An American On Rhea--Part Two

 (Author's note: Still have no idea where this is going.)

As jails go, after spending what amounted to ten terrestrial days in what the Rheans call a prison I couldn't really complain. The interior of my cell is circular with at least a third of the wall a huge window facing out to the frozen, airless surface of the moon. The view is breathtaking even for someone like me, in the distance I can see two of the large domes that pass as settlements along with Saturn itself positioned above in the sky. I am told by my keepers that the tiny lights I see buzzing around in the blackness are spaceships, mostly short range types going between the settled moons and various space stations.

One of them would eventually bring my newest accuser to Rhea. Right after I was tossed into jail I learned that not only were there disembodied survivors in the form of sentient recorded personalities from the mid-twenty first century Corporate War. But that biological technology had advanced enough to allow them to grow new human bodies and then have their conscious essence downloaded into them. For me it was quite the wrinkle in an already complicated existence I never could have dreamed of when I paid all that money to go into suspended animation.

At least the interior of my jail cell is comfortable to the point that I have to admit it rivals some of the five-star hotels I stayed in on Earth back in the twenty-first century. The bed looks pretty conventional to what has existed for thousand of years, except that it is made of a living form of aerogel that draws in its sustenance from my dead skill cells and toxins from my sweat. For reasons I can't figure out, I also have a couple of easy chairs and a table far too large for just one person, I guess Rhean prisoners like to entertain?

The most remarkable thing though is the passageway running from my cell to a central dome filled with park-like vegetation, a small pond, and what passes as exercise equipment. While the dome is truly both beautiful and functional what I really would like someone to explain is how the clear substance that allows full visibility outside during the night cycle somehow generates enough light to make plants grow during the day. Internal automated mechanisms, computerized, biological and mechanical I am told, dependably provide an oatmeal-like substance for food, recycles the water and air we need, and I guess also makes sure no one does anything stupid like trying to open one of the airlocks. I would ask, but I've only seen two others, both native Rheans, during my time in the dome and they avoid me like the plague.

This botanical garden/prison yard dome is also connected to fifteen other similar cells arrayed on the surface like the peddles of a flower. My fellow prisoners and I are completely cut off from the civilized parts of Rhea, a small jump shuttle comes out every other cycle to check on us. I guess I would be more upset had I any place to go but at least I was making full use of the computerized library to read up on both Earth and Rhean history.

Just to show how lowly the Earthers viewed the likes of me, only a week had passed from my resurrection to them escorting me aboard the interplanetary ship that would bring me to Rhea. It only took that long because the disembodied sentients wanted to make sure I was not a war criminal, of course while I wasn't, it was bad enough that I knew some of them. So, I was clothed, given the translator device, and instructions that the Rheans would allow me to stay with them until the starship arrived as long as I consented to some genetic tests, which was the only reason I was brought back to life. Not in a position to disagree, I was told all my questions about these tests would be answered on Rhea, until then, they told me, I best keep my mouth shut.

In fact, the Earthers seemed to take pleasure in telling me as little as possible about how their precious Earth Unity Collective was formed during my time there. I did learn that the vast majority of Earthers were embedded with tiny crystal devices all through their nervous systems and brains that directly linked them to vast collective intelligence. While they were still unique individuals they had the ability to create different facets of themselves that could essentially do dozens of complex tasks in different locations across the planet.

With having to come to gripes with a gigaton-sized culture shock my little pleasant prison became a calm respite from a storm of bewildering changes I never could have imagined. Since the other two inmates avoided me, I spent most of my time in the recreation dome reading as much as possible and waiting for my newest accuser to arrive from the Neptune habitats.

I have to admit, reading about the Corporate War turned out to be an uncomfortable proposition. According to the commonly accepted history throughout the solar system the causes essentially developed in the latter part of the Twentieth century with the collapse of old style communism, which conversely to many living at the time elevated its supposed antithesis, capitalism, to a religion. Government and its usual services was looked down upon since it never returned a visible profit. This in turn lead to casual disregard of such things as infrastructure, educational, and health care systems even as increasing population pressures required they stay up to date.

With the populations of the developed nations worshiping capitalism above all else, power flowed away from the middle of their societies to a tiny percentage of elites who increasingly exercised their influence to garner more authority. As underfunded governments failed the elites stepped in with offers to provide the basic institutional services an increasingly demoralized and distracted populations needed without raising taxes. The trouble started when the elites began only providing services to those who could pay. By that time societies throughout Earth had crumbled to the point that many populations seethed with resentment over essentially being written off and left to die. Their only choice was to rebel, which the elites quickly put down with not only overwhelming force but in many cases just dissolving what was left of the hollow shells of democratic national governments.

The screen on my jail cell tablet provided a host of troubling pictures of that era with one showing the members of the the five-person corporate guidance committee signing the treaty that formally dissolved the United States and Canada and formed the North American Corporate Authority. It troubled me greatly to see I personally knew two of those committee members years before I was placed in suspended animation. One of them, a man I knew as Carter Lewis, who made his money in software development, ended up in charge of the southeast section of the former United States and ordered the extermination of eight million people in retaliation for the Atlanta Food Riots of 2044.

The elites had supporters among the poor masses, which they mobilized for war with promises of increased status after the rebellions were put down. With battle lines drawn, the Corporate War lasted fifteen years and devastated every continent on Earth. The elites were only defeated after their allies among the poor realized they were never going to be rewarded.

While the elites were defeated allowing national governments to reform it took another fifty years before a planetary system of governance was established. Despite the delay everyone alive at the time fully realized that no entity with enough power to dissolve nations and endanger the planet as a whole, should be allowed to exist without some form of oversight. This period of chaos between the end of the war and the formation of the first world government allowed many war criminals to leave Earth for the asteroid colonies as well as many lower middle management types to sneak into the scattered suspended animation centers across the planet in hopes of being forgotten as the years passed.

After reading about how many of the people I called friends and business associates became monsters I finally realized why most everyone I had meet since my resurrection kept me at arms distance. In truth, even though I was long out of the game before the war started, I was honest enough with myself that had I not contracted Susskind's cancer I knew I would have almost certainly been part of that hideous monster called the North American Corporate Authority. I spent days in my cell disgusted with person knew I had been back then and, deep down, probably still was in truth. It was only the sudden and unexpected arrival Anni Missor, the Rhean ancient history professor, brought me out of my funk.

The depression I developed from learning the basics of the Corporate War was only deepened when Professor Missor met me in the recreation dome and began telling me the details on my unknown accuser. There was no announcement that the jump shuttle had landed, it was only when I saw the professor walking along the path towards me did find out she had arrived. I was propped up against the trunk of a fat oak tree at the time reading more about the formation of Earth's world government. I sat there marveling at the grace of Professor Missor's movements in the low gravity, she almost looked like she was floating a couple of centimeters about the path. Combined that with her dress that shimmered in the dome generated daylight and I began having absurd visions of sexy fairies or female angels sent to lure stupid human males to their doom.

“Hello Thomas Blake,” she called out in English.

I honestly didn't know what stunned me more, her beauty or the fact she was talking to me in my own language.

“Hello Professor,” I said back fearing I could choke up like a teenager. “How are you speaking what I was assured by everyone was a dead language?” I asked as she gently to a seat on the grass in front of me.

“The acquisition of new knowledge in this era is far more efficient that you probably can imagine Thomas Blake.”

“Some sort of download, like the Earthers do?” I asked back which only caused her to give me one of those enigmatic smiles similar to the one Mona Lisa had kept for thousands of years.

When she refused to respond I changed the direction of what I hoped would be a long conversation.“I hope you bring some sort of good news. As jails go yours is awesome but it's still a jail.”

“Actually I do,” she said getting down to business, “your accuser goes by the name Doa Criss. Her personal biography says she was not only a survivor of the Corporate War but played an active part in the North American resistance. Her memories were one of the first recorded for posterity because of her advanced age at that time. She became a disembodied sentient about five-hundred Earth years later and was downloaded in her new body two centuries ago. Since then she has lived throughout the solar system but mainly on Triton. Apparently news of your resurrection reached as far out to Neptune and even though the Earth Collective cleared you of war crimes, Doa Criss knew enough of Rhean law to have you placed under arrest and held until she could arrive to present her evidence. Given her status, it goes without saying she carries a lot of weight throughout the settled solar system.”

It also went without saying that Rhean law was structured differently than the American system had been and held that an accused was neither innocent now guilty until all the facts were placed before a tribunal. Nuance being the keyword in Rhea's judicial system I did appreciate the fact that the First Prime, the chief executive of this moon's government took time to personally explain to me that it took an unanimous decision by a seven person tribunal to convict someone, anything less and the accused went free. While not as clean and neat as a person being innocent until proven guilty the American judicial system had been a joke for decades before the Corporate War because what normally proved a person's innocence back then was the ability of a defendant to come up with enough cash to hire a decent lawyer.

“So when will this Doa Criss arrive?” I asked feeling frustrated in ways I could not describe.

“Her ship is in deceleration now, and will enter orbit above Rhea in three cycles,” Anni responded. Our conversation about the upcoming tribunal went on for at least several hours. By the time I asked every question possible about her moon's government and she exhausted every avenue trying to explain how humans in general, and her people specifically, adapted to the living in space the dome's day cycle had ended.

Sitting on the grass beside Anni, I looked up and saw the Milky Way splayed across the now clear dome. “You know,” I said to her feeling microscopically small, “I never really looked at the stars back in the twenty-first century. I was so busy trying to build an empire and acquire more money and power. If someone would have said something to me about looking at the stars I would have thought they were insane.”

“Why is that?” Anni asked sliding closer to me.

“Well, because they would have seemed less than trivial to what really mattered which was money. Secondly, because I lived in the city and the lights all but drowned out the brightest stars and planets.”

“That's incredible,” Anni said, “I can't imagine not being able to see the universe.”

“There is things you'd find even more bizarre from my time than being unable to see the stars.” I said enjoying the simple intimacy I was sharing with Anni.

“Well now,” she said smiling coyly, “since you brought it up I want you to tell me about a few things.”

“Anything,” I said feeling a warmth I didn't try to hide.

“I want to know about Mickey Mouse and something called Walt Disney World.” She said with deadly seriousness.

Because No Good Deed goes Unpunished

The old high school football stadium, while not exactly abandoned, had fallen into considerable disrepair since the construction of its replacement actually situated on the school grounds a couple of miles away. The bleachers where the home crowd had sat and cheered on its local heroes for years were slowly rotting away from the assault of both rain and sun. Directly across the football field, which hadn't been cut in ages, the bleachers constructed for those supporting the visiting team were in a worse condition. Rust was spreading like a contagion along the steel supports and if someone listened carefully when the wind blew you could actually hear the structure groaning from the strain. But the old facility still had its uses even as time and weather were in the middle of breaking it back down to its basic elements.

Running the outer edge of the football field was a quarter mile circular track that many people in the area had begun using after the stadium was decommissioned and county and school officials no longer locked the gates to the chain link fence surrounding the property. This allowed people from the early hours of the morning to well after sunset to casually walk or run the track for their personal health.

There was a bad side to this continued use though, because the school and county no longer emptied the trash receptacles on a regular basis most were literally overflowing. Things were made worse by the fact that a few careless people didn't even bother to throw their trash in one of the few cans that still had space but just discarded their plastic bottles, soda cans, and assorted food containers wherever they saw fit making the area look even worse. This is where the erstwhile hero of the story enters the scene.

The hero of this story started walking the track several months ago after his trusty and nearby gym was suddenly closed for the stated reason that the eighty-four year old owner of the franchise decided to shed himself of burdensome and time consuming investments. In truth, the hero believes that since the property the gym was built on is equal in size to a lower middle-class subdivision right next it that the building will eventually be torn down and replaced with an identical set of those cheap houses.

Whatever the case, since the hero does not like and in turn is not liked by the soulless, pod people he lives around he eventually got the bright idea to walk the track to get exercise he so missed after his gym closed. The hero quickly found that walking the track was the best idea he had in a long times. Not only was the circular track exactly a quarter mile after doing one lap, since he walked in the early morning he sound the relative solitude refreshing.

The one problem the hero had with the track was the trash scattered all about. During the times he would walk the track, usually on the weekends, he would think how sorry it was that people could not at least take their trash back home and properly dispose of it. He also would occasionally condemn the school and county officials for not coming by to empty the overflowing trash containers and pick up the various bottles, cans, and other garbage people had left on the ground.

Like all good ideas the hero had, they came rarely and slowly but eventually he realized that if there was going to be any improvement in the appearance of the track he so enjoyed walking he was going to have to pick up some of the garbage as he walked. During each lap he would pick up three items and then dump then in one of the trash cans that still had space. His intentions were to do just a little but being a little compulsive he spotted some more trash after each lap.

Several times the hero got frustrated with himself when he said, “No more, I'm not the garbage man for these stupid, littering rednecks.” But still he continued to pick up items while listening to the music blasting from his ear buds that was connected to his small media player.

The hero did admit to himself he was getting some internal satisfaction by doing picking up the trash. He did make sure to occasionally check his surroundings, since he didn't want anyone to see him doing the self-appointed civic cleanup. See, such civic mindedness might just be confused with nasty socialism.

After about forty-five minutes or so, the area adjacent to the track was looking a lot better. In fact the hero had gotten so into the impromptu trash pickup that he had long since abandoned the idea of stopping. That was when the universe decided to pay him back for his good deed.

The hero was rounding one end of the track when he spotted two round objects in the grass on the outside edge. The overgrown grass was making it difficult to identify the items but with the music blasting in his ears from his headphones that were connected to his MP3 player, and with his mind on really on other subjects he casually swooped down and grabbed the first object with intentions of picking up the other one on the next lap.

Once the object was in the hero's hand, the texture of the material that made it up immediately identified it for him. “Oh damn, a used baby diaper!” He exclaimed to an uncaring universe. In fact with his mind preoccupied the hero had used just a wee too much hand pressure on the diaper with the result being a brown, semi-liquid substance oozing out of the roughly spherical item. Talk about ruining a peaceful state of mind.

Whether this was the universe punishing the hero for his self-appointed good deed is unknown and really doesn't matter. The hero was able to find a few discarded socks and water bottles to wash his soiled hand. It did end the hero's walk and will almost certainly curb his enthusiasm for picking up trash.

Psychotic Barefoot Children in the Rain

The news channels here in the United States more often than it seems necessary love to occasionally spotlight some poll showing how blatantly stupid Americans are when it comes to the most basic of historical knowledge. The most recent one I heard was last night on NBC Nightly News with the ever perky and wise Brian Williams. Without showing any real emotion over the stomach turning results, Brian reported that only forty percent of the American public can correct identify which party controls congress.

This information can be parsed several ways, namely that Republicans will be overjoyed that it means the average American is too stupid to blame them for being incompetence douchebags for the last six years. Before someone bust a partisan gut, I'm not touching their thinly concealed racism towards President Obama nor their Ayn Rand level of utter indifference to the poor but how they nearly destroyed our already crippled economy by wanting to allow the United States government to default on its debts. That is all another subject for a day I feel especially cynical and dejected by our national suicide attempts.

No, what I want to touch on is history and the fact that one-hundred years ago tomorrow Gavrilo Princip walked up to the car carrying Archduke Ferdinand and his wife and busted a couple of caps into the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne and his wife, killing them both. With the geo-political situation at the time being a complicated series of alliances sitting atop a mountain of exaggerated nationalism mixed with the gigantic-sized egos of various heads of state, events spiraled out of control plunging the entire world into war. Now, we can't stop there, once World War One petered out by 1918, the resulting peace was so screwed up by the same issues and people that helped bring it about that the human race couldn't help but have another global conflict roughly twenty years later.

Am I being a little too flippant over the death of millions? Yeah, but for all the gnashing of teeth over how terrible war is by the noble politicians, religious types, and even the poor putz that ends up doing most of the dying there is hardly a time when humans don't rush into war when their feelings get hurt. True, there are times when evil men bring on war forcing the honorable to defend themselves, such was the Second World War, but had European leaders back in 1914 kept their heads instead of acting like school yard punks maybe that whole bloody episode in human history could have been prevented in the first place.

Well you might be saying to yourself, at least we didn't let the missiles fly cooking Mama Earth in a radioactive haze along with every other living organism. That is correct! There were good men and women after World War Two all across the planet who dedicated their lives to prevent the idiots among us from starting another war. I guess that comes from the fact that many of these good people saw the horrors of war firsthand and knew that if atomic weapons ever used that would pretty much mean the end of civilization if not human extinction.

Here's where the smelly poop is going to hit the spinning air recirculation device. On the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the event that started us down the path to a collective suicide the geo-political situation is even more screwed up now.

Iraq, a Frankenstein monster of a country pieced together out of the remains of the ancient Ottoman Empire is coming apart. While the Sunni and Shiites fight out centuries old conflicts the Kurds are busy grabbing as much land they can in preparation to declaring themselves an independent nation. Of course the Shiites, which dominate the Iraqi national government absolutely do not want to see the Kurds break away nor allow them to keep control of all that new oil rich territory they recently grabbed.

Now throw in Shiite dominated Iran which is coming to the rescue of their Iraqi brethren and the mixture gets even more volatile. There are two elements to worry about here, the first being that Saudi Arabia is a Sunni dominated country which incidentally doesn't have anything good to say about Iran. Particularly, since Iran is sort of, kind of, trying to develop their own nuclear bombs, and that is the second element to this potential global disaster.

The idea of Iraq having the “bomb” frankly scares the living shit not only out of the Saudis but the Israelis as well who sort of, kind of, already have their own stockpile of nuclear weapons. But, don't tell anyone about the Israeli weapons, see it's one of those open secrets, like the one people in South Carolina ignore about Senator Lindsey Graham.

So what has all this to do with the good old United States of America? Well, I'm damn glad you asked because I have a beer, several of them in fact, and plenty of time to rant away this afternoon. It all revolves around the ungodly amount of oil in that region, Western Civilizations addiction to it, and the special interest groups in the United States that will roast in the lowest and hottest level of Hell before they allow a concerted effort to break our dependency on it. Just for fun, lets bring in a resurgent People's Republic of China and its own growing addiction to oil along with Russia just because they're still pissed off they lost the Cold War and desperately want to make the United States look weak and we have all the players for another round of global conflict.

No, I've haven't forgotten the warmongering elements in the United States. Since this latest crisis in Iraq all the old players that lied and scammed us stupid Americans into invading in the first play have all crawled out from under their rocks to beat the drums of war again. It's truly surreal to see that dried up shell of a man, Dick Cheney, get on television and say the black guy in the White House totally FUBARed his and George W. Bush's awesome victory. Really Dickster? Just out of morbid curiosity where the hell are all of those weapons of mass destruction you and your buddies said we find once we went into Iraq? And just for further giggles you again screwed up the estimate on how much that war would cost, didn't you say just eighty billion? Wow, you missed that one by a couple of light-years!

Now if I wanted to get weird and crack a couple of history books to refresh my memory Western Civilization's addiction to the Middle East's cheap oil began just after World War One. Which came about because some idiot Serb wanted his dear homeland free from domination. But, there is no real use in rehashing all these dusty old fact any further. Namely because few give a furry rat's butt, so I'm going to sit back and watch the new 2014 global players juggle the same old ancient hatred, sour nationalism, and as always, overstuffed egos just like they had in 1914 and see what happens. It could very well be a blast.

An American on Rhea---Part One

 (Author's note: Drawing a big blank, so here is something I've been playing with for quite a while. Not sure if there will be a part two.)

It was my fourth wife, Anna, who was into guided hypnotic memory regression that said the first thing a baby feels when he or she is born is pain. About half-way through our standard five-year marriage contract she joined a pseudo-scientific cult that said it could regress a person all the way to birth and make them understand all the troubles and issues they faced growing up. I knew Anna was the impressionable type when I married her but she willingly signed my rock solid prenup and her talent at entertaining my business associates more than paid for itself so I ignored her strange but harmless spiritualism.

Anna’s first session took her all the way back to her birth. In tearful words she described to me the memory of her birth as a shocking, all encompassing pain that seemed to last an eternity. Her description made it sound like some damned soul being condemned to old fashioned Hell but Anna quickly corrected me saying my comparison was based on ancient superstition and modern ignorance. 

Anna said her life councilor explained that the pain had two main purposes, the first to wash away the memories of her previous life, and the second, to signify that her soul had rejoined the greater universe. The councilor also explained that all her suffering afterwards was to force her to become a better person. The way I understood it was that her spiritual group believed life was nothing but a cosmic catch-22, that to ascend to the next level of existence a being had deal with the pain associated with living without succumbing to all the usual human sins and weaknesses. It was all tired mumbo jumbo for me, but for the cool and hip crowd it was all the rage in the late 2020’s.

For the rest of our marriage Anna tried to get me to join saying it would allow us to enter a true union of souls. I’ll give her credit, she was a devout follower until our marriage contract expired and we went our separate ways. I must admit I did get a laugh when I learned my cosmically-inclined ex-wife who took pride in being in tune with the universe moved back to boring old Texas to be close to her folks. Even funnier was when I learned she had married an ultra-fundamentalist Christian leader who became one of the two United States senators from the newly created state of Panhandle after Texas broke up into four different states.

I didn’t dwell for long on Anna’s new found lifestyle, I was diagnosed with cancer that same year. It wasn’t the easily treated variety either; I had full blown Type Two Susskind’s cancer born out of all the neat toxic chemicals and genetically modified foods that civilization had come to believe it could not live without. I was lucky though, being a billionaire I could afford to buy my way into the one of the new biological suspension centers for the terminally ill.

Once my cancer was confirmed instead of dying a very painful death just two months later like the average and much poorer citizen my body was forced into an artificial coma, pumped full of high-tech preservatives, and then dropped into a vat containing a substance that looked like amber. It cost me nearly all my money but it was a proven technology, sort of anyway. And if everything had gone as planned once the research boys and girls found a cure for my mutant cancer, they said about seventy-years, I would be re-animated and reunited with my remaining wealth which had been placed in a carefully managed trust fund waiting for me.

So on a hot and humid November morning I walked into the building housing the Portland, Oregon branch of Forever Care, signed the final papers, was hooked up to an IV and closed my eyes for what I thought would be a relatively short disconnect from the world of the living.

That is where long lost ex-wife’s description of birth came into play. As the Forever Care people said there would be no dreams while I rested in their expensive goo waiting for my cancer to be defeated. My first recollection on returning to the living was just as Anna described. A searing pain that I could feel down to the atoms that made up my body. What she didn’t explain was how weird things would get once the pain subsided and I was forced to deal with living in the future.

****

The shuttle touched down on the landing pad with a noticeable thud. A second later the nearly empty cabin I was sitting in became pitch black. I tried to keep still and quiet but I guess I was fidgeting a little too much, which betrayed my nervousness.

From behind me, I heard the nearest passage say something in what passes as the lingua franca. “It’s just the crew taking the fusion reactor offline and switching over to land-based power.” Standard procedure really,” was what I heard after the tiny translator in my ear converted it into what was now essentially a dead language. 

I quickly remembered the guy, named Sarga Marsh, was from one of the asteroid colonies, hollowed out chunks of floating rock sometimes tens of kilometers long, filled with an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and spun to create artificial gravity. A tube of spun diamond running down the central axis filled with glowing ionized plasma of hydrogen to provide sunlight for plants and animals. My twenty-first century mind was still in awe of the concept but for everyone else living a little over thirty-three hundred years from the time I was placed in suspension, it’s ancient technology. In fact, what are to me marvels of engineering are to the people of this age third world countries if not banana republics.

The sudden return of cabin lighting was the cue for me and the few other passengers to gather up their belongings and make our way to the shuttle’s platform. I tried not to think at how similar it looked to people disembarking off some passenger plane from my century. “Are you really from the old calendar twenty-first century?” I heard Sarga ask from behind as I carefully thought out my every move trying to deal with Rhea’s much lower gravity.

“Yeah,” I said and waited for the translator hanging around my neck like a pendant to respond back. “Early twenty-first, before the Corporate War, I was in suspension for a little over ten Earth years before that started.”

“That’s fascinating,” he said back as we both followed the others out. “I’m from the Republic of Ida, my people can trace their ancestry back to refugees who fled Earth after the Corporate Powers were defeated.”

I said nothing, I’m sure the Mr. Marsh would love to hear that I sat in on the very first presentation by Davis Mining and Deep Ventures Aerospace as they recruited investors for the initial unmanned attempts at harvesting vital strategic minerals from asteroids. Since my resurrection, I had learned that the new consortium formed by Davis and Deep Ventures went on to be one of the most tyrannical corporations involved in the Corporate Wars. Despite that war being long in the past, certain technological advances since then have kept it in what amounted to living memory.

Which sort of made me a war criminal, or at the very minimum, guilty by association since many of the men and women I personally knew or had business relationships with back then were now held up alongside people like Hitler and Stalin. In fact, it was one of the reasons I was about to set foot on the moon of Rhea. There were simply few places in the solar system where I would be welcome for even the short time it would take for me to catch a starship to one of the interstellar colonies where I could blend in with all the others struggling to survive on a new planet. Even on Rhea, I was only welcome because of the information I could provide them.

Sarga continued to follow behind and kept quiet until we stepped out of the shuttle’s door and into the extended passageway that connected it to the main arrival terminal. I actually walked a couple of meters before casually glancing overhead to catch a glimpse of Saturn through the clear material that made up the connecting walkway. “Oh my God,” I whispered struck by the majesty of seeing the ringed planet. My amazement was not without consequence, the sudden stop of my slow, careful steps in the one-quarter gravity of the moon did not cancel my inertia and I found myself colliding with the person in front of me sending us both skidding to the ground. Only the friction of the floor surface eventually stopped us. Sarga then made a production out of helping me stand up again, as for the person who I hit, she collected her belonging while saying a few words the translator refused to convert to English.

“This your first time off Earth?” Sarga asked in what amounted to puzzled astonishment. From the time the Earth government booted me off the planet to our short stop at Ida and now to Rhea, I rarely ventured out of my cabin which was nestled in the outer spinning ring of the interplanetary ship that brought me to my temporary refuge in orbit around Saturn. It was during one of my brief visits to the passenger lounge that I met Sarga and some of my other fellow travelers.   

“Not sure what you know about ancient Earth history,” I said feeling strange uttering those words, "but space flight was still a pretty novel way of traveling in my time. I could have easily done a suborbital flight or even afforded a ticket to one of the space station hotels but I never got into that type of adventurism. For civilians like me, that was pretty much it, even the national governments didn’t venture much beyond lunar orbit. So the idea of walking, or at least stumbling and fall down, on one of the moons of Saturn is overwhelming. ”

“Incredible,” he said, “I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be restricted to such a small section of the solar system. Even Belters families like mine regularly do an Earth fly-by cruise for vacation. I’ve even been to the Pluto habitat twice on business.” 

From what little I understood of typical human behavior in this age, Sarga was a normal enough person. Compared to the rich and beautiful people from the twenty-first century I use to hang out with, Sarga was rather stout with the hair on his head cut into an elaborate pattern. From observing the other male Belters during the voyage to Rhea his appearance seemed typical. On the other hand, Belter females seemed to go to great pains to look like some ghost or ghoul. Not only were they a great deal taller than their male counterparts, but along with painting their bodies white apparently prided themselves on removing every single follicle of hair from their head and face. As far as clothes went, both genders dressed in similar elaborate outfits that reminded me of something a seventieth-century French king might wear to a state dinner. I on the other hand, was wearing what looked to be a sweatshirt and sweatpants, far from my usual, very formal business attire.

At least everyone I took time to talk with remained a recognizable human being to me. However, Sarga was starting to be a little overly clingy, almost to the point of being annoying. Back in my time with a couple of billion dollars easily at my disposal, my bodyguard detail would have long since tossed the guy into the nearest body of water. However, I was literally lost in time, considered a war criminal by most, so that meant I needed any friend I could get. “Excuse my terrible manners,” I sort of interrupted, “but I should have asked what brings you to this far flung part of the solar system?”

This question clearly delighted Sarga, “I’m here to meet my business companion. We sell and trade cultural products with the Rheans.”

“Cultural products,” I asked thinking strictly along twenty-first century ideas for some stupid reason.

“We mainly deal in sub-sentient recorded human personalities. We have a vast collection of early Belter and Mars colonists but over the years, I have acquired a few prized examples such as the crew of the Odyssey entering the Alpha Centauri B system and discovering the world that came to be known as Terra Nova. The first planet outside the solar system to be heavily terraformed and then colonized.”

I had an involuntary shutter at the mention of recorded personalities. It was the fully sentient type, all kids during the Corporate War that lead the charge to have me unceremoniously exiled off the planet to me cast out among the stars. As Sarga and I strolled into the main terminal, I let him carry on about the other recorded minds he had to sell. For me I still couldn’t wrap my mind about the very basis of personhood that now existed on Earth.

After the Corporate War the world government that was established quickly set out to document the atrocities done by the tyrants that overthrew the various weak and ineffective national governments. One method was the new process at that time of interfacing the human mind with a computer connected to a fifty-petabyte recording crystal. It didn’t take long before someone realized that such a process actually captured the consciousness of that person. Since the Earth Unity Collective was all about the rights of the common individual these disembodied personalities were eventually recognized as sentient and give full rights.

Since then, whenever the Collective feels the need to resurrect one of the thousands of people in suspended animation, as I was, the non-corporeal bloc starts to scream blood murder to make sure they are not some war criminal. To be fair, if the history I read was correct, a few of the middle managements types who didn’t rate a seat on the shuttles headed to the brand new asteroid settlements after the war did finagle a way into suspension under assumed identities. It was all quite convoluted for me but I didn’t have time to think about it.

As Sarga and I stood in line to be formally processed for admittance to Rhea, three people approached, clearly natives since their skin carried a noticeable yellow tint and the pupils of their eyes were a bright blue.

“Citizen Thomas Blake, I presume,” the Rhean man wearing what appeared to be a uniform said, “I am chief of spaceport security Trin Drock. Let me introduce Prone Cullton, First Prime of Rhea and Professor Anni Missor, Lead Professor of Ancient History at Ambat University. We are here to take you into custody for crimes against humanity.”

Being from the Belt, which still carried a taint from the long ago Corporate War, my new friend Sarga quickly quite suddenly forgot who I was and did his best to ignore me. It didn't matter, I let Drock place the thing restriction collar around my neck and begin to lead me away. I was far more interested in the stunning beauty of Professor Anni Missor, and the smile she kept sending my way.

When the Iraqi Poop Hits the Sectarian Fan

Given the deteriorating situation in that post-colonial Frankenstein monster of a country called Iraq I would bet a pile of money I do not have that Dick Cheney is one happy bastard right now. Not only did he and the Weaker Bush get away with pushing the United States into a war based on lies, get hundreds of thousands of people killed, and spend close to a TRILLION bucks in the process, the whole sorry mess begins imploding on the current president. In a dark and sinister way it's an incredible joke of cosmic proportions, especially since his Dickness with the transplanted heart has done everything but use the the “N word” to let it be known he considers President Obama on par with household mold or some common fungus.

Possibly the only thing worse than a happy, old, rich monster perched in his easy chair eating the fresh of little babies is the abject joy from the millions of right-wingers dealing with the self-righteous indignation and thinly disguised delight that Obama might have “lost” Iraq during his administration. The only trouble with such assumptions is that this impending disaster was constructed by both the obscenely shortsighted Shiite dominated Iraqi government and by none other than Weaker Bush himself.

For those who may not know the Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, a Shiite, has done everything possible to alienate the Sunni minority, who along with the Kurds are the third faction that makes up that country. It's all part of a vicious cycle of payback that goes back centuries but can more directly be traced to when the now very dead Saddam, a Sunni and confirmed monster, spent decades running roughshod over the other two groups. Iraq is the ultimate example of how payback is not only a bitch but a surreal merry-go-round in which one group spends a period oppressing others only to spend a time being persecuted all the while seeking ways to return to power.

Now enter Weaker Bush struggling to crawl out from daddy's more successful shadow and you have a recipe for a epic disaster. The years have flown by but I remember all the moaning and groaning when Stronger Bush decided not to go after Saddam after leading the Desert Storm coalition of nations that kicked that particular bastard out of Kuwait. No illusions here folks, yes Saddam did make a blatant power grab by invading a smaller nation and he did have aspirations of playing in the international big leagues armed with some serious chemical weapons. Before anyone gets all confused as to how Saddam amassed such weapons they should look up a very inconvenient photograph showing he had once been BFF's with none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Essentially, it boils down to the old maxim, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. At least until this friend of strict convenience screws around with the business partners of some serious Washington DC insiders.

The logic behind Stronger Bush's decision not to remove Saddam had to deal with something called realpolitik. The powers that be felt keeping the Sunni following Saddam in power with a still reasonably intact military was just the ticket to prevent Shiite dominated Iran from messing with the region's other oil producing nations, and more importantly Israel. Yeah I'll say it again Saddam was a pretentious monster, but when Weaker Bush invaded Iraq, first to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction, then to spread the seeds of glorious democracy he removed the one thing holding that country together and that was the dictator.

After all that spilled American blood and treasure the Mailiki government has so alienated the Sunni minority that they are siding with a terrorist organization that scares the hell out of al Qaeda. Republicans here in the United States can't wave their fingers in disgust fast enough saying we shouldn't have removed our troops from Iraq. Well, on that one it looks like I have to agree in a strictly tongue-in-cheek way, the only problem is that damn few of the nauseous combination of chickenhawks, armchair generals, and dementia-tainted old fucks were offering up their own kids to relieve the pressure on troops that had already served three, four, and even five tours in that hellish sandbox. You want an empire in such an unstable area where we are often considered invading infidels trying to restart the Crusades? Well you damn well better be willing to sacrifice your kids on the alter of national glory and a hell of a lot of more money than just the trillion we already spent.

Iraq was created after World War One when Britain and France craved up the remains of the defeated Ottoman Empire. From what I have read there was little concern given to the lumping of the Kurds, Sunni, and Shiites together with the result being the stitched-together Frankenstein monster. As I have explained the only thing that held them together was abject fear.

As of this writing, Iran--with its Shiite majority—will be sending several hundred of its Revolutionary Guards to fight alongside what remains of the Shiite dominated Iraqi army along with long established local militias. The Kurds, who for years have waited of an excuse to declare independence, appear to be grabbing as much oil rich territory in northern Iraq as they can.

Why are those two issues important? While there is little chance Saudi Arabia will get directly involved it has a Sunni majority population and boys and girls the question for the day is what was the country of origin for most if not all the 9/11 attackers back in 2001? As for the Kurds, well there is a complex relationship between them, Turkey, and Iran, which have sizable Kurdish minorities living in their territories all dreaming of a greater Kurdistan. No country likes to even consider it might lose territory. Long story short, we could be looking at a regional war with the major powers nervously standing on the sidelines calculating the advantages and liabilities of becoming involved.

So boys and girls, if you like the excitement provided by this collective unraveling of recent and nearly century old screwed up decision making fasten your seat belts, because it looks like we're in for a bumpy ride. The one certainty in all this is that I would bet even more money I don't have Weaker Bush will be at home calmly painting his cute little pictures. 

BFF's

Shithead