This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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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.

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 future is not ‘told’ with a tarot deck or ‘read’ in tea leaves. The future is ripped out of you kicking and screaming. It was that time again, I always knew when it was coming; it had been several weeks since they last ground the prescience out of me. It was time to play oracle. A normal person might vomit with fear, but the various drug cocktails they injected me with made it difficult. Marched from my cell down to ‘the lab,’ I knew the drill.

First the eye caps, saline drops followed by special contact lenses. The center of each lens contained a thick fiber optic cable which made it impossible to close my eyes. Not that it would matter, the surface of the contacts fed direct visual input into my eyes, an optical data fire hose. The first few sessions I remember trying to blink away the “dirt in your eye” feeling until a orderly casually mentioned that I was risking a, “65% chance of corneal abrasion which when combined with the high volume of optical activity has a 52% chance of leading to blindness.”

Next the ear plugs, they had drilled into my skull and implanted hearing aid like devices into the cochlear areas of my ear, combined with a form of bone conduction head phones, had me wired for sound. The tiny hole they had punched behind and above my ear still itched. I was ‘discouraged’ from playing with it, “23% chance” that if it became infected I would go deaf. It looked like any normal headphone jack except it was made of gold and the flesh was pink and swollen around the wound. It felt slightly cold, and the ‘click’ of the jack seating itself into my head made my toes curl. When I clenched my jaw I could feel the muscles moving over the new metal “additions” to my skull.

Lastly, my least favorite part, the needles… Gun metal colored, thin and strong, they were inserted into ports drilled into my skull and the base of my spine. These were for the pain. Connected directly to nerve centers these little beauties could, with the flick of a switch, drown me in pure scientifically adjustable pain. Pain fed directly into my nervous system. It was far more efficient this way; pain by nerve induction leaves no messy wounds. I held perfectly still as they were slowly inserted, “85% chance of complete paralysis should cranial probe alpha fail during insertion.” I was just a collection of statistics to them.

There was something else back there. Something that had needed a bone saw and three weeks of restraints and antibiotics. My best guess was that it was some sort of computer to help the entire process work. They never talked about it, and I never asked.

Once completely hooked up I was lowered into the vat, saline solution neutral buoyancy, helped take out the static from my other senses, things like touch, taste, and smell would only get in the way of what was to come. As they lowered me in I saw my arm, the scar Rain had helped me create. It seemed so long ago. At least she was still alive. They would cart her past my cell once in a while to “keep me motivated.”

“Hello Q, you don’t mind if I call you Q, do you? I feel we have become somewhat familiar with each other.”

Grey suit. Never got a name never got an explanation. Fastidious little man never seen in anything less than the finest grey suites. I have never really hated anyone until I met him.

“Call me whatever you want, lets just get this over with.” There was no reason I had to enjoy the part I played in their game.

“Ho ho, you are feisty today! Let’s hope that means the new amphetamine analogs we have been giving you are keeping your mood up. Nasty business you tried last month, wouldn’t want to see that again.”

My eyes were drawn to the relatively fresh and jagged wound across my left wrist. They had made the mistake of giving me the same food tray for every meal, a couple strokes on the concrete floor each time had slowly honed the edge into a relatively sharp makeshift knife. Escape doesn’t always mean tying your bed sheets together.

Telling the future for these people was now my full time job. It was a relatively straight forward setup, they hooked me up to the remains of the information super highway, which for the last 5 months Ophelia had been doing her best to destroy, and pumped as much information as my poor drug addled brain could accept then blasted me with intense bone cracking pain till I spat out tomorrows news. It didn’t take them long after I first got here to beat the method out of me, information plus pain equals forecast.

These people had done their homework; they knew everything about me, from my shoe size to how I wiped my ass. They knew they needed Rain for leverage, Marla and Jake had been collateral. They had not been too sure about how the “magic” worked, so they took everything and everyone. Our bikes, our bags and anything else we had bumped into in the last year or so. They even had all the garbage from my old place in Boston.

“Ok Q, here we go.”

It always started with a buzzing deep in my skull, the ear implants warming up and running through the diagnostics. Next the multi-color test pattern on the contacts. If I strained very hard I could see my brain readouts scrolling across a bank of monitors across the room. Technicians monitored them and watched the optical centers of my brain pick up the test patterns. Once the readouts were optimal, the deluge.

Imagine sitting inside a sphere made of a million television screens. Each one set to change station every half seconds with the volume turned all the way up. Imagine your eyes were held open with wires, and you couldn’t cover your ears. Now imagine the whole thing is shrinking toward you, the sound increasing as it comes closer and closer. Your eyes forced to encompass the full magnitude and horror of the data stream of a world being ravaged by an unstoppable killing machine. You might scream, but it would be drowned out by the audio, the damn thing keeps shrinking and intensifying until it is crammed directly into your brain via your optic and auditory nerves…I will forgive you if you can’t picture it. I wasn’t really ready for it the first time either.

The only redeeming part of the whole experience is that right about now…when the buzzing in my head is at full blast, and they kick in the pain probes…

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.

An intricate series of improbable events produced quantum fluctuations in the early big bang expansion universe leading to the formation of large scale meta structures known as galaxies full of what would come to be known as stars, and around some of these stars, gravitational workings in dust clouds lead to the formation of rocky bodies in a region of space warm enough to support liquid water, and on these rocky bodies through a long process of chance and natural selection complex organic entities came to exist.

In order to more effectively survive these entities developed an ever more complicated internal mental landscape. Slowly over eons these mental landscapes diversified and became more complex, mostly in relation to certain natural forces selecting for maximal reproductive success. To reinforce good selections certain of these creatures (let’s call them humans) developed a complex chemical and physical response to positive stimuli called love.

This mental condition has caused even the most rational of these entities to behave in ways that seems directly opposite to their own best interests.

Even though she was exhausted, even though she was covered in bruises, and grime, even though she had just been thrown twenty feet down a tunnel, Rain still didn’t stop fighting. As soon as she hit the ground she was trying to get back up to her brother. Green Eyes had other options, he held her in an iron grip. Rains struggles to escape produced little more than annoyed grunts from Green Eyes

Jake made it to the Hummer door as it began to shake and rattle, the sound of the storm roared on the other side of the vehicle in a drum beat of deafening chaos. The sound blasting us every time the car door came even a millimeter off the ground. All I could see was the back of Jakes wet body. I imagine him closing his eyes, as he threaded his body through a rung of the ladder, gripping it with his powerful legs. I imagine him listening to the un-earthly sound of Ophelia’s destruction, what must it be like to understand you are about to be ground into meat by an apocalyptic wind? I imagine him saying goodbye to the world, I imagine the pain.

A strong gust attacked our hiding place and the piece of metal protecting us began to rise. Rain’s hair began to stand up like it was electrified, Ophelia had found us, and she was hungry. Just as quickly her hair collapsed back down onto her shoulders in a dirty heap. Above us Jake had grabbed the door, one hand on the handle, the other slid elbow deep into a jagged hole in the metal. The strain on his body was visible, legs shaking, arms quaking.

“Run!” It was torn from him, the sound wrenching out over the noise of the storm.

“Run Now Go!” So we did.

Green Eyes was shoving us into the side tunnel, Rain first then myself. She tried one last time to make it past him back to her brother; she was rewarded with a swift punch to the kidneys that caused her to buckle into me. For a moment our faces were right next to each other.

“When this is over, he dies.” Rains face was covered in small cuts and bruises, her eyes were shrink wrapped in tears and burning with a mix of rage and sorrow. No words could fix this so I slowly nodded and held my forehead to hers.

Behind us the storm volume rose quickly, as was the volume of the screaming. Briefly the screaming won out drowning us in a symphony of pain, then only the wind. Jake had given us the extra five minutes that we needed to escape.

Every time I close my eyes I imagine what it must have been like to have been torn limb from limb, tendons popping then tearing, muscles rending off bone, bones breaking…I can only hope that it was fast.

The side tunnel offered far more protection and soon we were herded through several large air lock style doors, we were violently separated, hoods put over our faces. When they were removed gray walls…steel door…toilet.

I had spent the last couple hours pacing back and forth like an animal at the zoo. Someone must have been watching, someone must have thought I looked better. The sound of my door opening caused me to back into the corner, unsure of what was next.

A small man in an expensive business suit escorted by two large soldiers entered my room. He walked over to me and leaned in close to my face.

“Young man, you appear to have healed up nicely from your ordeal” he said as he inspected my arm. He voice was affected by a soft lisp that made my spine crawl.

“Very good!” He clapped his hands together in a fit of glee then motioned to the two brutes, who proceeded to frog marched me out the door.

“Have to be well healed for what comes next, wouldn’t want you to die on us…”