outweighs evidence to the contrary.

The little pebbles I throw into the pond of life are not causing typhoons in the South China Sea.

Or are they?

What if I believed that words I had written months or years ago were part of the zeitgeist which understood our species was only going to establish permanent offworld colonies by depriving the peasant class of essential raw materials needed to build laboratories where the next great living things were going to be created from scratch, beings specifically created to live in space and on other celestial spheres?

And that despite my reservations about his sanity, the current U.S. President and his administration understood the same thing?

Would I be willing to sacrifice my personal desires to declare a permanent presence on Mars of Earth-based lifeforms fully successful by 6th May 2050?

Can I have both?

Jenn gives me the hope that I can.

I don’t know how. I’ve already tried and failed once.

“If at first you don’t succeed…”

My smartwatch reminds me I’ve been sitting for an hour and not exercising.

My future is alive again and I feel fine. Time to stop writing/talking and dance!