Build an Ark?
Dogstar contacted me as I was staring into my CRT, slowly melting what eyes I had left. I was listening to one of my favorite bands, Motorgoat, and following random links on the web. His voice came right in over my headphones using whatever celestial protocol it had at its disposal. Scared the living crap out of me which is difficult to do given that the singer of Motorgoat sounds like the guttural ravings of a demon composed only of a giant throat covered with greasy hair. "Hey, mummy! What are doing sitting around?"
"Waiting for orders, I guess." I said. He understood me anyway.
"This ain't the friggin army, you ass. It's all up to you. If you want to spend the rest of your afterlife sitting around some trailer in Kansas, be my guest. But if you want to get on to some of the fun stuff, you best show some initiative."
"Well, I have poked around a little. I guess a little guidance would help."
"Oh, so you want some handholding? Here's a hint. Read the man files. Now don't get all homophobic on me. Man files are manual files on your hard drive that come installed with your Bjornix OS. If you had any innate curiosity, you'd be all over that shit. Try typing [man barge] at your command line to find out about building your first mummycraft."
"Gotcha. Uh, what's a command line?"
"Jesus itching crotch! Find the CRASH shell in the menus, that'll give you a command line interface where you can get some work done without having to manipulate a bunch of annoying graphics. If you're going to get anywhere, you'll learn to do everything with your keyboard. That is, until you rig up something more sophisticated. Now I gotta go. I got customers all over the globe."
"Hey Dog, can I ask you a question?"
"What's that?"
"How come you don't sound Swedish?" It logged off without reply. These avatar guys sure are touchy.
***
Construction of the Fun-o-Real Barge
I had already proved myself handy by rigging up a voicebox using the rubber of a hot water bottle. It felt like I had tried to swallow a pig's bladder whole and sounded like a gas leak blowing on a pinwheel. If I pulled on my throat I could make some good farting noises. I was the conversational equivalent of a balloon animal orgy.
Instructions were vague on the construction of the mummyship, so I needed to keep acting with equal serendipity and cunning. The man files advised using as many materials as could be found at hand. Living on the edge of civilization set me close to some rusting farm equipment. Still, some items were difficult to find around the house. For the fuselage, Dogstar's mummy manual recommended constructing a geodesic dome. I raided a playground in town for this. I stalked into the park with the cover of night and uprooted the jungle gym from its concrete moorings. It was no trouble carting it through downtown Hyenaville as it turns into a ghost town at 8 oclock.
I thought about all the disappointed children, their sad faces when they found out it was missing. I was disappointed with myself. Such pleasures distracted from my work. I had plenty to accomplish by morning, disguising the big toy within its new function. The last thing needed was the townspeople to grab their torches and chase me down lighting my bandages.
After dumping off the dome, I hit a couple of construction sites. A condominium village in a refurbished industrial area of town produced a wealth of materials. The architect or designer had decided the strategic use of exposed sheet metal was the appropriate expression of the zeitgeist that consumers would find appealing. Even in Kansas, urban ugly was chic. I banged out big strips of the stuff over the bucky dome and welded the ugly seams.
It might be important or just as obvious to note that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Some other force compelled me and in this trance state, I completed the hull. My life, like this odd construction in the yard, was becoming inscrutable to me, even as I was experiencing it.
***
Here is where I explain how I can just get by without a snag
A neighbor from on down the way stopped by to check on me as I was working on the mummyship. That's just what people do in Kansas. I was lucky he didn't bring me some casserole. "What the hell happened to you?"
"An accident," I said barely looking up from my welding. The way I was maniacally working, it wasn't too difficult to figured how it might have happened. I wasn't wearing any safety equipment of any kind. And the area was an OSHA-sticklers dream.
"Are you ok? What was it a fire?"
"Yea, a fire," I croaked through my pig bladder of a voice, "but I'm fine, never felt better. In fact, I feel great."
"OK, take care." Fortunately, he was too shocked by my appearance to ask me what I was doing. And this suited me fine. In fact, my shocking visage would be enough to convince most people to leave me alone. This made my job as a spacemummy much, much easier.
***
The SMS Scarab
So there was a shell of a space thing hardly suitable for 50s TV. That's fine. I wasn't submitting the thing to any contest, although the Swedes would cringe from it's inefficient design. I stuck some lawn furniture inside to make it comfy. The problem remained how to power the thing.
The Bjornix manual pages were not very helpful once again. However, in a state of decayed morale, I finally read one of the "Tip of the day" messages that pop into my face all the time. I was in the habit of just killing them without reading them. This time I read it, "Check Nodehumper for updates to a knowledge system called Deadweb." Even though I didn't have a brain, I did have a mind. And this array of information found some sticking place.
Deadweb was some kind of data haven located in Monstropolis, which was either a place or not. I was beginning to think it only existed as part of the internet, but parasitical to it. A short article found through Nodehumper was excessively technical, mentioning carrier waves and spoofed mangled packets. Deadweb grew organically, its information collecting around seed ideas.
As far as I could tell, Nodehumper made creative use of information entered by users and organized it in a way I'd never seen before. Imagine if Aristotle had a blog designed by Peter Greenaway. Information could be presented with metaphorical filters, yogic attitudes, screened through the viewpoints of the eight circuits of consciousness, which is important for a post-terrestrial. For instance, this Deadweb search on "spacetravel" came up with this result:
root: travel - 288 branches: transit, motion...
filters: brachiating, elemental
This was using the tree metaphor as a structure, but there was also cascade, which was a seemingly random stream of information; bonfire which mainly had to do with the disputes that arose from different entries, methods, what have you, but it didn't stop with that. I found out searching this:
alternative fuels for post-human transport
keywords: information, alchemy, telluric entelechies
It looks like a threaded discussion, but it's so much more. There's no end to way that information can be reconfigured. You could spend the rest of your afterlife just working with this tool and learning all the ins and outs.
MadScientist (233) says: "The key is not to cause a noticeable drain on human power supplies. You don't want to be revealed by anything as simple as auditing procedures. Exceptions would be during sunspot activity. On that occasion, no limits. Solar power should be used as much as possible. Of course, the sun does this trick of disappearing periodically. I recommend biomass as the fuel of choice." score: 72fire
I typed "biomass + engine" into the Nodehumper.
HippyChicken (14) says: "Put this in your hivemind and smoke it: a simplified biomass conversion reactor. You need a big container. Stainless steel is nice. A pressure cooker is the best. But a big one. 50 liters. Put your shit in there. Everything. It'll get hot. Run copper tubes through the shit and out the container. Pump water through the tube. The heat will drive the water through. The hot water action runs a flywheel or small turbine. Use hot water for shower and heating house. Harvest off methane to release pressure from the container o' shit. Burn this gas to heat the container even more. Keep pumping shit through. If your container is multichambered, then you can rotate the chamber so you don't have to power the beast down, cleaning each chamber of the final product. Methane powered shit robot is good for this. What's left over after a cycle is fertilizer. Grow more food for shit. Beans and grains are good." score: 89wood
This was still not enough power, but it was a start. Good for heating an opium den in Alaska, which is on the list of things I would do if I became human again. Further down that tree
xombie (32) says: "Pigs feet and spent nuclear fuel rods make an excellent battery. Tastes good too." score: 43fire
-stgeorge (59) says: "In Britain, we call them trotters. Just thought that might help when refueling on our merry isle." score: 15air
-xombie (32) says: "Just what I need, more funky pub food." score: 2earth
I was getting closer. Insane catalytic reactions is what it took. Maybe I could use some bioengineered e. coli to do the work. I guessed that I could probably find some mutant bacteria in the gut of a construction worker, so I set out to nab some portapotties as my first abductions. I used that biomass as my first fuel mixing some expired fruitpies from a grocery store dumpster to add more fuel to the fire. I added paint thinner, toothpaste, celery salt, and 30 issues of Time magazine. As a bird's first meal is the shell of the egg it hatched from, I used the accoutrements of my old life to propel me into this new one.
***
Alcohol-burning Funnypants
I was I finished the compost reactor on the escape pod, just in case I might need it. This pod itself is about as big as a child's tricycle, but with a few extra comfort features. Imagine riding your toilet down from the heavens, a crazy stain across the sky. It's not all that high powered, but it's good enough for a crash landing, and that's all I need to prevent me from burning up in the upper atmosphere. I'll pull myself together later. A little unguent and bandage and I'm fully operational.
This little module, like its bigger sibling aboard the mummyship, will run on anything-- table scraps, catshit, chicken feathers. Stuff you people take for granted. Nothing is wasted on the mummyship, let me tell you. We eat the whole hedgehog. The rest we use to grease our shoes, in case we have to skate across the mall to slow down. Right into a big display of pottery in the Crockery Barn.