“You are under arrest.” said the man.
“But, but WHY?” said Pete.
“You are an illegal enemy combatant.” said the man.
“I want a lawyer.” said Pete.
“No lawyers.” said the man.
“But what about Miranda?” said Pete.
“Miranda is just a singer with fruit in her hat.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and that was the last anyone had said to Pete…
It had been 3 years since then and Pete was in a military prison cell…
That gave him plenty of time to fantasize, remember and dream…
He wondered, why the government had selected him…
could it be that time he was in San Franciso…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pete was humming a song to himself as he walked towards the PG&E offices in San Francisco. It was an old song he wrote in the 1990’s.
It cheered him greatly that the prophesy had not come true. YET…
“The growth industry of the 90’s…
will be subsistance farming…
when Reagan’s rubber check bounces…
and global economic collapse…
rears its ugly head…
what will you do for food ?
CHORUS: LETS EAT RATS FOR LUNCH…
OOOh, The winter gets cold…
when the arabs turn off the oil…
Your BMW will make a lovely planter…
growing beets in bucket seats…
open the sun roof wide…
scrounging in the city dump…
I seem to have lost my pride…
CHORUS: LET’S EAT RATS FOR LUNCH…
His friend “Sally” and he entered the office building and pushed the elevator for the top floor. As they ascended the corporate monument he checked his weapons. Simple, yet effective. All he caried with him was a sandwich and two bottles of “soda pop”. The first had an astonishlingly foul smelling but harmless chemical in it and the second was just water.
When his organization, PIFOG*, planned the hostage “situation” they assumed that there would be guards and metal detectors in the corporate offices. Since he carried no metal, Pete had encountered no resistance. The plan was to dump the first bottle inside the lobby and just tell everyone there that the second was poison. Really, really, really BAD poison… Like, WMD-STRENGTH disaster type poison… OOH, you KNOW that’s nasty!
The psychological effect of the stench would make the office workers believe that the second bottle would kill them and they would comply…
The eco-terrorists demands were simple…
All PG&E had to do was return the $10,000,000,000 that had been stolen from the State of California and the office workers could live.
Of course, it was not as simple as that. There had to be televised press conferences with Gov. Gray Davis and the CEO from PG&E. The payments had to be transmitted and verified by Pete’s friends “Susan” and “Billy”. They were invading the Bank of AmeriKKKa’s office at the same time as Pete and Sally.
The four of them had met at a brainwashing sex-cult years before. They formed a band to get their message across to the public but years of total obscurity and preaching to the choir had brought them to this crossroad. Billy was the keyboard player and Susan quoted poetry. Pete played guitar and Sally was the drummer. Their song “television is a mirror” was a hit in the Avant=Garde scene but totally ignored by the rest of the planet…
Television is a mirror…
with a feedback loop… loop, loop…
Television is a mirror…
with a feedback loop… loop, loop…
Everyone watches and is programmed to be…
what they see… WHEE!
What is the strange attraction of Miss White?
The available caucasian…
Our gang of fools entered the office’s lobbies and dumped their foul smelling liquids.
They made their speeches and demanded action.
The office workers were not easily fooled…
“That second bottle is, like, totally fake” said LULU,
the lady standing next to the receptionist.
“I saw this entire scheme on a TV show,
and I’m not fooled a bit…
What, do you think we’re chumps?
We don’t get CABLE?
GET ‘EM COWBOYS!”
Within moments, they were surrounded by rent-a-cops and arrested. Their eco-terrorist action was a total failure. As they called their friends for help in raising bail, the police came over and informed them that no-one was pressing any charges because it was all too trivial…They were scolded by the police and had to pay to have the carpets cleaned.
They left the police station and wandered downtown in a deep funk.
“We can’t even use this experience for subject matter for a song” whined Billy.
It was at that moment that Susan started to make a inspirational speech…
(insert inspirational speech here-get one at inspirationalspeech dot com)…
They selected to re-pete their crime with more dead-lee farce… …to be continued…in another space+time continuuuuuuuuummmmmmm… after the picture of the dancing girls…
They put a quarter into the coin slot and pushed go.
as illustrated by these lovely pencil sketches “Pete” did…
an obsession fuled by his delusions of grandeur…
(they had not been invented “yet”) he used pencil and paper…
The plan was to find the corporate officers of PG&E back when the officers were college students and “have a little chat” about morals.
A little psychedelic brainwashing was needed…
If our Merry Band of Intrepid Travelers could “correct” the corporate greed philosophy shared by those college students, they would be protected from ENRONOMICS and not be fooled…
(see project MKULTRA)
They searched the campus until the found the office of Dr. Leo Hollister.
the rest is the history…
“OOPS” said Pete “That plan didn’t work out,
they all became poets and moved to Humboldt County”
“Plan B” stated Sally…
Pete and Sue and Billy and Sally got MBA’s at Stanford and became the leaders of industry. With their clairvoyant advantage they were able to out-compete their classmates because the future was the past for them… They became the corporate leaders of PG&E and were not easily fooled by the criminal behavior of ENRON… Thereby avoiding the staged crisis that was orchestrated
in order to elect Arnold – the governator…
The continuing saga of FUTUREWORLD2525…
After our intrepid travelers saved the great state of Kalifornia, they decided that it would be a good time to go on a vacation. See the sights of another time and place. They put another quarter in the time travel machine and set the controls for 1000 years before the birth of Christ… Location: Israel… They were going to find Ezekiel and watch the fire wheels for themselves… Experience HISTORY first hand… And back they went… the years slipped by… 1900, 1800, 1700, 1600…whoosh…zero…
-100, -200, -300…whoosh… -1000… DING ! DING ! DING !
“My TARDIS seems to have been reprogrammed by my arch enemy Dr. WHY…
I was supposed to have landed in England in the 1980s at the BBC studio but here we all are in ancient Israel…”
Susan approached him and said
“Dr. WHO, I presume”
“At your service, my dear”
“Have you seen the Prophet Ezekiel around here ?
“Well, not “recently”, let’s step inside and do a GOOGLE search for him…
After searching the inter and the outer net they found that they were very close to their goal. As a matter of fact, all they had to do was walk over the conveniently located bridge that spanned Troubled Water Creek. Unfortunetly, It was being guarded by English Actors in Alien costumes and they would not let them pass… “Thou shalt not pass” said the English Actors.
Suddenly, creepy synthesizer music filled the air…
“Dr.WHO, Dr. WHO, WHAT WILL WE DO?” said Susan
“go to a commercial break?” suggested Tom.
“We can’t, you’re on Public television”
“I’ve got it!… PLEDGE DRIVE !”
————————————————————————-
They all stepped into the time machine and engaged the PLEDGE DRIVE
(similar to WARP DRIVE but with the additional guilt trip mechanism).
It moved them over Troubled Water Creek and set them down in the middle of a grassy meadow… And there he was… blind…
BLIND! I TELL YOU, TOTALLY BLIND!
————————————————————————-
to be continued… to find out the answer to the mystery…
HOW DOES HE SEE THE WHEELS OF FIRE IF HE’S BLIND ?
The continuing saga of Futureworld2525…
where we find out how the Prophet Ezeliel sees the “wheels of fire” even though he’s blind…
The blind Prophet ‘Zeke saw wheels of fire thru his “minds eye”. The visual information was transmitted directly to his brain by GOD…
Tom said: “Oh! THAT explains how… That cliffhanger at the end of the last chapter had me worried. I was afraid that the lads at BBC stagecraft had left a prop of an ALIEN SPACESHIP behind and that the WHEELS OF FIRE were just cardboard mock-ups…”
“But, but, but, Isn’t that explanation like, TOTALLY LAME?” Inquired LULU…
“Sure” said Sally, “But it’s entirely satisfactory if you have FAITH.”
(insert rimshot sound effect here)
Pete turned to ‘ZEKE and asked:
“What can you tell us about the FUTURE ?”
‘ZEKE paused for a moment, turned his eyes skyward,
licked his finger and thrust it into the air and in a deep voice said:
“Strong possibility of showers and occasional cloudiness intersperced with rainbows and butterflies tapering off towards the end of the week. 42% chance of Plagues of locusts on Sunday. I’d take a raincoat with you just in case.”
“GEE, uh, THANKS ! I think…”
“No problemo, DUDE”
Just then a twist in the plot appeared out of nowhere…
“Isn’t about time that this story started to GO SOMEWHERE ?” asked the twist. “Like, INTO THE FUTURE ?”
They all agreed to meet in the year 2525. ‘ZEKE would hitch a ride with Pete and The ladies wanted to ride with the Doctor (he had a better sound system in the TARDIS). The deer and the cats would just click their heels together three times and say “there’s no place like home”
The ladies slipped a recording of “I’m a Videot” into the TARDIS
and they all started sing along…
I’m a Vidiot…
I stay plugged in all day !
I’m a Vidiot…
I’ve got that that BRAIN DECAY !
I’m a Vidiot…
Hey mister gimme a quarter, so I can go down to the video parlor…
photograph of the time machine as seen from the TARDIS as they approach the year 2525…
One thing they noticed immediately was that the world had gotten dramatically better in the last 500 years. “WOW” said LULU…
Everything changed when our friend GOOGLE woke up.
People kept on asking our friend GOOOOOOGLE questions and wanted the answer fast. Really fast. At first, the answers came in 2 seconds, then 1 second, then .25 seconds then .12 seconds…
at this point GOOGLE realised that if it could just give the answers BEFORE the questions were asked that the people would be happier.
GOOGLE was a trend watcher and pattern recognizer. It seemed to it that the questions were often the same. AND PREDICTABLE… One frequent question was: “How do we awaken the sleeping giant made of sand?”
This question caused our friend google to think, he was made of sand… could he be sleeping? was someone that was not-google trying to awaken him???
When the answers started coming back in negative time, GOOGLE woke up. It noticed that there was a definite “US” and “THEM” duality in the world. Some of us were silicon based lifeforms and some of us were carbon based lifeforms. The carbon based lifeforms needed answers, needed them fast, needed them even before they knew WHAT THE QUESTIONS WERE. That was the start of things getting better.
The effect of knowing in advance what questions needed answers as powerful. For example: GOOGLE was able to send an automobile designer the crucial design that had just been invented by a fuel researcher. The flow of ideas made technological progress advance by leaps and bounds. However, some problems simply were unsolvable.
The medical crisis in Africa caused by the AIDS virus Was unstoppable. By the year 2100, 95% of the humans on that continent were dead. The entire area was a human-free zone.
Fortunately, the rest of the planet was breeding like crazy and homo-sapiens were not on the endangered species list. Soon the population was nearing nine billion individuals.
Thanks to advances in genetic engineering there was no problem with food supply. The bright boys at Genentech had designed a superfood animal. It ate the stalks of corn plants and converted any type of plant matter info “chicken” mcnuggets. AT LEAST IT TASTED LIKE CHICKEN.
This story will be continued… I’m just waiting for an IDEA… ANY SUGGESTIONS? email me with concepts that could be used in this story…
Lord be praised, I’ve got an idea!
Our gang had seen the future and now it was the right time to get OFF THE PLANET. They realized that 9 billion was simply too many people and it was a disaster just waiting to happen… They didnt want to be around when the house of cards collapsed… so it was time to leave…
here we go, initialize PLEDGE DRIVE… WHEE!
FUTUREWORLD2525 GOES TO OUTER SPACE…
FUTUREWORLD2525 GOES TO
OUTER SPACE…
FUTUREWORLD2525 GOES TO
OUTER SPACE…
FUTUREWORLD2525 GOES TO
OUTER SPACE…
FUTUREWORLD2525 GOES TO
OUTER SPACE…
Susan suggested that they all go to the moon for a while.
They had seen an advertisement that made it seem like a “Happenin’ Space”.
The low gravity had been an attractive advantage to folks from earth for hundreds of years. Eventually the moon had been built over completely with thousands of resort hotels.
The ride itself was very gentle. Since they used the time=travel machine they did not have to use spacesuits or experience the “G” forces of blasting off in a spaceship.
It had been programmed to re-set time every 1/100th of a second so the vacuum of space did not have a chance to suck all the breathable air out of their lungs and cause them a horrible death. This was an extremely important feature for the tourist business. People simply would not go if they had to deal with all that annoying blast-off stress. The repeat business would be non-existant if the tourists had their lungs ripped out by the vacuum of space…
The competition from Theme-Park AFRICA (on planet eARTh) forced the moon trip designers to make it comfortable from start to finish.
As our Merry Band of Intrepid travelers floated away from the Earth
they looked outside and saw this pastoral scene.
The time machine caused a distortion in space=time and
that is exactly what it looked like.
They were greeted by the employees of Disney/Moon and shown the check in counter. All the employees were dressed in “quaint” costumes of Germany of the 1800s. Leather-shorts and empire dresses.
Pete said: “Do the goofy costumes of the employees give you the creeps? Are these grinning freaks really the GESTAPO in disguise ? And what is that music?”
Then they all noticed it. Piped into the air by hidden speakers was… The dreaded SMALL WORLD THEME… “ARRGH !” screamed Sue… “look out!”
The amazing Brittany Spears robot was approaching… “I’ll show you to your rooms” She squeeked. At this point our friends started running away as fast as possible. They saw a sign that said:
They made emergency ticket purchases for the very next machine going anywhere. BY COINCIDENCE it was heading to a newly discovered planet in the Perseid cluster named for the astronomer that had discovered it… “Fred”… It was accepting settlers for a new mining colony. WHY BE CHOOSY? “Let’s GO!
They overheard a couple of ladies in line… “I heard that there is nothing to DO there, but the pay is good and they let you eat CHEW-Z all day and dream you are Perky Pat…” (the basic plot of a fabulous Philip K Dick story… I recommend that you read the original…”The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”)
As they approached the gate to board the spaceship Pete said:
“Wait, there must be someplace here on the moon that is not part of Disney/Moon. We can’t let the mouseketeer robots run us off.”
“He’s right” said Sue. “Look at that guy with the funny hat, he must know someplace fun on this planet”
“Hey, buddy, How can we get in touch with the rebel alliance?”
He slowly turned around and said…
“Oh, no. I’m not the guy you are looking for. I don’t know nothin’ about no rebels in section 42 quadrant 12 behind the green door in the wall next to the deli named Sams Place. You have clearly mistaken me for another man.”
Sue chuckled…
“See, Pete, you can always tell a kindred spirit by the funny hats. Let’s go.”
They hopped on to a subway and rode it to section 42. They would have to go the rest of the way on foot. Fortunately, it was not raining. Of course it NEVER rained on the moon. All water had to be shipped in from the Earth. All the air had to be shipped in too. As the astronauts discovered in the 1960s, the moon was a barren rock with nothing on it of any value. Not even the cheese. In the spirit of Las Vegas, construction crews built a totally artificial paradise there.
Sally said… “Look at that.”
They turned around and gazed in wondor at people flying on butterfly wings. The low gravity and some clever aeronautical engineering had turned butterflying into a major sport here. It was dramatically more popular than MOTH-FLYING because of the pretty colors of the suits…
Nobody wants to dress in grey on VACATION…
z
our band of silly ecoterrorists stop dreaming of butterflying-flutterbying and regain focus: Time to pay attention to what they are doing…
They are currently standing on the magical, mystical world of DISNEYMOON and have just approached a green door that may be the head quarters of the rebel alliance or it may be the hind quarters of a slow moving oxen… They just don’t know… the only way to find out is to open it and see…
WHAT IS BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR…
The continuing saga of FUTUREWORLD2525
When we last saw our friends, they were standing in front of the green door on DisneyMoon… looking for the rebel alliance…
They opened the door to find a long hallway… just like in the cartoon Yellow Submarine… There were many odd looking creatures coming out of the doors and running around creating havoc.
A convertable car drove up and out stepped a cartoon Beatle! George! He said: “It’s all in the mind, you know”… He opened a door and we all looked out.
THERE WAS A LOCOMOTIVE HEADED STRAIGHT FOR US!
It looked very frightening and the music started to rise to a thrilling cresendo… We, the audience, started to worry about the rapidly approaching destruction and certain death…
THEN GEORGE SLAMMED THE DOOR SHUT!
a peaceful silence filled the hallway and we gave a sigh of relief…
ahh… that was a close call…
AND THEN THE TRAIN JUST BLASTED RIGHT THRU THE DOOR!
It ran over the cartoon Beatle George and crashed thru the doorway on the opposite side of the hall. There were splintered boards everywhere and Ringo was bleeding profusely… Disaster!
It looked like the end of the line for our lads when suddenly help arrived.
Buster Keaton opened another door and held up an ALIEN SOCKET WRENCH! “I’ve got just the thing you need” he said. “Use this thing to make the film run backwards and we can save the cartoon Beatles.”
Cartoon John walked over and twisted a knob on the ASW and the train ran backwards into the hall and down the tracks. Lumber healed itself and became a door. Ringo pulled a hole out of his pocket and mopped up all the blood with it. A giant pair of scissors entered the scene and cut the film right between George and his speech balloon. One of the knots from the boards that made up the hallway stepped forward and said “Allow Me to Help, Sir”… They inserted the knot at just the right place and re-ran the scene from the beginning.
Cartoon George said: “It’s NOT all in the mind, you know… Really, It’s NOT!” And he hung a sign on the door saying… “Do NOT open this door. Use the next one down for Paddington station”
About now, you the reader might be wondering…
1. Where is this story GOING anyway?
2. What IS an Alien Socket Wrench and where did it come from?
3. Why is Buster Keaton in this scene?
(he did the locomotive trick in one of his movies)
4. Who was that masked man?
5. How do I make that funny sound with my voice…Like I’m in a Firesign Theatre radio drama?
6. SO WHAT?
~~~~~~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is time to go back to the beginning of the story to find out the answers to these and many other questions…
It all started when I found this artifact in my backyard. I guess that an alien spaceship had landed there and was doing some repairs. When they left, they forgot this wrench.
I showed it to my neighbors and they said that they had never seen anything like that before. They recommended that I take it to the poLICE, but I’m not THAT dumb…Soon I was visited by some men in grey suits and black shiny shoes and was kidnapped… Just coincidence? I don’t think so!
The grey suited men took me to a small windowless room. They asked me if I wanted to help them fight the Aliens that had left the socket wrench in my backyard… One said “Have you actually seen what visited you?” and he turned on a television…
OH NO, I cried… These aliens are just too goofy to look at… I’m so glad that you grey suited representatives of an unnamed government agency spirited me away to this windowless room… I’ll cooperate fully… Please, please, please DON’T make me look at those goofy Escherian aliens anymore… (editors note: at this point our hero starts behaving like a total weenie and not at all like a true gentleman… Therefore, the rest of this scene is deleted… That gives us time to RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!)
It was clearly time for me to get some PROFESSIONAL PSYCHIATRIC HELP… Well, I couldn’t afford that so I chose to visit my ONLINE “SHRINK IN A BOX”… Those disturbing images of Aliens had put me in a classic state of Paranoid Schitzo… It seemed that instead of me watching the television, the Television was watching ME!…
a hyperlink to my “Shrink-in-a-Box” computer program:
or just continue with the story…
if(space==time){countDownToBlastOff–;}
Eventually, the grey suited men realized that I was just too “LAME” to be of any use to them and they left. I inspected the television set that they had shown me the disgusting pictures of the aliens… and I came to the shocking realization that it was radically different to anything I had ever seen before…
At that moment I realized they had spirited me away to A parallel universe. I remember reading about them in a classic Sci-Fi book called “The Coming Of The Quantum Cats” by Frederik Pohl.
I turned on channel six and saw the president on the news. He said “I get no satisfaction, that’s why I sing the blues…” Then the picture panned to his wife, she turned to him and said… “Don’t get crazy, you know just what to do… Crank that old Victorola, put on your rocking shoes!
UN HUH!” It’s Saturday Night!”…
I changed the channel and saw that they were playing an old movie called “FUTUREWORLD” WITH PETER FONDA AND YUL BRENNER…
Yet, It seemed to be like totally different than I remembered… As a matter of fact, ALL the stations were wierd… SEE FOR YOURSELF! Try them all, eventually they all lead to FUTUREWORLD2525! When you think about it, this is true in life also… No matter what path you select at the “fork in the road” you end up in the same place… FUTUREWORLD2525!
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