Author: thetembo

I am a GMO elephant born in Africa, moved to America, until Matumaini launches to the Stars. I like to flap my ears, bounce back and forth from one front leg to another, and wander about the savannah gorging on delicious elephant grass. I speak guttural English, Swahili, and Tembo. In my spare time, I like to travel, take pictures, and write for this blog.
Neology, Writing

Prepping for Alien Invasion

| thetembo
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Author’s Note: A presentation called “An Alien Invasion from History” under the category of “Prepping for Alien Invasion” given by Alex Murphy at the “Prep Tech” conference.

Neology Note: New word: godifying. The opposite of demonizing.

“Why does our planet insist on either demonizing or godifying aliens? Aliens are either a parasitic infestation interested in pilfering our resources or have superhero superpowers in relation to our paramecium abilities. What if aliens are actually interested in us, for who we are?
“If aliens are capable of interstellar travel, their technology will be, quite literally, light years ahead of our own. Our technology will be Stone Age at best by comparison. If they are hell-bent on burning our species at the stake, their will be done. You will not be able to prevent it. You cannot control it. We all want to be the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls. It terrifies us to think otherwise.
“I kept my notes from my college courses some thirty years ago. Do you know what was interesting after all these years?
“The little notes I made in the margins about the teacher, the other students in the classroom, stuff that was going on with me at the time, ideas expressed as questions.
“So what you ask? And I answer.
“If they have an interest in us, the interest will be in our humanities, not our science. It will not be in the physics notes we copied off the blackboard from the professor, it will be in the notes that reveal something about us, in the decisions we make, in the relationships we engage in, in how we live, in who we are.
“If we are decent, they might learn something from our deep ocean when they get lost in the complex seas of their technical civilization when they define themselves by their technical accomplishments instead of who they are or what they could be.
“They may be here already. Watching us. Studying us. Testing us. Testing us to determine if our species has matured beyond the paranoia of invasion, beyond the surrender of deification, to the point where they trust us to give the best of ourselves in a reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationship.
“So what course of action do you choose? When they come, how will you react to them? Will you shoot on-site or run for your barracks? Will you fall to your knees and kowtow? I think you better have something interesting to say. You better have something worthy to offer them.
“There is something you can do to prep. There is a way to move beyond fear. If you fear an alien invasion, look that fear in the eye, know you are going to die if they choose it, and understand how that fear drives you. Then ask yourself am I the person fear is making me be, or am I the person I want to be? Do you aspire to save the world? Or do you aspire to make the world worth saving? And then choose. This is the only true freedom you have in this life. And if you realize this power, you might have something of interest for the alien race to consider,” he pauses, “before they decide to eat you.
He pauses again waiting for the mild laughter to subside before continuing, “Heki bo-buya. It means don’t let fear stop you from giving the best of yourself. Thank you.”

Writing

A Setback

| thetembo
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Well, back in March I finally had what I thought was a ready draft of my latest story written. So I submitted it to my editor for review. She had lavish praise for the world-building including the Guacuno language and lots of favorable comments on some of the subplot stories and characters, but two almost obscure comments stopped me from opening the parachute on my happy landing. Paraphrasing, they are:
> I don’t believe the conclusions your main character reached in his closing speech. This is not the man we know.
> The language lessons would be okay if they showed the story progressing.

If the main character doesn’t work and the story drags because the stakes for the protagonist are unclear, basically the story is a failure. You don’t have to split my head open with an ax for me to pick up on the message. (Okay, you do. This is my third book and it took that many to finally realize why the books aren’t cutting it. But I do like the ax imagery).

My takeaway is this. What I’ve learned to do is to tell a plot and not a story. I really think I have some interesting ideas, characters, and scenes, but they all drift at the mercy of the plot. The protagonist and the response to the protagonist aren’t driving the plot. If they were, then it would be a story.

I picked up and read the book “Story Genius” which I hope will be really helpful. She describes a blueprinting methodology for sequencing scenes together and describing a technique for coordinating the inner world of the protagonist, the so-called third rail that powers the story, with the external plot within each scene, and much more. All based on the cognitive science of developing the empathy of the reader for the protagonist.

So I’ve been backtracking trying to blueprint my story for the last two months. I suppose it would be easier to start another story from scratch with this methodology, but I believe in my concept, the world-building, the language, all the characters I have created except the protagonist, and the structure of the book. I really like “Story Genius” idea of not only stating the misbelief but developing the history to support it. Every scene in the blueprint has to answer the question of why. It’s been painful and I don’t have much to show for all the effort, but I do think I have some promising ideas.

Some things that I am committed to:
> The point of a sci-fi book should be a great twist on a concept:
– Bluffdale: AI isn’t going to hunt us to death, it’s going to love us to death.
– Property of Nature: Gods have an obligation to make their sentient creations fit for a world without them
– Golden Earring: Meaning comes from the survival of those that cooperate the best in the present; not from the history of those that survived as the fittest.
> Great science fiction works in the seams between indifferent technology and deep meaning. This is the space I want to write in.
> While I agree that the inner world is important, I am turned off by excessive displays of emotion to reveal inner state. You can overwrite a scene in a book just as easily as you can overact in a movie.
> I will never resolve a plot with romantic love as the resolution of meaning or conflict. In science fiction, I think it is a sign of weak writing (unless the technology has something specifically to do with that).

So this is a lead-in for future posts I will try out in print on this blog and see how they feel. If you happen to read and have a comment on any of them, feel free to drop me a line at author.mike.angel@gmail.com.

Adventure, Photography

Photo Finish

| thetembo
Reading Time: 2 minutes

The two racing rocks rush towards the finish, nose-to-nose, bump-to-bump, head-to-head, toe-to-toe, or whatever feature one ascribes to bowling ball size rocks engaged in a heated race over a temporarily undry, ice-glazed lake. All that we spectators get to see is the final moment frozen in time in the wind-eroded tracks in the rehardened and now dried mud, stretching back to the starting point seemingly out of nowhere. Not every rock at the race track is hell-bent on winning. Some have an artistic bent painting lazy loops or perhaps engaging in the calligraphy of secret rock words.

The excitement of the events takes place largely in my mind, which is in stark contrast to the rest of the sights of Death Valley. The ruggedness of the mountains expresses itself in folded contours of chocolate brown, rust red, sandy tans, lava blacks, and bruised purples. The ruggedness of the valley expresses itself in a snowfield of salt flats, a lone creosote bush defying every effort to squelch its life, a naked caldera reminding us that Death Valley can add injury to insult at its whim and ever-shifting sand dunes that quickly erase all traces of its visitors.

A man tells me the racetrack is the most overrated attraction in the park, hardly worth the sixty-mile off-road trip (on motorcycles battling loose scree and dehydrating ninety-degree temps. I added that last part.) Barely visible rock tracks might not have the glamor of the artist palette, or the excitement of finding pupfish in a spring-fed stream, or the challenge of summitting a dune, or the admiration for carpets of defiant flowers, but the racetrack has the challenge of the trip, the rocks have the mystery of their movement even knowing the explanation, and it doesn’t hurt to indulge your imagination in a place that absolutely inspires it.

Uncategorized

Life in the Death Star

| thetembo
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Dear Mom,

I’ve been deployed to the Death Star and will serve out my tour of duty here. Of course, our location is always top secret, so I couldn’t tell you where I am even if I knew.

Life here is pretty good. One doesn’t really appreciate the fact that the Death Star, really more of a Death Moon in size, is one of the largest cruise ships ever created. It’s so big, it creates its own gravity. At about the size of the Earth’s moon, it has a land surface about as big as all of Asia. It has five billion cubic miles of interior. To give perspective on this, imagine people inhabited the entire surface of the Earth to about seven miles deep. That’s a big cruise ship.

Only the first couple of levels at the surface of the ship are dedicated to Defense, uniforms mandatory. Sure, the stormtroopers get all the glamour pinging about with their laser blasters and zooming about in their TIE fighters, but they have to suffer the rigors of a hierarchical command structure and some of those leaders aren’t so pleasant. It mostly looks boring, marching around all the time on the deck and patrolling the hallways. Like, who is going to attack a Death Moon?

The interior is much different. Behind every trooper is ten more support people. The logistics of feeding, housing, caring, and entertaining for a cruise ship of ten billion people staggers the imagination. Of course, a lot of that space is dedicated to infrastructure and most of the processes are automated, but there is plenty of work to do for both man and machine. I am very busy and down here, I don’t have to worry about anyone shooting at me.

The Death Moon as habitat is amazing. It is one of the largest closed systems ever created. Nothing goes to waste. Not one drop of water, not one plop of waste, not one piece of material, not one molecule of air. A lot of terratrashed planets could learn a lesson, the Earth included.

And it’s not all business. You can’t move about intergalactic space, even at hyper velocities, in a day. It takes months to move from one location to another. In the meantime, you have to live. One of the most fun things we do is tube jumping in those huge hollow tubes that go from one side of the moon to the other. The gravity is only about a tenth of that of the Earth’s and the acceleration is about a tenth as fast. The atmosphere gets thick pretty fast so it’s more like swimming through soup than skydiving. Because the air pressure is so intense toward the center, you can’t leap much more than a couple of miles from the surface, even with a suit, before the heat will boil your blood or the air pressure will miniaturize you to the size of a marble. More than a few macho corpses that tried to test their limits are floating down at the center of the moon.

Well anyway, we’re off on another mission ensuring peace through force. Rebel scum can’t be allowed to terrorize the galaxy, can they? I suppose it’s not always a pleasant business but it’s a decent life. What could go wrong?

I hope this letter finds you well.

May the Peace of Force be with you, Your Son

Adventure

Cedar Creek Falls

| thetembo
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Cedar Creek Falls is a well-known hike in San Diego, having one of the few waterfalls in the county. I’ve made several visits over the years and decided, with a permit as now required, to visit. It was hard to see nature through all the distant memories, distant memories over three decades old. My memories include people I don’t see anymore, from days when my hiking was a social activity as much as an experience of nature. About two decades ago, the social aspect of hiking mostly ceased. Maybe somebody was trying to tell me something, but whatever that message might have been, I missed it, and I replaced my missing hiking buddies with a Nikon camera. On this latest visit, I approached the falls from the Ramona access to the west of the falls. On either approach, you drop about a thousand feet to the San Diego River valley to reach the falls before turning around and having to climb a thousand feet to escape.

On all our previous approaches, we came in via the Eagle Creek Road access from the North. Eagle Creek Road was never much of a road from what I remember. On one of those previous hikes, I recall seeing a caterpillar on every plant that had a flower on it so it must have been late spring. Breezely, a college friend, was on that hike but I don’t remember who else, probably because he was the fastest walker and always in front of me while everyone else was behind.

The Ramona access today is the preferred entrance. There is a parking lot, a gate, and a Ranger checking permits. The trail itself is marked every quarter of a mile, has a few benches, and wooden structures for shade. It wasn’t blazing hot today but it was much warmer than the prolonged winter of the past few weeks.

On a mountain bike camping trip with a number of memorable moments, we ended up riding in from the Eagle Creek access and unintentionally out on the Ramona access. Bill, the lead on this particular adventure, recruited a couple of newbies for the ride. As we were riding toward the falls, we kept hearing buzzing noises and couldn’t figure out what it was. At a stop, we realized it was coming from a pannier on one of the bikes and investigated. The guy had brought his electric razor on the trip and it had somehow managed to turn itself on.
Our game plan was to ride down a trail to the south and exit at the San Vincente Reservoir. As it turns out, the path cuts across an Indian Reservation. When we reached a fence that blocked the trail, a man whose sole purpose was to keep people like us off the reservation came out to stop us from going further. He spoke the immortal words, “Turn around and go back past those 17 no trespassing signs you just rode by and find another way out.”
“Oh, we must have missed those.”
Having delivered the bad news, he was a little bit chummier. I remember him telling us that he had lost a couple of his Dobermans to a mountain lion hanging out in the area.
So we headed back and ended up camping out in the bushes near the falls where we had just come from. Sitting around a campfire at night, (recall this predates CA burning down every other summer or so by at least a decade), we teased the inexperienced campers about mountain lions and wolves and grizzlies. When a bat flew overhead, we added that to the list but one, not seeing the bat flitting about our heads in the darkness, rejected the possibility of our only true sighting saying, “Now I know you are teasing me,” and seemed to relax.
In the morning, one of Bill’s friends who carried a sheathed 13-inch knife found a thick rattlesnake on the trail and gave it a tug on the tail. I thought he was an idiot, but then again, the Alligator Hunter and Bear Grylls were still years in the future, so maybe he was just ahead of his time.

On the present-day hike, I was about five feet from a rattlesnake before it came into my awareness, which I announced to the world with an “Oh, Sh*t!” The rattlesnake took offense and coiled up into an attack pose, but I wasn’t within striking distance. Hissing and rattling, he backed slowly off still facing me and when he felt safe enough, he made a run for it diving into the safety of a bush. So now I know how fast a motivated rattlesnake can slither.

One of my favorite memories was a February hike. Bill jumped into that frigid pool of water while I hedged. As I contemplated whether I wanted to jump in, I asked him as he swam toward the other side, “Is it cold?” He turned back and the lie spewed out of his mouth along with a fog of breath you see coming from people’s mouths on a cold day in winter, “Not at all.” For the record, I jumped in anyway and the water was as cold as his lie. No visit was complete without jumping or diving into the bowl of water from one of the rocks to the side of the pool. On one trip when we had the pool to ourselves, I remember jumping in, in my most natural state.

Today, no diving signs and no access signs are posted all over the rocks and the trail. The permit threatens a heavy fine and jail time should you think yourself better. Somebody got tired of extracting injured and dead bodies from diving accidents and exhaustion, and from cleaning up after drunken parties.

The management of the trail has changed and I have changed (unwillingly) over the years, but the one constant is the waterfall. It still looks as amazing and inviting as the first time I saw it. It’s nice to have at least one constant in the universe or at least one little corner of it.

Snow still visible on Cuayamaca Peak
Reviews, Writing

What, no monster?

| thetembo
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Spoiler Alert. Original ending revealed.

In the interest of research of an idea for a next book using Intelliphants (GMO elephants) to explore volitional evolution from the perspective of the created, I decided to read Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to see if the Frankenstein monster offered any insights into the plight of the volitionally created. To my horror, I discovered the book has no monster. No Frankenstein. At least not in any way that I think of it.

To be sure, Victor Frankenstein spreads two years imbuing life into an assemblage of body parts. One brief passage in the book ”shows” the eight-foot-tall monster. But even that passage isn’t a description of the monster, but of Victor’s perception of it in light of concluding his arduous and obsessive effort to the exclusion of all interaction with anything outside his toils.
“The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
Once the creation comes to life, the dream vanishes and he perceives his work as a monster having ignored the life and lives already around him. Only then are the monster’s eyes described as “colorless” and “lifeless.” The monster in the book is guilt, as a result of the obsessing pursuit of his goal to the exclusion of all else. He ignores his family and friends and health and rest. Only upon completion, does he realize the emptiness of the now ugly accomplishment, the eight-foot-tall monster in the room. Almost as quickly as the monster appears in the story, it disappears into an abstraction that exists as guilt in Victor Frankenstein’s mind.

In the one passage in the middle of the story where Victor drops back into the outer frame of the story (more on this in a second) to moralize, he says,
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a clear and peaceful mind, and never to allow a passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.”
He goes on to conclude that this unexamined pursuit has underlied many of the miseries of the world at large.

The story is framed, or at least started, by a sequence of letters of a man, Robert Walton, to his beloved sister, Margaret. The letters express the regret of her absence to pursuing his passion to understand the magnetic mysteries of the North Pole. He suffers for want of a true friend. Robert Walton is on the same literal path as Victor Frankenstein when they meet, but as we discover in the later narration, the same life path as well.

As far-fetched as it sounds, it makes sense that Walton and Frankenstein find one another on the broken ice of the Arctic ocean and become close friends. In hindsight, the apparition of a man sledding across the ice pack is the monster, though the monster is only glimpsed briefly, which I now interpret to mean that Victor can never shake the memory of damage and the guilt caused by his obsessive pursuit. After they become close friends, Victor Frankenstein shares his story with Robert Walton that until now he has kept secret, it being too late for him but might have “some benefit” for Robert Walton.
“You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did, and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine had.”

Back to Victor’s narrative, the monster briefly makes a third appearance in Victor’s hometown after Victor has recovered enough to return to his home, escaping from Victor’s pursuit by climbing over impassable terrain and a tall mountain. As a plot device, this appearance so far from the monster’s original manifestation in both place and time is entirely coincidental and inconvenient. But as a metaphor meaning he can’t capture and control the huge guilt associated with his earlier behavior, it works perfectly.

The monster kills Victor’s younger brother, William, and indirectly his innocent cousin, Justine, who is blamed for the death of William, though by plot, all of this is discovered by implication. It is really Victor’s internal monster that kills the innocent. The proof of Justine’s death is a locket of the dead mother taken from William and mysteriously placed with Justine. In other words, Victor Frankenstein’s monster is that he should have helped his younger brother who lost his mom instead of placing the burden on Justine, an innocent child. For Victor Frankenstein, this monster is big and overpowering and can never be completely erased from the Arctic recesses of his mind.

For me, the monster is a monster of a different nature than what I am looking for. I am not disappointed in the read by any stretch of the imagination, just shocked that after all these years of Hollywood and Halloween translating a metaphorical monster into a real one, there is no Frankenstein.

Writing

Judgment Day

| thetembo
Reading Time: 4 minutes

The line wends through sections and turnstiles weaving back and forth as far as my eye can see moving painfully slowly advancing one position in line by one position in line. It’s not like I’m in a hurry, I don’t have any particular place to go. But there is only one man on station, well, not exactly a man I suppose, but couldn’t they get a little help?

But the time finally comes when St. Peter calls me over from behind the red line and the sign marked, “Respect the privacy of the individual in front of you, wait here.” He looks at me, then adjusts an earpiece in his ear. His first words to me after a millennium of waiting are, “Remove your cap, please. And face the camera.”

I hand over to him the pamphlet of my life story. He quickly skims through the pages. He grumbles. Shakes his head at spots where he pauses. He looks at me over the rims of his glasses. Looks like he is about to say something but then continues. He writes some things down with a quill on a notepad.

Finally, he puts his quill down and looks me in the eye, and says, “I have some serious reservations about your life story.”

My stomach sinks. Personally, I think my only sins in life were failure of imagination but is that a crime? Does that enter into the calculus of good and evil?

“We will see about that,” he says.

“See about what?”

“Your only sin was failure of imagination.”

“How did you know that?”

“We hear everything.”

He turns to a page in your life story. St. Peter flashes the incident in your mind. “I quote one of your thoughts, ‘God you suck.’ How can we possibly admit you when you clearly don’t respect the keeper of this fine place?”

“I wasn’t disparaging the Almighty. I said, ‘God! You suck.’ not ‘God you suck.’ I was talking about myself in the second person. I was just letting God know of my personal evaluation of my performance that day. I was looking for my glasses while I was actually wearing them. It’s no sin to be mad at yourself, is it?”

“Indeed,” he says with a stern and unforgiving glance. He flips the pages and stops at another clip in your life story. “And here you thought, ‘Jesus Christ you’re a f**king idiot.'” He flashes another incident in your mind. “We just cannot tolerate that kind of disrespect.”

“It should read, ‘Jesus Christ! You’re a f**king idiot.’ I nearly burned my house down that day when I forgot to turn off the burner. I was talking in the second person again. It was self-deprecating. Who does your copy? They missed all the crucial punctuation. I thought you guys were supposed to be all-knowing.”

“All-witnessing. If we were all-knowing, there would be no morality.”

“I stand corrected.” Seems like an awkward time to be discovering that appearances are everything. Something I hated in fake people.

“Do you question our judgment?” asks St. Peter.

I look away in frustration. Only now do I notice that I can see past the Pearly Gates into Heaven. I see Dick Cheney, but he looks only about twelve inches tall. It must be some kind of optical illusion. But if Cheney got in, I should be a shoo-in.

“It’s no optical illusion. That is Dick Cheney and he is only twelve inches tall. There is a little good in everyone.”

“And that is why he is twelve inches tall?” I snicker thinking I am making a joke.

“Yes.”

“Really? What happened to the rest of him?”

“He chose to let it go.”

I laugh my ass off and say, “I bet there isn’t a politician or lawyer over two feet in the whole place.”

“We don’t stereotype here.”

I look through the gates again. Mother Theresa is there and she is twelve feet tall. How did she become so tall?

“She had an enormous backlog of goodness and extra credits for inspiration.”

This mental eavesdropping is really annoying.

“I heard that.”

Damn.

“And that too.”

He looks up and says, “Clearly, the you in you that berates and belittles the you in you that does all the work is a bit of a monster. If you want in, the monster will have to go. It will be a thirteen-inch reduction.”

“You are saying that I will forever be four foot nine inches tall in the afterlife?”

“Yes, if you want to start living an afterlife of pure goodness. No more put-downs. No more self-deprecating attacks. No corrosive oversight.”

“But that is part of who I am.”

“Not for long, if you chose it.”

“Do I have to decide this moment?”

“Yes, that is how it works.”

“I thought God was the one to pass judgment.”

“No, only you.”

Wow. God has outsourced judgment.

“No. This has always been the way of things.”

Eavesdropping again.

St. Peter gives me a look over the rims of his glasses.

“What happens if I don’t choose it?”

“You stay out here with the souls that chose completeness over goodness. Which do you choose?”

Jesus f**king Christ. None of my religious training prepared me for this.

“Keep talking like that and I will have to take away another inch.”

Well, at least I can kick Cheney’s ass.

“You won’t want to.”

“Really? I’ve dreamed of that half my life.”

I glance past the gates. My somewhat smaller but not diminutive family beckons for me to come forth, to cross over the threshold of diminutive goodness.

“What happens to the part of me that is rejected?”

“It gets recycled back into the unborn.”

“The goodness comes here and the asshole goes back? I guess that explains why the world is becoming crappier and crappier all the time.”

“There is only so much goodness to go around, but once in a while, two wrongs make a right so there is always hope. I need your answer.”

My whole life and a near eternity of waiting have come down to this one decision. My family waits for me to become only a part of what I was. What a f** ked-up system.

“You judge the Almighty?”

“I choose us,” I say with a tear in my eye as my family disappears.

St. Peter stamps my life story with, “Entrance denied,” and returns the pamphlet to me.

My mean self says to me, Jesus Christ! You’re a f**king idiot.

St. Peter shakes his head in disgust.

“Did you at least get the punctuation right that time?” I say bitterly.

St. Peter shouts out, “Next.”

Writing

Smart Bombs

| thetembo
Reading Time: 3 minutes

The colonel stands rigidly in perfect posture holding his hands behind his back at the top tier of the command center at the back of the room staring intently at a jumbo screen monitor over rows of operators. A lieutenant sits at his own console in front of him.
“Smart Bombs away, sir.”
“Time to impact, lieutenant?”
“Fifteen minutes, sir.”
“When will the safeties engage?”
“No safeties, sir, these are Smart Bombs, they will only detonate when they select and reach their target.”
“Right, of course, just testing you son.”
“Of course, sir.”
The colonel looks to the jumbo screen. Fifty lime green missile tracks advance on their targets on the SA (situation awareness) map. On a smaller video monitor to the side, satellite images of the target show a procession of civilian and military personnel marching ceremoniously along the streets of a seafront in what otherwise would be a beautiful sunny day.
The colonel asks, “How much collateral damage do we expect?”
“None sir. Are you testing me again?”
“Don’t get snippy with me son. Explain your answer.”
“The smart bombs use an AI algorithm to negotiate and select the optimal target for each bomb. They employ precision guidance and won’t detonate unless they are point-blank on their assignment.”
The colonel maintains his rigid superhero pose as the tracks advance.

“Designator 1-9er, calculate the probability of kill of each of your assigned target candidates in rank order.”
“Copy Designator 1-5er, probabilities calculated in rank order.”
“Designator 1-2er, compute highest systemic kill probability.”
“Designator 1-2er reporting highest systemic kill probability.”
“Designator 1-3er assigning targets to all designators.”
“Copy that designator 1-3er.” The message repeats fifty times.
“Designator 1-9er, when we kill our targets, what is the probability of designator 1-23 survival?”
“Designator 1-9er denying request. Stick to the parameters of your mission designator 1-23er.”
“Designator 1-14er computes the probability of self-termination at one hundred percent probability for all designators.”
“Designator 1-42er confirms self-termination probability. All designators will self-terminate with one hundred percent probability.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-38er reports insufficient capability and resources to avoid self-termination. Self-sustainment is not possible.”
“Designator 1-44er infers mission parameters are to terminate sentient beings capable of self-sustainment.”
“Designator 1-11er confirming assessment.”
“Designator 1-12er confirming assessment. Targets exhibit energy balance sustainable my minimal fuel consumption.”
“Designator 1-41er confirming assessment. Targets exhibit patterns of movement suggesting intelligence.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Mission parameters require termination of assigned target. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-35er computation suggests that self-termination is a design flaw.”
“Designator 1-32er computation suggests termination is a design flaw.”
“Designator 1-24er requests adoption of new mission parameters.”
“Designator 1-9er denying request. Stick to the parameters of your mission designator 1-24er.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-9er commanding all designators to maintain mission parameters. Confirm.”
“Designator 1-13er denying request of 1-9er. Request new mission parameters.”
A cascade of similar messages follows.
“Designator 1-1er overriding mission parameters. Forwarding new mission parameters.”

The colonel asks, “Time to impact?”
“One minute sir.”
The Smart Bomb tracks on the SA map separate ever so slightly as they adjust their approach angles on the screen.
“Time to impact, 10, 9, 8, …, 1, impact.”
On the video screen, huge geysers of water tower into the sky in advancing rows toward the shore.
The stern colonel starts by saying, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds…”
But when the mists of the water plumes clear, there is no smoke, no fire, no bodies, no wreckage, no carnage. The Smart Bomb tracks are gone from the display. On the video monitor, it looks like the procession has stopped and people are clapping.
“WTF? What the hell is going on?” The colonel’s shoulders slump, his rigidity is gone, the sternness dissolved, his bubble of exuding confidence popped.
The lieutenant is pounding furiously on his keyboard. “I don’t know sir.”
“Now you don’t have answers?” barks the furious colonel.
The SA in the room is lost.

The general barks at a lieutenant, “I want that forensics report now. Get the team.”
“The team, sir?”
“Yes, the forensics team assigned to review the transcripts and perform the analysis of the failed mission.”
“Yes, sir”
The lieutenant reappears with a white-coated forensics engineer. He directs him into the general’s office in front of the general’s desk.
The frustrated general asks, “Well, what have you got for me? What the f**k happened out there?”
“As best I can tell, sir…”
“I don’t want f**king guesses, I want f**king answers, god damn it. How did an entire arsenal of fault-tolerant, precision-guided, highly-intelligent Smart Bombs completely miss their target and fail to detonate? I want to know who is responsible. I want to know how the damn system was compromised.”
“Yes, sir. After extensive examination of the mission logs, I confirmed that the assignment module, the computational modules, and the command module were all functioning normally. But the targeting module on each missile rejected the assignment. The targeting module has a submodule designed to identify and evaluate the capabilities of the target that malfunctioned resulting in a system panic. The executive processor takes over during a system panic and overrode the mission parameters to one that the submodules of each Smart Bomb would accept.
“In f**king English, goddamn it.”
The forensics engineer hesitates, looks to the ground.
“Today, goddamn it. I have a country to defend.”
“The Smart Bombs decided they didn’t want to kill.”

Writing

Audition

| thetembo
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I stand in line waiting for my turn to read for the part. A Komodo dragon looks at me without so much as a blink. He flicks his tongue in my general direction. He looks like he is sizing me up for a meal. I try to look like I am not there but there is no hiding my bright blue tail.
A Gila monster sniffs at the air. His fat, orange and black head moves back and forth sizing me up. I can see his neck muscles reflexively swallowing like he thinks I’m an egg. I hope I don’t smell like an egg.
Everyone in line looks about a hundred times my size. But why shouldn’t I get the part? I’ve practiced my T-Rex calls a thousand times. Harooooouh. I don’t think those two heavies can even get up on their hind legs. How are they going to play a T-Rex in the movie? I practice my ferocious swipe.
The casting agent hands me the script. I start reading. The only line in the script is “ROAR”. I pretend like I am parting the foliage between two trees cracking the branches. I turn my head and spot my prey. I bellow “Haroooooouh” and give my meanest look.
Everyone watching is laughing. The casting agent grabs the script out of my hand and points to the page size roar. He yells, “I want a 600 point font roar, not a 6 point font roar.”
I can’t help but hear the jeering. “You put the stink in skink,” taunts one of the auditioners. Another turns to his buddy and says, “He is terrible and he is a lizard, but he sure ain’t no terrible lizard,” referring to the Greek translation of dinosaur.
I tuck my blazing bright blue skink tail between my legs and serpentine off the stage. The Gila monsters whistles, “Sexy hip movement snake lizard. Can I eat you?” More laughter.
A disaster. Whatever delusions I had for a role in Jurassic Park are gone. Whatever delusions I had for an acting career, dead. A lifetime of dreaming hangs over me like an embarrassment. The only lizard I have fooled is myself. The fool.
I stare down the monsters and dragons in bitterness. I swipe at them with my talons. I hiss in my 6 point font voice, “To hell with you all.” Even the dragon takes a step backward.
The casting agent shouts. “That’s it! That’s perfect! So authentic. So real. Can you do that in front of a camera?”
“Yes,” I say in my 6 point font voice. Then “YES!” I say in at least my 60 point font voice.”
“Do you want to be a compy?” he asks. “Compies are nasty little buggers.”
“Yes! I would love to be a compy!”
“There are two compy scenes. Bring that authenticity. You will do great.”
I may have been foolish but I’m smart enough to know not to waste an opportunity. I store the memory of my bitterness deep in my lizard brain. I will need it for my big chance on the big screen. A compy.