Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 63
July 6, 2016
Short Story Reading: STARMAN – LIFE ON TRAPPISTONE by Dermott Hayes
This is the first of the ten Starman episodes (completed and posted today), being read in the Novel Writing Festival, Toronto
CATCH UP
TRAP1 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/05/starman-life-on-trappistone-2/
TRAP2 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/12/starman-life-on-trappistone-2-2/
TRAP3 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/20/starman-life-on-trappistone-3-obsession/
TRAP4 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/26/starman-life-on-trappistone-4/
TRAP5 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/02/starman-life-on-trappistone-5-inspiration/
TRAP6 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/12/starmanlife-on-trappistone6-adventure/
TRAP7 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/16/starman-life-on-trappistone-7-rebirth/
TRAP8 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/24/starman-life-on-trappist18-happiness/
TRAP9 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/30/starman-life-on-trappist1-faith/
TRAP10 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/07/06/starman-life-on-trappist1-10/
Watch the July 2016 Winning Short Screenplay Reading.
Story performed by actor Julian Ford
STARMAN – LIFE ON TRAPPISTONE by Dermott Hayes
Get to know the winning writer:
1. What is your Short Story about?
Suppose a person from another planet discovered they were from Earth, that their planet was colonized by aliens? And discovering this, how would it reflect on the world in which they lived? Does history repeat itself and are we always destined to repeat our mistakes
2. What genres would you say this short story is in?
Science fiction, mystery, a moral tale
3. How would you describe this story in two words?
Begin Again
4. What movie have you seen the most in your life?
High Noon
5. How long have you been working on this story?
1 day, for this story and 10 weeks, since, 9 new episodes.
6. Do you have an all-time favorite…
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Signs of the Time#10
I like coffee. I like it simple, but pure. That’s why I buy a certain coffee bean. I grind it, myself, at home. Then I brew it in an espresso machine.
Here’s a collection of signs, inspired, oddly by Richard Ankers’ excellent 50 word story post on Negativity https://richardankers.com/2016/07/06/50-word-stories-negativity/ to which I answered “I have a double negative every morning, before breakfast. It gives me a positive outlook.” It’s a collection of coffee bar signs, compiled originally by The Daily Edge, http://www.dailyedge.ie/coffee-shop-signs-perfect-1873214-Jan2015/
If you ordered a ‘Jackson’, what should you expect?
Anti-Corbyn plots & the myth of the un-electable left
Excellent analysis of the continuing campaign to undermine and oust Jeremy Corbyn
By Daniel Margrain
Corbyn speaking at the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and Rally in 2015
In 1978, the Australian social scientist, Alex Carey, pointed out that the twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: “the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.” The corporations that now dominate much of the domestic and global economies recognize the need to manipulate the public through media propaganda by manufacturing their consent in order to defend their interests against the forces of democracy. This is largely achieved as a result of coordinated mass campaigns that combine sophisticated public relations techniques.
The result is the media underplay, or even ignore, the economic and ideological motivations that drive the social policy decisions and strategies of governments’. Sharon Beder outlines the reasoning behind the coordinated political…
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Are You a Writer?
I couldn’t fault anything in this post. It speaks the truth. Writers write.
by M.R. Goodhew
I recently found myself exploring the idea of what makes a writer a writer, but more importantly what is a writer that doesn’t write?
A friend of mine keeps calling themselves a writer, but they never write a word. I am somewhat offended, because I am a writer.
My aim with this blog post is to inspire the would-be writer to do what they love, simply because they will so enjoy doing it.
But first let’s explore why it is that some of you might not be writing.
Here Is the Conclusion I Came To:
First of all, if you don’t write anything, then you’re not a writer, because a writer writes!
You may once have been a writer, but if your not writing, then your not producing anything and you’ve quit.
I know it sounds harsh, but that’s the reality of it.
I felt compelled to write this…
View original post 1,154 more words
Starman: Life on Trappist1 #10
Tr
https://silverthreading.com/2016/07/06/beauty-quote-theme/
THIS IS THE LAST EPISODE OF THE Starman: Life on Trappist1 series.
The pulsing light on his InfoTab startles him. He looks at it as though staring will provide an answer. Surprise is not a familiar emotion, even for him and his recent activities.
It was not as though he never got InfoTab alerts. InfoTab pulses indicate communication from GrUnCo: a ReAs reminder, for example – It was just three days away, or, a general welfare memo, when all Units assembled for inoculation. It might be a Function Report request.
He taps the InfoTab, once, to indicate receipt. The face of an unfamiliar female Unit fills the screen. Another surprise.
‘Unit 158? Unit 420 reporting. I’ve been assigned Intern Function for the Crater of Density Index.’
Now Abraham experiences something for which he has no words or meaning. It is beyond surprise. His mind is crammed with messages and information, crossing, collapsing, colliding as he tries to assimilate this new disturbance to his, already jolted, equilibrium.
He becomes aware of his rasping breath, his heart is racing but his skin is cold and drained of colour. He double taps the InfoTab screen. Unit 420 disappears from view and he, from hers. He closes his eyes, counting slowly, backwards, from 10, he draws breath, slowly, steadily. Shock, he thinks, this is it, like a sensory overload.
He gathers his thoughts, feels his pulse slow, his breathing steady. He taps the InfoTab screen again.
‘Unit 420, apologies, materials in the Crater of Density cause malfunctions. Please enter.’ He punches in the security code for the Tabernacle and waits for her arrival.
He knows he has made no intern request nor has he received any notification of her arrival. He gathers the alien Tablet and his own InfoTab and disappears into another chamber of the Tabernacle where he secures them from unauthorised interference. He returns to the Tabernacle command deck just as Unit 420 arrives.
She is tall and lean with hair like the copper glow from a dwarf star moonrise, the second moon, that is. He’s never seen hair that colour. He stares. Abraham is not used to the proximity of female Units having only met a few, before, while in InIt and FormU. To be truthful, he isn’t used to the proximity of any Units, outside the Crater and the Tabernacle, apart from ReAs.
Her eyes are fixed on his, open, as though she has a question or is waiting for an answer. Abraham feels her look mirrors his thoughts. He’s unsure what to say or how to say it. Female Units are no different to male Units, apart from their physical composition. They have no reproductive purpose although some, from Init, are trained for nurturing. PleasureBots are used for harvesting semen; a female’s gamete production is harvested in a regular health check, about once every four weeks. Reproduction occurs in the WombHome laboratories, administered by dedicated receptoBots and supervised, as all things are, by the watchful QuantumBot.
Abraham fidgets. ’So’, he says, scratching his neck and putting his hand in and then out of his pocket, rolling a tiny follicle of lint, absentmindedly, between his thumb and forefinger. He doesn’t finish the sentence as Unit 420 speaks.
’So, Unit 158, what do you do here?,’ Unit 420 asks. Abraham feels sweat tickle the back of his neck and run down his face, even in the comfort chill induced by air filters.
‘M – my name is Abraham,’ he says, realising he hasn’t answered her question. Now he feels his cheeks burn.
She smiles. Abraham squirms, manages a smirk, he can’t meet her eyes that are as green, if not greener than, Aladdin Sane’s, ‘w – what’s yours?,’ he blurts.
’Andromeda’, she replies, self consciously. Now it was her turn to avoid his gaze.
‘I wasn’t sent by QuantumBot and I’m not an intern from FormU,’ she says. It’s Abraham’s turn to look like he’s been given an answer before he asks a question but, ignoring him, she continues, ‘I’m one of the real Diamond Dogs.’
Her eyes never leave Abraham’s who thinks now he understands how mesmerism works. It was something he read in the Tabernacle Chronicles, an addendum or memo attached to a treatise on mind control, propaganda and behavioural pattern manipulation.
‘We gathered you knew the Aladdin Sane and the Diamond Dogs you met last week were ImageBots. We regret the deception but it was necessary, in the interest of self preservation and survival.’
Abraham listens, intently, while sizing her, up, down and three-dimensionally, too. Unless she is a grade of imageBot far beyond any he’s experienced before, he’s convinced she’s the real thing but, at the same time, like no female Unit he’s ever encountered. He doesn’t respond to her revelation, though, as now he’s unsure if he can trust himself.
His feelings, already a confusing assault of daily discoveries, are in overdrive. Her presence and proximity is already clouding and crowding his perception. He can smell her where she stands and with the slightest movement, that cool, lavender scent, envelops him. He steals looks at her profile, almond skin, her gently curving cheekbones and her nose, tiny with the slightest upturn that all combine to accentuate her eyes, so green and bright. Is this beauty? He shuts his eyes and turns away.
‘Good’, he hears himself saying, ‘Andromeda, eh? I’ve never heard this name before. Right, to work, the Tabernacle Index is an inventory. You must begin in the craft’s aft.’
He looks at her and realises she’s smiling, a smile with the power of the dwarf star, he thinks, then he sees she’s laughing, her slender fingers hiding her smirking mouth.
Flustered, he feels, what? Thinking. Craft’s aft, I get it. Then he’s laughing, too and loudly, inhibitions dispersed. They both laugh and smiling, laugh again. Then he feels himself relax. He stops laughing but still smiling, he tells her to make detailed images of every component, in every dimension, so they can be reconstructed later, if needed.
With a last, deep and lingering look into those green eyes that say to him, he hopes, we have a new understanding that he, he admits to himself, must yet work out, then he withdraws to the chamber where he has hidden his infoTab and the Tabernacle Tablet.
Away from her, he blows his breath out like air escaping an inflatable. Does he accept what she says at face value or is this some sinister ploy, to penetrate his defences and measure his disAssembly? And orchestrated by whom, he wonders and to what end?
************************************
The insectBots place themselves at strategic points in the Tabernacle control deck, one in the illumination panel directly above the central control module, the other, over the hatch that led to the chamber where Unit 158 went. Its attempt to follow him failed, damaging a tarsus but, apart from impeding its balance slightly, did little else as it was a hexapod.
They are programmed to track the Units in the Tabernacle, gaining access when the female Unit 420 enters. Their observations are observed, in detail, from a secure chamber where QuantumBot is located, along with the GrUnCo servers, but not by bots, quantum or otherwise. Human eyes watch them but not from human bodies. But the only sign of ‘life’ is the stream of lights that erupt occasionally and sidle along the wall by psychImpulse, through fibre optic cables, directly to QuantumBot.
These eyes belong to the few survivors of the old Earth, the self style architects, savants and Lords of the New Order but, in the aftermath of the tabernacle’s grand tour and nearly catastrophic arrival on Trappist1, cryonic perversions, existing in a horrifying stew of plasma, alive like a breathing omelette. QuantumBot, programmed to respond to their psychImpulses, never responds or questions.
***********************************
Andromeda studies him. He feels as though she’s looking inside him, even right through him. Then she reaches across to him and, with a feather-like touch, grips his lower arm. He feels like he’s melting and his mind is mush, like a marshmallow dessert.
Yet, 'twas not her beauty alone that won me
Oh no! 'Twas the the truth in her eye ever dawning
Abraham shudders, shakes himself, he hopes, surreptitiously.
‘I watched the ImageBot performance and I thought it pathetic. I argued for full disclosure, leave no questions unanswered,’ she tells him.
He sits down on the edge of the Tabernacle control console, never taking his eyes off her. He makes a decision, blinks his eyes, slowly. She continues.
‘The only problem is, we have more questions than we have answers, but we do have you.’
‘Me?’, Abraham asks, ‘how do you have me?’
‘Let me start at our beginning. First, there are five of us. I know, I know, Aladdin Sane and the six Diamond Dogs makes seven but that was just a romantic ruse as in The Magnificent Seven, The Seven Samurai?’
Abraham’s blank look tells her all she needs to know. ’Never mind,’ she says, ‘the five of us were all that survived the crash of The Tabernacle, as sperm and unfertilised gametes, that is. Our parents, the ’N.O.T.’ were enslaved technicians in the service of the self ordained master puppeteers who financed the whole Tabernacle project. It was the culmination of millennia of exploitation and appropriation, designed to take their plan, for a world of their own design, to a new world and start again. They called this project, N.O.W.’
’N.O.W.?’, Abraham asks.
‘New Order World,’ she answers, without the slightest hint of irony.
Abraham can’t contain himself. His smirk becomes a giggle until, with a hiss like the doors of the truckBot, his suppressed chuckle turns in to a loud guffaw that says ridicule and disbelief.
She looks at him, frowning.
‘C’mon,’ he says, gasping between laughs, ’N.O.T. And N.O.W.? Not Now?’, he looks at her, mouth agape, eyes wide open, hands flat apart, before him.
Still that frowning, quizzical look.
He realises then she doesn’t understand and at the same time begins to think they might be both in the same boat. They just got on at different ports.
’How do you know all this?’ he asks.
’This world is not as old as you might think it is,’ she begins.
Abraham realises that’s a thought that has never occurred to him.
‘What? What do you mean?,’ he hears himself asking, knowing now he is being played or that’s what he wants to believe to keep control of his own mind. Or is this love?, he wonders, thinking, why does he think that?
All that sweating, racing heart , shortness of breath, fear of falling, but was that not fear, anxiety?
Idiot love will spark the fusion
Inspirations have I none
Just to touch the flaming dove
All I have is my love of love
And love is not loving
Really, Starman, he thinks, is that helpful? But sexual urges he has felt and gratified with a PleasureBot. It is a functional duty for all male Units. But this, this confusion? It’s natural, he tells himself, feeling delight at that acknowledgement, too. Natural, no, it’s natural to be suspicious, too. That’s a survival instinct.
Cassandra carries on talking, oblivious to his meandering mind, ‘QuantumBot began the fertilisation process while the Tabernacle was in motion except the NOTs had rogue receptoBots on board that were programmed to see we were among the chosen. The first wave, of which you were one, were fed raw data, even while you were being fertilised. They were playing odds that were stacked against them but you, were the first wave, were the building blocks of their New Order. Some of them were separated from the rest after WombHome. They are the Facilitators.’
Abraham feels like his head is exploding, like a giant jackhammer is pounding on his head. He feels himself moving before he’s aware of it. Then the whole Tabernacle rocks violently and he sees himself tossed against the ceiling before he hurtles across the control deck, head first. He sees Cassandra tumble as she’s projected in the opposite direction. Then all the air and the light is sucked out of the chamber.
Soul Love lyrics © EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC, TINTORETTO MUSIC
CATCH UP
TRAP1 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/05/starman-life-on-trappistone-2/
TRAP2 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/12/starman-life-on-trappistone-2-2/
TRAP3 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/20/starman-life-on-trappistone-3-obsession/
TRAP4 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/26/starman-life-on-trappistone-4/
TRAP5 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/02/starman-life-on-trappistone-5-inspiration/
TRAP6 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/12/starmanlife-on-trappistone6-adventure/
TRAP7 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/16/starman-life-on-trappistone-7-rebirth/
TRAP8 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/24/starman-life-on-trappist18-happiness/
TRAP9 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/30/starman-life-on-trappist1-faith/
TRAP10 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/07/06/starman-life-on-trappist1-10/
July 4, 2016
Age of Awareness, at last
Should we really be surprised that young people are rejecting the economic status quo?
via Why Young Americans Are Giving Up on Capitalism — Foreign Policy
Brexit stiff on sterling
Photo: PR
Sterling’s never been so hard, apparently, despite its recent limp showing on currency markets. It’s inspired Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union, the first erotic novel about one man’s obsession with a £1 sterling coin.
by Adam Gabbatt (The Guardian)
Brexit has produced its first work of literature, in the form of an erotic novel depicting a relationship between a man and a “massive, sentient” pound coin.
Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union is the latest novella from Chuck Tingle, the author of more than 50 sexually explicit science fiction stories.
In the book a giant floating pound coin, with an “incredible set of chiseled metallic abs” and a “thick golden rod”, takes 25-year-old Alex Liverbot one month into the future, offering a haunting vision of the UK a few weeks after the Brexit vote.
In London the Houses of Parliament are ablaze, the River Thames is “bubbling like the lava of a molten volcano”, and strange creatures “dressed [as] the Queen’s guard but with leathery reptilian wings and extended knifelike teeth” patrol the sky. Quadruple-decker passenger buses, introduced in a cost-saving measure by a desperate post-referendum government, have proven impractical and lie on their sides in the streets.
Against this dystopian backdrop Liverbot and the giant pound coin, which is called Perber and appears to have hands, a penis and some method of speaking aloud, strike up an unlikely relationship. Their coupling culminates with a breathlessly depicted sexual encounter in a London pub.
Tingle – the name is believed to be a pseudonym – has been honing his distinct take on erotica since January 2015, when his debut novel, Chuck’s Dinosaur Tinglers Volume 1, was released.
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A prolific writer, Tingle averages almost three books a month. He rose to fame over the last year after his work was nominated for a Hugo prize – a prestigious science fiction award – following an online campaign by the Rabid Puppies movement. The group campaigns against a perceived leftwing bias by Hugo award judges by voting en masse for male authors and criticizing female writers. Tingle disowned the Rabid Puppies earlier this year, and invited Zoë Quinn, a video game developer who has been the target of online harassment by Gamergate and the Rabid Puppies, to attend the Hugo awards ceremony in his stead.
Tingle’s work has been described as a parody of dinosaur erotica, a real sub-genre of literature which explores hypothetical sexual encounters between animals from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and human beings.
In recent months Tingle has expanded his ouevre, however, and exploring themes such as unicorns – in Hunter Dentist: Pounded in the Butt by Cecil the Handsome Unicorn – and inanimate objects, in Pounded in the Butt by my Handsome Ghost Boats.
In an email interview, Tingle said Pounded by the Pound took “seven or eight” hours to write, but conceded that many more hours had been spent on research.
The author, who in his correspondence displayed an eccentric interpretation of grammar and punctuation, warned that his stark vision for Britain’s future, including the distortion of the Queen’s guard and the ill-conceived adaptations to London’s public transport, could yet come to pass.
“Well the events of Pounded by Pound are only a month later so id say [it is] pretty realistic,” Tingle said.
“It makes sense that they would have to call in the reptile guards and also that all double decker bus[es] would need four stories to cut costs.”
He advised: “DON’T DO THIS THEY WILL TIP OVER.”
June 30, 2016
BBC producer deletes blog where he admits political manipulation before PM Questions
BBC: Making (Up) the News
A BBC producer has admitted in a BBC blog – now deleted – that Andrew Neil, Laura Kuenssberg and himself manipulated the news to negatively impact Jeremy Corbyn during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday.
In the blog, the producer – Andrew Alexander – openly admits the BBC team were not just reporting the day’s news but trying to influence it:
“this was a story where we could make an impact”
Alexander also admits the BBC team were fully aware that their actions would influence events:
“we knew his resignation just before PMQs would be a dramatic moment with big political impact”
And expresses pleasure in seeing the PM use their actions to attack the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn:
“we took a moment to watch the story ripple out across news outlets and social media. Within minutes we heard David Cameron refer to the resignation during his exchanges with Jeremy Corbyn”
This is not reporting news.
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Palace of Fruit
Photos taken, last night, of Dublin’s Fruit and Vegetable Market
Starman: Life on Trappist1, Faith
https://silverthreading.com/2016/06/29/wqwwc-writers-quote-wednesday-writers-challenge-faith/
The truckBot doesn’t linger after dropping Abraham back to his CraterProx dwelling. Abraham doesn’t hang about, either, to watch him go. Mindful of Aladdin Sane’s warnings regarding psychImp and QuantumBot’s capability to monitor his input to GrUnCo, he quickly gathers what he needs – a supply of solid and liquid ingestions, survival garments – and heads on for the Crater of Density and the alien craft, The Tabernacle.
He figures if QuantumBot has no way of knowing what he does there, then neither will Sane and the other holoBot Dogs and whoever controls them. Before he leaves his CraterProx dwelling, he takes the precaution of logging on for Function input, something he has always done, by training, but now, he realises, it’s instinctive, fuelled by caution and survival.
In The Tabernacle, he retrieves the Tablet Chronicles, secures the giant pod’s gateway and settles in to complete the study he’d begun, before the arrival of the truckBot.
QuantumBot, he understands from his previous but interrupted research, is the failsafe mechanism that would rebuild the Earth beings’ ideal world. The Tablet Chronicles was not just a detailed record of Earth’s story, it was also a blueprint of all the factors that led to its destruction and a plan for how these problems would be avoided, if and when they found a new home.
Controlling memory was a key ingredient in the success of their ideal world where everyone would have everything they needed and all would work together to achieve that objective. By controlling memory, they figured, they could limit desire because desire, they figured, was what led to all their troubles in the first place.
Earth was a planet in a galaxy at a distant quadrant of the known universe, the Chronicles told him, although what that meant, he isn’t entirely sure. He just knows it’s out there, somewhere. Anyway, this earth was two thirds liquid surface and one third, terrestrial. It is, or was, made up of iron, oxygen, magnesium and silicon.
Abraham wades, with some effort and not a little trouble through the formation of the planet earth’s solar system from nebula to a planetary system and from there, the evolution of the planet, itself, asteroid collisions, tectonic plates, the formation of oceans through condensation, from water and ice delivered by impacting comets.
He understands little of this but wonders at the earth people’s ability to annotate everything so for everything he doesn’t understand, which was just about everything, he’s able to learn through the notes. Assimilating information rapidly comes natural to him. That was how they were trained in FormU and InIt, so they could be reassigned Function, where it was needed.
Having waded through the planet’s position and ecological evolution, he finds the narrative more densely annotated as he approaches the storey’s resolution. Earth became too small for its population and what was once a thriving planet, soon became a wasted husk, drained of natural resources, its self sustaining ecological environment lost the means and will to live.
Of course, this was after wading through an entire treatise on the history of earth and its living species. This, he found intriguing and entirely engrossing.
Earth, it appears, according to the Tabernacle Chronicles, developed a complex eco system over many, to him entirely unfathomable, ages. From single cell bacteria that found themselves living on land, from the sea, they developed wings, limbs, complex organisms. And the humanoid was not the only species; it was only one of many millions, many of which remained unidentified, even when the planet imploded.
But it is the evolutionary development of the humanoid beings, the aliens who created and piloted the Tabernacle, he finds most fascinating.
First, they were hunter – gatherers who preyed on other species. Then, they gathered together and preyed on each other. They asked questions and sought answers for their own existence. They created belief systems so a few could control many and, though each system failed, another, like the one before it and so on, until it was no more. The only thing that ever changed was the number in control and the complexity of what they had to believe in, even when, in the logic language of their questioners, the philosophers, the faith they held was, well, in their language, illogical.
To their final day, the earth people followed a faith whose primary tenet was their own self destruction. It was called consumerism and at the core of this faith, the tabernacle Chroniclers believed, was memory.
So, he reads, the core of their Tabernacle plan for a brave, new world, is the belief that so long as everyone works together and no-one has a memory of what they can’t have or might want, then the only thing that’s important is what is.
Abraham studies on this for a time. His understanding of the aliens has improved, he knows, but, equally, he believes, there’s something missing.
Firstly, he reads no mention of the Starman, suspecting, perhaps, he was just one of their emissaries, like Major Tom, whose exploratory mission failed. Unsatisfied, he returns to the Tablet to find the cache of missives from the Starman. He scrolls through them to see if he can find, in one he hasn’t heard before, some clue to the answer he requires.
Here’s one, he thinks, entitled, curiously, ‘Moonage Daydream.’
I’m an alligator, I’m a mama-papa coming for you
I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock ‘n’ rollin’ bitch for you
Keep your mouth shut, you’re squawking like a pink monkey bird
And I’m busting up my brains for the words
What does that mean? He asks himself. Either the Starman was very confused or there is some secret code he has yet to unlock. Who, for example, were the people of The Tabernacle?
He knows, from his research, that as some Earth beings foresaw their planet’s own destruction, they were actively involved in seeking a way to escape. For this reason, The Starman and Major Tom were sent. But one of their biggest problems was propulsion, finding the technology that would transport them the distances they wanted to travel.
Trappist1, the dwarf star, was discovered by Earth living astral explorers, called astronomers, in the Earth time they called 2016. Their discovery triggered a new urgency to find the travel technology because Trappist1’s satellite planets, they believed, were like Earth and could sustain Earth life.
Trappist1 and its satellites, were 20 light years from Earth so was the biggest problem facing them, or so it appeared. The Chroniclers, however, belonged to a secret cabal that traversed all the power structures on earth, infiltrating the belief, power, manufacturing, energy, military and banking systems. Through their machinations, over millennia of Earth time, they gathered, recovered and accumulated secret knowledge and lost technologies, preparing, ultimately, for their day of departure.
The Tabernacle inventory included all this archival information, the sum of all the knowledge and information there was about the planet from whence they came; detailed manuals for their technology, its development archived with precision; the Chroniclers’ Blueprint, the detailed plan for the development of the new dawn of their species on another planet, its implementation in the hands of the QuantumBot and a massive cryogenic storage facility containing sperm and ova, collected, collated and assiduously vetted to fulfil their programme.
Everything was organised, annotated and logged, meticulously. Or so they thought. In the Tablet’s chronicles of Earth race history, Abraham had noted the recurrence in time of independent thought and thinkers who challenged the reality they were programmed to accept. At different times they were ‘free thinkers’, ‘heretics’, ‘revisionists’, ‘revolutionaries’, ‘dissidents’, ‘intellectuals’, ‘leftists’, Marxists’, ‘rebels’, ‘anarchists’, ‘conspiracy theorists’, ’nut jobs’ ‘crazies’, or ‘terrorists’. It was a common and repetitive strain to label and marginalise those who questioned the status quo, a reality that was carefully and fastidiously manipulated, in the background, by the acolytes of the Chroniclers.
And these were who sprang to mind when, having finished his research of the Tabernacle Chronicle, the screen image dissolved, replaced by another, an image of a pendant, with the letters, N.O.T. Emblazoned on it and beneath that, the legend, ’Nerds of Thoth’. 
Unfamiliar with their name among the long and exhaustive list of labels and acronyms in the Chroniclers’ archives, Abraham sets about researching them using the acronym N.O.T. And the legend, Nerds of Thoth, as his parameters.
A ‘nerd’ he finds,is ‘a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious’ and a single-minded expert in a particular technical field’ while Thoth, he discovers, is ‘a moon god, the god of wisdom, justice, and writing, patron of the sciences, and messenger of the sun god Ra.’
Put together, he surmises, they have chosen their acronym to deny , decry and devalue the Chroniclers’ assertion of ownership of knowledge and the blueprint for the species’ future on another planet.
Excited, he clicks on the symbol of Thoth, an image of a sword, coiled by two serpents climbing to a circular orb or crystal. It opens to a plain manifesto.
He told me:
Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie
Abraham recognises it as the words of The Starman. He reads on.
We, the Nerds of Thoth, the architect slaves of the Chroniclers, who put this Tabernacle together and compiled these archives, would like to introduce you to the Ghost in the Machine or Deus ex Machina. Since we could not participate in this adventure as travellers in the Tabernacle, we’ve replaced some of the chosen few with the irregular sperm and ova of our own membership. The Chroniclers’ blueprint agenda precludes freedom and freedom of choice, two human traits that are the fountain source of both the species’ triumphs and terrors. The QuantumBot will follow its pre-programmed protocol and will not interfere, but one day, some of these children will ask, why?
Then, the adventure begins…
CATCH UP
TRAP1 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/05/starman-life-on-trappistone-2/
TRAP2 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/12/starman-life-on-trappistone-2-2/
TRAP3 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/20/starman-life-on-trappistone-3-obsession/
TRAP4 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/26/starman-life-on-trappistone-4/
TRAP5 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/02/starman-life-on-trappistone-5-inspiration/
TRAP6 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/12/starmanlife-on-trappistone6-adventure/
TRAP7 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/16/starman-life-on-trappistone-7-rebirth/
TRAP8 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/06/24/starman-life-on-trappist18-happiness/
Postcard from a Pigeon
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