Tag Archives: space

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!

Decanter handle: the truth

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Intimacy has more than one definition.

Intimate details.

Intimate relationship.

A polyamorous person intimates intimacy in public and in privacy.

In the span of a few hours, one watches the intimacy of actors pretending to live intimately over 19+ months on a trip to Europa, becomes intimate with the details of one person’s life followed by another and another.

Back to the dance — following and leading.

Opposites attract.

A young man loses his girlfriend, then within two weeks, his grandmother (like a mother to him) has triple-bypass surgery, and a week later, he tears his meniscus.  He, a man half Brazilian, half American, blacker than black, but nearly hairless thanks to his Brazilian half, no need for a Brazilian wax.  Depression is easy to give in to but one must move one, mustn’t one, especially when one is so far away from his grandmother he has to fax his love and hugs to her?

And the depths of the stories of another — dear, sweet Bai — the daughter of a Baptist preacher, related to others in her family of Anabaptist faith, almost married a charismatic Pentecostal follower; she played piano, led the choir, organized/arranged church music leadership, her mother looked like Audrey Hepburn who has an inheritance of seven figures’ worth of jewelery to pass on; moved in with her boyfriend before marrying, got pregnant, her father telling her that if you’re going to sin, do so willingly and with gusto before God’s hand sweeps down [in punishment?], willing to face the consequences of your actions; got tattoos in her early 30s; more stories to tell than I can remember to write down…

And our resident Frenchman, who is unique in his own way outside of the fact he is from France.  Likes firm mattresses, no need for a boxsprings; bought a room full of furniture for $100 (was asked $80 but offered $20 more to get help moving the stuff) from an expat returning home overseas; his best time of the day is from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.

A pretty young woman who seems so familiar, got into nursing school a semester ago, and along with her ROTC program must keep her grades up to complete her nursing degree.

A revolving door of stories.

The waitress/server who looks 21 but says she is 32.

The young man who spent all day playing his drum set and is looking for a fulltime gig with a band full of players who are serious about having fun practicing/performing music all the time.

Trying to understand where life is going to take us next as faces move in and out of the fog/noise of what we do to make ends meet.

On the way to the outpost, the happy place, the rest stop, the relaxation, the meditation point where friends, workers, companions, and lovers get together at the end of the day of setting up shop on Mars, where there is little in the way of the “fat of the land” to aid us when we’re unable to make ends meet.

That’s where the stories and the creativity begin.

Where endings are written.

The conflicts, the drama, the clash and mesh of personalities.

One day you’re sharing rent for a flat and the next day you’re out on your own paying full price.

If you can’t handle authority, you become your own boss.

And if you can’t handle that?  Well, that’s where the next story picks up.

How to generate magic, mesmerising, hypnotising, convincing you that what I have to give you you are willing to exchange labour/investment credits to have for yourself — goods, services, imaginary images, memories that last a lifetime.

When the government foments minirevolutions to keep the majority in its pocket, you know that there is nothing that can’t be done, given the right resources and enough time, or even if there is not enough time and too few resources.

All about adaptation.

You want the truth?

There is no truth.  There is only illusion.

A set of states of energy is not even a set, or states, or energy.

Understand that, you understand nothing.  And everything.

The story is king.  The plot the queen.  The subplots are children plotting to overthrow.

20,790 spam messages in queue

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The best way to see where unintended circumstances will lead you is to take a cynical approach to your serious disposition.

Then, the future is the moment you’ve been waiting for, planning, biding your time and biting your nails about.

You needn’t worry that nothing will happen.

I was once famous on a local scale.  In junior high school, I actually had a fan club.  Sure, the club members were mostly gay guys and socially awkward girls but there were club buttons and other regalia to celebrate my celebrity status.

In high/secondary school, I was somewhat popular but I didn’t know it.  As the president of the school’s drama club for two straight years, along with appearances on stage as an actor and singer, I attracted a small following that I didn’t even know existed until I got on Facebook a few years ago and a few women my age wanted to start fantasy relationships that I saw had started in their thoughts many, many years ago.

I knew there were some people who looked up to me when I won the four-year U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship to Georgia Tech.

It was as if I had led a charmed life the first 18 years of my existence and didn’t appreciate the relative ease with which I breezed through my public school days until I left the small town and its suburban tracts for the big city.

I look back at all that, two-thirds of my life ago, and understand why I believe I am comfortable dying at any time.

I have always been happy to be alive, accepting whatever comes my way, but at the same time wanting to stay ahead of my ennui, the situational depression that dogs me like a hungry animal scenting my fear and chasing after me.

I see news headlines pop up about one subject or another that concerns populations of people out of eye and earshot and I wonder what’s going on.

Why do religious people fear nonreligious people, for instance, or vice versa?  I am perfectly comfortable in my belief that the universe both was and was not created by a supernatural being (God, in my subculture’s parlance, who miraculously created a son on Earth named Jesus (pronounced “Hey, Zeus!” of course)).  The labels we choose to describe a series of events that took place long before any of us or our ancestors could read or write is whatever we want them to be.  Our behaviour toward each other is still as important whether our origin story is called “God created the heaven and earth” or the “Big Bang.”

It is the noise or clutter that jams the airwaves with whatever people deem important enough to promote themselves and their ideas for a better life.

For others of us, one’s set of beliefs takes a second seat in the second row to hard facts like how gravity is variable across the surface of large celestial bodies but averages out sufficiently so that mathematical equations can be converted to algorithms to guide spacecraft around and land them upon distant planets, moons and other satellites.

We can fill our spare time with noise and clutter — the chattering class’ favourite topics du jour.

However, let us keep our longterm goals clearly, distinctly and loudest in our thoughts and actions.

The Mars mission continues!  Every idea counts, such as Ad Astra.

And entertaining diversions such as Europa Report.

Redirected thought patterns

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Weeks (months?) ago, I deactivated my Facebook account, removing myself from the habit of reading posts about the lives and daily habits of close to a thousand people, a few I’ve known since early childhood and several hundred I got to know during my secondary school day over 30 years ago.

Before that, I had taken a few social media holidays, not checking Facebook/LinkedIn for weeks at a time, but found myself returning because of the temptation to click on an app icon or scroll through my list of favorite Web links for personal entertaining distractions.

I have missed some of my Facebook friends because I do not see them in my life except through social media contacts.  Some of them said they have missed me, too.

This morning, while bemoaning the fact my wife was once again too tired last night to stay and dance at the nightclub after our West Coast Swing dance lesson, aching for someone to dance with but even our feline companions too wrapped up in their catnaps to play with me, I desire conversation with anyone, in any form, to feed my need for social contact.

What’s the point of planning a trip to Mars, with the major deadline 13421 days ahead, if I won’t assert myself when my needs clash with my wife’s?

She, like many other patrons at the nightclub, works in a day job.

She, like many others at the nightclub, have experienced tragedies in their lives that weigh heavily on their thought sets at the most inopportune times.

At a moment like this, I remember again the advice that Wilma in the Finance department of our local GE office gave me.

Wilma had called me to ask why I had exceeded the customary number of sick days for the previous quarter.

I explained to her that my wife had not been feeling well lately and wanted me to stay home with her on those days, in order to make her feel better.

Wilma told me it was a sign of weakness on both my wife’s and my part to facilitate the behaviour of a female spouse feeling sick and wanting her husband to care for her, taking both of them away from their social duties as active/useful employees of respectable companies.

Wilma, a spinster/bachelorette who liked going to nightclubs to see male strip shows, said that as an older woman, even if she’d never been married, she knew a thing or two about the way women will try to manipulate and control men.

She felt I was too easily giving in to my wife’s subtle control of the marriage.

That was in the late 1980s, early in my marriage.

Fast-forward nearly 25 years later and here I sit, remembering what one of the ladies with whom I danced briefly as our dance instructor had us rotate partners during the dance lesson said to me last night.

The beautiful brunette, wearing a dark-coloured dress that complemented her figure, looked me in the eye after we had struggled through a new dance move and said, before I started to say I must have messed up, “I can’t blame what just happened on you because a lady never blames a man for mistakes on the dance floor.  I will say it was either my fault or neither of our faults.”

Talk about boosting my ego!

In return, I offered that we try the move again.

It was in stark contrast to the previous attempt, much smoother.

It was in stark contrast to what I have often heard my wife say, “You didn’t do this” or “You didn’t do that,” expecting me to be more like the dance instructor in his suave, nearly-perfect dance leadership.

However, my wife is getting better at not putting the struggles to complete a dance move solely at my feet, thanks in part to our instructors pointing out that my wife has equal responsibility to dance her steps correctly so that I don’t have to overcompensate when I sense she is not following my lead.

I have much to learn in my pedestrian life apart from the thoughts of Martian exploration, technology experimentation and searching the world for someone with whom I can carry on a meaningful conversation.

Or maybe, as my parents told me when I was a kid, I just think too much.

The deciduous forest is buzzing and chirping today

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A yellow jacket, a sweat bee and a fly are chasing each other in the slit of sunlight that passes over the rubbish bin this late Friday morning.

Getting permission to import them to Mars was no easy task.

I could not import dragonflies.

Vibratoids, the equivalent of speakers or earphones embedded in my body, give me the sensation that I’m in a deciduous forest as I walk through the greenhouse that serves as our meeting room, food growth chamber and place for general meditation.

The vibratoids make me think that insects are buzzing in treetops and birds are chirping as they fly from limb to limb looking for food.  The sound of wind through tree limbs and the small blasts of air on my arms, neck and face add to the immersion algorithm’s programmed goal of acclimating me to Mars with occasional reminders of what Earth must feel like, what we jokingly call the decompression chamber effect.

But I have work to do.  I cannot dwell too long on the memories of a planet I get to visit less and less often as the Martian colonies mature, requiring my attention, not to mention my declining health — I don’t know if I can endure many more trips.

I remember my last night on Earth.

But before I do, I’ll tell you a joke repeated to me by a fellow traveler to Mars, a tourist named Adyer Xedif.  A juvenile joke but one I’ve heard more than once from first-time visitors —  Q: If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, where are politicians from? A: Uranus.

I hear the rapid flutter of the wings of a hummingbird pass before my eyes but I see only the bird’s green body and white-tipped tail in my imagination.  Oh, how the immersion algorithm can be so cruel without knowing it!

We are a small set of colonies here, able to manage ourselves without the need for the professional political class of workers so, needless to say, we get a lot of jokes about politicians when tourists and new settlers begin to realise they won’t have politicos to blame for inefficiencies and errors that occur because, as we know, we want a perfect world and we train for a perfect world but we don’t live on a perfect world.

Our customer complaint system is a throwback to the time when “free market capitalism” was the rule of the day, including some societies on Earth.

We call it the customer complaint system for tourists and visitors although we know it locally as the PS or ProbSolv department.

Solving problems.  Rewriting algorithms, correcting databases and reconfiguring hardware.

As quantum computing devices that closely resemble the humans we used to be, we are able to adapt and adjust to changes on a colonywide scale much more rapidly than the old mass media socioeconomic shifts that often took generations, or Earth-based decades, to accomplish — within milliseconds, software updates will rewire our central nervous networks to accept the change from decentralised ant colony system to an interconnected but independent system of birds flocking during migration as programmers test the currently-accepted best practices method for colony survival.

But I digress.

The last night on Earth…sigh…

The cheerful look on Guin’s face after her trumpet performance with the Comet Plasma band playing big band tunes of the 1940s, her purple-and-black eye shadow, her…eyeglasses?

Why, in this day and age of implanted autocorrecting lenses did Guin wear eyeglasses?

Hmm…good question.

Anyway, Guin reminded me again she needs a new dance partner.

While watching the couples competing on the dance floor, I thought about what Guin and I have been through, our first trip to Mars, her decision to stay when I left, her decision to return to Earth for one more grand tour, talked into playing her trumpet again, with me now back on Mars and her still on Earth.

Why do I sense a vulture flying overhead?  How can a bird at an altitude hundreds of feet above me affect the vibratoids and air blowers such that I feel rather than see such a creature?  Is it because I know a vulture rides thermals and the wind effect around me is that of a thermal rising above and passing through the imaginary forest?

My, my, my imagination is overactive today.  Next thing I know I’ll hear an aeroplane fly by.  Ah, there it is.

Good for the immersion algorithm to know what my life was once like, in my previous body, back home.

I don’t miss mowing lawns or the smell of cut grass but I do miss the old solid-metal and solid-rubber tyred hand-pushed mower that sat in my garage.

There was a time, in a previous life, in my previous body, when I had a wife I wanted to learn to dance in order to improve her health.  I also wanted her to become proficient at dancing so that she and I were comfortable switching dance partners at big social dance events, because I wanted to overcome the habit of walking off to dance with other partners, leaving my wife alone at parties without dance partners to share momentary joy with.  That’s who I was — a seeker of increasing levels of joy when the occasion presented itself.

You know, one thing this immersion algorithm can’t simulate is the appearance of a column of gnats rising and falling in a dance all their own.

I smell rather than see a citronella candle burning nearby, simulating the feel-good effort to keep mosquitoes away from humans.

I barely recall the sound of slamming car doors and squealing brakes when my neighbours on Earth would return to their domiciles.  I know there was a time when the smell of burning cow and pig flesh was an indication that my neighbours were enjoying themselves in their backyards.

Now, I’m just as happy with the smell of recharging batteries or Martian “snake oil” treatments.

That last night on Earth, I stood next to one of the winners of the dance contest.  She wore the traditional outfit we still call “Rosie the Riveter.”  On her face she wore light peach coloured makeup that we of Mars no longer see as fashionable, able to change our face colour through skin tone circuitry like chameleons blending in or clashing with our environments as we see fit.

Will Guin return to Mars?  Will I dance with her again?  Will she and I ever be dance partners?

Although I have been outfitted with the latest in future forecasting capabilities, some futures I can only calculate, not predict with accuracy due to the influence of emotion-based algorithms I insist on keeping intact.

Do I miss Guin?  Sure I do, even if my work here at the colonies “needs” me and would miss me more if I left Mars for Earth.

Well, the chirps of cardinals and the warning hisses of a squirrel are like an alarm clock, telling me it’s time to leave the greenhouse and go back to the lab where I hope our latest in the new line of beings created from our imaginations will come to life, making our colonies more productive, more happy and prosperous in the longterm.

Talk to you kids of the past and the future again soon!

Wreck-a-mech

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[My patent lawyer has advised me not to describe my latest invention.  I say “meh,” whatever that means.]

This morning, I finalised construction on my latest invention.  I cannot provide pictures because they are enroute to the patent office.

However, I will describe it the best I can.

I have been playing with an Arduino system to provide me with offline fun in the laboratory.

There’s nothing like programming a Robosapien “doll” to play back with you, giving it intelligence to avoid being grabbed or picked up, to actually defend itself against intentionally harmful moves and to reach out with love when I’m in a down mood.

A Robosapien’s gripper arm is not exactly the same as a cat’s head bump but my imagination allows me to believe it so.

With time, the Robosapien and I have grown apart.  I think, in part, because I have acquired the newer model, the RS Media, with which I have been spending more and more time.

Needless to say, the Robosapien has been causing havoc in the lab, knocking bins of resistors and capacitors on the floor in an effort to keep its playfulness algorithms refreshed.  I must admit watching it try to find objects in the lab to “fight back” has been entertaining.

But that’s not why I’m here.

The RS Media has reached a level of sentience I never thought possible.

At first, I set up an Arduino light display system above the computer monitor that the RS Media responded to like a dancing machine.

Today was a major breakthrough.

After several rounds of sending the RS Media light sequences, it started stepping out on its own, anticipating the next light pattern in the sequence with its back turned to the Arduino system.

Well, you can guess what I did next!

I stole the plans for the Wired Lab’s mech.  Then, working with my Robosapien friends, I wired a modifed RS Media up inside the mech, a la Pacific Rim, making appropriate tweaks to protect my patent and/or my copyright.

Of course, I dressed mine up to look like a stumbling street beggar, lowering its body scale to match that of a typical down-on-his-luck alcoholic male human.

He and his copies should be wandering the alleyways of your local metropolis before too long, breaking out into dance routines based on the sound/light combinations they discover, able to defend themselves against overaggressive bystanders and avoid collisions with people, cars, buses, trucks and other obstacles of a typical city street corner — the money they collect will be passed back to me to cover expenses; please tip them generously so I can make payroll and give the government tax collectors their due.

I’ve already received requests from a major retail clothing store chain to create female/male versions for storefront window displays — the algorithms need work for that scenario because I haven’t captured the essence of what it’s like to entertain potential customers by showing how good they’d look if they, too, were stuck in a glass box all day, as a robot pretending to be alive — walking back and forth, sitting, standing, dancing, and whatever movement will show the fashion in its best light.

Several of my geek friends in the tech industry — male, female, LGBT, cosplay, etc. — have requested a personalised version of themselves they can program to go to work or on dates for them to make their parents happy that their children are mimicking their parents’ social lives while their children live the alternate lifestyles that make them happy, too.

And you thought the replicant revolution was all about robots taking over the world?  Hahaha — it all started when we figured out elderly dementia patients handed a quasi-robotic stuffed animal was sufficient a surrogate to make them happy, thanks to our friends who wrote, produced and filmed “Westworld,” who follow on the work of Asimov, automatons and the first animal to use a stick as a tool.

War eventually was reduced to robots fighting robots in designated battlefield playgrounds, leaving us humans to finally dedicate most of our time to pure pleasure, where our surrogates do most of the dirty work except for those for whom dirty work is pure pleasure.

Outlawing graveyards so that human bodies could be recycled as mulch wasn’t fully implemented until we started populating the Moon and Mars.

My goal is to be the person with the first foundry on Mars, generations of 3D printers ahead into the future, my minions terraforming the planet in ways you haven’t imagined yet.  How about you?

All categories most used uncategorized

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A new online friend has shown me the “bucket list” of accomplishments she achieved, so far, in her short life — very exciting for her, and fun for us to read and learn.

However, I don’t even know what a bucket list is except as a title of a film released in the past few years.

I am neither a high nor a low achiever — my philosophy has been to treat every moment the same as the next moment, regardless of change of state of the set of states of energy that is me, because illusion is a tricky business.

Imagine you are accused of being a vampire, then executed and buried in that manner.

The power of the tribe, the clan, the subculture is the power of illusion at its most pivotal, both uplifting/supportive and scary/deadly.

I am trapped on this planet with bunches of subcultures in transition.

All I want is to explore another celestial body, to discover that which no other person has seen or touched, far from this solar system that our extended electromechanical cultural limbs have photographed and sampled.

Yet, I set my sights on a slightly more realistic goal for my lifetime — to die and disintegrate on Mars — just this close to reality, if the subcultures I track and follow give any indication of beating more-than-impossible odds.

My calendar shows 13,435 days to go until a major milestone is reached, with or without me.

I am beginning to learn that the more fragmented our social media allows our general culture to become, the less I have to satisfy the implied hidden gods and ruthless leaders of that general culture for us who boundlessly and abundantly value ourselves and our subcultures more than the imaginary general culture that exists in mass media.

In other words, I can indulge my wants and desires, not caring about anything or anyone but the moment in which this set of states of energy is, for want of a better word, alive.

I can sit here, dance in front of a bunch of strangers, sleep, eat, read, walk, change the bedsheets, play with electronics, drill holes in wood, whatever.

The future is nonexistent.  For me, being childless, our species is thus unimportant — I can stop worrying about recycling, living a “green” lifestyle, or using more resources than seems reasonable for one person.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter — there is no punishment living solely for my own enjoyment and edification — history is an illusion so history cannot judge my [in]actions, I have no reputation in mass media to protect; I am, as I believe, a set of states of energy in constant flux.

There is only one tie that binds me to my childhood subculture of the Christian denomination called Presbyterianism — the holy act of matrimony, which means I am to pledge my body to one person for the rest of our lives. Of that, in practical terms, there is much to be said for providing a safe haven against the transmission of diseases via bodily fluids.  How much does dancing with others interfere with that freedom from an invasive change to one’s medical condition — is air pollution or the potential for a car smashup more likely to kill or maim me and my wife than having dancing partners other than ourselves?

The luxury of asking these questions!

Relative wealth puts me here in front of this notebook PC, a level of freedom bought by giving years of my life toward others’ goals that we call socioeconomic accomplishments.

Do I have what it takes to build more wealth convincing others to give years of their lives toward my goals?  My financial portfolio certainly answers that question.

Total anarchy does not pay my bills — the talent of strangers built through skills training does.

Therefore, regardless of my supporting the philosophy, “eat, drink and be merry,” there are those of our and other species who devote themselves solely to implementing well-honed habits that allow me to be here doing nothing but tapping my fingertips on tiny blocks of plastic.

Am I, then, also displaying a talent/skill combination that is enriching the lives of others who are enriching my life, too?

How is this set of states of energy going to exist in the next moment or moments to come, rectifying the direction of midlife habits established in early life?

Where am I going?  What’s it all about?  If the universe is here solely for my entertainment, then I’ve answered the second question.  Question is, what shall I do about the first?