Welcome to Webulon

Top photo by Jeff Worman

It started with Earth, then the moon, Mars and now the whole Solar System is shot.

Now what?

Talk of more space tourism. No cap.

Mysterious cube and other crap on the dark side of the moon found by the Chinese. Yes.

The Russians testing their anti-satellite weapons leaving a debris field for everyone else in Earth’s orbit. Makes it a pain when your spacesuit is pierced by some garbage.

For what?

R and D or just to get the hell out of here?

Or what?

Yes, icy thermal vents on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Reminds me of the fumarolic ice columns I saw snowmobiling around Mount Erebus in Antarctica. Pretty cool. My hands were freezing as the only gloves I had were those cheap ones supplied from Uncle Sam. I didn’t realize everyone shipped a designer wardrobe back from the states. Europa. Let’s go. May be some night life there.

But the price paid with holes drilled in Earth’s force field. With each spaceship going off-world, piercing the ionosphere. Corrupting the planet’s magnetic field. That all gets in the way of shielding us down here from harmful radiation from our sun and other stars. Besides the noise. Weren’t we directed to leave Europa alone in 2001?

Harmful radiation or mutations rarely give you super powers.

We need a new broom to sweep it all clear.

The cost of reparation to the system is not in the billions or trillions but in the quadrillions, just for the preliminary study to see what’s what. We’ve been kicking around the idea for decades and it is not the opinion of politicians but the facts based on science, mathematics and reality. The good news is that it can be taken care of with the sale of one captured asteroid of nickel, iron or gold, from the Belt between Mars and Jupiter. The bad news is we don’t have any buyers and we don’t actually have the technology to capture an asteroid.

We should be able to move the concept from ideation to actuation just as soon as we figure that out.

Shouldn’t be too long. The United Arab Emirates know that oil exploration is finite and they too have an agency exploring the mining of the belt. And their financial resources are pretty close to infinite. The Saudis have androids for a Westworld style theme park under construction so staffing shouldn’t be a problem. Just redirect them for sixteen-fifty an hour. Then, after a stint in space, they can return and fill the jobs needed for the fast food industry and trucking.

Eau Claire, Wisconsin has a restaurant, Shanghai Bistro, with a robot waiter named Jonny 5. He doesn’t look like much, more conversational that a Roomba banging into the wall looking for dog hair and dust bunnies. With Jonny, you still have to grab your food from a flat surface in what would be his chest. As far as being a model employee, he doesn’t have any kids, so he never has to take them to soccer or tend to their COVID. Never calls in hung over or dead. He’s a lease. If he doesn’t pay taxes like a human or into Social Security and there are going to be more of these, how can we pay for people staying home, eating Doritos and gaming in their parent’s basements?

It’s time to start making replicants for a more refined dining experience and fill the roles of not only the hospitality industry, but police, military and anyone else. Anyone else leaving their careers because they don’t take the vaccine. Or prefer to just chill as it were.

Hence, we need to have that slave labor made in a factory (such as robots and androids) or in a laboratory (like your standard replicant) to pay taxes – so those humanoids leaving their careers can be paid to stay home. Plot against those evil mad scientists attempting to modify the genome. Or just chill.

I see now they made a robot that procreates. It’s not much of a robot, for now, just one cell, but it’s a start. Cells, interlinked cells, and pretty soon you have a pretty good baseline. What would Vladmir Nabokov do?

That reminds me. I need to recalibrate.

I see too that DARPA funded some researchers that accidently created the first warp bubble. FTL is around the corner. The Limitless Space Institute, it’s real. Miguel Alcubierre initially proposed a mathematically sound warp drive propulsion system in 1994 and then Dr. Harold “Sonny” White, part of Eagleworks re-worked the need for exotic materials and incredible amounts of energy. Here we go. And here you thought it would be Zefram Cochrane.

In Star Trek, played by James Cromwell, who also gave us a portal to The Other Side in Counterpart. As well as the Pandemic. He’s also the president in that confrontation between the US and Russia. That too is on the horizon. See how everything comes full circle?

What about Omicron?

That too was in Star Trek.

The inhabitants of Omiron Ceti III… violent emotions would reverse the effects of the spores which instead of giving you respiratory problems, broke down your inhibitions and then allowed you to thrive within an environment of deadly rays from outer space.  Maybe being really mad at Anthony Fauci and the medical community is just enough to counter the effects of COVID and the mutation du jour Omicron.

I doubt it.

Someone told me that two doses of The Vaccine and booster are not enough. A fourth is on the horizon and it is thought that another two after that may be in order. Not a small price to stay alive. People ingest substances known to kill them everyday. Just introduce the vaccines as a lager or something you smoke every few hours. There’s talk of a tablet. What’s wrong with a daily suppository or shoot with your other morning injections. The drive-thru for expensive coffee.

It’s cold here so I needed some supplies from a relatively close big box merchant still in business. I picked up something for my wood stove, a bellows, for fanning the fire. Instead of blowing on the flames as I have for the past twenty years and then inhaling a fine particulate ash that is probably now in every cell of my body. The bellows, was a hit with Lannie who was checking me out. Like Voight-Kampf, she aimed the bellows at her pupil and scanned her body with the infrared and said she was a replicant. First time I’ve had a cashier introduce herself as a replicant. I guess they already have them in the workplace.

And in Burlington.

Of course they would.  This isn’t even the real world anymore, is it?

Of course not.

It’s almost 2022.