I fell asleep while watching an old Godzilla movie. The movie kept going while I slept, which resulted in some odd dreams.
In the one I remember most, I was in an apartment with an unfamiliar Asian girl. I had the distinct impression that it wasn't her apartment either. We were watching TV when a news report interrupted to say that Godzilla was attacking the city.
I excused myself to use the bathroom, but found it was infested with lobsters, crabs and frogs. They were all crawling up through the drains. I decided that I didn't have to go to the bathroom that bad, but did my best to herd all the animals into the shower stall and shut the door on them. Meanwhile, Godzilla was getting closer to our apartment building.
Neither of us seemed to be concerned in the least as we watched him approach through the windows, even when he smashed in the side of our building.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Technology gone mad in the near future - part 1
My dreams usually progress like stories: jumping quickly between different scenes and even points of view. This was definitely one of those.
I was a special forces operative. My partner and I were approaching our objective: a large three-story corporate building. We both wore black nano-woven carbon body armor and had belts and packs festooned with myriad high-tech weapons and gear. She was black, with her hair tied back in a pony-tail, while my own head was shaven.
The eight-lane highway that separated us from the building was packed with cars and trucks flying by us. There was no way that we could cross it and we were forced to crawl on hands and knees through a narrow drainage pipe that ran underneath it. My smaller partner was able to make her way through without much difficulty, but I had to work to squeeze my wide shoulders through.
On the other side we came out into a concrete loading dock. No one was visible as we crossed it to wall of the building, keeping low. A semi was backed up to one of the loading bays, which was open to receive it. I crept up and looked quickly inside through the gap between the trailer and the building. There were only stacked boxes inside the warehouse space and no people.
I was about to climb in when my partner pointed up with a gloved hand. "Look!"
Something huge shot upward from the roof of the building. It was nearly invisible in the sky, but as it flew through the clouds they flowed around it, revealing it to have the shape of a huge sphere. I knew immediately that it was a focused EMP, shaped and fired from a device on the roof. We had failed in our mission to stop them from using it.
Another EMP shot into the sky. This one intersected with an unfortunate passenger jet and immediately fried all the electronics on board. We watched in horror as the jet fell out of the sky and crashed in a massive explosion of flame and debris a few blocks away. Several drivers on the highway saw the crash as well and were distracted enough to crash into each other. The highway was immediately a disaster as trucks and cars, unable to stop, plowed into the wreckage.
There was a crash, and the sound of chain-link fence tearing apart. I grabbed my partner and threw us both to the ground as a semi drove off the highway and through the fence into the loading dock at full speed. It hit the opposite side of the semi we were hiding beneath. As a second truck followed almost immediately behind the first into the loading dock and metal debris flew around us, I remember thinking it was a good thing we were wearing body armor.
Once the dust had settled, we crawled out from under the twisted metal and away from the leaking diesel fuel. The warehouse wall had collapsed in the destruction, and it was easy for us to enter now. Although we had both survived the incident, we hadn't escaped without injury. She and I were both battered and bruised, and my armor had been punctured in the shoulder by several steel rods in spite of my armor. Above us, we could hear the EMPs continuing to be fired.
As my partner helped me struggle out of my armor to address the wounds, the scene shifted.
I sat in my expansive office on the top floor of the same corporate building. On one of several computer screens above my desk, I watched the two members of special forces in the warehouse. The EMP gun had functioned exactly as expected. It had almost finished its list of targets, most of which were military bases and centers of power across the globe. Several weaker nations had already offered secret capitulation to our demands, although I was sure they were still holding out hope for one of their stronger neighbors to stop us. The plan had gone perfectly thus far, and I wouldn't let those two do anything to foul things up.
I looked to my second-in-command and chief scientist, who was standing quietly nearby. He appeared to be staring off into space, but I knew he was using the picotech that had been implanted in his brain to communicate with all our divisions, as well as to directly oversee the actions of other semi-intelligent machines throughout the building. "Get rid of them," I ordered.
He blinked and looked at me with a detached expression. "Yes, sir." As he turned to leave, I could see the grotesque bulge at the base of his skull which held the picotech hardware that allowed him to communicate and control the other machines. I couldn't help grimacing at the inelegance of it. The scientist had been willing to accept the enhancements offered by our new picotechnology, but had balked at actually replacing anything. Unlike myself.
I looked at my reflection in the glass of a nearby window. The top of my head was gone, revealing not a biological brain but a jumble of black metal highlighted across all its surfaces by intricate glowing blue circuits. The picotech circuit boards shifted and moved, constantly rearranging themselves to follow my thought processes. My reflection smiled back at me.
To be continued
I was a special forces operative. My partner and I were approaching our objective: a large three-story corporate building. We both wore black nano-woven carbon body armor and had belts and packs festooned with myriad high-tech weapons and gear. She was black, with her hair tied back in a pony-tail, while my own head was shaven.
The eight-lane highway that separated us from the building was packed with cars and trucks flying by us. There was no way that we could cross it and we were forced to crawl on hands and knees through a narrow drainage pipe that ran underneath it. My smaller partner was able to make her way through without much difficulty, but I had to work to squeeze my wide shoulders through.
On the other side we came out into a concrete loading dock. No one was visible as we crossed it to wall of the building, keeping low. A semi was backed up to one of the loading bays, which was open to receive it. I crept up and looked quickly inside through the gap between the trailer and the building. There were only stacked boxes inside the warehouse space and no people.
I was about to climb in when my partner pointed up with a gloved hand. "Look!"
Something huge shot upward from the roof of the building. It was nearly invisible in the sky, but as it flew through the clouds they flowed around it, revealing it to have the shape of a huge sphere. I knew immediately that it was a focused EMP, shaped and fired from a device on the roof. We had failed in our mission to stop them from using it.
Another EMP shot into the sky. This one intersected with an unfortunate passenger jet and immediately fried all the electronics on board. We watched in horror as the jet fell out of the sky and crashed in a massive explosion of flame and debris a few blocks away. Several drivers on the highway saw the crash as well and were distracted enough to crash into each other. The highway was immediately a disaster as trucks and cars, unable to stop, plowed into the wreckage.
There was a crash, and the sound of chain-link fence tearing apart. I grabbed my partner and threw us both to the ground as a semi drove off the highway and through the fence into the loading dock at full speed. It hit the opposite side of the semi we were hiding beneath. As a second truck followed almost immediately behind the first into the loading dock and metal debris flew around us, I remember thinking it was a good thing we were wearing body armor.
Once the dust had settled, we crawled out from under the twisted metal and away from the leaking diesel fuel. The warehouse wall had collapsed in the destruction, and it was easy for us to enter now. Although we had both survived the incident, we hadn't escaped without injury. She and I were both battered and bruised, and my armor had been punctured in the shoulder by several steel rods in spite of my armor. Above us, we could hear the EMPs continuing to be fired.
As my partner helped me struggle out of my armor to address the wounds, the scene shifted.
I sat in my expansive office on the top floor of the same corporate building. On one of several computer screens above my desk, I watched the two members of special forces in the warehouse. The EMP gun had functioned exactly as expected. It had almost finished its list of targets, most of which were military bases and centers of power across the globe. Several weaker nations had already offered secret capitulation to our demands, although I was sure they were still holding out hope for one of their stronger neighbors to stop us. The plan had gone perfectly thus far, and I wouldn't let those two do anything to foul things up.
I looked to my second-in-command and chief scientist, who was standing quietly nearby. He appeared to be staring off into space, but I knew he was using the picotech that had been implanted in his brain to communicate with all our divisions, as well as to directly oversee the actions of other semi-intelligent machines throughout the building. "Get rid of them," I ordered.
He blinked and looked at me with a detached expression. "Yes, sir." As he turned to leave, I could see the grotesque bulge at the base of his skull which held the picotech hardware that allowed him to communicate and control the other machines. I couldn't help grimacing at the inelegance of it. The scientist had been willing to accept the enhancements offered by our new picotechnology, but had balked at actually replacing anything. Unlike myself.
I looked at my reflection in the glass of a nearby window. The top of my head was gone, revealing not a biological brain but a jumble of black metal highlighted across all its surfaces by intricate glowing blue circuits. The picotech circuit boards shifted and moved, constantly rearranging themselves to follow my thought processes. My reflection smiled back at me.
To be continued
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