The Mindpost

As always when decelerating from full flight speed, the ramjets made a horribly loud noise, like angry titans banging gigantic sledgehammers against the wings of the plane. The shock waves made the whole cabin vibrate and Caligula felt his neck muscles absorb the violent forces. He had learned to look at the minutes spent coming down from Mach 2 speed as a core musculature workout. Surely it wouldn’t kill him, and quite possibly make him stronger, and he never understood how other folks could dread flying so much anyway; it made him feel alive to see the expanses of the far south Pacific and the bottom part of the Australian continent pass underneath him when traveling at this unreal speed. Eventually, the plane he was seated in lost more and more of its altitude and after a few minutes of dropping down, Cal could make out the north shore of Botany Bay with the runways of Sydney airport.

“Welcome back home mate” said the immigration officer with a mildly amused smile. “Did you bring any meat products or vegetables from Antarctica?”

“No, none”. Cal’s head was still slightly buzzed from the hour spent restrained in a vibrating metal tube, with too little space to sit and too poor of an air to breathe.

“And I see here that you have been stuck in transit for over a year, Mr. Bootstrapper?”

“I’m sorry, what do you mean?”

“Look at the date. Did you fill out your immigration form a year ago?”. Cal looked at the piece of paper on which they had made him write down all kinds of pointless details. His handwriting in the little box indicating ‘date’ said 3-1-2263. He realized that 2263 was in fact last year. But this was the first time he had to write down a date in ’64, and he had not switched mentally over to the new year yet.

“Haha. Ups. Sorry.” What a faux pas to be caught with such a stupid mistake by some immigration dude. Cal put a displeasured smile on his face for a few seconds to acknowledge his mistake and quickly overwrote the wrong number on the form. Immigration man obviously enjoyed having demonstrated that he was the brighter one of the two. Cal’s emotions about returning home had been so overwhelmingly delightful and now his ecstasy was slightly tainted – less than perfect! – thanks to being outsmarted by some bureaucrat. He smiled into the rays of the Australian sun coming through the glass roof of the arrivals hall, and tried hard to forget about the episode. Which is of course an exceedingly ineffective way to actually forget something.

The petty-bitterness didn’t last long. The appearance of his mate Jimmy in the arrivals hall quickly and totally threw Cal out of this slightly grumpy mental trajectory. “South pole man!” Jimmy jelled across the small crowd of waiting families and limousine drivers.

“Bro!!!” Cal barked back. They embraced. Cal picked the smaller Jimmy up from the ground to make the hug look somewhat like a poorly executed rugby tackle. With the help of a hacked trolley (no need to swipe any cards) Jimmy pushed the several large plastic boxes Cal had taped up a day earlier on the shores of Antarctica to the car park, while Cal was carrying a large, full duffle bag on his right shoulder. “Did you bring back a whole penguin family, crazy man?” Jimmy joked. “No, just camera gear, and a bunch of survival tools you need down there, you know.” Cal explained with a smile.

Twenty minutes later they were cruising on the highway north towards the great city of Sydney. Cal looked down onto the asphalt rushing past underneath his feet. Mid-23rd century car fashion had brought humanity – or at least the part of humanity with enough superfluous cash – the translucent chassis. The two men seemed to be suspended in mid-air between the dark black engine capsule and the pile of luggage next to Jimmy’s surfboard in the back.

“Let me mindpost that I’m back, mate!” Cal said.

The idea bothered Jimmy. “Addict! Enjoy the view of home for a few minutes before you go back online, will ya?”

“Ah, I can enjoy the view while mindposting. I’ve done it before, you know?”. Cal took a large black tablet out of his backpack and put a black cap on his head. The tightly fitting cap with a silver “M” printed on its front covered most of his skull down to the base of the neck. About a hundred little buttons stuck out, electrodes integrated into the flexible fabric of the cap, waiting to pick up the brain waves of Cal, the veteran mindposter. He wiggled the cap for a few seconds before a sharp high-pitched sound indicated that it was in the right position relative to his brain folds below his hard skull.

A large lens on the upper part of the tablet homed in on Cal’s face, and he placed his palm on the tablet’s surface. With audible pathos in his voice, he started to speak towards the camera:

Rocket engines burning fuel so fast

Up into the night sky they blast

Through the universe the engines whine

Could it be the end of man and time?

Back on earth the flame of life burns low

Everywhere is misery and woe

Pollution kills the air, the land and sea

Man prepares to meet his destiny

And I’m back, in Oz, you see!

“Poser! Poooser!” Jimmy howled. “Always out to show the world that you know the classics, eh?”

“You have to respect Black Sabbath. And it’s such a nice piece of lyrics, mate!” Cal’s words, images, vital signs and electroencephalogram waves were now online, available to everyone with a mindpost subscription to Cal’s account. Posting brain waves wasn’t something that had caught on so quickly, but by 2263 (I mean, 2264) a lot of people were neurobiologically literate enough to judge what they meant. By that time, a lot of kids had grown up looking almost daily at their friends’ posted brain wave patterns. Is someone sexually aroused? In fear? Deeply relaxed? Experienced mindpost users could tell the answer without listening to a single word of the post, just by looking at the electroencephalogram. Even telling apart your buddies by the electrical activity of their cortex (that amazing walnut-like folded structure making up most of a human’s brain) had become a fairly standard skill amongst the highly educated and nerdy in 23rd century Australia.

After the mind was posted and the view thoroughly enjoyed on their way, the friends exited the highway heading north onto Oxford Street, beachwards to Bondi, the suburb where Jimmy was living these days. Without much traffic in mid-morning of a weekday, they soon pull into the driveway of his house.

When they entered the spacious living room, the air-conditioning quietly hummed and the sunlight fell through the blinds to create a lattice of shadowy lines on the white-tiled floor. Jimmy walked behind the kitchen counter and on the push of a few buttons, sounds akin to an asthmatic diesel engine post maintenance date vibrated through the room. A brownish liquid dripped down from below a solid metal cube into a small porcelain cup. “A methpresso for you as well?” Jimmy asked his friend. “Waddaya think?” the snappy reply came right back from Cal who was doing a few stretches in the middle of the room. “Single or double?” Jimmy wanted to know. – “Guess again!”

“Still the same old addict.” Jimmy stated. He put his own, filled, cup to the side, and slid an empty one under the methpresso machine. More mini diesel engine screeching ensued. “Odin bless Thuglin.” Jimmy said matter-of-factly. “Bless who?” Cal hadn’t quite heard what Jimmy said through the noise, and he wasn’t sure if he knew what his mate was talking about in first place. “Anthony Thuglin. You know. The chemist who first attached all these methyl groups to the caffeine molecule when the original compound had lost its effect on most of the urban population back in the old days.”

“Ah” replied Cal. He took the filled cup out of his friend’s hand, and raised it to below his nose. What a rich aroma. They just don’t make a good methpresso in Antarctica, he thought. It’s always the little pleasures which make coming back home such an emotional experience. He took a sip and felt his nostrils widen and a wave of heat rise up through his neck muscles to the base of his skull. He really wasn’t all that tired from the long flight anymore, and he very well knew that this instant rush was only the well-known strong initial placebo effect of a good methpresso. It’s gonna be a blast once the actual drug effect kicks in, in twenty minutes plus-minus a few hundred racing heartbeats, Cal said to himself. Full of newfound energy, he threw himself onto the wide white couch opposite the entrance of Jimmy’s living room. With a burst of canine enthusiasm, Jimmy’s dog, a black and white border collie, suddenly appeared and joined him on the cushions. She wasted no time trying to lick his face, and Cal only laughingly pushed her off after she landed a few good licks across his right eye. He wondered if the dog remembered him; when he had left for Antarctica she had just barely outgrown puppyhood. “Does your dog still not have a name?” He asks Jimmy. “No, she does not. And you wouldn’t believe how that freaks people out! So I kept her nameless, the dog herself surely doesn’t mind”.

“Haha” laughed Jimmy. He then changed topic. “So, how did your anthropological research in Europe go during the last few years?” he asked.

“Good, it’s always such an interesting place. You never know what you get there, with all these shifting tribal allegiances. People started doing really unusual things after the European Union collapsed two hundred years ago. Many parts of especially Central and Eastern Europe are essentially theocratic city-states. After 800 years, the church has returned as the sole source of stability and cohesion. And the economy is all small-scale agriculture. Life is again nasty, brutish and short.”

Cal was genuinely surprised. He had heard about the societal and intellectual decay in the offline parts of the world, but had not expected such a severity. “So, the countries which have given us Nietzsche, Monod and Wittgenstein are back to believing in demons and angles?” he asked.

“Yep.” Jimmy replied. “And the fact that half of their grain is overgrown with hallucinogenic ergot parasite fungus doesn’t help the cause of rationality, either. The hot and humid climate over there really gets that stuff to grow good.”

“Having hallucinations without knowing that they are hallucinations is bad for you.” Cal remarked.

“Indeed!” Jimmy hardly took half a breath before continuing with his anthro-rave “But then once in a while you stumble onto something completely out-there, villages where they have all read some Indian guru’s writings and all live according to his teachings. And, you might go back 10 years later and all of that has changed. They might be old-school Christians again, or follow a new Eastern salvation philosophy. Crazy!”

Cal always enjoyed hearing about Jimmy’s expeditions to the offline world. His observations were truly interesting as such, and it was delightful to see his friends’ eyes light up with enthusiasm when talking about the science he was doing. Shifting his body to the other side of the couch, stretching his neck back for a few seconds, Cal asked “Any plans to visit North America? Tribal organization should be fairly similar there compared to Europe?”

Jimmy took a long sip of his methpresso, looked at his friend across the room and exclaimed: “Yes! But it’s plainly too dangerous. There are too many high-powered weapons left from the 21st and early 22nd century in that place. Two of my colleagues were shot during their expeditions last year. One of them by a five-year old native in a wheelchair! The recoil knocked the little boy off his ass out of the chair, and while he was bleeding like a geyser from a huge gash on his forehead, Dr. Malinersky bled to death from a chest wound. Nasty.”

He gave the story about his colleagues’ violent demise a few dramatic seconds to sink in. Cal found this slightly childish but played along the macho ritual with a genuinely shocked-sounding “For real? Bastards!”.

Jimmy went on: “What they wrote before they were blown to pieces really sounds like Chagnon’s classic work on the Yanomamo, just with grenade launchers instead of wooden spears. Before America went offline, they had at most one or two shooting rampages per week in the whole nation. Now this seems to have become a coming-of-age ritual for boys in some Southern tribes!”.

“Wooow” Cal remarked. Now he was genuinely shocked.

“But let’s not just talk about my work! Throw in some of your shots from Antarctica, bro!” Jimmy encouraged Cal. With a quick burst of energy Cal hoisted himself up from deep in the couch and grabbed his black backpack from the corner of Jimmy’s living room. By now the methpresso had gotten his heart to race and his lip to twitch. A small price to pay for all that enthusiastic vigor flowing through his veins! He took out his camera, opened a small hatch in its side, and pulled the memory cube out, which he then slid in the projector standing on the coffee table next to the couch. Automatically, the window shades lowered to darken the room, and a three-dimensional image of a treeless landscape appeared.

“That’s where all the reindeer for the barbie come from!” exclaimed Cal. Indeed, a large part of the green plain below the rocky mountain ridge was covered with a reindeer herd of several thousand animals, tiny dots from the high aerial viewpoint of this shot. The following pictures showed the animals up close, dense groups grazing, mothers with calfs and lone animals looking out over the Antarctic planes. “They look very much at home there, given that they are a relatively recent introduction, don’t they? Cal remarked. “Certainly!” answered Jimmy. Cal looked over at his friend’s face, and to his satisfaction saw his eyes locked onto the photographs he had worked so hard to shoot during the last five years.

The next image showed a close up on the face of a large bird. “Lebanese charcoal penguin! Yeah! You are really making me hungry with these pix!” exclaimed Jimmy. “Haha, yes, that’s where they come from. Everyone eats them, but few people have ever seen a penguin farm. This must interest people here, I really hope I can sell these pictures to some of the better magazines in Oz.” Cal said with ample pride about his Antarctic photographic work in his voice.

Jimmy liked the pictures, but after watching hoofed beasts and flightless birds for an hour and a half, he eventually had enough: “Good luck mate! But, let’s head to the beach now! You haven’t been there in such a long while. We are right here in Bondi, it’s just a few blocks from the water. And it’s almost six, so it won’t be too scorching anymore. Let’s go!”

They both put on their caps and sunnies and stepped out of the front door of Jimmy’s house. A block further east they had to cross the street.

Now, some things had changed considerably during the last quarter millennium. Other things, really due to the lack of alternative solutions, had remained remarkably conserved. With every pedestrian crossing still comes a small box with a button to request the traffic light to turn green. While in ancient times, these buttons simply didn’t do much, they were now equipped with processors running sophisticated algorithms to calculate the relative road use needs of the automotive traffic versus those of the pedestrians. This had changed the wait times surprisingly little over the two and a half centuries. Cal pressed the button and leaned his elbow on the top of the box. “Ouch!” he quickly pulled his arm back. The metal bock had heated up to a surface temperature too painful to touch from the day’s input of intensive sunshine. “Haha, Southpolie, it’s hot here. Not used to that anymore, are you?” quipped Jimmy.

After a few more seconds of carefully calculated wait they got a green light and crossed to the other side of the road. There they continued to walk beach-wards. Rather suddenly, Jimmy turned left into an alley between two brick houses. “Where are you going?” inquired Cal. “That’s a short-cut” stated Jimmy in response. With all bodily functions from blood pressure to nervous system excitability on methpresso turbo-boost, Cal followed him with quick, unwavering steps. They passed the side of the brick house, and came to an abandoned concrete lot fenced off with a mesh-wire fence. The fence was broken in spots, and a large lobe-eared cactus grew in a crack in the concrete in the center of the empty property. From a central stem, two arms of contorted cactus lobes grew to each side, forming an impromptu cross. Next to the cactus lay what seemed to be a human figure with outstretched arms staring skywards.

Cal had seen him first “Dude, look at that. Let’s check him out.” They crawled through one of the numerous gaps in the fence and walked across the concrete to the fallen man. The heat radiating off the ground was bordering the painful and Cal regretted exposing his antarcticaly pale calves by wearing board-shorts.

The man next to the cactus must have been already lying in his spot for a couple of days. He wore no shirt and probably had been a skinny guy even in life. The dried flesh on his face and upper body now had taken the color and texture of beef jerky. The remnant of his lips had receded from his mouth to expose a rather incomplete set of surprisingly white teeth reflecting the later afternoon sun. His dehydrated eyeballs had shrunk to the size of marbles, both of them looking painfully lost in their cavities. The dead man’s left hand was still clenching one of these self-cooling two liter bottles of VB, now empty. The filthy shorts he wore fit very loosely to the dried meat on his legs. In an odd contrast to the rest of the mummified body’s appearance, the socks and sneakers he wore were spotless and white.

“Oh no. Another grilled homeless guy.” Jimmy stated the obvious.

“Yeah. Ugly. Poor guy! He probably just passed out, and look at him now: every gram of water evaporated from his body.” Cal couldn’t take his eyes of the grizzly carcass.

“This happens so often in Sydney these days, they even have a toll free number for such cases now.” Jimmy’s fingers flew over the touchscreen of the communicator on his wrist. “Hello. Yes. My name is Jimmy Waterman, I’m in the alley behind Fry street in Bondi…. Yes, that back alley. Listen, we found a grilled person …. He must have been for a couple of days, at least … a forget clown? Oh, yes, please bring one of these, I appreciate …. There’s two of us …. Thank you, see you soon!”.

An odd silence fell between the three men. The two living among them briefly glanced at each other before Jimmy went back to the fence to look for the arrival of the police. Cal squatted down next to the mummified man, and carefully looked over his face: The dried earlobes, the crumbled skin in the tip of what was left of his nose, and the thin blonde hair on his wrinkled scalp. Not a pretty sight. Cal had seen dead people before, notably some of the earlier Antarctic explorers whose bodies had been released by the melting ice masses, but the presence of such a disfigured dead body in such a happy place as Bondi made him very, very uneasy. In his squat down position, the baking heat radiating off the concrete below him now engulfed all of his legs, his lower back, and, particularly unpleasantly, his testicles. He quickly stood up again and turned around to see where Jimmy had gone. With the first step after rising up, he inadvertently kicked the beer bottle out of the deceased man’s grip, and caused it to roll noisily in a semicircle around the cactus. “Aaargh!” shrieked Cal in surprised, uncontained terror. Did the carcass briefly come back to life again just to throw an empty bottle at him, as a last act on earth, demanding a full, cold one?

“Are you all right, mate?” asked Jimmy from across the fence. Cal’s face, already left pale from years of weak Antarctic sunshine had turned noticeably paler. His neck and abdominal muscles had completely stiffened by the surprise horror show. It took him a few seconds to regain his composure. “Yes, I’m ok, his beer bottle rolling around just scared the hell out of me for a second.” he assured Jimmy.

Within a few more minutes, a police van came down the alley and stopped when the driver spotted the two waiting men. Out came two officers and the forget clown. The policemen shook Cal and Jimmy’s hands, and the shorter of the two listened to Jimmy’s description of their discovery. They transferred their contact information from their communicators to the police officer’s unit, and after a brief farewell he and his colleague went to pull a body bag over the deceased.

The forget clown who had been waiting next to the van came forward and, foregoing any formalities, asked “You have done this before?”. “Yes”, Jimmy answered, and a still shaken Cal simply nodded.

The forget clown wore a wide hat with a bizarre contraption of multiple rectangular images suspended on a wire frame mounted on top of it. The colorful little images bounced around in a very peculiar irregular manner, and they already exerted a strong hypnotic effect on Cal. The forget clown was probably about Jimmy and Cal’s age. His youthful face below his mad hat was half covered with large orange sunglasses. A blonde chin beard just barely stuck out below the massive hat-and-sunnie combination. The forget clown wore a black long sleeve shirt with bright white spirals all over it, and comically tight black pants and a pair of thongs. He handed one rubbery full face mask each to Cal and Jimmy. They pulled them over their faces and fixed them in place with a Velcro strap behind their heads. Quickly Mr. help-me-forget-this connected the hoses coming of the two masks to the regulator of a gas tank dangling on his hip.

“Gentlemen! You know what to do! Look at my image gallery! Feed your head!” the forget clown announced with the hyperbole of an old-fashioned circus director introducing the upcoming appearance of the world’s greatest ant lion tamer. Cal and Jimmy started to stare at the mobile art gallery dangling above his hat, and both took a deep, deep breath.

Nitrous oxide is a curious drug. It does not so much directly alter the content of your consciousness, but changes what gets there. It’s not that the sensory input stream reaching the higher order areas of your brain all dries out; you do not descend into total darkness; you can still make out what happens in front of your eyes and ears; you still know where you are; but all of this becomes less and less important. Instead, the thoughts and memories which reverberate through your brain and mind predominate over the perceptual inflow of new information. Internal reality just wins a little bit more over external reality than it normally does. Experienced users say that nitrous oxide inebriation is similar to the floating limbo between sleep and wakefulness sometimes experienced for a few minutes before drifting off at night.

When nitrous oxide chokes the sensory influx like that, only the most salient sensations make it to the level of consciousness; bright lights; emotionally charged scenes and parts of the world perceived as deeply symbolic; low, rhythmic sounds. These sounds are often bizarrely stretched and have their pitch altered by the gas’ effects. Or possibly the frequency of these sound waves does not even change, but time itself passes slower? It certainly seems as if the external and the internal time have lost their synchronization. A minute breathing nitrous oxide can seem like a day’s worth of thoughts and contemplations. That is the case, it seems, because without much competition from the sensory influx the autonomous activity of your brain starts going around in larger and larger circles. Association chains grow longer and longer, reaching from the most trivial observations to the most far-ranging thoughts about world history, ecology and cosmology. This was the stage which the forget clown’s mask had presently shuttled Cal’s mind into. Now to him the cactus defying the sealing of Mother Earth’s surface with concrete and tar became a martyr of the planet’s struggle against human destructiveness. From this desert flora contemplation his mind wandered to another form of environmental destruction – the global warming which had turned Antarctica into the boreal steppes he had spent the last few years exploring. He remembered the wet noses and the glassy eyes of the newborn reindeer calf he had photographed, and he saw as clearly as never before how birth came from death. His thoughts then returned to the mental attractor they had originated from: The cross shaped cactus. Still, he rejected any link of the plant’s shape with Christian symbolism as too obvious and shallow. Instead he steered his mind down a path leading from the specialized plant biochemistry in cacti to the stale smell of the lecture hall he had first learned about their unusual capacities for carbon fixation, and to Jimmy, whom he had met as a university undergraduate in the corridors between those smelly lecture halls. A gazillion shared adventures flashed back into his mind at once. That prompted him to peek over at Jimmy; his friend was now on his knees, connected to the forget clown through a surreal umbilical cord leading right into his cortex. Jimmy was staring at the clown’s hat’s wired image gallery – it seemed that it served its purpose as an association starter crystal very well for him.

Now, unaugmented nitrous is already very good at throwing a man’s mind into endless streams of associations. But the length of the experience is limited; either the psychonaut would completely lose consciousness due to too much of the gas, or the effect would wear off when only taking a single lung full. This is where the masks Cal and Jimmy were wearing came in. An electroencephalography device not unlike the one in Cal’s mindpost would record the nitrous breather’s brainwaves. Then, a processor not unlike the one in the box with the button next to the pedestrian crossing would compute the appropriate nitrous oxide dose. It would use a feedback loop to calculate the optimal mix of air with the psychoactive gas to keep the gamma oscillations in the subject’s brain waves just above a certain minimum, and as desynchronized as possible. In this way, a person could be kept on the peak of a nitrous experience almost infinitely. Realistically, the forget clown would maintain this intense state for around ten minutes and then briefly knock his client out with a high gas concentration.

And the idea the forget clown was working with is simple: flush any bad experiences to the bottom of the mind’s stack of things to process. Imagine you see something horrible like a shirtless man who had been slowly grilled on a solar concrete stove-top; and let’s further image you would go on a three month trip through Southeast Asia afterwards. You will have such a multitude of impressions, experiences, feelings and insights that after your return, the dead man will be at the back of your mind. You will still be able to consciously recall the gruesome experience, but a flood of other, more recent mental contents will occlude it. And the forget clown’s treatment delivers these three months’ worth of mind contents in the course of a few minutes, right after you have seen something you really don’t want to remember too well. Off into the clownish abyss they went.

When Cal and Jimmy came back to their senses they were sitting on the pavement in the shadow across from the broken fence surrounding the concrete yard. The spiny cross in its center was now devoid of its lifeless companion. They had regained consciousness within seconds of each other, and both quickly got to their feet and started to walk to the end of the alley they originally came from. “So much for a shortcut!” somberly remarked Cal. The police and the forget clown were gone. He had left some ice under their caps to help them along in regaining a clear head. Both guys took of their caps, dumped out the ice slush, and shook their hair dry. Neither of them would ever lose another word about the incident.

The Pacific Ocean’s surf broke in the late afternoon sun, and Cal and Jimmy were walking along just above the high mark the water reached with each wave’s last bit of energy. Bodysurfing into the shallows, an athletic dark haired woman let the ocean sweep her onshore. Coming out of the water, she stumbled a few steps forward and finally got completely upright on the beach right in front of Cal and Jimmy. From being wet with saltwater her long black hair was stuck together in thick strains sticking to her neck and shoulders. A wide bright purple headband kept the strains out of her face – the last remnant of the hijab after three centuries of its cultural assimilation to southern hemisphere hedonism. The woman had one of these straight noses with a lot of character, hinting at her Middle-Eastern ancestry, and big, dark, charismatic eyes.

But these were not what Cal and Jimmy were looking at.

Her breasts were so full and high that they seemed to be just about to burst. Each one of them was only a slight bit smaller than half a volleyball, and they were just barely not touching in the middle. Drops of ocean water ran down on both sides of these miracle curves. Perfect pointy nipples stuck a good centimeter straight forward from the centers of her large, dark brown areolae.

“Hi, how are you doing?” said Cal with a smile poorly masking his excited bedazzlement. “Hi guys!” the hijab-lady returned the greeting with an amused smile of her own.

The guys trotted past her through the sand, and Jimmy lowered his voice. “Man! Did you see these? I’d love to drink from those epic boobies. What a dream!”.

Cal laughed. “The last time I checked, they were for kissing and squeezing; unless you are her baby, then they are really for drinking, mate! Did you get too much sun on your head today?”

“That just shows how long ago it was since you had checked the last time. You do know how they make ’em that big, do you?” Jimmy started to explain with unmistakable condescension in his voice.

“Yes, all genetically engineered, probably with some adenovirus vector targeting estrogen-sensitive tissues. Works really well, as we just saw.” Cal answered confidently. Obviously he knew his molecular biology well.

“Exactly” continued Jimmy. “And while you were stalking reindeers, someone came up with the idea to include a few additional hormone-encoding genes and the genes for the biosynthesis of cannabinoids. Then the boobie-enhancement DNA-delivery vectors will get your special lady lactating with milk that gets you stoned. It’s only legal in Tasmania, but lots of chicks fly there to get it done to them.”

Cal’s eyes opened up really wide. What a brilliant idea, he thought. Right away he stopped and turned around to look at the molecular-genetically enhanced beauty one more time. Jimmy did the same. Now she was standing next to an unusually muscular Middle-Eastern guy who caressed her waist with his right hand. With his chest stuck out, he raised his chin and smiled – his body language super saliently said: “nice, isn’t it? I’m sure you’d like to have this, but it’s mine. I won’t attack you, but stop looking at her like that now.”

Jimmy thought that he had seen the guy at some state championship once, only that he hadn’t looked that baked back then. He and Cal turned around again and walked on. For a few minutes neither of them said anything but rather enjoyed the view of the early evening light playing on the water.

Quite suddenly Jimmy jelled “Let’s go for a swim before it gets dark! Come on, Cal!” and ran into the arms of Mother Pacific. Cal threw his cap and t-shirt into the sand and ran after him. They both spent a brief but excited time in the waves, throwing themselves into the surf, diving down to just above the beautiful hard coral cover, and finally bodysurfing back to shore.

When Cal walked out of the ocean, he just briefly dried himself off using his t-shirt, and then sank into the soft sand in happy exhaustion. He closed his eyes to end a day which for him had started in a concrete cabin on the shore of the Antarctic continent.

When he woke up, the air was pleasantly cool for the first time since he had set foot onto the Australian continent again, and the stars were shining above him. “I’m hungry! Let’s go!” Jimmy barked at him. “What do you feel like having, mate? A strawberry milkshake?” Cal asked with a grin. “How about some Vietnamese soup? Guaranteed reindeer free.”

The petite, exceptionally cute Vietnamese waitress set down two large bowls of steaming beef soup in front of the guys. “Thank you very much!” exclaimed Cal, while Jimmy was already rapidly chop sticking the noodles from the depth of the broth straight into his mouth.

On the wall of the restaurant opposite their table “Prime Australia” was running. The television set was seemingly about to break down, and the image was not three-dimensional all across the display anymore. There unit must have suffered a defect somewhere in its image processing circuits, as the loss of three-dimensionality was happening in a very peculiar manner. Only the most salient objects onscreen were left to be displayed in 3D; whenever the local contrast in the images was too low, stuff was relegated to remain flat.

On screen, an extremely obese man in a business suit was perched on a large white pillow. He started to lecture into the camera with a high-pitched, almost whiny voice. “Mister Sebastian Kim” he said while drawing out each of the “i”s. Due to the TVs unusual defect, his nose was the only part of him shown in 3D and seemed much longer than it probably was in reality.

“Wasn’t the head of Rausweich Corporation always a woman?” inquired Cal. “She still is” explained Jimmy. “Flora Rausweich, but she heads Rausweich-1, the New South Wales line of the Rausweichs. This guy here, Nino Rausweich III, is the head of the Victorian Rausweich family branch. They have their own prime minister casting show now.”

“Far out” commented Cal with his eyes on the undignified spectacle on TV. “And isn’t there also a third line somewhere?” “Yeah” confirmed Jimmy. “Rausweich 2B, they only control Broken Hill. But nobody really watches their prime minister casting show.”

The camera had switched perspective to show a close-up of the face of an extremely well groomed early middle-aged Asian man. One of the type who enters early middle age just after his teens, and remains in that period of his life for a surprisingly long time.

“Mister Sebastian Kim” repeated the fat man’s voice with pathos which would be deemed too thick even for a first-time actor in a high-school theater performance of Macbeth.

“Yes, Sir!” Mister Kim replied. His lower lip twitched involuntarily.

The view switched back to the enormous man on the pillow, and then back to the contestant again. “It has been decided that you will leave the show” the whiny voice sounded.

“You don’t have the leadership skills it takes to be the prime minister of Australia.” A pause pseud-pregnant with meaning followed. The camera panned out to show all three remaining contestants, standing behind a white hip-high desk across the television studio from Nino Rausweich III on his pillow. They all looked surprisingly alike.

“The Koreans sure like to be prime minister!” observed Cal. “They sure do.” Jimmy said matter-of-factly.

Rausweich continued his sermon “Your portfolio is simply not strong enough for this important position. Your sales pitch did not convince us that you are the proper candidate to climb this far up the career ladder. As an executive, you are not yet ready for this challenge.”

The camera was showing Mr. Kim’s face again, and at this point he was barely holding back his tears. Balancing some steamy noodles in front of his mouth, Cal hoped that this televised humiliation would end soon. He had never cared that much about the reality TV of politics, but this was simply painful to watch.

His own body mass near suffocating him, Nino Rausweich III had to take a deep breath before he could continue sending off the poor chap. A tall man in his 20s, dressed in immaculate black trousers, a white shirt and a gray tie around his neck hustled onto the scene to wipe sweat and drool of Rausweich’s face. Such freshened up, he continued on: “Rausweich Corporation can not endorse you as the Prime Minister of Australia. You are OUT.”

“Out! Out! Out! …. Out! Out! Out!” the studio crowd chanted. Poor Sebastian Kim turned around and rushed to the studio exit.

Cal and Jimmy looked at each other and shook their heads in disbelieve. That’s not the type of TV to cheer you up over dinner! But the noodles in front of them were a culinary revelation. Cal reached for the jar with the chili powder. “Is this the chili powder with mixed-in psychedelic mushrooms?” he asked. “No, the restaurant is BYO, this stuff is just spicy” Jimmy clarified.

The moderately three-dimensional images on screen had switched over to a car advertisement. Jimmy was quite familiar with model promoted.

“Drive the Holden Invisible!” A pleasant female voice commanded. A dirty old car rolled along a desolate suburban road between empty lots and unused warehouses. The camera then focused on the shirtless driver, who was unshaven and carried considerable excess flab on his hairy torso. Then, all around this sad loser, the car’s chassis became translucent and within a few seconds the man was driving a Holden Invisible. And not only that had changed: The driver had miraculously lost most of his body hair and fat, and picked up a few kilos of muscle on the way. His beard stubs were also gone, and next to him two busty girls in bikinis had materialized. The guys were giggling in exuberance because they were allowed to ride in a car with translucent sides. The Holden Invisible transporting this happy posse accelerated and drove off to disappear behind a bend between two glass walled skyscrapers.

“Only ninety nine thousand dollars for the starter model! Only ninety nine thousand! Buy now! Buy now!”. While a male voice was shrieking the car’s price with an above methamphetamine-binge-level of excitement, the initially shown looser and the superfit Holden Invisible owner both came back on screen. Without the slightest provocation, the athletic young Invisible-driver kneed his chubby former self into the stomach. With his alter ego folding forward and wincing in pain next to him, the happy youthful consumer gave himself a thumbs-up with both hands.

Cal wasn’t the only one increasingly annoyed with this display of utterly brain-dead consumerism. “Are you done with your soup? Let’s go to the pub, mate!” suggested Jimmy. It almost seemed as if the ad had made him ashamed to actually own a vehicle peddled so idiotically. To the pub they went. Life was good.

Cal turned around to order two more beers. He caught the bartender’s attention, pointed at their empty glasses and wiggled two fingers in the air. By the time he turned around again, he just barely had enough time to sidestep the altercation which had very suddenly developed between the two fellows next to himself and Jimmy.

A tall, wiry, short haired young man was swinging at a dude with a ponytail and heavily tattooed thick arms. This guy had put these arms up on both sides of his face to block the left and right hooks his adversary was throwing at him. At the same time, he circled to his right, trying to get away from the more powerful right hand of his opponent. Just when it seemed that the thinner man’s barrage of punches was only hitting air and forearms, a single hard left connected with the tattooed man’s chin and made his knees buckle.

However, just at that instant, his opponent stopped punching and took a deep breath with his fists in front of his chest. He seemed almost surprised that he had finally connected, and failed to capitalize on the situation. His hurt opponent quickly regained his composure and drove his shoulders into the other man’s chest. They flew across the pub against the wall, in-between two heavy leather seating arrangements. The skinny man, a few moments ago still completely in control of the action, let out a deep grunt when his back absorbed the force of the slam against the wall.

By now the majority of pub-goers were paying attention to the fight and were cheering for either of the fighters. It seemed as if the so far more active taller man had the majority of the crowd behind him.

The stocky tattooed dude tied his opponent up with his right arm under his adversary’s shoulder and tried to trip him with brief, sharp sweeps to the back of his calves, Judo style. None of them worked, though. The skinny man, still pinned against the wall, skillfully shifted his weight away from whatever leg his opponent was attacking. With a sudden burst of energy, he spun to his left and disengaged from the tie-up.

“Good takedown defense!” commented Jimmy to Cal who had gotten out of the way of the fight just in time and now was holding an almost empty beer glass – most of his drink had spilled onto the pub floor during his hasty escape from the focus of the action.

Sometime around the year 2100, the Australian government had given up on policing pub fights, and instead declared pub fighting the official national martial art. Henceforth it was taught in physical education classes in schools, and national competitions were held. Hard rubber replicas of beer bottles and billiard balls were introduced as standard fighting paraphernalia, not likely to cause serious trauma, but still capable of hurting a man. Jimmy had won his school’s pub fighting competition in the welterweight division for two successive years while in high school. It bugged him to this day that he never made it past the kids from the more traditional pub fighting areas in Coogee and Bankstown in the state championships.

“I could easily take both of them out, man! Look at how he telegraphs his right hands!“ Jimmy let Cal know. Cal nodded. Indeed, the short haired combatant had almost punched himself out at this point. The two pub fighters were now trading shots well off the wall, with the tall guy lunging increasingly slow and imprecise jabs and haymakers at his foe. The stockier man, now with his shirt torn from the grappling action a few seconds earlier, bobbed out of the way of this uncoordinated onslaught. One lone jab surprisingly hit him in the face, but there was not enough steam in the punch to really hurt him. A few seconds later, he shot for a takedown again, and this time the entangled fighters ended up on the floor. As before, the thinner man absorbed most of the force of the impact, and it stunned him enough to take his breath away for a second. Pony tail man did not hesitate, and smashed his face with two well-placed elbows. A small geyser of blood erupted from the loser’s nose, and the fight was over. Immediately, three men from the audience acted as improvised referees and pulled the winner off his hurt rival. The pub erupted in cheers.

“Time to take off, mate!” Jimmy said with solid conviction. Seeing a good fight had made the evening complete for him. “What are you going to do with this?” Cal asked and pointed at Jimmy’s half-full beer glass. “I don’t know” he replied without too much interest in the issue. Cal grabbed the beer out of Jimmy’s hand, jugged it, put down the glass and followed his friend to the door. Drinking eight beers, and more beers than his buddy, had made the evening complete for him. On the way out he glanced back at the winner of the fight, now with a bleeding nose from that last jab, but a smile on his face and a fresh beer in his hand. Cal gave him a friendly thumps up. The guy briefly waved back at him before toasting to the victory with some of the friends surrounding him, including his barely upright beaten opponent.

Cal and Jimmy got into the car, which looked even more funkadelic now that the night had set in. The translucent chassis was all but invisible, and the black engine block was hard to make out as well. When they drove off, it seemed as if their two dark silhouettes were hovering through the night between the car’s bright front and back lights. At this point of the alcoholic progression of the evening, Jimmy didn’t actually steer the car; it drove almost completely by itself, while leaving the driver under the impression that he was in charge. Jimmy still commandeered the rough direction of their journey; the car would turn left if he steered that way – of course only after automatically taking care of details like slowing down or checking for oncoming traffic.

Right after coming up a mildly steep hill, Jimmy – or the car itself, we are not sure – slowed the car down, and within a minute they were standing still, surrounded by other motorists who were stuck on their way home from a night out in town.

“What an annoying traffic jam, and at this time of the day!” Cal said.

“Yeah, it’s actually not a big surprise at all; they are always around that area late at night.” Jimmy replied.

A huge crowd of large metal boxes blocked most of the four lane road leading past Central Station. Even the smaller boxes dwarfed a big man, and they somehow looked like soft drink vending machines, but much bigger. Every single one of them wore a wide sombrero made of solar panels. Most boxes were painted in gaudy colors and some of them had childish looking cartoon animals painted on their sides. But a lot of them had large parts of their decoration chipped off, and a few of them had sustained fire damage. The boxes had two, three or four studly robotic legs, and bounced back and forth without moving much in any direction. Only a few of them hopped in circles around the mass of their more or less stationary box brothers.

“Who is around? What the … What are these?” Cal inquired. The unusual sight had woken him up from his post-pub late-evening semi-dormant period. Quite suddenly, his curiosity had overpowered his meat- and alcohol-induced tiredness.

“The Jap bots. You haven’t heard about them? Bro, I can’t believe you’ve never been in a Jap bot traffic jam before. It’s a Sydney classic. How long were you in Antarctica for, again?” Jimmy replied.

“Five years” Cal reminded him in a hasty voice. This robot infantry amassment was much more interesting than yet another elaboration on his recent biography. “What are these? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“You know that almost nobody lives in Japan anymore, do you?” Jimmy started his explanation. “Yeah, sure, of course” said Cal “Their birthrates were so low for so long, and they didn’t like immigration very much, so by the ’190s, almost only old people were left over there. Kinda weird. I know that, mate!”.

Jimmy took a deep breath. The traffic was still standing and there was no need to concentrate on the road. He smiled at Cal and continued: “Exactly! Well, before they died out, they built a lot of robots. And these were supremely designed robots, not like the cheap crap bots we get here, which break down after 10 years or something like that.

Now, a lot of the robots they built were actually autonomous, mobile drink vending machines. They were designed to sustain themselves with solar energy, and intelligently find accumulations of potential customers. They would follow commuters and offer their products right there were most people were to be found. These robots would stand around near the train stations in the morning and afternoon, and in the entertainment areas at night. Smart bots! This of course became a problem once less and less people were alive on the Japanese islands.” Cal was fascinated by Jimmy’s elaborations, and at the same time could not get his eyes off the crowd of Jap bots blocking their way. The robots were in less of a good shape than they had first seemed to him. One fell over with a deep whompa-sound. A tripod-like mechanism designed to help the robot back on his feet emerged from a hatch on his back, and after a few minutes of the screeching hydraulics doing their job, the fallen Jap bot had rejoined his buddies in standing around.

“Are you listening, Caligula?”

“Yes, yes! Go ahead. You were saying that the Japanese built these things before they died out?” Cal answered without looking at Jimmy; he observed the robotic commotion blocking their way with increasing amusement and curiosity.

“Yes! So, once the actual Japanese had all but died out, these autonomous vending machines had nothing left to do. They had no one to sell refreshments to anymore. And, they were so well designed that very few of them terminally broke down. And at some point, the collective Jap bot intelligence managed to hire a number of boats to venture out in their quests for new customers. A lot of these boats came to Australia.”

“And the government did not stop the boats?” Cal inquired.

“Nope. Since they are not people they didn’t need any visas. And here they are, the Jap bots, now a part of Sydney just like the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge. Haha.”

“I didn’t see any of these during the day” observed Cal.

“Yeah, it’s curious, isn’t it? I’m not actually sure where they usually are then. The Jap-bots surely like to stick together in groups.”

The Sydney city police was already attending the situation. “Ikimasu! Ikimasu! Come oooon! Fucking Jap bots, get off the road!”. A few of the officers were trying to shove the Jap bots towards the curb, and the bots would take a step or two in that direction, but then move no more. The original Japanese engineers must have outfitted them with some form of obstacle avoidance algorithm to avoid collisions with prospective soft drink buyers. “Gomenasi, ne. Gomenasai, ne.” the bots repeated every time they side-stepped in response to a policeman’s push. Thumping sounds of angry police hands banging against metal plates echoed through the warm Sydney summer night. But the aversion was clearly not mutual. The Jap bots liked the Australian policemen. The growing crowd of law enforcement officials made the Jap bots want to stay. They offered the uniformed men refrigerated refreshments, and a few exhausted policemen were indeed already standing on the perimeter of this increasingly hectic scene, sipping a cold drink. This served as a positive reinforcement for the Jap bots who were now even more convinced that they found exactly the right spot to stand around and look for potential customers.

“It’s always like that. The cops just can’t get into the Jap bots’ heads. Once you have such a Jap bot jam, it doesn’t dissolve till the next morning.” Jimmy explained. “We might as well walk home.”

It took a few minutes to get the car into a semi-acceptable parking position, and then Cal and Jimmy were on their separate ways. Cal had booked a hotel room in the area for his first week back in Australia. Jimmy would have to walk a few blocks to find a cab unimpeded by the Jap bots.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, mate. Welcome back, South Pole man!”

“Yeah, see you! Thanks for everything!”

Cal walked on the sidewalk along the still very busy Jap bot and cop drama. One of the Jap bots had taken position in a corner next to a few automated teller machines. They looked like his younger cousins. This was one happy Jap bot. “Oichi! Oichi!” he tried to convince Cal of the deliciousness of the drinks he was peddling. Images of beautiful young Japanese girls, now an extremely rare occurrence, flashed across the screen on the bot’s belly. Cal had to laugh. Peeking behind the robot, he looked at the hatch which, as he had seen before, hides the repositioning mechanism.

A few more night lifers walked by. A group of five young people seemingly found it quite amusing that Cal was so interested in the Jap bot. They stopped to talk to him.

“Hey, man, these girls the Jap bot is showing you won’t date you, seriously” joked one of the guys belonging to the friendly group. “I know.” Cal smiled at no one in particular. “But I have never seen one of these before, you know? Interesting machines!”

“You’re kidding!” said the young women standing next to the guy who had first talked to Cal. She was probably in her mid to late-20s, likely of Southeast Asian ancestry, although taller than most people whose families originated in that part of the world. She was wearing a denim miniskirt with black stockings and a T-shirt with a screen-print of the face of 22nd century soul music legend Manny Wonderman. Her long black hair fell over the left side of Manny’s face. “Have you been living under a rock for the last five years?”

“No, but in Antarctica. I’m not kidding at all.”

“Wow, really? That’s exciting! What did you do there?” The pretty young woman asked.

“Mostly photographing reindeer, and a few penguins. It’s a cool place.”

“Nice pun. Hey, do you want to join us? The night is still young!” she smiled at Cal. He only now realized how exceptionally pretty the young lady was. Her eyes were lively, and her skin of a lovely milk chocolate brown. Her top was not hugging her breasts particularly tightly, but Cal could sense some exciting curves in the hiding. Her thighs and calves were muscular in a very balanced, Yoga-every-day kind of way.

“Definitely! Do you guys know a place where we are safe from these obtrusive oriental soda peddlers? I’m starting to become really afraid”.

“Haha, yes, let’s go! There is a cocktail bar over there which is human only.”

A few hours later, Manny Wonderman was on the floor in a pile of other hastily removed clothes and Julie’s fingers rhythmically crawled through Cal’s curly hair in figure eights in post-coital bliss. Cal’s right index finger was resting in the dimple in the center of her lower back, at the origin or her butt cheeks – his favorite part of a woman’s body. Life was going in the right direction back home.

The next morning the heat had already started to rise to the high 30s before 9 o’clock and opening a window felt like peeking into an oven. “Are you going to bake us? Let me know when you’re well done, ok?” Cal heard Julie quip behind him.

“Ok, sorry, I had forgotten how hot it gets around here, sweety!” Cal said and closed the window right away. When he turned around he saw Julie walk from the bedroom to the kitchen, wearing nothing but her pink cotton slip. Her young breasts sat high and firm on her ribcage and bounced only the slightest bit with each of her steps. Two poems written in skin, glandular and adipose tissue. No need for adenovirus-enhancement here. The intense morning sun played on her shiny black hair. Though, the look in her eyes was not quite as cheerful as it was the night before.

“Are you going to make me a coffee?” she asked Cal.

“I’d love to, but it’s your apartment. I don’t know where your coffee machine is, you know?” he replied with a sleepy voice. “Ok, I’ll make myself one.” Julie let him know. When he woke up, Cal had thought that he had only one headache, from all the beers.

“We really need to talk about what we did yesterday, Cal. I’m not so sure I’m not so happy anymore that all of that happened so fast between the two of us.” Julie stated. Cal looked at her. Realizing that her juicy breasts were right there, on display for him to see, Julie turned around in a haste and grabbed a t-shirt from a stack on one of the shelves in her bedroom. She slid into it quickly and walked back to the kitchen.

“Can I also have a coffee … please?” asked Cal.

“No!”

Time to leave.