A rhythm, a voice that came over me returned, and surprised, I typed for it, seeking nuance, shades in the darkness, descriptions of ancient dreams carved in stone, whispers of long forgotten poets standing in firelight, now transformed to electrons shimmering in the liquid crystal rain...
Henceforth and Heretofore the message spread out, a style, a mutation that resonated with a million partials and beat frequencies across the bandwidth. So be it. The meme is out of its cage. A story begins.

Tanbric stared at the modulating light searching for logic in its dance.
Far below on a woven platform in the dark perched the sandmiser all stigmatic and petulant in his hobbit pride.
A scan darrow,bird of photons, flew near him searching for food in his beard.
Nasty winds kept the place as bleak as a scowling hag, hills worn nobly by erosion and broken promises, the reason in the light seemed broken, the logic of the place somehow disinterested.

Understanding the fabrications and conflagrations of those sandstones and eucalypts, the historian walked mildly into the sunset, searching for footsteps and whisky, things he knew would lead him to Tanbric.

The woman was from earth and her uncanny style in the face of gruelling discomfort spoke well of her upbringing. Her campsite was a study in woven cloths from that planet, hanging on a line that she carried for this purpose. Of course these were garments, and it was largely cleaning rituals she was undertaking, but the tent, the kitchen, all were adorned with her textures and fabric..I was fascinated.

Tanbric had climbed the local prayer tower, talking to sadhus and quantum divers on the staircase, he had stopped to chew some beetlenut or qat he wasn't sure which. It was all bitter roots to him. When he got to the prayer wheel, all neon and self propulsion, he groked. The underlying oligarchy of that place became clear.

He jumped wildly from the tower, seeking the sandmiser, hungry for a his newly comprehended revenge. A struggle ensued, as they plunged to the sandstone below only to be saved by the historian, all airbags and advice, and taken to a hospice nearby for repair.

He'd receive convalescence from the woman all sex and fabric from plants far away, and together they headed out onto the landscape of broken promises to make a life.

Dude on the bus yesterday. Worn black leather jacket. Some kind of abrasion on his knees. Utili-kilt. Leather hiking boots. Dell D6xx series laptop. Big hands, thick knuckles. Unshaven.

He's biting the collar of his jacket. Biting it. On the bus. Over and over he does this. All the while surfing the web. Corner of leather collar in teeth, lips drawn back, looks like a pain grimace.

The little Asian lady that uses a handi-wipe on the vinyl seat cover. Every day.

The race-baiting talky black chick. Runs her scheme on all manner of inoffensive white boys. Had to fixate my gaze on my knee for about 15 minutes once when sitting across from her. Providing no excuse for initiating aggression. My favorite line thus far has been, "Will you PLEASE stop starring at my *breasts*!", it worked just fine.


The guy w. the endless notes in Japanese, overflowing the tattered and dogged-eared instructional text, scattered about him.

The inoffensive chubby bastard. The guy from my Tai Chi class. Dude all in red, dyed red hair, beard, red tea shades. The hat was not a very vivid color, not leather either, really weakened the ensemble I thought.

Friday night, home from the bar, raindrops bouncing off black asphalt,and electric streams of consciousness beckon from a streetlight. A form in a web page, all crusty and archival,( you can blow off the dust on this place!) but importantly boring so write on, because at least words are still worshipped here, in this edifice of data. this electric temple. And so the glyphs fly out, like facemasks at a jungle campfire, primitive dances across the page before you.A language of flashes in that light, where she dancing becomes of other beings,of other times, and you flash back or so you hope sending playing card emoticons through that beach air that reminds her of once,when you met and all was brite and young.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: greendreams,

Bits from a serial I've tentatively titled The Silence.


Grandchildren of the Atom

“A good friend once said we should be thankful for The Bomb,” said Red Jesus as he baptized the Geiger counter in the innocently trickling rivulet. The sparse ticking of the radiation sensor increased to a just barely noticeable sound cloud, the hand of the dial twitching past the “E”. Jesus frowned.

“Thankful? For what, giving us six-fingered piano players?” said Circuit Cid, shading eyes against rusty evening light. “Nuclear power plants? Like all the ones that fucking went Fat Man on us?” He crackled a laugh. “Oh, I get it. MAD, right? ‘Mutually Assured Destruction‘?” He laughed harder, and coughed up something the color of the sick sky.

Red Jesus cupped his hands in the stream, brought a pool of water to his mouth and drank. He retrieved a small glass phial, swiping a sample. He dabbed the tip to his index, making the sign of the cross.

“While one might cite all of those reasons, no. Do you remember the organization that was known as DARPA?” Red Jesus said.

“Oh, those robot guys, sure. What about ‘em?”

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known for their work on robots, yes. When the Soviet Union launched their first satellite, Sputnik I, in 1957, the US realized they had to regain their technological edge, and defend against a space-based nuclear attack. President Dwight D Eisenhower created the ARPA agency in response, later renamed DARPA. In order to assure continued functionality in the event a major city was nuked, new computer technology was developed that linked university mainframes together in the first ‘network‘.”

“Right, I remember, and that network was the beginning of ‘The Internet’. What’s your point?”

“Well, some would say that if it were not for the Cold War, which is to say, the advent of the atom bomb, we would not have been forced into that arms race, and thus would not have developed the internet, as we know it. It’s easy for us to forget that so many aspects of reality, so many technologies could just have easily not have been invented, not made ubiquitous. The electric car, for example, could have been in every driveway in America in the 70’s, but it wasn’t to be, thanks to the fossil fuel oligarchy aborting it each time it entered infancy.” Red Jesus swirled the quartz tube, particulate matter dancing like zygotes latent with potential yet extinguishable with the flick of a wrist. “Do you believe that’s true, that we should be thankful?”

“No A-Bomb, no internet? I don’t know, kinda sounds like something overeducated nerds in lab coats working ten stories down in Manhattan might say to make themselves feel better about creating Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

“Of course, we all must find ways to wash our hands of the ‘fallout’ of our actions. I personally believe we would have found some other vessel of self destruction. If fission were not available, we would have filled the Hiroshima bomb with anthrax. If thermo nuclear weapons were not the Cold War poker chip of choice, we would have stockpiled Sarin, or some other unknown unknown, some other pestilent chimera born of ‘The Best Minds’. Technology is inert, it is silent. It is but an amplifier of our decisions, of our strength, and our weakness.”

“Yeah. Well I guess it doesn’t matter now that the net’s gone, we’re all out of megaphones. Welcome to Web 4.0” Circuit Cid turned his head sideways and pulled his lips into the shape of a parentheses, in a meatspace mockery of a smiley emoticon.

“Aha, is it now?” a smile tugged at the corners of Red Jesus’ mouth, crows feet framed by long luminous hair flowing like threads of light caught in a gravitational well. It momentarily reminded Cid of this little painting of Jesus his mom used to have hung in the living room. Euro-Jesus with those Photoshopped, other-worldly blue eyes. Except these eyes were a weird pink.

Circuit Cid stood, skipped a stone across the softly burbling stream, a line of ripple circles spreading out like sonar pings. “So what’s the verdict, Red?”

“About five rad, I don’t recommend taking a bath in it.” Red Jesus shook his head, packed up the Geiger counter and the tube.

“Damn, shit. Mountain Dew: Code Red again.” Cid tossed the handful of flat, smooth stones he’d collected into the water shattering his reflection with a big splash. They’d gone for almost a week and not come across anything drinkable. Cid’s throat felt scratchy, like the start of Avian flu, and his spit was pasty and tasted like chalk. “What I wouldn’t give for a Dasani. Or hell, even some of that pool water that passes for Seattle tap.” As if they didn’t have enough to deal with the EMPs sending the world back to the Dark Ages, now it was nuclear hell too. Red Jesus and Circuit Cid hiked back up the river bank to the road.



Kaytie



At the top of the hill was a big guy in a black leather duster, millimeter of smoky buzz cut, broad shouldered like he might have trouble getting through a doorway. But then he looked like he might not be a doorway kinda guy, either.

“T, let’s go,” Cid called to The Terminator.

The closed face, East European trimmed with Asian overtones, nodded, “Affirmative.” He picked up a large Adidas bag that looked like you could haul a team’s worth of football or basketball equipment in it. Although from the way the bag rattled, it didn’t sound like a friendly game of two-hand-touch. Cid didn’t really feel like asking him what all he was carrying, and that was fine with Cid as long as The Terminator kept doing his job. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

The trio continued south down the highway. Evergreens, mountains and evergreens, like the Christmas tree Valhalla, where all valiant Christmas tree warriors go after braving axes, tinsel, and toddlers. The occasional eagle soaring overhead, chuckling at the silly humans who’d failed to keep their X chromosomal dick-waving genes on a leash and pissed everything away, washed out into the Neolithic. They hadn’t run into anyone for days, and for the most part that was a good thing, especially while on foot, since the Chevy had broken down a hundred miles back. There had been a small group of wanderers, wearily trekking towards last known locations of family members. But the encounter before that was a close call with the raw, ugly face of wasteland Darwinism that nearly left Cid with a bowie knife in the kidney, a scenario Cid really didn’t want to repeat. Which was why he didn’t at all like what he saw coming up ahead.

“Red, we’ve got a Hyondei Echelon a hundred yards up. One individual, a woman. Looks like she’s stalled.” Cid handed the binoculars over to Red Jesus. Normally, Cid would be creaming his jeans at the sight of an Echelon. The car was the apex of alternative-energy vehicles, just before things went to hell after The Big Silence. Funded by Google, Twitter, and a dozen other Silicon Valley magnates with half the tech-sector GDP of Korea and Japan brain-drained and funneled into a research complex the size of a US state capitol. The result was a near-indestructable luxury electric vehicle that did 0-60 in 2 seconds flat with extra light weight nanofiber body and supercapacitors allowing near-zero energy loss, which meant it could go seven hundred miles on a single charge. Cid had even heard of some Echelons going over a thousand in good conditions. But the fact that there was someone there on the road leaning on the hood of this chariot of the gods quickly curdled the excitement into anxiety.

“I don’t like this,” Cid said.

Red Jesus handed the binoculars back. “Looks like it’s just a stall. If you can help them out, we could get to the next town before sundown.” It was getting dark, the sun had already hunkered down behind the tree line trench, the only light was the dimming blood-red glow of air pollutant, and hopefully none of the pollutants were radioactive. They were caught between a car and a dark place.

“I still don’t like this,” mumbled Cid. They approached the vehicle cautiously. Cid’s hand sought the Beretta at his waist, thumbed off the safety.

The woman waved and called to them, “Hey! Like oh-em-gee! Wow, your guyses timing is full of awesome!” She sounded like a character from one of those overwritten white collar metro sit-coms before they all turned into net-streamed reality TV shite. Early 20’s at the latest, maybe herself an aspiring Reality Tube star running around with daddy’s bottomless credit card. The fake blonde with an inch of brunette was wearing cutoff jeans and a bright, low-cut halter top. Cid noticed a little too hard, mentally slapped his libido and forced himself to focus.

“Car trouble?” asked Red Jesus, gaze dipping toward the glossy hood that looked like it was stolen from the set of a Sci-Fi Channel mini series. Which it literally might have been. Just before the silence, there had been more than one Clancy-esque techno thriller featuring Echelons dodging bullets and babies in strollers, product placement nestling deep into the Bondian subconsciouses of 25-55 year old male marketing analysts with repressed senses of hubris. He’d be surprised if some grip paid a Benjamin a day to shuttle chai lattes hadn’t gone Grand Theft Auto with the merchandise when hell broke loose.

Blondie bit her lip, “Mhmm. Yeah, about half an hour ago. One of the red lights came on and I was like ‘wtf?’ then the hood started smoking like an LA morning so I pulled over. I waited a bit then tried starting it again, but it went craptastic on me. I would’ve just run Google Diagnostics and had my i-Repairman fix it, but you know… interwebz all dead and all. EMPs for the lose! Lol.” A too-high giggle bubbled out, tainted with hysteria. The nervous tic in her smiling cheek gave away her IDS, the “offline shakes”. It hit so many when the online world vanished, in varying degrees of severity.

It was a bit unusual to find a working vehicle after The Silence, since the EMP took out computerized cars, which most were, but this one might have been out of range or shielded. The vehicle was pulled over into the grass, tire marks where she’d probably freaked out and braked too fast. Circuit Cid looked at Red Jesus and half-rolled his eyes. Red gestured toward the car. The Terminator stoically scanned the area like a well-oiled leathery sentinel. “Just watch my ass,” Cid whispered to them.

“I’m Kaytie, with a ‘y’. In the middle. By the way. Although you won’t really need to worry about that since we won’t really be typing out tweets or anything anytime soon, lol.”

“Right, Kaytie. I’m Cid. Nice to meet you, let’s have a look.” Cid checked around, underneath the car, the back seat and the trunk, all clear. The doors were unlocked so he opened the drivers side, slowly. The back-to-the-future style door slid open like liquid metal. The keys were still in the ignition, so he gave it a try. Some lights flashed on, but no sound. The red light shaped like the platonic ideal of a computer chip stayed on. Cid pulled himself back out.

“Looks like you’ve got a dead energy regeneration chip. I might be able to do a bypass on it. It won’t operate at one hundred percent but at least you’ll be able to drive it.” Cid shrugged, popped the hood and shut the door.

Kaytie’s eyes perked up further, if that was possible. “You mean you can fix it? Will you marry me!?”Cid couldn’t hide a little grin of pleased-with-myself. That’s right, Circuit Cid, playa playa of the post-apoc playgirls. Red Jesus gave Cid a little tip of an imaginary hat as he came around to pop the hood. Nanowire Li-ion batteries all looked intact, deceptively powerful little electric motor, transmission all mint.

“Here we go.” Cid located the busted chip, whipped out his multi-tools and got to work.

***

Super Cid


Cid was one of those kids who had always liked to take things apart, to trace the inner lives
of objects. Clocks, radios, TVs, notebooks, PDAs, software, you name it, he’d probably disembowled it at least once. Unfortunately, Cid was a wrench in an education system wherein real creativity and intelligence that resulted in deviation from conveyor of the assembly line classroom, coloring outside the SAT bubble, was treated as a clinical defect. When he took apart another boy’s graphing calculator, stripped it down and reprogrammed it into a Funstation Portable that played Space Invaders: Attack of The Plus Signs, they suspended him, made him lie on a couch and tell a kiddie shrink what was keeping him from “focusing”. Kids at school mostly avoided him, he didn’t get to join in any reindeer games. After seeing Contact in the 6th grade, he hacked into NASA’s servers, used the Hubble telescope as his personal spyglass. When the scary men with wires in their ears asked him what he was doing, he told them he was looking for aliens like him to be friends with.

After escaping high school with his ulnar arteries mostly intact, he met a fellow techno outcast Mike, who helped get him a job at a hole-in-the-mall computer repair place. Through Mike, he started playing in an eclectic avante electro band, creating unearthly instruments from the remains of discarded electronics. Mike introduced him to like minds, a place to call home, the growing neon ocean of the internet. He was an ugly duckling who’d finally been reunited with the swans.

And the digital was quickly becoming the water in which everyone was swimming. First everyone was just checking their email, looking for bargains on 1972 Gibson Les Pauls. Then there were schools of Myspace fish eating up blackberries and iPhones. Geeky computer hackers became Hollywood action film co-stars, counterhacking terrorists, diving from explosions, learning kung fu with the click of a mouse, soaring through matrices in mirrorshades, oilskin trenchcoat flapping like the cape of a goth-superman. It seemed like geek was becoming the new cool, but at the same time, the definition of geek seemed to be shifting away from someone who knew the ins and outs of technology to someone who just had the latest shiny toys. And the toys were taking over every function of daily life. First there were just apps for finding a good Thai restaurant or movie times. But soon, answer engines got so good that people were getting everything from their healthcare to homework answers to investment advice from a handheld device. And once they figured out how to make cheap, efficient robotics, there were apps for taking out your trash, fixing your car, Cid had even heard of apps that literally wiped your ass for you.

Cid couldn’t and didn’t want to keep up with this techno-consumerism arms race / moneymaking scheme. His friends ribbed him about how lame his phone was for not having a retractable toothbrush, insulted his E-eyes for not having the tribal LED plumage of the moment, laughed away for having ringtones not rendered in virtual THX surround. And then Mike, who’d finally hooked an Apple worshipping girlfriend with his iEverything. It was like his childhood hell inverted: the swans had turned into vultures. For the most part he didn’t let it bother him but there was one stint in his life Cid referred later to as “The Dark Times” when he retreated into his basement of tweaked remote controls and modded calculators. There in his cave he gave birth to an elitist image of self, cultivated it with a contempt for the mainstream and all it’s posery, reptilian, 140 character attention span shallowness. Cid learned a lot of internet intelligentsia-chic Latin and French words, aped critic-speak, became that bane of the interweb: Trollus Irritatus. He began trolling internet message boards, starting flame wars, became a slave of his own addiction to the hot endorphinal rush of anonymous self-righteous indignation. And then he realized he was just getting himself down being a pretentious hypocrite and cut that shit out.

***

But in this new, unwired world, Cid was an invaluable archangel of technology, a bringer of bytes to the byteless. Circuit Cid, the electrical tape wielding superhero in that great cosmic comic book whose chapters were separated by days of trekking a half-dead landscape, pages counted in half lives of uranium 235.

“Hey guys, I’m going to need a hand over here.” Cid was reaching down beneath the motor trying to patch a wire through, unscrewing bolts here and there to make room. Red Jesus and The Terminator walked over and stood on either side, awaiting orders.

“Ok, Red, just hold this battery up against here like this, and T, I need you to lift this engine up when I say so, ok?” Almost there, all he needed to do was just set this wire and the chip would be good to… Something was wrong. Red spinning lights and alarm sounds went off in Cid’s head. His subconscious was screaming at him something but the sound was muffled by that membrane between the lower and higher brain, like someone yelling through a closed window that the building is on fire.

“Alright, one, two, three, lift!” The chasis lifted an inch as the Terminator hefted the motor and Cid got the wire hooked up to the chip. Something Kaytie had said… smoking…

“Ok, I think that should do it.” She had said the hood was smoking up a storm. But there wouldn’t have been any smoke involved with the dead chip. Oh shit…

Click.

Click, clack, clickety-clack click.

Cid felt a ring of cold aluminum alloy nudge the base of his skull.

“Sorry Cid, thanks for fixing the car. We’ll be taking your things now. I hope this doesn’t come between us. We could totally be BFFs.” Kaytie giggled, but it wasn’t so hysterical this time.

quote:

Originally posted by TwiliteMinotaur:
Click.

Click, clack, clickety-clack click.

Cid felt a ring of cold aluminum alloy nudge the base of his skull.

really liking this. keep it coming!

Punked

“Goddamnit Cid you epic schmuck,” Cid mentally punched himself. His superhero playa fantasy deflated like an inflatable Macy’s parade figure. How could he let down his guard like that? He was bent over, literally bent over the engine of a Hyondei Echelon, waiting to be taken. It was like the plot of some deranged, environmentally friendly porno.

“Hands up, turn around, slowly, kthx.” A male voice. They turned. To face two men and two women, including Kaytie, holding three semi automatic handguns and a twelve gauge in their faces. The highway robbers were all about the same age as Kaytie and all looked like they were spawned, fully formed, from the same blue blooded hipster ectoplasm. Tailored turtlenecks, designer jeans, band t-shirt of “The Venusian Invaders”, an emo-metal group that probably no longer existed. Holes and rips here and there, dirt marks, many of which not very recent-looking. Post-Apoc had been quite the rage in fashion circles Cid entertained for a moment the idea that this sullying of runway perfection might have been achieved by underpaid street urchins rolling in gutters and getting into bar fights to achieve that precise Mad Max aura of wear and tear. But then Cid suspected that Milan had been wiped out like every other metropolis. The punk who spoke was scruffed, with a fake tan to complete the wasteland wanderer ensemble. Cid could tell it was fake from the too-homogenous apricot glow, but the unnatural orange was slowly burning, flaking away into real sun kissed brown. The real end of the world violating the Platonic media simulacra. Cid felt a bizarre pang of sympathy.

“Check them. Don’t get smart, FYI, I hate to hurt n00b badasses who try to grow balls.” Cid wondered if this guy was a smartass or a dumbass with the C-list hardboiled act. His hand was shaking, although that could have just been the IDS, not actual nervousness. Either way, the guy seemed about as stable as WIFI in a salt mine, and was silently praying his index wouldn’t twitch a joule too hard. The other guy in a Neru blazer came around, patted them up, took their weapons, searched backpacks.

“Wait,” Red Jesus said. Rattling, cocking of guns as they trained on Red’s forehead. A millimeter of roseate white above each iris, he raised his hands higher. “Please, you can take the food, the tools, the device. But please, leave us the medicine, I beg you,” said Red Jesus. Tan Kid’s brow wrinkled, he eyed Red Jesus as if he had just received a really great deal for a Ralph Lauren suit and was wondering if the Armani was worth the premium.

“We’ll take the antibiotics, if you have any, you can keep the rest. You can keep that clanky 20th-cen dumbware too.” Fake Tan waved his Desert Eagle dismissively at the Geiger counter. The guy in the turtleneck took the rest of Red Jesus’ luggage.

Turtleneck started shaking a bit more as he came to The Terminator. The Terminator put the bag down calmly, that steel-within-steel gaze never leaving the kid. He was the largest of the bunch, might have been an extreme sport junkie at one time from his build, but he was having trouble keeping his cool as he reached for the Adidas bag, blanketed by The Terminators shadow. He unzipped it, rattled around inside, came up with a quizzical look.

“WTF is this? Um… It’s just a bunch of kids’ toys.” Turtleneck lifted the bag to show the others. It looked like a portable toy chest, a crowded jangly mass of Transformers, Lego, Playdough, assorted others. Turtleneck eyed The Terminator like a suspect.

“What’s with the kiddie toys, army guy?” silence reigned several seconds.

“I’m in the Salvation Army,” said The Terminator, expression and tone never shifting a micrometer.

“Leave it. Let’s just GTFO, Brad,” Tan Kid called to Turtleneck.

The well-dressed highway raiders tossed the loot in the trunk of the Echelon, all the time keeping wobbling guns pointed approximately at the three. Kaytie lingered a moment, one handle on the latch of the Echelon’s passenger door, the other aimed at Cid, and something about her ridiculous pout was almost apologetic.

“WTF, let’s go!” Tan Kid came up behind her, grabbed her butt and kissed her. Cid felt like his stomach was going to cave in, the last gust of air stomped out of his blow-up action figurine. They got in the car and fired it up, electric motor whining like a very quiet 747 engine. Dirt and smoke plumed as they burned out of the ditch, creating a nearly-symmetrical set of tire marks to match those leading into the stall spot. As the Echelon hauled off towards the twilit horizon, they could hear the boys howling, and Cid recognized a screamed Vin Diesel quote from Fast and the Furious VII.

“This sucks.” Cid sighed. There they were, no food, no weapons, miles from the next human settlement. If he’d just been a little less sappy. When the Echelon approached the size of a Kleenex box down the road, The Terminator raised his right arm to shoulder height, aiming at the car. There was a faint electric hum and a series of metallic clicks.

“No!” Red Jesus dove for The Terminator’s arm, pulling it down. “Let them go. They are only doing what they must.”

2050



So I fly in my mind to 2050 and I look down on the world I see there. This isn't just any 2050. This is the one that for 40 years was steered to by mankind.Starting in Copenhagen, but committed to in mexico, this is the pathway to tomorrow built by man…walked by humanity.A pathway handed down by our forefathers from long ago..

Really it looks a lot like 2009.
I mean there are 10 billion people so its more crowded but one of the design criteria used was 'change things as little as possible'.

Which is not to say it was easy to arrive at. The sheer volume of tiny invisible changes is staggering.

This is a 2050 where most uses of carbon are deprecated. Perhaps a campfire by the lake when you go camping, a candle when the lights go out, a guilty cigarette, but the planet is at 430 ppm and the number is dropping by 2 a year. You wouldn't burn carbon to go anywhere (well sometimes biodiesel,but that was grown) or heat your house. Its a post carbon day, which is faster than planned for 2050...

How is carbon dropping by 2 a year when in 2009 it is going up by almost 3 a year? Well this is a much greener world, in its plant coverage it has changed a lot. There are very few scrublands or desserts, the sahel in africa is largely irrigated.. other than parks and reserved ecological sanctuaries 2050 has changed the landscape a lot. The sahara for example is covered in solar arrays of sterling engine thermal dishes, with a lot of sea water desalination going on to water the forests...

there is a new smart grid, and every body seems to have a piece of the energy biz, selling power from their house, their car,the cottage.

Really having a cottage that earns money in alternative energy isn't so odd. There are management companies that maintain equipment, it's all taken care of. You just get a check in the mail each month....


Very early, like 2012, after carbon was monetized,
it became a valuable business proposition to buy up dry wasteland by oceans all over the world and irrigate it with desalinated sea water. Mostly drip irrigated forests…There were incentives to USE seawater lowering the oceans, there were incentives to take a piece of land that is neutral in carbon uptake and times that by 20 creating a rain forest. Getting paid by the carbon fixed...
After years of being artificially irrigated the trees form a canopy and trap water themselves.


Actually getting water for dry lands was something that the world had a renaissance in. Done so well that most small systems became irrelevant. Desalination arrays that were really huge were created. A channel of seawater as big as a river is heated by sunlight, then enters a long condensation chamber that climb a hillside . At the top the pure water is trapped and then flows into a huge tank that flows downhill onto a drip irrigated forest.


So how is the carbon sucked out of the air each year doubled?
Largely by water dripped onto perennials, and permaculture water saving techniques were applied getting the most foliage for the least water.



But by the rules of transpiration, all this greenery created canopies and rainfall so the irrigation was just a backup in unstable times…re-engineering the plants re-engineered the rain.


So you've got a world that is fixing tons of carbon in plants.. A world that has reinvented and improved irrigation… Small cars run on elec., trucks on biodiesel. Lots of dirt batteries underground…

Dirt batteries were huge in the underground. If you had special glasses that showed the buried underground world you'd see arrays of these huge thermal mass systems that could be warmed during the summer months to provide enough heat for a house all winter.


the fact that so much of the change is hidden was because people rapidly grew tired of a busier world with solar panels everywhere and windmills…Too busy, too ugly.
instead they opted for photovoltaic roof tiles that looked like normal roof tiles, roads that were photovoltaic, walls. all covered with a clear saran wrap like photovoltaic.
Geothermal plants for electrical generation that were almost completely buried… high altitude windmills that flew out of sight in the jetstream and offshore windmills unseen from the shoreline…

Uglier things were built in the 10's and 20's but mostly rebuilt in the 30's and 40s as techniques improved.


So rather that a world that is festooned with alternative energy devices…they built a world of hidden treasures.

You have to understand that people loved doing this work because they were competent. The entire project was computer designed and pre visualized by all. This made random acts make sense. It was a goldrush and they were making big cash too. that helped.


So there is a party. I mean there was a plan adopted called the 'party steps' so in 2020,2030 and 2040 there are big parties to celebrate progress…then in 2050 is the biggest party, not at a predefined date, but when all goals are met. The 2040 party and 2050 parties are both contingent on meeting goals. The 2040 party doesn't happen till 2043. but the 2050 party happens in the fall of that same year.

and its at that party our story begins.
**********************************************************

Guffaws greet his spoon...
smile too wide to stuff food in
Wee baby has fun!

The beast shifts in the darkness, curling and coiling, she only catches glimpses from the corner of her eye, flashes of red scales as it hides in the night, the great beast stalking her, getting ever closer, her heart races, her stomach clenches and she feels alive with horror. Then she wakes. She screams. Pulls the covers up to her chin. She looks frantically around the room. Where is she? What is going on? It takes a moment to sink in. She is in her room, but he has redecorated again. Everything in the room is horrifically pink, offensively girly, so not her thing. Frills everywhere. And she looks at him, crouched on the chair, like some kind of gothic gargoyle, poised, watching her intently. He thrives on this, waits to spring these traps on her. The dragon boy - she thinks of his as some kind of cross between Hellboy and Nemesis the Warlock, dressed in pin stripe suit. He is grinning, that evil reptilian, monstrous face, at least she thinks it is a grin. He straightens and steps from the chair on to the floor of her bedroom in one seamless, graceful motion, nods that red head at her, waves with hand, and leaves the room. Lolita girl shudders, that summoning was definitely not one of her smartest moves, and he took every opportunity it seemed to show her his resentment. She hears the sound of the kettle, and knows that he is out there, creeping round the kitchen like he owns the place, making damn breakfast.

In this case, perhaps literally damned breakfast?

probably devilled eggs...

he is standing in the back yard, his hands in his pockets, watching the slowly falling flashes of snow. he sticks his tongue out, watching them tumble in wandering motions, landing there sudden splash of cold as it melts quickly. he takes some kind of simple pleasure in this, feels like life is hassle free and easy. closing his eyes, he sighs contented, opens them again, as he hears the back gate clattering closed. the monster girl stalks up the path, leaving boot prints in the thin layer of snow behind her. he tips his head sideways and looks at her curiously – the thin layer white shift, poncho like over her shoulders, cling to her body, skinny and pale, arms and legs sticking out. human limbs compared to the head, which is lizard like, with a coloured plume of feathers. the monster's mouth is open in a rictus grin, showing rows of sharp little teeth. he blinks at her, standing there fists clenched, shaking from the cold or some kind of fury, while he stands and looks at her. she shoves her hand into her mouth, taking a firm grip and tugging, the whole assembly, mask and shift, come off as one unit. she holds it there, trailing in the deepening snow, before she drops it. now she is standing there, naked but for stockings which come up to mid-thigh, pale white, with a lacy band. contrasting the clumpy black boots, which she stamps on the ground. he suddenly becomes animated – pointing at her head, then his head, miming to indicate that she has had her hair cut. lolita scowls at him, shoving passed him as she storms into the house. the door clattering shut in her wake. dragon boy shrugs, turns back to look at the sky, to catch snow flakes on his tongue.

she is sitting nearly naked in the big black leather arm chair that sits in the living room. her hands clutching the arms of the chair, her shoulders slumped, her face combining a mixture of emotions from despairing fury to melancholic resolution. he peaks through the hatch at her, studying her, she ignores him with a grim determination. he shrugs, turns back to the kitchen, glancing outside – it is still snowing – snow makes him happy, they don't have snow where he comes from. he pulls open a drawer, rifling through its contents till he finds a small box, which he brandishes triumphantly. he places the box on the table, then looks back toward the living room to make sure she hasn't moved. nodding to himself he gets the cake out of the cupboard where he had hidden it so that she didn't see it when she got back. he inspects the icing, the writing in a sky blue against the white background “happy 30th birthday lolita”. he takes the box and removes the birthday candles, places them strategically on the cake before lighting them. pleased with himself he lifts the cake, balancing it on one hand as he pushes through into the room, swinging his free hand around in a ta-da fashion. the cushion goes flying by his head, missing the cake thanks to his quick reflexes, but the passage of air blows the candles out. dragon boy gestures to indicate what she has done, she leans forward in a humphing fashion, all the better to demonstrate the quality and depth of her pout. he gives a quick puff and relights the candles, then gives her a look that says now lets do this again properly. she stands, her body language saying that she is doing this with the utmost reluctance. leans forward gives a quick blow to extinguish the candles in the proper fashion, before throwing herself back into the armchair. dragon boy nods, contented enough, then takes a knife from the pocket of the comedy apron he is wearing over his best suit (the one that makes it look like he has an enormous set of breasts). he cuts two careful slices from the cake, plopping each of them on to the plates that he had stashed in the apron pockets as well.

Replicating Putnam


There was a crossroads in my life. I read Putnam and found that in 1936 he had blocked the veins of dogs. Occlusions. guess what? They got MS! or encephalomyelitis which is pretty much MS…

so why didn't science pay any attention? Dunno. They fixated on the notion that MS is a neurological disease, and handed it over to neurologists. Putnam did work with blood thinners but it was the wrong path... When animal studies were conducted it was using EAE as the 'animal model' for MS. This was encephalomyelitis caused by injecting an animal with part of the nervous system tissue from another animal. A kind of allergic reaction that all the medicines were based on.

So there I was and I could see how it would go… Chronic diseases were a major cash cow for pharmaceuticals, nears were still in charge, fast change was impossible. In this case, bad replication was very possible. Average imaging didn't show ccsvi, so if one wanted to prove it untrue they could just take standard pictures.

This was the crossroads. I kissed my wife and kids so long and I flew to Angola.

what was in Angola?? That was where Jonas Purn had his cattle ranch. It was a country without rules on animal studies…I had met Jonas on the web, he had MS(grew up in Scotland where there's low vitamin d) and wanted to know. We found a local vet and we clamped the jugular vein on 10 cows. Every month we slaughtered a cow, and the vet did an autopsy.

It took till month 9 but those last 2 cows got MS. I flew home and published the results on the web. Only patients cared that this was the mechanism! .Scientists cant hear unless it comes from the right sources. Still, the stanford animal study was due in a few months, and even docs would read that…

So I was settling in at home confident in my knowledge that Putnam would be replicated, when the stanford study comes out. Because they used mice, that have a short life span, they didn't see the lesions appear. Science would go back to sleep. Just like 1936.

So there I am back in Angola again. This time we do surgery on 20 cows blocking their veins. We don't start killing (and eating) them until month 8 then we see 1 a month for a year. By the end of month 24 these cows are spastic with balance issues…For sure this is it.

I mean its not like Patients aren't getting fixed. Every day someone flies off to somewhere and gets some stents put in, some angioplasty, but a lot of people aren't fixed. A lot of doctors still voice the old line. If you look up MS today you will still see 'an autoimmune disease, neurological in origin.
Neither of those is true.

I proved it. I replicated Putnam.

That haiku rocks the baby socks, Anabel!

Liking the stuff from greendreams and Remote too

Harvesters

Robbed of almost all earthly possessions, vulnerable as broken-ankled deer, they decided it was best to veer off the highway, take the path less traveled, preferably non-traveled. They trekked through the woods, keeping a line of sight with the road. They made camp a quarter mile out, far enough that the glow of the campfire would not attract unwanted attention, like flies to a lightbulb, to their vulnerable and unconscious bodies in the night.

Cid whipped out his WiFi hotspot power harvester, a matte white rectangle of plastic the size and shape of a sink sponge. Able to recharge your i-Eyes or G-Pal handheld device by transmuting WiFi signal into energy, it meant you never had to see the un-augmented world again, never missed a clever nano-blurb about a coworker’s breakfast, never had to find your way through a new city by the seat of your pants, never met a looker at a party without already knowing their job and favorite food through auto-face recognition, never had to remember any information about anyone or any thing ever again. Everything you needed about anything you were doing was instantly drawn up from the all seeing eye of The Cloud, inserted contextually yet unobtrusively into your visual field in a cyan text overlay. This meant the harvester was clipped to the belt of virtually everyone with disposable income above the poverty line or without moral hang-ups with regards to misdemeanor theft. Built to feed on the once all-permeating, brain cancer-inducing cyber-ether, the WiFi harvester was a flourishing species of polymer and silicon based life form. It was a thunder lizard of the digital, suddenly wiped out by the e-Cataclysm that was The Great Silence, leaving only these inert plastic fossils as evidence of the mass extinction.

But as always, with great power comes great irresponsibility.

The first Black Friday when the Apex Cyber Leech WiFi harvester, the top of the A-list of hip gadgets that year, made its debut, the United States made almost its entire GDP in cheap Chinese plastic. Cid remembered checking his news feed that morning to find dozens of people were trampled to death in stampedes through Wal-Mart aisles to claw tooth-and-nail for one of the holy objects, talismans into the looking-glass world of Augmented Reality. After the Futura E-Eyes AR goggles, the Cyber Leech was the most mass produced gizmo of all time.

And, like melamine-poisoned baby formula and cadmium-tainted children’s jewelry, the Chinese manufacturers cut every corner off the E-Eyes short of paying pollution-blinded children the price of a cup of coffee a day to hack it together out of cyanide laced construction paper, turning the Yellow River literally yellow with toxic byproduct. Before the first recall a week after release, several million children and adults suffered nausea, vomiting, blindness, paralysis, and even a few deaths. The culprit was contact with the toxic plastic casings coated with tritocyclidine, a neurotoxin used in the fabrication of the cheaper batteries that would’ve cost another fistful of yen per unit to decontaminate. The effects wore off if use was immediately discontinued, but many users of the E-Eyes found themselves unable, in some cases physically unable, to stop once they discovered the joys of eternal connectivity in augmented reality. Withdrawal symptoms ranged from mild to clinical depression, to bodily dysphoria to actual physical pain.

One of Cid’s co-workers had himself passed into a coma after a 28-hour session of “True War”, an augmented reality Iraq War sim that overlaid a bombed-out cobblestone and mud brick Baghdad onto your neighborhood buildings. In his dreams Cid could still see the kid sprawled on the sidewalk behind a line of officers and parametics, spasming and jerking epileptic, as if he’d eaten several poorly filleted fugu, unseeing dilated pupils zipping back and forth like mad flies caught in glass bowls, some terribly malicious form of REM from which there was no waking.

Many reported thoughts of suicide after the E-Eyes were removed forcefully whilst patients were IV’d in hospital beds and “Augmented Reality Rehab” clinics sprouting up like fast food franchises. The makeshift clinics were often staffed by unqualified personnel looking to milk the “Augmented Reality Addiction” mass hysteria, reassuring paranoid parents that their children’s “cyber demons” would be cleansed in their whitewashed halls, and back on the Ivy League track. The “wirehead nuthouses”, as they became perjoratively known, then essentially resorted to terrorizing the kids into quitting cold turkey or else, turning to sleep deprivation, beatings, waterboarding and worse. Torture campaigns that would’ve made even the most hawkish Bush Administration official cringe. The clinics were horribly ineffective, and after a scandal wherein a counselor drowned an eight year old due to amateur waterboarding technique involving a firehose and saran wrap, most of them were shut down.

The Cyber Leech never had quite as deadly side effects, although it did have the peculiar property, due to its chemical make up, of being highly flammable, and prone to spontaneously immolate, which hospitalized many an unwary user with third-degree hip burns.

Cid had collected as many husks of these Cyber Leeches as he could after The Great Silence, and they were thankfully never in short supply due to their pre-Apocalypse popularity. The raider kids left the inert objects, ignorant of the Cyber Leech’s multifaceted uses without their precious Internetz to tell them. Ignorant of everything. But people like Cid, they found uses for things.

He held the device like a flint rock in one hand, taking the USB jack between forefinger and thumb in the other, raising the chrome plug to the base of the Cyber Leech’s metallic abdomen. If you did it right, you could reuse the same Leech dozens of times, but if you messed up you could wind up with no eyebrows and BBQ chicken finger fingers. Striking quickly, down and towards the whittled sticks and pine needles, a bright flame like oxidizing magnesium flared, singing the ends of the needles, a cluster of red embers, dying soon after. Three more strikes and several huffs and puffs later and the camp fire was up and cackling. The rediscovery of fire in the noxious rubble of endgame laissez faire Reagonomics, Cid awaited the epic timpani of a Kubrick soundtrack to herald the miniaturized 2001 Space Odyssey Monolith. Cid smiled, packed the defective, black-streaked gadget back into his too-light knapsack, giving it a loving pat. “Leave it to the Chinese,” he murmured before drifting off in the fire’s warm embrace.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

quote:

Originally posted by greendreams:
Replicating Putnam

Rogue science fiction - I like it!

its that time of year again....



he has the dreamiest eyes, the way he walks along the street, as though lost in the most wondourous of thoughts. so she stops him, and takes a moment to catch her breath, he is so pale, has the most incredible cheek bones, a stunning figure of a man. so much like the heroes of the books that she has been reading, like the actors in the films she has been watching. he wobbles to a halt, and it takes a second for him to focus on her, she gushes “you look so dreamy! so handsome! i think i love you!”
“hungry” he grunts.
“we can go eat something if you want?”
“blood, must feed on blood, hungry.”
her heart beat accelerates, his nostrils flare aware of her emotional surge.
“you really are a vampire, aren't you! thats awesome! you could turn me!” she flutters her hand in front of her face, “we could be eternal lovers, bound together for eternity by blood!”
“must feed”
she looks around, there is an alley ahead, she grabs a hand, and pulls him, “i'll let you have a little now, to show you how much i love you! then you can take me to your well appointed appartments (i've read about your kind, you aare all rich and lead incredible lives!)”
once they are off the street, she bares her throat for him, and he is on her in seconds, his teeth sinking in, there must be some kind of chemical process involved because this feels incredible, as her heart races she can feel the blood pumping round her body, into his mouth. he is rough with her, his hands on her shoulders, turning her to an angle which optimises his accesss. “just a little” she whimpers, “my love” before she blacks out. he feeds on her, blood spattering his clothes. when she stops pumping, he lets her body slump to the ground, a little seepage remaining as she bleeds and dies, dies bleeding.
he staggers into the street. a woman steps into his path “oh god look at you, you poor dear, covered in blood, where are you hurt?”
“cold” he whispers, a void of emptiness in his tone, “so cold, so hungry!”
her pulse accelerates as she takes his hand, “don't worry, let me help you!”
she guides him along, her voice lost in breathy whisper, “let me help you, my love!”

he had always said he would leave her something when he died, to show how much he loved her. the fact that she had pushed him down the stairs whereupon he had broken his neck, she felt shouldn't prevent her from receiving her rewards as promised. and she had gotten away with it, it was listed as accidental death, well he had been drinking, and how could anyone suspect a woman of her standing of murder? so, when the giant vase full of flowers arrived at her door that valentine's day, only days after his death, with his name printed on it, full of roses, she wasn't entirely surprised, though she was a little disappointed. she was hoping this was something he has put in motion before the recent incident, rather than the product of his last will and testament, because if this was the best he could do then she was not impressed. sure, it was a large vase, but it wasn't even particularly pretty – perhaps it was worth something? an antique? it was so large she couldn't move it herself, she had had to allow the delivery men to carry it into her house. she had sniffed at the roses, her face wrinkling in dismay – they were obviously one of those new fangled hyrbid flowers, because they smelt awful, she glanced at the card again, paying it more attention. this time she observed that the flowers were named after her, she had sneered, what a pathetic gesture, how typically lame of him. she didn't want flowers, she wanted something more practical from life, like say a diamond or three. whatever, she had a date to get ready for, another one of her older gentlemen, who thought it was his lucky day to have a date with her on valentine's, though, she knew full well he was going home alone. hours later, she had returned home, glanced into the living room and wrinkled her nose – the smell was worse. but she was too tired, had perhaps drunk a little too much, so she didn't switch the lights on, heading straight up to bed, so she missed the flowers scattered across the floor. she missed the trail of petals up the stairs, leading determinedly to her bedroom. for a moment she is surprised to see the light from under the door, but its not the first time that she has gone out and forgotten to switch a light off. so she shrugs and pushes through the door and gasps with fright, with horror. there is in, sitting in bed, waiting for her, his neck at that same angle which she just knew meant he was dead when he'd gone tumbling down the stairs she has just climbed up. he seems to be looking at her, his eyes seemingly intense. she shudders, well this explains the smell, someone's idea of a sick joke. then he rattles and wheezes, taking in a breath – darling, i have been waiting...

Lyrics for a quick, simple song, "Marie," which I'll try to put to music tomorrow.

I’m never coming back, Marie
You really shouldn’t wait for me
I said a prayer in desperation
God sent me to the Greyhound station
Check the papers for a note from me
I tried to write it out so you could read
But I found it wasn’t making sense
I'll work it out when I can think again

I think of you in a Spanish dress, a black shawl and you’re wrapped up tight
I didn’t mean to leave a mess, but I’m not coming home tonight

The devil’s coming and I need to be
Somewhere far away from you, Marie
I said a prayer in desperation
God sent me to a new location
If I’m laughing it’s the surest sign
That I’m speaking with the clearest mind
You think I’m crazy, no but that’s not it
I guarantee that I’m with God on this

I think of you in a Spanish dress, a black shawl and you’re wrapped up tight
I didn’t mean to leave a mess, but I’m not coming home tonight

I’m never coming back, Marie
You really shouldn’t wait for me
I said a prayer in desperation
God sent me to the Greyhound station
Check the papers for a note from me
I tried to write it out so you could read
But I found it wasn’t making sense
I'll work it out when I can think again