No matter what he did, he couldn't help but feel like a character in one of his father's fucked up science fiction stories. Bob Humonculous had tried to keep it minimal, real low profile. He tried not to think about the encroachment of technology into human biological prcesses, the hazy border between fantasy and reality, or whether automata could ever really think and possibly replace mankind. So he became a janitor. Well, he was a glorified janitor in charge of the maintenance of many systems about an interplanetary starliner including life support and the upgrade of passenger and crew systems.
Since the great Econ Wars of 2062, that's where all the money was. Yes, the Econ Wars, when Mars showed how red it really was. Humanity was pulled out its own arsehole and the structure of economic society seemingly turned upside down. Cause if you want to point up in space, you have to point everywhere at once. Since then, the lowliest jobs paid the best, and the least exerting paid nothing at all. But then again, everything was free, so it didn't matter all that much anyways. Unless you enjoyed the absurd luxuries or wanted to own worthless property on some desolate planet credit mattered as much as the conceptual difference between squawk and squat.
The only thing that really mattered anymore was tasteless, odorless and confined to the space between a human's temples. And that belonged to the laws that governed the galaxy, the impetus that propelled the churning of time. What had always impelled humans but the dreams and aspirations, the act of imagining something better from what was. The science of this was called imagineering and had come a long way since Walt Disney built an empire on the shoulders of a mouse. It was the collective yearnings of millions of professional dreamers that gave this engine its fuel.
One day, he awoke in his quarters and nothing seemed quite right. He looked at a holopinup of Marjorie Pleiades in her role as the Seven Sisters. Her image danced in a set that could have been designed by M.C Escher. Why would this appeal to me, he wondered. I mean, she was sexy, that was certain, but why put this up on the wall? Was this to prove he was the low-brow kind of character that would hang such a thing?
copyright 2002 Jeff Holland