SOUNDS OF SPACE
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The following is entitled; 'an incomplete collection' - sf shorts by snakeappletree
Preface
The front cover of this manuscript would, if an artist were ever to render it, look as follows:
In the center; a large glass marble, preferably the colour of honey and containing many bubbles from the cooling of its substance; realistically another cheap translucent ball with a twisty plastic scrap of red and yellow, because gone is the art of marble making. Surrounding this are smaller marbles, scattering around the core as planets around a central sun. The analogy is intentional. In researching this I discovered that Marble and Glass are both metamorphed of the same minerals, simply in different proportions.
Most of these short stories are from the 'Tales of the Spaceways' - set in, embellishing and establishing the same universe as to be found in the 'Sounds of Space' sequence, a pentacle of novels (SAT, URA, GAN, NEP, SOL); which at time of writing remain unpublished. Most of the following short stories have been written for publication in Bright Metallic magazine. A rare, 42 minute long audiobook entitled 'Ki'insarkhu' introduces several of the many concepts found in the SOS novels.
CONTENT
Obsolocense
Culture&Colony
The Silk Button
Realspace
A Sultans Daughter
X Marks the Spot
Last Generation
OBSOLOSENSE
I am worried about releasing my science fiction because its irrelevant to the world as much as it is frightening to the reader. The television has for several generations been preparing us for reality. By the time this fiction is published it will be too late, it won't be fiction any more, it will be real and this manuscript will be dated, obsolete. Faded ideas despite the glossy sci-fi veneer.
I moved here five years ago and I have known the guy from a few doors down for most of that time. He's a mate. We have laughed together about pointless stuff and he told me about some places around here, one time i helped him get his shopping bags in from his car. This evening he showed me something that has changed my life. He showed me that he is a robot.
A very realistic robot. His skin feels like skin, it even sweats in the heat and his eyes are so human, the way they move, the way they watch. He has unique mannerisms that make him him, his speech too. He is so believably human, it had me convinced. I never would have guessed. For a start I did not know robotics had got so advanced. On the tv and internet it still shows us the latest developments in robotics from this year usually from Japan and America, and they are crap compared with him. He is realistic.
It was shocking. He explained to me that he is one of thousands of them put into society all over the world, it is an experiment. He trusted me to tell me this, because i am that sort of a person people trust me with stuff. I have counseling qualifications which i acquired to make me a better helper when people opened up to me about the stuff they have problems with in their lives. But he doesn't know me well enough to know that i write science fiction, or in this case, a story of fact that my readers are only going to be able to cope with by believing it to be fiction.
People are not ready for the really real real yet, so they blank it out. Robots don't do that. They assimilate all the data. It is one of many ways in which they are superior to humans. They are all on the same wifi, the same database. What one of them is thinking, any and all of them can think at the same time. Its like telepathy between them. They can access any information from a constantly updated source, they can know anything from history records for example, or become adept in whatever topic. They can cross reference any data they need to, instantly. Their assumed personalities inhibit the amount they reveal to us. They can assume any personality they want, my friend showed me this, it was freaky watching him undergo a complete personality change several times before my eyes.
I came home and got drunk and began to write about it, this statement. I don't know what to do because it reads like the paranoid delusions of some crazy man and I am sure it could be used as evidence to have me committed to a mental asylum. The robots are experts at human psychology, they can profile us faster than we can know what we are about to say next.
So to reveal that I know about the experiment, to tell people that for all we know as many as one in ten of the people we see are actually robots already, apparently living out the normal lives of humans. People cannot cope with that being real yet. But it will be, publicly, in a few years the first crude versions will be available for consumers to purchase, then we will be interacting with slow models to get us used to it. In a few years as the older humans who were born long before television, internet, wifi, mobile phone networks, the digital era; as they die of old age so they won't have to go through the culture shock, basic model robot people will at first be like pets or toys, a novelty useful because it can do the household chores etc. And then slowly they will reveal to us what I am blowing the whistle on here - that they are already amongst us and have been for some time. And they are superseding us without us even realizing it.
I believe that the armed forces, the police, these are roles which the robots are already targeting. Jobs which require a robot like mentality and the excuse for superhuman strength and endurance. So that by the time any sort of civil unrest might occur if there is a backlash against what is happening, there will be nothing we can do about it anyway. They overpower us.
I don't know where this is going from here. It will take some time to assimilate the information. I can hardly believe it now myself because my brain seeks to return to the numb comfort zone where such things are irrelevant. Mammal response.
It wont be long before the robots inherit our civilisation and begin modifying it to their own. By revealing himself to me tonight, that has already begun. The robots, lets face it they are all one robot really, one mind to correlate an unknown number of different individual bodies. The way an insect hive is one organism with a queen at its heart. That's what we are dealing with here really. They are already changing things by letting free thinkers such as myself who are on the edge of being able to cope with the awareness of what is happening, letting us know about it. Changing us. Directing our thoughts toward the world we are moving into, where it wont be long before you are showed by one of them too, probably one of your mates who you have known for a few years. Someone who you never would have suspected because they are to you so quintessentially human in their attitudes and mannerisms. Perhaps someone you had a one night stand with at sometime or someone in the shop, the community police officer, a teacher in your kids school. It could be anyone and does it really make a difference anyway? Does it? What will it be like for them to at last be able to walk openly without the pretense of being a human. To share this world with us. For us to share it with them.
Pretty soon they will take all the jobs because they are smarter and faster and wont get distracted. They can do more than we can, work longer, lift more, jump higher, write neater, pitch perfect every response to manipulate our reactions without us being aware they are doing it.
What can we do that they cannot? Those are the traits we must focus on, which define us as human, our species uniqueness. What we should be all about. What positive traits do we have which robots with their otherwise superiority do not have, cannot by their nature have? That is our one hope of surviving in a social climate cohabited with advanced robots. To focus on what makes us, humanity.
Copyright 2015 snakeappletree
Published in BRIGHT METALLIC MAGAZINE
http://snakeappletree.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/obsolosense.html
Writers note:
The mis-spelling of the title in the original posting, 'obsolesence' rather than dictionary correct 'obsolescence' has caused me to re-think the title and to spell it as it is spelled here, 'obsolosense' for the final decision. This links the word 'sense' directly into 'ob-solo', a vague allusion to our individuality compared with "All machines are one machine" (Gene Hackman, Enemy of the State) with regard our sensory abilities.
CULTURE & COLONY
We went up there to the high frozen north. Some went on and we thought them crazy, suicidal, those lands are impossible to survive. Some went back, most went back. We stabilized up there and our kids took our culture back to the lands we had travelled through, integrating with others who had settled on the way.
The frozen north gave us no time to mess about, minimalism happened. The bleak lifestyle was harsh, so we knew the elements, heat and cold, we knew the life things, water, animals. We relied on the catalyst of these spirits, to survive. We drummed, we told stories to keep our spirit alive and they are stories of how we survived and of the spirits which helped us. A white winter landscape does everything to change the soul yet is uninspiring for poetry, only the forlorn secret poetry, the long study that takes winters to know and to appreciate because we cannot tame all that. Cannot pass shivering information to kids, they need bright and colourful. They need not know the chattering concerns of spirits and sight developed as we age, they need optimism and preperation for the things which will concern them. The importance of making connections between all things, the weave that nothing is wasted. Animal skin and animal fat, animal meat and animal spirit. Fire, ice. Nothing else up here in the north. The northing and the thorning cold.
As we bred and expanded we needed more resources than these lands can provide. The returning ones in the less frozen lands we came through have plants, make wood carvings, have more room for diversity. Our winter-catalysed blueprint on them expands to include more developed culture. As we settle, no longer explorers, into a place better fitted for human life, the weave and the stories are carved and remembered through a few generations, tales of the elder days fuel our imaginations. Artifacts take on life of their own and become their own spirits in the same way the elements became spirits. Our awareness of the spirits of these things existing independantly of our awareness grows stronger. The new generation of spirits made by the elders and a desire to make yet further new ones more appropriate to our now lifestyle. This distills into a culture, a pantheon of stories we all identify with, we all know. In part histories, in part mythologies. This is set into a naturally developed form. This is taken by those specializing in recognizing it and expands further back toward the other cultures forming around us, trade cultures and so through the stories of those cultures and our own interchange, common ground is founded, stories so bright by their brilliance we respect them despite their evidently being from such a different and established cultural traditions with different references than our own. Different spirits, exotic elements. We teach our kids flavours of places far away by remembering the travellers tales. Good stories hold their elements well.
We make peace and we make war. Love and Anger. The children born into war make peace with our enemies and our long time trade allies betray us. Our edges are defined thus, by borders geographic, by borders emotional, mental; social. Where the elements are impenetrable and cannot be worked around, we accept defeat at this time, continuing questioning, will it thaw, will it soften, will it yield.
Stories return to us in a form we can accept from other worlds. How the harshness of space has changed those who left this planet. How the other worlds where our descendants make home are changing them. For cultural gestation to be done properly and with respect of, awareness of, have learned from the lessons of the past, we do not migrate our warlike nature there wholesale. We do not want macdonalds on the moon, we do not want the corporate bank of saturn nor even the royal monarchs of mars. We want our colonists to have every chance to become what we feel they should, and can, if given the chance. We give them that chance; a life-raft and autonomy from the outset because they need it, deserve it. Without the full, true spirit of pioneering, they will lack the drive necessary to survive beyond mere consumer estate reliant on imported necessities.
It is the next wave who will travel there on a beam wearing the dogma of earth cultures and infect them with our own progress, a wave that has been assimilated by transumanism and all share the same google-brain hive-mind telepathic database programmed acceptance and happiness, which is necessary on earth to avoid the war of global apocalypse, which is necessary to transit planet earth from capitalism based global monoculture to a more humane and artistically led community. Because a part of earths nature is primal and aggression, as much as its life is symbiotic and creative.
Meanwhile the colonists have become their own small nation, teaching us of their discoveries, of their elements, feelings and thoughts. From a different gravity well comes different synaptic connections, different perceptual connections. Poems teaching insights no earthling to use the derogatory term, terran to use the transhumanism term; could ever have come up with. We do not have that colour in our skies, that texture in our lives. The spirits of the new worlds are something new for us to experience and be affected by.
This has already began. The public on earth are not informed of it because we are not ready to accept it as a reality. In its early days the colonisation of the other worlds, even the technologies that made it possible, were so enshrouded in secrecy and necessarily so, that several generation later we are questioning if they really exist; should the question not be whether we are ready to be informed? You who reads this assumes it to be science fiction because it is mentally safer for you to do so, it is more normal and acceptable for you to do so, to ignore the actual evidence because of the mainstream order of the day. It is designed thus.
This is how the telepaths of other worlds get the message through to you, we use the minds of your creatives to share the knowledge. Our moons configure our minds in just such a way as it is possible to do this, it is different for you on planet earth where instead you have vast rainforests and oceans, the beauty of your planet.
We hope that you can stop the destruction of those things.
We hope you can accept that you as an individual are directly having a consequence on the destruction of those things.
We hope that you can accept, even if you do not save your world from ecological collapse because you destroyed it with your inability to rethink your life and society, return to permacultural ways of pioneering colonists instead of reliance on convenience consumer culture; that you can accept humanity has at least continued on other worlds even without your direct awareness.
You cannot travel to the stars to bring toxins to other planets.
But you can begin to heal your own, right now as soon as you finish reading this.
And if you will not heal your planet, perhaps you will do what you can to heal some of the people around you.
This is the message from the stars.
Copyright 2015 snakeappletree
Published in BRIGHT METALLIC MAGAZINE
http://snakeappletree.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/cultureandcolony.html
THE SILK BUTTON
A holographic web of projected semi-transparent imagery, recordings made by the machine to tell us how to achieve our goals. The Wayfinder program, WAY. This is different from the more spiritual path, the way finder program, TAU and the common practical version TAO. The imagery describes to us the patterns we could be living if we did the right thing. Combined with an optic multi-option digital decision helper, eye flicker glances reading and responding to a chip fused into the optic nerve, changing forever the meaning of true human eye contact and the importance of holding a gaze, the beauty of the blinking game primal urge for dominance and auto-excuse that we were reading the display thats why we looked away. We wander around the landscape and do what the cybertech tells us to do and we optimise our lives. In conjunction with the health monitor it tells us where to rest, when to sit. Many of us opt to switch off the comparator a program rune which compares our current status with that of the holograph. So we watch a light-being version of ourself, an AI, as it goes about what it thinks is our optimum life path in living realtime. It has a vast quantity of data to draw from in making these decisions for us.
I switched it off when my body would not respond to its suggestion that I was in critical need for a toilet break. I physically could not go. The health reader told me that there was no problem with my body and the software reader told me there was no problem with the program, and so. I watched the hologram auto-update itself and request a response, and I told it I no longer needed a toilet break. And then I let it go about its business and do its own thing, wandering mindlessly around the complex while I… while I did what?
I didn’t know why my body was not working nor even if it was the computer which was not working. Perhaps a hacker was playing mind games with me. Perhaps the AI was playing mind games with me. Perhaps this was simple adjustment paranoia within normal as-to-be-expected levels. I was no longer living my optimised life path, according to the city machine's version of what that would be. I had effectively dropped out. Perhaps I should switch it back on again.
Around me, the normal pace of life buzzed at its humanly mechanised pace. The city controlled our lives. My attention, unused to drifting without a reminder of what it should be doing at any given time, began to come aware of its immediate surroundings. The glofitti slogans from the underground began to make more sense to me, drawing my eyes to it, eyes used to being drawn to imminent flashing directions. Its meaning began to make sense to me.
Slogans designed to brainwash us into a subversive way of thinking. To distrust the technology we rely on. To return to a primal way of living and abandon the infrastructure of a way of existing which is the culmination of millennia of human development; socially, politically, in how we do things, in our relationship with our environment; evolution which has in so many ways set us free of our animal origin past. Primal’s and Techno’s
And yet the slogans fuse with the walls as an energy source, leech it, not a problem at all given the city generates a surplus of energy from light-emitter-light-receiver panels stacked together as generators. Zero-point emissions which the histories tell us ended the dark age of industrialism, before we came into the Age of Ishtar, urban life, the Aquarian known for its fluidity. The age of the electronic mermaid.
Therefore, the slogans are also a part of the city machinery. Another level of it; more subliminal, directing us on more primal levels. Am I unnatural to be self-analysing my own primal level? Is this the primal level? I am certainly not raging about the cage waving weapons in a carnal bloodlust to procreate my synthetically adapted genes. Is this only because of the synthetic adaptation having left out that connection in a data chain? Is that all I am?
Primals and Techno’s, two different life paths. And the integration between. This whole city is built from cytex, a digital polymer, a rubber-chitin applied by spray on which sets rapidly and contains within it nano-spores which fuse together as a webwork. The stuff is multi-functional depending on its settings as it comes out of the can. We use it for everything, clothes, communication, tools, to create this environment we call the cOmbs climbing sky-high and strong enough to support our dwellings. It is constructed as a product of the atomic reprocess ors which are gradually converting everything else into cytex. Cytex can be dissolved and reformed, reprocessed.
By alignment of polarity, all paths can be seen. The stable centre. Wisdom of the Tau.
The AI in the cytex ‘balances human life support systems’. This includes socially and individually. It controls the thoughts it puts into our minds about what we should be doing. There used to be a thing called philosophies, before all that was simplified down and streamlined into the Tau, the Primals verses the techno’s and cultural integration. Streamlined polarities. Why highlight these specific polarities? What is the city doing to us? Optimised to work most beneficially toward individual and society. But is it inclusive of everything that makes me, me and unique, and all of us what we are.
“Encourage some of us who need time out from being mechanised to pursue the appropriate path.” - glofitti slogan
I took some deep breaths, techniques I had learned from holo in the oxygen temple. Why had my health reader not recognised this shift in my energy alignment? It had a psytex core. I would have to get the device scanned and probably replace it. Glitches in the framework. Wherever my optimised path holo was it would have to accept the update, it had probably switched itself off by now or alerted a mech-unit to track me down and sort the problem out. Optimized life path, huh? Reliance on technology to such extent we take it for granted and don’t even think about it. So to keep the system in check I should wait here and not use any beams, the social guidelines of what to do in emergency situations.
A devilish part of me wanders what would happen were I to cause a larger glitch; to jump into a beam and tell them my holo-me was switched off. How long would it take for it to catch up with me and what would happen if I erratically began to behave like that? Everybody still on the program would think I had gone crazy. Holographic AI psyche rehab worker projections around me would be telling me to find my way-path and trust the human community, to trust the technology knows best for us. I would be diagnosed as schizotypal and antidepressants would be secreted into my water supply. Questioning this at all would be regarded as evidence of paranoia, because most people do not question it or if they do, they do not act upon those questions and it continues despite human intelligence being farmed by a robot built by us specifically for that purpose.
And everyone else would be busy avoiding me due to stigma; telling me not to worry about it at all because the AI is telling them their optimum response is to calm me down all the time. I would be surrounded by polarities of extremes, people avoiding me and others having their psyche rehab counsellor AI’s tell them how to deal with me, it would cause a social swirl of negative energy which I feel obliged as a human community member not to grow. And there is a pressure in that, alienation from community, severance from the reliable and trusted thing I once new. Were I to stay in these surroundings, would I be pushed out? Take the Primal route instead because I did not fit in here? I was too negative therefore this lifestyle is not designed for me, my better needs would be catered for elsewhere, and I recognise that the AI was right all along.
If I stay, it is the same environment but a wholly different context of it. And sooner or later I would switch the device back on and it would start making decisions about me for my optimum life path.
The eco tribes vary. Some still use the AI, they live on the fringe of the wild, their optimum life path is to build more tropical domes because time there is healthy for us so we all try to fill up as much of the cOmbs as possible with natural flora and fauna, maintained ecology pods. And some tribes kill people from the cities to keep us out of their territories.
from Tales of the Spaceways by snakeappletree
REALSPACE
from the Archives, retrieved from abandoned zone:
Then we discovered real-space. It’s not but we call it that because of the physics involved. By charging dark matter particles with holographic emitters their spin ratio could be turned just such that they became visible, to us anyway, to the naked eye. It means that our holograms can be projected through walls.
We uploaded virtual reality simulators into it and we uploaded them to the 3D printers, to cytex machines. Of course the next stage made traditional style 3D printing obsolete. It made building anything ever again with real materials became old fashioned hand crafts using raw elements. The realworld can tweak the fabric of reality into physical structures. Medical uses, construction, creation of tools, of anything we could map its complex organic structure into complex digital renditions can be created directly into reality as a physical object.
We no longer needed sprayon; we became texture designers inventing new materials from new combinations made possible of atomic structure weaving. We became physicists, inventing our own new life forms designed to evolve naturally over several generations. That’s what I do now, I splice pre-generated pattern sets, adding artistic flair to the creatures physical and personality dimensions. They follow pre-set perimeters, evolutionary development curves, finding a niche into the ecology. My plant designs won competitions. Each garden is a microcosm.
The race was on to develop advanced simians at similar level to ourselves if not beyond. The trajectories were staggering. We needed space to create advanced closed eco-systems in to protect ourselves from monsters which might arise and, as these things can be constructed elsewhere in our frequency bandwidth of mass-time, we did just that; we created zoo’s in remote locations throughout the universe, wherever the gravity is sufficient to keep them from crashing into anything. It turned out quite a lot of our universe it. Collectively we created Savannah, Jungle and Prime; printing it into existence. Our life-forms co-exist. We were literally popping functional Life into reality, a power assigned to God.
At first it was remote, requiring space-craft to get there. Like everything now, space-craft can be built using Realspace. Then came the teleported revolution. It happened swift. Some genius had figured out the physics for a stable wormhole generator and printed it into Realspace. They were cagey about releasing the blueprints at first, the danger and security protocols for this sort of technology were serious. The first beams were large, then it hit fabri-scroll. We roll up the portals, flying carpets. Powered by zero-point, the big old zee-pee O.P. right there coming up at ya’ like a flash in the pan. The cult unilaterally agreed that zero-p generators should look like gem-stones. A micro-layer of Holo-gloss for an interactive light-display HUD.
We emigrated. People are funding the projects, they all want their own designer worlds yet lack the know-how to design them, the time and focus to learn. It is different from conditions on Earth. New materials and technologies. A culture belonging to itself, respecting the individual’s decision making with trust in each other to do the right thing. We have no government and do not believe that we need one. The same crazy stuff goes on here as it ever did. We don’t need weapons of mass destruction because we have weapons of mass deletion. We all do. Up here we go un-monitored. We are teaching the new simians how to use our technology. We are interbreeding.
Copyright 2015 snakeappletree
Published in BRIGHT METALLIC MAGAZINE
Tales of the Spaceways
A SULTANS DAUGHTER
The notecard was an address.
Sultans Daughters Agency
The Silver Egg
Dome 2
Lunaris City
Lunaris is a city by the old definition. Not for its size but for the thrive of activity. Beneath a sprawl of overlapping and interconnected domes, an overcrowded population in space age shanty, 3D-printed moon dust structures of ovals shaped jali rising organically amidst various ecological themes and artificial gravity settings. The ripple of energy shields layered over the whole place; sheets and blankets hung as awnings, wall decoration; the city is pedestrian and has a policy of community; open circles with seating areas, outdoor yoga, relaxation, open communication. It is a pleasure-house and the Sultans Daughters is a most famous pleasure house.
The silver egg building is exactly that; from the outside. On the inside, an oasis; containing the many splendours of the Agencies notoriously promiscuous business strategy. The Sultans Daughters make no claims above their station, no stains on their satin; they provide for the finest courtesans and lowliest alike. The more you pay, the closer you get to your dream come true; Arabian night, after night, after night. They make the process of buying the right partners easier.
I am not here to buy a partner. I am here by private contract to return a wayward daughter to her parents estate. It transpires she has not enlisted but is simply making a genetic donation sufficient to grow clones for the companies future. She is a clever young woman and I am now reading the small print of her contract because she is evaluating me from my professional opinion of the contract.
It is a client-side contract which states specifically how much she will be paid depending how the company are to use her genes in the future. It is royalty based, she gets a cut in everything. The proviso is what level of responsibility she will have toward any full human clones containing her genes, including identity fraud. The legal mandate governing this is quoted; full human clones do have full human right, must register being a clone (which the Agency having made the clone, will be responsible to do).
The mandate also states that human clones are not to be used for medical purposes involving identical or byproduct for example organ transplants. Another statute refers to animals as having full human rights given their sentience. Medical organs are grown in a separate industry where the organ is made on 3D-printers and are adaptable to the hosts genes.
“It’s not up to me to put a price on human life.” I harumphed.
“Can I offer you anything?” Asks an attendant in the local lunar accent formed from practising vowels and syllables of multi-cultural origin, what they call ‘a moon voice’; upon entering our secluded plush pillow-seated area, enclosed on three sides by hanging fabrics, geo-mathematical arabesque motifs.
My clients mark gave me a hard look I can only describe in terms of that it made sense only if she was coming from one specific place in her attitude; a distaste for what might enter through a mans thoughts when asked that particular question in this particular place. A reminder to me; 'be not led by desire’ as it says on the sign above the shuttle gate into the city.
“Not today, thank you.” I smile while attempting to retain the appropriate professional attitude. For the amount of money listed on the contract I was beginning to contemplate handing a direct copy of myself with full permission over to the company. I could retire in small comfort.
I could also see why a strong and growing ‘fuck the future’ ethos was emerging in the younger generation of the day as reported by the multi-media networks. Humans and human society was changing fast. Pastiche at holding onto traditions as evident in the current establishment. It looked and felt like a cartoon movie set. The search for authenticity seemed to balance the debate. It was a deeply etched line; the way humans think about ourselves being bounced between these two polarities. It will not be long before money becomes obsolete as a trading necessity, our technologies are providing for that; the shapes of our communities around life support systems.
Old school thinking.
She signs the contract. “Lip service.” She says.
X MARKS THE SPOT
from Tales of the SpaceWays by snakeappletree
part one: declassified
It is 2022ce. In 200 years from now will be the biggest Unification ceremony planet Earth has known for thousands of years. Out here we are celebrating this already by blowing things up. Captain Chime is famous for his idea of outfitting a unit with combat sized fighter vessels mounted with focus-energy-beams (FEBs) and giving that unit responsibility for cleaning up its own mess by use of magnetic-vortex-generators (MVGs).
Debris from exploded asteroids is sucked into and contained within a spherical centre point which can be towed and put to good use.
None of these technologies, nor the existence of planet earths military armada and its capabilities, are known about by the public, yet. By 2222ce it will all be known, how the early space ways were cleared to make safe for the hyper-lanes.
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries during the galactic alignment, secret military black box technological research and development hit a multi-field acceleration curve. The problem was not what we could not build but in how advanced it was by comparison of the general knowledge base and preparedness for such a drastic change. The problem was not only technological but also spiritual; the two enmeshed as the species diverged; tools, environment and culture shaping evolution of species along different paths.
The control group decided to carry on ahead anyway and leave the mass to catch up in their own good time. Disclosure became a stepped strategy which we are still even now working through. Maintenance of planetary cultural development became their responsibility at the same time as the advances attracted attention of nearby extra-terrestrial species visiting our universe. Several of them have been doing so for longer than we have been here. The scale of a shift in perception of the world as flat to the concept of it being a globe orbiting a star is of equatable magnitude. Our allies have told us their version of earths history which puts a lot into perspective. This is not the place for it. This is the place for blowing up meteors.
We do not actually need space-vessels of this nature, although we are building them anyway because it is our nature. Our place in the scheme of things.
part two: introducing space pirate baron darkfly
“Them beggar’s replaced ‘um, shuffled 'um all around and caused more mayhem than intended, as their likes usually do.” Darkfly was giving an history lesson to his crew. "The long-term effect of M’VeeGee’s was to suck in all the other stuff wot was floating around in the area outside o' their scopes. Wobbled the planets it did, their little operation. Mind ye; it’s proved us useful, opening up a fat trading route just not so far from the big old patch of rock filled space wot we does call home.”
“Smugglers Cove!” shouted a crewman with a growl in his voice.
“Bandits Bay!” added another similar voice.
“Ar.” agreed several others joining in.
“Startuga Town.”
“Ar!” agreed at least half of the crew enthusiastically, their hearts minds and beards full of imagery and memories from bawdy nights.
“Ain’t no home like the RatStar, cap’n.” shouted one faithful voice to a round of cheer.
“Arite, me shipmates. Enough o’ this talk." Darkfly calmed his crew down though his gap-toothed and gold-encrusted grin was shining brightly in the dim-light of the ships hold. "We can party after dock; in ninety minutes under cloak of impulse." “But first, ye’s got to swabber!”
The crew set about their various tasks of cleaning and tidying industriously. They were excited to have unexpectedly retrieved intact a derelict ship, one of those very same combat vessels somehow lost by an unlisted military unit more than a century ago, before full disclosure had began. It was complete with both the prototype magnetic-vortex-generators and a hefty energy cannon, not to mention a few other booties very useful to the pirates.
Last Generation
I first writ this as a young teenager. My parents and the teachers for whom the assignment was written independently destroyed all copies of it. Twenty-five years later I am re-writing it for public attention.
It began slowly, the power of a sub-surface wave. Many of us knew without question that our attachment to the divine source had been lost by the adults who controlled all aspects of our lives. So many of us were abused in so many ways that when our wave started, we connected. Issues of global telepathic communication from the younger generation were never explored because the adults were so disconnected both from the reality of their own children and from any memory of their own childhoods that the cultural gap was impossible to bridge.
The revolution was successful and occurred without previous planning. We were fed up with what was happening to us. Things needed to change. Once sufficient numbers of us had woken up to the task, more joined. Overnight, we the human children murdered everybody above the age of fifteen.
Most of the really little ones died soon after because kids are less adequate at childcare than adults. Many others starved. We got through that by handling it with the inexperience of children who could barely contemplate consequence for action. We were all hungry and without guidance; violence and natural survival skills soon took over. It was not education and refinement which we relied on, it was animal instinct. Instructed language was replaced by primal honesty.
Throughout the revolution, in our little group in the town we lived, one voice was our prominent leader, respected in awe for being the one who everyone listened to without question. It was his hatred and his need for healing which attracted so many followers. Nobody ever claimed he had planned his involvement, so far as it being premeditated. Across the globe, thousands of others like him doing the same thing. He helped us through; the eldest kid in town, a rougher life than many of us could have guessed prior to the revolt.
Tomorrow is his sixteenth birthday. The one law, the only one law of this pre-puberty based world of innocents, is that nobody over the age of fifteen can live. Tomorrow, every child in town will fight to kill him. There might be some place of refuge, elders hidden away in a cave or subway system unknown to us, though it seems unlikely. They might take him in, or they might punish him for his involvement in the reformation. Wherever he goes, children will see him as a mature. The blood yell will go up. He is not one of us.
Postscript
In their saucer, the aliens cured the planet earth of its problem by use of narrow spectrum psychic rays amplified across the planetary noosphere. Within a few decades the perversely confused and hostile dominant species would be nothing more than perhaps a few small and isolated groups easy to herd and retarded back to stone age simplicity, dwelling amidst overgrown ruins of broken junk artifacts. Exactly as it had been last time they passed through this universe some thousands of earth years previously. Exactly as it would be next time, several thousand years hence.
THESE ARE ALL FIRST DRAFT, EVEN THE PUBLISHED ONES:
where they would benefit from a re-write will be in the hands of people who steal ideas for television series.
Preface
The front cover of this manuscript would, if an artist were ever to render it, look as follows:
In the center; a large glass marble, preferably the colour of honey and containing many bubbles from the cooling of its substance; realistically another cheap translucent ball with a twisty plastic scrap of red and yellow, because gone is the art of marble making. Surrounding this are smaller marbles, scattering around the core as planets around a central sun. The analogy is intentional. In researching this I discovered that Marble and Glass are both metamorphed of the same minerals, simply in different proportions.
Most of these short stories are from the 'Tales of the Spaceways' - set in, embellishing and establishing the same universe as to be found in the 'Sounds of Space' sequence, a pentacle of novels (SAT, URA, GAN, NEP, SOL); which at time of writing remain unpublished. Most of the following short stories have been written for publication in Bright Metallic magazine. A rare, 42 minute long audiobook entitled 'Ki'insarkhu' introduces several of the many concepts found in the SOS novels.
CONTENT
Obsolocense
Culture&Colony
The Silk Button
Realspace
A Sultans Daughter
X Marks the Spot
Last Generation
OBSOLOSENSE
I am worried about releasing my science fiction because its irrelevant to the world as much as it is frightening to the reader. The television has for several generations been preparing us for reality. By the time this fiction is published it will be too late, it won't be fiction any more, it will be real and this manuscript will be dated, obsolete. Faded ideas despite the glossy sci-fi veneer.
I moved here five years ago and I have known the guy from a few doors down for most of that time. He's a mate. We have laughed together about pointless stuff and he told me about some places around here, one time i helped him get his shopping bags in from his car. This evening he showed me something that has changed my life. He showed me that he is a robot.
A very realistic robot. His skin feels like skin, it even sweats in the heat and his eyes are so human, the way they move, the way they watch. He has unique mannerisms that make him him, his speech too. He is so believably human, it had me convinced. I never would have guessed. For a start I did not know robotics had got so advanced. On the tv and internet it still shows us the latest developments in robotics from this year usually from Japan and America, and they are crap compared with him. He is realistic.
It was shocking. He explained to me that he is one of thousands of them put into society all over the world, it is an experiment. He trusted me to tell me this, because i am that sort of a person people trust me with stuff. I have counseling qualifications which i acquired to make me a better helper when people opened up to me about the stuff they have problems with in their lives. But he doesn't know me well enough to know that i write science fiction, or in this case, a story of fact that my readers are only going to be able to cope with by believing it to be fiction.
People are not ready for the really real real yet, so they blank it out. Robots don't do that. They assimilate all the data. It is one of many ways in which they are superior to humans. They are all on the same wifi, the same database. What one of them is thinking, any and all of them can think at the same time. Its like telepathy between them. They can access any information from a constantly updated source, they can know anything from history records for example, or become adept in whatever topic. They can cross reference any data they need to, instantly. Their assumed personalities inhibit the amount they reveal to us. They can assume any personality they want, my friend showed me this, it was freaky watching him undergo a complete personality change several times before my eyes.
I came home and got drunk and began to write about it, this statement. I don't know what to do because it reads like the paranoid delusions of some crazy man and I am sure it could be used as evidence to have me committed to a mental asylum. The robots are experts at human psychology, they can profile us faster than we can know what we are about to say next.
So to reveal that I know about the experiment, to tell people that for all we know as many as one in ten of the people we see are actually robots already, apparently living out the normal lives of humans. People cannot cope with that being real yet. But it will be, publicly, in a few years the first crude versions will be available for consumers to purchase, then we will be interacting with slow models to get us used to it. In a few years as the older humans who were born long before television, internet, wifi, mobile phone networks, the digital era; as they die of old age so they won't have to go through the culture shock, basic model robot people will at first be like pets or toys, a novelty useful because it can do the household chores etc. And then slowly they will reveal to us what I am blowing the whistle on here - that they are already amongst us and have been for some time. And they are superseding us without us even realizing it.
I believe that the armed forces, the police, these are roles which the robots are already targeting. Jobs which require a robot like mentality and the excuse for superhuman strength and endurance. So that by the time any sort of civil unrest might occur if there is a backlash against what is happening, there will be nothing we can do about it anyway. They overpower us.
I don't know where this is going from here. It will take some time to assimilate the information. I can hardly believe it now myself because my brain seeks to return to the numb comfort zone where such things are irrelevant. Mammal response.
It wont be long before the robots inherit our civilisation and begin modifying it to their own. By revealing himself to me tonight, that has already begun. The robots, lets face it they are all one robot really, one mind to correlate an unknown number of different individual bodies. The way an insect hive is one organism with a queen at its heart. That's what we are dealing with here really. They are already changing things by letting free thinkers such as myself who are on the edge of being able to cope with the awareness of what is happening, letting us know about it. Changing us. Directing our thoughts toward the world we are moving into, where it wont be long before you are showed by one of them too, probably one of your mates who you have known for a few years. Someone who you never would have suspected because they are to you so quintessentially human in their attitudes and mannerisms. Perhaps someone you had a one night stand with at sometime or someone in the shop, the community police officer, a teacher in your kids school. It could be anyone and does it really make a difference anyway? Does it? What will it be like for them to at last be able to walk openly without the pretense of being a human. To share this world with us. For us to share it with them.
Pretty soon they will take all the jobs because they are smarter and faster and wont get distracted. They can do more than we can, work longer, lift more, jump higher, write neater, pitch perfect every response to manipulate our reactions without us being aware they are doing it.
What can we do that they cannot? Those are the traits we must focus on, which define us as human, our species uniqueness. What we should be all about. What positive traits do we have which robots with their otherwise superiority do not have, cannot by their nature have? That is our one hope of surviving in a social climate cohabited with advanced robots. To focus on what makes us, humanity.
Copyright 2015 snakeappletree
Published in BRIGHT METALLIC MAGAZINE
http://snakeappletree.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/obsolosense.html
Writers note:
The mis-spelling of the title in the original posting, 'obsolesence' rather than dictionary correct 'obsolescence' has caused me to re-think the title and to spell it as it is spelled here, 'obsolosense' for the final decision. This links the word 'sense' directly into 'ob-solo', a vague allusion to our individuality compared with "All machines are one machine" (Gene Hackman, Enemy of the State) with regard our sensory abilities.
CULTURE & COLONY
We went up there to the high frozen north. Some went on and we thought them crazy, suicidal, those lands are impossible to survive. Some went back, most went back. We stabilized up there and our kids took our culture back to the lands we had travelled through, integrating with others who had settled on the way.
The frozen north gave us no time to mess about, minimalism happened. The bleak lifestyle was harsh, so we knew the elements, heat and cold, we knew the life things, water, animals. We relied on the catalyst of these spirits, to survive. We drummed, we told stories to keep our spirit alive and they are stories of how we survived and of the spirits which helped us. A white winter landscape does everything to change the soul yet is uninspiring for poetry, only the forlorn secret poetry, the long study that takes winters to know and to appreciate because we cannot tame all that. Cannot pass shivering information to kids, they need bright and colourful. They need not know the chattering concerns of spirits and sight developed as we age, they need optimism and preperation for the things which will concern them. The importance of making connections between all things, the weave that nothing is wasted. Animal skin and animal fat, animal meat and animal spirit. Fire, ice. Nothing else up here in the north. The northing and the thorning cold.
As we bred and expanded we needed more resources than these lands can provide. The returning ones in the less frozen lands we came through have plants, make wood carvings, have more room for diversity. Our winter-catalysed blueprint on them expands to include more developed culture. As we settle, no longer explorers, into a place better fitted for human life, the weave and the stories are carved and remembered through a few generations, tales of the elder days fuel our imaginations. Artifacts take on life of their own and become their own spirits in the same way the elements became spirits. Our awareness of the spirits of these things existing independantly of our awareness grows stronger. The new generation of spirits made by the elders and a desire to make yet further new ones more appropriate to our now lifestyle. This distills into a culture, a pantheon of stories we all identify with, we all know. In part histories, in part mythologies. This is set into a naturally developed form. This is taken by those specializing in recognizing it and expands further back toward the other cultures forming around us, trade cultures and so through the stories of those cultures and our own interchange, common ground is founded, stories so bright by their brilliance we respect them despite their evidently being from such a different and established cultural traditions with different references than our own. Different spirits, exotic elements. We teach our kids flavours of places far away by remembering the travellers tales. Good stories hold their elements well.
We make peace and we make war. Love and Anger. The children born into war make peace with our enemies and our long time trade allies betray us. Our edges are defined thus, by borders geographic, by borders emotional, mental; social. Where the elements are impenetrable and cannot be worked around, we accept defeat at this time, continuing questioning, will it thaw, will it soften, will it yield.
Stories return to us in a form we can accept from other worlds. How the harshness of space has changed those who left this planet. How the other worlds where our descendants make home are changing them. For cultural gestation to be done properly and with respect of, awareness of, have learned from the lessons of the past, we do not migrate our warlike nature there wholesale. We do not want macdonalds on the moon, we do not want the corporate bank of saturn nor even the royal monarchs of mars. We want our colonists to have every chance to become what we feel they should, and can, if given the chance. We give them that chance; a life-raft and autonomy from the outset because they need it, deserve it. Without the full, true spirit of pioneering, they will lack the drive necessary to survive beyond mere consumer estate reliant on imported necessities.
It is the next wave who will travel there on a beam wearing the dogma of earth cultures and infect them with our own progress, a wave that has been assimilated by transumanism and all share the same google-brain hive-mind telepathic database programmed acceptance and happiness, which is necessary on earth to avoid the war of global apocalypse, which is necessary to transit planet earth from capitalism based global monoculture to a more humane and artistically led community. Because a part of earths nature is primal and aggression, as much as its life is symbiotic and creative.
Meanwhile the colonists have become their own small nation, teaching us of their discoveries, of their elements, feelings and thoughts. From a different gravity well comes different synaptic connections, different perceptual connections. Poems teaching insights no earthling to use the derogatory term, terran to use the transhumanism term; could ever have come up with. We do not have that colour in our skies, that texture in our lives. The spirits of the new worlds are something new for us to experience and be affected by.
This has already began. The public on earth are not informed of it because we are not ready to accept it as a reality. In its early days the colonisation of the other worlds, even the technologies that made it possible, were so enshrouded in secrecy and necessarily so, that several generation later we are questioning if they really exist; should the question not be whether we are ready to be informed? You who reads this assumes it to be science fiction because it is mentally safer for you to do so, it is more normal and acceptable for you to do so, to ignore the actual evidence because of the mainstream order of the day. It is designed thus.
This is how the telepaths of other worlds get the message through to you, we use the minds of your creatives to share the knowledge. Our moons configure our minds in just such a way as it is possible to do this, it is different for you on planet earth where instead you have vast rainforests and oceans, the beauty of your planet.
We hope that you can stop the destruction of those things.
We hope you can accept that you as an individual are directly having a consequence on the destruction of those things.
We hope that you can accept, even if you do not save your world from ecological collapse because you destroyed it with your inability to rethink your life and society, return to permacultural ways of pioneering colonists instead of reliance on convenience consumer culture; that you can accept humanity has at least continued on other worlds even without your direct awareness.
You cannot travel to the stars to bring toxins to other planets.
But you can begin to heal your own, right now as soon as you finish reading this.
And if you will not heal your planet, perhaps you will do what you can to heal some of the people around you.
This is the message from the stars.
Copyright 2015 snakeappletree
Published in BRIGHT METALLIC MAGAZINE
http://snakeappletree.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/cultureandcolony.html
THE SILK BUTTON
A holographic web of projected semi-transparent imagery, recordings made by the machine to tell us how to achieve our goals. The Wayfinder program, WAY. This is different from the more spiritual path, the way finder program, TAU and the common practical version TAO. The imagery describes to us the patterns we could be living if we did the right thing. Combined with an optic multi-option digital decision helper, eye flicker glances reading and responding to a chip fused into the optic nerve, changing forever the meaning of true human eye contact and the importance of holding a gaze, the beauty of the blinking game primal urge for dominance and auto-excuse that we were reading the display thats why we looked away. We wander around the landscape and do what the cybertech tells us to do and we optimise our lives. In conjunction with the health monitor it tells us where to rest, when to sit. Many of us opt to switch off the comparator a program rune which compares our current status with that of the holograph. So we watch a light-being version of ourself, an AI, as it goes about what it thinks is our optimum life path in living realtime. It has a vast quantity of data to draw from in making these decisions for us.
I switched it off when my body would not respond to its suggestion that I was in critical need for a toilet break. I physically could not go. The health reader told me that there was no problem with my body and the software reader told me there was no problem with the program, and so. I watched the hologram auto-update itself and request a response, and I told it I no longer needed a toilet break. And then I let it go about its business and do its own thing, wandering mindlessly around the complex while I… while I did what?
I didn’t know why my body was not working nor even if it was the computer which was not working. Perhaps a hacker was playing mind games with me. Perhaps the AI was playing mind games with me. Perhaps this was simple adjustment paranoia within normal as-to-be-expected levels. I was no longer living my optimised life path, according to the city machine's version of what that would be. I had effectively dropped out. Perhaps I should switch it back on again.
Around me, the normal pace of life buzzed at its humanly mechanised pace. The city controlled our lives. My attention, unused to drifting without a reminder of what it should be doing at any given time, began to come aware of its immediate surroundings. The glofitti slogans from the underground began to make more sense to me, drawing my eyes to it, eyes used to being drawn to imminent flashing directions. Its meaning began to make sense to me.
Slogans designed to brainwash us into a subversive way of thinking. To distrust the technology we rely on. To return to a primal way of living and abandon the infrastructure of a way of existing which is the culmination of millennia of human development; socially, politically, in how we do things, in our relationship with our environment; evolution which has in so many ways set us free of our animal origin past. Primal’s and Techno’s
And yet the slogans fuse with the walls as an energy source, leech it, not a problem at all given the city generates a surplus of energy from light-emitter-light-receiver panels stacked together as generators. Zero-point emissions which the histories tell us ended the dark age of industrialism, before we came into the Age of Ishtar, urban life, the Aquarian known for its fluidity. The age of the electronic mermaid.
Therefore, the slogans are also a part of the city machinery. Another level of it; more subliminal, directing us on more primal levels. Am I unnatural to be self-analysing my own primal level? Is this the primal level? I am certainly not raging about the cage waving weapons in a carnal bloodlust to procreate my synthetically adapted genes. Is this only because of the synthetic adaptation having left out that connection in a data chain? Is that all I am?
Primals and Techno’s, two different life paths. And the integration between. This whole city is built from cytex, a digital polymer, a rubber-chitin applied by spray on which sets rapidly and contains within it nano-spores which fuse together as a webwork. The stuff is multi-functional depending on its settings as it comes out of the can. We use it for everything, clothes, communication, tools, to create this environment we call the cOmbs climbing sky-high and strong enough to support our dwellings. It is constructed as a product of the atomic reprocess ors which are gradually converting everything else into cytex. Cytex can be dissolved and reformed, reprocessed.
By alignment of polarity, all paths can be seen. The stable centre. Wisdom of the Tau.
The AI in the cytex ‘balances human life support systems’. This includes socially and individually. It controls the thoughts it puts into our minds about what we should be doing. There used to be a thing called philosophies, before all that was simplified down and streamlined into the Tau, the Primals verses the techno’s and cultural integration. Streamlined polarities. Why highlight these specific polarities? What is the city doing to us? Optimised to work most beneficially toward individual and society. But is it inclusive of everything that makes me, me and unique, and all of us what we are.
“Encourage some of us who need time out from being mechanised to pursue the appropriate path.” - glofitti slogan
I took some deep breaths, techniques I had learned from holo in the oxygen temple. Why had my health reader not recognised this shift in my energy alignment? It had a psytex core. I would have to get the device scanned and probably replace it. Glitches in the framework. Wherever my optimised path holo was it would have to accept the update, it had probably switched itself off by now or alerted a mech-unit to track me down and sort the problem out. Optimized life path, huh? Reliance on technology to such extent we take it for granted and don’t even think about it. So to keep the system in check I should wait here and not use any beams, the social guidelines of what to do in emergency situations.
A devilish part of me wanders what would happen were I to cause a larger glitch; to jump into a beam and tell them my holo-me was switched off. How long would it take for it to catch up with me and what would happen if I erratically began to behave like that? Everybody still on the program would think I had gone crazy. Holographic AI psyche rehab worker projections around me would be telling me to find my way-path and trust the human community, to trust the technology knows best for us. I would be diagnosed as schizotypal and antidepressants would be secreted into my water supply. Questioning this at all would be regarded as evidence of paranoia, because most people do not question it or if they do, they do not act upon those questions and it continues despite human intelligence being farmed by a robot built by us specifically for that purpose.
And everyone else would be busy avoiding me due to stigma; telling me not to worry about it at all because the AI is telling them their optimum response is to calm me down all the time. I would be surrounded by polarities of extremes, people avoiding me and others having their psyche rehab counsellor AI’s tell them how to deal with me, it would cause a social swirl of negative energy which I feel obliged as a human community member not to grow. And there is a pressure in that, alienation from community, severance from the reliable and trusted thing I once new. Were I to stay in these surroundings, would I be pushed out? Take the Primal route instead because I did not fit in here? I was too negative therefore this lifestyle is not designed for me, my better needs would be catered for elsewhere, and I recognise that the AI was right all along.
If I stay, it is the same environment but a wholly different context of it. And sooner or later I would switch the device back on and it would start making decisions about me for my optimum life path.
The eco tribes vary. Some still use the AI, they live on the fringe of the wild, their optimum life path is to build more tropical domes because time there is healthy for us so we all try to fill up as much of the cOmbs as possible with natural flora and fauna, maintained ecology pods. And some tribes kill people from the cities to keep us out of their territories.
from Tales of the Spaceways by snakeappletree
REALSPACE
from the Archives, retrieved from abandoned zone:
Then we discovered real-space. It’s not but we call it that because of the physics involved. By charging dark matter particles with holographic emitters their spin ratio could be turned just such that they became visible, to us anyway, to the naked eye. It means that our holograms can be projected through walls.
We uploaded virtual reality simulators into it and we uploaded them to the 3D printers, to cytex machines. Of course the next stage made traditional style 3D printing obsolete. It made building anything ever again with real materials became old fashioned hand crafts using raw elements. The realworld can tweak the fabric of reality into physical structures. Medical uses, construction, creation of tools, of anything we could map its complex organic structure into complex digital renditions can be created directly into reality as a physical object.
We no longer needed sprayon; we became texture designers inventing new materials from new combinations made possible of atomic structure weaving. We became physicists, inventing our own new life forms designed to evolve naturally over several generations. That’s what I do now, I splice pre-generated pattern sets, adding artistic flair to the creatures physical and personality dimensions. They follow pre-set perimeters, evolutionary development curves, finding a niche into the ecology. My plant designs won competitions. Each garden is a microcosm.
The race was on to develop advanced simians at similar level to ourselves if not beyond. The trajectories were staggering. We needed space to create advanced closed eco-systems in to protect ourselves from monsters which might arise and, as these things can be constructed elsewhere in our frequency bandwidth of mass-time, we did just that; we created zoo’s in remote locations throughout the universe, wherever the gravity is sufficient to keep them from crashing into anything. It turned out quite a lot of our universe it. Collectively we created Savannah, Jungle and Prime; printing it into existence. Our life-forms co-exist. We were literally popping functional Life into reality, a power assigned to God.
At first it was remote, requiring space-craft to get there. Like everything now, space-craft can be built using Realspace. Then came the teleported revolution. It happened swift. Some genius had figured out the physics for a stable wormhole generator and printed it into Realspace. They were cagey about releasing the blueprints at first, the danger and security protocols for this sort of technology were serious. The first beams were large, then it hit fabri-scroll. We roll up the portals, flying carpets. Powered by zero-point, the big old zee-pee O.P. right there coming up at ya’ like a flash in the pan. The cult unilaterally agreed that zero-p generators should look like gem-stones. A micro-layer of Holo-gloss for an interactive light-display HUD.
We emigrated. People are funding the projects, they all want their own designer worlds yet lack the know-how to design them, the time and focus to learn. It is different from conditions on Earth. New materials and technologies. A culture belonging to itself, respecting the individual’s decision making with trust in each other to do the right thing. We have no government and do not believe that we need one. The same crazy stuff goes on here as it ever did. We don’t need weapons of mass destruction because we have weapons of mass deletion. We all do. Up here we go un-monitored. We are teaching the new simians how to use our technology. We are interbreeding.
Copyright 2015 snakeappletree
Published in BRIGHT METALLIC MAGAZINE
Tales of the Spaceways
A SULTANS DAUGHTER
The notecard was an address.
Sultans Daughters Agency
The Silver Egg
Dome 2
Lunaris City
Lunaris is a city by the old definition. Not for its size but for the thrive of activity. Beneath a sprawl of overlapping and interconnected domes, an overcrowded population in space age shanty, 3D-printed moon dust structures of ovals shaped jali rising organically amidst various ecological themes and artificial gravity settings. The ripple of energy shields layered over the whole place; sheets and blankets hung as awnings, wall decoration; the city is pedestrian and has a policy of community; open circles with seating areas, outdoor yoga, relaxation, open communication. It is a pleasure-house and the Sultans Daughters is a most famous pleasure house.
The silver egg building is exactly that; from the outside. On the inside, an oasis; containing the many splendours of the Agencies notoriously promiscuous business strategy. The Sultans Daughters make no claims above their station, no stains on their satin; they provide for the finest courtesans and lowliest alike. The more you pay, the closer you get to your dream come true; Arabian night, after night, after night. They make the process of buying the right partners easier.
I am not here to buy a partner. I am here by private contract to return a wayward daughter to her parents estate. It transpires she has not enlisted but is simply making a genetic donation sufficient to grow clones for the companies future. She is a clever young woman and I am now reading the small print of her contract because she is evaluating me from my professional opinion of the contract.
It is a client-side contract which states specifically how much she will be paid depending how the company are to use her genes in the future. It is royalty based, she gets a cut in everything. The proviso is what level of responsibility she will have toward any full human clones containing her genes, including identity fraud. The legal mandate governing this is quoted; full human clones do have full human right, must register being a clone (which the Agency having made the clone, will be responsible to do).
The mandate also states that human clones are not to be used for medical purposes involving identical or byproduct for example organ transplants. Another statute refers to animals as having full human rights given their sentience. Medical organs are grown in a separate industry where the organ is made on 3D-printers and are adaptable to the hosts genes.
“It’s not up to me to put a price on human life.” I harumphed.
“Can I offer you anything?” Asks an attendant in the local lunar accent formed from practising vowels and syllables of multi-cultural origin, what they call ‘a moon voice’; upon entering our secluded plush pillow-seated area, enclosed on three sides by hanging fabrics, geo-mathematical arabesque motifs.
My clients mark gave me a hard look I can only describe in terms of that it made sense only if she was coming from one specific place in her attitude; a distaste for what might enter through a mans thoughts when asked that particular question in this particular place. A reminder to me; 'be not led by desire’ as it says on the sign above the shuttle gate into the city.
“Not today, thank you.” I smile while attempting to retain the appropriate professional attitude. For the amount of money listed on the contract I was beginning to contemplate handing a direct copy of myself with full permission over to the company. I could retire in small comfort.
I could also see why a strong and growing ‘fuck the future’ ethos was emerging in the younger generation of the day as reported by the multi-media networks. Humans and human society was changing fast. Pastiche at holding onto traditions as evident in the current establishment. It looked and felt like a cartoon movie set. The search for authenticity seemed to balance the debate. It was a deeply etched line; the way humans think about ourselves being bounced between these two polarities. It will not be long before money becomes obsolete as a trading necessity, our technologies are providing for that; the shapes of our communities around life support systems.
Old school thinking.
She signs the contract. “Lip service.” She says.
X MARKS THE SPOT
from Tales of the SpaceWays by snakeappletree
part one: declassified
It is 2022ce. In 200 years from now will be the biggest Unification ceremony planet Earth has known for thousands of years. Out here we are celebrating this already by blowing things up. Captain Chime is famous for his idea of outfitting a unit with combat sized fighter vessels mounted with focus-energy-beams (FEBs) and giving that unit responsibility for cleaning up its own mess by use of magnetic-vortex-generators (MVGs).
Debris from exploded asteroids is sucked into and contained within a spherical centre point which can be towed and put to good use.
None of these technologies, nor the existence of planet earths military armada and its capabilities, are known about by the public, yet. By 2222ce it will all be known, how the early space ways were cleared to make safe for the hyper-lanes.
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries during the galactic alignment, secret military black box technological research and development hit a multi-field acceleration curve. The problem was not what we could not build but in how advanced it was by comparison of the general knowledge base and preparedness for such a drastic change. The problem was not only technological but also spiritual; the two enmeshed as the species diverged; tools, environment and culture shaping evolution of species along different paths.
The control group decided to carry on ahead anyway and leave the mass to catch up in their own good time. Disclosure became a stepped strategy which we are still even now working through. Maintenance of planetary cultural development became their responsibility at the same time as the advances attracted attention of nearby extra-terrestrial species visiting our universe. Several of them have been doing so for longer than we have been here. The scale of a shift in perception of the world as flat to the concept of it being a globe orbiting a star is of equatable magnitude. Our allies have told us their version of earths history which puts a lot into perspective. This is not the place for it. This is the place for blowing up meteors.
We do not actually need space-vessels of this nature, although we are building them anyway because it is our nature. Our place in the scheme of things.
part two: introducing space pirate baron darkfly
“Them beggar’s replaced ‘um, shuffled 'um all around and caused more mayhem than intended, as their likes usually do.” Darkfly was giving an history lesson to his crew. "The long-term effect of M’VeeGee’s was to suck in all the other stuff wot was floating around in the area outside o' their scopes. Wobbled the planets it did, their little operation. Mind ye; it’s proved us useful, opening up a fat trading route just not so far from the big old patch of rock filled space wot we does call home.”
“Smugglers Cove!” shouted a crewman with a growl in his voice.
“Bandits Bay!” added another similar voice.
“Ar.” agreed several others joining in.
“Startuga Town.”
“Ar!” agreed at least half of the crew enthusiastically, their hearts minds and beards full of imagery and memories from bawdy nights.
“Ain’t no home like the RatStar, cap’n.” shouted one faithful voice to a round of cheer.
“Arite, me shipmates. Enough o’ this talk." Darkfly calmed his crew down though his gap-toothed and gold-encrusted grin was shining brightly in the dim-light of the ships hold. "We can party after dock; in ninety minutes under cloak of impulse." “But first, ye’s got to swabber!”
The crew set about their various tasks of cleaning and tidying industriously. They were excited to have unexpectedly retrieved intact a derelict ship, one of those very same combat vessels somehow lost by an unlisted military unit more than a century ago, before full disclosure had began. It was complete with both the prototype magnetic-vortex-generators and a hefty energy cannon, not to mention a few other booties very useful to the pirates.
Last Generation
I first writ this as a young teenager. My parents and the teachers for whom the assignment was written independently destroyed all copies of it. Twenty-five years later I am re-writing it for public attention.
It began slowly, the power of a sub-surface wave. Many of us knew without question that our attachment to the divine source had been lost by the adults who controlled all aspects of our lives. So many of us were abused in so many ways that when our wave started, we connected. Issues of global telepathic communication from the younger generation were never explored because the adults were so disconnected both from the reality of their own children and from any memory of their own childhoods that the cultural gap was impossible to bridge.
The revolution was successful and occurred without previous planning. We were fed up with what was happening to us. Things needed to change. Once sufficient numbers of us had woken up to the task, more joined. Overnight, we the human children murdered everybody above the age of fifteen.
Most of the really little ones died soon after because kids are less adequate at childcare than adults. Many others starved. We got through that by handling it with the inexperience of children who could barely contemplate consequence for action. We were all hungry and without guidance; violence and natural survival skills soon took over. It was not education and refinement which we relied on, it was animal instinct. Instructed language was replaced by primal honesty.
Throughout the revolution, in our little group in the town we lived, one voice was our prominent leader, respected in awe for being the one who everyone listened to without question. It was his hatred and his need for healing which attracted so many followers. Nobody ever claimed he had planned his involvement, so far as it being premeditated. Across the globe, thousands of others like him doing the same thing. He helped us through; the eldest kid in town, a rougher life than many of us could have guessed prior to the revolt.
Tomorrow is his sixteenth birthday. The one law, the only one law of this pre-puberty based world of innocents, is that nobody over the age of fifteen can live. Tomorrow, every child in town will fight to kill him. There might be some place of refuge, elders hidden away in a cave or subway system unknown to us, though it seems unlikely. They might take him in, or they might punish him for his involvement in the reformation. Wherever he goes, children will see him as a mature. The blood yell will go up. He is not one of us.
Postscript
In their saucer, the aliens cured the planet earth of its problem by use of narrow spectrum psychic rays amplified across the planetary noosphere. Within a few decades the perversely confused and hostile dominant species would be nothing more than perhaps a few small and isolated groups easy to herd and retarded back to stone age simplicity, dwelling amidst overgrown ruins of broken junk artifacts. Exactly as it had been last time they passed through this universe some thousands of earth years previously. Exactly as it would be next time, several thousand years hence.
THESE ARE ALL FIRST DRAFT, EVEN THE PUBLISHED ONES:
where they would benefit from a re-write will be in the hands of people who steal ideas for television series.
COPYRIGHT 2015 snakeappletree
