In The Year 2617.....

The year was 2617 but no one was counting. The earth had been through hell and high water for 200 years, or more, with most of its population gone. Gone literally. Turned into slime under the submerged ground or dissolved in the salt waters. There were millions upon millions of dead bodies still floating, washing up on the shores.

The interiors of continents fared the best or better. Higher lands survived. Denver was high. Moscow. And Mexico City. But not New York, L.A., Frisco, Miami, Tokyo, Rio, London, Bangladesh. All gone. 

The rest, high plains, upland pastures, steppes escaped the flood, still alive with some crops. Intact infrastructure. The bigger cities have survived but relied on the countryside to supplement city parks for food. The countryside relied on the cities for protection against marauding bands of killers. Populations overwhelmed the cities, suffocating the safer ones of any size. The resulting panics and breakdown of societies made the smaller cities fall to the armies of wanton killers. The smallest villages and towns were long ago wiped out. There seemed to be a line, a radius, from the large cities that could be protected and anyone beyond that line was doomed. By 2617 most of what could have been killed or slaughtered or subjugated had been consumed and the bands fought each other but sometimes they consolidated and attacked previously too-powerful strongholds.

Institutions all changed. Government,learning, healthcare, military, all morphed from one form to another. Learning came and went as was needed for survival. The cities, singly, with a population to choose from held sway over the armament technologies forging alliances between collections of brains and production. The marauders formed significant units that could fight well. This did not produce a standoff but rather some uneven back and forth of gains and losses destroying and re-destroying land and people.

Continents shrank and consolidated. Some survived. Some became fortresses of stone walls and moats. Some were doomed.

In this craziness each side was uncovering new sights and things in the fought-over territories. One such discovery happened when an armed patrol from one of the big inland cities, high and dry, well fed, and watered sufficiently, found an underground cavern system complete with its own power and disposal plants. The thing went on for miles and they found in it a water source, greenhouses, and working robots tending the greenhouses and the water supply as if they were assisting something living.

Exploring further the scouting crew found something living: primates. Maybe 1,000 or more. All healthy, all active, all being fed continuously, and playing games on keyboards. The primates looked young. The scouts watched, avoided the robots, and began to notice that some robots labored in another part of the cavern system and followed these to find an incinerator, in full working condition, into which the robots fed dead primates. The scouts were stunned. It was as if this automated system, apparently giving life, feeding, and then tending to the dead, along with power and light and water and waste removal, all planned and executed centuries ago, was still in full operation.

And no one knew about it.

Further inspection led the scouts to determine than some kind of old-fashioned computer was monitoring the output of the primates through their keyboard strokes and every time it recognized a word it stored that output. The machine’s ability to read the words was correctly functioning but the words in context made no sense.

The scouts, and subsequently the intelligence services, had no notion of what to think of it.
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You are an astronaut

Describe your perfect day.

A lot of people seem to think that when you’re an astronaut you spend your time with these glorious sunrises and sunsets. Well, yes, those are nothing short of spectacular. If you ever get a chance to see the sun either rising or setting against the backdrop of the curve of the earth, take it! Nothing, and I mean nothing, on earth, compares.

But, my perfect day?

We don’t have much spare time up here. There are too many experiments going and a lot of maintenance to be done. We have some equipment that just seems to not want to work right. One centrifuge in the soil density test works about half the time. It is a commercial centrifuge and I keep saying we should send it back down and get a refund, but can you imagine the paperwork? FedEx doesn’t deliver here yet, but they will someday. Won’t that be cool? We threaten to fix it with blunt force trauma delivered by a hammer but we can’t get a good swing at it because, as Newton’s law of motion reminds us, we’re up here in gravity-free space.

We do generally have time set aside to read (I love to read) or play cards although we have a game of Parcheesi going playing against a Google app. It doesn’t win nearly as often as you’d think. Sometimes I sense the game is rigged to let me win once in a while.

One thing that keeps life interesting up here is that we play background music via Siri that doubles as the intra-station communication device. We recognize that Siri also listens in on our conversations without our permission and the folks back home might be listening, as well. We get three songs each at a time but we can put as many songs as we like on the playlist. I think the playlist right now is about seventy songs long! My kids keep sending up songs for me to listen to and I put ‘em on the playlist but, heck, I’m old, I don’t know these bands.

Ultimately this is just like a day at work except without the commute! I miss my coffee. We had a coffee pot in the office at Houston and our secretary, Martina Higgins, a great person, could blend and make a perfect cup of coffee. We talked the other day when she called us about our W-2s, some things you can’t escape, and I asked if they could send up a thermos of her coffee. Of course, they couldn’t, it would explode en route but I was really eager for a cup of her coffee. My wife, Julia, figured out how to send up a big serving of lasagna that we can reheat in the low-power microwave. Talk about delicious! Now all we have to do is figure up a way to send up Julia and the kids! That would be perfect!

So, long answer to a short question. The perfect day? The perfect day will be when I get back home to my family.

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