First sneak peek at Mercury Forty-Two
[Here is a peek at a scene from Mercury Forty-Two, my current work-in-progress--pardon the mistakes; I am still focused on cranking out the rough draft--25K, that's half of a novel!]
Our regular drop zone was the Denver-Cairo-Rowling roundabout. We would hop to Egypt, boost up to Rowling Orbital Field, and then drop to Colorado on our return trip. This being training, not alone the normal hazards of such operations, it meant that occasionally we came down in other places—sometimes even on purpose.
We spent a week in Antarica for our cold winter and Europa Earthside training. An escape pod survival suit is designed to cope with the hazards of vacuum, but it can also be put to use as an insulated coverall if you find yourself facing the teeth of a will-of-god blizzard. I found myself wishing that I would had one in my childhood when my mom made me shovel the sidewalk without gloves and only a thin windbreaker to wear. A survival suit keeps you nice and cozy, cuts down on the frostbite. The only hazard is that the ARTIC winds can toss you around like a balloon.
Another week was spent in the Australian Outback, walking our way out of the interior. The aboriginal instructors delighted in calling us “kangaroos.” Watching the kangaroos bounce around, I could see the similarities, especially when they decided to be ill-tempered. And to drive home the point of how far afield the Neos went to find implant potential astronaut candidates, there is nothing like running into an aboriginal with philosopher’s eyes.
Then there was the drop into the Korean War Memorial Zone, perhaps the most heavily mined and auto-missiled zone on the entire planet. Upon landing, we had to police our landing area for booby traps and sniper positions before constructing a fortification of fallen trees. I gained a pound of muscle chopping them down while the quicker runners scouted the surrounding countryside. Only after that did we start to make our way to the nearest underground bunker-trench tunnel we could find, before making our way through the hazardous darkness of cavernous city of Kimpolis. I was never so glad to see the sun in my life.
Those drops were planned. Our drop into Vegas was not planned. Maybe. Maybe not. Look—I have my suspicions, but the evidence could be argued both ways.
“I am telling you that the New Egyptians have combined cold fission technology with tracking devices. And being the servants of the devil, they have tricked us by claiming that their medical implants are just routine medicine, a way of keeping healthy in an unhealthy world. The sad part, so very sad, is the fact that they convinced the rich and powerful to accept implants under the illusion of treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The New Egyptians delight in the suffering of the poor and dying. The only difference with the rich and elite is that the New Egyptians desperately need money. Therefore, the rich are, quote, unquote, healed. When the Dark Pharaoh orders it, all of those who received implants are going to be enslaved, or have their heads blown off by the landmines that we allowed our citizens to receive. It is the mark of the Antichrist, I tell you…”
The Good Hermetic Rosicrucian, True Patriot and Prophet, the Right Reverend Robert Norton, and his Saint Queen wife, Cyzarine Vanya, beamed out their True American Mysteries broadcast out of the small town of Pahrump, Nevada sixty miles west of Las Vegas. It was a nutty mix of conspiracy theories, populism, and wisdom that the mad couple claimed to have verified with the help of their Holy Guardian Angel, Metatron.
“How does Norton get so many views?” one of the drill instructors asked in the rec room for the billionth time.
“Maybe he is spending a lot on advertising,” another instructor said.
“His whole show is advertising: Buy my Ultimate Eight Ball, personally blessed by the archangel Raphael—just sixty-nine ninety-nine. Worried that international tensions will meltdown into a dirty atomic war? Buy your own personal urban fallout pod—guaranteed to protect you from the hazards of Sino-Russo-Com aggression. Stock your shelter with the ultimate to eat survival meals, Ultra-Prepper Meals, a steal at going out of business prices! ”
“And who believes this type of tripe?”
My dear sainted mother, I thought.
“Shocking Independent Thought War Update: Today, the New Egyptians and their supporters once again tried to kill me. I was going down Route 66, driving Bessie my classic mustard yellow roadster, real wheels—no hover lift for me, when the semi in front of me blew its port turbo, causing it to lose control and drop onto the roadway. I braked real hard and rammed into the side of the truck. It split opening, showering me in dozens of green pleasure droids. I was horrified to learn that the semi was quote, unquote, involved in the illegal traffic of sex droids. And who encourages this illegal trade. The New Egyptians. No surprise that their peacekeepers were soon on the scene claiming humanartain reasons, but we all know the truth that this was just another attempt to assassinate me for spreading the truth of their enslavement of the so-called Free American Islands. Today, the First Minister of the Holy American Empire called for new laws ensuring that the sex industry was protected from artificial porn stars, and the increase in real human workers to meet the growing demand for sin-confess.”
“We just learned from an informant that the Free American Islands have joined with the New Egyptians to send millions of refugees from the conquered Mexican nomes northward across the southern border of the Holy American Empire to cripple our economy, stir unrest, and murder us all in our beds. I call upon our First Minister to adapt a no-tolerance policy, and allow for executions of illegal immigrants as soon as they cross the border. The Holy Empire has long been the safety net for the poverty-ridden Free American Islands and their associated nomes. Enough is enough already. I am a tax payer, and I demand prompt action on this issue!”
“A Warden from the Holy American Empire has provided me with explosive evidence that the New Egyptian’s technology is actually rooted in witchcraft and sorcery. The documents, as you can see, are classified NORAD 51, the highest secret classification of the Empire’s intelligence services. And while I normally frown on the unveiling of top secret documents, my wife and I feel that this information is so important and critical to your survival that today we are going to reveal the undisclosed truth about how the implants are really the larvae of demons, who use the Neos to mature into their adult form. Upon maturation, the alien implant bursts out of the skull and backbone in a ritual called the Revenge of the Demonic Goddess Athena…”
“The reason are that the Free American Islands and the global slave masters continue to expound that the Collapse was caused by man-made climate change and wars fought for political reasons, is that the citizens of the Free Islands are servants of the false god Science, who demands that children be indoctrinated in the falsehoods of science, so that our children become unbelievers in the truth of the Books, and are willing to rise up in rebellion against the true and last prophet of IHVH-Jesus-Allah—the First Minister of the Holy American Empire. If our children only knew of the hellfire in the afterlife that awaited them, they would scorn everything that has come out of the Scientific-Economic-Industrial Complex. Save your soul—denounce science!”
“The biggest conspiracy is that the New Egyptians are being guided by alien artifacts from the far future which archaeologists and paleologists have dug up in Dinosaur Flats and in the Recovered Artic. These artifacts appear to be human heads. Some of them are made from large crystals. Others are made from metal. As we can see from this picture, this particular example looks like it had organic matter—muscle and skin—over its metallic base. In the American Rosicrucian Order of the Last Savior, we possess letters and manuscripts that detail the strange messages that was received by the Knight Templars from a similar head, pure heresy all of it—but it was so alluring that the Knight Templars renounced their Christianity and became servants of this dark influence. Let me tell you the truth…”
“How can you trust a country, a communist country no less, that has the ability to drop an empty spacepod on anyone that they want. And that is only if their claims of near-perfect accuracy is true. What if the New Egyptians have no control over where they are dropping their pods? What if they are just dropping them randomly? Killing innocent people whose only crime was to be downward of a thirty ton pod...”
One could see how some of these statements might upset the delicate feelings of the New Egyptian Space Force and Support Services.
We had just finished another week at Rowling Orbital Field. It was once again time to plummet to Earth, surfing the undertow of gravity, daring the forces of nature to kill us. Grounders wonder how we cope with the exposure to near-constant danger. Truth is that coping with the continuous threat that each moment could be your last has been the lot of every solder since the battlefields of the twentieth century. Fear. Horror. Death. Drugs. Corruption. PTSD. AWOL. The soldier of old hid in their trenches and silos for safety; a spacer has his pod.
There are vital differences between an Earth war veteran and a member of the Space Force. First, our implant neutralizes drugs, hence no substance abuse for us. Second, the implant cannot mature in the corrupt—if you see a pair of lighted eyes acting corrupt, you need to look at the bigger picture and understand that you are missing something. Third, most of our time is spent in conditions where the only way to go AWOL is to take a walk without a sufficient supply of atmosphere. But we spacers still have the fear, horror, and death to deal with, hopefully without developing a full blown case of PTSD.
The implant helps. But it can only do so much. Sometimes, an implant can make PTSD worse.
The root cause of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is that you can’t forget traumatic memories. They will boil up to the surface, unbidden and still as emotional charged as the moment when the memory was etched into the cerebral cortex. At one time, crackpots like the descendent of the Emperor Norton, thought that some events were so traumatic that a human being would suppress and forget the event, in order to protect their sanity. Quark doctors and conspiracy experts would claim to recover such buried memories by methods like hypnotism when in fact they were creating and embedding false memories in their patients. False memories rehearsed over and over...
[End of sneak peek.]
Our regular drop zone was the Denver-Cairo-Rowling roundabout. We would hop to Egypt, boost up to Rowling Orbital Field, and then drop to Colorado on our return trip. This being training, not alone the normal hazards of such operations, it meant that occasionally we came down in other places—sometimes even on purpose.
We spent a week in Antarica for our cold winter and Europa Earthside training. An escape pod survival suit is designed to cope with the hazards of vacuum, but it can also be put to use as an insulated coverall if you find yourself facing the teeth of a will-of-god blizzard. I found myself wishing that I would had one in my childhood when my mom made me shovel the sidewalk without gloves and only a thin windbreaker to wear. A survival suit keeps you nice and cozy, cuts down on the frostbite. The only hazard is that the ARTIC winds can toss you around like a balloon.
Another week was spent in the Australian Outback, walking our way out of the interior. The aboriginal instructors delighted in calling us “kangaroos.” Watching the kangaroos bounce around, I could see the similarities, especially when they decided to be ill-tempered. And to drive home the point of how far afield the Neos went to find implant potential astronaut candidates, there is nothing like running into an aboriginal with philosopher’s eyes.
Then there was the drop into the Korean War Memorial Zone, perhaps the most heavily mined and auto-missiled zone on the entire planet. Upon landing, we had to police our landing area for booby traps and sniper positions before constructing a fortification of fallen trees. I gained a pound of muscle chopping them down while the quicker runners scouted the surrounding countryside. Only after that did we start to make our way to the nearest underground bunker-trench tunnel we could find, before making our way through the hazardous darkness of cavernous city of Kimpolis. I was never so glad to see the sun in my life.
Those drops were planned. Our drop into Vegas was not planned. Maybe. Maybe not. Look—I have my suspicions, but the evidence could be argued both ways.
“I am telling you that the New Egyptians have combined cold fission technology with tracking devices. And being the servants of the devil, they have tricked us by claiming that their medical implants are just routine medicine, a way of keeping healthy in an unhealthy world. The sad part, so very sad, is the fact that they convinced the rich and powerful to accept implants under the illusion of treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The New Egyptians delight in the suffering of the poor and dying. The only difference with the rich and elite is that the New Egyptians desperately need money. Therefore, the rich are, quote, unquote, healed. When the Dark Pharaoh orders it, all of those who received implants are going to be enslaved, or have their heads blown off by the landmines that we allowed our citizens to receive. It is the mark of the Antichrist, I tell you…”
The Good Hermetic Rosicrucian, True Patriot and Prophet, the Right Reverend Robert Norton, and his Saint Queen wife, Cyzarine Vanya, beamed out their True American Mysteries broadcast out of the small town of Pahrump, Nevada sixty miles west of Las Vegas. It was a nutty mix of conspiracy theories, populism, and wisdom that the mad couple claimed to have verified with the help of their Holy Guardian Angel, Metatron.
“How does Norton get so many views?” one of the drill instructors asked in the rec room for the billionth time.
“Maybe he is spending a lot on advertising,” another instructor said.
“His whole show is advertising: Buy my Ultimate Eight Ball, personally blessed by the archangel Raphael—just sixty-nine ninety-nine. Worried that international tensions will meltdown into a dirty atomic war? Buy your own personal urban fallout pod—guaranteed to protect you from the hazards of Sino-Russo-Com aggression. Stock your shelter with the ultimate to eat survival meals, Ultra-Prepper Meals, a steal at going out of business prices! ”
“And who believes this type of tripe?”
My dear sainted mother, I thought.
“Shocking Independent Thought War Update: Today, the New Egyptians and their supporters once again tried to kill me. I was going down Route 66, driving Bessie my classic mustard yellow roadster, real wheels—no hover lift for me, when the semi in front of me blew its port turbo, causing it to lose control and drop onto the roadway. I braked real hard and rammed into the side of the truck. It split opening, showering me in dozens of green pleasure droids. I was horrified to learn that the semi was quote, unquote, involved in the illegal traffic of sex droids. And who encourages this illegal trade. The New Egyptians. No surprise that their peacekeepers were soon on the scene claiming humanartain reasons, but we all know the truth that this was just another attempt to assassinate me for spreading the truth of their enslavement of the so-called Free American Islands. Today, the First Minister of the Holy American Empire called for new laws ensuring that the sex industry was protected from artificial porn stars, and the increase in real human workers to meet the growing demand for sin-confess.”
“We just learned from an informant that the Free American Islands have joined with the New Egyptians to send millions of refugees from the conquered Mexican nomes northward across the southern border of the Holy American Empire to cripple our economy, stir unrest, and murder us all in our beds. I call upon our First Minister to adapt a no-tolerance policy, and allow for executions of illegal immigrants as soon as they cross the border. The Holy Empire has long been the safety net for the poverty-ridden Free American Islands and their associated nomes. Enough is enough already. I am a tax payer, and I demand prompt action on this issue!”
“A Warden from the Holy American Empire has provided me with explosive evidence that the New Egyptian’s technology is actually rooted in witchcraft and sorcery. The documents, as you can see, are classified NORAD 51, the highest secret classification of the Empire’s intelligence services. And while I normally frown on the unveiling of top secret documents, my wife and I feel that this information is so important and critical to your survival that today we are going to reveal the undisclosed truth about how the implants are really the larvae of demons, who use the Neos to mature into their adult form. Upon maturation, the alien implant bursts out of the skull and backbone in a ritual called the Revenge of the Demonic Goddess Athena…”
“The reason are that the Free American Islands and the global slave masters continue to expound that the Collapse was caused by man-made climate change and wars fought for political reasons, is that the citizens of the Free Islands are servants of the false god Science, who demands that children be indoctrinated in the falsehoods of science, so that our children become unbelievers in the truth of the Books, and are willing to rise up in rebellion against the true and last prophet of IHVH-Jesus-Allah—the First Minister of the Holy American Empire. If our children only knew of the hellfire in the afterlife that awaited them, they would scorn everything that has come out of the Scientific-Economic-Industrial Complex. Save your soul—denounce science!”
“The biggest conspiracy is that the New Egyptians are being guided by alien artifacts from the far future which archaeologists and paleologists have dug up in Dinosaur Flats and in the Recovered Artic. These artifacts appear to be human heads. Some of them are made from large crystals. Others are made from metal. As we can see from this picture, this particular example looks like it had organic matter—muscle and skin—over its metallic base. In the American Rosicrucian Order of the Last Savior, we possess letters and manuscripts that detail the strange messages that was received by the Knight Templars from a similar head, pure heresy all of it—but it was so alluring that the Knight Templars renounced their Christianity and became servants of this dark influence. Let me tell you the truth…”
“How can you trust a country, a communist country no less, that has the ability to drop an empty spacepod on anyone that they want. And that is only if their claims of near-perfect accuracy is true. What if the New Egyptians have no control over where they are dropping their pods? What if they are just dropping them randomly? Killing innocent people whose only crime was to be downward of a thirty ton pod...”
One could see how some of these statements might upset the delicate feelings of the New Egyptian Space Force and Support Services.
We had just finished another week at Rowling Orbital Field. It was once again time to plummet to Earth, surfing the undertow of gravity, daring the forces of nature to kill us. Grounders wonder how we cope with the exposure to near-constant danger. Truth is that coping with the continuous threat that each moment could be your last has been the lot of every solder since the battlefields of the twentieth century. Fear. Horror. Death. Drugs. Corruption. PTSD. AWOL. The soldier of old hid in their trenches and silos for safety; a spacer has his pod.
There are vital differences between an Earth war veteran and a member of the Space Force. First, our implant neutralizes drugs, hence no substance abuse for us. Second, the implant cannot mature in the corrupt—if you see a pair of lighted eyes acting corrupt, you need to look at the bigger picture and understand that you are missing something. Third, most of our time is spent in conditions where the only way to go AWOL is to take a walk without a sufficient supply of atmosphere. But we spacers still have the fear, horror, and death to deal with, hopefully without developing a full blown case of PTSD.
The implant helps. But it can only do so much. Sometimes, an implant can make PTSD worse.
The root cause of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is that you can’t forget traumatic memories. They will boil up to the surface, unbidden and still as emotional charged as the moment when the memory was etched into the cerebral cortex. At one time, crackpots like the descendent of the Emperor Norton, thought that some events were so traumatic that a human being would suppress and forget the event, in order to protect their sanity. Quark doctors and conspiracy experts would claim to recover such buried memories by methods like hypnotism when in fact they were creating and embedding false memories in their patients. False memories rehearsed over and over...
[End of sneak peek.]
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| 42nd "'Flying Pigs" Peace Keeper Astro-Squadron |
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