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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Monday, January 01, 2007

Mars Attacked! and Pennies by the Pound


     I dreamed that we had managed to move into Mars orbit and were watching the planet's surface for changes when we crashed a huge Ice asteroid into it. The asteroid was set to skim through the atmosphere a few dozen times before it finally crashed into the planet (after having most of its liquid burned off in the atmosphere.)
     The original idea here was not to crash a huge asteroid into Mars, but to whittle it down considerably before letting it skim down to the surface. Things did not go quite as planned. A large section of the asteroid separated from the main body on the third atmospheric sweep, the ejection caused the main mass to shift into a slightly lower orbit, and on the next pass it was grabbed and slowed so much by the atmosphere that the asteroid's orbit changed into a much faster decay. Bits and pieces of the asteroid broke off of and rained down onto Mars' surface in a series of devastating impacts.
     Near one of the new craters we detected some sort of movement, then radio signals, alien. We managed to get several high resolution photos of the area, and there were structures and launch vehicles of an alien design.
     We'd not noticed them before. When we pulled up the detailed photos from previous missions there they were! At least on plates a year old or newer, no indication on data from earlier than that. The asteroid had been well on its way to the planet long before they had landed, whoever they were. We quickly made up some diagrams of what was happening. NASA spent a couple of days arguing about trying to send one of the recon landers down to make contact with the aliens. We tried radio, but couldn't seem to get anything intelligible through to them, nor they to us. We also tried to predict where as many of the shattered pieces of the asteroid would land as we could. There didn't seem to be any safe places unless you moved towards the poles, and even then there would be some ice slamming into the planet. Finally NASA radioed back to send team members down to the planet, a pilot, a computer technician and a mission specialist. I was chosen to be the computer technician, since I'd already done the radio messages and tried to make contact. When it was pointed out to NASA that I was also cross trained as a pilot, they reduced the mission profile to two. Just before we left I managed to get some high resolution photographs that included two of the aliens outside their buildings, making some sort of repairs. They were shaped like cuttle fish, but with a single leg that ended in 5 tentacles. They seemed to have a sort of radial symmetry. They were also about two feet taller than us and we estimated a hundred pounds heavier.
     "Lets hope they're friendly" I quipped.
     We landed on the planet, I was stuck back in the return vessel after we unloaded several sensor packages and set up some atmospheric monitoring stations. We didn't want the mission to go completely to the contact purpose, because there was not any replacement fuel for what we burned. We decided to make a full run of equipment down to the planet, that way it would not be left in orbit. This site was close enough to one of our chosen stations that recovering the building materials in a solar powered vehicle would add a couple of mission days, but that would better than losing the materials altogether.
     My mission specialist made her way over to the alien camp site. As she approached we sent radio pulses hopefully indicating that we were peaceful. I had no way of knowing if that was working or not.
     No way of knowing until my crewmate crested the crater rim and came under fire from the alien creatures. They had some sort of airgun that fired a stream of ice crystals in the shape of darts. The mission specialist managed to duck back down into the crater, dropping off the map of Mars we'd made that showed the ice landing zones, (The alien camp was not directly in one, but was darned close.) She was able to apply emergency patches to her suit (the air pressure on Mars had been raised to about 4 PSI, still too thin to survive in.)
     Our contingency plans had included an armed response possibility, basically, I was to abandon the mission specialist and take off, the multi-use vehicle being more important to the success of the mission than either of us. (Nice, knowing that the multi-million dollar piece of equipment is more valuable than you are.) There were several nailguns in the tools I had dropped off, though, and I didn't want to abandon my crewmate (She was too darned cute to leave behind.) I'd already been suited up and working outside previous to her trip, so cycled myself out and grabbed two nailguns from the tool locker. I ran over to the contact site, watching my progress on the orbital camera display in my helmet to make a safe route that would put me above the aliens.
     I watched the aliens puzzle over the paper map, trying to figure out what we'd indicated. They were gesticulating wildly with their arms at the photos of their encampment taken from above. I got the impression that their space suits were more like vehicles than suits. I dropped over the ridge and down into the crater. I'd also brought a piece of Kevlar construction material to use as a shield. We stood up behind it, the radios went silent. Then there was a burst of their language and ice slivers pinged off the shield. When the shield stopped vibrating I poked the nailgun out from behind it and fired a single nail at a large rock near them. I managed to hit it. The nail, contrary to what I expected, buried itself in the rock, chipping out a golf-ball-sized hole at its entry point. I aimed the nailgun back directly at them this time, but didn't pull the trigger.
     The radio went silent again. I indicated the PDA we'd left behind. They picked it up. The mission specialist started remotely playing the 3d renderings of the ice delivery, and showed the various orbital trajectories and then over-layed the landing zones with a particular emphasis on the camp site. We were using the time from the original impact to now as a time standard to show them the future. I think they finally started to understand that we were not trying to kill them. One of them then took a rock and added some information to the drawing of the planet. He rolled the drawing up into a tube and tossed it over to us. I started for it, but the mission specialist stopped me. "You have to fly the relander back."
     Actually it's set to auto return in two hours, or mission control can lift it off immediately if I don't return.
     "Still, I'm getting it." And she stepped out from behind the shield with her nailgun in front of her. She set the nailgun down.
     The aliens lowered their arms that contained the ice caster. She walked over to the map and gasped. There were a number of hash marks and then a GIANT ice asteroid drawn smashing into the top of Olympus Mons. We had a large unmanned research station there. We downloaded the pictures from orbit of the mountain to their PDA. They quickly figured out how to work the zoom controls. We were still linked remotely to them. They slewed around the map, taking a quick tour to four other locations on the surface, the zooms in three of the cases were recent and showed alien structures, also unmanned. They were in the outer part of the landing ellipses for several of the smaller chunks of asteroid. The other two sites were older images, devoid of alien structures. The aliens raised their firearms.
     The specialist raced back to the shield and I radioed mission control to get current data for the location they had on the screen. The screen updated to a lower resolution image, but enough to show structures. The image quickly filled in as the satellites made more image passes. The aliens lowered their firearms. The images seemed to be reassuring, as was the fact that neither of them were in the projected landing zones of any of the ice fragments.
     There was a low rumble as another chunk entered the atmosphere. The sky lit up behind us. The relander was lifting off without us. My radio crackled, we were informed that NASA had determined not to risk the relander, and we were to build ourselves a couple of domes right there and continue to work with the aliens. There were several months of supplies for two people, and a large enough hydroponics farm to add fresh vegetables to our menu. We were told our project was code-named Adam and Eve.
     "Very funny guys."
     "Don't do anything we wouldn't do!"
     "Real professional." I stood up from behind our shield, which would soon be part of the outer wall of our home.
     "Oh, shit!" was all the mission specialist could say. I was glad we'd been getting along really well in orbit, because I calculated that there would be about 6 months of living in four domes before other crews would begin landing and setting up the first manned monitoring stations. The Martian terraforming project was going to go much faster now that there were two races working on it. I just hoped we were going for a compatible atmospheric mix. Oh, and that we weren't headed for some sort of interplanetary war.

     The second dream I remember was about being in a sort of department store basement where they had the money cleaning machines. Apparently the store would clean and press all of the change they were going to load into their cash registers the following day. I thought that was a bit on the loony side. They also had a penny packaging machine that pulled out the older pennies and shrink wrapped them in one pound packages. I was informed that these were then sold on E-Bay for a tidy profit.
     "Who would buy a pound of pennies and then pay the shipping on top of that?"
     "Lots of people do, all the time."
     "Do you sell other coins by the pound?"
     "No, just the pennies from the coin machines upstairs."
     "Right. All this equipment, power, labor, is it really worth it?
     "Yes, we get about 300 percent profit on each pound."
     I finished the tour, but to be honest the pound of pennies thing kept me from following much else that was going on. I kept thinking of the fifteen pounds of pennies sitting on my bathroom counter, though some few pounds of that is the glass container.

     There was a third dream, some sort of sexy hot tub extravaganza. (OK I just made that up, but there were physical manifestations to support that theory.) Seeing the real glass jar of pennies on the counter after waking, locked the "Pennies by the Pound" theme in my brain, and the mere wet dream was completely forgotten. (Who knows, if there'd been sexy bikini clad women in my bathroom when I awoke, maybe I'd have remembered all three dreams. Though it's more likely, I'd remember none at all.)

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