The Return of the Roaches – An Adumbration
In the year 2050 great orbiting power plants were constructed, one for each continent. The billionaires in Moscow send up a smaller private one. Then the scientists in the Chinese station had let the hardy cockroaches they were using escape and before the mistake was admitted and quarantines, all regularly inhabited orbiting stations were infested. So they were shot out of orbit toward the sun, all but the small one which was privately held and had no contact with the others.
Of the rest, all of them fell into the sun but one. This one managed to slingshot around the sun and became a meteoroid.
“Roaches Away!” Bricknevsky was heard to quip. He could afford to be jolly as he was receiving power in a steady beam. At least he could afford to be jolly for a while; it was not long before pirates figured out how to tap the orbiting power source.
And what do you think happened to the last power station, the meteoroid? One day strange activity was detected by the inter-solar patrol ships. It was an unidentified space ship. It was beaming strange things back; could it be first contact? In this dramatic way was the scene set for the Galactic Roach Wars.
In other science fiction news I heard R. Giuliani—the guy in drag on youTube, the transvestite running for president—yell at a crowd that we need to have a man on Mars by some date in the near future. I laughed out loud, but I don’t really know why I should still laugh at anything he says or attempts . . . or any of them.
But assuming a serious person had said it and not somebody running for president, why is it so important to have a man on Mars? The moon for that matter? Do you know they’re actually breeding roaches on the space station? It’s the Russians, of course. You know what is more weird than first contact being with a space-going tin can full of killer roaches? Current events.
3 responses so far ↓
Ryan Martin // January 28, 2008 at 11:31 pm |
I heard him say that too.
Only in America.
AR // February 3, 2008 at 6:42 pm |
My husband and I agree that ours is an adolescent nation. He admires Vladimir Putin immensely because he says that he is an adult leading a nation of adults. It may be a long time before we get there.
Has anyone ever thought of what ages and personalities a nation might have? To my eyes, Britian would be a distinguished, if slightly eccentric, old fellow, with a few odd ideas picked up during the course of a long and interesting life. France is a doddering old woman. Germany is a hard, embittered, drunken apostate, old before his time, with disordered tastes. Russia a robust middle-aged man with a few indiscretions to live down and perhaps not quite the amount of sophistication one expects from someone with that amount of power. Canada might be a demure teenager who believes whatever she is told but lives a fairly decent life. Ethiopia is wild and honest and impoverished; a clear-eyed ancient hermit of the mountains whose very superstitions give him light of a sort.
It’s fun.
AR // February 3, 2008 at 6:59 pm |
BTW Giuliani may be have appeared in drag as entertainment…but so did one of the profs at Maranatha, every single year during a student chapel. That doesn’t make someone a transvestite, as in changing body parts.
I think him getting shot down is a function of our national adolescence. We insist on making political decisions based on ideology. Ieological politics are inflammatory and dangerous.