Photo: Aunt Mallery ( aka Director of Earth-land security and justice stuff Mallery Banks). looks a lot like Jessica Lange I admit, but we are not going into an entire subplot about the craze for celebrity look-a-like surgery in 2080's ( which was one of the reasons Scarlett's mother Sally Banks left earth). celebrity surgery like this whole cloning of certain historic celebrities while resisting to go into a deep explanation of it (hint it's very very expensive)- is hard enough to pull off. You don't want to be bored with the whole Tom Cruise has two clones to work on separate Mission impossible 43 (rogue protocol) and Mission impossible 44 (Ghost nation)films at the same time, do you? RK
Saturday Morning
Earth/North America/Massachusetts/Gloucester
Facebook friends ( no reception sorry)
Later that morning I pulled the short straw so the director bot had decided I was the perky teen who should accompany Aunt Mallery into a near by town called Gloucester. Gloucester Aunt Mallory informed me was pronounced 'Gloss-ter'. I'm looking at 'Gee-lou-ces-ter' thinking hey why go to all the effort of inventing words which are made out of symbols which make sounds and then go and spell things randomly? I mean if you're going to do that why not just make up a squiggle like Prince and if you haven't been introduced to a word before then you will never know how to pronounce it. This 'Gloucester' business smelt of the end of spelling. Unfortunately the lonely planet guide to earth failed to mention the breakdown of written language as one of Earth's negatives.
While I was away this gave the boys ( and George ) the chance to carry on emptying out the room. It wasn't going well. Kentro had to distract Grouthouser and George had to get step uncle John out of the room. I got the feeling George and Uncle John were watching the Arsenal vs New York game on the TV. As we drove into town in an auto-Ubur I got a constant commentary from the house. Including group chatter.
'<Zing>I can hear the buzzing down here guys' George had sent back from the house.
'<Zing>I can't figure out how to turn it off' sent Leo.
'<Zing>There should be some kind of knob' sent George.
'<Zing> the knob isn't a problem it's the off switch I want' sent Leo.
Aunt Mallery kept getting interrupted with calls from the media. The whole sky girl thing was killing her. The self driving Ubur dropped us in the centre of town next to a large building called 'Chamber of Legion' and opposite and imposing statue of a man on a horse. Near the outskirts of the town many of the old shuffleboard buildings had rotted and fallen down by their own accord. Further in you have the sense that the buildings were actually lived in. You saw are flags and occasionally hot pink cards in people's windows with titles like 'alien scum out, friend Ronald Bentham now'.
"Everything is so spaced out" I said to aunt Mallory. Under a dome on the Eye, buildings were much closer together. Sometimes you could put both hands on either side of a street. Here buildings didn't crowd each other like awkward passengers in a crowded lift. Buildings were sweetly built of romantic wood and burly brick.
We walked past an imposing old house in the front of which was a well kept garden. In the garden was a small girl selling charity cookies.
"Well this place is so old," I said as we stood before a home-made stall. I was completely in love with this place and I wasn't sure even where I was. Everything in America was so old It was just rich with history. We had even driven past a historic gas station museum which I wanted to go back and just look at for hours.
"No it's not," said the nine year old girl "me and my mom just put this table up this morning."
"What are you selling?" said aunt Mallory for the camera.
"Cookies and muffins for to help people recycle robots," said the girl.
"I remember doing this as a kid. You know I really felt I could change the world, for the better" said aunt Mallory.
"So what happened bud?" I said.
"Well that's the weird thing." said Aunt Mallory picking some home baked cookies and getting some money out "If you say from a very young age you want to be an astronaut or something and then you grow up work hard and do everything you need to do to become an astronaut then everyone goes. Well, she's really committed and she got where she deserves. You do that in politics and everybody calls you a power crazed cow. I oftern think Politics is like going out to the mall with a toddler, you spend most of your time chasing it but when you do catch up and put your fingers around its neck then you get into trouble."
"That's a pit stop" I agreed.
"Now I hope you're not keeping any of this money" said aunt Mallory to the girl looking at how she was arranging the bit face-coins on the table.
"ohhh Can't I just keep a little?" complained the girl.
"Well that would be nice" said aunt Mallory "but you know what doing things for money is called?"
"errr we had this in a history test the other day" said the girl. "pros..pros...pros.. professionalisation?"
"Nearly, that's called working," said aunt Mallory smiling.
"Ooohhhh" said the little girl pulling a face like she had just realised that her hands had been rubbing a cow's behind.
"We don't want a police robots to catch you working do you?" said aunt Mallory.
"No Mam" said the little girl "That's for bad people."
That kind of summed up Earth for me. Work is for bad people. It was kind of weird, we spent so long on Mars striving to make things better we never really stopped to wonder what would happen at the end of the line. Now Earth had got there already. The robots did everything, they ran the corporations, then got taxed and the taxes paid for all the humans to live a life of leisure. Mars was going that way F★★K was a Martain company owned and run entirely by robots. The only humans involved were taste testers on new products. The human company director and his management team of three who had set the first Mars F★★K bar up twenty years ago had retired a recently replacing themselves with an AI called ORAC which had managed the company very skillfully. So was this what I had store for my children or grandchildren? Work is for bad people? I wondered what the alternative was? Mars restricted some jobs to humans, but how far down could we go? I mean we could never restrict 100% employment and be able to compete with other planets. We were all trying to become Earth and not thinking about what we were all pushing to.
I got an urgent message from George on my earrings.
"<Zing>GOAL ! ! 3-2" it said. Did she realise I didn't care about her soccer game?
Aunt Mallory handed me a muffin and we continued down a tree lined street dense with cute small shops called Main street.
The street was quiet, mind you most of earth was quiet.
I got a message on my earrings from the director that I needed to get her to do more of that. "She almost looks human" the machine said.
We carried on walking and chatting. Aunt Mallery mentioned knowing about secret passages in the house.
"So what do you want to do?" asked aunt Mallery licking the chocolate from her fingers.
"I thought I would study astronavigation and be a navigator on a spice freighter maybe even an explorer one day" I said.
"You power crazed cow" said aunt Mallery to me.
I laughed "Yeh that's me totally, bud."