That rocket-powered car you planned to be the first person on the planet to 3D-print and test yourself?
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Scrum with rum on the run in the rain
Tonight I will sleep.
How much can two (or more) people synchronise their states of energy?
Bai floated across the room, feeling ill, tired from her travels across the planet’s surface, to-and-from the Orbiter Entertainment Conference Centre circling Mars.
An ancient, well-preserved copy of the Oxford Multilingual Dictionary suspended in a stationary position above Lee’s desk.
“Are you okay?”
Bai shrugged. “I didn’t sleep well last night, got maybe 2 marshours’ sleep, same the night before.”
“Do you want to practice our dance?”
Bai attempted a weak smile. “That’s why I’m here. Let’s do it.”
As they stepped through the first 40 marsecs of their routine repeatedly, they stopped occasionally for a break.
Bai stopped and looked Lee in the eyes. “Look at this.”
In his thoughts, Lee watched a conversation between Bai and a man whose identity was left blank.
The man walked up to Bai in the conference centre bar. “I know everything about you.”
“You do.”
“Yeah. You got that tattoo within the last few weeks, didn’t you?”
“Nope. Had it for over two years.”
“No you didn’t. I said I know you. You just got it.”
“Sorry, but you’re wrong.”
“I missed you. Where have you been the last two weeks?”
“I was out of town.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was working.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I thought you knew everything about me.”
[The sound of crickets chirping had been inserted from Bai’s longterm memory.]
Bai stopped showing her memory to Lee. “What do you think of that?”
“That guy…he…”
“He’s the chief of police, that’s who he is. Thinks his orbiter privileges give him some sort of special abilities.”
“Did you give him that look of yours?”
Bai made a face that said ‘Are you talking to me?’
Lee smiled. He responded to everyone differently, some making him laugh uncontrollably. Bai gave him a warm feeling inside just by being herself, cracking her jokes that were so funny to Lee he was embarrassed to let himself let his boyish guffaw snort out loud. “Did that turn him off?”
“I wish. He even said he had a special friendship with my boyfriend, said that my boyfriend, being military, was going to leave me. I told his he was wrong. My boyfriend is French — French boyfriends have to go on to the next woman — it’s in their DNA.”
Bai sat down, exhausted. She took a few sips of energy water and a few drops of baby food formula. “This is the best stuff, no matter what they say.”
Lee nodded.
After their dance showcase practice, they worked on a few moves from a historic dance form called Lindy Hop.
Bai described the best she could how the dance moves should appear in engineering terms, which Lee quickly absorbed.
They cut their practice short because Bai was feeling too weak to go on.
Later that day, Guin met Lee for more dance practice. They reviewed their previous dance lesson stored on the ISSA Net, seeing where they needed improvement and went from there.
Lee’s empathetic neuron net was extra sensitive to people who triggered his proximity sensor array, most notably Bai and Guin in the last few days. His brain circuitry surged with pulsating neurochemical signals, flooding his thoughts with old, broken memories, incomplete images and uncategorised emotions, all at the same time.
After the lesson review, Lee allowed his thoughts to relax, leaving unanswered questions from earlier in the week to fade into the background.
However, as they warmed up, Guin sensed Lee’s tense shoulders and arms. She told him to relax, let their arms connected to their hands form a smiley face.
Lee’s conscious thoughts understood the word “relax” but after a terrible car smashup on Earth when he was a teenager, Lee had forgotten how to translate the word into action for the nerves, muscles, ligaments and tendons of his left arm and shoulder.
He did not have the knowledge to ask Guin what “relax” meant. He wanted to learn but his thoughts were still disconnected from the past few days of rewiring habitual pathways.
Guin kept working on the dance steps with Lee, slowly working with him to forget what he was doing, no longer thinking but dancing the steps, closing the gap between them and fading Lee’s personal space into nothingness.
Lee could have let the ISSA Net get rid of the annoying brain-muscle connection problems but he was “old skoowuhl” as Shadowgrass called him and liked the challenge of the personal struggle of his current self forming around and against the previous versions of himself left in deadends and byways of his central nervous system.
They knocked out the steps.
Next on Lee’s list was working through the unexplored feelings he had for Guin and Bai, decades old, just as Bai could recall an old man named Marcus she remembered training when the man was a teenager.
There was so much more to learn about them and their shared connections.
But what’s a lifetime for if one can’t return to Earth in one’s thoughts and go wakeboarding every now and then?
Guin and Lee checked in on Shadowgrass to see how his homework was coming along. Shadowgrass was studying the history of the extinct social system called politics, trying to understand the need for hierarchical bureaucratic layers of society once called government. “Dad, did we really used to waste so much energy on superfluous levels of managing our species’ resource needs?”
“Yes, son, we did. That’s why Earth’s climate changed so drastically over a short period of time. Mismanaged priorities.”
“I’m glad we’re not like that.”
Me, too, son. Me, too.”
Guin turned to go. “Sorry, guys, but I’ve got a rover’s load of work to do at the lab. Lee, please practice the apache move we went over. I want you to have it down to a science when I get back next sol.”
“Sure thing. Don’t work too hard.”
“‘Work’? You mean, don’t have too much fun!”
The three of them laughed at Lee’s slip. ‘Work’ had almost completely left the common language of Mars, replaced by Martian society’s ability to shift colonisation needs according to the abilities and desires of the nonrobotic inhabitants such as humans.
As Lee rolled into bed alone, he found himself crying, a memory of his father passing through his thoughts. He still loved his father after all these years, having forgiven his father for unknowingly mistreating his son in his attempt to raise his son the best way he knew how in the moment and based on his personality shaped by his own father’s mistreatment of him.
Living longer didn’t make old memories go away, just more memories to choose from, the earliest ones gaining or fading in strength as memories accumulated and cross-referenced themselves.
His mother didn’t raise a fool, just watched him often make a fool of himself as he grew up.
How the house burned down
“What story, Mom?”
“Well, Amish pirates are not known for subtlety. They’d rather kill you and turn you into fertiliser than negotiate with you.”
“But we’re not like that, are we?”
“Shadowgrass, let me tell you the quick version of what happened when one of your great-great-uncle’s cousin’s boy’s father’s cousin’s nephew’s cousin’s uncle’s father’s boy’s cousin’s uncle burned the house down. It started one day when the two of them were clearing a field…”
“How big was the wasp?”
“Bigger than the farmhouse.”
“Bigger than our Martian habitat module?!”
“Yes.”
“What did they do?”
Bai popped into their thought trail. “Hey, guys! I’m back!”
“Hi, Bai. How did it go?”
“Great. But boy, am I mentally wrung out. Alek advanced me to the next level of dancing. I’ll tell you something funny. He said, ‘You know the way a guy keeps pestering you to dance with him and you aren’t interested? He keeps asking and asking until you are giving him the look that says ‘Get away from me!'” I told him, yeah, I’ve made that look. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘stop giving me that look. Act like you want to dance with me. Flirt with me!’ Me! As if I don’t know how to flirt.”
Guin and Shadowgrass laughed with Bai.
“Hey, can you believe Stephane only drank water last week? And he’s accusing me of finally growing up!”
“When are you coming over to our colony?”
“I don’t know, Guin. Depends on my schedule. I’m booked for the next two marsweeks.
“Okay, I’ll see you when you get here.”
“Sure thing.”
Guin turned to Shadowgrass. “Where was I?”
“Jersey and the Frenchman were about to battle the great, big, gigantanormasaurus Wasp.”
“That’s right. But it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. You’ve got work to do.”
“Ah, Mom. I thought you said that you and Dad brought your electromechanical design wizardry to Mars so no one would have to work again.”
“We did. But then we found that we liked to share time with our creations. Nothing like getting your hands into the soil yourself.”
“Must be the Amish pirate in you, eh, Mom?”
“Well… I don’t know…”
“Stabbing giant worms with your sabre! Slashing through deadly grass blades!”
“That’s right, son. You can imagine what all we faced on Earth and why we wanted to start over here. Just make sure you get plenty of nightmares letting your imagination run too wild. And remember to tell us about them tomorrow.”
“Mom, you’re being facetious, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” She smiled at her little genius and scrunched her nose. “Maybe just a little bit.”
Archie and Veronica Mars, where’s Betty?
What is the consensual consensus about the perceived and perpetuated personality of the public popular culture in your area?
For me, it is a mix of science, technology, and military development supported by agriculture, arts, retail sales and financial backing that sets the Heart of Dixie, Deep South progressive religious moral persuasion of headline news.
In one day, the satirical talk of a singer’s performance on a single TV channel, repeated ad repeatum across the virtual news/gossip system known as the Internet, accented by related “news” stories about infidelity shows the level of normal behaviour we tolerate in the local/national psyche.
We are not independent from our bodies even if cave drawings and ebooks give us that sensation.
Why do our bodies’ cycles influence us individually and collectively?
How well do we see that our chemical composition ratios redirect our thought patterns and thus the flow of our society into the future?
On Mars, we have a word for this nostalgic look at your antiquated society: Scheißcorn.
Meaning that the Zeitgeist is a wind never seen and quickly forgotten, just like the flow of cholesterol through your veins that used to kill so many of you with a scary word, Atherosclerosis!
Controversy is a measurement of a type of mob mentality.
Our talk about what is controversial to us is a measurement of our set of states of energy in transition.
It tells us what we consider important in the perceived past, present and future for ourselves and our children.
Is your life tragic? Macabre? Grotesque? Victorian? Bland? Grand? Your best life now?
What in your life is clogging your thoughts like cholesterol clogs veins?
What is a healthy thought set that unites you to your body to your friends/family/colleagues and the rest of the natural environment of the universe?
One answer is here on Mars. It was once in orbit around Earth, on the Moon. It will be somewhere else one day.
See you there soon!
Factoid of the day
Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart meet the Mad Hatter in the Victorian era
Historians have never paid attention to one fact: our history was written by our parents before we were born.
Their actions, just like ours for our children, set the stage for their direct descendants.
You must have a clear understanding of that solid principle, that unwritten immutable law of the universe, before going on with this story.
For you see, before they were born, two famous aviators met Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for a memorable fictional character whilst Queen Victoria reigned.
While the middle-class prudes proved their noble worth, the threesome of Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter went off on an adventure.
Ever had a three-wheeled vehicle in which all three wheels steered independently? Most likely not. Either one wheel turns and the other two point permanently in one direction, or two wheels turn in synch with each other and the third wheel points permanently in one direction.
So it was with our flyers and their eccentric co-conspirator who set out on an unpublished expedition.
Unpublished until now, that is.
Ground into a pulp and turned into a felt hat were the notes, diaries and maps used by the explorers. It wasn’t until a new computer deciphering program was invented by a retired secret agent to ferret out the hidden codes in the city maps of foreign countries that the threads and fibers of the felt hat were pulled apart and reassembled in their original form.
The hat sat in a hat box as hats are wont to do, taking up space in the attic of one Hegrapevinucus Forvell, the famous daguerreotypist who had documented the lives of both the famous and notorious across two centuries.
M. H. Forvell died and left his fortune to a geographic feature named Pilot Knob in middle Tennessee, not far from Readyville, where his belongings were carted and stored in caves carved out of the rock.
Using an aeroplane-engined dirigible, Earhart navigated her two companions over the knob, spotting the secret caves one early dawn morning.
They tethered their lighter-than-air craft to an old pine tree and descended a rope ladder to the caves.
Stored in giant clay jars sealed with impenetrable tar and humongous glass jars sealed with water-resistant wax were the life’s work of Forvell.
Much of the information was repetitious — farm harvest records and stock market buys/sales/trades, for instance.
But one container held a series of inventions, some patented and some stamped “For My Eyes Only,” including one for converting printed paper or paper covered with handwriting into articles of clothing, wallpaper glue or, to the interest of M. Hatter, a felt top hat.
From then on, when one of the three had finished a logbook or diary, the Hatter would use Forvell’s secret formula to reconstitute the water-dissolved and shredded logbook or diary pages, forming hat shapes.
None of them was a more prolific writer than the other. However, multiplying their output by three meant quite a few journals were filling up on a weekly basis, driving the Hatter mad with desire to create as many new styles of hats as he could — tall, skinny, fat, short, see-through, invisible, and everything in-between.
Eventually the Hatter ran out of ideas for new hats and the two pilots realised they needed to return to public life.
Before they did, their records show they had more fun in a short period of time than should be legal (and some of it wasn’t!).
While they were tethered to Pilot Knob, they overheard some old-timey mountain music, the good stuff, hypnotic, said to turn you inside out, stop the motion of the planets and move you and the world around you over to the parallel train track of alternate universes.
Little did they know that they had changed their timeline.
They also had inadvertently invented a new social period called Steampunk.
The song they heard that changed history? Well, you already know what it is: “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” written so far back up in the hills, no one had heard of sheet music or sound recording devices, so no one knows exactly when the song was first created or by whom.
And by changing history, Lindbergh, Earhart and the Hatter changed everything, including the style of dancing the local people performed to their mountain music.
No longer did they buck or clog dance. They started a new craze, a dance sensation called the Lindy Hop and their clothing style became the name of the new era — Steampunk.
To get back to that time, Guin and Lee adopted the Steampunk clothing style and started learning a Lindy Hop dance routine that would induce a hypnotic trance and send them out of one spacetime continuum into another.
They had also found some of Forvell’s writings and wanted to create their own electromechanical wonders based on Forvell’s notes scribbled on incomplete inventions.
But which would you rather read about — how Guin and Lee invented a new form of space travel or what Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter discovered but had told no one because it was so earth-shakingly stupendous?
Don’t answer flippantly.
The answer you receive will shift history again, maybe by only the slightest change but also maybe by large changes all jumbled up together.
Be willing to accept the changes your answer causes.
Alice may never return from Wonderland and you don’t want that, I can tell you!
A Guy What Takes His Time
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
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
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!
Open Water Diver
Congrats to my sister on her latest accomplishment:
Your certification: Open Water Diver
Welcome Anne,
Congratulations – Your certification card has just been printed:
Open Water Diver
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treetrunkdings 