E tickets

I guess it amuses the machines that run Dream Street to sell dreams to biots, since they are totally useless to the machines, and they can make them out of thin air.  I went into Lost Loves, and the machine scanned my credit, and told me to take room number seven.  In an instant the dream program searched my memories and found the one I had specified.  All of a sudden, I was back at Grad Night at Disneyland, with sweet Alice Willowby hanging on my arm as we waited in line for the Matterhorn.  I used up my thirty minutes in that recreation, and went back out and took the big black car to a diplomatic reception at the Stardust Lounge atop one of the taller towers, something to do with the Trade Council I think it was.....And you know, the machines are really good at what they do, because when I was taking stuff out of my pockets that night before going to bed, I found a little booklet with a couple of E tickets still left in it.

There are a thousand stories

in the city...I don't mean it's a thousand stories tall, I mean that there are a thousand tall tales, at least....nobody seems to remember who or what got this thing going in the first place, since it's been wandering for eons untold.....the City will swing down over decades towards the galactic center, do a dosey-doe, and then swing back out on a different elliptic through the spiral arms, so that over several thousand years it will pass through most of the whole thing....the whole of the Milky Way.  And of course there are the time-anomolies and matter-drift and dark energy currents to consider, so it really does wander a lot....you pretty much have to guess where and when it is, exactly.  But if you can find it, then you can probably find whatever it is in the galaxy you might be looking for, because somebody bought one cheap, and is willing to sell it dear, here in the City.  For example, one day I was riding in the big black car along the Street of Dreams in the EastSouthSide, when I saw a shop advertising Lost Loves.....Clearance Sale.....75% off today only......I told the car to pull over.....

Earth Embassy

We got off the freeway and rolled into a nice looking part of town, with big houses behind walls and gates.  We pulled up to one really big looking place, that said Earth Embassy on the arch over the iron gates.  The gates opened and we went up the drive, got out of the car, and went up the steps.  The door was opened for us by a robobutler, wearing black tails.  "Jeeves," said the lady "This is Mr. Dodge, a guest from Earth."  "Welcome, Sir." says Jeeves. We went on into a parlor, and sat down.  Jeeves fetched us brandy and soda.  "Well" says the lady "Let me fill you in a bit here.  I am Madame Wu, the Earth Ambassador to the Stars.  I imagine my story is a little  like your own.  I was with a caravan in the desert of western China, in my tent, around midnight, when a Djin entered and slipped me whole into his magic sack, and spirited me away to Xanadu, where I was sold as a slave in the bazaar.....and after adventures many and various I arrived here in the City.  Those in Authority here in the City determined that I was the first person from Earth to get here, so they made me Earth Ambassador, and fixed me up with this nice Embassy and staff."  "Wow" I said.  "How long ago was this?"  "As near as I have been able to figure it, I was kidnapped around 900 A.D." she stated.  "You have sure held up well for your age." I flattered.  "Thank you, dear boy!" she replied. " The City Health Services are quite excellent, and it's all free."  Later we had a fine dinner, and I was shown to a very comfortable suite, where I easily got a good nights sleep.  In the morning, I took a shower and all....and found a nice suit laid out for me, with shoes that fit just right too...so I looked really spiffy when I went down to breakfast.  The Madame Ambassador made me a proposition as we ate.  "Mr. Dodge" she began "I've been waiting quite a while for somebody else to show up from Earth, so I could take a little time off and attend to family matters.  How would you like to be Earth Ambassador, instead of a deckhand?  I won't be gone all that long I don't think, and the job comes with lots of ..um..perks I guess you'd call it....like you get to be called the Honorable, and you have diplomatic immunity, so you don't have to pay parking tickets, and Jeeves does all the real work, actually.  What do you think?"  she asked.  It all sounded pretty good to me....and, well, the eggs were perfect, and there was even marmalade.

Big Black Car

There was a big black car waiting at the curb, the back door opened, and the lady asked me to get in, so I did.  The door shut, and the car merged into traffic and picked up speed, heading into a freeway tunnel.  The lady who had bailed me out looked to be an older Chinese woman, very well dressed, with her hair done up that way with the chop-sticks stuck through it, you know what I mean.  She looked at me sideways for a minute, and then flipped down a keyboard out of the back of the front seat.  The screen came on, and she punched a few keys, and asked "First name?"  "Walter" I answered..."Walter Matthew Dodge."  She typed that in.  "Place of birth?"  "Los Angeles, California."  "And date of birth?"  "June 13, 1948."  She finished inputting the data, and waited while the screen flashed through a few changes.  "Well," she says,"The L.A. County Coroner issued your death certificate 185 years ago."  "Oh."  was all I could think to say.  

Flung out between the stars...

Have you ever been up on Mt.Wilson at night, and seen the lights of Los Angeles spreading out in endless profusion, as far as the eye can see?  As our galleon approached the Wandering City, I was reminded of that view.  It looked like someone had taken the whole greater L.A. area, ripped it off of California, and flung it out between the stars.  As we got closer, we had to jib and dodge through the flotsam in the wake of the drifting metropolis....old cargo containers, fifty gallon steel drums crushed like beer cans, bald tires, railroad ties....and many things I couldn't begin to put a name to.  Finally we reached the clear shipping channel, and a rocket tug came to nudge us towards the docks.  The city pulsated and thrummed before us, tall spires and skyscrapers lit with dazzling displays of light....searchlights wheeling through space, like for some gala blockbuster movie premiere, neon signs advertising bizarre products, the flashing strobes of smallcraft flitting about high and low....giant robot dockworkers beeped and honked as they loaded and unloaded the wealth of a hundred star empires.....freight trains crawled, silver cars whisked along monorails, hot rods rumbled in the streets....We reached the dock and tied up, and the captain told us to take a week shore leave.  So I went with some of the others and hit a few bars, and we went into one of the towers and had a fine meal, and then we went and hit more bars.....and.....well, I woke up in the 103rd Ward drunk tank, not even knowing what day it was.  After some hours, a robocop came along and called my name.  I followed him back out to the booking area, and they gave me back my belt, boots, wallet, and flip-phone.  "A lady has gone your bail" they told me. "Have a nice day."  "Yessir." I replied....

The Wandering City

Lucia ended up with a knight in shining armor, in the Court of the Eldricth Princess, and I drifted further East eventually, reaching Avalon after some time.  It was a crisp Winter morning, and myself and some Druids were drinking mulled wine laced with mistletoe extract when the word reached us that the star-galleon had reappeared in the sky, after almost one hundred years.  My Druid pals were much excited, since the star-galleon was legendary for bringing the most exotic treasures, products, potions, magics, tales, novelties and what not.....Quite a crowd assembled at the Fairgrounds, where the star-sailors were wont to come down to ground, flying in what looked to me like something out of an old Buck Rogers serial movie....Well, I didn't know if the star-galleon could ever get me back to Los Angeles, but I found out it could get me somewhere other than the Land of Nod, so I signed up as an apprentice deck-hand, and we rocketed up from Avalon to the orbiting galleon, and sailed away into the vastness of Space.  I learned that the star-sailors did not have the trick of faster than light travel, but did know how to use a reality keel and dark energy sails to whisk their vessel up to around three-quarters light-speed, which is pretty darned fast.  Fast enough for the time-dilation factor to enter into the equation, so that in the months of my first voyage, years reeled by back in Nod, or in L.A. for that matter.  So I was truly traveling in Time, as well as Space.  We angled across one arm of our spiral galaxy, on a bearing to intercept the Wandering City.....

Screaming from the sky

Justin was out in the deep woods tending a string of rabbit traps.  It was some months since he had left his home to come out here to the Eldritch lands, but he was fitting right in, he thought.  And they were teaching him mysteries, magic, metaphysics, and what not....things he didn't think he would be getting from the tutors back in his father's castle.....and they trusted him to deal with the rabbit traps, even at his young age.....but suddenly there came a shrill screaming from the sky, and he looked up to see a lad and a lass falling down as from a great height, with her hanging 'bout his neck, screaming to beat the band.....and with an amount of crashing through boughs and flying pinecones and scattering birds and squirrels, the two folk abruptly reached the forest floor.  "What ho!" he called....."Are ye alright, then?"  He made his way towards their landing spot, and found them dusting themselves off and looking round in somewhat confusion.  "What has happened to you, mi'lord 'n lady?"  Justin asked politely.  "Oh, we had to jump over the mountains to escape evil treatment at the hands of some trolls, is all." replied the young man.

The Maestro had a daughter

At the castle, they had told me there was a snake-oil show passing through the next town down the road....they tricked me out in a sort of Robin Hood costume, and suggested that I approach the Maestro of the carnival, or circus, or whatever you might call it, and show him my trick of leaping over buildings.  Well, I did just that, and he hired me on the spot.  We would come into some burgh with a lot of hoopla, with our sword-eaters, and fire-breathers, and dancing girls, and what all....and we'd put on a show in the market square, with the Maestro preaching his snake-oil to beat the band, and the shills and card-sharks working the crowd for all we were worth.  I would leap over buildings and astonish the locals.  In small towns, where there were only small buildings, I would spice up the act by jumping over the townhall carrying a cow, or a pony-cart full of whooping children, something like that.  The Maestro had a pert little daughter, who I kept trying to get next to, since I was still a young buck in those days....but she didn't seem to take much of a shine to me......but one day our caravan was between towns, out in a desolute moor, all low brush and swampland, when hundreds of foul trolls popped up out of the ground, it seemed.  They were all around us, and we could see no escape.  The foul troll King jumped up on a fallen log, and yelled that they were going to rob our wagons, steal our mules, roast our men over the coals  and eat them for dinner, and have their perverted way with our women.  Lucia, the Maestro's daughter, screamed "Alas and alack, we are undone and I am troll-bait for certain!"  "Never fear my dear"quoth I.  "Wrap your arms about my neck and hold on for dear life."  She did that, and I grasped her tight as I could, and leapt with all my might into the air.  My strange talent is to leap over whatever tall thing might be about, but in this flat moor the nearest tall thing was the snow-capped mountain range some 25 miles to the North, so up we went, with Lucia screaming the whole bleeding time right into my ear, way up from the caravan, troll host, and all....off we flew over the mountains, and down we went on the other side, down into a deep forest.

Jack-the-Leaper

"Well"  said the wizard "Seeing as you were tricked out of your proper reality by some jokester, the Law of Compensation says that now you must have some unusual power or skill in this realm."  "What?" says I.  "The Powers-That-Be won't allow people to be just jerked around willy-nilly, without some sort of recompense....you must have some sort of power we can discover.  Tell me, can you see through that wall?"  he said, pointing at the wall.  I tried, but I could not, and I told him so.  And he asked if I could tell what he was thinking, and I told him I could not.  And he asked me if I knew what was going to happen an hour from now, and I told him I did not know that either.  So we went outside into the court yard, and he told me to try leaping over the tallest tower.  I told him I didn't think I could do that, but he told me to give it a try.  So I took a running start, and jumped.....and went sailing up over the flagpole on top of the tower, and did a neat flip and started back down.....I thought for sure I was going to die, but I landed like a cat outside the castle wall.  The fair-haired boy danced around in circles atop the wall, clapping his hands and singing "Oh Jack-the-Leaper Jack-the-Leaper, fair leaped or' the castle wall!"  He called down to me "Now jump back, Jack!"  So I did, landing lightly by the wizard's side.  He took out a small notebook, and wrote "Discovered power: can leap over tall buildings in a single bound."  My name is really Walter, but the name Jack stuck to me while I was in the Land of Nod.  And my odd talent stood me in good stead many a time, particularly that time when our caravan was surrounded by the troll host......

(Old Slops is spinning his yarn)

It was Spring Break, 1967....we went out camping in the Mojave, because it's usually nice out there that time of year.  We were camped in one of those rocky canyons you get to on a dirt road, out all by ourselves.  Around midnight, everybody else was in their sleeping bags, but I was still sitting up by the fire, finishing a beer, watching the stars.  I thought I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye.....I turned and peered into the dark, and saw somebody or something in the brush.....the native tribes in the Mojave have tales about hairy ghost men who play tricks on you at night.....and this looked like an albino ape, maybe.  The creature beckoned me to come and follow him, up the wash.  I for sure don't know why I did, but I did....follow the creature up between the rocks for a ways, when it suddenly walked right into a big stone.  It just seemed to go right through the solid rock and disappear.  I walked up the the stone and pushed my hand against it, expecting to find it a normal rock, but my hand and arm sank right into the stone....and something grabbed my arm and pulled me hard right through the rock and into another reality.  I wasn't in the desert anymore, I was on the side of a mountain, up in the pines.  And it wasn't midnight anymore, it was just after dawn.  Down in the valley, the mist was starting to rise, and I could see the morning breeze begin to stir the banners on the towers of a white castle, down below me.  Behind me, my footprints led out from a solid rock face....it did not yield to my pushing.  Before me was a path, that tended down towards the castle, so I started walking through the cool of the morning.  In a while, I reached the castle, and a young fair-haired boy met me at the drawbridge.  He asked me something, but I could not understand his language.  He beckoned me to follow him, and we went into the castle, and on into one of the towers.  We went up the spiral stairs, to a round tower chamber, where there was an old man dressed like a wizard.  You know, he had on the funny hat, and the robe with stars and symbols, and his chamber was full of things like a large crystal ball, and bubbling retorts, and scrolls scattered about, and large leather-bound tomes.  He tried to talk to me too, trying several different tongues, but to no avail.  He tugged thoughtfully at his long white beard for a moment, and then began to open drawers in a big cabinet along the wall, taking out various powders and herbs and what not, and mixing them all up in a tankard with some wine.  He handed it to me, and motioned that I should drink.  Well, I didn't see what else to do, so I drank it all down.  It felt like my brain was melting inside my skull, and then it felt like it was reforming, in a different manner.  "There" said the wizard "Is that better?"  "Why yes" I said "I can understand you now."  "Excellent" he says.  "Where are you from."  he asks.  "Los Angeles" I reply.  "That explains the funny outfit"  says the wizard.  "You do realize don't you that you are not on Earth anymore, hmm?" quoth the sage.  "Well, where am I?" is my question.  "The Land of Nod." I am informed.

It rang eight bells

About a dozen pirate spiders getting off the graveyard watch came ambling into the mess, grabbed their trays, and moved down the serving line, as Slops and I dished out the grub.  In twenty minutes, they had all finished and were gone....Slops was fixing us a decent human-style breakfast, while I wiped the tables.  "Slops" I asked.."Just how old are you anyway?"  He paused from flipping the pancakes for a moment, and replied..."I don't rightly know, I've kinda lost track of the years, I'm afraid.  I can tell you though that I was born in 1948."  "Damn, Slops.."  I said.."That would make you almost five hundred years old!"  "Yeh, that seems about right, I guess", he said, scratching at his scraggly white chin whiskers.  "You must have quite a tale to tell." I speculated.  "Well, I have been a lot of places and seen a lot of strange things, I reckon...."    (stay tuned for a tale of strange places and things)

Cosmic Size Relativity

Ramesy did a double take bringing him back into the DOME's heating system and lights.

"DOME....DOME..." he uttered.

He was assaulted by a series of squawks and beeps.

Damn it.

"DOME...In English Please...."


Ramsey waited for a moment. Took another sip of his too cold coffee.

"DOME?"

"This is the DOME system speaking. How may I help you."

"DOME we need to crank the heating system down for a spell, to nearly 40 degrees Fahrenheit."

"May I enquire about your status check?"

"Containment Coordinator/BXGG - Russal Ramesy....enviorsuit 2596-oghe....under Special Unit."

"One moment please."

Ramesy heard the tuck of the heating system kick in, it blew hot for a moment and then settled into cold.

"The heating system will bring you to 40 degrees in ....14 minutes."

"Thank you DOME. Also may we have light please."

"Eviorlight or Human Light"

"Human Light."

"One moment please."

The light popped on. What Ramesy saw was putrid, it was why he never wanted to do this again. And yet, here is was again. He got his gloves out, and buttoned up his jump suit, drew his beanie down. I guess I better count the heads. Everywhere, over the entire DOME, people were throwed everywhere. He made a game of it. Ramesy lost count when he got to number 104.

He threw up.

Wiped the vomit off his mouth. Took a sip of his cold coffee, washed it around and spit it out. Over by the Illuminated Light Show, he saw what had brought them to this.

All girl spider band

Will this work?  Guess it didn't work....I was trying to put in a link to Ziggy Starlet and the Spiders from Venus, but just go to youtube and search for that.....

In the web of the spider pirates

I was sleeping when my lifeboat drifted into a huge spider web, so I awoke to find myself being reeled in towards a great shambling affair of a spaceship, that looked like it had been put together by random acts in a junkyard.  All kinds of old spacecraft dangled in the webbing....aged saucers, finned rockets, lunar modules....what have you.   Reaching the ship, the hatch was popped open by manipulator arms, and I went ahead and walked aboard, not seeing many options at this point.  I was met inside by a man tall spider, like a huge hairy tarantula....he looked like he had been in a fight with a Dollar Store....he was festooned with cheap brightly colored bandannas and scarves, and hung around with gold-colored plastic costume jewelry....he had a dozen fake Rolexes on one arm-like appendage, and of his eight legs, three were peg-legs, each of a different colored nylon.  He was drooling around the mandibles, and he had some kind of chaw in his mouth...he spat once into the brass spitoon on the deck, and the parrot on his shoulder said...."Argh, matey!  Welcome a'bard the "Merry Wider"!  AR-har-har...."  Spiders let the parrots do the talking, while they communicate with some mysterious "spider sense"....Quoth the parrot further..."Ye best foller me arft matey, a for ol' Capn Crunch here takes it inter 'is brain ta par-a-lize-yur now an' et you later.  Come on then!"  I quickly did as the bird said, following him as he flew down a passageway deeper into this shambles of a ship.  I could smell something cooking, and soon enough we were in the galley, where the oldest looking human I had ever seen still moving around under his own power was busy with pots and pans and a big iron grill.  "Arrgh" said the parrot..."I'll lets ya two hue-mans figure out what's next!"  And he flew back the way we had come.  "Morning" says the old man.."They call me Slops, and I'm the cook for the pirate spiders.  They like cooked food, but they don't know how to cook, so that's my job.  How ya' doin'?"  He wiped his hand on a greasy rag, and extended it towards me.  I shook his hand and introduced myself.  "Well then" he says, "I'm doing breakfast prep right now, and maybe you'd like to help?  I can't offer any wages, but working in the galley there's always plenty to eat and drink."   "Sounds like a deal to me." I replied.  "OK, then you can start with those larvae there....slice 'em thin like for frying....length-wise so they end up looking like bacon strips....can ya do that, ya think?"  "Where do you keep the sharp knives? " I asked....

Maximum Savior

Briefing on the Dragon Angel Cult

Director Wu, Agent Hedley, and some others who shall remain unidentified were gathered in a briefing room at Moon City Human Security Services headquarters.  Dr. Smith, the noted historical exobiologist, was ready to tell them the official ghost story.  He dims the lights, and the big screen comes on, showing a shot of a spiral galaxy......"As you all know.."the doctor begins.."many of the trace remains of the various fifty-eight known transcended races can be found closer to the center of the Milky Way....because of chronological drift....the most obvious trace is of course the machine culture that has developed itself from the various artificial intelligences that were left on the common plane when the parent biological intelligences transcended to a higher plane, as it were. "  He pauses for a sip of water, and resumes..."Other manifestations or evidences of the continued association of the elder races with our common plane include such cultural relics as tales of angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, the powers-that-be, and so on."  The big screen is now looping the images Senior Analyst Shelby has sent from the HSS Impeccable, showing the souls of two HSS officers being taken up by the dragonship.  The doctor continues..."Here we see but the latest hard evidence of a race that likes to play around on our plane sometimes.  Seven other instances have been similarly recorded, by our own instraments, and by those of the Nomad Horde, and the Imperial Insects.  The dragonships seem to be drawn most often to the vicinity of spacequakes, supernovae, reality inversions, and the like.....disasters on the common plane, in other words.  Most of the transcended just ignore us, but what has been named the Dragon Angel Cult makes a habit of gathering up sentient souls in dire danger, and offering them safety and solace in a variant dimensional reality, or higher plane, if you will.  I have been asked the question as to whether or not it is likely that we can get the officers back from where they have gone.  I do not think this is likely, since there is no recorded instance of anyone having done this before.  It is speculated that the transcendent realm is probably quite pleasant to a suddenly elevated sentient from our common plane, and they would not want to return if they could."  The briefing goes on, but Director Wu is lost in thought, trying to imagine what experiences one might have on that other side......

Equal day and night

We work three shifts, eight hours each.....they are called "day", "swing", and "graveyard".  These are old terms, brought out here long ago from Earth, where there are hours of dawning, hours of full day, twilight, night.....here deep beneath kilometers of frozen methane on a little ball of a moon spinning around a giant gas planet, there are just light strips glowing in the overhead along the corridors.....their light does not vary with the hours of the day.  Most of the workers do turn the lights off in their little rooms to sleep .....some don't....some sleep with the screen on all the time....noise and flickering images....I finished my "graveyard"....0001 to 0801.....some on my shift would go now to their rooms and go right to sleep, some would go to the cafeteria for breakfast....I go to the canteen, and claim my usual stool at the bar.  Trixie goes through the ritual of fixing me  a complicated Bloody Mary, and sets it down on the little bar napkin.  She seems wistful today, with a little smile, and a distracted manner.  "What you on about?" I ask.  "Why," she says,"Ain't it just lovely on this first day of Spring?"

When her brother left....

I was seven years old, when the mysterious Old Ones sent an embassy to our father the King.  They came out of the forest one Summer day near sunset, out of the deep woods, from the direction of the ancient tribal holdings.  There was the beautiful Eldritch Princess, and her escort of fair tall warriors....in silver mail, with precious stones studding their accoutrement ....our father the King received them in the Great Hall, sitting on the Iron Throne of our ancestors.  He rose when he saw the face of the Princess, and went down to one knee.  We were all stunned at this, for never had the King bent a knee to any but a God.  She bid him to rise with a graceful gesture, and made a holy sign with her thin white hands.  "Oh Brother King" she said in a voice like bells ringing at dawn...." We are come to you today to claim what was promised to us."  My father the King grew pale and grim, but nodded his agreement.  "Justin" he called to my brother, two years younger than I, his sister...."Go you now with this holy Princess, and do her will."  Justin stood gape-mouthed and trembling, staring first at  father, and then at the Old Ones.  He took but a moment to calm himself, and then said "Yes, my lord."  The embassy left the hall with my brother Justin, and walked into the forest.  The seasons passed, and all of a score of years.  And one Summer day, a handsome youth, of perhaps thirteen or fourteen years,  came walking from the woods....I was in the garden with my young children....my aged father was within the castle....."Hello, sister." he said...."Do you not recognize your brother?"

Find the path

It's been almost 500 years now, since I found the path and walked off the planet....well, it's been 500 years back on old Earth, but I have only experienced maybe 200 years.....because a lot of the time I have spent traveling at relativistic speeds, or hanging around the event horizons of black holes....situations in which time passes more slowly than it does in a "normal" situation.  Also, seven years pass on Earth, for every year that passes in the land of Fairie....

Lost in space, again....

I dashed to the closest lifeboat, jumped in and slammed the hatch behind me.  Yanking the emergency override levers, I powered away from Slither's ship before anyone could stop me.  I went to the default escape vector, and the gravatron motor revved up towards redline as I put the pedal to the metal....energy beams sliced through space, as the ship on Slither's tail traded weapons fire with the smuggler craft.  Slither is a smuggler by trade, so who knows what's going on....could be an Insect patrol cutter on to him, or it could be one of his nasty cousins after his hide.....lizards seem to have lots of family feuds.....but, knowing Slither's history, it was probably just another drug deal gone horribly bad.  I quickly disabled the lifeboat rescue beacon and transponder, trying to get lost from this part of space anyway quick as I could.  Passive GPS was still working (Galactic Positioning System), so later I could get a fix, and try to angle towards some traveled spacelane.  Slither, of course, hadn't been using any normal flightpath.  There were emergency rations on board, and water enough.  It was that spicy lizard fare, but there was also a large bottle of alka-selzer.  

Lock Up

I have been impersonating a holographic gardener for a long while now. It is not as difficult as you might think, pretending to be unreal. Madam Elestra has four acres of gardens behind her vinyl fab stone farm cottage. I watch as educational special one while waiting for a tram. It showed how all the plastic form the plastic drink bottles is melted down and blended with creaosteel emulsifiers before being colored with stone pigment and poured into the injection molds. Most of her gardening is done by gene tailored insects and rodents, the rest by intelligent skimmers. Madam Elestra is one hundred and six years old.
She missed the company of the gardener, so she called the Holo farm bureau and requested a groundskeeper. She lives in a poorly networked area of still rural Charlottesville. Much of the South is not fully infrastructure ; folks have to make do however they can.
It is safe to walk the streets now. The foot patrols and the sky eyes are doing their jobs, protecting us. Two out of ten Americans are behind bars: six to a five-foot square cell, in work camps, security warrens, monitored with blue metal ankle bracelets. Three of the twelve are on some level of probation: voting right revoked contracted into indentured servitude to private corporations to work off the sixty nine thousand creds it takes (on average) to apprehend, prosecute and lock them up. Still, you can learn some thing is the big house. Stuff they don’t teach you in play school or write about in the video guides. Stuff like how to vanish. The number one rule for vanishing is this: no IP gear, no digi-fone, no hip slate and no throat implant. You want to talk to somebody; you do it face to face. You need to send a message, you use a two-dollar post card and you don’t mail it from within tem miles of your home. Never carry more that 100 flash creds on your person and any given time. Never spend more than 23 creds at any public kiosk. Travel alone when ever possible.
I posted a request for employment on a local agency bulletin board. I received a response. The runner slipped the job sheet under the big aluminum door of the garage I rented from an acquaintance of a stepbrother. I listened till I heard the footsteps recede before sliding from my hammock to read the card. Jay’s Employment annex is operated as a subdivision of the Charlottesville probation department. Jay runs the office out of the back of his coin Laundromat a few blocks off South Main Street. When I arrived, Jay Fry had is head inside a triple load washer and he was swearing.
“Damn chrome heads mixing in my place.”
I waited while he removed his biohazard-masked face form the machine. Fry guessed who I was right off.
“Thatcher?” he said.
I confirmed my ID with a nod.
“Half a minute, I’ll be right with you.”
Jac-putty is not a chrome head’s kick but a tradable currency. They crimp the water and drain hoses on a washer and port in the make. Four pounds of the borax to five gallons of white glue, water and smart scrub, you add the control mites during the spin cycle for even dispersal. A half pound of Joy Spackle with the right suck and lick chip and goes for twenty creds a pop. A full washer can yield up to 25 pops; even a dope head can do that math. Fry took a hand held torch form his took kit, lit it and proceeded to burn dried fleck of Spackle from the washer’s drum. When he finished the air was laced with a thin, sweet-smelling smoke.
Jay fry removed the biohazard mask. His long red hair was thinning on top and stuck in matted clumps to his forehead and the side of his face. He smiled a big yellow-toothed smile at me as he looked over they Job card. There was an old-fashioned soda machine in the corner of the room, next to the token dispenser. Jay reached into the pockets of his coveralls, fished out some change and fed the machine slot. He helped himself to a bottle of grape soda.
“Whatcha drinking, kid?” he said.
I looked at the selections.
“Root Beer, please.”
Outside the Laundromat we sat on some broken down aluminum lawn chairs and sipped our drinks.
“This job I got for you is not strictly by the book, and I need you to understand that up front.” Jay said.
“Ok.”
I figured as much, seeing as how the job being offered to someone what was technically a non-entity.
“Out off Route 15 they ain’t got the dish coverage to support fully saturated band width, least ways not enough for your high end apps. What we got here is a situation where according to the information charter specs Madam Elestra is entitled, based on her property tax based billing, to full system access. But we ain’t got the band width to support her.”
“What sort of access does she want?”
“Well, Madam is getting on. She gets lonely out there at her place, says she wants a hologram gardener.”

“I don’t know much about plants…”I said.
“Don’t have to, she got bot’s galore and what all to take care of that for her. What she wants in the company.”

Company: a number of individuals. I got enough company in the lock up to last me a long while, but I learned about being lonely there too. I was sent up for phracking corporate dial tone. At any given time there are between three to seven million dollars in prepaid, unclaimed, telco services just sitting around in corporate clock houses waiting for the cog in question to swipe the company issue link card through a FoneSlot and key in his ID. I’d gotten pretty good at helping myself at the data pool, skimming off spare change till it was enough to strip onto a sheet of blank card stock. Then I got greedy, hung for a milli to long on a pool session and got trace, tagged and bagged. I pleaded down to a lesser charge and spent two months time in the county, hard time, four months on a worked farm and nine months on ankle probation, tethered electronically to a municipal soup kitchen’s staff headquarters. When the bracelet dropped off, I droppen out and vanished south.
Jay drove me out the Madam Elestras place on a Monday morning. The countryside was in bloom. I gave up my garage accommodations; the Charlottesville Network Services Office installed an inflatable habitat on the land two lots down the road from my new work place. It looked like a one-story loaf of white bread and would suit me just fine. Jay gave me a hand unloading my few belongings.

“I’ll have someone out to fix you up with water form the well and get you on the septic line later this week.” He said.
I was looking out over the fields towards the Elestra place.
“How we gonna work this Jay? Won’t she figure right off that I’m not a hologram?”
“You might be right to worry about that, ‘cept Elestra, she’s half-blind and her hearing ain’t too good neither. That’s why the council thought up this spoof for her.”
“Spoof?”
“You know, a short fix that ain’t a fix at all. See, she’s entitled to the network services and there is no way around that, but the council hasn’t got the services to provide, so they spoofed a work-around. It will cost them less in the long run to provide you with shelter and wages to pretend to be a hologram that it would to reallocate or purchase the services.”
As tall as me and lean under a flesh suit Madam Elestra wore and assortment of mech. Her body creaked and whined as she moved onto the front porch. In her arms she held a double-barreled shotgun with the hammers drawn back. What little remained of her hair was silver; she kept in clipped back with a tortoise shell clasp.

“Jay Fry, you should shout ‘Hey!’ to an old lady ‘fore creeping up to her door.”

Jay took off his hat and held it in both hands over his chest.

“I should have at that. You are right. I apologize Madam.”
Elestra lowed her weapon with that, letting it hand loose from her left hand as she turned to open the screen door.
“Come on in then, I expect you got a ting or two to tell me about this hologram business.”

I got the shivers when I stepped in Madam Elextras kitchen. The room was a good size with lots of windows letting in plenty of sunlight. It was of an old fashioned design, like my grandmother’s, big fuel burning stove with the heat vent on one wall, an ice box on another beside a counter top with a stainless steal sink. It smelled of hot grease, coffee and fresh onions. Jay sat down with her at the big, oilcloth covered table. I stood off to the side, not at all certain of what I had gotten myself into.

In a way I felt better about being arrested that I did about going to work as a spoofed hologram. I knew what to expect of the American Justice System, Madam Elestra was a mystery to me. A big steel pitcher was sitting on the table. It was covered with a dishtowel to keep out the files. She poured two glassed of ice tea from it. She and Jay sat and sipped in silence for a spell. Madam Elestra was looking me over; her augmented eyes were clear shiny blue. If I was a hologram they should have been looking right through me, but she focused on me all right.
Then she reached for the third glass and filled it with tea.
“Son, you gonna stand there pretending to be a hologram all morning or are you gonna sit down and talk to me about this spoof?”

When I vanished form the urbanized Midwest and dropped off the map into the South, my intention was to lay low and get by monk-like and never go back to a lock up. ‘Cause it is not like I was ever in some major hood. Not that I am downplaying my crimes. The shit I pulled was not right, I know what then and I know it now, but once you have a record you are always a suspect and it is endless line ups and snitch requests form the authorities and just a long rough road in general. Your debt to society my never be paid. So when Madam Elestra took the Com Pack out of her apron packets and slid it across the kitchen table to me I must have had quite and expression on my face.
“Thatcher you hear me now.” She said.
“This is closed com you understand, point to point no broad bad access; its bits is mixed.”
Jay gave me a look that said I could believe her even if my instincts told me other wise,
“Can’t be fixed on a digi-cell or eavesdropped from a dish?” I said.
“You are questioning you elders, boy? Damn, I tell you it is not traceable, it’s just between you and me.”
That was how our relationship started and how it stayed. Meaning I worn the Com link day in, day out, hung it on the shower curtain rod with I bathed, left I on the bed next to my pillow at night. I stayed vanished. Charlottesville fulfilled its obligation to its citizens. Madam Elestra and I got along just fine. It was a win for everyone, for a while. In the lock up you settle into the rhythm of the place, falling in the roll call, lessening for the buzzers to tell you when to eat, when to bathe, when to sleep. I guess you can’t stay in any place too long with out setting into a routine. Elestra and I settled into ours. Each morning around seven I’d make my way across the field to where her gardens began. I’d check the status printout for the maintenance system in the tool shed, make sure the right number of insect were eating as other, that the rodents were eating the insects, that the skimmers were operational and had full nutrient tanks. Then I’d head to the house to check up on Elestra.
She’d be up and about most morning, but some of her mech was nearly as old as she was and there were days I’d spend half the morning doing a physical patch on a servo or software shake down on a driver code just so she could make it out of bed. She showed me a scrapbook full of old, hard documents, black and white photos with crinkle cut edges showing her parents standing beside a long black train car. Elestra had her mother’s whisper thin build and her father’s wide smile.
“Daddy made his money in patients,” she said, “ see how shinny that black train is? It was his baked enamel process that allowed the surface to be polished to such a high gloss.”

Because of growing up in the city, being sent up and living the life of the vanished I’d eaten most of my meals out of bags. Proteburgers wrapped in waxed paper, or some similarly processed meal. I’d never sat down to dinner with a china plate to eat off of and silverware to eat with. I’d never picked tomatoes and corn from the garden and eaten then an hour later. Madam Elestra liked showing me her old ways.
Ways ain’t old if new folks take them up.” She said.
I’d been living as a hologram for about nice weeks when Jay came out for a visit and stayed for supper.
“Damn Thatcher, look at you!” he said.
“You filled out like a farm boy out here, I’d better measure you up and send you out some new clothes.”
I did not plan it of look for it but it found me anyway. The Charlottesville countryside was beginning to feel like home, its people, like my family.
I did not realize it was my twenty-second birthday ‘till the light went out and Jay produced a birthday cake with candles blazing.
Jay was mighty pleased with himself, grinning and laughing.
“I got your birthday off your job file.” He said.

Jay helped me clean the supper dishes with Madam napped on the couch in the parlor. I packed him a plate of black-eyed peas with corn bread and mustard greens to take home. We stood together in the front yard watching the sky. Summer was ending and there was some clouds hanging low that looked like they might try to rain.
“
You OK out here, Thatcher?”
“Better than that Jay, I’ve wanted to thank you.”
“Hell we both took a gamble on this deal, kid. Spoofing a spoof is what we done. I’m just glad it all worked out.”
Jay got in his truck and drove off. Later that night Madam and I had second helping of the cake for dinner. It was raining when she went to bed.
“You’d best sleep on the couch tonight Thatcher. I don’t want my hologram getting all wend on his way home.”

It was coming down pretty good, so I did just that. It was one AM when I heard a truck bumping up the road. You learn to sleep light in the lock up. I was up to the front window in a moment. The truck was Jay’s but he was not driving. He was lashed to the hood with some fence wire and he did not look too good. Sometimes you can stay away from trouble but trouble won’t stay away from you. The trio of chrome head brought it right to my door. They were all muscled up on something that must have affected their hearing ‘cause they were talking load. The biggest one said:
“This must be the place the shit head told us ‘bout.”
He pulled at Jay’s hair and lifted his head.
“This the place shit head?”

Jay groaned. He was still alive at least. Madam woke up and turned on her light; it spilled across the front yard to the illuminate the chrome heads.
“Looks like we woke Momma up.” One of them laughed.
“It’s Madam not Momma you dimwit!”
I found Elestra trying to get out of bed. She started to speak but stopped when I held a finger to her lips. I pantomimed hold a shot gun and drew a question mark in the air. She threw back the covers of her bed. The shotgun was there, along with a box of shells. I picked the Fone from her nightstand, dial 911 and handed it over. It would take twenty minutes for a response from town. I figured we had about thirty seconds before the trouble started. I was right. I met chrome head number one’s nose with the stock on the gun as he broke down the front door. Chrome head two came in through the kitchen. He was looking as his partner on the floor and didn’t see me standing behind the coat rack till it was too late. He pulled out a knife and I shot off his hand. Chrome head number three was holding a gun to Jay’s head. The muscles on his neck were twitching. The snub nose trash gun shook in his hand. He was upset.
“Jimbo! Tellmen! What the hell’s going on in there?”
I reloaded in the foyer before stepping out onto the porch.
“Damn it all shit head.” He said to Jay.
“I asked you with the rich old bitch lived alone, you said yes. Why the hell you want to lie to me shit head?”
Jay was coming around. He opened his eyes a bit and saw me. He mouth was bloody and I could see his teeth were busted up. Still he managed to take a breath and speak.
“I told you she lives with a hologram.”
What happened next surprised me; it surprised the chrome head too. A pair of skimmers came flying up out of the dark spraying fertilizer. A swath of tailored bee’s followed in their wake. Chrome head moved his fun away from Jays’ head. I stepped forward and fired on him with both barrels; he groaned and fell back into the dark. I looked up to see Elestra standing on the porch with a pest remote in her hands. She maneuvered the joy stick and sent the swarm and the skimmers back to their nests. I reached into the cab of Jays’ truck and switched on the headlights. I got a good look at what a shot gun does to a man when fired up close. Then I threw up.

I got some wire cutter form the tool shed and set Jay free. His wrists and legs were cup up pretty bad and his face was a worked over mess, but he smiled at me anyway. The authorities showed up about tem minutes later in the form of the Charlottesville Sheriff Department. The Deputy took a quick look around them and called in for an ambulance. I had to go into town to make a report; I didn’t figure I’d be coming back any time soon. But I’ve never been happier to be wrong. Jays’ gave his deposition form his hospital bed: he made it pretty clear that the shooting were a case of self-defense. The chrome heads all lived, but when their families heard I had a record they tried to press charges against me. The County Judge said he’d never heard of any cases being filed with a hologram as the defendant and that he wasn’t of a mid to set any precedents. The Sheriff dropped my back to Madams’ the next day. I got my work cut out for me cleaning the mess I made with the shotgun and fixing the front door. It will be time to start in on the winter garden soon. Madam wants to plant a patch of bulbs out by the driveway. She says they will bloom in spring.

With one razor sharp claw

Slither slit the nylon cord binding my wrists, and hauled me roughly to my feet, his blaster pressed against my ribs.  He marched me to a cell in the brig, and locked the door.  On the little table, there was a big plate of enchiladas, with beans and rice.  "Eat hearty little human." leered the lizard..."I want you to be nice and fat when I put you on a spit and roast you over the coals at my hatching day party next weekend.  Oh, by the way you are cordially invited!  Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!"Well, I was hungry, so I ate.  There was even cold beer....just that lousy Old Lizard Breath, though.  Don't know how they drink that stuff all the time.  But it was cold anyway, which is good, because the lizards always put too many chilies in their cooking.  Later, when the lights dimmed, I tried to get some sleep on the narrow cot.  I was just dozing off, when all of a sudden I was tossed to the deck as the ship lurched violently and listed hard to starboard.....klaxons sounded, the lights flickered on and off.....explosions could be heard far aft, near the engines.....the cell door cycled open, and the P.A. instructed all passengers to follow the flashing arrows to the lifeboats.

I hate it when that happens

Not making much money selling churros, I got involved in some things that I should have stayed clear of, which is why I was in a very seedy part of the transient zone wending my way through the trash piles in a dark narrow stinking alley, when somebody hit me from behind.  I awoke in pitch dark, with my head throbbing like a gravatron motor with a bearing going out....my hands were tied behind my back, and I was face down on cold steel plate.  The air was thick and foul, and gravity was too heavy for my taste.  Things were not looking good, and they were looking even worse when the lights suddenly came on, and I found myself staring at the steel-capped toe-claws of a lizard warrior.  I must be a captive of some faction of the Lizard Nomad Horde.  "Well, if it isn't mister Estaban, appearing at somewhat of a disadvantage.....ha ha ha!"  hissed a nasty lizard voice.  Damn, it sounded like my old nemesis Slither the One-Eyed.....who used to just be called Slither, before our last little contretemps.  Last I'd seen of him, he was cursing me at the top of his lungs, vowing to eat my liver without removing it first, as I made my getaway by stealing his spaceship.

Ghosts

Senior Analyst Shelby took a deep breath, and tried to get back to work, but things were getting a little scary here.  It was bad enough that they had lost a ship down in Insect Empire space, where it really wasn't supposed to be in the first place, but now it also looked like at least two souls from her crew had gone off on a ghost ship.  How was he going to spin that in his report to Covert Command?  To begin with, they wouldn't believe him.....they would say he'd been out on the fringes too long.  But the long range scan was playing over and over on the big screen in Comm Station......the hulk of the frigate Elf is drifting amid various cosmic junk, and the fantastic looking ghost ship comes out of nowhere, and two humans go waltzing out through cold space like they were going on a walk in the park, fade into this dragonship thing, and then it just melts away again.  The Captain was waiting for permission from Imperial Command to go in and aid in rescue operations.....they would see if they could do any good with the distressed vessels in the area, and they would for sure try to get to what was left of the Elf, and see if reading her logs would tell them anything more coherent.  Hedley had said he would send him what they knew about the "ghosts"....seems that this was not the first time somebody had seen them.......

The Pink Cadillac

....was rolling through the redolent desert air, under the twin crescent moons.....the other day, at the airport, the Joan Rivers robot had tossed me the keys, saying she was off to London where she had a couple of gigs lined up.....one on the Graham Norton Show, and then the celebrity speed lap thing on Top Gear.  I was getting hungry, the truck stop burger basket was long gone....the one cold hard french fry on the passenger side floormat was starting to look good.....

Ready Freddy?

Diedre opened her eyes, and saw Freddy standing there.  "Take my hand." he said.  He helped her sit up out of her body, and she stood next to him, looking down at herself, as the lifesupport systems flickered out.  "Come on, then, let's go." says Freddy.  They float out through the hull of the ship, she looks back and sees that the drive modules are all smashed, and all the lights are out.  A huge dragonship is floating above them.....with widespread dragon wings and a long dragonscaled silver hull....as they fly closer, you can see that the crystal eye of the dragon is a large porthole....inside there are people having a cocktail party.  They wave and point at the new guests.....Freddy and Diedre slide through the dragon hull, into the lounge with the others.  A tall matronly looking lady tells Diedre  "My dear, you must be exhausted!  Come with me and we'll find you a place to lie down."  They go to a nice cabin, and the bed looks so inviting.....Diedre lies down and goes to sleep.  Back in the lounge, Freddy and some of the others start a game of dice-and-ball.  In the morning, Diedre gets up out of bed and goes to look at herself in the mirror....she looks like an angel.  She goes back to the lounge, and finds Freddy having breakfast.  She sits down and orders scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and the fruit cup.  Freddy pours her some coffee.  "Freddy, can you tell me what is going on?" she asks.  Freddy folds his newspaper and sets it down.  "Well," he begins.."The disfunction wave front knocked me out of the ship and clean into another reality.  The folks in the dragonship had heard the noise, and came to see if there was anything they could do.  They found me and took me in, and then we went back to the shipwreck to see if there was anyone else we could help.  But you were the only one we found still alive, so I brought you back on board here."  he concluded.  "I see." she says, looking thoughtful.  The eggs were perfect, and there was even marmalade.

Diedre awoke

In confusion.....where am I?  She seemed to be strapped down, she could hardly feel her body, the light was dim but still hurt her eyes.....a blur in front of her resolved itself into the artificial face of Bones, the ship medbot.  She was in sickbay, looked like.  She for sure felt drugged up.  "Just take it easy." says Bones.  She remembers the terror of the reality disfunction wave, but it seems somehow far away and mitigated....must be the drugs.....she wants to ask about the others....about the ship....but Bones seems to fade away, the light grows dimmer....she sinks back into nothingness.....

Hey

This is cool. A multiperson blog. I will see if I can come up with an scifi scenarios

His right earbud

Started reading him a public broadcast...."Subether reports are reaching newscenter of a seven point one magnitude spacequake in a populated region of the Insect Empire.  Human spacecraft have monitored multiple distress signals, and deep range scans are revealing large amounts of cosmic debris in the affected area..."The Director set his glass back down on the bar, returned to his seat, fastened his lap belt and closed his eyes.  He switched to VirtualVision, and the screen came on inside his head.  The mail icon said 13 unread.  He ignored that for the moment, and started channel surfing through the major news feeds, trying to see what kind of slant the talking heads were giving the disaster story.  As a Director with Frontier Affairs, this thing could be a real pain to his office.  He didn't get very far before a priority flag came in ....it was from Hedley, his contact man at HSS(covert)...."Say Wu, thought you should get this post haste....our guy on scene, ol' BillyBob Shelby on the Impeccable, he's telling me that we lost a whole damn ship out there....a signal frigate that was operating near the apparent epicenter where all kinds of crap boiled up out of a dimensional rift.  They've lost all comm with the frigate, anyway....and things look pretty rough for any biots that were near that.  Anyway, that's what I've got.  See you at the meeting."  The hum from the gravatron engines shifted pitch, as the 0800 started its approach into the lunar gravity well.....

Ensign Diedre Parrish

Tumbled out of her bunk and made it to her station as the klaxon continued to sound away.....Chief was strapped into the pilot station, but the comm station was not manned....where was Freddy?  She felt a little useless in her weapons station....what the hell good were any weapons against a rolling wave of pure chaos?  On her screens it looked like somebody was taking the fabric of the galaxy and ripping it open like a packet of instant grits you were getting ready to microwave for breakfast.....glittering stardust falling all around.....the AI was just plain stunned.....this did not compute, did not compute.....Chief shunted all power to full integrity, as the first ripples of the wave-front started shaking the ship like .....well, like something that's really being shaken a lot.....words failed her at the moment....Chief yelled "Hang On!" and everything started tumbling over one way and flipping around the other.....all kinds of colors and patterns pulsed through the cabin, along with sounds and smells and emotions and memories and glimpses of sheer bliss and pure terror.....her clinched jaw began to ache....tears rolled down her cheeks.....her stomach was in knots.....and then it was over.

Flaco and I

...were watching the news out on the patio.....seems like a reality disfunction wave was sweeping through an area out towards the buffer zone.....net traffic was crashed for sure.....everything said "server not found"  ....oh well.....

He wished it with every fiber of his being.

Chief Operation Officer took pills from his pockets and downed them all. It did not matter which drug, just any drug was better than no drug. Jeron Keron washed his face and shook as the first drugs kick in.
The lizard skin was not one of them. Get down there lizard, we will have time to you later. Jeron said. I have to get my COO online, to boot, yhea hehehehe....
Jeron wizzled down the toilet, his pee looked like beer, he had to not get down on it, but flushed it away. Just then another drug kicked it, he had something he had to do.

"Blister my blister we have to get on with it." Jeron said.

"You are in the toilet Sir." said Blaot-a-er. "And Sir the name is Blaot-a-er."

It took everything the Chief Operation Officer could muster to get himself out the the toilet.

"Blaot-e-er, Blisher, Blister...what ever..."

Hmm, thought Blaot-e-er, a fine mess we are in. He was tripped out in the latest fashion : a Horn Shirt, Baggy Pants, Rugged Work Boots all done up a fuchsia. The Telugu made it clear to him the Chief Operation Officer would be an ordeal for him.

"Yessss, well, can we go now?"

The Chief Operation Officer was still looking at his hands.

"Blister , how about my hands?"

"What about your hands?"

"Jesus H. Christ...they are huge!!! I mean really huge. I don't think I will be able to go any where....Jesus Blessed God....THEY ARE HUGE!!!!!"

"Make them smaller."

"Blister they are huge, huge I tell you , oh wait, smaller?"

"Yes, smaller Sir."

"Smaller you say?"

The COO wished his hands would be smaller. He wished it with every fiber of his being.

"Damn ....how about that...they ARE smaller!!!"

"That is right Sir, they are smaller."

Blaot-e-er made his way into the car. Jeron got in behind him. Thinking : smaller, huh, if I could just get my gut to go smaller. He wished it with every fiber of his being.

Shear terror

Meanwhile, the Estaban of that time-line sits at the bar in the Down Lounge, playing the dice and ball game with the half-power holographic barkeep....they are both down pretty deep in the cheap gin well, and well they might be, since things are just looking worse and worse.....but nothing matters anymore, 'cause here comes the reality disfunction wave-front sweeping through the zone, to clean up whatever the first Shear disaster had left around....the stars started to dance, everything started to phase in and out.....Dagwood screamed and burst into flames....back in Calcutta, a small red indicator lamp flashed briefly on a secondary status board......

Deep in the buffer zone

In superstealth mode, the signal frigate HSS Elf slips and slides along dimension edges.....Chief Warrant has the third watch, the "graveyard"  some call it.....the stars swarm around him, sitting there in the pilot station.....all kinds of data dump along the fringes of his conciousness, with AI  backup filtering the wheat from the chaff.....everything looks pretty normal, for being in the zone.  Far off, the sensor array is picking up machine culture shipping.  Closer, Insect Empire transports are powering out towards their home worlds.  No Lizard Nomad traffic around right now.  But what the hey is THAT!  A tingle goes down his spine.....the effing starfield is starting to do some kind of DANCE.....this just can't be real.....oh shit.....REALITY BREAKDOWN.....the klaxons are already sounding......a wave of sheer insanity is sweeping through the zone.....looks like the good ship Elf might be up the creek real quick, without a paddle, or a spoon.....

Lizard Nomad Horde

One of the Colonel's cousins, William Robert "BillyBob" Shelby, was at this same time just coming off watch aboard the HSS Impeccable, on deep frontier patrol out of Orion Base. Security Council had decided that the HSS shouldn't use nasty warlike names for the ships anymore, like Triumph, or Warrior, or Smasher....we want to seem nice and peaceful to the peoples around us, like the Insect Empire, and the Lizard Nomad Horde. So the flagship was Impeccable, and the escort stardestroyers were the Truth and the Beauty. The signal frigate Elf was still out of comm range, operating in stealth mode within what was actually Insect space, but we don't want to talk about that too much.

Treaty Council politics

Called the Director away from Calcutta.   The embassy got him a vertical up to the transhub space station, where he caught the 0800 to Moon City.  The Frontier Affairs Directorate was having a little meeting with Human Security Services regarding the bothersome news from the Insect Empire.....something about severe reality slippage in the buffer zones.  That was the trouble with things down towards galactic center....physics got all messed up with the stars being so concentrated....and rouge black matter waves kept altering the space-time plots, so the unexpected could become the norm, which plays hell with proper planning.  And the Delegates with their Budget Hearings......they were always on about the expense of operations, calling into question the usefulness even of maintaining a presence on the Frontier.  Well, he had about forty minutes to kill before lunar touchdown, so he went to the barcar and got a brandy and soda, and some cashews.

Dream Journal # 7

I was asleep. Or was I awake. No, no, I was asleep. A S L E E P. In a dream, the dreams I always took a small Coke. It's icy bottle cool against my hand. It was summer. Summer all around. It was late July, maybe even August. The heat was deafening, only in the shade could you take a spell for awhile. Looking out that the cracked soil. Weeds busted out and withered and died. It was that kind of summer. I had in my pockets, peanuts. I took one out and popped it in my mouth. The salt tasted good. Then I spit out the shell and got down to the nuts. The sun was drifting across the sky. Down by the dump there was a Dodge left over from another time. It sat, broken down, the wheels long gone, it was pitted by the sand. The seats were gone. I took a seat where the driver once sat. Made a clicking noise when I had to shift. Over the the "garden" the hose was on. Leaching the sand. Getting Tomatoes and Squash to come up. All around them snails were petrified by the dust my bother-bot laid around them.

"Do not let Rachel come near here."

Rachel was the dog-bot. A German and a mixed breed. Rachel was nice. The Mom-bot hated her. Of course the Mom-bot hated most things. It was her that let Rachel near the garden. The bother-bot was out fencing a new post half a mile away when the Mom-bot came a clanging the bells. Dressed in a high top pants, a cheery blouse. The Mom-bot was convulsing worse the Dog-bot. As the Dad-bot came running, all squeaks and tumbling.

"Damn you I say! Did not you hear!"

He swore.

"Look at your Mom-bot, shacking on the floor."

"It was not him, Rachel got out, I damn that dog-bot...."

This was something the Dad-bot had not heard before. Shit if it was not me well who was it? Was it him?

He swore some more.

I was asleep. Or was I awake.......

Dream Journal # 6

Meanwhile, in a divergent reality stream....I awoke in the woods, somewhat cold and damp. Two moons stared down at me through the tree branches overhead....looking like baleful glowing eyes of evil....tinted red, like moonlight after a forest fire. The sun rose eventually, fat and squirming with those sunspot things that make you feel like maybe you got some of those tainted drugs from overseas at the four dollar generic counter at the supermarket. I could hear a highway sound down the hill....I made it to the roadside, and tried to hitch a ride, but the big trucks all had robot drivers who looked just like crash test dummies....they looked neither right nor left, just stared straight ahead and kept rolling. I kept walking with my thumb out when I heard something coming. A pink Cadillac came cruising down the pike, looking like one of those Mary Kay jobs. The brake lights came on just after the lady went past....I could see what had to be a peroxide wig....."Jump in, honey." she said. It was the Phyllis Diller robot from "Space Balls"....or maybe that was Joan Rivers, I get those two confused. We rolled on down to a truck stop, to get some eats. Clark Gable and W.C. Fields were in a booth by the window, in black and white. Betty Boop was our waitress, and Dagwood was behind the counter, flipping burgers. Indiana Jones came out of the mens' room, wiping his hands on his slacks, like when there aren't any paper towels, and you have to use that silly air blowing thing. Come to think of it, I had seen a motorcycle with a sidecar out front. We slid into a booth, and ordered two burger baskets with iced tea. My robot friend got her's to go, since she's a robot. She said I could have the extra meal later, as we rolled on towards evening.

....things were looking somewhat confused....

In one of those big white colonial houses in Calcutta or someplace like that,
Colonel Bradford-Shelby and Director Chen-Wu watched the feed from the agent at the
Dome....things were looking somewhat confused....what was living and what was dead?
How does one define those terms? The Colonel poured more brandy from the crystal
carafe, and shot in a splash from the silver and glass soda water shooting thingy,
whatever that is really called....the Director thanked him for the drink, took a
good long sip, and said:

"Damn it Bradford-Shelby, it looks like we'll have to run the old terminate, a what?"

....but the after effect of bodies....

Ramesy puttered up the the DOME. It was left over from another time, a time before the Free World. It shown like the sun. Entrances all over the place. He took a sip of the coffee. Damn it Connie, Fuck You. He took a swipe at the Biotique and placed it under his nose. Into his lapel he stated:

"Russal Ramesy - Containment Coordinator/BXGG, on site at the DOME, bio-metrics are set to now, LEFT, RIGHT, UP, DOWN. Checking them out. Ok-dokey."

He took another sip of his coffee. And got out of the car. He took a flash-light, and, a weapon he had not used forever.

"OK, so I am heading out. We may have to find entry...."

So went Russal Ramesy was nipped from the bud, way back when, a sensory was place just under the skull by a Med-0-bot. The sensory made everything from the brain report into the main frame. When he was just under one a Med-0-bot placed a nervous tunic ( the retina ) right behind the Mammalian eye. This too was down loaded into the main frame. Every thing the boy did was loaded into the main frame. From pre-school, to 5-14, Grade School, it was down loaded. From there he was placed under the military humanism, bringing humanitarian aid to disaster relief operations. Which meant, everyone.

Ramsey looked the DOME.

"Ok, DOME Entrances - A-17, looks like it is open, here we go....."

He drew out the flash-light, casting it around. The sun would start coming up and brighten everything. It was then he spotted the arm.

"Blast you Connie, damn you, Fuck, shit this...."

It was then Ramesy took a step back. Focus on what had to be done. They were all around him, not bodies, but the after effect of bodies.

Life in the imperial insect zone for transients

The rent is cheap in Happy Paradise Vehicle Park, because the location is less than ideal.  Park Management claims that "residents enjoy the benefits of the latest semi-permeable bubble field technology."  Well, what that means is that the field leaks....you get a lot of noise and fumes from the spaceport on the other side of the chain link fence.  So the thing to do is to get your own secondary bubble unit, to give your rented space a little more privacy and liveability.  After a couple of weeks just living in the saucer at night and selling churros in the daytime, I traded a lunch bag full of food stamps for a used patio bubble, and set it up outside my entry hatch.  It came with a tall table, and four of the tall stools the insects are comfortable with.  Works for me.  Flaco, one of the security dudes at the Free Market, lives two spaces down from me, in an old construction shack he got surplus from some jobsite over the fence.  He got somebody he knew with a reaction jet lifter to move it up over here, for cheap housing.  Flaco comes over some times after work, and we have some churros and rum-and-cola, watch the news or whatever.  Since he has four arms, he carries two billy clubs on his service belt, at work.  Not that he needs to use them much....there isn't much trouble to deal with, just sometimes punk insects run through the rows grabbing stuff off vendor tables....or sometimes the migrant worker lizard people will get their paychecks from the mine, and decide to get all smashed at the beer garden that caters to their kind, and security might have to break up a fight over there, or something.  The different species like the transient zone shops and stalls, because they can get their various ethnic cuisine prepared in an authentic manner, and they can find all the specialty items that the big stores in the city don't stock.  I'm still waiting for the cable company guy to show up, so I can configure a connection and try to see if I can access the human space net.  Maybe then I can get some help getting back to civilization.

Hmmm, maybe I'm doing the blogger thing right now, I don't know....anyway, I was going to offer some ruminations on the machine culture thing.  It is generally accepted that, down towards the center of the Milky Way, there is an advanced machine culture.  How did this come about, you ask?  Well, the first thing you have to remember is that this old galaxy is really, really old.  Time is older than you can imagine.  And, as biological species rise up from where-ever they rise up from, they evolve in physical ways, and in what I suppose we can call spiritual ways.  The most ancient species have  evolved beyond the purely or merely physical....they have transcended to a higher plane.  When they do this, they usually leave behind their machines, to mind the store.  Now, think about how the water swirls down a toilet bowl....things get sucked to the center and then are gone.  Same thing with a spiral galaxy, like ours.  The older peoples have been sucked down towards the center as time goes by, so most of the leftover supermachines are down there near Mother, the big black hole that dumps stuff out of this phase of the multiverse, and into another.  Got that?  So when a race, like maybe this poor human race, gets good enough with technology to leap between the stars, eventually it is going to encounter the left over machines of our forefathers.  You may remember that someone on this blog previously has in fact been rescued, after his spaceship exploded, by a machine culture.   And he is now selling churros, and maybe hotcakes with maple syrup, at a the Free Market on an Insect Empire frontier moon.   Stay tuned for another exciting episode.

The telephuncian.....

The beeps from the telephuncian were growing loader. The telephuncian was,in part, of the dreary shell. There was a bubble surface going around the whole house. Little bubbles. Microscopic bubbles. It hooked up us up into space and down to earth. Ramesy hit the button again. Nothing happen. The beeping got loader still. It was four in the morning, ok, well, four - o - three.

"Shit." Ramesy thought.

Ok, I will get up.

"Just a moment, damn it."

Ramesy padded over the Tex-Mex plate, and the poppers. It the bathroom, he whizzed and got himself together. The beeping got loader still.

"Heysus, OK. OK."

He sat down it the arm chair.

"Ok, what the heck is it."

"Containment Coordinator/BXGG - Russal Ramesy"

"Yes"

"We need a virtual of you."

Ramesy scratch his head. A virtual of me. Heysus, I am getting fired. Damn it.

He heaved himself out of the arm chair and made for a virtual.

"Ok, this is it I suppose."

"One moment."

He blinked as the laser light swept over him. Got down into the fibers of his being. And then it was done.

"Russal Ramesy - Containment Coordinator/BXGG. Wait one moment please."

There was a flash and then the Containment Chair/RXGH was in view.

"Well. Hi Connie."

"Sorry to get you up this early Ramesy."

"Well, it is unusual...."

"There is a CC at the DOME."

"What?"

"It is not the usual CC....it is the sort of thing you did in a past life...."

"Shit, Connie...."

Ramesy looked at Connie. Her hair was a mess. There was no lipstick. Her Asian/African was not use to being up this late or early.

"Connie, I don't do that anymore. Just give me something where there is no blood. I mean come on."

Connie looked stoic.

They looked at one another.

"Damn it Connie."

Sewer hose....

Out in the high desert, they had dug a lot of trenches, as wide as a double-wide, and miles long. Then they ran in sewer hose, water hose, and power and comm conduit. Then they extruded resin boxes, one after the other, six feet under the desert floor. And then they buried them, leaving only miles and miles of solar array showing over the acres. They called them "eco-condos", and moved a generation into them. It was great growing up underground, like insects, or rodents. By the time we got out of high-school, you could rent them dirt cheap. (heh-heh) My buds and our chicks would crawl up to the surface at night, and sit around on cheap resin patio chairs, smelling the wonderful desert air, looking up at the stars, watching the verticals dropping down from the space stations, heading for Edwards. I kept my nose clean, made all the right key-strokes, got through Greater Mojave Community College, and got a job as a spaceman. Five-four-three-two-one.....They had good drugs for the spacesickness now, and I floated down the corridor to my bunkhouse. It looked exactly like our crash pad under the desert. Same walls, same vid screens, same forced air. If everybody chipped in, you could buy the desert air smell as an extra.

It kills them with kindness......

Speaking of money; it's always the economy, stupid. Or is it the stupid economy? Anyway, the machine-biot dynamic is at heart a problem in economics. The machines have way too much stuff, so much that they go to great lengths to get rid of what they can when they can. They twist space-time with the powers they have developed over uncountable eons, sending space freighters hurling between the stars at impossible velocity carrying multiple metric tonnes of surplus goods and commodities, just to get rid of excess production. They have even cultured millions of cyborgs, in a vain attempt to create a consumer class. But that backfired, when the cyborgs decided they would rather be gypsys or hippies than strait-laced time-card-punching middle class. But, back to what I was trying to say: when a political entity like the Insect Empire comes into contact with the machine culture shipping lanes, things will be fine for a while, but sooner or later the biot waste is going to it the air circulation unit, in a big way. Think about it, the insects came way out here to the edge of their space to set up a mining operation on this otherwise useless rocky moon of a gas giant planet. They bulldoze out a spaceport, and get to work. The machines, ever vigilant, see a new spaceport and quick as a wink start sending ships there. The insect mining company asks them how much they want for their goods....like mining machines, hydrocarbons, raw bulk food paste, whatever....and the machines say "Hell, we're giving it away!" So of course the mining company chief gets together with his buddy the Imperial Local Agent, and says "Good buddy, I think we are on to something here, know what I mean....wink, wink, nudge, nudge?" Do I have to explain the rest? OK, the Imperial-industrial powers that be set up an import tariff structure where they get the stuff for free, but sell it for the price after the tariff. It's all still way cheaper than shipping the same stuff out from the Imperial core planets, and everybody in on the deal is making one or two fortunes every day. Of course, that is not enough for really greedy insects: they go hog-wild and start trans-shipping mass quantities of excellent machine made product back into the core realm at totally nuts rock bottom prices, which soon enough leads to the crash of the Imperial economy as old line business goes bankrupt, the banks go bottom up, and the housing market flips upside-down. That's how the machine culture deals with really big aggressive biot infestations on it's frontier...it kills them with kindness.I got lost in an economic digression....I was going to tell you about how things were going at the flea market....I mean Free Market....things were still going great, the local economy was still in the upswing phase, and my churros were selling like hotcakes....Damn....that knocked me sideways again...I mean, how would hotcakes sell? What an idea! I wonder if the food machine can make maple syrup? I bet it can....

Un Momento

In the dreary shell, all he could afford, which was dumb, as myriads open up as the buzz about the New World came into being. All the way out past Temecula, pass the frozen food shops, past the "DOME". It was made of plasticarft, set down amongst other dreary shells at the end of a street called "2x4-R248". He sat for a moment, looking at the red sky. And wandered inside.

"hhhhmmm" he said.

"What is it." the dreary shell said to him.

"Nothing much, just make me something for dinner will you...."

"Un momento!"

"One moment." he said.

"That is what I said."

"No, you said "Un Momento"..."

"Exactly."

Why the hell do I put up with this? He would need to check the main frame again. He changed from the working outfit, placing them in the washdry, took a shower, brushed his teeth, and came out wearing a tank top, faded blue jeans and flip flops.

The Dineobot looked at him, charming him with beeps.

He got an oven mitt and looked at the food.

Tex-Mex

"I know you were supposed to be set up via Dallas, but this is California, what is left of it, and I don't mind having Tex-Mex as one of the options, but really Tex-Mex every meal you eat, it is a drag..."

"It is Thai."

He dug into the Tex-Mex, dripping with reconstituted cheese.

"No , Thai is noodles, it is Gai Yaung, or Sai Grok or Pad Pak Roam Mit....."

"This is noodles dress in beef broth with and assortment of veggies."

"Is this Noodles" he said. Holding to up for view.

"Yes, it is Thai noodles dress in beef broths with an assortment of veggies."

"No. This is Tex-Mex, look at the cheese!"

"Yes, it is Thai noodles..."

The Young Insect…The Cyborgs…And Me…..

The cyborgs and I sat huddled in the bubble domes, with the constant vibration of the lane surge pulsing up from the tanker hull. We were falling from station to station, getting a free ride between the close packed stars of the galactic center, the gigantic colorful fans of cosmic dust clouds swirled around us. This tribe all came from the same machine producer, and it was hard to tell them apart, the only thing really different from one to another was the scrimshaw they carved into their exoskeletons....esoteric glyphs that indicated the lines they had run on in the past....or deeds they had done for the betterment of the tribe. They tapped into the tankers, and ran whatever it was the machines were shipping through filters and stills, and poured that into themselves for lubrication. My AI sang songs and told stories of human space for their amusement, and in return they provided hydrocarbons for my purloined food machine. I learned that this line was headed out towards the frontier, where the machine culture intermixed loosely with some biot empire....they showed me videos of arid moons with large clusters of bubble habitat spreading like blue froth over the rocky surface. Strange looking insect-like creatures flew around in open framework reaction jet vehicles. They said that others like me had been seen there before.
Camping out with a dozen cyborgs on the after deck of an automated chemical tanker isn't too bad of a trip, after you get used to it. Somebody had told me once that you can get used to anything. The cyborgs had a couple of bubblecraft, pretty much the standard flying saucer looking thing, and they had unpacked their gear and set up bubble tents, for more living space. They mostly sat around playing a game that involved varicolored dice and a ping-pong ball, or carving on each other. The cyborg who handled most of the chemical processing started playing with the food unit one day, and discovered that if he poured a particular sugar analog concoction into it, he could get it to dispense pretty decent 150 proof rum. So after that, I spent a lot of time drinking rum and cola, trying to get good at the dice-ball game. Weeks went by.......As we got closer to the insect realm port, the cyborg chief told me that we would probably have to split up when we got there. They had a registered clan logo, and valid bar-codes, but my only ID showed up as "transient biot of unknown origin". They didn't think they would have any trouble getting through Imperial Insect quarantine at the port, but I might have some trouble. Or maybe not, he didn't know for sure. So they decided to fix me up with my own little bubblecraft, and let me take my chances. The chief talked to the tanker shipbrain, and got it to fabricate a couple of large lens shaped pieces of light hull material in it's machine shop. The bottom piece would be solid black, and the top piece was transition glass. They stuck the two pieces together, programmed an entry hatch, and loaded in spare parts from their hoard of stuff in their craft hold. They put in a small gravatron drive, a driver's seat, a chemical toilet, and my food machine. A large plastic bladder held a good supply of carbon-based food syrup, and could double as a water bed. Down in a gravity well, soft biots needed something to sleep on. So it looked like I was pretty well set up for when we got to port in a couple of more weeks, roughly.
My little flying saucer dropped off the tanker, and settled into the traffic stream towards the spaceport. The driver's module came complete with a navigation bar, and comm suite...so eventually I got a signal from Port Authority..."Unknown small craft, follow only marked vector to Quarantine Zone". I stayed on mark approach to the space station orbiting above the insect city below on the rocky moon....The gravatron motor whirled rapidly as the landing dock got closer and closer....touchdown in Imperial Insect jurisdiction is accomplished. I wait for further contact. The dock bay cycles atmosphere, various light bars blink and strobe....binary code scrolls across the comm screen....I am told to exit the vehicle and follow the yellow line on the deck to Immigration. After a short walk, I find myself in a small office with a creature facing me over a wood-grained counter. The insect people are taller than me looks like, and have multiple limbs and eyestalks. The immigration official aims some eyestalks at me, and some at a screen array. There is a chrome speaker box on the counter, which starts speaking in my language...."You are a human biot in transient status?" I reply in the affirmative. "Very good, I'm giving you a temp visa with a pending. You may move your vehicle anywhere in the transient zone between the spaceport and the city limits, but you may not leave that zone under any circumstances without official sponser. You are not eligible for food stamps or free medical, and you have no recognized civil rights. Failure to abide by local laws and regulations may result in death. Have a nice day."
Well, that had gone pretty well, I guess. The "death" part was a little disturbing....I would have to try to keep my nose clean, as it were. Back in my flying saucer, I turned on the comm and an advert popped up: "Happy Paradise Vehicle Park and Sanitary Facility! Many available clean modern spaces! Full hook-ups! Cable ready! E-Z quick credit terms! Imperial law prohibits discrimination by race, religion, gender, or species." And so on.....There was a marker already there to follow, so I let an autopilot program take over, and after the bay doors opened, my little craft coasted down towards the surface, through a maze of orbiting shipping, towards the huge flat spaceport area. Outside the spaceport fence, there were lots of parking lots, with all manner of small craft and bubble tents in rows. The program settled me down into Space 38 in Happy Paradise. Luckily for me, the Imperial Insect economy was is a boom cycle, and credit really was E-Z. As soon as I had landed, a pop-up came on the comm and offered me an account with First Insect Trust and Savings. I put my first, middle, last as Estaban Mickey Mouse, and my 9 digit SS# as 123-4567-89. Within 30 seconds I had access to a 10,000 Imperial Credit Unit line, and it would only cost me 10 ICU a month minimum payment. So when the vehicle park manager came around in a golf cart, I charged six months all at once, and got a slight discount.
A few weeks later, I was sitting out in front of my space, eating a churro my food machine had made. A young insect was watching me, a female I think. She asked me what I was eating, and I asked her if she wanted a bite. She wiggled any eyestalk in an affirmative manner, so I broke a piece off for her. She said she really liked it and asked for more. I went inside and programmed more churros. Pretty soon, I had a whole crowd of kids wanting churro bites. A mother insect came along and asked for a whole bag of them, because her kids were driving her nuts asking for them. I got her a bag, and she got a little coupon book out of her purse and tore off a sheet of little stamps. I asked her what that was, and she said they were food stamps, of course. The light bulb lit up above my head, as it were. Over next to the fence at the far edge of the transient zone, there is a place called the Free Market and Duty-Free Shop Plaza..(don't mispronounce it as "flea" market, or the insects will get upset)...anyway, I got myself a thermal chest, and let the food machine run churros for an hour or so, and went off in the morning to see if I could get a spot at the Free Market. I found one on the south wall, number five. When security came around, they said that was OK, since it was far enough away from the established vendors who sold cotton candy and popcorn balls. For a nominal fee, I reserved my space for a week. It went great, by a little after lunch time I was sold out, and I had a stack of food stamps, and some nylon coins in my pocket that looked like varicolored guitar picks. Maybe I would actually be able to pay First Insect the 10 ICU a month.

After maybe two months....

After maybe two months in the biot holding tank, some cyborg tribals showed up, tripping along the machine lanes by sticking their habitat bubbles on the hulls of chemical tankers. My AI had learned quite a bit of local info from the hospitality program the machines had set up to deal with us stray biots, so I was able to talk myself out of the tank and into the tribal setup. They helped me pry the food unit off the wall, and we stuck it to a tanker hull too. My worksuit configured a power tap to the lane surge, so my air scrubber could keep going, and we were off.

Containment Coordinator/BXGG....

Containment Coordinator/BXGG scoping out the scene. All around him dead bodies were everywhere. Into his lapel he sighed and rattled off the dispute:
"...we will need a field of officers here, two of them and a crew of sub-contracted workers, preferable from Mexico....we will need five haulers...."
Back in , what amounted to his car, he ripped off a chew pouch and settled down to the drive. The coffee was cold, but he drank it anyway. Gurgling in his guts. The chew pouch did not help matters any. Buy the time he reached the city, he was warn out. He stopped at any electopad and let the engine idle. Looking down at his mud caked shoes, he began to wonder. And then fall asleep. The dream happened the way a dream happened :

He was at a State Fair. People bustled around him. The State Fair could have been anyplace. He realized this in the dream. He was 24 again. 24. And yet he was over 50 in his mind. The folks were bustling to a show. He went with them. It was dark inside, very dark. He was starting to get feverous when the light came on and everyone stood up cheering. The man in the ostrich suit was giving him the go, along with the others.

"Feel freedom! Away from the others, be ostentatious, give you a start will you, a start into the new world. The New World!"

He was making his way to the entrance, the entrance to a world he has never seen before....

Then he woke up.


The electopad was dinging. He'd been asleep for twenty minutes.

"Hello Odd-fellow," the electopad was singing, "you can move along will you."

"Shit." he said. And moved along.

The Atomic Taco

Estaban stared at the empty shot glass in front of him on the bar, and it stared back. It had been eight earth years since he had crashed here on Shear, and things were slowly winding down. Whatever bizarre force that had sliced the asteroid in half however long ago had left half of the life-support funtioning.....but a half isn't a whole, so the whole thing just couldn't keep going, despite the heroic efforts of the multiple redundant repair systems. The Down Lounge was about the last place still up and running....and it was running out. Atomic Taco could still make a string beef taquito, but it could no longer manage to fake the cilantro. A shot of cheap gin is easy to fake.....and for some reason, the bar-food program could still do deep fried calamari....tells you something about the quality of the calimari on Shear, doesn't it? The holographic bartender flickered sickly, running on half power....."Another, sir?" Estaban stared at the shot glass, and nodded for one more. Outside the meager bar windows, the stars pressed ever closer, as the atmosphere slowly bled away.....

I can remember grandmother....

I can remember grandmother telling us about when she first came to outer space. It was in the second half of the 21st century, when the medical-insurance industry perfected the pills that made you keep from dying. This gave the medical industry more customers, and the insurance industry never had to pay off on life insurance. Well, of course things started to get pretty crowded down dirt-side, so they started shooting the older folks up to big space stations in low earth orbit. When they fell down in the microgravity, they could just get up by themselves without calling for help with any med-alert necklace thing. The old geezers started forming basketball leagues, where they would do fantastic monster slam dunks all the time, since they could all leap above the rim. Of course some of them started to get really fat, since it didn't really make them gain much weight. But when the industry people cut the food rations way back, then the fat people got skinny pretty quick. Granny is still alive, she comes to visit us on Mars at Christmas, usually.

....the hissing noise was getting bothersome....

the hissing noise was getting bothersome....nothing should be hissing like that ....it sounded like air escaping? Which would be bad news when you are in a war-surplus spaceship orbiting barely outside the event horizon of a black hole....well, things looked pretty bad, even without the hissing noise....if only you could wake all the way up....but that seems to be hard to do.....they put you on too many drugs on these spaceships....the ship brain is next to useless, gravatic wave pulses from the black hole have scrambled it's cyber-synapses like two eggs and pork sausage on Sunday morning....breath in, breath out....that part is still working, for the moment.....

SteveDannaDevetS

 

Dream Journal # 5

As a boy he dreamed of robots. Not the shiny metal visions of Asimov's future but imperfect soft fleshy robots that said they were his family. In the dreams only he was human, the single warm blooded being in a house of cold automated companions. The Mom-bot was over weight, with bad hair that was gray at it's bottle black roots with a wheezing respiratory system. She perpetually clutched a soiled tissue in her left hand, when the boy took out the trash he examined the discarded wads of thin paper, they smelled of cheap machine oil. For breakfast the Dad-bot ate onions fried in axle grease with eggs and washed it all down with coffee prepared by boiling used grounds in vinegar.
The boys' two brothers, almost identical looking models although they rolled off the assembly line three years apart, with skin like waxed paper freckled with splatters of orange juice. Their bodies long thin, loosely jointed, moved as if dancing to some unheard music. With reedy, nasal voices that spoke from some place located in a southern bayou they would call the boy in from the yard for supper.
The family meals were shared in a semi-converted garage; a sheet of plywood on saw horses for the table. A mismatched set of cane back chairs scuffed the plain plank floor as they were seated. One end of the room was just open framework, the studs and electrical work protected from the outside with tacked up layers of plastic. The afternoon sun through the plastic and carpentry cast slippery shadows across the table as the family began to eat.
The Dad-bot filled his plate first. The meal was always the same: wild greens, mustard and shard picked from the local hillsides and boiled in the brackish water from the well. Fat back, greasy slabs of it, added to the greens as an after thought. Cold biscuits served dry… no butter or jam or even flavorless white margarine to spread on them. Tea in a surplus aluminum three-gallon pitcher, made from loose boiled leaves, sickly sweet with five heaping cups of sugar.
The boy was careful to chew slowly and try to eat his fill; this early supper was the last food he would see till morning. After the meal the boy cleared the table and stacked the chipped enamel plates by the sink for his brothers to wash.
Behind the house a back yard cut like an uneven wedge of pie led down to a mostly dry creek bed over grown with bamboo and cattails. Houses on either side of their lot stood empty, boarded up, yards a mess of rusting industrial rending equipment overgrown with sour grass and black ivy. It was in the silt and mud of the creek that the boy found the disintegrating skeleton of an infant-bot.
He carried it from the muck to the side yard where he hosed it clean and examined its tiny bones and circuitry. He rubbed dirt out of a marking on the infants' breastplate; the lettering was in a fine, feathery type. It read: Princess Ann version 3.6 rev C.
He gathered a pile of clean rags from the wash room floor, used the first batch to wipe and dry the remains and the rest to wrap it up like a doll. In the living room, seated cross-legged on the wood floor in front of the 16 inch black and white Television the Bro-bots are watching a baseball game. On a sagging sofa the Mom-bot is reading a second hand Women's Day magazine in the light of a 60-watt lamp. Her features look ashen in the poor light.
The Dad-bot sleeps on a cot at the edge of the illumination; his snore rattles about the room like a trapped pidgin. The sound drowns out the voice of the sportscaster as he talks about the home teams' pitcher. The boy shows the salvaged remains of the Ann-Bot to his mother. Chewing a piece of candy the Mom-bot inhales sharply at the sight, sucking the candy down her windpipe. She sits up, choking, motioning towards her throat with her hands.
The ever present clutched tissue flutters loose from her grip to the floor. Broken down oil, dirty from use, boils from her tear ducts. The eldest of the Bro-bots runs to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Bro-bot two pounds on the Mom-bots back. With a convulsive hack she chokes the candy up. It slips from her lips and falls to the floor with a trail of shiny red spit. Still unable to speak she takes the Ann-Bot from the boy and looks at it as she forces her breaths to steady. Saying nothing she gives the Ann-Bot to the younger Bro-bot, picks the candy up off the floor, rinses it off in the glass of water, puts it back in her mouth and resumes reading. The older Bro-bot scowls.
The sun sets, winds blow through the canyon, the Moon is obscured by clouds, there will be no stars tonight. As a boy he dreamed of robots.