March 5, 2010
The Future Belongs to Whoever Gets the Most Oxygen
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The Newcomers wanted an average town.
So we sent up Long Beach.
Because what place could ever look
more like America?
With the gift of Their technology,
constant rotational rebalancing,
we got the town, and Signal Hill,
and farms in the surrounding county
off the pad and into space,
with no weather degradation.
A big win for Lynwood and Lakewood
in fact, which now have seaports.
And the Long Beach ark is traveling
to Alcyone in the Pleiades.
After 20 years, their messages
are two years old when we receive them.
So we follow a feed, which gets
more cryptic every month:
#itsacookbookitsacookbook
(which turned out to be a joke),
LOL RT @spivey
u old if you rmbr the ocean!!!
Which I think means two years ago
my twin Spivey was nostalgic
for the sea that used to meet
the waterfront but was replaced
by a platinum radiation shield.
Another time he wished the airport
still functioned in artificial g.
It made him feel old, he said,
though I'm the twin who's aging faster.
He said his hair had gone pure white,
he'd lost teeth and erectile strength.
Which isn't much worse than I'm doing,
but he's supposed to be younger now.
They call it cubic acceleration,
so at some point he stops aging,
then as the speed is canceled, rests,
growing younger among blue suns.
They've explained it all in theory,
saying the old rules don't apply.
And so far They've been right.
Knowing the Newcomers, we wonder:
Why did people ever fear Them?
They try to help us understand,
with down-homey paradoxes:
How fast must you walk to catch
your shadow? What do thoughts weigh?
They're great on major engineering,
just look what they did with the moon.
But network stuff, communication
theory, swarming, not so much.
Which disappointed us, because
when we saw they really weren't
reptiles, actors with ridged heads,
hive-minded insect people, but
something infinitely stranger,
we hoped They'd have some kind of
distributed intelligence --
data mining, or data fogging
that makes every node all-knowing.
They're not like that at all!
You lose whole days just answering
Their plodding, painstaking questions.
It took ten years to understand
They wanted to know us, but only
as individuals. Now everybody's
a politician, with life-affirming
clichs we tell about ourselves:
It's my yiddishkeit, we say,
or, We got a word for that back home.
Like Rick's American Caf,
All of us sweating to become a type.
My assigned Newcomer said
We shouldn't be so guarded. I said:
It's harder now to remember pain,
cause what's there to complain about?
Howbout the time, She said, that Spivey
got to Danielle before you?
I told you already, I wanted to kill
so bad I had to kill a dog.
You wish, She said, that you'd killed Spivey?
I told that too, the answer's no,
but there were times I wished him dead.
But I behaved. She's with him now.
Everybody got happiness.
And how do you feel about it now?
441 years later,
I still will want to be with her.
Even if she's got Spivey's disease,
or mine, and is nothing but a mantis
exoskeleton of embers,
I'll breathe apart her dusty lungs.
Would you prefer you both be young?
The way we are now is good enough --
or she is now, me in two years.
For that I'll wait a thousand years,
worship your gods, endure speeds
that rip the skin off a human skull.
And You, why don't You come clean
that You can make all that happen?
O yeah, that stuff's our bread and butter.
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