The stone marker
A memorial to those who had come
But otherwise left no mark
After the third colony failed
The only visitors would be
Passersby and tourists checking off a box
She shook a little with her distress
Speaking between tightened lips
Just barely containing a primal scream
I don’t mind the old-Earth tenements
Their utilitarian simplicity
But why does every other building
Have to look like the cover
Of an Arthur C. Clarke paperback
Couldn’t we come up with
A more interesting ‘future’
Than one dreamed up by hack illustrators
Over two centuries ago
Jinessa was just getting started
When she goes full rant
You can either cower and exit
Or saddle up and ride it for the eight count
I struggled to get a foot in the stirrup
As her exasperation rose
Oh my gawd
But it feels like someone
Stripped the life out of the colour wheel
I mean I get it
Proxima is not good old Sol
But why does it have to suck
All the juice out of orange
All the indigo out of the sky
All the crimson out of my hair!
She’d wanted the change
As much as I did
Coming here was her idea
It took most of our combined savings
And a serious cut in our lifestyle
To pull it off
Those tenements she mentioned
Were functional and clean
But hardly the standard she’d lived in
All her deeply privileged existence
And why does the atmosphere have to smell
Like fucking plum pudding
What is up with that
Even a hamburger tastes like
A sickeningly sweet yet
Gaggingly pungent holiday desert
Why doesn’t it explain all that
In the brochures
How was it kept out of the news
But life with Jinessa was a bit of a rodeo
Whether it was staged here on Proxima b
Or back on Earth
Truth is I love this most about her
Well not so much the ranting
Also, my apologies for the lateness of this week’s challenge. I had to work today, and then this much prose takes much longer to pen than a poem. 😉
The situational awareness of a Series 25 is pretty hard for a mere human to wrap their head around. While these battle droids are equipped with a pair of excellent optical sensors, positioned to replicate the appearance of a predator’s stereo vision, it is their internal sensors which provide the bulk of their operational data. These include radar (both atmospheric and ground-penetrating), with full sonic and electro-magnetic spectrum arrays. Their entire body acts as an antenna, collecting sensory data in a sphere up to a one kilometer radius. The Quantum Processing Unit parses and analyzes this data in real-time, determining all relevant threats in the sensory sphere and developing ongoing action plans for eliminating them.
I talked with a droid designer once who said there was really no way of putting an upper-limit on how fast a 25 can assess and respond to every situational detail of a battle in terms I could understand. “But,” she said, “if you can imagine beating Bobby Fisher at chess one hundred million times in a nanosecond while simultaneously playing every instrument for a full orchestra’s rendition of the William Tell Overture, you’ll have an inkling.”
No one
Ever
Does
Blessed shade and gloom
In an existence
Which fears the light
Grateful for each eclipse
Beauty in the shadows
Mystery in the illumined
Too bright for eyes to see
Ominous
It hangs there
No rotor wash
No engine sound
A not quite motionless
Hover
A spectacular
Unblinking eye
Staring at me
And I
So vulnerable
A thousand yards
Of waist high grass
From cover
Him? It.
Pix to Words 