Short Stuff, Working, Space Survival
Many little dream snippets.
Two featuring miniature people. The first was a vacation trip. Couldn't afford to go our selves, so sent miniature versions on the vacation. We got to be there, but in miniature form. It was like visiting a beach in 'Land of the Giants' mode. While at the beach one of the avatars dropped the room key down a sewer grate. In climbing down after the key, the avatar started growing, good, in that the long drop wasn't long any more, bad in that there was no going back the way we came.
Lots of large stacks of boxes and crates and a dark damp wall full of fist sized hollows, one of which had the key, which had morphed into the key for my old Plymouth Satellite. I had to slide down a pipe, then scale down a stack of moldy crates and boxes to get over to the wall.
In the second Little People Dream, the avatars were back home, and they were now living independent of us. They had developed their own personalities and shared our home. One evening there was a glass soup steamer over the fire pit. The steamer rolled off of its stand as the last of the soup dried up. The little man avatar threw himself in front of it where it rolled out into the room, absorbing the shards of glass as the tube shattered. I don't know how he knew the tube would shatter, but had moved faster than any of us. The female avatar raced to his side and collapsed, sobbing, and then shut herself off.
We put them in a series of sarcophagi on a shelf with statues of birds, because, as the avatar's instructions indicated, "There shall only be birds at our grave site." The avatars personalities had been backed up, but we knew that even if restored from that backup, they wouldn't be the same.
In another dream I handed in a couple of spreadsheets to an accountant, who was just raving about the quality and speed of the work. (Which mystified me, as it was something that took about twenty minutes.) She was cute, though, so I didn't mind the fuss.
I was sitting at another desk across the hall, and after my last appointment left, my old boss came in to express how disappointed he was that I had taken these other jobs. "All for what?" he asked.
"Less stress, and eight percent more per year in my retirement check."
I was trying out both jobs to determine which one I would keep, if either at the end of the year. One job was full time to half in the second part of the year, the other was half time to full time at the end of the year, so they complemented one another perfectly to make me full time. Both paid considerably better than the previous job.
My old boss wanted to know why I hadn't promoted in his department, so I had to explain that the education cost to do so was greater in terms of time and money, neither of which I would have gotten back on the job, not to mention it was only a five percent raise, not twelve percent.
"It's a waste of your time and talents."
I pointed to the happy accountant and the family that was just making their way out of the lobby, "not to them it isn't."
In the fourth little snippet, I was floating in space, having been ejected from my vessel by pirates. I jetted off into orbit near some asteroids and set up my emergency shelter. There was enough ice in the nearby asteroid to flood the cotton candy like walls and get the greenery growing faster than normal, that would scrub the CO2 from the air and in a few days provide food. I had enough emergency rations to make it that far.
I was floating in the center of the sixty foot diameter ball, watching the grass grow, as well as the gauges that showed the atmosphere percentages, the electricity production (the outer layer of the ball was solar panel material) and the positions of nearby ship transponders. Sometime during the second day, another commander drifted my way. He also had an emergency shelter in tow. I extended my airlock tube and the commander rotated to connect. I had still not completely gotten off of my suit oxygen as my bubble was still growing its atmosphere (I could have survived if I had, but didn't want to stretch the growing system.)
She introduced herself, and we compared seed stocks. We traded some seeds, passing them through the tube. We decided not to visit one another yet. I could see that she'd been out in space far longer than I, her greens had grown more than a foot into her living space, and she'd trained some of her vine plants out into a sort of hammock, or nest. I indicated that there were good organic carbon solids on the asteroid I was orbiting, so we could grow some of the longer rooted plants in time.
She indicated that she was hoping to make a go out here, if she could just get a more permanent shelter. She then asked if she could keep my bubble when I was rescued. I had to admit that I'd been toying with the idea of tethering to the asteroid below and then hollowing it out. She let out a girlish giggle, and asked if I had two spoons. I pointed to my escape pod, explaining that I had my prospecting tools, including a portable mining laser. It was fully charged, still.
Two featuring miniature people. The first was a vacation trip. Couldn't afford to go our selves, so sent miniature versions on the vacation. We got to be there, but in miniature form. It was like visiting a beach in 'Land of the Giants' mode. While at the beach one of the avatars dropped the room key down a sewer grate. In climbing down after the key, the avatar started growing, good, in that the long drop wasn't long any more, bad in that there was no going back the way we came.
Lots of large stacks of boxes and crates and a dark damp wall full of fist sized hollows, one of which had the key, which had morphed into the key for my old Plymouth Satellite. I had to slide down a pipe, then scale down a stack of moldy crates and boxes to get over to the wall.
In the second Little People Dream, the avatars were back home, and they were now living independent of us. They had developed their own personalities and shared our home. One evening there was a glass soup steamer over the fire pit. The steamer rolled off of its stand as the last of the soup dried up. The little man avatar threw himself in front of it where it rolled out into the room, absorbing the shards of glass as the tube shattered. I don't know how he knew the tube would shatter, but had moved faster than any of us. The female avatar raced to his side and collapsed, sobbing, and then shut herself off.
We put them in a series of sarcophagi on a shelf with statues of birds, because, as the avatar's instructions indicated, "There shall only be birds at our grave site." The avatars personalities had been backed up, but we knew that even if restored from that backup, they wouldn't be the same.
In another dream I handed in a couple of spreadsheets to an accountant, who was just raving about the quality and speed of the work. (Which mystified me, as it was something that took about twenty minutes.) She was cute, though, so I didn't mind the fuss.
I was sitting at another desk across the hall, and after my last appointment left, my old boss came in to express how disappointed he was that I had taken these other jobs. "All for what?" he asked.
"Less stress, and eight percent more per year in my retirement check."
I was trying out both jobs to determine which one I would keep, if either at the end of the year. One job was full time to half in the second part of the year, the other was half time to full time at the end of the year, so they complemented one another perfectly to make me full time. Both paid considerably better than the previous job.
My old boss wanted to know why I hadn't promoted in his department, so I had to explain that the education cost to do so was greater in terms of time and money, neither of which I would have gotten back on the job, not to mention it was only a five percent raise, not twelve percent.
"It's a waste of your time and talents."
I pointed to the happy accountant and the family that was just making their way out of the lobby, "not to them it isn't."
In the fourth little snippet, I was floating in space, having been ejected from my vessel by pirates. I jetted off into orbit near some asteroids and set up my emergency shelter. There was enough ice in the nearby asteroid to flood the cotton candy like walls and get the greenery growing faster than normal, that would scrub the CO2 from the air and in a few days provide food. I had enough emergency rations to make it that far.
I was floating in the center of the sixty foot diameter ball, watching the grass grow, as well as the gauges that showed the atmosphere percentages, the electricity production (the outer layer of the ball was solar panel material) and the positions of nearby ship transponders. Sometime during the second day, another commander drifted my way. He also had an emergency shelter in tow. I extended my airlock tube and the commander rotated to connect. I had still not completely gotten off of my suit oxygen as my bubble was still growing its atmosphere (I could have survived if I had, but didn't want to stretch the growing system.)
She introduced herself, and we compared seed stocks. We traded some seeds, passing them through the tube. We decided not to visit one another yet. I could see that she'd been out in space far longer than I, her greens had grown more than a foot into her living space, and she'd trained some of her vine plants out into a sort of hammock, or nest. I indicated that there were good organic carbon solids on the asteroid I was orbiting, so we could grow some of the longer rooted plants in time.
She indicated that she was hoping to make a go out here, if she could just get a more permanent shelter. She then asked if she could keep my bubble when I was rescued. I had to admit that I'd been toying with the idea of tethering to the asteroid below and then hollowing it out. She let out a girlish giggle, and asked if I had two spoons. I pointed to my escape pod, explaining that I had my prospecting tools, including a portable mining laser. It was fully charged, still.
Labels: Conflict, Fantastic Creature, Flying, Future, Invention, Technology, Water, Women, Work
posted by Fermius Firefly | 7:04 AM
2 Comments:
Hello Fermius, I recently stumbled upon cloudwabbits.blogspot.com. It was a delight! I relished the countless displays of your never-ending imagination. I am here wondering why you discontinued such great posts. I long for the day when the site will take a breath of new air and live to its full potential. - Regards, Robert Rodriguez
Thank you for your comment, and, in an odd bit of serendipity, yours is the second comment on "Cloud Wabbits" in as many days. In another bit of serendipity, I will be at an event with the co-contributor of that blog tomorrow. (SCV is the poet.) Perhaps it is time to think about re-opening the site.
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