House on a Line - A Chapter

The rented car’s tires gripped the road. Gazing past the red flaked hood the ascent up this humble mountain was met with a view of a green verdant valley. My initial fear driving up this route was only barricaded in with a single guardrail that assured drivers they wouldn’t immediately plunge to their death at the right speed and angle of impact. Some of parts of this climb had no guard and instinctively drove safer around these. A gentle illusion of safety.

The pavement wrapped around the dirt and slate of this mountain. The dark blue slate was intermixed with vegetation and mounds of dirt that had not yet slid off into the valley below. “Time takes us all.” I muttered. I glanced at the plush and gray passenger seat at my phone. No calls yet from my agent. The seat had years of service. The velvety plush material was impacted right where dozens had sat. Evidence that there was once life there.

Finally the end point of regular society. Stretched into a thick unkempt wood was a dirt road. There was once an attempt to pack the dirt with gravel. A rusted shovel and a pile of the speckled stone with weed growth sat next to a gate with no surrounding fence. The pig iron gate once sat ornate in an attempt to add class to the height and magnitude of the mountain. Now it sat rusted and slightly twisted.

The Fluer de lis was crafted well even though the paint was well beyond it. The symmetric flower arrangement curved into itself on the outer most petals while the center stalk pointed in a harrowing spike.  In the center there was an iron-casted face of a lion or humanoid looking creature. It’s hollow eyes narrowed in a seemingly wrathful visage leering over the valley behind me. The gate was an easy push and after wiping the deep red rust off my hands on my blue jeans I re-entered the idling red car. This road was too rough for a fancy car, my agent warned. The tires crushed the gravel and beige clay dirt as I retreated to the cabin my agent rented for me.

It was supposed to be a holiday.

#Fiction #Odd

The metallic blue polycarbonite floor was soaked with insulator fluid. Druid could see through the hazed glass, breath obscuring the disaster in Chamber 32-A. As the only one on board and one of the only known earthseed this far out of the old radius. Druid then batted away a sort of unknown cable. Walking back through the empty ship there was only Druid and the autopilot.

In the empty mess and lone gaze of an obscured star field through a port Druid gulped down the protein assembler drink. The texture of wet cardboard slurry was knocked back. Fifty days had passed since Druid awoke to an abandoned spaceship with the pilot logs wiped. No signs of a struggle from a crew of 243 or the 14 other civilian travelers.

No scrawling of Roanoke on any of the massive ships alloyed posts.

Time made little difference adrift floating in cosmic absence. With the captain's chambers Druid made himself comfortable. He remembered at first when social convention and politeness were part of the initial exploratory process. All of the spacebound and vetted earthseeds poked a tad bit of fun at him along the way to his father's outpost. Druid missed the comfortable jesting. Now he was stuck in a giant ship with no means or gains to operate.

The autopilot allotted access to the wheelhouse and all of the sensory array. The A.I. had a protocol that made Druid the emergency temporary captain as the only person on board. There was no notion of controlling the ship with vocal or manual codex commands without a pilots license or having access to the logs that contain the manual codex itself. A proprietary security feature that fails without crew or logs.

Barring navigational controls Druid had full access to the spacecraft and inner-workings. He particularly enjoyed going to the greenhouse and the onboard labs. It was like home. The ambient temperature and humidity fluctuated in each area as if he rapidly traveled the globe. Mechanical hands with multiple segmented joints tended to the nursery and checked vitality of each plant. Snake like hands bent at odd impossible angles pushing and stretching the translucent membrane that protected the joint system. As a plant surgeon it loosely adjusted each leaf inspecting, scanning for deficiencies. Aerosol sprays went off like timers.

Larger model robots would patrol the larger and more permanent soil layers tending to the plants fetched from the last phase of the nursery.  When Druid first came to the gardens it was desiccated as if the science department was restarting the entire batch. The automated systems were offline and in maintenance mode and restarting was simple. Only sixteen more days until the radishes are ready.

Musings I

Just writing to express myself sans theme.

We are standing on a global precipice if you flip the infection bell curve upside down. There is a greater possibility of surviving individual infections so I am not going to play the ‘we-are-doomed’ card. Nor the ‘Open-the-Marts’ card. There are too many questions that are not satisfactorily answered.

No one wants to shed much life in their communities. Yes some say they are willing to sacrifice lives and votes to call the bluff of the dangers of Covid-19. I want to be very clear and direct at this juncture: You are endangering an already fragile health care system that is fairly infested with parasitic non-medical health care ‘professionals’. That industry exists as a tower of babel and I do recognize the importance of accounting. How much medical wreckage your body mind and spirit procures over the course of character development. A measure of self-care and self-abuse.

Make sure it is just Your Life you are sacrificing.

When you go out horde of zombies style you will not have to wait long for that call out to become true. The real killer in pandemics is not just the virus but the repercussions of repeated poor decisions. Adding a 0.001 percent chance a few times is not great. In this math problem there are Thousands upon Thousands of actors deciding to work on the behalf of the virus.

Local medical professionals will be overtaxed as a result. Medical workers in the entirety of the field will be wiped out faster than you can replace the skill vacuum. The survival rate of yourself and the ones in your community decreases.

Sickeningly the Insurance Industry will generate greatest profits at the lowest risk available.

With no one to patch up the arteries that are the food delivery lines and the mechanisms to get essential goods you are condemning people to death with only regard to the luxuries once enjoyed.

We were promised Make America Great Again, Change, Safer World/Hope, Compassion, Bridges, Change (Again), Kindness, Gentleness, Mornings, Make America Great Again (Again), Change…………………….. Again.

Where am I reading this from? How long will this last? Will I be able to have a full meal for my loved ones tomorrow? Do people in flint Michigan have clean water yet? Will I find out I have a simple health complication that went detected because of that ever-growing sweet spot of poverty? Could I die?

These are semi-personal questions. Given the spectrum of people around my age started off working right around when the recession of 2008 made its impact. Some went to school on many promises of jobs only to find out the saturation of mass produced degrees made markets difficult and there were hardships in trying to pay (sometimes) predatory student debt.

At this level of poverty there is an entire class that are expected to give to a country that has figured out how much disposable income it can take through economic incentives to leave them at the same level with no movement forward. So it is expected of us to just take it.

The current White House administration as of 2020 16^th of April is by far the most concentrated worst example. For reasons alluding to the legions of sockpuppets and robotic troll armies I do not want to debate these facts. Let facts stand as they are until the mounting evidence washes over the din and noise.

My time is going to be spent inventing with what little I have to solve huge problems. People need to work but safely and using some science and basic engineering skills. Self-sustenance, ingenuity, and learning from harsh mistakes are going to be a theme over the next few months.