Slaying dragons

A month or so ago, I saw some article where some billionaire said something like, “You peasants can’t understand how tough it is to be rich.” I mean, that wasn’t what was actually said, but that seemed to be their real thoughts.  I read that, and I thought, You know, in days of yore, there would be brave knights who would come and slay the foul beasts that hoarded gold and laid waste to the land. 

I liked that image, and for a couple of days I tried to figure out some story I could write with it.  While I didn’t find a story idea, I did realize what I would do if I had a few million dollars I didn’t know what else to do with.  I would create an organization, The Knights of … some term that hasn’t already been taken by some other organization or metal band.  This organization would hire a bunch of investigative journalists, forensic accountants, and a ton of lawyers.  And the point of the organization would be to … metaphorically slay dragons.  Probably in a monthly, online newsletter.

Are you some company who doesn’t pay your employees overtime?  Do you use some accounting slight-of-hand to underreport your profits to the IRS?  Do you use your obscene wealth to basically buy a politician?  Our job would be to make sure everyone knows that. 

Now we wouldn’t just repeat baseless gossip.  The key point for the organization would be that everything we report would have been double and triple confirmed to the point it would hold up in a court of law.  And if the gossip was some company was doing something illegal but we couldn’t prove it, we would come out and say that we were unable to prove it.  I guess I should say we wouldn’t slay all the dragons, just the ones we could prove were committing crimes.  And I bet, most dragons would still be upset by that.  Curious.

The things I think about: tasty humans

This is an idea I had years ago that I wrote up, but didn’t do anything with.  I think I wanted to do a series of these blogs, but never wrote any more and this just got buried under all my other half-finished blog posts.  I recently discovered it, and figured I might as well use it.

I think this is a really weird idea and someone – possibly me if I ever get around to it – could make a good story out of it.  But here goes.  What if, one day these aliens (We’ll call them Aliens X) show up and announce that after scanning a human with some medical device, they believe these other aliens (Aliens Y) would find humans tasty.  Aliens X would then ask if they could purchase some human meat to sell to Aliens Y to see if they find it pleasant and would like some more.  Now Aliens X are not evil.  They don’t want to gather up humans in their prime and send them to a slaughterhouse, all they are asking for are medical waste and donated corpses.  What I was thinking about, was if Aliens Y do find human a delicacy, would people sign contracts so that when they die, Aliens X would pay their families so many Galactic Credits per pound?  Would there be a market?  Would you sign up for it?

Short story – “Change for the Better?”

“Change for the Better?”

“Let me get this straight, you want to preach the word of God to …”

The young man interrupted with, “Yes, it’s my purpose in life.”

“Right.  You don’t run a megachurch, do you?”

“No.”

“Have a cable show?”

“No.”

“Radio show?”

“No.”

“Website?”

“No.”

“How did you plan to reach people with your message?”

The young man smiled.  “I will walk among them.”

“Listen, I understand.  What you want to do is noble and all, but if you want to be part of the big leagues, you’ll have to put aside such rank amateur ideas.”

The young man frowned.  After a few moments he nodded.  “I understand.”

“Great.  Let’s start you off with something simple, an Instagram page.  Now, what was your name again?”

“Jesus.”

***

I first wrote this story back in 2009 and posted it on a website that is still up but the formatting is messed up.  So I figured I should repost it.  The point of the story is simple: if Jesus came back today, would he open a megachurch or would he slip on a pair of sandals and go among the people?

Short story – “The Gift of Vomit”

“The Gift of Vomit”

I turn off my phone and set it back on the dresser.  Just as I snuggle back under the covers, I hear my upstairs neighbor’s alarm going off.  The muffled blare goes on for several seconds before blissfully stopping.  For a minute or so I hear the vague sounds of him moving around before quiet returns.

I take a deep breath, and hope to go back to the dream I was having about my ex-girlfriend’s sister. 

My poor neighbor will be trudging through the rain on his morning commute, while under my warm blankets things are so peaceful.  I’ll have a nice relaxing day, all because I told my boss I threw up breakfast.

***

This was originally published in 2014 on a now defunct website.  Of course, back then if you did call in sick it probably wasn’t that big of a deal.  Now you’d probably get bombarded with an endless stream of “Nobody wants to work anymore” BS. 

***

I started reposting these stories on the third Thursday, and that the day this goes up happens to be St. Patrick’s Day is a complete coincidence.  The story isn’t titled “The Gift of Green Vomit” after all.

Rural socialism

I live in a very rural area.  It’s about fifteen miles from where I live to where I work, and my preferred route has about ten miles of back roads where I’m more likely to see deer than cars, with the final five miles on a main road.  Where I live is also very red.  I believe 80% of my county voted for Trump in 2020, which was a few points higher than in 2016.  I don’t see as many Trump flags as I used to, but I don’t know if they’ve finally been taken down or were just put away because of winter weather. 

Anyway, a few months ago as I was going to work, I wondered how many people actually live on these back roads.  And it’s hard to say because there are numerous little roads going off into the woods and I don’t know if there’s one house back there or ten.  There are also numerous camps in the area and when you just see glimpses of a building through the trees as you drive by it’s hard to say if that’s a camp or a house.  To make things easy, I’ll just say that there’s 100 people living along those ten miles.  There’s probably about the same on the five miles of main road, but that does bring you in to the business side of town, not the residential side.

Since these are Pennsylvania back roads, they’re … okay.  I’ve driven on worse, I’ve driven on better.  But I was wondering how much it costs to pave these roads.  Now, I started looking online, but it seemed every site I found gave different numbers, from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a million.  The high end were for actually building roads, but even just simply repaving an existing road is expensive, especially since these roads wind around and over hills.  Without finding an actual bill – or driving an expert along the roads so they can calculate how much it would cost – there’s no firm way for me to know how much it would cost to repave these back roads.  For simplicity sake, we’ll take a low end of $100,000.  Oh, that’s per mile.  So for the ten miles of these back roads, that would be $1,000,000.  Of course, maybe we only repave it every decade, so that means the 100 of us who live along these roads need to come up with $100,000 every year, or $1,000 each.

That’s just for these roads I said are my preferred route.  When the weather gets bad, I take another route which is five miles of back roads and ten miles of main road.  I don’t normally take this route because it brings me to the other side of town which I then have to go through.  So that $1,000 a year is just for the decadal repaving of this one ten mile section of road and doesn’t include stuff like plowing in the winter or any other maintenance.

So how do these roads get paved?  Well, the government takes taxes from heavily populated areas and redistributes it so that us rural folk aren’t left with the whole bill.  Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my neighbors used these roads to go to some “Taxation is theft!” rally where they scream that the tyrannical government never did anything for them.

Some thoughts on Elon Musk

I’ll start by saying that I’m a SpaceX fan.  I watched their first successful Falcon 1 flight and I probably jumped for joy at the thought at the beginning of a new era in spaceflight.  And at first, I was a Musk fan.  I think my biggest complaint was his focus on Mars.  I’m a Return to the Moon person, who thinks the best way to make humanity a spacefaring civilization is to go mine the asteroids and build the rotating space stations and ships we see so often in fiction.  In that type of world, Mars is more of a dead end.  I do support the scientific exploration of Mars, I just don’t see much future in colonizing it.

So I was never one of those who thought of Musk as the perfect sage.  But over the last few years, whenever I see him trending on Twitter, I groan and wonder, “What asshole thing did he do now?” My … respect, I guess you’d call it, for Musk has nosedived over the years, but the final straw came when I realized something.

There are multiple spacecraft in orbit of Mars right now.  The reason we have so many is that we don’t have tricorders, or sensors, that we can just point at an object and get 80,000 pieces of data about.  We have cameras that can only take pictures in a dozen or so wavelengths at only certain resolutions.  If we want super detailed images, that’s another camera.  If we want a look at subsurface stuff, that’s an entirely different instrument like ground penetrating radar.  Is there any radiation?  Well that’s another instrument.  And since these spacecraft were all paid for by governments, they try to get the broadest amount of science for their buck.  Meaning if someone really wanted to build a Mars Colony, they’d probably need a dedicated spacecraft with specific instruments to look for needed resources or potential hazards to help narrow down a site.  The Mars Orbiter Mission apparently cost less than $100 million, which is about what Musk makes when he sneezes.  So why hasn’t Musk paid to have the first privately funded interplanetary mission?  Some might say that it’s better to wait until the Starship is flying so they can send a big spacecraft to Mars.  But we can learn a lot with a small spacecraft that could be launched on a Falcon Heavy, which could lead to better choices on what to allocate on a future Starship. 

I’m starting to wonder, is Musk’s talk about Mars just a politician’s campaign promises?

I think it’s time for a Twenty-First Century economic theory

Roughly speaking, there are two big economic theories in the world today: capitalism and socialism.  A lot of people spend a lot of time talking about the successes and failures of each.  Nobody really cares about my opinion, but it is that both are failing ideologies. 

Now some will be screaming “How has capitalism failed?” Well, let me ask a question.  Let’s say there is a company named WidgetCo that makes widgets.  These widgets are so wondrous that everyone wants one, and WidgetCo makes a lot of money selling them.  But they make their widgets so well that they almost never breakdown, and soon everyone who wants a widget has one, and WidgetCo goes out of business, leaving room for DoohickeyCo to enter the market with their groundbreaking doohickey.  Now, in the ideal of Capital C Capitalism, is WidgetCo a success?  I’d say yes.  They made a healthy profit off their widgets, how is that a failure?  But is that how things work in the real world?  In the real world, WidgetCo would make less quality widgets that breakdown, and then they’d stop making parts, or stop giving tech support, all to force people into buying the – basically the same but with some cosmetic changes – Widget2.  Then, since they have all the money, they corner the market on thingumabobs to prevent DoohickeyCo from making their doohickeys.  Is that the ideal of capitalism?  I’d say that’s more Capital G Capitalism (for greed).  An argument I’ve had for why the current system isn’t the greatest is that I never realized the point of capitalism was to create a plutocracy. 

Now, since I’ve had some valid criticism of capitalism as practiced, some will just yell, “That’s just because you’re a dirty socialist.” Wouldn’t those people be surprised to learn that I think socialism is failing as well.  I think Capital S Socialism is pretty good.  The problem comes with the implementation.  Say you start with the radical socialist idea that nobody should starve.  So you start with all the numbers from 2015, of where the people are, where the food is grown, how it’s transported and distributed, etc.  You crunch all the numbers and run simulations, and by 2017 you have the perfect system … on paper.  You then need to actually put it into place, which miraculously only takes until 2019.  But the end result is that in 2019 you have the perfect system in place to feed everyone … in 2015.  And then 2020 happens.  I think a lot of the horror stories told of socialism are a result, not of Capital S Socialism, but Capital B Socialism, for bureaucracy.  Just as with power WidgetCo can turn monopolistic, any socialist system can turn bureaucratic and then be unable – or unwilling – to change when the situation changes.

Here’s an idea for a better world.  Everyone gets 1000 Credits a month.  One bedroom apartments are capped at 500 Credits a month, and a month’s worth of groceries can be 100 Credits, if you get the generic cereal, for example.  Basic and emergency medical care is covered, but a lot of elective stuff isn’t.  To pay for all of this free stuff, all able people have to do X hours of community service each year.  You could either work for a few hours a week, or eight hours a day for a couple of weeks in January and be good for the year.  If you want a bigger apartment, or a car, or whatever, you need to get a job to earn extra money.  Some will cry that people need to contribute to society and they’ll point to some kid playing video games and just call them a slacker.  I wonder what those people think of these assholes who play golf all the time while the money their parents made makes more money.  Are they contributing to society?

I think my better world idea would be great.  I have no idea how such a system would be implemented, and know it would probably only work for a decade or two before technological advance would crack it apart.  It’s only a matter of time before autonomous vehicles will drive around checking for potholes.  When a pothole is detected, another autonomous vehicle will show up, block off traffic, and fix it.  And these autonomous vehicles will be built in automated factories, which will be supplied from automated mines.  In this system, does someone need to own all these vehicles?  Would we still need to pay taxes to pay for this system?  And this won’t just be for roads.  There will be robots building solar power stations, houses, picking food, transporting it all, etc. 

Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, died in 1790.  Karl Marx, often seen as the socialist poster boy, died in 1883.  Even if you think their ideas were perfect – they weren’t – they were Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century ideas.  We live in the Twenty-first.  Shouldn’t there be a new economic system that takes automation and bitcoin into account?  It doesn’t even have to be completely new.  I’d say this new system should be about 40% Capital S Socialism, 30% Capital C Capitalism, and 30% something new.  What do you think?

Looking to make a little extra money?

Over the years, I’ve tried a few sites where you answer surveys or whatever and earn some type of token.  Earn enough tokens and you can cash them in for gift cards or even a direct deposit into your bank account.  Several of these sites have gone belly-up, but there are two that I still use.  These are InstaGC and Swagbucks.  To be perfectly clear, those links are my referral links, meaning if you click on them and sign up, I get a bit of a bonus.  But before you sign up, be sure to read all the terms and everything.

How much money you can make depends on how much time you can put into them.  Back when I was unemployed, I probably put an hour or so a day into them.  Now that I have a “real” job, I only spend a few minutes per week on them, and therefore only earn about a $1 a month.  Which is not much, but I look at it as after a year on these sites, I can easily pay for a month of Netflix. 

First city to go full autonomous taxi

I am a big supporter of autonomous vehicles.  Not only are they an aspect of “The Future” that we’ve been waiting so long for, but they will make life better for so many people.  I live – I like to say – a short drive from the middle of nowhere and if I need to go to work or a store, it takes half-an-hour to get there.  But if my car just drove itself, I’d have that extra time to read, watch YouTube, or write. 

Unfortunately, we’re not at the point of fully self-driving cars on country roads.  They’ll start in cities, which got me wondering which will be the first city with a self-driving taxi service.  I don’t mean when some tech billionaire gifts ten self-driving cars to their small hometown so it now has a self-driving taxi service, but some city – like New York or London – that currently has a taxi service switches over entirely to a self-driving service.  My top picks are some city in Japan, China, or Germany.  Japan because they like robots and have a population issue, and China and Germany to show off their technological might. 

Whatever city goes first, it will be closely watched by the rest of the world, and as long as there is no major issue there will be a rapid – maybe ten years – transition to self-driving taxis in other cities.  Mainly because they’ll be cheaper to operate because they don’t have to pay drivers.  They may even cut fares to knock the people protesting the “dehumanization” off-balance.  Still, there will be a few hold outs like New York and London which are known for their human taxis.

So millions of taxi customers may save money, but what about all the taxi drivers?  What will happen to them?  They’ll just have to find new jobs.  Before you start yelling that that’s a cold view to take, realize, that’s capitalism.  How many horse farms were put out of business when people started buying horseless carriages?  If you don’t complain about that, why complain now about drivers being put out of business by driverless cars?

Some of these taxi drivers could make a new career as … I guess tour guides.  If you just need to go to work, or the airport, or whatever, when you order your taxi you could specify a fully autonomous one.  But if you’re on vacation, you could get one with a tour guide.  These could take you around, tell you the history of the places you go by, maybe recommend some restaurants, stuff like that.  Those that aren’t that interesting, wouldn’t be rated that highly, and would have to look for yet another job. 

Before cars, a lot of people knew how to ride a horse, but now that’s rarely a necessary skill.  Now, most people know how to drive a car, but that will become an unnecessary skill in the coming decades.  It’s possible that in some future amusement park there might be a place where you could drive a car.  Perhaps these aging, out of work cabbies could give those whippersnappers a … crash course on how to drive.  Although a virtual reality setup might be better.  Of course, that could lead to a Virtual Virtual Skeeball scenario.

The Billionaire College

Here’s an idea on how to replace the Electoral College.  This election system starts much the same way as the current one does, with each party holding a primary to select a candidate.  But once these candidates are selected they go before what I call, the Billionaire College.  This would consist of the nine richest Americans on some predetermined date.  They would be the ones to choose the next President.

So what are the pros of this idea?  Well, as things stand now, candidates spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars – a sizable portion of which is supplied by the members of the BC – to try to convince us peons that they deserve our votes.  All the annoying ads you skip, mailers you throw away, and all the countless speeches would be pointless.  It wouldn’t eliminate, but would drastically cut the number of arguments around the Thanksgiving table.  And what could be more American than some shyster selling overpriced garbage to raise the money to gain political power?

What are the cons to this idea?  Well, the naïve view that every person should have a voice in choosing their government.  I guess that’s a “nice” idea, but it’s not like we live by that now.  From aggressive voter purges, to long lines on Election Day, to cutting early voting or voting by mail to make the lines even longer, there are factions in this country trying to take voting away from the “peons” and too few people care.  Maybe we should stop ignoring that we live in an oligarchy and just go all in.

Everyone should work in retail, at some point in their lives

About ten years ago, I had a good paying, 9-5 job that I … didn’t like all that much.  So I moved back home to help my parents around the house and farm and to have time writing.  Which is great, but it did burn through my savings.  So a couple of years ago I got a crappy retail job to pay the bills.  Was it my dream to return to retail?  Fuck no.  But there aren’t that many good paying jobs where you only work a couple days a week because you also need time to help you dad bale hay or pick green beans for your mom to can or write.  And over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone should work in retail, at some point in their lives.  And it’s not because of some grand social ideology of seeing how rough it is for people stuck in low paying jobs – that’s a side benefit – it’s to see how fucking annoying customers can be.

I’m not talking about the “If you tell me to wear a mask I’ll shoot you” type of customers, I’m talking about the little annoyances that build up day after day.  Like whenever something doesn’t want to scan so the standup comedian goes, “It must be free.” Yeah, that wasn’t funny the first forty times I heard that today.  Or the people who assume – since you work there – you must know the price of this random item, half of which I didn’t even know we sold.  Or, why do so many people feel the need to explain – sometimes in detail – why they are buying anti-diarrhea medicine? 

Similar to knowing the price are the people who assume I know what all the sales are.  It seems that I’ll be off for three or four days and I’ll walk in and someone will immediately come up to me, show me an item, and ask, “Is this on sale?” And while I want to just shrug and go, “Fuck if I know,” you can’t do that and stay employed.  Speaking of sales, a couple of years ago, it was probably mid-December and we needed to get rid of all the Christmas lights so we could start putting out Valentine’s Day crap, so we had a one day sale of Buy One Get One Free on your basic, $2 Christmas lights.  This one lady got super pissed off when she found out it wasn’t on these $20 Projector light things that just so happened to be on the same shelf as the stuff that was on sale.  Apparently, she wanted us – shorthanded to begin with and at Christmas – to rearrange everything on a shelf for a One Day Sale, because she couldn’t be bothered to read to see what exactly was on sale.

Probably the issue that irks me the most are the customers who assume I have no idea what I’m doing.  For example, several times each shift someone will ask, “Did you ring up this item?” Sometimes – because of the stupid layout of everything – I won’t see a pack of gum or something small.  But nine times out of ten the item in question is a 48 roll of TP that takes up 2/3 of our counter space.  I almost want to slap myself and go, “How did I miss that?”

Worse are the people who don’t know how everything works, so they assume we’re cheating them.  Like our system for calculating sale discounts makes perfect sense … to a computer.  It’s just not the clearest thing for customers to understand, so we must be ripping them off.  “Why did those each ring up at $3 when on the shelf it says 2 for $5?” “Because it doesn’t actually take the sale price off until I hit the total button.” The reason it does that, is because some sales are “Buy X, get Y for half-off,” and it is so much easier for the computer to check all your items for these X-Y, or 2 for whatever, sales once at the end instead of after each item scanned. 

A related issue are our receipts.  It’s almost a code that gives as much information about each item sold in as small a space as possible, and once you know what it is doing it makes perfect sense.  I don’t know how many times people have come in five minutes after leaving – looking over their receipt in the parking lot – and demand to know why they didn’t get some discount, like a $5 off their total sale.  And I look at their receipt and go, “It did take the discount off.  It took a little bit off each item, that’s what these little amounts here are,” and I sometimes circle the discount it took off each item.  And they usually argue with me, like I was the idiot that designed the system.  And half the time they usually just huff and leave the store thinking we cheated them, when they are the ones who refused to listen to the explanation. 

That’s why I think everyone should work retail at some point in their lives because when you’re the one standing behind a register, you see how fucking annoying people can be.  I consider myself a good customer: I don’t tell pointless stories, I don’t make scenes, and I don’t demand to see a manager because I don’t understand a line on the receipt.  Part of that is because I’ve worked retail.  Probably a big part is that I’m not an asshole.

The economics of Speed Demon Construction

So the other night – as I was trying to fall asleep – I had an interesting idea I thought about turning into a story, for a bit.  It seems that – in the comics and movies and whatever – whenever someone develops supernatural powers they become either a superhero or supervillain.  But I wondered what if some Joe got super speed and instead of fighting crime they started a construction business.  You’d buy all the materials and have them sitting on your lawn and the Speed Demon would show up, and a minute later you’d have a new roof, or garage, or whatever.  You’d pay like a hundred bucks, and then he’s off to the next job.  He’d probably have a deal with all the local pizza and sub shops to have something set out for him every half-hour or so.  There’d be a blur and the pizza would be gone with a $50 bill in its place.

Of course even in a large town there wouldn’t be enough construction jobs to keep the Speed Demon active all the time, so he’d diversify.  Like he’d have Speed Demon Movers where, in like thirty seconds he can have all your belongings packed up and loaded in a van.  And there’d also be the Speed Demon Garage.  You stop in, say the engine is making an odd noise, and in less than a minute – with you not even getting out of the car – the engine is disassembled on the floor next to you.  He fixes whatever the issue was, puts it all back together, and only charges for parts and maybe a flat $20 for labor.

Now this Speed Demon would likely put dozens of small business out of business by being able to do in an hour what would take them a month.  And even charging so little for his time, he could still make tens of thousands of dollars a day.  Some would say that if hundreds of people lose their jobs because someone else can do it better and cheaper, well, that’s Capitalism, and if you even think anything bad about Capitalism, well, you’re just a dirty socialist.

While in this world toxic goo usually just gives you cancer instead of superpowers, we do have a burgeoning Speed Demon: automation.  It’s unlikely we’ll have machines able to replace your roof in a minute or less, but it is likely that someday a (self-driving?) truck will pull up to your house with robotic arms in the back that lift up the materials and other robots that scurry around and do all the work.  Not as fast, but robots won’t need a lunch break, or even a restroom break, can work 24/7, and you don’t have to pay them.  So we’re coming to a point where hundreds of people will lose their jobs because machines will be able to do it faster and cheaper.  Yea Capitalism.  But how does Capitalism work if nobody has money because nobody has jobs?

Fourth of July Sale!

For the last few years, I’ve tried to have a free sale for my ebook of political stories, Political Pies, around the Fourth of July.  But this year – because of everything – I figured I’d include a few of my other ebooks as well.  So if you are so disgusted with real politics you don’t want to even read fictional politics, you have a few other choices.  All of these will be free to download from Wednesday July 1st, through Sunday July 5th.  So grab them before you get too drunk.

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 this 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.

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 1000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars” allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

Duty

Who cleans up the mess when the time machine malfunctions?

A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories

Hopefully, in the not too distant future humans will return to the moon. We will build bases and colonies, make farms and factories, and live, love and learn. “A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories” contains five of my short stories that are all set upon the moon. They give the tiniest glimpse of the possibilities awaiting us there.

Short story – “Naive Thoughts”

“Naïve Thoughts”

The old man stood up behind the podium and raised his snifter of brandy to the score of gentlemen seated around the conference table.  “As Prime,” he said, “I welcome you to the 417th Annual Meeting of the Cacumen Society.”

As one, they all took a drink.

The Prime smiled, then stated, “Before we get down to business, I wish to welcome Jonathon Lowe, son of the late Benjamin Lowe, to our ranks.”

The men nodded to a young man at the back of the room who smiled and returned several nods.

“Jonathon,” the Prime asked, “would you care to make an introductory speech?”

Jonathon stood and, after clearing his throat, said, “Yes.  Thank you, Prime.  I would very much like to make an introductory speech.”

The Prime stepped aside and waved to the podium.

Jonathon smiled then holding himself straight walked up to the podium.  He nodded to the Prime and said, “Thank you, Prime.” Turning to the room he began, “My fellow members.  When my father explained to me that we were members of this illustrious Society that controls the majority of world affairs, I frankly thought he was telling a joke.  But as I’m sure you all know, my father was not known for his sense of humor.” Several of the men gave smiling nods to that.

After a brief smile, Jonathon went on.  “I reviewed the information he gave me, and I came to the conclusion that there is indeed a secret society that controls worldly affairs.  This revelation surprised, pleased, disturbed and confused me.  The disturbed and confused part comes from the fact that, okay, we control the world.  But you have to admit, we’re doing a pretty poor job of it.”

There were a few grumbles from the room.

“On one hand,” Jonathon continued, “I understand how – by fomenting wars, for example – we can ensure a large profit from our companies manufacturing arms.  But I have to wonder, can’t we make just as much money – if not more – by selling dishwashers and computers to the Third World instead of guns.

“I brought some of my ideas up to my father, who explained that by keeping the population worried about war and crime and such, it keeps them from trying to better their lives, keeping them better sheep for us to control.  But to me, that seems like it would have the opposite reaction.  If we want docile sheep, then we should make them fat and content.  Instead of having them worried about crime, or losing their job, or where their next meal will come from, we should stuff them with quintuple cheeseburgers, give them movies filled with explosions and nudity and video games filled with violence.”

Jonathon looked around the room.  “In my opinion, what’s the point of ruling over a cesspit of a world?  Yes, we have our estates and private islands, but we have to keep bribing politicians and hiring security to keep them.  If everyone lived like we did, there would be nobody for them to rise up against.  I mean, with every assassination or rigged election, we run the risk of someone noticing our actions.  If that ever happens, then the hungry, snarling masses will come after us.  But if we just had them fat, content, and docile, we’d never have to worry about them again.

“Thank you for hearing me out.” Jonathon then stepped back from the podium.

The room was silent for a few heartbeats, then it exploded in laughter.

Wiping his eyes, the Prime stepped back to the podium.  He put a hand on Jonathon’s shoulder and said, “Ah, the naivety of youth.”

“What?” Jonathon asked.

“Your thoughts are not new,” the Prime explained.  “But in a few years, you’ll come to understand why we do things the way we do.

“Now, be a good lad and take your seat, so the meeting can begin.”

***

I first wrote this story in June 2013 under the title “Hmmm.” It began after I saw a comment online about how things can’t be fixed because “the ones in power” don’t want them to be fixed.  I recently came across it and figured I should repost it.  But I wanted to rework it first and one of the things I wanted to change was the title.  It took me some time, but I think “Naïve Thoughts” works pretty good.