Microstory 2455: Flumendome

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If you don’t know what a flume is, it’s a waterslide. I mean, it’s a certain type of waterslide, but who am I to get bogged down in the intricacies of linguistics? Oh, that’s right, I’m a linguist. I suppose this rolls off the tongue better than Waterslidedome. Or Waterslidome. Well, hmm. Waterslidome. Yeah, it should be that, but pronounce it like slid. Whatever, it doesn’t matter what the name is, people! Waterslides is the name of the game. I don’t even know how many there are, because I did not read the prospectus. I saw that word, then saw the main picture, and I was hooked. I’ve loved waterslides ever since I was a kid. I remember going to the waterpark every summer, but just once per year. Oh, I would beg my parents to take us more than once, but they wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t about the money, it was about keeping it special, and learning delayed gratification. Parenting is a crapshoot; when I had kids, I learned that myself. I don’t fault them for their line of reasoning. I still wish I could have gone more, but we’re all immortal now, so yay, I have all the time in the universe! Back to Flumendome, this is the best park I’ve ever seen by far. Since it’s contained in this dome, its engineering limitations are a lot farther away from the ground than its Earthan equivalents. So are the slides themselves. The best one starts at the zenith, and goes all the way down to the surface. Again, I didn’t read the prospectus, so I don’t know how long it is, but I know it’s more than 41.5 kilometers. It could be double that, or more. I don’t have any friends so I shared a raft with some lovely, kind strangers. They calculated that it was probably close to 120 kilometers, which is insane to me. I grew up in the 2080s and ’90s; we didn’t have anything anywhere near this scale. It takes just an hour to get all the way down, and there is no escape. You’re moving too fast, and trying to fish you out of there would just be unsafe, for you, and anyone you’re with, or behind you. If you don’t think you can handle it, then absolutely don’t try. Fortunately, you can start small, with some regular waterslides, and work your way up. I told you, we’re immortal, baby, don’t be strict about your time. There is another that starts at the top, and goes all the way down, but it’s not as steep, and not as fast. It takes about four hours to get to the bottom, and if it’s a desperate emergency, a rescue drone can reportedly extract you, but only during lulls, so again, proceed with caution. I don’t think they’ve had to do it before, but I did hear about someone needing to get off this next one, which sounds like that wasn’t hard at all. The slide is the craziest one of all in some respects. It also starts way up there, but it’s even longer. We can’t even begin to estimate its length. It takes a full 24 hours to get down. They can extract you because you’re moving so slowly. It’s like being on a river, except if you climbed over the edge, you would fall off and die. Fortunately, that’s probably impossible, because the sides are so steep and wet, you’d have to be a tree frog, or something. And why would you? I’ve been talking a lot about extremes, but this place has a slide for everyone. Its prospectus is one of the most comprehensive (which is why I didn’t read it), but if you’re unsure, I suggest you take a look at it, and find what you’re looking for. It’s a lot of fun, for people of all ages.

Microstory 2188: Trust in Other People

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Thank you for being patient with me yesterday. How easy it is for us to forget the lessons of our youth. I’ve been trying to take on too much work for one person, and it’s had a negative impact on my well-being so I need to learn to lean on others. Or rather, I need to relearn it, because I already figured it out during college. I was taking a class in the linguistics department called Semantics, but I wasn’t working very hard at it. I didn’t go to class unless a classmate was presenting—because I wanted to show them respect—or if there was a test. I was at a high risk of failing when I discovered that some of my classmates were regularly meeting for a study group. I’ve joked that the TV series Community was probably based on them. Lol, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but that would be really funny if it were true. I wouldn’t know, because I never attended the meetings. I wasn’t invited. They did let me use the study guide that they had curated for the open note exam at the end of the semester. I aced that test, and passed the class with a C. I didn’t learn much about semantics, but I did learn everything I needed to know about humanity. I learned to trust in other people’s expertise, and their efforts. People are basically good, and they’re just trying to do the right thing, so don’t assume the worst in them, or try to take advantage. Share knowledge, and help when you can. You never know when a friend will come in handy. I won’t ever forget that again.

Microstory 2144: Thursday

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Oh, Thursday. Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. What more can I say about Thursday, and how many times am I going to say Thursday? A Thursday by any other name would smell just like crap, because I think roses smell like crap, and Thursdays don’t smell like anything at all, but perhaps that’s only because I have an underdeveloped olfactory system. What was I talking about again? That’s right, Thursdays. Again? Yes. I don’t remember you talking much about Thursdays before. I mentioned it once in the post I posted three weeks and three days ago, called Called it Hustling, but it wasn’t on a Thursday when I said it. How do you remember that? By the power of Thursday, and Thur’s hammer. Okay. I also mentioned Tuesday. Now are you gonna go on and on about Tuesday? I would only do that if it were Saturday. Wat?! Here’s the thing. I finished all of my work for the day, which I can’t tell you about, because it’s all still confidential, and I can’t tell you about really anything else. The smoll borbs don’t care if I talk about them, but there’s nothing going on with them. My therapist had to skip our session yesterday for personal reasons, so I can’t get real candid about my mental health either. Or maybe I can, and I am, because I keep talking about Thursdays. Why am I doing that? Why am I spiraling? Because I learned something interesting today...at least interesting by your world’s standards.

Where I’m from, we have seven days of the week, and most of them are named after gods. Monday is named after the moon, and obviously Sunday the sun. I won’t get into details, because I don’t remember it well enough, but I do remember Thursdays, because it’s named after Thor, and Thor is not only a Norse god, but also characters from two of my favorite franchises. These aren’t coincidences either, they too are named after the original mythological figure. Why is this important? Well, because in order to tell you about any of these characters, I would indeed have to recite them from memory, because they do not exist in your world. Your history did not have a Norse religion, and never came up with Thor Odinson. So let me ask you this...why the hell did you name this day Thursday!? Huh?!? HUH!?! Why do you call it Thursday!?!?!?!/1 Where exactly do you think that word comes from? I tried to research it, but I can’t get an answer. All of the days of your week match mine, but with absolutely none of the historical value. I went deeper down this rabbit hole too, and it only got worse. January is named after Janus, March after Mars. July and August are named after famous historical figures who were never born here either. What about the planets? Samesies, young Padawan. The people who devised these systems were polytheistic, so that’s what was important to them. Language isn’t something that some dude just randomly came up with one day. It’s a constant evolution of phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes; smashed together and mixed up after coming into contact with other languages, and being updated with slang, or altered by ignorance or illiteracy. If you never had a Thor, how come you gave him a day? Thursday, Thursday, THURSDAY, THURSDAY, TTHHUURRSSDDAAYY!! I can’t explain it, not if I know my bulkverse rules, which I do. You see, there are different kinds of universes. Some are stable, some are unstable. Some are small, some are big. They’re all real, but they are not equal, and you, my good friends...are not built to last. I need to get out of here if I want to survive. It could happen any day now.

Microstory 1536: Talking Animals

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This was probably the best ________ of my life, and that’s saying a ________, because I have had a lot of ________ great ________. My life is ________; I don’t let things get me ________, and I don’t suffer ________ who want to make me work too ________, or get ________. I was sitting on the ________ in my backyard when a little ________ came up to talk to ________. And I don’t mean that proverbially. He ________ started talking to me, as if we ________ the same language. It ________ English—in fact, I couldn’t tell ________ what it was—but it was absolutely a complex ________. I could make out separate words, and there were even a ________ cognates in there like ________, ________, and ________. Things seemed to be going ________. We were using ________ gestures to get our respective points ________, and picking up a few words here and ________, just based on ________ context. He appeared to be enjoying the ________. I was trying to hide how ________ I thought this was, for obvious reasons. I didn't know that ________ could talk, but I’ve always ____ed to * with ____s. I've been so ________ curious what they're ____ing about, how ________ they are, and most importantly, what they ________ of humans. I am no linguistic ________, but I did study it in ________, and this is a ________ opportunity. I try to work with ________, so we can have a better understanding of each ________, but I know I’m going to need some ________. I try to convey this to ________; that I’m going to need to contact a real ________ to help us, but he freaks ________. He starts ________ faster than he was before, and I stop being ________ to tell the separation between words or ideas. Then he ________ up to attack me, and I’m forced to ________ back. That’s why I’m here, doc. This isn’t just  any ol’ ________ that could be put down. You have to ________ him. He might be unique.

Microstory 992: Astrophysics

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For the most part, I didn’t get a lot out of the classes I took in college—or high school, for that matter—but there were a few gems. There was a math class that taught me some interesting real world skills, focusing less on solving equations, and more on time and project management. There was a fascinating linguistics course that was just an hour of looking at examples of words in language after language, and trying to comprehend its grammar. I also took a fun astrophysics course that was tailored towards people who weren’t planning on going into the field. More classes should be like that. I understand that college is meant to help you figure out what you want to do with your life, but there aren’t a lot of people who hated algebra all through grade school who are suddenly going to become world-class mathematicians. I ended my own dreams of becoming an important scientist when I started failing science in eighth grade. A love of science remained in my heart, but I ignored it, because I felt that I needed to work on my writing. This class, however, reminded me why I was interested in the subject in the first place. I have horrible retention, just as a general rule, which is why I like to watch my favorite shows at least twice, so I couldn’t tell you anything I learned in this introductory physics class, but I remember loving it. I remember it igniting new fires of my canon. It, combined with my binging of the Stargate franchise a few years later, opened a plethora of science fiction stories that I wouldn’t have been able to tell without it. Because of Tolkien, I thought I was a fantasy writer, but that isn’t me at all. I’m all about space and time travel. Everything in this universe is physics, but I single out astrophysics because it involves things that are so foreign. I want to go out and see the rest of the cosmos; not that I’ve seen everything on this world. I want to live on alien worlds, and seek out alien life. Hmm, I guess I just want to be on the Enterprise.

Microstory 979: Teachers

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As I’ve said, I think the education system is flawed. This is a major issue, in different ways, all over the world. Each student is expected to learn certain things, regardless of their interests or strengths. Even at higher levels, where there’s more freedom to study what you want, they have needless restrictions. For instance, when I was working towards my linguistics degree, there was no class that taught geolinguistics. I didn’t care about phonemes and sound frequency. I wanted to learn who speaks what languages, where, at what times in history, why it came to be like that, and how surrounding languages influence those speakers. I should have been given the opportunity to look into all that stuff, instead of wasting my time diagramming sentences. With all this technology, that could have been possible, but humans are notoriously fearful of change. The reason we study the way that we do is because the way we do it is perfectly suited to really intelligent people. An individual with a high intelligence quotient does really well when confronted with new information via lecture, or reading, and then evaluated through achievement testing. Not everyone benefits from this, and I daresay most don’t. So why, when only the few function well under these directives, do we do it like this? Well, obviously because people who come up with these methods are smart. Normal people don’t reform education, because we’re generally not in a position to do so. We’re so looked down upon by the elite that we wouldn’t be able to make any headway.

Now is the part where I make it clear that I blame none of this on the teachers. They are teaching under guidelines set forth by others, and coming from a history of having been taught this same way when they were students. To put it bluntly, it’s all they know. To put it more bluntly, it’s often all they’re allowed to do. Teachers have some leeway to choose their own curriculum, but there are still a ton of expectations on the district and national level that require the majority of their attention. Standardized tests, entry exams, and college acceptance thresholds prevent teachers from going too far off book. The arts generally have a little more flexibility, but not nearly enough. At a certain point in the history of the world in some of my stories, education shifts to the future. Students begin to learn somewhat independently. They’re given the tools they need to explore topics of their choosing, and work at their own pace, using AI instructors. They still have authorities guiding students, but instead of calling them teachers, they use the term facilitator, because they’re meant to help their students stay on track. A student, for example, wouldn’t be allowed to spend years learning only underwater basket-weaving. They are still expected to grow, and become well-rounded contributors to society. These highly-tailored study modules are supplemented with instructional videos, group discussions, and group activities, so don’t think of this as dystopian mindlessness. We can do this, but we have to want it. Teachers are great. They shape young minds, and get them prepared for their future careers. The problem is that they’re bad careers. The way we do business on a general level is inefficient, and predominantly meaningless. Most jobs are stupid, and either should be done by a robot, or just not done at all. We should be teaching our kids to excel in their own ways, and chase their passions, rather than simply expecting everyone to be able to solve for X by age Y. I don’t know where we start with this; whether we transition to a more fulfilling labor structure, or if it begins with the teachers themselves, but something has to be done. Teachers have to be allowed to help students be their best selves. The elite can handle anything, so we need to be focusing our resources on helping the average, and underprivileged.

Microstory 948: Clean Meat

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I love meat. Meaty, meat, meat. Here it goes down; down into my belly. Mm-mm-mm. I love cow meat, and pig meat, and bird meat, and sea meat. When I was younger, I was willing to eat any kind of animal, as long as it wasn’t lamb or veal. Why those exceptions? Well, they’re babies, and I think eating babies is monstrous. But maybe that’s just me. Other than that, I was up for anything. Cow tongue, escargot, caviar; whatever, I’m a pretty adventurous guy. I never had any interest in becoming a vegetarian, but somehow at the same time, I always wanted to be a vegetarian. I never liked the fact that something had to die so that I could live, but I did it, because I needed the protein. Things are different now, though. I’m educated enough to know that there are vegetarian protein options, I’m living late enough in history for those options to be readily available, and now all I need is the money. I would love to go full vegetarian right now, but I just cannot afford the substitutes I would need to stay healthy. If I had better self-control, and wasn’t a recovering binge eater, I might be able to get away with it. After all, the majority of your diet is meant to be carbohydrates anyway. That doesn’t work, though, when the you can’t get full just from eating fruits and vegetables, and ended up eating thousands of calories a day to compensate.

A few months ago, one of my cousins was being celebrated for having graduated from college. Family from all over came to the area for a lunch, which was being catered by a local fried chicken place. They came in with this huge tin of dark chicken meat, and I wanted to throw up. My favorite food had always been chicken, but that looked so...Usonian (you would call it “American”). It was excessive and wasteful; it kind of opened up my eyes. I decided I wanted to change my lifestyle, but I knew I couldn’t just go cold turkey (pun well intended). Ironically, I’ve actually kept the chicken in my diet, along with other fowl. I also continue to eat seafood, though it’s fairly expensive in landlocked Kansas, so it’s mostly birds. Chicken. It’s mostly chicken. All I did was cut out the mammals, which is perhaps the easiest way to explain it. I’m saving up money so I can by a car, but once I have that, I’ll start saving...so I can adopt an older child. But maybe someday down the line, I’ll be able to afford—and consistently stomach—all those nuts, lentils, tofu, quinoa, and yogurt. Hopefully soon, though, I’ll have an even better option. They call it clean meat. You know me; I’m great at naming things. Seriously, using my linguistics resources to figure out how to name things is a special skill I have that’s surpassed by few others. I’m the one who came up with the term materianet, for anyone reading this in the future when it has finally replaced the ridiculously-sounding “internet of things”. Clean meat is an odd choice of words, and an entirely politco-marketing one. It’s not any cleaner than regular meat, but it is less cruel. What they do is extract a few cells from a living creature, let that creature continue to live, then engineer the sample to grow on its own. It’s a fascinating process that is presently still in its infancy, but it is showing real promise. Imagine the staunchest of carnivores capable of devouring any meat they’d like without having killed a single animal. Despite all those restaurants that make you wear use forks for soup—or whatever other crap they do—this really will revolutionize the food industry, and I’m extremely pleased with the prospect.

Microstory 942: Language

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When I was in seventh grade, I found myself failing English class. I was blowing off every assignment, and bombing every test. It got to be so bad that my teacher had to call my parents, which led to an awful fight. It was the weekend, and another test was coming up, but I had no way of studying, because I didn’t bother bringing the booklet home with me. My dad made me start calling my classmates one by one from the student directory to ask them if I could borrow their booklet, make a copy, and take it back. I don’t remember how many I had to call—which, as an undiagnosed autistic boy, was about the worst thing you could make me do—but I remember there being several of them. I cracked open the booklet, and was surprised at the material. They called it Greek and Latin Roots and Stems. You mean to tell me the string of letters -ing means “continuous action”? Well, of course it does. And -ed denotes the past tense? It couldn’t be anything else. In a matter of weeks, I ended up with one of the highest grades in the class, because this was my field of study. I just didn’t know it yet. Over the course of the next few years, I would regularly start failing English class, only to make up for it once I actually agreed to pay attention, and try. Still, I was into my second year of college before I discovered Linguistics. People in movies often struggle to decide what kind of classes they want to take, but it wasn’t so up in the air for me. There were tons of general requirements, and you had to take a great deal of classes at a certain level or higher. And in order to reach that level, you had to take prerequisites. I’m not saying we all took the exact same classes, but there was quite a bit of overlap, regardless of your major. I ended up falling in love with the linguistics course that fulfilled these requirements, and decided to minor in it, while continuing to major in film. Though, by the time the next semester rolled around, I had realized that no one in the film department liked me, and I was better off switching completely.

True to form, I kept failing my classes, but this time I had to retake them, because college professors are far less forgiving than high school teachers. Still, because I basically started as a junior, with nearly the maximum number of transfer credits, I was able to graduate in four years, just like most people. And here I am today as what’s easiest to describe as a permanent office temp. I have a multitude of duties, at dozens of different locations, and not a single one of them is at all related to the study of linguistics. The name of my degree is, every single time, misleading to people who ask for it. Some think it means I know every single language, which would be tough, since there are/were literally thousands of them. Those who understand it better, want to engage me in an intellectual conversation, which I am unable to provide, because I was a horrible student, no matter how you look at it. I know a little about a lot of things, but I don’t know much about any one thing; not even linguistics. And don’t even get me started on what kind of job people are meant to get with this degree. The answer is, the one I have right now, asshole. Most people don’t have their dream job, but thanks for quite deliberately making me feel like a failure. Fortunately for the people who paid my way through school, the entire ordeal was not technically a waste of time. As a writer, I use the skills and knowledge I picked up every day. My foundation allows me to seek out answers without being completely lost, unlike when I try to research, say, how to repair an automobile. I love language. I love all its little twists and exceptions. I love learning about who speaks what languages, where, when they started, and why. I find it fascinating that the term a napron was so decisively mistaken for an apron that few people even know the truth behind it. And I love that English is the only Germanic Romance language in the world. Language isn’t everything, but if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t be able to talk about all the other things that matter.

Microstory 821: Fits and Starts

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When the bladapods first cropped up around our world, the first people to get a crack at them were the scientists. They wanted to research their biology, and behavioral habits. No one can blame them, really; they’re fascinating creatures. I mean, chlorophyll knives for legs? Who knew evolution could come up with something so elegant and dangerous? Of course we all know how this research turned out. They multiplied out of control, and released gases capable of altering both genes and reality itself. One thing those original researches hadn’t considered was the possibility that these bladapods were actually sentient, and could be capable of communicating with us on an intellectual level. One woman realized this prospect, and urged the Association International de Bladapodologie to fund a new department, one designed to crack the code for a theoretical language deemed bladapotango. Suddenly there was a huge influx in open positions at the AIB, and I was proverbially first in line. As a linguist, I was always fascinated with the similarities and differences in languages. The chance to study the communication patterns of an entirely new species was too good to pass up. Unfortunately, the bladapod gas had transformed my perfectly normal-sized vehicle into one of those tiny motor cars that children drive around the neighborhood. Since I’ve been trying to find a decent job for years now, I’ve not had the money necessary to upgrade to something more reasonable. The upside was that the bladapod gas had only quartered my car’s top speed, so it was now sitting at a healthy thirty-five miles per hour, so it could be worse. It’s frustrating not being able to drive on the highway, but since it fits in the cargo hold of a commercial jet, I was able to take it with me to AIB headquarters in Martinique. Bonus: it now has a perpetual motion engine, so it never runs out of power. I discover, however, that the car operates better while within the North American bladapodosphere. It still works, but it keeps stopping and starting, forcing me to keep coming up with new little tricks to get it to start again.

I finally make it into mall, which is where my interview is. Apparently there was literal crapstorm over the actual headquarters last week that has yet to be fully cleaned up, and the mall is being used for continuity of operations. Honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t postpone, or even just cancel, the interview, but I certainly am grateful. I’m driving through the mall, trying to find the right retrofitted storefront, when I hear a commotion across the way. I drive up to it out of curiosity and find a man throwing a violent fit. He’s covered in mud, screaming at people, and flailing his arms all around. He almost looks like me, but he can’t be me, because I’m me. I shrug it off, and try to focus on being ready for my interview. I find where I’m meant to be, and the interview seems to be going great. Then, without provocation, a mudfooted ragepanda crashes through the wall from the store next door, and starts trampling over me. I’m overcome with anger, and start fighting it with my bare hands. They tell you to stop, drop, and roll when exposed to emomud, but the only people who say that are the ones who’ve never experienced it themselves. I don’t know how I ended up traveling back in the past, but needless to say, I was unable to break the timeloop, and did not get the job. To make matters worse, I didn’t get all the emomud washed off my body before trying to drive my car back to the hotel, so now it gives me lip, and won’t take me anywhere unless I give it compliments.

Microstory 783: Joy Girl

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I wanted to take a moment clear a few things up about my approach to sexuality in my stories, because the way they do things in these worlds may be a bit confusing. As I believe I’ve said before, homosexuality has never been condemned on these so-called “fictional” worlds. People tend to identify as bisexual, recognizing sexual acts as independent of love and/or procreation, but not always. But this sex positive position goes deeper than the acceptance of diversity. In our world, we have strong opposition to certain positions, like exotic dancing, pornography, and prostitution. Even the word pornography means “obscene painting”. Likewise, the word prostitution has a longer history of referring to dishonorable harlots than it does the job itself, meaning you could be called that in the 16th century as an insult, before sex workers adopted it the term more formally. But that’s just us, and it’s not how it has to be. In other universes, these people are respected for their dedication to their trade as much as a stockbroker, or a coal miner. Dancers and adult film performers are treated as artists, who provide a necessary and specific contribution to the world of entertainment. Similarly, sex workers provide a service for clientele in a more intimate, and usually private, setting. They don’t use that vile word, instead choosing to be known as paramours, which carries with it an interesting linguistic twist, in that it’s a portmanteau of para + amour, signifying their status as more ‘parallel’ to love, rather than in true love. There’s a lot of stigma surrounding these jobs, a lot of it evidence of ignorance. They say that the only reason a woman would walks the streets is because of some psychological trauma they’ve been unable to come to terms with by “healthier” means. The most common of these claims is daddy issues, but setting aside my fiction for a moment, I want everyone to look at their wall and see if there’s a fucking psychology degree on it. If there is, I then want you to look back at your records and check if you ever even had a fucking conversation with these women to make a reasonable conclusion about their motives or history. To be more general, let’s all take what any pundit or commentator says about the mental capacity of a politician, celebrity, news subject, or subculture, with a grain of salt, and appreciate the fact that that is not goddamn how science works. To be sure, this stigma does not exist in my stories, and I do this to illustrate how our world could look like if you rethought your judgy intolerance for one second. People claim there’s a lot of abuse, danger, a drugs attached to these jobs, and that’s true. But those are peripheral consequences of the laws and opposition towards them, not the industries themselves. If these things were both legal, and socially accepted, plus regulated, do you think those actual crimes would continue? Localized data suggests otherwise. This became more of a tirade against our (in)justice system, when I set out to simply codify my narrative canon, but if even one person starts questioning their judgy attitudes towards other people’s choices, then maybe I’ve helped, even only in some small way. This story is dedicated to all the joy girls out there, empowered by their sexuality, not ashamed of it. They are the best kind of wild cards.

Microstory 591: Visitors Have Yet to Leave Ship

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Hundreds of years ago, our ancestors found a way to travel from their homeworld to this one. They didn’t necessarily have to. Sure, there was some water here, but not as much as there was on the eighth planet in the solar system, Aziïr...or on two of the moons of gas giant, Polavia. At the time, Keres was uninhabitable, but it had a lot of potential, and so they set about a journey to transform themselves into an interplanetary civilization. Over time, they were able to actually become an interstellar culture, but Keresites have generally remained here. The Great Flood brought this planet the greatest exodus humans have ever seen. We’re descended from those refugees. Since then, we have made this world beautiful. Gardens spread all across the surface, with new life being created by the Azi water. This is now our home. No one living today has ever been alive at the same time as anyone who was alive during The Great Exodus. Now there appears to be some kind of new possible exodus that we can’t explain. A massive black ship, large enough to blot out the sun, has arrived in our atmosphere. After coming out of the green simplex dimension, it has done absolutely nothing. We have attempted to communicate with it, and even tried to access the vessel, but have found no success. We don’t know if they are humans from an exoplanet, or aliens from another galaxy, or even our own descendants from the future. The fact is that we know nothing about them, and this has caused a stir amongst our populace. Already the government urges civilians to remain indoors. Every city has deployed an emergency fleet of armored vehicle drivers to deliver rations to every household. Please note that each and every household will be serviced by this network. Do not leave your residence without true necessity. Anyone with educational backgrounds in engineering, electronics, plex mechanics, physics, rocket surgery, anthropology, xenopology, linguistics, or related field is being asked to contact their local representative for the possibility of assisting with our exploration into this development. We still don’t understand what we’re dealing with here, but if Keresites work together, there’s nothing we can’t get through.

Microstory 396: Transhumanism I

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Self-actualization

I have a good reason for putting these last few after self-actualization, rather than before, where you might have expected them. The next two are so far beyond what we understand about the world that we can’t truly know how they’ll work in the end. The one after that isn’t really something I personally believe in, but it’s a theoretical step. The last one is something no human has ever witnessed, or really even accurately imagined, in the history of time. I keep bringing up transhumanism because it’s a very important subject to me. I want to discuss it in more depth, and I want to be able to use 793 words to do it. Transhumanism is all about living forever. Some say that this is not true immortality, and that it’s best described as the longevity escape velocity, but no. I have a bachelor’s degree in linguistics, and I’m here to tell you that immortality is a perfectly acceptable word to use in this scenario. Most words have more than one meaning, so stop being so narrow-minded and ignorant just because you’re trying to be trendy. Whew, that wasn’t directed at you, more at my futurist community. The fact of the matter is that there is no real reason for death, or most of the other restrictions we have so far experienced in this world. We don’t know what the mind is, or how to create or move it, but we will. One day, long after artificial intelligence has been created, you will be able to transfer your consciousness to a new substrate. Now, people don’t like this, and they think it goes against God’s will. That’s all well and good, but remember that I don’t worship your God, or any God, so don’t stop me from living as I choose. From my perspective, anyone who chooses a life that ends in death might as well be choosing to kill themselves. Remaining a standard human when more efficient, healthy, and lasting options are available is tantamount to suicide. I mean, you don’t reject antibiotics when you’re sick do you? That would be insane. I wouldn’t respect anyone who does that. I’ve also heard people worry that immortality would render life meaningless, but it won’t. Death does not give life meaning, what you do in life is what gives it meaning. Stay tuned for more tomorrow.

Transhumanism II

Microstory 272: Perspective Forty-Seven

Click here for a list of every perspective.

Perspective Forty-Six

We’re trying to build an artificial neural network. The ultimate goal of our project is to develop artificial lifeforms that resemble humans, but are far superior in practically every way. Our organization is extremely secretive of this department, and goes to great lengths to prevent so much as whispers that we even exist. Everyone has a cover job in some other department, but we are the elite. At least, everyone else in the department is; I’m different. Most of my coworkers are programmers, linguists, geneticists, and other highly educated people. The guy I get along with the most is a neurobiologist. I’m nothing like any of them. I am speculative fiction writer. The company founders decided that, along with people necessary to actually develop a true artificial intelligence, they would need someone who understood the ramifications of such a thing. They were worried about what happens following the singularity; a point in technological progress where machines become so powerful and self-sufficient that predicting later events is nearly impossible. But writers have been doing just that for ages. My contribution comes, not from the stories I’ve written myself, but those that I’ve enjoyed by others. I’ve not read or watched more science fiction than anyone else in the world, but I’m right up there in the high numbers. It’s my job to analyze decisions that the rest of the team is making, and suggest decisions for the future. In that regard, I work closely with our ethicists. We’re there to determine what place in society an AI would hold, and what rights it would have. Most importantly, we work on ways to make sure our creations will have rights in the first place. We’re not trying to create robot slaves. We’re trying to create life. From scratch. The scientists are actually working on the chemicals and materials that might be used to generate an actual brain and body. Very Victor Frankenstein, I know. But they’re amazing, and I can’t wait to see what we come up with.

Perspective Forty-Eight

The Odds: Twenty-Four (Part II)

On Saturday, February 24, 2007, I went off to the movies to see five films in a row. I saw Music and Lyrics, The Number 23, Rush Hour 3, The Astronaut Farmer, and Reno 911!: Miami. In that order. Now don’t worry, I don’t have an eidetic memory. I wrote it down on my calendar. That’s about as many as I could see at the theatre (yes, that’s how you spell that word) in the town where I went to college before they closed for the night. Trust me, I timed it out many times. That second movie was terrible; just the worst. It’s about a guy who is obsessed with the number 23 (obviously) and seems to think that it’s controlling every facet of his life, or something like that. He turns out to be a serial killer, or something. I don’t really remember, and it was really confusing because...eeso baaad. The plot was evidently lifted from a preexisting theory known as the 23 Enigma. It is probably one of the most famous examples of apophenia, which is the assumption of patterns that do not exist. 23 only seems like it appears all over the place because you’ve had the notion that it does, and every time it does show up, it confirms your suspicions. This psychological phenomena, and related conditions, are some of my favorite that do not involve language.

I decided to call this story The Odds because it’s kind of about the lottery, but perhaps I should have instead called in Tangent, because there is no way you have any clue just what the hell is happening here. There’s this psychological phenomenon involving language called logorrhea where you basically can’t stop goddamn talking. And so I’m using this story as a mean of spitting out my thoughts as they come, mashing up my personal experience with this bullshit story about winning the lottery. I don’t really think it through that much, and I believe that it shows. Just remember that you don’t have to read it, and I fully expect this to be my least popular stories, besides that godawful Siftens Landing; Jesus Christ. What am I doing right now? I mean there’s meta...and then there’s this. This thing. It’s freaking me out. Are you freaking out?

Moving on. The 23 Enigma is important, because that’s what this lottery story all comes down to. For the most part, numbers only hold relevance as you expect them to. Twenty-three doesn’t appear any more often than any other number, but someone arbitrarily settled on it once, and now people can’t get away from it. For me, however, Twenty-Four is one of the numbers. Twenty-three actually is too, because it’s one of the LOST numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42). But Twenty-Four was the very first number I chose, long before I had any aim to play the lottery. Are you ready for another tangent story about my childhood? No? Good. Here we go. When I was thirteen years old (don’t worry, that’s not one of “the numbers) I was...crap, I need to go back further. When I was a little baby child baby, I fell in love with science. I had a laboratory in our basement that was really just a microscope, a book on genetics, and some graphing paper. Dexter would be disappoint. At some point I was going to be a Quantum Physicist, a Biochemist, and a Meteorologist. Respectively, I chose these from Quantum Leap, a science field trip I took in fourth grade, and doing well in meteorology in seventh grade. Tell me please that I’m not still such a basic bitch.

Come eighth grade, I start failing science class. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s all because of balancing chemical equations. Damn. I remember standing in the hallway where the grades were posted for a couple minutes, rapidly resigning myself to the fact that science was absolutely, positively, inarguably not my thing. But writing was. I was always good with language, and don’t remember having to learn the alphabet. I had intended to write science textbooks, but now I needed to shift my paradigm over to writing full time. I experienced two years of experimentation; Quantum Leap and Harry Potter fanfiction, mostly. Following a trip to the Florida Keys in the summer of aught-two (yeah, I’m using that word wrong, but I don’t even care cuz I’m a rebel), I found inspiration for my first novel, and things really got started. But one thing I determined during that experimentation period was that I would always write in terms of Twenty-Four. My novels would each have twenty-four chapters, my anthologies would be published in collections of twenty-four, and—after I started writing television—my TV series would contain twenty-four episodes per season.

Despite all of the rules I’ve set up, broken down, rearranged, and twisted throughout years of honing my skills, the Rule of Twenty-Four has held strong. In fact, I believe that it is the only early thing to survive my tenure thus far (save for the Anti-magic clause of 2003), and I see no reason to change it now. There isn’t really any specific reason why I chose it, however. Sure there are twenty-four timezones and hours in a day, but can you think of anything else? I just now looked it up on Wikipedia and found there to be very few uses of the number significant enough to publish online. It’s a nice enough number that’s easy to utilize in everyday life, so it’s not outcast like Eleven is, but I dunno. I like it despite how great it is, and I don’t think there’s anything more I can say on the matter. I have to get ready for class, but I may write more tomorrow after reading it with a fresh...perspective. Heyo, perspective reference. I can’t be stopped! If you read this in published form, independent from my website, then that doesn’t mean anything to you. But I’m currently running a series of microstories that each belong to a different character’s perspective. Now does it make sense? Crap, I’m gonna be late. Hey guys, I’m back. It’s tomorrow and I’ve added very little to this story. I guess I’ll just have to settle with what’s here. I know you won’t like it, so I just hope that you’re at least okay with it.

Do you see that? I think Forty-Two is on his way.

Microstory 205: New Measurements

I realize that I’ve mentioned a few what you must believe to be measurements, but are not completely sure. You see, my stories take place in a universe where such things are part of common knowledge, and very few people can act as “audience proxies”. I try to go over things, but at the same time, I want to organically bring them up, rather than just spell them out. If you were telling a story about Barack Obama, you wouldn’t first explain that Obama was the President of the United States of America between the common era years of 2009 to 2016. Everybody knows that...mostly. But since the secondary purpose of this site is to give you an introduction to my new world, I’m just going to go at it; in this case, giving you highlights of a fictional (or is it?) measurement system. The smallest positive unit of measurement is the yoem. It is equal to 2.442 millimeters. Multiply that by 10 and you get the deam which is 2.442 centimeters. Multiply by 10 and we have a sheam: 24.42 centimeters. Get the picture? Continue to multiply by 10 for a geara: 2.670603674541 yards (8.011811023623 feet); demra: 26.70603674541 yards (80.11811023623 feet); shemra: 267.0603674541 yards (801.1811023623 feet); and nayko: 2.442 kilometers (8,011.811023623 feet). That last one is what my characters use in place of a mile, and naykos per hour are informally referred to as neels. Units of mass follow a similar linguistic and mathematical structure starting with the yoemtra: 2.442 grams; deamtra: 0.86139 ounces; sheamtra (sheels): 0.538369 pounds; gearatra: 5.38369 pounds; demratra: 53.8369 pounds; shemratra: 538.369 pounds; and naykotra: 2.691845 tons (5,383.69 pounds). So the next time someone asks you how tall you are and how much you weigh, after punching them in the face for being rude, you can say something like 7 sheaman and 24 gearatran. Oh yeah, by the way, if you want to pluralize something, you add -an to the end (or just -n if the singular ends in a vowel). Did you not already know that?

The Shape of Things to Come

I know that you are just absolutely dying to read my first flash fiction piece. Well, you're going to have to wait until next Saturday. Why? Because I want to start this new process at the beginning of the week; not somewhere in the middle, or the end. This coming Monday, one new microstory. The last one I wrote was...on November 18? Wow, it's been that long? What a hack. Anyway, I have no idea what it's going to be about, but that's the exciting part. I could lie to you and tell you that I will write only one a day, on the day of publishing, but I won't. I may start a bank, like I sometimes do with my nanofiction. I can't risk not having anything to produce. I'm actually probably going to write one today, as well as start on the first installment of "The Advancement of Mateo Matic".

I've really been thinking hard about whether I want to do something on Sundays. I've already made a list of potential YouTube videos. They would be pretty short, and would just involve me talking to the camera. I don't know how easy/hard it is to superimpose text, insert pictures, and use other editing techniques. Each one would be on a different topic that gives me the chance to explain some interesting, ridiculous, or misunderstood linguistic concepts. There would also be a few in there that are really just about logical fallacies that people make. Topics include contranyms, chicken or the egg, and unusual idiom origins.

Here's my problem with a YouTube series, I am not an actor. I don't have charisma, I have trouble getting my lines out, I'm not that attractive, and worst of all, I have a terrible voice. It's nasally and annoying and hard to understand. I would probably call it my worst quality, and I have autism! But if I want to be famous, which I do, then perhaps I ought to do it anyway. I'm supposed to be stepping out of my comfort zone, as is everyone. I still don't know...

In the meantime, here is a picture of my late digger baby, Sophie. Because reasons.