Random Story – Three quick stories

These are just three, odd little stories from my life.

Serial Killer

Years ago, I showed up to the apartment of the woman I was dating at the time, and she told me that she had been watching some daytime talk show and the topic was something like, “Ten signs your child may grow up to be a serial killer.” She said I had nine of the signs.  I almost asked, “What am I missing?” but I knew better. 

Honestly, this shouldn’t be taken seriously.  First off, I’m a white male, so that’s probably two signs right there.  Not to mention she was the type that once she thought something, just about no amount of evidence would convince her otherwise.  I’m sure if I had asked her what signs I had, probably five or six of them wouldn’t be true or would be taken waaaay out of proportion.

Would you lie to me? 

In my senior year of high school, we got class rings.  (I don’t know if schools still do that or not.  At the time they seemed important, but mine is probably in a box in the attic.  If I had to guess, I’d say the last time I saw it was probably twenty-some years ago when I came across it cleaning.)  Anyway, this one friend of mine would take his ring off in study hall and leave it on his desk.  When he wasn’t looking, another friend would grab it and start passing it around.  I sat at the end of the row, and I usually ended up with it.  This happened day, after day, after day.  One day, our friend snagged the ring and started passing it around, but I DID NOT END UP WITH IT.  But this guy told the teacher that I had his ring.  So she asked, “Steve, do you have Guy’s ring?” I honestly replied, “No.” She then asked, “Would you lie to me?” After a second or so, I honestly answered, “Yeah.” One of our friends – who I think did have the ring – almost fell on the floor laughing.  The teacher wasn’t sure what to say to that. 

Killing time

Over twelve years ago, I worked in a lab for a company that made industrial lubricants.  Sometimes, I’d run tests that took twenty or so minutes to set up, and then they’d run for an hour and there wasn’t anything I could do while they ran.  So I ended up with a lot of free time.  One of the things I’d do to kill time, was go to the store room to “get supplies.”

In the store room there were a bunch of plastic binding strips that had been used on the packaging just laying around.  Out of boredom, I started weaving these into the holes on the metal shelves.  

As you can see, I still have pictures of these.  I did this over several months, and as far as I know nobody ever mentioned it.  I wonder if they’re still there.

Where I stand on things

The idea for this blog began, like, five years ago.  It all started when a guy I used to be friends with and I had arguments on Facebook.  Basically, the way I somewhat jokingly put it, since I didn’t believe the current practice of capitalism wasn’t the bestest, most perfectest thing in the universe, I was just a dirty socialist who wanted to use the dark arts to resurrect Stalin.  At some point I realized that many of our disagreements stemmed from him just assuming my position on matters.  I didn’t agree with him, therefore I must think X, when in reality I’d often think Q.  And I didn’t fully understand his position on matters, but a large part of that was him refusing to tell me, even after I repeatedly asked him to.  Admittedly, part of why I wanted to nail down some of his positions was so I could point out any contradictions I could find.  I figured all of this out about the time he unfriended me.

Of course, part of why my positions on things aren’t easy to understand is because I don’t hold to some grand philosophy which dictates my views.  I know a couple of times he’d call me something like a, Ramsey-style neo-socialist, or something, and I’d have Google that to see what that even meant.  And often, I’d have to look up the explanation to see what it meant.  Decades ago, I noticed that people were rarely just X.  They were often X, subsection 3, paragraph VII, or whatever.  Which isn’t so bad, but often the X, 3, VIIs will see the X, 3 VIs as “The same as Hitler.” It seems so many disagreements – especially amongst those you’d think would be allies – are just battles over minutiae. 

So I’ve pretty much abandoned trying to explain myself in some neat, little box with fourteen layers of description.  Instead, my … ideology I guess, is summed up with stuff that would fit on a bumper sticker.  Which is probably annoying in that instead of having a solution for a specific problem, I’m more likely to wonder why that problem exists in the first place.  Or, I’ll want to solve some other problem that, two or three dominoes later, solves or greatly reduces the original problem. 

I’ve spent some time trying to explain that better, only to get more and more in the weeds or just sounding pretentious, so let’s move on.  These are the bumper sticker sayings that best explain my views on … life in general.

No ideology is perfect.

A sad moment was when I realized my former friend was an ideologue, because I view ideologues as … basically idiots.  The way to defeat an ideologue is to show that their ideology isn’t perfect.  If there was a perfect ideology, it would obviously be perfect and there wouldn’t be any questions about it.  No such perfect ideology exists, therefore, ideologues are defeated.  No matter how great your ideology is, there is a flaw in it that you conveniently overlook.

A year or so ago, I came up with the idea that in the Race of History, backing any ideology – be it capitalism or Catholicism – is backing the wrong horse.  The Racetrack of History is littered with dead ideologies, from feudalism to the Ancient Egyptian religion.  Why should the horses still running have a different fate?  I’d say it’s better to back the racetrack, the bedrock of reality.

And yes, I realize how stupid it is of me to say my ideology is that no ideology is perfect.  That’s the flaw I’m overlooking.

People are people.

I don’t care what skin color, gender identity, sexual identity, whatever identity you have, humans should all be treated like humans.  Admittedly, some humans are assholes, and I do my best to avoid/ignore them.  And while I will say I hate some groups of people, what I mean is I hate their ideology.  If pressed on the matter, what I really am is often just confused and saddened that so many people can’t see how idiotic/repugnant their ideology is: Flat-Earthers and Trump supporters, for example.  If they changed their ideology and stopped being assholes, I’d no longer hate them. 

Meaning is where you find it.

I think it was back in my college years, one day I was thinking about clones and wondering at what point in the cloning process could you “abort” the clone.  My clumsy answer to that evolved my stance on abortion.  I did write a blog a couple years ago with some of my thoughts on abortion, which explains things a bit more.  But the point of this is that my understanding of a real-world issue was changed by me probably thinking about the plot of some mediocre scifi story.  It’s often the little, personal, things that change us the most.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

This is basically my economic philosophy.  Would this policy help the poorest not be as poor?  Good.  Would this policy make the richest even richer?  They don’t fucking need it.

Probably a lot of people readily agree with that, but for those who don’t, let me give you an example.  I’m a writer with ebooks for sale.  For people to buy my ebooks, several dominoes need to fall.  They have to read English, have an interest in the types of stories I’m telling, have access to the internet, and to have enough disposable income to buy my books and enough free time to read them.  The people who have to work 80 hours a week just to buy food, even if they’d love my books, can’t afford to buy them.  So if the minimum wage was raised, that would increase the number of people who could afford to buy my ebooks.  And if I made enough money from my ebooks sales, I could afford to buy things I wanted.  All of which would make for a stronger economy. 

Do not knowingly harm others.

Our technology is evolving faster than our laws that govern the use of that technology.  Thinking about this, I realized that either we’ll continue making more specialized laws that will likely be outdated by the time the politicians get around to voting on them, or we could try simplifying our laws to broadly cover situations.  I wondered what the broadest, most simplistic law there could be, and I came up with: Do not knowingly harm others.  I thought that was a pretty good answer, until I started thinking about it.  What actually counts as harm?  Big things like murder and rape are clearly bad, but what about hurting someone’s feelings?  Years ago, an ex-girlfriend broke my heart.  Yes, that’s a part of life, but she did it in a way that left scars that, honestly, still haven’t healed.  She chose to do some things, even though a reasonable person would know I would be hurt by them.  If this law was in effect, could I take her to court?

Art is never finished, only abandoned. 

That is a line attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci.  And as a writer who’s read a story forty times and will still occasionally find a typo, I think that’s a perfect description of art.

Thoughts on Starship

I typed this up and scheduled it to post just before Starship’s second test flight.

My thoughts on Starship?  Meh.

I was extremely excited in 2008 when SpaceX became the first private company to put a payload into orbit on their Falcon 1 rocket.  As a big space supporter, I saw this as the first step on the road to the space future I’d been dreaming about.  I figured it was just a matter of maybe a decade or so before we’d see private rockets launching private astronauts to private space stations.  I was super excited for the future.

I was a bit bummed when the Falcon 1 was retired, but the Falcon 9 would be a better rocket to launch people on.  And the first fights were of the cargo Dragon capsules which would lead the way to crewed Dragons.  So I was still super excited.

Now, I know that the space business isn’t known for speed.  That it takes years to design, and build, and test craft long before they even launch.  But even knowing that, there were some unnerving things with SpaceX.  At some point, I read that they had contracts to launch 60 satellites in the next five years, which works out to a launch a month.  At the time, that was a pretty tough launch cadence.  But at the time, they had launched only five or six times in a year.  And sometime in this “They need to speed things up” thinking, they started making changes to the booster and the fueling.  Which is great, but for awhile it seemed about every mission was delayed because they had issues with the densified fuel.  As an armchair rocket person, I wondered why they didn’t just build five or six of the boosters they knew worked to keep launching satellites to get through their backlog, and to give them some time to work on their new boosters on the side.  And I’m sure there are a hundred reasons not to have done it that way, but from the outside looking in it seemed like a missed opportunity to keep the launch cadence up while still experimenting.

Still, these experiments lead to boosters being recovered and launched again, and again.  Reusable rockets are fantastic.  They are a clear necessity to the space future I want.  And yes, now it’s a slow week if only one Falcon 9 launches, but most of the flights are for Starlink.  Don’t get me wrong, space internet is a great idea, but far from the private space stations and moon bases and stuff I’ve been waiting for for … over a decade now. 

And yes, the cargo Dragon got upgraded to a Crew Dragon, and they are flying astronauts to the ISS and to orbit, but I read they stopped building Crew Dragons.  Which I don’t understand.  There are people who will pay to orbit the Earth, and I’m sure there are friendly nations who would love to have missions with their astronauts, and someday there will be private space stations needing craft to carry crew to.  And again, as someone from the outside looking in, it’s like, “You have something that’s working, why aren’t you continuing with it?”

To step back a bit, there’s the Falcon Heavy.  Which, when it was announced, I was thrilled by.  I’m a Return to the Moon person, and surely the Falcon Heavy could land rovers or cargo to start building up a moon base.  But then, it will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  And it finally launched, but then we only had like four launches in five years.  Now, I understand it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse of why build a satellite needing this much lift if a rocket capable of that lift isn’t flying yet.  But we’re coming up on six years since Elon’s car was launched.  And yes, we’ve had four flights this year, with one more scheduled.  But it almost feels like they spent all this time to build this big rocket, and then found it hard to find things to launch with it.  Which seems like a bit of a misstep. 

And now to Starship.  After years of waiting for the Falcon Heavy, I knew not to get too excited for this even bigger, more complex rocket.  And after all this time, I don’t really care.  Like, either it will be like the Falcon Heavy and start to hit its stride four or five years from now, in which case I might be more excited, or it will hit its stride in a year or two by launching Starlinks.  What would get me excited is if they announced a plan to launch Starship with an expendable upper stage so they could put this Skylab type space station up.  That I would like.  But nothing else about Starship seems that exciting.  Yes, there’s the Human Landing System for Artemis 3 and 4, but what happens beyond that?  Will it just be for those missions, or will there be more to build up a private moon base?  You’d think, if they had the systems to land people on the moon, why not continue to do that?  But I’ll point out, they apparently stopped building Crew Dragons.

What is the future of Starship, and of SpaceX?  They’ve pretty much stopped talking about Mars, which I always found annoying.  (I mean, I am the author of The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars.) But is their future just … Starlink?  It’s tough to get excited for this big rocket if I don’t really care what it will be used for.  It’s like, even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I don’t really care for the SLS.  Because I want a continual, sustained presence on the moon, and a billion-dollar rocket that launches once a year, maybe, isn’t how you do that.  And I don’t know if Starship will do that.  Honestly, at this point I’m more excited for New Glenn, only because, while I don’t know what they’ll do with it, it doesn’t have as much baggage as Starship or SLS. 

I think all of this comes down to me being tired of waiting.  I think there are to be fourteen missions that will go to or flyby the moon in 2024.  Seven of these will launch on Falcon 9s, two on Falcon Heavies, and one on Starship.  And even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I’m not overly excited.  Probably because for decades I’ve heard plans on moon bases, but all have fallen through.  When the next humans land on the moon, I will be happy, but there will a bit of dread in the back of my mind that it will be another Apollo Program where we stop going after a couple of missions.  I don’t think I’ll feel like the future is finally here until there is a permanently crewed Lunar base.  Will Starship play a role in that?  Who knows.

Random Story – For want of a lug wrench

This is just an odd little story from my life.

One Saturday in February, maybe 2006, I was going to meet with some friends and go to a matinee movie and then get some dinner.  The theater was only five minutes or so from my apartment, but we had still planned to meet fifteen or twenty minutes before the movie started.  I got in my car and backed out of the parking spot, but something seemed wrong.  I pulled back in and got out to see that my left front tire was flat.  Not having time to change it, I went back in and called one of my friends – who had a cell phone – to ask if he could pick me up.  And by the time he dropped me off that night, it was dark, so there was no point trying to change my tire then.

On Sunday, after lunch I planned on changing my tire.  I’d had my car for a couple years by this point, but I had never needed to change a tire on it before.  When I got it, I had looked to see if there was a spare, and there was a small one and a jack, and I didn’t think any more about it.  Well, I went out and opened my trunk, and got out the spare, and the jack.  I looked around, but couldn’t see a lug wrench.  I knew some jacks had a handle that doubled as a lug wrench, but that wasn’t the case with mine.  So I had no way to take the old tire off.  Fortunately, I had a can of Fix-a-Flat which I think had been part of an emergency road kit I got for Christmas a few years earlier.  Unfortunately, since it was the middle of February, it was frozen solid.  I took it in, but a couple hours later there was still a solid block in it.

Thankfully, Monday was President’s Day and I had the day off from work.  The Fix-a-Flat had thawed and I went out and put it in the tire.  And nothing happened.  So I called another friend – who lived closer – to ask if I could borrow a lug wrench.  He came out and I soon had the old tire off, and found out why the Fix-a-Flat did nothing: there was a foot long slice on the inside of the tire.  The strut, or something, had broken and there was a nice sharp chunk of metal that sliced though the tire.  I’m not entirely sure when this happened, because you’d think I’d hear something snapping and a tire being punctured.  Maybe it broke just as I parked Friday night, and there was a slow leak with the slice happening when I pulled out on Saturday.  Who knows.

Anyway, I soon had the small spare on, and set off to the Sears Auto Center about a quarter mile from the theater.  My friend followed me in case something happened, but I made it safely to the store.  I then spent an hour or more – on my day off – waiting for my car to be fixed. 

Sometime that week – possibly even on Tuesday – after work I went to the Walmart near where I worked for a lug wrench.  I can’t remember why I didn’t just get one at Sears.  Probably I just wanted to be done with it all, and didn’t think about getting my own lug wrench until I got home.  I think I had to walk down an aisle two or three times before I finally saw them on the bottom shelf.  I bought one, walked out to the parking lot, and threw it in my trunk.

I was about to say that I haven’t used it, but one time two or three years later, I was going to the apartment of the woman I was dating at the time, and as I drove along I thought something wasn’t right.  I pulled over and found one of my tires was flat.  I’m pretty sure it was on the left side, but I don’t remember which one.  I was soon able to get the spare on, and I think where I pulled over was within sight of the Sears Auto Center, so I went and got my tire fixed.  I think I just picked up a nail or something somewhere, so it wasn’t a huge deal.  Though it did ruin date night.

When I got my new car, five or six years ago, I checked and I think the handle for the jack that came with it is also a lug wrench, but I threw my once used lug wrench in the trunk.  I’ll keep it with me for every car I have from now on.

2023 Election ebook sale!

I know that a lot of people are tired of being told that every election for the past decade is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER!  But it’s true.  The fastest way for the anti-democratic forces to seize power is if The People can’t be bothered to vote.  And they have too much power as it is.  To keep our democracy, we need to vote, in this election and every election. 

The tiniest part that I’m doing is having a sale of five of my ebooks.  All I ask – and there’s no way for me to know – is that if you’re an adult American you vote in this Election.  Here’s a site to help you find your polling location.  And you don’t have to wait until after you vote, if you grab my books now, you can have something to read while you wait in line. 

If you’re an American under 18, you can still get my books.  All I ask is that once you turn 18 you register to vote.  Information on how to do that should be on your state’s website.  You can also grab my books if you’re not an American.  I just ask that you participate in your country’s political system, because the anti-democratic forces are not limited to the US.

The following five ebooks will be free to download from Friday, November 3, through Tuesday, November 7.  The title links take you to the US site for the book.

 

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

 

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories is a collection of five, short, scifi stories to provide a sample of my writing.

A being from the distant future with almost unlimited powers comes back to help Ian Steele make the world a better place in “The Most Powerful Man in the World.” One bookstore customer has an entirely different reason for wanting books in “Black Market Books.” “Motherhood” tells the story of Thomas Gillespie, the surrogate mother for a baby AI. “Storyteller” is about an author thinking his book into existence. And “Deadworld” is about the alien world humans are reborn on – in alien bodies – after we die.

 

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and more using less than 1,000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

 

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

 

The Future is Coming

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

More ideas for space missions

I’ve done a few posts – A fun idea for a moon mission and A Space Junk Prize – about space missions I would fund if I had a few billion dollars I didn’t know what else to do with.  The point of these missions – printing bricks on the moon and putting up satellites as targets for companies to attempt to deorbit them – wouldn’t be to have some big flashy mission that gets all the news, but would do the boring groundwork to help further humanity into becoming a spacefaring civilization.  I was wondering what other missions I could think of, and this is what I came up with.

Solar shield

There is an idea, that if we can’t get enough greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere soon enough, we could put a giant mirror in space to reflect enough of the sunlight to cool the Earth.  One version is for one giant mirror, while another is for thousands of smaller mirrors working together.  My idea is a test for the second.

I figure there would be at least three small spacecraft – launched on different rockets so if there is a launch failure you can still test with two – that would each fly out to the L1 point and deploy a ten-meter shield.  Possibly, each spacecraft would have different shield materials or deploying patterns so we can test what works best.  The whole point of the test would be how these solar shields react and if we can control several spacecraft flying in close formation.  These wouldn’t be big enough to make any effect combating climate change, but if we ever needed to do this then we’d have some real-world data. 

This whole idea of climate engineering is very contentious, with some saying we need to be doing something now, to others saying we need to conduct tests so that if we do decide we need to do something we’ll have some idea of what to do, and still others saying we shouldn’t even do any tests.  As a complex issue, there isn’t a simple answer.  And if it’s any help, the data we’d get – formation flying, unfolding techniques, whatever – could easily be applied to other space activities that don’t have anything to do with climate engineering so it wouldn’t be solely a climate engineering mission.  Although that probably wouldn’t matter.

More space junk ideas

I thought of the solar shield idea, but I didn’t think that was enough for a blog.  So I wondered what else I could do, and I went back to thinking about space junk and wondered if there was another project that would help us combat that.  What I came up with would be a mission that would give us some real-world data on the smallest of space junk.

The mission would be a cubesat put into a very low orbit, one likely to only last six months or so.  This cubesat would have a telescoping rod twenty, or thirty centimeters long.  The end of this rod would be an electromagnet.  Attached to the magnet – by a small bit of metal – would be a fleck of paint one centimeter square with some design on it.  The rod would telescope out, then wait twenty or so minutes to make sure any vibration had damped out.  Then the electromagnet would be turned off and the rod retracted. 

On the cubesat would be a camera with a flash, that would take a photo every five minutes or so.  All this depends on how much memory the cubesat has and how often it can downlink the data.  The onboard computer would use the design on the fleck to figure out the distance to it and it would have tiny gas thrusters to try to stay within so many meters of the fleck.

The point of all this would be to see how flecks of paint actually interact with the near-vacuum of the upper atmosphere.  We probably don’t have much data on this.  Ideally, the cubesat could stay close enough to see if the fleck just disintegrates when the air density gets so high, if it burns up like a meteor, or if it slows down gradually enough that it just falls out of orbit.  But in reality, with the different drag between a fleck of paint and a cubesat, the cubesat might run out of fuel trying to stay close enough to see what happens.  In that case, and if the cubesat will still be in orbit for a month or two, then maybe it could be used as a target for the more aggressive methods of deorbiting satellites: ways that might cause the satellite to break up.  In higher orbits that would just make the space junk problem worse, but hopefully any debris resulting from the test would deorbit within a few weeks. 

At first, I figured such a mission could be jettisoned by a Cygnus as it was getting ready to deorbit, because I figured it wouldn’t be worth it to use a rocket to put such a small satellite into such a low orbit, but then I realized that one of the main things of science is repeating experiments to see if we get the same results.  So instead of a rocket putting one cubesat in a low orbit, it could put ten or however many will fit.  Some of these could have identical paint flecks, to see if similar things happen, or maybe thicker flecks, or maybe instead of a fleck of paint it could be a screw or some other random bit of junk the cubesat may have a better chance of staying close to.

Some would say this would just be me burning money, but hopefully we’d get some interesting data out of it.

Random Story – The naked neighbor

This is just an odd little story from my life.

My first apartment was in this old building that had been split up into six or seven apartments.  The first floor on this building must have had ten-foot-high ceilings at least, because it was a very long staircase up to the second floor.  I spent way too long trying to describe the second floor set up, so I decided to just make this little diagram.

 

You go up the stairs, to a landing, where there’s a door to an apartment.  There’s another apartment, tucked back in a little nook of some sort.  To get to my apartment, I had to go down the hallway and up another set of stairs. 

Anyway, I believe I had just gotten back after going home for Christmas, so it was early afternoon and I was tired from driving for six hours.  I was trudging up the stairs carrying a bunch of stuff, when I hear a noise.  I look up, and I see the neighbor from Apartment 2.  Well, I see a hairy gut and a hairy leg.  Fortunately, the area in between was behind the corner of the nook.  But, I only saw him for a second, because he rushed back into his apartment.

I didn’t want to know, and tried to forget about it, but the next day he knocked on my door and through broken English said he was sorry and that he had been drunk.  We laughed, and I hoped that would be the end of it.

A couple months later, I think I was at a friend’s playing poker, and it was 3 in the morning when I finally got home.  I was walking up the stairs, when I heard a noise and looked up.  And that’s when I saw a hairy ass rush back in the apartment and slam the door.  After that, I kept telling myself, “If you’re going up the stairs and hear a noise, DO NOT LOOK UP.”

I don’t know if he was a nudist trapped in a clothed world, or if he just got naked when he got drunk.  I’m pretty sure those were the only three interactions I had with him.  For which I’m glad. 

The Uncapped Pen, at last!

 

Over a decade ago, I had the idea of putting together a collection of stories dealing with writing: authors arguing with their muse, or struggling with having too many ideas, or too few, or whatever.  But for reasons, I set it aside, until a few years ago when I figured I’d finish it.  Well, it took longer than expected, and just as I was about to put the final polish on, there was a writer’s strike.  While I’m not a member of the Writers Guild of America, it felt wrong to publish a book about writing during their strike.  But since the strike is over, I’ve now published The Uncapped Pen.  You can find it on Kindle for $3.99, or equivalent.

Short story – “Dust to Dust”

Warning, while not graphic, this story does contain content that many will find disturbing.

“Dust to Dust”

Three juvenile delinquents stood in the small waiting room when Maria Cuevas walked in carrying three small buckets.  She walked up to the nearest boy whose name tag read “Cyril Motlanthe” and handed him a bucket.

“What’s this for?” Cyril asked, not taking the bucket.

“Did you eat breakfast this morning?” Maria asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then this is for when you puke.” When Cyril still didn’t take the bucket, Maria said, “You either puke in the bucket, or stay and mop the floor.”

Cyril glanced at the other two kids with a smirk before snatching the offered bucket. 

Maria then handed buckets to Soad Kaya and Vladimir Kopacz who only grinned when they took theirs.

Maria stepped back and looked at them.  “My name is Maria Cuevas.  I’m the Assistant Plant Manager here.  Now I don’t care how you screwed up to get sent to the Pedogenesis Department, or as we call it PedDep, on Career Day.  Instead of going to the hydroponic farms, or to Apollo to study governance, or one of the spaceports to watch a launch, you were sent to the department you’ve probably never heard of before.  But PedDep is one of the most important departments on Mercury.  It’s also the shittiest.  Which makes it the perfect place to punish those convicted of minor offenses.”

“So why are you here?” Soad asked, to grins from her compatriots.

Maria chuckled.  She had lost track of how many such youngsters had stood before her, thinking they had asked such an original question.  “Oh,” she replied, “I guess I’m a bit of a sadist.” She paused to let that sink in a bit, before adding, “I don’t know how many kids I’ve seen standing there thinking they’re so tough and important, only to watch them leave with their shoes squishing with vomit.”

That wasn’t the kind of response they had expected.  It knocked some of the arrogant glow from their faces, replacing it with the slightest touch of green.

“Now,” Maria continued, “when you discovered you were being sent to the Pedogenesis Department, did any of you bother finding out what we do here?”

“You make dirt,” Vladimir said.

Maria stepped forward and glared down at him, even though he was only a few centimeters shorter.  “How old are you?”

Vladimir glanced at the other two then replied, “63 Revs.”

“If you were an adult I would slap you.” Stepping back she told all of them, “We do not use the ‘D-word’ here because it is too base.  In PedDep we create soil.”

Maria watched the three share confused looks with one another, then said, “Follow me,” and led them into the Main Shredding Room.  The room was ten meters by five with double doors on each of the short sides.  Along the long wall opposite of the door they entered, was a metal panel that could slide up and down.  It was up and blocked the view of the shredder and what was to be shredded. 

Maria let the kids look around the nearly bare room before beginning, “In simplest terms, soil is a combination of minerals from rocks and organic matter.  Every day, over a kilometer’s worth of tunnels are excavated around the planet.  Any metal or mineral useful for industry are extracted from the debris, we collect what we want, and the rest is dumped up on the surface.  So we have plenty of rock minerals, but very little organic matter.  It wasn’t much of a problem for the first colonists because they set up hydroponic greenhouses which don’t need soil.  While most of our food is still grown hydroponically, it’s hard to make a hydroponic football pitch.  So all the public parkland on Mercury is planted in soil we make here.  As well as all the potted plants people have in their homes, since soil for them is just easier than a bunch of little hydroponic systems.

“At first, soil was made using ground up rocks mixed with composted sewage and plant wastes; those being the only sources of excess organic material in the early days.  But humans weren’t the only animals to come to Mercury.  Early colonists brought chickens, rabbits, even goats.  Their manure is also used to make soil, but what were we to do when those animals died, or were butchered for meat?  All those bones and organs like brains and lungs became a new stream of organic material to create soil.”

Maria pointed to one of the double doors.  “Through there,” she explained, “is the Receiving Room where material to be processed is loaded onto a conveyor belt.  The belt comes in to here,” she patted the metal cover and continued, “where it comes to our first shredder.  The shredders are a series of rotating drums with diamond coated teeth.  In a couple of minutes this first one can chop a truckload of animal carcasses into chunks no bigger than ten centimeters by two.  Further drums breaks things down into pieces only a few millimeters in size.  These are the first steps of turning waste organic material into soil.” As Maria had spoken, the kid’s faces had lit up.  It was somewhat disturbing how the Career Day kids always seemed interested in watching stuff be shredded.  But she knew they would quickly change their minds.

“Every few days we process a truckload of animal carcasses from the various farms and butcher shops around the planet.   We also handle animals from the zoo as well as pets.  But there is one other item we process which you’ll see today.

“Some people,” Maria explained, “usually for religious reasons, request that when they die they be put out onto the surface.  When the sun rises, it incinerates their body and their atoms can be carried away by the solar wind across the solar system, even out into interstellar space.  Other people, knowing of our constant shortage of organic matter for soil, choose another option.”

Maria pushed a button and the metal panel dropped away.  Behind thick safety glass was a conveyor belt leading to the two massive drums, all motionless.  On the belt lay three naked, human corpses.  The youngest was over eighty Earth years old. 

“You’ve got to be joking,” Soad said.

“Why would I joke about such a solemn business?”

“They’re people,” Soad said.

Maria waited for a moment, then stated, “They were people.  Now, they’re just several hundred kilos of dead, organic matter.”

Maria turned away from the kids and explained, “Their families have already said their goodbyes, so we can get started.” She hit another button and the two drums began spinning.  Despite the thick glass, a low whine came into the room.

Once the drums got up to speed, the conveyor belt began carrying the corpses towards them.  Maria was watching the conveyor belt and seconds before the first body went in she heard the distinctive sound of someone vomiting behind her.  This was quickly followed by two more.

Maria waited until the three bodies had gone through before turning around.  All three kids were standing at the opposite wall with their backs turned.  Maria frowned when she saw several splashes of vomit that had missed the buckets.

With a sigh, she went to a storage cupboard and grabbed three new buckets.  She told them to set their buckets down and take a new one.  While Soad and Vladimir didn’t look anywhere near the Shredder, Cyril just glanced at it and retched into his new bucket.  That almost made Soad and Vladimir vomit into theirs.  Maria rolled her eyes and went back to the cupboard and got three more buckets.  Maria had learned long ago it was better to leave even partially filled buckets with their odors behind. 

She led the kids into the next room.  Here, the smaller shredders made smaller pieces, but they were set close enough together that one couldn’t really see what was being shredded.  Not that the kids even looked.

“At this stage of the process,” Maria explained, “water is added to the material stream creating a slurry.  This makes further processing easier.”

Something about that made Vladimir retch. 

After grabbing a new bucket from another cabinet, Maria led them down a flight of stairs to the next room.  “Here the slurry comes to series a settlement pools,” she explained.  “In this first one, bits of bone, teeth, beaks, hoofs, whatever fall to the bottom where they are recovered.  There really isn’t much we can do with them – any minerals that we could extract we already have plenty of from excavating tunnels – so they are ground into a powder which is then usually mixed in with cement for use in general construction.”

Before leading them to the next stage of the process, she said, “If it makes things easier, from this point on you’ll just being seeing material from earlier runs.  The last load we ran yesterday came from a chicken farm.”

In the next room there were a couple of technicians checking some equipment.  They shared a brief smile with Maria about the look of the kids.  While they still looked a tad green, they’d apparently already vomited everything in their stomachs. 

Maria pointed through a thick window at a five meter long cylinder.  It was on a slant, with the bottom a meter lower than the top.  “That’s the Solid Separator Cylinder.  Inside is a smaller cylinder with walls made of a very fine mesh.  The remaining material from the settling tanks it pumped in at the top, and the inner cylinder rotates at a high speed.  The centrifugal force squeezes most of the fluids through the mesh and into the outer cylinder where it’s collected.  The remaining material – or pulp – falls out of the bottom onto a conveyor belt.”

Maria pointed to a technician working near the cylinder, but she wasn’t sure if any of the kids even looked.  “Do you see that technician?  They’re wearing ear protection because the Separator is very loud when it’s running.  The reason we can’t hear it is because,” here she tapped the window, “this isn’t just one window.  The Separator is actually in its own room that’s surrounded by a two centimeter vacuum gap.  A vacuum is the best sound proofer in the universe.”

Vladimir actually chuckled at that, which brought a slight smile to Maria.

“The fluid that is collected,” she continued, “is pumped into huge storage tanks.  Its processing is pretty interesting, but can only be done when the sun’s in the sky.  Up on the surface, we’re still some two weeks from dawn, and I doubt you want to wait that long.  But once the sun rises, the fluid will be pumped under pressure through specialized pipes on the surface.  Inside the pipes, the fluid will be heated to several hundred degrees.  The intense heat breaks apart most of the chemical bonds of the complex molecules.  In goes a mix of blood, fats, even microbes, and out comes a stream of carbon dioxide, methanol and other smaller molecules.  They’re sorted and collected to be used however they are needed.  Even the iron from the hemoglobin in blood is collected, but more as a way to keep it from contamination other processes than for industrial use.

“Our next stop is to view some of the composting rooms.” Maria led them down another flight of stairs and along a short hallway.  The room they entered was five by twenty meters.  Along one long wall were five observation windows, each looking into a circular room.  Each contained a mound of dark material.  In one room, a slowly rotating blade was turning over and mixing the mound, while water was being sprayed onto another.

“Like with the Solid Separator Cylinder, the composting rooms are separated from the rest of the facility with vacuum gaps.  But it’s not for sound insulation, but odor insulation.  You may think your stomachs are empty now, but if you caught a whiff from any of those rooms you’d be surprised what you’d dredge up.” Over the last few minutes, the kids had been starting to look better, but that comment checked that.

“In the Composting Rooms we mix three streams of materials.  There’s the pulp from our Separator, there’s plant wastes from either the parks or hydroponic gardens, and there’s partially treated sewage.  The sewage plants take part of the sewage stream and send it to the hydroponic gardens and we get the rest.  But we don’t just throw everything we have together.  Soil to be used to grow grass on a playground is different than that needed to grow grass for a pasture, or soil used to grow trees.  There are different nutrients in the three material streams, so we adjust the amounts of each depending on what type of soil we need to make.

“Into the pile we add various bacteria which start to break down, or decompose, the material.  This turns complex structures like plant stems or flesh into small bits plants can use to grow.  The decomposition process releases heat which helps to kill off any pathogens that arrive through any of the streams.  The rooms are monitored to make sure the piles are at a temperature and oxygen level to the bacteria’s liking so they keep working.”

Maria pointed at the mound being watered.  “That pile started a week ago.  In less than a Rev, it will be turned into a rich compost.  Once it’s fully composted, it will be baked just to be sure no pathogens survived.  Then it can be used to help fertilize what’s already been planted, or it can be mixed with rocks ground up in a separate processing stream.  We then have a basic soil ready to fill in the parkland of new tunnels.”

Maria shrugged.  “That’s a quick overview of Soil Creation 101.  I could show you all of the various processes, but I’m sure you’ve seen more than you care to.  If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you where you can clean up and I’ll answer any questions you have.”

Five minutes later, they all sat in a small conference room.  The kids had washed their faces, and Maria had gotten herself a cup of coffee.  Taking a sip, she asked, “Now, do you have any questions?”

None of the three had been looking at her, but now Soad did and asked, “Why did you show us that?”

Maria took another sip of coffee before answering.  “For most of human history, humans lived in small bands of usually related individuals.  These tribes only survived if all the members knew that they could trust and rely upon one another.  That was also true for the early space colonies where one idiot screwing around could have killed everyone.  You three,” Maria’s finger swept passed all of them, “are idiots screwing around.  I don’t know the details of your cases, but the usual reason kids are sent here are for bullying the other students, selling narcotics, disorderly conduct, shit like that.  While stuff like that won’t kill everyone on the planet, it’s still thought best to nip such actions in the bud.  The reason we hold on to some bodies to run through on Career Day is to show screw-ups like you that some people – even in death – are doing more to advance life on this planet than you are.”

“All I did was cheat on a test,” Cyril said.

Vladimir barked out a laugh.  “You hacked the system to change your grades.”

After a moment, Cyril explained, “That’s a kind of cheating.  But being forced to watch someone be … shredded for that seems a tad cruel and unusual.”

“I thought you all turned away,” Maria said.  “Nobody was forcing you to watch.”

“Semantics,” Soad said.

Maria shrugged.  “True.” She looked at Cyril and said, “So, instead of just facing the consequences of not studying, you decided that the rules shouldn’t apply to you.  Back in the tribal days, someone like that was usually banished.”

“So seeing people being turned into … soil is supposed to keep me from hacking?”

“No.” Maria let the kids look confused while she took another sip of coffee.

“Then what was the point?” Soad asked.

Maria smiled.  “All three of you are from the Celaeno Corridor, yes?” After the three nodded, Maria continued, “The central park of Celaeno was planted about ninety Revs ago.  I can’t be certain, but it’s most likely that some of the first people to set foot on Mercury went into the soil there.  In life they opened up a new world.  In death, they gave us a way to make oxygen, and flowers, and a place for children to run and play.”

Pointing in a random direction, Maria said, “The majority of adults in the tunnels know what we do here, but they don’t want to think about it.  They want to think that soil is … just something that happens.  They don’t want to think about what, or who, goes into the soil because it reminds them of their mortality.  Thinking about one’s mortality makes one wonder what mark they’ll leave on the world.  At some point growing up, most people realize that their only bit of immortality will be in how they are remembered.  There are few Shakespeares and Gandhis who will be remembered for thousands of years, but even they will fade away in time.  Most of us just have to do our best with our families and friends and try to leave the world better than we found it. 

“So why show you people being shredded when you’re not yet adults?  In the hopes a large dose of mortality will make you reconsider your lives.  Just remember that one day – sooner than you would like – you’ll die.  Will you be remembered as a jerk who didn’t play by the rules, or will people actually miss you?”

Maria pointed at the door.  “Go out that door and turn to the left and you’ll be back at the entrance.  Whether you go and make the world a better place or not is all up to you.  Choose wisely, for you only get one shot at it.”