Month: April 2011

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

Charlie was a good dog. He knew this was true because when he opened his mouth just so, and wagged his tail just so, and made just the right kind of bark he got treats from Master. Master was a good dog too, because he always scratched Charlie’s ears, and gave Charlie treats, and made sure Charlie had a warm place to sleep.
Master was a funny looking dog, he moved funny, and barked funny, but Charlie didn’t care because Master was the source of treats, and ear scratches, and Charlie liked both of those a lot. Charlie was a good dog, and he loved his life. He would run along the beaches, and chase the crabs back into their holes in the sand. Charlie always wondered where the crabs went, but no amount of digging ever seemed to produce them. Charlie didn’t care; he liked digging in the sand.
Sometimes Charlie would run around in the ocean, Charlie liked the ocean. Master would toss a stick, and Charlie would get it back. Master liked this, and Charlie liked this, and the water was fun to play in. When Charlie was hot the water made the hot go away, and when Master was near Charlie would shake the water off in a synchronized dance starting at his nose and going all the way to his tail. Master liked the water because he would always bark his funny bark when Charlie brought him ocean water to make the hot go away.
Because he was a good dog Charlie got Blanket. Blanket was great, Charlie could attack Blanket, he could chew Blanket, and he could rub new smells onto Blanket for later. Charlie loved Blanket. Sometimes he would bring Blanket to Master so he could play with it, or they could each pull on it. Charlie liked pulling on Blanket. Charlie had a problem though. He couldn’t find Blanket.
Charlie had lost blanket when the big noise had come. The big noise had made Charlie’s ear hurt, and had made Charlie hide with master in the cool dark room of the basement. The big noise had come and scared Charlie very badly. When the big noise was gone, Charlie was surprised to find that sunshine had come into the dark cool basement, Charlie could never remember a time when sunshine had been in the dark cool room.
Charlie looked all over but couldn’t find Master. He looked in the cool dark room, and under the stairs. Charlie eventually found Master. Master was hiding under some big sticks, sticks so big that Charlie couldn’t fetch them, instead he dug and dug until he found the source of Master’s smell. Master was very quiet. Charlie barked and barked but Master didn’t want to play. Charlie licked Master’s face, and opened his mouth just in the right way, and wagged his tail in just the right way, and made just the right bark for treats, but Master didn’t give Charlie treats. Charlie was sad, he liked playing with Master. Charlie sat down next to Master and waited for a long time, maybe Master would like to play later.
When Charlie started to get hungry he got up and checked on Master again. Master was starting to smell strangely. Charlie had never smelled a smell like that before, and Charlie knew a lot of smells. Charlie wanted to find Blanket to save this smell for later. After rolling on Master and giving his face a final lick Charlie left the dark cool room, which was not so dark or cool anymore.
Sunshine was now in all the rooms of Charlie’s house, he had never felt so much sunshine before inside the house. When Charlie got to the front room he was surprised to find that the door was open. An open door meant that Charlie got walks! Charlie loved walks. Charlie was a good dog; good dogs got to go out.
Charlie quickly forgot about Blanket. There was so many new smells in the yard. The tree smells were different, and the ground smells were different, and the same smell that Master had made was all over the place. Charlie also found out that the fence was no longer there. Charlie had never been outside the fence without Master before. But there were so many wonderful smells, he couldn’t resist. Charlie was hot, when Charlie was hot the ocean made the hot go away. He would go towards the ocean.
Following his nose Charlie quickly reached the ocean. Tiny crabs littered the beach, to his surprise the first crab Charlie lunged for didn’t run away. Charlie noticed that none of the crabs were moving. Before him on the beach were thousands of crabs, fish, sea weed, and a million new smells for Charlie to explore. Charlie didn’t know what to do so he tried tasting some of the crabs. After a couple he noticed that the beach was covered with other strange dogs like Master.
Charlie had met other dogs like Master before, sometimes they were nice to Charlie, and sometimes they were mean. Charlie was always worried about other dogs like Master, he was always careful to give them a good smell before he trusted them. Every strange dog on the beach was making the same smell that Master had made. Charlie didn’t like this new smell, he barked loudly and ran the other way down the beach.
Charlie sat on the beach for a long time and got very sad. He didn’t have Blanket, Master wouldn’t play with him, and he was hungry. Even ocean wasn’t making the hot go away, for some reason ocean was very warm today. Was Charlie no longer a good dog? Had he chewed something he wasn’t supposed to? Once Master had not given him treats because he had chewed something he wasn’t supposed to. Charlie went and lay down on his paws in the shadow of a large boat that had been washed up on the sand. He whined quietly, wishing Master was here to give him an ear scratch.
As Charlie sat on the beach a wind started to blow. At first Charlie was happy because he had gotten very hot and was very thirsty, and the wind made him cooler. But then the wind started to get louder. It was just like before when the big noise had come. Charlie thought about running but he was mad at the big noise. Charlie would scare the big noise away! He would protect Master and make sure the big noise went away. He kept barking until a large piece of wood slammed into him crushing his small yellow furred ribs in. He was able to get one more bark out before the tidal surge washed him out to sea. Charlie was a good dog.

NOAH advisory 09SCWA001: Tropical event Ophelia came ashore briefly in previously un-affected South Carolina shore near Isle of Palms. Mandatory evacuation orders were ignored by approximately .01% of the population, no survivors reported. Damage was consistent with previous affected regions. See attached documents for latest satellite revisions to east coast sand bar locations.
Primary projection of Ophelia’s path: East Coast on trajectory 10A. Future actions not required; all areas marked uninhabitable/evacuated.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

Human beings are creatures of the now. Snap emotional judgments, instant reactions, fight or flight. They didn’t get this way by accident. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution conditioned them to deal with the immediate. An entire world lived in the “right now!” The lion, the ache of hunger, the need to protect your kill from a rival clan. Sitting around thinking about what you were going to do in 20 years didn’t get your hunting and gathering done.

It was only later, that evolution found some use for longer term planning, agriculture, animal husbandry, culture. Considering our current situation it’s debatable if that really lead to anything special. Sure we made some nice art, but would any of that be around in 1000 years, 10,000? Even the best planners tend to think about lifetimes. A hundred or so years to kick around this rock and then they are gone. Our brains just aren’t set up to deal with large spans of times. The spans of time needed to say, plan for what a couple hundred years of burning fossil fuels would do to the ecosystem.

So when a couple of corporate shills decided to cram my head full of sophisticated technology so they could artificially do some long term planning, they really didn’t think it through very well. I was going to show them that fucking with the future could have serious consequences.

They were making the same mistake all seekers of the future make. They simply wanted to know tonight’s lotto numbers. They wanted the right now. Who cares what happened tomorrow. They were making so much money that the boys in accounting didn’t even bat an eye when the next report told them to buy this chip and not that one. Or that the sound cards on the complex computers were switched out with new ones from South Korea. They didn’t notice when a couple lines of code were rewritten for the power management software for the lights. They were too busy counting the billions to notice that the research division had ordered the tech division to change the interface on my data ports, or the new flash memory upgrades, or the reprogrammable optical interface.

I had been thinking about it for a while, what would we do once we got out? It was irony at a base level, but it was still true, the oracle had no idea what he would do in the future. I knew that Rain and I were trying to get to Ohio, trying to find my mother, but what then? What if The Company came looking for us? No amount of data seemed to produce a trend that would tell me what I would do in the future.

Maybe it didn’t work that way. Maybe when you are swimming in the future you couldn’t pick what direction the waves would take you. Instead of rely on some prediction I set about to give us as many options as possible.

The Company had successfully done something no one else had managed before, a viable brain-technology interface. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t put to waste. If I was going to be a freak I was going to be a freak on my own terms. Standard jacks, programmable open source software, memory recall, I was getting upgrades. The world was changing faster than most people could keep up. Why should I be limited by proprietary hardware?

I could now interface with almost any computer on the planet; my brain had its own data storage area. Hell you could run a Unix server out of the back of my skull if you wanted. The old me would have killed for such a system, the current me required large doses of pain killers to deal with the constant surgeries.

Keeping it all secret was easy enough, though the new interface I could erase records, make changes in billing, order parts, create work orders, change drug dosages. The hardest part was also the easiest. The only time I could possibly give myself away was when I was not hooked up to the chair. All I had to do was keep acting the way I had been. It was easy to act like you despise someone when you had a deep burning hatred for them.

The techs continued to drug me (now with a cocktail of my own design), Grey Suit still talked to me like I was his best pupil, Rain was trotted out in front of me every couple weeks. What really scared me was how it all seemed to have become normal…like living in an underground secret bunker having the future tortured out of you was something everyone did.

‘How was your day today Son?’ ‘Oh you know mom, some corporate goons used nerve inductive pain in order to torture me until I told them what stocks to buy…same old stuff.’ ‘That’s nice honey.’

No one cared about the slight alteration in guard schedules, or the work order that moved our gear and bicycles to the top level of the complex, or any of a million other changes that I made over the next couple weeks. There was no way to tell Rain or Marla what was going on, but I was sure they would know what to do when the time came. The biggest problem, the thing that kept me up at night, was that my entire plan required one key ingredient. Ophelia.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

The pain is so intense it causes my tendons to contract with enough force that, before the muscle relaxants, I tore muscle from bone. The clean razor like blasts of pain lasts for what seems like an eternity, my teeth grinding themselves flat trying to escape it. It is right about here, right when my entire body is alight with pure agony that I pass out, only to babble the secrets of the future to these cretins.

But not this time. The comforting blankness, the sweet oblivion, never comes. Instead the pain is focused, honed in like a laser burning thorough the filters my brain had previously set up to protect itself. This time the cacophony of data was there in front of me.

Each day you learn a million new facts, so many in fact that the brain would soon become overloaded with useless minutia, the flicker of a shadow, the sight of a piece of trash floating on the wind, the exact color of a blade of grass. Each of these memories represents a neural connection, a path from one tiny brain cell reaching out to the next. Each night while you sleep your brain prunes away these useless connections in an orgy of selective destruction. If you don’t sleep for a week your brain is so fuzzy with connections that you can barely operate.

The opposite is true as well. When you want to get good at baseball you practice baseball. Over and over you throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball, run the bases. Inside your brain each night the dance of destruction is still going on. But the connections for baseball have gotten too strong, your brain is unable to prune them down, and at a certain point will assume they are important and leave them alone.

For months something had been happening in my brain. Slowly the neurons had been pruned by repeated application of pain and data. Slowly, literally, rewiring my brain. If you consider that the mind is what makes you, “you” then changes to that state make you a different person, I was now a new man. Aided and molded by hardware forcibly rammed into my skull, my brain had stopped trying to fight what was happening to it, and had “learned” to accept the onslaught. I had been practicing telling the future, and now it would seem, I could be a conscious participant.

Oceanographic data from buoys still operating, satellite feeds, ground based radar, blog entries, the remnants of network television, the automobile mesh network, internet traffic, phone calls, all of it seemed to have been funneled down into a needle and then stabbed directly into my mind. I could “see” it, right there; if I had not been drugged and restrained I could have reached out and touched it. It was beautiful in its hopelessness. Transparent plains of colors and sounds, my brain had managed to add some structure to the chaos. What had started as a lot of ones and zeros was now a cohesive picture of the earth dying.

Ask me how long it would be before Bermuda was scrapped down to sea level (10 more direct hits by Ophelia). Ask me how many people had already died today due to weather related causes (4,833…4,834…4,835…4,836…). Ask me how many times Bobbie Jennings was able to say “I love you” to his wife on the phone before an F5 Tornado killed everyone stationed at his office in Atlanta (0).

It was all there, presented to me like some sort of video game. Perfect little boxes, translucent and moving, I had only to think and they would rearrange to tell me what I needed to know. While at the same time a completely separate feed of things were appearing that had not happened yet. On one side of my vision the present, on the other the future. Move something on the left, and the right would change.

The truth, laid out in perfect simple detail. Slowly the data came into focus the great scheme apparent, they were using me. Ask me who they were and I would tell you that they were the combination of several large government contractors. Halliburton, KBR, GE, most of the aerospace industry, and a couple criminal mafias. Ask me what they were doing and I would tell you; making money.

These people had abducted me and my friends, killed people, and crawled through destroyed cities, to make money. They had built a monopolistic shadow government, to make money. They had killed thousands, and allowed tens of thousands to die, to make money. They had no grand scheme, there was no evil genius in a volcano calling the shots, this wasn’t world domination or religious zeal, they simply wanted to make as much money as possible.

I had been telling them lots of things, but the only thing they cared about was how they could effectively manipulate the global market. They were using me to make the invisible hand into a marionette, and it was working. I told them when to buy lumber, when to sell copper, where to station agents, how much to pay for fuel, when to invest, when to buy bonds, when stocks. Capitalism once wild, now domesticated. This new company, known internally as simply “The Company” was now richer than most of the world’s governments put together. The US government was now a contractor to them, and no one was the wiser. In case you hadn’t noticed most of the world’s governments had some pretty big problems to worry about.

The Company didn’t know everything through. They didn’t know that I was on to them. They also didn’t know that unless stopped, Ophelia would do a lot more than continue to destroy the Atlantic basin. And the number one thing they didn’t know, something I would be sure not to tell them when, in a second, I started screaming out the future, was that I knew how to get out of here.