KESSLER SYNDROME
*
Year 3030 .The Michigan mushroom is a misnomer. The thing itself lurks before-after-beneath an allegedly pleasant peninsula that’s called Michigan and is far older than the place name.
The Great Shroom is biomassive and older than old, more ancient than the notions of blood and bone. The fungus came to be the first time there was any time, when god crawled ashore from the fractal to make here–when author arrived all tired and tempest tossed (a haggard refugee).
Some time after the first Big Bang called the first Big Crunch and all the cold quiet that comes after-before-from. Once creation ran-re-ran a few times., the Author’s evolution algorithm came to abhor the lacuna / vacuum / lack of decomposers. Without them, the dead things, all the life that lived its brilliant day in the sun piled high and wide and threatened to bury all the rest. Decomposers come to close the loop the circle in any biological system. Composters. Mouths. The mighty maw at the center of your galaxy and the microscopic things that will turn your meat and mine to tree feed. As above so below, and this is the way god rhymes: mouths great and small are mighty and do, at scale, devour.
*
Year 2030. Let the archival mind-montage biopic of Thaddeus MacGuffin’s life fly forward-fast a decade and some change.
Thus begins the arc-redemption of Thaddeus MacGuffin, or so he hoped. His babies, his Machinenmensch coffee-pot robots would of-course be the fulcrum for his last arc of life. Turns out we montage danced right the fuck past his psychedelic-fueled spiritual awakening in some tourist-friendly former forest. This awakening is the source of his refusal to make murder machines–to let his semi-sentient “babies” be weaponized.
Thaddeus put his foot down, and dug in both heels. Hid the secret of the accidental cranial trauma that break made one-in-dozens of his robots semi-sentent and threatened to take it to his grave: “No police. No military. The Machinenmensch is for labor” In factories where workers destroy them like the looms of old. “The Machinenmensch is a care robot…” for elders that recoil in uncanny-valley horror at them and still yearn for human contact and companionship. “My machines were meant to build and do great things” like dragging fat-bergs out of clogged sewer lines and piloting garbage scows with a reek etched into their hulls and very-unsexy and dangerous work. And the pile of Venture Capital beneath Thaddeus did threaten to dwindle to less than dragon-horde.
Enter the puzzle-problem Thaddeus and his babies could solve (self-inflicted as most human threats are): Earth(0xBED42820A10) has a rash on its ass. Humans aren’t the rash, but yes they caused it. Of course humans gave their planet pink eye. Kessler syndrome: the cloud of space debris that makes orbiting anything of consequence impossible.
While Thaddeus chased enlightenment and redemption-through-hallucination, a problem grand enough for the man presented itself. A nation, a power, sought to poke itself and all other nations in the eyes and tossed a rock into/at orbit. A country used a space shotgun to set the stage for first strike but thought better of it (so that there might continue to be a world). Though worldwarthree was not yet meant to be, the good folks of the Earth were blind. No climate satellites or spying. No communications or exploration. Just Kessler’s debris disease and the long self-imposed quarantine it brings to whole worlds. Every piece of space debris in the satellite graveyard gliding razor-bullet through the firmament in haphazard formation at a hazardous 17,000 kph. That’s metric for terrifyingly violent velocity apt to shred any attempt at achieving orbit-meaningful.
Thaddeus re-emerged, placid in the face of fresh internet hate to save the day by volunteering his Machinenmensch for the great task looming over humanity’s head: ridding the skies of the devil-debris crosshatching the firmament. For such a task, even and especially armed with super-science, would call forth a thirst for labor-disposable.
*
3030: Evolution of the mouth calls forth it’s equal opposite. Not straight line. No single-cell sat there food-bloated and praying for relief in the form of an asshole or willed it into being. No, life found its way with painful random hilarity toward the solution to all the second order problems and concerns that came with being alive and having a mouth and flesh and digestive bits.
“Shit is a marvel, a gift, a blessing back to life. The ultimate embodiment of humility. From water and shit does all life begin and does all life depend. Marine snow fish shit and land animal scat and all that rots and reeks is the basis for you and me and all we’ll ever be” Mushroom’s voice ticking out the mouth of a rust and rot robot lying in a fungal death-clearing. The mighty thing with a million mouths and forever memory, the mushroom gathers its strength to grip and groan and flex. It’s only then that the ghost archivist enthralled in the giant fungus’ grip notices the firm tied tendrils that press his un-flesh to the regurgitated rock he regrets resting on. Great dolomite slab worn smooth in the mushrooms subterranean gut—grist-rock, millstone, grinding stone for digesting big meals.
“Be still” says the mighty mushroom to the ghost of a man as it bears down, moves its bowels and begins to shit-print him a new body for a “great and terrible purpose.”
*
The man made malady, the self inflicted disease afflicting Earth is made of debris. The solution flows, naturally, from the same shallow sea of human intellect.
Rockets. Surely rockets will fix things. “Space shits” in popular parlance. Heavy lifters shaped ugly-un-aero-dynamic–like big bulky baseballs with rockets on their arbitrarily named ass end and un-flushed riveting in place of stitching. Each spacecraft will carry a payload, a crew, and exactly nothing else. Each ship is a prayer.
Payload: Nets. Sheets. Sails. Great big sail nets made by tiny nano-processes that weaved spider silk and industrial diamond filament over-through composites-carbon and materials as meta- as they are exotic. Do not forget the conductors, fine filaments of copper mag-twisted carrying current to every meter-squared. Fully unfurled and electro-magnetized, each space net spans an area best-reckoned in square-kilometers.
Sixteen ‘manned’ pods rocket powered and gyro-stable, ‘anchor’ the sail-that-is-a-ship at the edges of the hexadecagon, each pod providing electricity to the space-net monstrosity. Sixteen identical sets of controls capable of piloting their bit or the whole-sail (should the need arise–the need will arise).
Each ship is ‘manned’ by 16 Machinenmensch meant to unfurl the sail net, set about magnetizing it, and manage debris collection. These metal man-substitutes, anthropomorphic robots each made brave-awake-obedient by Thaddeus’ own hand and hammer strike ride to orbit clutching their knees crouched cargo-fetal. Each one that ‘lives’ long enough to complete its mission will fall back to Earth wreathed in flame–piloting each sail-ship on its one-time death dive back to Earth.
The overall plan is engineering perfection. Power nerds broke down the design docs for mega-engineers who ‘chunked’ the thing to CAD and old-hands on shop floors took to drawing sub-assemblies on whiteboards. The great armies of industry aimed at a whole species problem did quite quickly gird the Earth’s equator with a bandolier of grenade-looking baseball-shaped ‘space shits.’ What’s more, they made the fleet of baseball ‘rocket shits’ in a span of time that would make old Hank Forge and his boys Taylor and Gilbreth green with envy.
The execution of the plan to clear Earth orbits of debris is a shitshow something opposite of perfection, and the whole thing live streamed on the teevee to boot. Whole mission, from first launch to last de-orbit was live streamed. Mac-Tech Industries and Rockhart-Marvin, Forge Motors and Bong. Every industrial concern on Earth transfigured, became an aerospace firm merged with a tech company, in the same mega-project moment, those entities-corporate all seemed-suddenly to be vertically integrated info-tainment companies.
The stream. The TeeVee broadcast. The twentyfourseven real-time broadcast of the shitshow. That’s what changed minds about the mechanical monstrosities–the wage-depressing, job-stealing, “Dudley-Dickhead percolator looking ass job stealing bitches.”
Typical launch stream: The ‘rocket shit’ sits on a launch pad, rushed and ready. Camera cuts to human ground crew walking the condemned machine-men to their births. The cinematic eye lingers long and deliberate on the bodies of the bots–every Machinenmensch chassis marked up like a formula one onsie or a soccer jersey. Every square inch of their robot bodies canvas for a product placement tattoo.
The pile into space-baseballs at Cape Canaveral, packed ‘space shits’ in French Guiana. Women and men crammed nets and bots into rushed-rocket ships in Wenchang and Baikonur. Every ‘rocket shit’ that slipped the surly bonds, did its mission and dipped, called forth a cheer and roar. And when the hastily constructed ships exploded on the pad or corkscrewed off into a shrapnel rain, the people wept or took cover as needed.
*
3030 Contaminated Forest-Clearing, Michigan
The Ghost archivist gape gazes in amazement at his legs–aether made-meat (again). The shade is trapped and tied to his emerging body. The spirit tries to reason with the fungus beneath Michigan, the being shit-printing him a body in glorious 3D: “I don’t need a ‘Great and Terrible Purpose’, Mighty Mushroom. You see, I have a purpose already, a task immense in its tedium.” The Archivist with my nose pleads, “Please, let me just write my report that no one will read, and I’ll leave, and nobody has to even know I was here…”
“No” The fungus’ answers firm. Before it bears down, sets to moving its mighty mycorrhizal bowels again: “quit squirming, herald.”
“Not Harold. Adam. Not named Harold.”
“We know your name and do not care” The Mushroom strains, a tendril ending in cloaca shudders and shits the ghosts skull full. “Harold is your job. Your purpose. Your role: delivering our words, warnings, and admonishments to the wicked and other sundry tasks.”
“And if I refuse?” The pain that takes language pours down his antennae, the little mushroom, the tiny fruiting body sprouting out the new body’s head.
The Herald rises in flesh fresh that functions surprisingly well for being fashioned by a fungal asshole. The messenger, the one named Adam-not-Harold in life begins his long march South-East to Cleveland Archology carrying the words of the Mighty One, the mushroom beneath Michigan: “Woe to thee, Cleveland.”
*
2030 EARTH (ALL OF IT)
24/7 live stream, global via trans-oceanic cables and teevee signals trick-shot bounced off the ionosphere. When this story is done, I wanna circle back and ask that mushroom to print M. McLuhan for me so I can yell at him. Medium ain’t the message. It matters, but it ultimately mediates. You need Zamyatin to make that thought complete: tech and all the traditions that web and gird its use accrete. And you’ll buy “boots and cigs and sausages” next to the shop where you buy your “ticket for a sleeper ship to Mars.” Well, you will buy those tickets maybe some day if these little robot fuckers can clean-clear the skies of space trash.
The Earth did not stand still, for it cannot, but every set of eyes that could find a screen did. Digital hearths is backwards words. Hearth digital, for the teevee screen is the hearth first and the digital medium second. Don’t matter if its brain rot propaganda or good feed-the-soul stories, people will gather. So it came to be that when the all the armies of industry on Earth (0xBED42820A) watched the fruit of their labor, the Machinenmensch, and wonder if it will rust and rot or win the day for all.
“Fifteen of 16 pods show green. Net is open and ready for electrification. Mike 101, move to pod 3 immediately. Copy? Mike 101, you must move, do you copy?”
“I’m scared.” Bot’s body cam pans to a comrades dead torso caught in the space-net.
“Mike 101, I order you to move to pod 3.” Crumpled static pause. “Mike 101, say again.”
“I’m scared. I can’t. ”
“Mickey-one-oh-one. You are ordered to…”
“No!” Mike one-oh-one’s head cam shows the robot hugging its knees, self-tethered to Anchor Pod.
Three days of the live stream. 72 hours of bots dutifully dying for human fuck ups, upper lips as stiff as when they rolled off the factory floor. Machinenmensch, dented sentient and moving with haste and purpose, skittering over space sails like sailors in the rigging of old tall ships. Doing hero-shit, and getting got in the doing. Poseidon’s cousin, whichever one governs what’s above Olympus, comes to shake bots off the rigging and into the void. Machine’s in orbit catch speeding-bullet debris cast by probability. Bad luck’s ever lethal accuracy. Robots working dutifully jerk-stiffen, spark, spit clouds of flash-frozen hydraulic juice. For three days, their comrades soldiered on, until Mike 101.
Mission Control tried a remote re-start, nothing. MacGuff-Tech rep even busted out the kill switch, but Mickey is still hugging his knees and scream-pleading for a mother it never had when two M6 bolts punch through the robot’s coffee-pot skull. Alarms on Earth blare, warning lights in space blaze cold and quiet.
The sail-ships and the space-shits that deliver them to orbit are modern marvels, tough enough to gather space razors and rocket chunks whipping at fuck-you-up miles-per-hour (and faster still in metric reckonings). A ship out of control and un-manned by machine-men will crash wherever it likes–the brutal accuracy of bad luck. Somebody or something has to save the day.
A tin-speaker voice cuts in on the doomed-ship’s channel: “Houston. Elmo 123, on loan from EU mission control.”
Control is reeling: “No one, authorized..”
“You’re right I lied. Time constraints. Consider the attached telemetry.” The bot beams mission control its ballparked trajectory, and all the girls and boys in Houston play with a hologram showing the maneuver-to-be.
Whole-Earth-audience holds its breath and watches the heavens through a teevee pinhole. Elmo 123 aims its ship at Earth below and safe de-orbit into the sea. As Elmo’s doomed ship passes Mickey’s the newborn hero leaps, untethered perfect timing to the un-manned ship to save the day.
Took three days to turn a news-cast into a docu-drama, three days for humanity to see that its children had the same odds of heroism or cowardice as all of you or me or we.
*
END UNANIMITY 3
MORE TO COME