Dump

Soma was a dump. A waste disposal facility. No. The word "facility" implies some sort of scheme, a tactic, it gives it a sense of process. There was deliberation here but nothing formally organised. Everything was just dumped here. First the endless megatons of "unwanted" food. Then residual nuclear waste. After that, chronodebris created by the first, unsuccessful experiments in controlled time travel. Everything that was discarded or deemed useless. Everything that defined people, because as any good historian or archaeologist will tell you, what else serves as our definition, what are we, if not what we leave behind. Every single disposed of item, ended here. For several decades, in Standard Objective Time that is, this planet was one of the countless, and ultimately unidentifiable, dumping grounds of the destructive force that was our ancestors.

For several centuries, no one knew what the surface even looked like and after the first few decades it would probably be virtually impossible to find out without landing since the upper layers of Soma's atmosphere became opaque with the gaseous byproducts of decomposition on a massive scale. No landing attempts were ever recorded, everything was shot at the planet's surface from orbit. This was thought to be the most "cost effective" course of action. It is estimated that over the course of two-hundred and seventy three SOT years, more than half of the Originating System's waste and "big science" experimental byproducts ended up on the planet's surface. Running a few crude calculations shows that today, even after taking into account of the rate of decay and decomposition of organic and inorganic matter and the half-life of radioactive material, we should be at least up to our necks in garbage. Anywhere on the planet. By the way, this is why the dumping stopped. Our ancestors ran the same calculations and found out that any more and they might disturb the planet's orbit. Not that they cared that much about the planet's well-being, but even they weren't stupid enough to risk having a planet leave its place in their vicinity. So what happened? Did we overestimate in our overeager attempt to accuse our ancestors of being, well, the colonialist, imperialist fuckheads that they usually were? The short answer is no. Our calculations are correct within a reasonable margin of error. And our ancestors were indeed fuckheads. However, this knowledge doesn't serve in any way our quest to understand what happened during those two-hundred and seventy three years. Or should I say during this period that could potentially amount to over ten billion Cumulative Standard Subjective Time years?


In the past few years tremendous progress has been made in our attempts to elaborate on the intricacies of the theoretical frameworks of chronobiology and chronogenetics and to unify them with our already extensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms of temporal flow. To put it more simply, we have a way of making some very educated guesses about why we're not buried in trash and at the same time why some of our most beautiful species, including the Dictyum, came to be. We now believe that Soma was pretty much the same as the Originating Planet during what was once termed the Mesozoic era, minus the great-big-fuck-off-scary lizards. More importantly it was a balanced super-ecomatrix. All this was massively upset by our ancestors' firing several hundred megatons of waste at random points and time intervals on the planet's surface. Normally, an ecological disturbance of this magnitude would have flung the entire planet's ecomatrix so far away from equilibrium that not only is it tempting to call this, us, today, a miracle but it also requires a lot of effort to not start listing all the ways by which Soma should have ended up as a barren rock.


Of course we know this is not a miracle, at least not in the way some of our more deluded ancestors would think. This is a miracle because it tells us something. It lets us know that life, sentient or not, is the most persistent force known to us and that once it has established itself it is not willing to go anywhere, it will not budge, not without putting up a good fight.


So far, our research has shown that before the period now colloquially known as the Great Waste, organisms very similar to fungi thrived on Soma. Great mycelial-like networks running under the surface of the planet with properties very similar to those of the Originating Planet. These protofungi were the planet's main force of decomposition. We posit that the waste dumped on Soma, most of the organic and some of the inorganic too, was the nutritional substrate for what would follow. What did follow is probably the biggest chronoevolutionary event that ever happened on Soma and quite possibly anywhere else. The chronodebris fell all over the planet's surface pretty much randomly and in a large fraction of those cases it created pockets of temporal instability. Next, or rather at the same time, came the radioactive waste. This, as unlikely as it may seem, served as a catalyst in what probably is the single most rapid case of evolution. The radioactive material served as a mutagenic factor inside the temporal bubbles created by the chronodebris. That, combined with the fact that there were essentially limitless nutrients lead to the super-rapid evolution of the protofungi. While on the outside of those temporal pockets barely three centuries had passed, on the inside the protofungi fed on the waste while mutating aggressively over what is now calculated to be several millions of ST years. Leaving momentarily aside the fact that this amount of time only makes sense when you're in the time bubble, try and imagine for a minute what that means. Pure, wild evolution. Metamorphosis in fast-forward. If evolution had a goal this would be the equivalent of skipping to the last page to read the ending. In some of those bubbles it is possible that up to a billion years could have passed. Apart from that we can't say much. It's obvious that metafungi evolved in one of those temporal pockets but how they came out of them or how the pockets broke down we have no idea. And they did break down, there is no sign of temporal disturbances on the planet's surface today, at least not of that nature.


Many other species evolved inside those perfect havens of time and space, some of which you are all very familiar with. The most important though is metafungi. The single most significant species on this planet, if not for its present benefits then definitely for what it has offered in the past. A second chance for a planet doomed to die in the ignorant and negligent hands of our ancestors.

-Introductory lecture for the course of Chronoevolution 101, Open Access Horizontal University of Self-Education, Ursula Shelter, Soma

Pigs in Blankets

That’s what Doug Stanhope called the imaginary charity gig he did for police officers fallen in the line of duty. That opener should have got rid of the cop sympathisers among you and for those of you reading still on the fence here’s another one, more succinct and one that leaves no doubt about where I stand on the issue of police. I shit on the grave of fallen police officers.

But seriously, let’s analyse this lest we make ourselves look as dumb as the pigs. The first and extremely common argument about cops, living or dead, is that they are people like us. Ha! I say to thee. Let’s just find out. I’m not going to quote the numbers that show the grief and malignancy caused by cops, oh no, because you can argue numbers. In fact, I’m not going to refer to anything you can argue about. Instead, I will talk about things that no matter how good a debater you might think you are (even a master debater, heh) you will have to accept as general truths or otherwise reveal what an idiot you are. So without further ado, what makes us human?

The common things among all people are our fundamental human needs. These, according to the school of "Human Scale Development" developed by Manfred Max-Neef and others (Antonio Elizalde and Martin Hopenhayn), are seen as stemming from the condition of being human. They are subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom. For the time being we can ignore subsistence, protection and understanding, not because they’re not important or for any silly reason like that but because they’re not really unique to us humans. Animals fulfill these needs every day so I don’t think we can use them as something that makes us stand out as humans. The same is probably true of affection but I chose to leave that in, if only slightly facetiously, in order to poke further fun at the argument that “cops are people just like us”. So let’s pick at each of them one by one.

Oh look, the first one is affection. Do I really need to analyse that? Is there anywhere on this planet where cops are known for how sweet and cuddly they are? No, I didn’t think so. They might have a deep need for affection that they hide very, very well but it is most definitely something that does not go well at all with their role and it is probably stamped on early on, either at a young age in their family or later on in their training or maybe even both.

Next up is participation. This may appear to be somehow fulfilled by the illusion of police being an integral part of society but nothing is further from the truth. Cops are elitists. They are their own special little boys’ club. More importantly though they exist because society is elitist and it wants to stay that way. The haves are protected from the have-nots and those higher up on the hierarchy need someone to do their dirty work and manage the chaos created by those lower down. For all intents and purposes, there is no organisation more segregationist than the police. And that is most likely true on an individual level. We’ve all seen and heard of “corrupt” cops but when was the last time you heard of a cop fighting for the rights of immigrants, or women, or children, or animals? Even if by some miracle you did find some, they would only highlight their rarity. The only thing cops are interested in participating in is the police and its purpose.

To show you that I am not prejudiced however, I will give them leisure. Although I don’t believe that one is limited to humans either, it is I feel a connecting point among absolutely all humans. Everyone, absolutely everyone, wants a break once and a while no matter how much fun they’re having with a task. Not even machines can run forever.

Creation. This is my favourite. I’m going to let you do the thinking for this one though because I feel it illustrates my point perfectly. What is it that cops create? What do they make? No, really, think about it. That’s right, absolutely fucking nothing. They are a bunch of bloodsucking parasites.

As far as identity goes, please no more, this is too much. The police, as much as any other kind of army, wants you to be a number not a person. They want individuality set aside and they want each cop to work like a well-oiled cog in the machine of state-sponsored repression. There is no identity in the police, you are whatever your commanding officer tells you you are. If cops need to find an identity then they’re looking in the wrong place.

And last but not least, freedom. I don’t know how to talk about this one without laughing. Seriously, I need to argue about this one too? Get the fuck out. Police for freedom would really be like fucking for virginity.

So that’s one stupid argument down, about a million more to go. Let’s take a break now, fulfill our need of leisure, possibly the only thing that we and the pigs have in common and we’ll come back with even more cop-apologist bashing.