“Three aircraft launched by ISIL in a plot to destroy airliners in the skies above the Middle East have been thwarted and destroyed in a test of the new Air Force drone program code-named the ‘Aurora Project.’ Although this new weapons program has remained classified, and many of its workings remain so, our country and our global community owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women of the Air Force and the many scientists and technicians of this covert aviation program.
“Our nation is safer and…”
* * *
James demoted himself to just be the reserves. He conceded he could be helpful but it was a thing that came to him in small doses.
His friend Edgar Fong could teach advanced gaming and math to the new breed of Air Force drone gamers.
Sean wouldn’t have believed him so he learned to keep his mouth shut. It was a strange discipline but it was necessary.
He returned to Minneapolis with a notable bank account and a reserve status that did not require a haircut and a uniform.
* * *
Tanner got his Congressional Medal of Honor. Plus disability. Plus the cash gotten for renting out his mind as the ultimate military proving ground
He would go on to teach to other people with amputations.
He won the medal for the grenade incident, but quietly it was known his combat against ISIS was a factor that expedited things.
* * *
James went to NA meetings geared toward nurses, anesthesiologists, and doctors. He had enough money that he could go to school.
He got lieutenant’s pay full time but only clocked in the hours of a reservist.
Two months later he got his first disability check from the VA. It was a back pay check for $72,000.
James pursued a career as a nurse. Now that he had his college money, there was no stopping him.
He moved out of the Towers called the “crack stacks” and into an apartment that had off-street parking.
He wrote science fiction and sent Sean blog notes.
On May 22nd James’ father died of a bad reaction to the oxaliplatin chemotherapy drug. He had interstitial lung disease which was intensified and exacerbated by the oxaliplatin.
Cathleen graduated from the University of Minnesota. She moved in with James.
James taught air combat gaming for the Air Force. He studied Boyd and weapons technology.
He strategically found ways to ignore technologies he did not like. Land mines, nuclear weapons, and chemical or biological warfare disinterested him.
But counterterrorism was good.
Lieutenant Sergeiovich was killed. Faissal died. Hafez was rescued by ISIS troops but died in a firefight on his way back to ISIS-controlled safe areas. The convoy that rescued him was bombed by a French jet.
James wrote science fiction about computers that came alive and took over the military and enslaved the world.
He and Cathleen had three children and got married when the oldest offspring was in second grade and got tired of people calling him a bastard.
For James it was always a balance of a little conformity and a little freedom. It worked for him so he was happy.
* * *
James lit a cigarette outside of the church basement where the Narcotics Anonymous meeting was about to start. He inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. Sean was there and some other friends were also present.
Sean said with a smile, “I am glad you got your VA disability. Nice to know you can afford school.”
“I have enough pennies saved up. I can do just about anything I set my mind to. All is well, Sean. All is well.”
THE END
FROM THE VAULT
Four Short Stories
by
William Strawn Douglas
IMMORTALITY CLASS
“How did your immortality class go?” she said.
“Well, I have an assignment from class. I have to choose someone from history who became immortal through fame to a point and degree whereby we still talk about that person.”
“Great,” she replied, deep-brown eyes raising from the cup of cappuccino to meet his blue irises. “You could go with Hatshepsut, the great female pharaoh of ancient Egypt.” His eyes drifted out the window in focus as cars and buses drove by, leaving clouds of smoke and condensation on the cold December day. It was only ten in the morning. She had eaten an omelet in the café and was now working on coffee. He had sat down only momentarily, gone to the cashier and gotten a cup of coffee, added cream and sat down in front of Nancy.
“I don’t need to turn every assignment into a feminist statement,” George replied.
“It wasn’t politics I was thinking about, it’s just she was the first woman of power to come around since the Venus of Willendorf was carved by Joe Caveman in twelve thousand B.C. She was fat while Hatshepsut was skinny. You like slim women. No?”
“Yes, I like skinny women. I am guilty of promoting anorexia and Karen Carpenter’s demise from that disease.” He slid his leather backpack onto the floor below the table opposite from Nancy. “I must debunk Jesus to achieve satisfaction in class.”
“Why Jesus?”
“He is the Everest, the Moon, the Marianas Trench. The top challenge on or around planet Earth.”
“But why not Crick and Watson and the race for the double helix of DNA?”
“They are fun,” he continued, “but with Jesus you have a person claiming to be an emissary of God. He achieved immortality through writing of a kind of software for the computer of the human mind. When people put their lives into devotion to Jesus, they quit drinking, cussing, and sleeping around in a world racked by substance abuse and AIDS. Jesus used the immortal aspect of papyrus and skins to activate the papyrus hard drive. Once his life was invested into that recording, then people hundreds or thousands of years later could read about the bounty of a fisherman’s catch, or from the Old Testament you could learn how it is an abomination to lie with a sheep. All of this is on the permanent record. Eighty percent of the population of the USA claims to be involved in the product of that great software engineer. His followers give up their vices, turn over new leaves, and live righteous and honorable lives. With that external memory device in action, this Jesus had an audience to include the multitudes yet to be born. His words transcended time. That’s how that technology worked. The era of written script. It became an immortality device.”
“I still like Hatshepsut better.”
“You would.” He tossed light-brown hair out from his eyes and sipped his coffee. “I have lots of research and writing to do. I have to get some accurate DNA stats and pull an article on folded proteins.”
“Why the DNA?”
“The DNA has some effect on the God belief systems. Some would say that we are pre-programmed to worship whatever we fear or don’t understand. As for Jesus, it may be either righteous fraud or defrauding the righteous. Maybe even both. The DNA stats will confirm the existence of something beyond mere luck at the assembling of DNA chains. It works too well to be just accidental mutation for evolution to get the high sign. With lotteries, every time you play, you eventually get a winner. It may be astronomical odds but someone wins. With the human mind we have five thousand years of papyrus-hard-drive-enhanced consciousness to draw upon. Nature has had five billion years to form earth and try its DNA magic on us all. With the papyrus in place we have just begun to scratch the surface. A ratio of five thousand to five billion.”
“Your papyrus hard drive will be a good angle to argue. I haven’t taken that class but the Old Testament is really the first collection of folk tales from the early Bronze Age. Those stories were the entertainment and morality plays of that very uneducated era. The split of Israel and Judea is key to most biblical scholars. They point to four authors of the oldest of the books. You choose your words differently when you know you have an audience, let alone an audience of millions for two thousand years plus. That puts a lot of punch into the technology of script. Books like that can make or break kingdoms, s
ocieties, cultures.”
He pondered her words for a moment. He reached into his wallet and withdrew a bill and held it up to her. “Here is written script on a papyrus that is so evolved that we actually value it as credit. People will steal it, forge it, banks in foreign nations will stockpile tons of it. This is the ultimate expression of papyrus and written script.”
“I have to cover a hafnium X-ray reactor before lunch. Escort me if you will, my beamish boy, to the repository of all things printed. Can your brain handle being in the library?” she said.
“But of course. Shall we go? Let us go forth and author great stories for the world to contemplate.”
“Lemme pay up. I’ll meet you outside,” she said as she shouldered her purse strap and folded her long blue wool coat over her arm. She paid her five-dollar bill and some change to the cashier. She had left a one as a tip on the table. He walked outside into the bracing winter air. He withdrew a cigarette and lit it. She came out of the café as he was drawing the first breath of smoke into his lungs. “Do you have oral argument or is it a paper?”
“Both. Some oral discussion and about an essay’s worth of written material. There’s so much to choose from. I plan on using TV BC and Christ’s automatic pilot principle. TV BC’s principle is TV before Christ. It’s the name of a punk band. Written scriptural stories like the books of Ruth and Ezekiel are the lasting remnants of humankind’s first morality stories. These are the first fledgling efforts at entertainment. This is how time was passed, morals disseminated and taught. The technology of this is symbols. Little Hebrew or Roman letters on scrolls. These symbols were external memory. The king no longer had to count chickens. He had someone do it and write down how many chickens got counted. You could write down a memory and recall it a hundred years later. That external memory is the papyrus hard drive effect. This man who filled the empty glove of messianic destiny with himself was totally conscious of the fact that his adventures were being recorded. That’s what I believe was his motivation to do what he did. What is written is software. To achieve the written he had to risk the health of the hardware, much to his own demise. Nonetheless, the software did work and we got a world inspired forever by one man’s attempt to create an automatic pilot system for the collective computer mind of the human race.”
She walked with him through the crosswalks and through the parking lot. “But you’ll be making enemies with eighty percent of the nation. That’s how many associate themselves with Christianity.”
“I’m not disagreeing with them per se. My gig is that the whole passion of Christ was steeped in reality. I just don’t support the miraculous aspect. The man was very brave and I can see method to his madness. He tossed a ball into orbit. I think we should catch that ball. We should write some new software for the human computer.” They approached the library and went inside, cigarette being discarded by George as breath went from steam to invisibility indoors. Such was the norm on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota in early December.
“We have learned to use symbols to convey information on scrolls of paper, papyrus, skins, and hides. The knowledge of ages is written on the books in this library. This building is the software of the human race. Christ was a software engineer. If we see him as altruistic, can we emulate that altruism and all of his ‘be nice, righteous, and honorable’ software, can we add to it in a positive way?”
“I’ve gotta do some research. When is your assignment due?”
“Next week. Tuesday the eighth. I feel like Galileo telling the pope the sun doesn’t go around the earth. I will be in the smokers’ study hall. If you finish your research, you can find me there.” He proceeded down the stairs to the basement tunnels to the study hall. He took off his coat and his backpack and sat down and settled into a writing mood. He began to write.
Six days went by until he was reciting the words he wrote that morning. They sounded like this:
“When we talk about immortality, we end up talking about our timeless religious heroes, should they be Moses, Jesus, Mohamed, or Buddha. We always refer to the people who have already achieved immortality in our historical understanding of that concept.
“Here in Lutheran Minnesota USA, we hear sermons in church and the circular logic of god being the word and the word was god. I put to you that evolution invented man, who in turn invented a word for god when he had evolved sufficiently that he could do such a thing. The god concept allowed man to evolve from a hunter-gatherer to one terrified by his world and barely capable of lumping his fears together into one universal fear: the ultimate taboo or great spirit, this god.
“After Og the caveman invented a word for god, his Neanderthal brain was able to first intellectualize an identity for all the mysteries of Og’s world. Why does fire burn? Why does water quench fire and thirst? Where does the sun go at night? Og looked to the sun, and seeing something he didn’t understand, he declared it god.
“When writing was invented, Og for the first time had memory storage capacity that was from outside his own mind. Using counting sticks or abacus, he would figure out how many sheep were in his herd. When writing was discovered, he could pen an idea, pass it on to his great-grandson who could read it after his death, and there was our immortality. Everything Og believed about god was probably wrong, but there is some kind of spirit that helps DNA evolve faster than mathematical chance says it would. A creative force may exist. That may be the same force that gives us dark matter and galaxies that accelerate away from the big bang.
“Was Jesus touched by a creative force? Quite possibly. His passion for altruism and the creation of a new religious faith was momentous and productive. What makes the Jesus software work is the book, the hardware, that his story is printed onto. The handwritten Bibles from the port city of Biblios were known for being different versions of the same tale. We have the actor being Jesus and the recording machine being the group of scribes such as Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, and others. He wouldn’t have done the deed if the scribe was not recording it. He gave his life for that edition.
“Now things are different. We have his incomplete puzzle to put together. The ball that was thrown into orbit calls out to be caught and a new game invented. If some creative spirit exists that we owe the gift of our minds to, then that spirit would want us to use the gift of mind to separate us from the animal and pond scum. Now we have symbols and machines to read those symbols for us.
“Take a look at the magnetic strip on your ID card. A machine reads it and has your grade point average at willful call before you can even guess what’s on its silicon memory. We are transitioning from paper or papyrus scrolls to digital disks. What will be the next big thing? If your faith is evolutionary math, then you can tell your fellow that someone will win the evolutionary puzzle. Your chances may be daunting but someone will win that lottery. In the same way you can expect a savior and he will arrive on time.
“The evolutionary math will win whether you call it god or not. The Internet has promise that nobody has yet seen. Every note printed contributes to the next level of critical mass being achieved. Just as the books of Ruth and Ezekiel are sacred, so one day will be my chemistry textbook and reruns of old TV shows. This is media. This is expression. This is art. This is humanity, good or bad. As we drift away from symbols, we dispense altruism without a cross or a star or a crescent. The old divides dissipate and new bonds begin.”
A young woman in the classroom spoke at George. “Are you trying to achieve immortality through this assignment?”
“I am intrigued by the subject. I will post a note on a few points on the Internet dealing with the subject.” George looked around the room in silence. “A bit over the top?”
“No, no, that’s just fine, it goes with the territory, that’s just fine,” the instructor said.
“Let me give you all something concrete rather than all those questions being answered with other questions. Take a five-dollar bill out and hold it up to the light. You will see the magne
tic thread to the left of the portrait, the watermark, the signatures. We are still in the era of data storage on papyrus. We are on the crest of a big change. When it hits us, things are going to be really different. The text that was written two millennia ago lent itself to the performance art of Jesus. The time will come when you will see a website address for the Treasury appear on a dollar bill. That and new forms of plastic money. With the way things are going, I predict a change in the weather and this change is coming soon.”
THE END
GHOST STORY
The plum scarf she wore around her neck fluttered in the wind. She looked back to the golden rays of sunlight illuminating the runways of the spaceport. She reached into her leather purse of black hide and withdrew a clove cigarette. She lit it and it crackled.
Although Nikita Bowman was still young in years, she felt elderly in experience. Her trim, athletic body craved a bit of relaxation. She crouched and sat on the steps of the Collective Temple. The cigarette hissed. She drew smoke into her lungs and felt the mild anesthetic effect of the clove spice on her throat.
Her Caucasian skin and blue eyes confessed her Western European biases. She thought about what Tarkus had said. “Endeavor to Persevere” had been the message from Tarkus.
So many things had crossed her mind in the trance with the Collective and its mindset. Here was a being that could exist in 20 multiverses. Tarkus could bring anti-matter back from universes where all was in the antithesis of that which the people of Earth found sensible and logical. She did not find the bomb to be logical.
Tarkus knew what all that was but he wasn’t talking much about it.
Nikita remembered it and the first day of her 72-hour coupling with Tarkus. She sucked in smoke from the clove cigarette and noted its sizzle.
She had just saved Andrews from the Morgoth.
* * *
Three days ago Nicky was wandering the streets of Suleman. This town was named after the Muslim version of the name Soloman.
The Temple was a stone cube. The facing wall on the street was one of green marble and stone.
Spaceships negotiated the runways of the dry lakebed.