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Updated Sunday 15 August, 2010 12:14 PM |
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SNAKE OIL
By Doctor What
Chapter Twenty
A man is usually more careful of his
money than of his principles. ~Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., speech, Boston, 8 January 1897 **
April 1, 2017
“Class dismissed!” shouted Bob.
As one, ninety-three people stood up and began slowly shuffling out the classroom.
Baldwin waited a few minutes for the crowd to dissipate and leaned back. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his handheld.
The handheld was surprisingly light and only seven millimeters thick. At twenty by twenty centimeters, it was gigantic by BlackBerry standards but the ‘LeapFrog’ (Mark I) had a few things that put any of its old PDA ancestors to shame. It was waterproof and EMP hardened, had a holographic screen and virtual keyboard, and contained 120 gigs of memory, a camera, speaker and a videophone – not to mention a whole plethora of media players, applications and assorted bells and whistles.
Baldwin wasn’t one hundred percent sure but he was fairly certain that it could even make toast.
He pushed a few buttons and Bob’s lecture notes scrolled across the screen.
Not that reading it for the third time makes it any more readable thought Baldwin.
The ‘LeapFrog’ was a godsend for Baldwin – he would have been completely lost without it, rather than the ‘struggling to keep up’ stage that he was at now.
And as much as he hated to admit it, he felt a little bit thrilled about having in his possession such a ‘secret’ device.
Well—not exactly ‘secret’.
The LeapFrog was a complimentary gift from some big newly merged Japanese-EU-Canadian mega electronics firm to the 986 members of the ‘Class of 2017’ that was studying at the Lytasian’s spaceship school – which, in accordance with typical geek humour, had been dubbed ‘Starfleet Academy’ by everyone, including the students. It was a prototype that had come literally right off the presses (or in the immortal words of the Japanese Director in Charge of Production ‘Sweat still on brow!’) just as the school started and even now a small army of CEOs, researchers and marketing directors were eagerly awaiting the results of its performance before springing it onto an unsuspecting public just in time for Christmas.
The LeapFrog beeped and a message appeared on the screen.
Meet us in Ten-Forward at 12 - P.L.
Baldwin smiled and hit the reply button.
On my way.
Taking one last look at his notes, Baldwin closed the handheld and walked out of the classroom.
Ten-Forward wasn’t the name of the bar, of course.
Not officially, at any rate.
Its official name was simply ‘The Bar’ and it was similar to pretty much every single student bar in existence since the dawn of mankind; a bunch of tables and chairs jammed into a convenient empty room, a bar-counter and a large supply of various varieties of alcohol to sooth the stressed out minds of students.
‘Ten-Forward’ wouldn’t have been out of place in any university on Earth – except for one thing.
The view.
It had, without a doubt, the most spectacular view that any human could possibly want or imagine.
The planet Jupiter filled up the entire wall.
Baldwin knew that the view wasn’t through a window. The Lytasians had howled with laughter when told that most science fiction movies on Earth had spaceships with actual windows of glass or transparent aluminum or whatever. Instead it was a sophisticated system of sensors and viewscreens that gave the illusion that one was looking through a clear glass window when you were, in fact, separated from the vacuum of space by a good six inches of a super-dense metal that made titanium steel look like tissue paper.
He didn’t care – it still took his breath away every time.
Most of the other students felt the same way. The bar was open 24/7 and on more than one occasion Baldwin had walked into the place at some ungodly early hour expecting to find the place empty – but in each and every case, there was at least half a dozen people just staring at the view.
Why shouldn’t they? thought Baldwin.
As of right now, the 986 humans on the station had travelled further into space than any other human in history.
As if all goes, most of those 986 –and hopefully I would be among those - would go further still…
The Galilean moons of Io, Europa and Ganymede could be seen from time to time, depending on how their orbits synched up with your visit.
Callisto could always be seen, for a very good reason.
‘Starfleet Academy’ -- all one and half cubic kilometers of it -- was in synchronous orbit around it.
Even now, he could see Valhalla, a crater 600 kilometers across with a massive system of rings extending from it that made it a staggering 3600 kilometers across.
The same distance as from New York to Los Angeles.
His entire country – a country that he had fought and spilled blood for and which at least three generations of his ancestors had done the same as well - could be placed into a crater on a moon of Jupiter.
It made him feel…insignificant.
“Michael! Over here!”
Baldwin tore his existential angst ridden gaze away from the viewscreen and turned towards the voice.
Two men – appearing to be in their late twenties or early thirties – were sitting side by side at one table.
One of them waved again.
“Michael!” repeated the man. He pronounced it as ‘Michelle’. This wasn’t because he was confused about Baldwin’s gender but rather because the man waving his hand – Philippe Laroche – was from Quebec and despite being quite fluent in English still retained some vestiges of a French accent, especially if he had been drinking heavily.
Taking one last look at Jupiter, Baldwin turned and walked towards the table.
“Have to admit—I’m liking it here,” said Philippe. “I was worried at first but it’s actually quite fun. Reminds me of my college days.”
“Which part?” asked Baldwin. “The insane class schedules, the incomprehensible professors, the weird smells in the dorms or the lack of sleep?”
Philippe took a sip of his beer and pondered this question for a full thirty seconds.
“All of that!” he replied eventually, smiling. “It’s fucking awesome!”
Baldwin shook his head in amusement.
Every class has the one designated class clown and Philippe seemed determined to be that one. When the Lytasians announced that they were accepting an initial class of a thousand students for ‘Starfleet Academy’, the NATO governments were overwhelmed with responses, getting approximately ten million applications in a single week. The weeding out process was downright brutal but Philippe survived and was now one step closer to fulfilling his dream of becoming just like his idol – Mr. Spock. At the rate he was zipping through his classes, he seemed like a shoe-in for the first Science Officer slot to show up.
The man next to Philippe just smiled and took another sip of beer.
Just as every class has the class clown, so too does every one have the ‘quiet studious Brainiac’ type and Nicholas Kayser was no exception. Baldwin was fairly certain that Nicholas probably had a mild version of Asperger Syndrome, which made some of their drinking sessions a bit… odd. On the other hand, Nicholas probably had more knowledge and more affinity for history, sociology, random factoids and weird trivia than anyone he knew. His dream was to become the Earth’s first Xeno-Anthropologist and Baldwin so far did not see any indications that this dream would go unfulfilled.
“Busy schedule tomorrow?” asked Philippe.
Baldwin pulled out his LeapFrog and checked his schedule.
“Got Advanced Navigation at 8, a docking simulation in VR room four at 10, Intermediate Sensory Analysis at 1, and Planetary Formation 101 at 4. You?”
“Mostly just a bunch of reading labs. Have a ten page report on proplyd formation in three days that I haven’t even begun to start researching on.”
“Nick?”
Nicholas shrugged his shoulders. “Cross Species Analysis of Land Inheritance Rules.”
“Ouch—sounds heavy.”
“Nah—I can do it in my sleep.”
For any other person, Baldwin would have seen this statement as just a figure of speech. In Nicholas’ case, Baldwin had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t just a metaphor.
“Have you heard the news, though?” asked Nicholas, changing the subject completely. “They finally decided on a name for the first Earth Alliance ship.”
Baldwin rolled his eyes.
Not for the first time in his life, Baldwin wondered just how low humans fit on the galactic maturity scale.
Even deciding on the – at least to his mind - seemingly innocuous ‘Earth Alliance’ name to describe the grand coalition of countries that had agreed to pool their resources and manpower into managing the spaceships that the Lytasians sold to humanity had been a nightmare, with endless committee meetings and arguments.
“We can’t go with United Earth—we’re not uniting everyone!” “Well—how about just Earth Alliance? Pretty safe and boring name, right?” “Are you nuts? They were the bad guys in Babylon 5!” “Only in one season, you idiot! They were the good guys in the other four seasons!”
And so on and so forth.
And then when the spaceships actually showed up…
The Lytasians may have been several centuries ahead of Earth in technology but when it came to aesthetics, they were centuries behind. Their idea of ‘radical aesthetics’ on their spaceships was to go with their basic brick-like design –and put slightly rounded edges on it. Even that was considered ‘a bit much’ among the older Lytasians, who muttered vague complaints about ‘those damn crazy kids having no respect for traditions’.
Humans took one look at the ships and nodded their heads and said ‘Awesome’ out loud – and then muttered very quietly ‘God—why couldn’t they be like the spaceships in the movies with all kinds of funky curves and stuff like that?’
Those complaints had eventually managed to make it back to the Lytasians.
Far from being insulted, the Lytasians were ecstatic instead.
“Why—if the ship designs are not to your liking, we will happily make a few alterations to them to fit your specifications!” they replied.
Baldwin had a hard time finding out exactly how much those ‘alterations’ cost Earth.
Probably an extra thousand cases of cognac or something would be my guess…
Even now, the ten ships of the new Earth Alliance ‘fleet’ were currently undergoing refits on a base that the Lytasians had set up in orbit around Mars.
Of course—now that a ship design had been agreed upon, the small matter of a ship name was child’s play. Right?
If anything, that caused even more hassles than coming up with ‘Earth Alliance’.
Everyone had come up as a name – from names of famous people to ‘Unity’ to –and Baldwin groaned again at the thought – even the USS Enterprise.
Somebody somewhere at some point had decided to ask the Lytasians what the names of the ships were, perhaps in some misguided effort to bring some semblance of calm to the debate.
Amazingly – that threw them off completely.
“Names? Why do you need a name for a ship? It’s just a ship—a tool – a thing to take you from one location to another. What—do you humans name everything that transports you? Next you’ll be telling us that you humans even come up with names for those large herbivores of yours that you use – horses? -- as beasts of burden!”
Nobody had the heart to correct the Lytasians on that.
“So what glorious name had they come up with for Earth’s first interstellar spaceship?” asked Baldwin.
Nicholas smiled.
“Odyssey.”
Baldwin and Philippe stared at Nicholas for a long moment and then exchanged a glance with one another.
“You know,” said Baldwin after a few seconds, “that doesn’t completely suck as a name.”
Philippe nodded his head.
“I know. That scares me. They might actually have some intelligent people on that committee.”
“Hey—let’s not go crazy here!” replied Baldwin.
That brought a round of laughter from the three of them.
Two hours later, Baldwin was alone again.
It was getting quite a bit late and Nicholas and Philippe had to leave.
There were only a dozen or so die-hards left in Ten-Forward.
Baldwin was nursing a glass of scotch and staring at Jupiter again.
He had realized at one point that if you squinted your eyes just right, you could just make out a little blob of light that he had been assured was the planet Saturn. And beyond that…
A whole universe.
And Earth’s place in the universe?
A minor insignificant planet in an area of the galaxy that was considered to be the equivalent of the deepest darkest bayou swamps of the Deep South.
And for how many millennia had we humans thought we were the supreme beings of the universe? And we sent all those radio signals into space and felt depressed that they weren’t being answered.
And the reason they weren’t being answered?
Not because we were alone – but because our attempts at communication was seen by the spacefaring races in the local region as one step above those Nigerian bank scam e-mails.
I’m going back into emo angst existentialism again…better do something to get my mind off of it…
Baldwin pulled out his LeapFrog and pushed a few buttons.
Despite Earth being nearly 400 million miles away, within a few seconds the handheld managed to connect with the internet. A few seconds later, there was an acknowledging series of beeps and a page loaded up on his screen.
Google-Yahoo News Alert
Entertainment Dick Clark has become the first celebrity to undergo the ‘New-U’ rejuvenation technique. The technique – now being offered in only eight cities worldwide but expected to be offered in eighty cities by the end of the year – claims to enhance skin and muscle tone, remove old scars, return hair to its natural colour and repair any damage to internal organs. In the words of CEO David Huckleberry, “a quarter of a century of age and abuse will be gone in a single day”. Mr. Clark quipped as he left the clinic “Now I’ll be able to bring in the New Year for a third millennium!”
Financial Oil prices continue to plummet with the price now standing at just under 18 dollars a barrel.
Talks continue for possible bailout packages for the pharmaceutical and oil industries.
U.S. Third fusion reactor goes on-line. Two more to be on-line ‘by end of next week’.
Lytasian’s Companions claim to have 10,000 members in New York City alone.
Travel Book early for your Moon vacation!
Health Cancer vaccine trials complete. 10,009 subjects. 10,009 cures. Visitors promise ‘tens of millions of doses’ available by end of April.
Tech Virtual Reality Spa ‘Second Life’ opens first offices in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London and Paris.
Upper limit for Moore’s Law reached?
Sports Can the Chicago Cubs win their third straight World Series? Experts weigh in with their thoughts.
With a deep sigh, Baldwin shut the LeapFrog off and put it away.
He resumed staring off into space.
He was so engrossed in doing this that a few seconds passed before he realized that there had been a discrete cough coming from next to him.
Baldwin turned – and actually gasped.
It was Bob.
Not just a ‘Bob’ – the ‘Bob’. The one was had been designated as the official spokes-alien.
God help me…I’m actually beginning to be able to tell all these guys apart…
“Enjoying the view, Mister Baldwin?”
Baldwin nodded his head.
“Quite a bit. I come here every night, it seems.”
“So it appears. And how are your classes coming along?”
Baldwin shrugged his shoulders.
“A bit difficult, to be honest.”
Bob shook his head, smiling slightly.
“Do not worry about that. Most of you humans are having a few difficulties. Things will turn around for all of you soon enough.”
Baldwin stared at Bob for a long moment before asking the question that had been on his mind for several weeks now.
“Bob—why me?”
“Hmmmm?”
“Why did your people specifically request me? Nobody’s been able to give me a straight answer on that. Since you’re the closest person we have as an ambassador between our two people…”
Bob’s antennae seems to blur for a moment.
“I was under the impression that we already informed you of the reason? We were impressed with your questions, your intelligence, your determination and all of those excellent qualities you humans possess.”
“So—no ulterior motives?”
Bob stared at Baldwin for a very long moment before breaking into laughter.
“Your race seems to be prone to conspiracy theories, no? I can assure you, Mister Baldwin, that we have nothing but your best interests in heart.”
Baldwin relaxed just a bit.
“Here Mister Baldwin,” said Bob, “let me get you another drink. Then afterwards we can go down to the movie theatre and watch some of those wonderful Earth movies of yours. Tonight we’re showing a most amusing comedy. I do not believe I have laughed so hard in weeks! I have seen the movie twelve times and I intend to keep watching it for twelve more! I’ve already made arrangements for its distribution rights on our homeplanet. I can assure you that once my people have seen that movie, arrangements will be made for a dozen sequels!”
“Uh—that’s nice, Bob. By the way—what’s the name of the movie?”
“Independence Day” replied Bob, as he handed a glass of scotch over to Baldwin.
~~
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