Ray Kurzweil says that the singularity is near.
“So, Ray, where is it?” I asked him.
He stuck his hand in his pocket. “I swear, I just had it.”
He then searched his other pockets, the sofa, the refrigerator and the kitchen drawer. Twice.
“Shit,” he growled. “Help me look?”
We turned the place upside-down, but all we found was a handful of pocket change and a stray ketchup packet.
“Oh well,” he said. “Maybe I left it back home.”
We shook hands, and Ray began to fade from view.
BACKUP COMPLETE, said a robotic voice, and everything else vanished.
Tag: science fiction
Aliens Aliens
When people say space alien, I want to smack them.
Where else would aliens come from?
Turns out, there’s more aliens out there than just space aliens.
Dimensional aliens cross over from other dimensions to ours.
And time aliens come from the future.
But, yeah, we got invaded by the space variety.
Didn’t last long, though. Fools thought they could breathe our atmosphere.
Nope. Couldn’t. Troop carriers landed and they all suffocated.
They didn’t start with an aerial bombardment, which was bad strategy, but polite. So we let bygones be bygones. New friends.
In case time aliens attack, you know.
Aging Badly
Time travel machines are expensive.
So, to pay for the cost of building and maintaining a time machine, I’ve bought an abandoned mine.
In the mine, I found a cache of brandy and wine that had been left to age for a hundred years.
After I auctioned them off, I was able to build the time machine.
Then I bought the brandy and wine to send back in time.
“What about going forward in time?” said an assistant.
“Sure,” I said. And I went ahead a hundred years.
The world was a burnt-out radioactive husk.
(And the wine was spoiled.)
Kill Hitler
Let’s go back in time and kill Hitler.
I have a gun.
You have a time machine.
There’s nothing on TV.
And it’s raining. We can’t go out and play.
Unless.
Is the time machine fully charged?
Good. I’ve got bullets for the gun.
Dad left them in the drawer with the gun.
So, we can go back to Germany and kill Hitler.
What?
It’s just a time machine?
It doesn’t travel?
Then we can’t get to Germany to kill Hitler.
Besides, the rain’s stopping. And the worms are coming out of the grass.
We’ll kill them instead.
Stomp! Stomp!
Harryhausen
The Find A Grave site has no information about the legendary animator Ray Harryhausen.
Why the mystery?
Well, when Ray died, his colleagues wanted to pull out his bones and replace then with a poseable metal armature. That way, they could create stop-motion puppetry animation with him.
That’s disgusting, I know. And terribly inefficient in this age of computer-generated special effects. They could just create a digital Ray Harryhausen.
But you just don’t get the same impact with CGI as you do with a practical puppet. It isn’t too real. It’s fantasy.
The cops arresting them for grave-robbing?
Too real.
Arm’s Length
Nancy didn’t like other people, so she kept everyone at arm’s length.
When she was a baby, her arms were stubby, so she couldn’t keep people from tickling her toes or getting in her face and babbling baby-talk at her.
As she grew, her arms grew too, and she could keep people a bit further away.
But still not far enough.
So, she had a series of surgeries to lengthen her arms.
Eventually, her arms were freakishly long enough to scare people away.
She enjoyed the peace… until she tried to brush her teeth and stabbed herself in the head.
Cheesy Maze
Most researchers put cheese in the middle of the maze for the mice to find. But Dr. Odd puts mice in the middle of the maze for cheese to avoid.
Because, you know, cheese doesn’t want to be eaten by mice.
The hardest part was keeping the mice in the middle of the maze.
Dead mice aren’t all that interesting or threatening to cheese. And there’s rules against cruelty to animals.
After years of experimentation, Dr. Odd developed a humane way to keep mice in the same spot.
Which isn’t interesting or useful at all.
Whatever. Care for some cheese?
Santa Survives
Santa Claus watched horrors spread across the globe.
Humanity completely lost its shit all at once, and aside from a few hundred thousand survivors, every society had collapsed. The toxic clouds and radiation waves would finish the rest off soon enough.
Santa tore up his naughty and nice lists, and set his elves to working on a space ship.
“We’ll set up shop on the moon or Mars,” he said.
The elves made a spaceship.
A toy spaceship.
“Fuck,” murmured Claus, and he coughed up some blood.
The elves fought over the remaining reindeer meat before they got sick too.
Covered Bridges
In a parallel universe, they have a lot of covered bridges. But they call them bridges.
And what we call bridges here, they call uncovered bridges.
Other than that, there’s no difference between our universes. But that’s enough of a difference to convince me that I need to find a way back to my own universe.
Because as hard as I try, I can get over the whole bridge thing.
I admit that it isn’t like a world full of vampires or flying cars or killer robots, but I’m sick to death of these damn covered bridges…
I mean bridges.
What kind of world?
“What kind of world are we leaving to our children and grandchildren?” shouted the Green Party protestor.
I followed him home after the protest.
He lives in his mother’s basement.
If you’re going to get them to succeed, you’ve got to kick them out of the nest.
Which applies to space travel.
Humanity will never reach for the stars as long as it can play its XBoxes and Playstations in its mother’s basement.
If we ruin this planet faster, humanity has no choice but to reach for the stars.
Forget saving the nest, kid. Spread your wings and fly free.