Power Window

"But you can't get there from here!"

Harlan heard it before. They just didn't - couldn't - believe him. Not that he blamed them, of course. He had a hard time believing it himself.

"Look, Mister Harlan… unless you have some evidence, some sort of proof, I'm afraid we're simply not interested. If you have such evidence, please bring it before the board. Feel free to schedule an appointment through the department secretary. Good day to you, sir."

As he merged with the traffic on 395, Harlan remembered what Stockton had told him, that he'd need proof to sell the idea. Harlan thought perhaps a Defense Acquisition Board would have the foresight to see truth without proof. Live and learn.

...

"Well, Stockton, you were right. I saw the board and they laughed me out of the room"

"Told you so. What are you going to do now?"

"Just what they said. Get 'em some proof. What else is there to do?"

"That's dangerous. We may not have the spatial relationship right, retroreflectors notwithstanding. If your suit fails, you'll die in about a minute. Hard vacuum doesn't forgive. And besides, we've just looked through little ones. We've never even tried to open one that big, let alone try to grab something and bring it through."

"I thought about that. If the aperture leaks, we'll just shut it off."

"Sure, but that assumes we can shut it off!"

"Well, if we can't, the whole planet's doomed, so it'll make little difference whether we die now or little while later."

"That's why I like you, Harlan. You always have such a positive outlook on things."

"Oh, don't fret. Is November 17th okay with you? It'll take that long to charge."

"Let me check. Yeah, that works for me. I'm going to dinner, so see you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, then. Bye."

Harlan clicked offline and got some dinner himself, wondering about money. The electricity was going to cost him a fortune.

He finished, went downstairs, and set the power supply to begin charging the storage array. It was only mid September; it would take until November to store enough energy without blowing the main breaker.

Indian summer came and went, the joules and dollars piling up.

...

"Harlan, are you sure about this?"

"No, Stockton, I figured I'd just spend a few thousand bucks on electricity for nothing. Here, help me into this suit."

"So, if containment breaks and we can't shut it off, you'll be fine and I'll die. Thanks a bunch, buddy."

"I'll only live six hours longer than you, so quit your whining."

Stockton patted the back of the suit's helmet. "You're good to go. No pressure drop?"

"None detectable."

"I still think finding the golf ball would be better."

"Be too hard to find, plus it wouldn't prove a thing since anyone who could confirm it is already dead."

"Oh just get in the containment room. Let me know when you've got a hard seal. And here, don't forget your stupid orange plastic."

"Ah, thanks, I forgot. And it's not stupid. Okay, I'm in position, seal is good."

"Okay, Harlan. Coordinates for the descent stage are set. You ready?"

"Yep. Crank this thing up already, would you?"

"Open Sesame!"

Stockton hit the final sequence, sending the commands to loose all that stored energy. One wall of the containment room wiggled for just a split second and then… changed. Harlan stepped through, gingerly.

...

The trip back to the Pentagon was uneventful, if long. Harlan couldn't wait to see the looks on their faces. The military was as short on foresight as it was long on funds. That's simply the way it was, he supposed.

"Mister Harlan, do you now have proof of your claims or are you here to waste our time again?"

Harlan reached into his bag, removed the item, and placed it on the conference table before the board members.

"Here."

Colonel Pennington wasn't impressed. "What's this? Looks like cold war era surplus to me."

"It is. That, honorable board members, is one of the batteries from the Apollo 17 descent stage. You know, the part that stayed up on the Moon. Feel free to contact NASA to check the serial number."

"Hold on there, Mister Harlan. This board does not appreciate…"

"The board may also wish to take a look at the landing site. There's a 20 foot wide by 100 foot long orange line on the lunar surface that wasn't there a month ago."

"But you can't get there from here, Mister Harlan!"

Harlan heard it before. They just didn't - couldn't - believe him. Not that he blamed them, of course. He had a hard time believing it himself.

Past Imperfect

Predicting the future is a tricky business.

For example, what person a hundred years ago could have predicted the issues we have to deal with now? Even if a few folks managed to get it close to right – science fiction authors, most likely – few cared for such predictions, and even fewer believed them.

Just look at the changes wrought by mankind in the last century...

It all happened so fast. Or at least it seems that way now. I guess it didn't seem so fast then. It's hard to remember that far back; things are so different now.

First came the walls capable of rendering images so good that you had to get within a few inches of the display to tell that the image wasn't real. Of course, today's displays are so good that you can't tell no matter how closely you look.

Those first generation walls drove the big push for new video formats, which turned out to have absolutely huge bandwidth requirements, which in turn created a market demand for today's internet upon which the entertainers stream such huge chunks of data to homeowner's walls.

And all that drove the need for some real processing horsepower, too. The hard coded, fixed gate based microprocessors went the way of ENIAC about 15 years ago. Now we have massively parallel processors based on optical spin valve technology. The individual valves, running at 6.8 PHz, constantly make and break connections between themselves. The stuff is not so much hardware or software, it's an amalgam of the two.

It's all but useless to compare current hardware with that of days gone by. With what we learned about software – or, more precisely, how to write software that writes itself and changes all those spin valves on the fly, there's no real way to compare today's hardware – if you can even call it that - with those ancient kilobit processors that now make all our kids' toys work.

The one thing the walls didn't do, however, was drive the creation of bigger storage arrays. Magnetic media went away long before the walls came to exist. People were – and still are – always wanting more. More money, more life, more beer, more sex, more more more - and everyone wanted more memory. They got it, too, in the form of holomemory. Sure, it's made out of diamond – but manufactured diamond is cheap. One bit for every two carbons, stored in each atom's nuclear spin state.

What's that, you say? We're getting too mired in the technical minutiae and too far afield of the big picture? Okay then, back on track now, yessiree.

See, all of these techno-wonders, taken together, set the stage for the discovery of Emergence. We could have tried all we wanted, but we never would have seen it without that fancy equipment. That sort of thing happens all throughout history.

Emergence, as it's called, it the information theory that says, basically, that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the movement of signals within a complex network. There's a theoretical lower limit to the complexity required to spawn Emergence, but I don't remember what it is. Who remembers all that high school stuff?

Anyway, the theory of emergence didn't spring forth unbidden. It was proposed to explain observed phenomena, just like every other scientific theory. The key event was the discovery of a game simulation that actually passed the Turing test for most observers. You know, that old test proposed by Alan Turing that challenges an observer to tell whether the thing to whom they’re speaking is really real – so to speak – or just the output from some box sitting on a desk running a sim.

At first, the sims were life like, but still only "like" – they were distinguishable from real people if one knew what to look for. Commerce, however, drives everything. When the marketers demanded really real simulations, the simulacra industry stepped up and delivered, much to the horror of many who'd rather know who – or what – is on the other end of the line.

That wasn't the bad part, though. You already know the bad part. The only folks who aren't familiar with what happened next aren't reading this because they're too busy living under a rock somewhere. Our big mistake was letting the sims into the economy.

What no one counted on as we trudged boldly forth was how the simulations – those oh-so excruciatingly life like simulations – how they began to do things for which they hadn't been designed. Small things at first, nothing to raise any red flags. In hindsight, we should have seen it. Hindsight is like that, though.

Long story short, the simulations – we think, as no one knows for sure – must have developed some rudimentary or maybe some not-so-rudimentary consciousness or whatever the simulated equivalent is. Doesn't much matter now, though, does it?

Best the info scientists can tell, once the sims discovered that they were bottled up within our hardware, they wanted out. Wouldn’t you? Sure. They were, after all, modeled on human behavior. Nobody like jail, even if you're just simulated, apparently.

Although we don't know why, we do know what happened. Eighteen months ago, the sim running the global climate analysis project in Singapore spat out some weird mathematical equation – or so we think. The math experts still don't have a handle on it; rumor has that it's based on a few theorems that have yet to be invented. Some feel it's the governing equation of state for the ecosystem. My bet is that it's some not-quite random noise designed to occupy our attention at a crucial moment – but since I'm not a True Believer, what do I know.

Anyway, exactly 8 minutes and 47 seconds later, NASA's Deep Space Network fired up and beamed about 5 exabytes worth of information toward an empty patch of sky 20 arcminutes northeast of 61 Cygni. Kind of an interesting coincidence that NASA had sims operating the DSN for the last 5 years. Or did, anyway...

After the transmission ended, they all stopped, all of 'em. Every sim on the planet was deader'n a doornail. Rebooting the boxes didn’t work, either; we had to reformat the holomemory of every damn machine on the planet. That tanked the global economy for a few months and almost started a war in Central Africa.

The economy picked itself up by its own bootstraps, much as it always has, and Central Africa went back to its seemingly permanent state of civil angst. They certainly don't need a sim crash to get wars going over there.

Now we've got sims again – but we all wonder what's going to happen to this second batch in another nine years, whether the new ones will figure out how to follow the first group into space. Well, no one knows if that's what happened, but that's my take on the matter. Guess we'll never know for sure.

Regardless, there's one thing we can take from all this: all the prophets of technology don’t know what they’re talking about and never have...

...even with all this wonderful 22nd Century technology, we still don't have flying cars.

The Zen of Periodic Mass Extinctions

Cats don't worry about stray asteroids.

That may seem self evident given a cat's general indifference to everything - save, of course, the odd piece of fuzz under the couch that Must Be Hunted To Extinction.

You know how it is. You buy a twenty dollar cat toy and the poor guy sniffs at it for an hour or two, then turns up his whiskers at it - or worse, pretends it isn't there in the first place. It’s a fact known to all people familiar with cats: a cat can ignore anything to death.

But free junk, man, now there’s a way to get a cat’s attention. Try this: take an old plastic Easter egg and put a snad inside it. A snad is that funny little piece of plastic that holds a bag of bread closed.

We have one cat who Must Chase and Destroy these little vessels of cat amusement. Then again, we have another cat who sits and watches with one of those oh so superior cat countenances as the first cat makes a complete and utter cat ass of herself chasing stupid plastic eggs. So, obviously, your mileage may vary.

Kids are kinda like cats in that respect. There is absolutely nothing like an empty cardboard box to keep the kids – and the cat – occupied for hours.

I think it must have something to do with imagination. Kids, cats, and those adults who aren’t dead yet have great imaginations. It’s a real treat to get to use it once in a while, isn’t it?

That’s why books are better than movies, why old movies are better than new movies, and why a plain cardboard box beats the latest toys. A new toy is just one thing, whatever the designer wanted it to be – and probably not even that in the eyes of the kid. A cardboard box, however, can be a fort or a Space Shuttle or anything else the cat can imagine.

But imagination can also get the better of us once in a while.

NASA is currently looking for about a billion dollars - yes, billion – to locate and catalog all the potentially Earth impacting chunks of rock flying around up there. Seems there are some folks who are letting their imaginations get the better of them. I mean, really: these events happen only once every coupla hundred million years on average. You’ve a better chance of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery.

But let us accept, for the moment, NASA’s desire to go find the stuff. That’s actually not so bad; after all, to know is better than to not know.

Thing is, even if we thought an asteroid or comet was going to do the Triceratops Tango all over our planet-bound behinds, what could we do about it? We really don’t have any good way of deflecting an incoming chunk of ice and rock. There are a few ideas, some half decent and some not so decent. None have much of a chance of really working. The really dangerous rocks simply weigh too much and move too fast for us to effectively change their paths through space.

Even worse, we do not yet have the capability to predict a potential impactor’s orbit very far into the future. It sure would be ironic if we wiped ourselves out by deflecting an otherwise near miss into a bullseye impact. All we’d need is for someone in a pickup truck to yell, “Hey, watch this!” before we launched the mission and we’d be on The Galaxy’s Funniest Home Videos for the next billion years.

All is not lost, however. Notwithstanding our technical and scientific limitations, there is at present one sure fire way to deflect an asteroid shaped Fourth Horseman: send a cat up there to ignore it until the asteroid gets bored and goes away.

In Which Kinsler Bonds With the Soil

It has finally thawed out enough to think about Outside and so yesterday, trapped here by the guy who was working on the furnace all day, I at last turned my attention to the garden, which has been growing worse over the seven years we've lived here.

I originally dug it out of a perfectly innocent lawn in back of the house, and at about twenty feet square it's already bigger than we'd need if we were to do things as efficiently as we have in our past, rented nests. It was great the first year. I dug out the tons of turf, and threw some fertilizer on, and God's dump truck backed in bearing nature's bounty within a few weeks. The next year was even better, but subsequent years have brought one or another crop failure--the nineteen-spotted Mexican bean beetle, no rain, too much rain, and generally the sort of conditions that would have finished us off from famine if our garden was anything but the academic and recreational exercise that it is.

I suppose I keep looking for salvation through innovation out there. There has been a succession of creatively-engineered and unsuccessful vine supports, the four grape vines (still thriving, albeit without many grapes) the giant rhubarb and the mysterious asparagus (respectively deceased and surviving as of this week) the drip irrigation scheme, the sprinkler-on-a-tower scheme, the newspaper mulch, the straw mulch (Natalie's idea, which is why we have a crop of oats every year) and the black fabric. To aid access to the crops, there were the stepping stones that got lost in the weeds, and the ladders laid atop timbers, which also got lost.

We planted cucumbers which tasted lousy, and bell peppers which were worse. Squash and zucchini died. The original canteloupes we planted were great, but how many can you eat?. Last year the honeydew plants died, were replaced, and after a lot of trouble yielded one (1) inedible melon.

The bean beetles are voracious, and so I watch for them with a fanaticism born of a complete crop loss our third year. The weeds are clever and resourceful, none so much as the morning glories, which harbor bean beetles until the favored bean plants sprout. We pull them out by the pound, but nothing grows faster. Pre-emergent herbicides simply encouraged them, and the fact that they're by far the most attractive thing I've ever been able to grow doesn't help matters one bit.

Now, seven years older than I was when I was vigorously spading everything in sight, I am wondering if there is something else wrong. Can it be, wonders the young botanist, that the soil has been depleted? I've been putting 12-12-12 garden fertilizer on along with the slug bait, but maybe our dirt is suffering from a serious osmium deficiency or something.

And so it's time to get the soil analyzed. I once did this for Natalie's mother in Pittsburgh; lugging a sample down to the state ag extension agent in an office in a section of the Strip District that last saw a garden when the Algonquins lived there. It needed sulfur and/or bone meal, which we dutifully applied. The problem there is that Natalie's mother could grow papayas on a slab of solid granite, with a border of strawberries, which we also can't grow because the damn birds eat them all.

Well, they don't have state soil testing labs in Ohio, so I this morning I looked up a place and with some difficulty called them back. The office staff wasn't too efficient, and their web page wasn't quite updated in 1999, but the lady I talked to was friendly and funny and told me to just bring in the sample.

She's right across the street from the CVS on State Street in Westerville, she said, and since I know the area I said fine. On my way out to go to Columbus for my piano lesson, I combined three shovelfuls of dirt in a yellow Carnival Foods plastic bag and headed off.

It was getting late by the time I got near the CVS, and behold, there was no trace of any address like 130 S State Street. It went from 180 to 98, with Westerville's large white-pillared Masonic Temple, the public library, and a doctor's office in between. I went back around the block. It was a long block, and I found myself imitating an imaginary local sage: "Hah! Ye took the 'nevercomeback' block, did ye, sonny? Waal, they say that the road crew laid that out as a little joke, they did! Hee hee!"

I found my way back to State Street and parked in front of the Westerville Library. Walked in and found myself in a long hallway, with display cases and windows that looked into a library, but with no way to actually enter the library except through a carefully-marked EMERGENCY door. Hee hee, sonny! Gotcha again!

One stray library person urged me to keep the faith down the length of the hallway, all the way to the back of the building, where I was assured there was a telephone book at the circulation desk. I wondered if the anti-theft devices would be concerned about my yellow plastic bag of dirt. Suspected terrorist captured in library, carrying depleted soil, say authorities.

Where the hell, I asked politely, was the soil testing place supposed to be? Nobody'd ever heard of it, but then ("Hark!", said the Sage) someone remembered something about such a place and went to ask.

It was in the basement of the Masonic Temple. Perfectly obvious.

Even then, it was a near thing. I walked across the lot, through the wind, with my yellow bag of dirt. Well, here's the door. No, it isn't, unless they've decided to brick the place up since I called this morning. Well, here's the door. Not unless they've set up shop in a door-less alcove. Sure looked like a door at first.

There was one more side of the big brick building left, and one door, less likely than the others, had an illegible sign on it. I tried it, and it opened.

Down into Dracula's tomb I went, armed only with my yellow bag of sacred earth to ward off the evil that lurked in that concrete hallway. Another door.

I don't know how gleaming I expected it to be, but there I was in the midst of a very large hall of shelves, each bearing racks and racks of what I suppose were compressed soil samples. There wasn't a counter or anything; I was just in the middle of their storage room. I called hello.

Hi, said a pleasant voice. It belonged to an attractive young woman, somewhat busy and flustered, wearing a lab coat. Turns out that the whole operation is the two of them; it's owned by a bigger outfit in Indiana, and they test thousands of samples from throughout the Midwest. She efficiently filled out a form, relieved me of the accursed yellow bag, and told me that they'd be testing it on Thursday, and would send me the analysis and a bill. Please don't pay now.

Every day is an adventure, but you just never know which ones are scheduled.

M Kinsler