It wasn't in the nineties when we had a series of very cold winters in central Illinois. Not even that frigid day when the high temperature was ten below (-23C) and I was trying to replace a heater hose in my old car. I finally wound up taking it to a mechanic, because my fingers were too cold to work.

No, the coldest I ever was was in the month of August, forty years ago sometime this week; I don't remember the exact date, although I'm pretty sure it was today or tomorrow.

Two days earlier I was in Thailand, where I'd been stationed for a year. Four of us were scheduled to go home the next day and decided to celebrate our upcoming trip on top of a large hill, where we could overlook the base for a final time and have a little "going home" party with wine and that great Thai ganga.

The bottles were empty and the weed as gone, so we got up to start down the hill, which was a pile of dirt and rock they had excavated to build some new barracks. A voice yelled "freeze!" and we all froze like statues; you could tell from the tone of voice there was a firearm involved. It was just like in the movies.

A guy came up the hill carrying what appeared to be a huge automatic pistol, and he was shaking like a leaf. "G-G-G-G-GIs?" he stammered.

"Yeah, man, don't shoot!" someone said.

He yelled down the hill, "Hold your fire! Hold your fire! For Christ's sake hold your fire!" and then asked us for I.D. After showing our IDs the five of us walked down the hill, where we were met by what looked like a whole army, with jeep mounted fifty caliber machine guns, rocket launchers, M-16s, all of them pointed at where we had been at the top of the hill. If one round had been fired we'd have all been MIA, because there wouldn't have been anything left of us.

That was certainly not the coldest night, though. The low that night, usual year around in that tropical jungle close to the equator, was well above 80 (27C). We all left for the US the next morning.

We reached Alaska (I don't remember if it was Fairbanks or Anchorage) about ten PM for a connecting flight to San Fransisco and got off the plane, and damn but it was cold. It had been over a year since I'd been in a temperature lower than 76 (25C), which was a record low, and they had been keeping records for thousands of years. The thermometer outside the terminal said it was 60 (15.5C). I was wearing a uniform designed for the jungle.

We got bumped off the flight so they could carry a fire truck somewhere and were all going to spend the night in the terminal.

I walked inside, the cold wind blowing through its open doors, as cold inside as it was out. I thought I'd succumb to exposure.

All the headlines on all the newspapers in the newspaper racks screamed "NIXON RESIGNS!"

It was the first I'd heard of it. Being stationed in Thailand, the only news I'd gotten was the Stars and Stripes and the Armed Forces Radio Service. Rent Good Morning, Vietnam to see how badly our news was censored; there had been no news about Watergate, streakers, or the Arab Oil Embargo whatever.

I was outside the Base Exchange, shivering and covered with goose bumps when it opened the next morning. I bought a blue jean jacket that I still wear, not caring a bit about uniform regulations or an Article Fifteen, I was freezing!

Nobody complained about me wearing it, though. I sure was glad to get the hell out of Alaska, with its tiny, weak sun.

Heat
        It was only a little after seven when I woke up. Destiny was asleep, so I put on a robe, started coffee, and went to the head to take a piss. I turned on the video; nothing on but the news. Nothing new, some "special report" about Martian piracy. I finished my cup and took a shower. Destiny was waking up as I was getting dressed.
        "You're up early again! Another alarm, sweetheart?"
        "No," I said, "I just woke up early. I don't know why I fell asleep so early last night. It isn't like yesterday was a busy day or anything. Hungry?"
        "I don't know, what time is it?"
        I had to ask the computer. It said seventeen after seven. She got a cup of coffee and told the computer to make a turkey omelette, and again the stupid damned thing said "There are no Turkish omelette dishes listed in the database."
        Stupid computer. She sighed. "Stupid computer," she said, "I want an omelette with turkey meat. A turkey omelette has nothing to do with the country called Turkey."
        The idiotic thing replied "Parse error, please rephrase."
        "God!" Destiny exclaimed, "Jesus but Dad's computers are stupid. Computer!"
        "Waiting for input."
        "I want an omelette with turkey meat."
        "There is no meat that has come from that country."
        "Turkey the bird, damn it!"
        "Parse error, please rephrase."
        "What meats are available for omelettes?"
        "Chicken, duck, turkey, and beef."
        "An omelette with turkey meat."
        "There is no meat from that country," the idiotic thing repeated.
        She was becoming annoyed. "Damn it, computer, I want an omelette with bird meat."
        "Please name the bird."
        "Turkey."
        "Acknowledged, complying."
        "That must the dumbest computer I ever saw," she said.
        "Waiting for input," the computer stupidly said, obviously picking up on the word "computer".
        "Damn it," she started.
        "Roast beef and cheese omelette," I said.
        "Complying."
        By the time breakfast was finished cooking I only had fifteen minutes to eat, the stupid computer had wasted most of our morning time together because its programming was so idiotic.
        The "special report" didn't have anything I didn't already know. The news is almost as stupid as the stupid computer.
        I left for the pilot room with two minutes to spare. I hadn't even finished my breakfast. God damned computer!
        There was a light on the map as I went into the pilot room. Damn, but that computer has shitty timing; I had to do readings and couldn't check it out.
        Luckily everything was normal; the computers were agreeing, we were on course, and it showed nothing except engine seventeen and the port generator had anything wrong with them.
        The light was pirates, about four and a half light minutes away, but they weren't headed anywhere near us. A few minutes later it was off the radar.
        Still, it was worrying. Even though we had tangled with pirates farther out, this was the first trip I'd ever seen pirates anywhere near this far from Mars. And it would still be well over a week before we met the fleet.
        I went back to our quarters to fill my coffee. Destiny asked "Trouble?"
        "Pirates," I said. "They showed up at the fringe of radar but are gone now."
        The robots hadn't thrown the rest of my breakfast away, so I finished eating before starting inspections, chatting about droppers and pirates with Destiny. I kissed her and started inspections. Luckily I only had to inspect downstairs. Luckily? Hell, there were all those damned stairs... but I guess that has nothing to do with luck.
        At the bottom of the stairs there was nothing wrong except number sixty two, which had a robot attached, and seventeen. I logged sixty two and started towards all those damned steps.
        But as I passed the starboard generator, there was a yellow light. What the hell? I looked closer and checked the panel -- it was dangerously warm. Damn it, that should set an alarm off! Looking closer, number seventeen was drawing an obscene amount of power. I hit the generator's emergency shutoff, and the readings said the batteries were draining at a rapid rate as gravity got lighter.
        I took off at a run to seventeen, and the robot attached to it was starting to smoke badly. I also saw that the robot had plugged itself into the main power. I tried to disconnect it from the engine, but the lead was too hot to touch. My fingers were going to be blistered. I kicked the robot's main power cable loose from mains with my boot as the robot burst into flames and the alarm went off. I got the hell out of there and ran back to the generator room.
        The batteries weren't draining like they were; something in the robot had shorted and had been feeding number seventeen with the mains it had plugged itself into. At least the yellow light had gone out, but it was still way too hot for my liking, it being our only remaining generator. I'd let it cool some more before I fired it back up.
        I went back to seventeen, which was in a vacuum by now. I waited for the door to open. Still smoking, the robot was half melted. This robot wouldn't be doing any more repairs! It was surely totaled. I found a pair of gloves and was able to disconnect it. I got some cable cutters, cut off the plug and plugged it back into the engine's robot plug. Maybe other robots couldn't try to fix it. I hoped so, anyway.
        I walked back to the generator. It had cooled almost to normal, so I restarted it. Gravity started to rise again.
        My phone buzzed; it was Destiny. "What's going on, John?"
        "Trouble with an engine and the generator," I said. "I hope it didn't upset the droppers too much. I'm on my way upstairs now, have you had lunch yet?
        "Well, yeah, it's two in the afternoon. I was worried."
        "So was I," I said, "but I think it's okay now. Have the robot make me a sandwich, would you?" I was starved, but I'd been too busy to even notice I'd been hungry.
        I trudged wearily up all those stairs to correct the ship's course. Destiny brought my lunch to the pilot room. "You're sweet," I said, "thanks, but this will only take a few minutes and I'm done... I hope. Just put it on the table and I'll be right there." She kissed me and left.
        I went and finished my lunch, and had a beer with it. This had really been a crappy day. Shit, except for Destiny the whole damned trip was a trip through hell.
        We sat on the couch cuddling and I didn't even hardly notice that an old gray Dracula movie was on. I must have been really tired, because even though there weren't any colors, Dracula's eyes looked red.
        Destiny was comforting me after my bad day, and I fell asleep in her arms. She woke me up and led me to bed, but I was too tired to do anything but sleep.

I woke up early yesterday, and as I do on early days I turned on the TV news and opened Google News on the laptop. After I opened a dozen or so tabs, the notebook ground to a screeching halt. Obviously its 1 gig of memory was completely full. It took a full five minutes for task manager to come up.

I rebooted it (the ancient Linux box with 750 megs never needs rebooting!) and did something I should have done years ago -- I installed Flashblock. After whitelisting KSHE I opened the news back up, and the notebook performed flawlessly.

After reading the news I opened Mars, Ho! for editing. I'll go through the whole book, reading and editing, and when I get to the next chapter to be posted here I post it. Thirty seven was Monday, I reached chapter 50, the last chapter, yesterday.

I've been struggling to get books into e-book format for almost a year now. The trouble wasn't Calibre, even though it has its quirks. It was Open Office's confusing documentation (in fairness, Microsoft documentation sucks, too). It made an incredibly easy and simple procedure seem obscure and convoluted.

I'd decided that on the next pass through Mars, Ho! I would format the typeface and size of chapter names and numbers, and mark it so I could easily convert it to the ePub format.

I had struggled with and experimented with converting Nobots while not exactly sober, but Oo's documentation was as confusing full of coffee as it had been when I was full of beer. But when I opened the file in an eBook reader it became apparent; it was dirt simple. I spent as much time on Nobots yesterday as I did on Mars, Ho!.

I did run across two minor problems with Calibre. It wanted to remove paragraph indents and add blank lines between paragraphs. A little mousing around the interface and I found where to fix it.

The other was a bug in Calibre. You're supposed to be able to drag and drop image files for the cover, but it simply didn't work. It displayed the cover in Calibre, but not in the eBook reader. However, there's a button that lets you choose a file, and that worked.

This morning I converted The Paxil Diaries, uploaded the ePub files and edited the index files. So if you would like an eBook version of either of these books, they're available for free download at my web site. A little googling showed that the Nook and Kindle and about all eBook readers support that format. I neither know nor care if Sony's reader supports it, and in fact would rather people not be able to read them on a Sony device; I've hated that company with a passion since my daughter infected my PC with Sony's XCP malware. Their CEO should have gone to prison!

I'm taking a different approach with Mars, Ho! than with my previous two books. Having them printed is terribly expensive and I'd at least like to make the money back on copyright and ISBN registrations, so I'm going to release it as a two dollar Amazon eBook first, with PDF and HTML versions still free.

If you want an eBook version of the two finished books, rather than making you visit my web site I'll just link them here:
The Paxil Diaries
Nobots

Couch
        I woke up about twenty after seven. I put on a robe and trudged bleary-eyed to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Destiny woke up just as I was going to the head. I still think that's a stupid name for a bathroom.
        She had the robot make French toast and sausage and was in the living room drinking coffee and watching the news when I got dressed and went in there. "I wish we had some pork sausage," she said.
        "You should have brought some," I replied. "I wish we were on Mars!"
        "Yeah, I should have," she said. "Oh, well, I ought to be able to get it on Mars."
        "It's four times as expensive there," I said. "Shipping costs."
        She smiled. "That's okay, I can afford it even if it does make me feel guilty."
        "Why does it make you feel guilty? I could see it if you were spending the rent money on pork."
        "I don't know," she said.
        Huh? I don't know, we were gabbing and not paying attention to the news. We ate our breakfast in the living room, and the map lit up just as I was finishing eating. I went to the pilot room, mug in hand. It was about ten 'til so I'd be in there a while.
        The blip was a cargo ship from another shipping company. I wondered why other companies didn't have radar absorbing coatings and passive radar like ours did, our boats are easy to hide and hard to find, or Bill's goose would have been cooked when he ran across the pirates I rained on, and they would have had his boat.
        Eight o'clock finally came. Funny how long it takes ten minutes to pass when you have absolutely nothing to do. It looked like this was going to be a really easy day; no course corrections and the only red light was engine seventeen, and I didn't have to inspect upstairs today.
        I stopped by our quarters... yeah, our quarters, she was living with me and we're getting married. So shut the fuck up before I walk out of here, asshole. Anyway, I stopped by our quarters to fill my cup, kissed Destiny, and started my trek to my dungeon, with its torture equipment. Huh? The stairs, of course. I hate those God damned stairs.
        The German woman was, as usual, in the commons eating. Tammy walked past and said "hi".
        I went down the torture equipment, which is worse coming up, to inspect my "dungeon".
        Everything checked out, all lights were green and all readings normal and the only robot doing anything was on number seventeen. I hauled my aching back up the torturous stairs.
        The commons was just starting to fill with droppers and was still pretty empty, I must not have spent much time at all downstairs. Destiny wasn't home, probably in Tammy's quarters, I thought. "What time is it?" I asked the computer. Wow, only eleven! I was home really early today.
        I turned on the video and checked listings on my tablet. All right! A zero gravity football game was just starting so I switched it to that.
        About quarter after, Destiny came home. "Wow!" she said. "You're really early today!"
        "Yeah," I said. "I haven't had a day this light since the first week we were in space. Cross your fingers! Want to watch this game with me, or do you want to do something else?"
        "I like football," she said. "We'll watch the game." Right then the map lit, but only for a second.
        "I'll be right back," I said. I went to the pilot room to see what the light was, but it hadn't had a good enough signal to even tell what kind of vessel it was. I went back home. A robot was cooking hot dogs and french fries and making potato salad.
        Huh? How the hell should I know what the damned hot dogs were made of, except I know it wasn't pork.
        I missed a goal while I was checking out the blip, St. Louis had scored against Novosibirsk. One nothing, and it was really early in the game.
        We moved to the dining room when lunch was done cooking and turned the game on in there. By the time we got the video turned on and on the right channel, it was one up; Novosibirsk had scored. Wow, two goals this fast?
        The cookbot brought our lunch. When we finished eating we moved back into the living room. Two to one Novosibirsk. Damn, I'd missed all three goals.
        When the game ended it was still two to one. Novosibirsk had beaten St. Louis.
        We watched some old short gray movies; two episodes of Rawhide, part of a silly serial called "Buck Rogers," a different Untouchables movie that wasn't nearly as good as the long one that was in color we'd watched quite a while ago, and one in color called "Emergency!" about a fire department in the second half of the twentieth century.
        Destiny asked "How about burritos for supper?"
        "No way in hell," I said. "If I eat Mexican food my asshole is on fire the next day!" She had a burrito and I had beef stew.
        She put on Hardly Ever After, a new holo. I fell asleep on the couch, and she woke me up when it was really bedtime. You would think I'd have stayed awake after such an easy day.

Oops, that's "get off of Weird Al's lawn."

Rummaging through Google News this morning I ran across what I considered a humorous article on Time about Weird Al's song Word Crimes, a diatribe against poor grammar. Of course, being a writer who (not "whom") has no editor, I really have to watch my own grammar closely; books are supposed to be grammatical. Uh, was that sentence grammatically correct?

I must confess that besides the fact that some folks I know IRL (Al and the article's author would hate that "IRL") had trouble with some of the vocabulary in Nobots ("Are those all words I can look up in the dictionary?" Well, yeah, mostly) that's one reason I chose to make the lion's share of Mars, Ho! to be a first person perspective from an undereducated viewpoint. Thank you, Mister Clemons. Twain was bashed for Huckleberry Finn's atrocious grammar, when having Huck, Jim, and Tom speak proper English would have been stupid and ruined the story.

It's hard enough writing a 100,000 word novel, and I'm failing at this, I doubt it will be anywhere near Baen's lower limit. Baen's management must not have read any Twain. When Twain was asked how long a novel should be, he replied "as many words as it takes to tell the story and not a single word more." I refuse to pad it out to drearyness, as was a long, boring, pointless 450 page science fiction book by a writer I used to enjoy greatly before publishers started insisting on books as heavy as the average American.

Plus, the poor grammar of the character allows a little humor (Knolls: "Computer, what's the best way to knock them bitches out?" Computer: "Parse error, there are no female dogs on board and 'knock' is not in context, please rephrase the question or order"), even some poetic humor such as "the heavy German woman with the heavy German accent", playing on the multiple meanings of the word ("Whoa, dude, that's heavy!! Pass me that bong, man").

But I have to say, I agree with Al and with the article's writer, Richard Corliss, who (not whom) makes his own grammar errors, such as "And the copy editor of a book I wrote for Simon & Schuster corrected my frequent use of years as adjectives ('the 1955 novelty tune...'). I didn't know that was a word crime, and, between you and I [sic], I keep breaking it." Uh, that oughta be "you and me", dude. And yes, that error of mine was on purpose; I realize that "oughta" ain't a word any more than "ain't" is a word.

This paragraph is, I think, 100% factually correct:

Nothing in a living language is written in stone. Over the decades, words go from wrong to right. Speak as you will; others will understand you, whatever offenses you utter against hoary* tradition. Just realize that the people in a position to hire you, mark your exams or fall in love with you may have stricter standards of written and spoken English. Like Weird Al Yankovic, or the reporters who noted the less and fewer mistake on Greg Maddux's Hall of Fame plaque, we grammar snobs are listening.

That goes quadruple for literature, even my poor attempt at literature. But those of you who "could care less" (which the writer correctly points out actually says that if you could care less, you must care at least a little) should know that when you don't know the difference between there, their, and they're, you come across as being so uneducated that your viewpoint can be safely dismissed. The literate is unlikely to learn much from the aliterate.

* I have GOT to find a use for that word in the book!

It annoys the hell out of me that my books are so damned expensive, which is why I wanted Mars, Ho! to be 100,000 words. I'd hoped that possibly Baen might publish it so it would be, oddly, far cheaper. I can buy a copy of Andy Wier's excellent novel The Martian from Barnes and Noble or Amazon for less than I can get a copy of my own Paxil Diaries from my printer, and Wier's book is a lot longer.

It's no wonder they're not selling; not only can I not afford merchandizing, but they're way overpriced. I can't blame anyone for not wanting to buy one. I'm still looking for ways to make them cheaper.

I went to check sales this morning and saw that they have some new, cheaper formats. So now there's a 6x9 paperback version for a much less unreasonable $7.00. Unfortunately, this one can only ship to U.S. addresses and will only be available at my website or the printer's website.

I don't think Mars, Ho! will reach Baen's required 100,000 words; right now the manuscript is just short of 60,000 words, a lot more than Nobots' 42042 words and there's only a chapter or two left to write.

Of course, I'm not writing these books for the money (fortunately!); my pension and Social Security pays well enough to meet my needs. But of course I want as many people as possible to read them.

Cory Doctorow's tactics aren't working for me. I may do what Wier did and publish Mars, Ho! as a $2.00 Amazon ebook if I can't find a good publisher. It's most likely I won't find one.

There are two more chapters of Mars, Ho! ready to post, chapter 37 will be here in a day or three.

Drills
        I got woke up early again, about five thirty this time. Fire in passengers quarters number forty seven. God damned drills, but I had to get up and inspect forty seven anyway. I put on a robe and trudged down there.
        Yep, just a stupid drill. I noticed that Tammy was in the commons with the German woman as I walked past on my way back home. It was still early enough that I could still get another hour's sleep or so.
        Nope, as soon as I got back there another damned alarm went off, this time a fire in engine seventeen. This one might be real, so I hurried down there and told the computer do deliver some nasty robot coffee.
        The computer wouldn't let me in at first, it must have been in a vacuum. The door finally opened, and the robot that had been working on it was charred and still smoking a little. I unhooked it from the engine, and another one rolled up for me to hook up, and a third dragged the smoking robot to the repair shop.
        I logged it and trudged back up the five damned flights of stairs towards home, but by then it was too late to go back to bed, quarter after six. I made a pot of real coffee and put a game on, but it was almost over. When it was over I switched it to the always old news.
        Nothing new, of course, they were still trying to scare people about the Venus virus. Destiny came in, kissed me, and poured a cup of coffee. "You're up early again," she said.
        "Yeah," I replied, "fire drill in the passenger section and a burned up robot down in the engine room. I was up at five thirty. I'm sure glad we went to bed early!"
        "Did you eat yet?"
        "No, you hungry?"
        "Yeah. Computer, make a turkey and cheese omelette."
        I said "Computer, a turkey Denver."
        The stupid thing said "Error, no Turkish dishes named Denver are listed in the database."
        God damn stupid computer. "A Denver omelette with turkey meat you dumb computer."
        "Affirmative."
        "Fuck you."
        Destiny laughed. "Had your shower yet?"
        "No," I said, "Want to take one together?"
        "Sure," she said, with a twinkle in her eye. God, but I love that woman.
        We had a pretty long, really fun shower and ate our breakfast. By then it was almost eight. I kissed her and took a cup of coffee to the pilot room. We were going the right way and all the computers were agreeing with each other that everything was cool.
        After that I had inspection. The German woman was eating in the commons and the rest were asleep, except Lek who was in her quarters reading, still dressed. I complimented her on her clothing.
        "Thank you," she said. "I want Doctor Winters to cure me."
        "So do I," I said. "I want her to cure all of you."
        "I want that too," she said.
        I went down those five damned flights of stairs again to the bottom of the boat. The good generator was still good and the busted generator was still busted. So was engine seventeen, with the robot I'd plugged into it still working on it.
        It had been an easy inspection. I trudged up all those damned stairs. There were fifty or so women in the commons, pretty much behaving themselves.
        As I went in my quarters Destiny said "You're a little early. Done?"
        "Yeah, I hope so. Are you hungry?"
        She said yes, and laughed. "Computer, ham and beans."
        The computer replied, of course, "There are no pork products on the menu."
        I said "I think I'll have prime rib, baked potato and a glass of wine."
        "Sounds good to me," Destiny said.
        Right then a light lit up on the map. "Damn it," I said, and went to the pilot room to listen in. Thankfully it wasn't pirates, it was a boat from a different shipping company about five light minutes away.
        The robot was finished cooking lunch right after I got back, so we ate. Then we watched an old two dimensional movie called "The Blues Brothers", and I loved that movie! Funny as hell and it had some really great old classical music. Some of the musical greats from the time, like Ray Charles and John Lee Hooker were in it.
        The closing credits were rolling on the screen when an alarm went off in cargo nine. I hoped it was a drill. "Is cargo nine occupied?" I asked the computer.
        "Negative."
        That was Lek's room; she was in the commons. The light on her door was solid red, so I went in to investigate; there was no fire.
        I went to the commons to talk to Lek. "Here because of the fire drill?" I asked.
        "Drill? I thought my apartment really on fire! Scared me when the alarm go off."
        "Yeah, it was just a drill, you can go home if you want."
        "Thank you," she said.
        I went home myself and we had Polish sausage and sauerkraut with shikes for dinner. Destiny put on an old two dimensional western, True Grit.
        We'd each had a glass of wine with lunch and finished the bottle watching the western, since it would be sour by the next morning. No sense wasting it.
        We listened to a little Clapton when the movie was over and then we went to bed. It was still early but Destiny had gotten up earlier than normal and I'd gotten up way early and was just plumb wore out.

When I posted the last chapter, I'd started this one but it had been nowhere near finished. After posting the previous chapter I "finished" this one and the next, as well. So there will be a new chapter in a few days.

Smiles
        Destiny woke me up about seven thirty; I'd been the one up early the day before because of that engine. "Wake up, sleepyhead, or you won't have time for breakfast." She'd already made coffee had the robots make chicken cheese omelets. God but I love that woman, meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. Of course, were it not for the monsters I'd never have met her. You take the wonderful with the insanely horrible, I guess.
        We watched the news while we ate, but there was nothing new. A war had broken out in Africa, but there's always a war somewhere, it seems. People are stupid.
        Lankham Farms in Mexico closed down, citing Mexico's new environmental laws. The environmental regulations in almost all countries were strict to the point that raising pork just wasn't economical enough to earn any money. About the only place you could buy pork was from the fanciest farm restaurants, the kind you had to be a Dewey Green to afford eating at.
        Like I care about the price of pork. Sheesh.
        I finished breakfast, showered and got dressed, kissed Destiny and went to the pilot room for my normal morning routine.
        Everything in the pilot room checked out. There were no upstairs inspections today so I trudged down the five damned flights of stairs, which is better than trudging up them, and inspected the generators and engines. Yep, port generator and engine seventeen still broke. A robot was working on seventeen so I logged it.
        I got done quick today! Probably wasn't even noon yet. Destiny was in the commons drinking coffee with Tammy and Lek, who was still wearing clothes, although different ones. I wondered where she got them, probably traded drops to the naked animals for theirs. Or maybe Tammy gave her some, I don't know. I sat down with them and complimented Lek.
        "Thank you," she said.
        "You've come a long way, Lek. You should be proud." She smiled widely. Thailand is known as "the land of smiles" and unless they were short of drops the three on board were smiling almost all every time I saw them. Lots different than that German woman, who was always frowning and never seemed to smile.
        "Doctor Winters help me," she said. I was startled. "Tammy?" I said, really confused.
        "She's smart, John. She figured me out after a couple of weeks and confronted me. She noticed that I was the only one wearing clothes and had plenty of drops and she guessed correctly that I was pretending to be an addicted prostitute, so I told her I was a really a scientist studying them and trying to find a cure."
        "I no tell anybody," Lek said. "I only call her doctor when we alone. She say I not animal because I have respect, and animals no have respect."
        I asked "What was up with that one woman yesterday?"
        "She knocked her drops off of the sink and thought they went down the drain. She went through withdrawal for nothing, if she'd been in her right mind she would have realized that there's no way that bottle would fit down that drain."
        Then she started talking Thai with Lek. Lek said "We need speak English, they no understand." I gathered that Tammy spoke very good Thai and communication was easier between them in that language.
        "Uh," I said, "Are you working right now, Tammy?"
        "Well, kind of," she said.
        "I'm sorry, we're in the way" I responded.
        Destiny blushed. "Oh, God, Tammy, I'm sorry! You're making great progress, though. Both of you. Come on, John."
        We went home, ate lunch, and Destiny put on a two dimensional science fiction movie from the twentieth century, and it was funny as hell. I think it was called "Star Wars" or something. Huh? I don't know, it was Italian food, Destiny ordered it. Some kind of cheesy noodles with meat and tomato sauce. Huh? Oh, there's quite a few of those Star Wars movies. After the first one was so successful they made it into a trilogy. Back then computers were still way too primitive to make movies in so it was all models and puppets and probably drawings by hand. Oddly they shot episodes four through six first, and didn't shoot one through three for another twenty years, probably because the technology to do it wasn't there. It was another fifteen years before another was made.
        Then we had beef and beans for supper and watched Forever Old, a new holo.
        We listened to the Vaughn brothers for a while and went to bed.

The last nine chapters are ready to post, but the next 3 or 4 haven't yet been written so I don't know when the next chapter will be available.

What I've been doing is I'll read the whole thing, usually adding stuff and sometimes taking stuff out; I removed about a thousand words from one chapter. when I get to the next chapter to be posted is when they get posted, so I'll post the next few as I write them, then the rest as I edit.

I doubt I'll hit my 100,000 word goal, with so few chapters left to write and only 54,515 words in the manuscript as of now.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5444485&cid=47519545

"Sustainability" is, as far as I can see, a project designed to keep this culture - this lifestyle - afloat. The modern human economy is an engine of mass destruction. Of course, I am conflicted about this. I live at the heart of this machine; like you, I am a beneficiary of it. If it falls apart, I will probably suffer, and I don't want to. ...

I don't think any "climate movement" is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil "1%" destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you'll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world's wildlife in the last four decades alone."

http://grist.org/climate-energy/i-withdraw-a-talk-with-climate-defeatist-paul-kingsnorth/

China 'seals off' town after man dies of bubonic plague
"A Chinese town has been sealed off and 151 people placed in quarantine since last week after a man died of bubonic plague, state media said Tuesday.

The 30,000 people living in Yumen in the northwestern province of Gansu are not being allowed to leave, and police at roadblocks on its perimeter are telling motorists to find alternative routes, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said.

Other reports said that earlier this month the 38-year-old victim had found a dead marmot, a small furry animal which lives on grasslands and is related to the squirrel.

He chopped it up to feed his dog but developed a fever the same day. He was taken to hospital after his condition worsened and died last Wednesday."

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/24523564/china-seals-off-town-after-man-dies-of-bubonic-plague/

Think about that, while you make absolute positions...

"...Liberty, as defined in its truest negative sense, is freedom from external restraint. This, along with the principle of self-ownership, commands that nobody shall have the right to act on the body of another without their consent. But "property rights" as Gobry slyly calls them gives people precisely that right. For a right to property is not a right over a piece of the world, but rather a right to act on the bodies of others: to attack and externally restrain those bodies without consent.

In a world that respects liberty, people are free to do whatever they'd like, provided they do not act on the body of another (e.g. externally restrain it). This requires that people may walk about the world as they please, grabbing and utilizing any of its various pieces and resources as they go. No person may stop them from doing so because such stopping would impose an external restraint on their body, a destruction of their negative liberty.

Yet, this kind of liberty-destroying external restraint is precisely what property ownership is. In fact, it is the only thing that property is: a social relation of violent exclusion wherein the "owner" has claimed a right to attack other human beings if they try to act on a particular piece of the world. Claiming a "property right" does not change the piece of world that it is meant to attach to, nor the person claiming it. It merely advertises a terrifying threat: everyone else's pre-existing liberty to use this piece of the world is hereby extinguished at my violent hands whether they consent to have their liberty so destroyed or not."

http://mattbruenig.com/2014/07/23/does-nature-command-the-destruction-of-all-human-liberty/

Osama bin Laden in the Wall Street Journal

Engine
        An alarm woke me up at quarter to seven and for once I didn't mind a bit, and in fact I was glad it woke me up. I was in the middle of a really weird dream. A herd of cows was stampeding towards me, only they were running on their hind legs and somehow carrying big butcher knives in their front hooves, all singing a Chartov song while coming at me. Too many westerns, I guess.
        It was engine seventeen, something was wrong with it. I shut it down from the pilot room and started a pot of coffee perking before I shit, showered, and shaved. Destiny woke up about the time I was getting dressed.
        "What time is it?" she asked.
        "I don't know, maybe ten or fifteen after seven."
        "You're up early again!"
        "Yeah," I said. "Alarm woke me up from a really weird dream, something wrong with engine seventeen. I shut it down and corrected course so eight o'clock should be easy this morning. Hungry?"
        "I probably will be. What are you having?"
        "Steak and scrambled eggs and toast. Should I have the robot make you that?"
        "Sure, only I want my eggs sunny side up. Is there any good coffee made?"
        "Yeah, I made a pot, most of it is still left."
        She got out of bed and put on a robe and followed me into the dining room, where the robot was already cooking our breakfast. I put the news on. Not much new, some problem at that big Venus station, an outbreak of some disease they thought had been eradicated decades earlier. They were worried it might get back to Earth.
        I think they only have the news to scare people and make them worry.
        We ate our breakfast and drank coffee and Destiny started a second pot as I went back to the pilot room for the eight o'clock readings. Like I figured they were fine, and I was sure glad because this was going to be another busy day, what with number seventeen shut down and today I had to inspect cargo.
        The passenger section was, like usual, a big waste of time. Cargo were all asleep except the German woman, who was in the commons with Tammy, and a girl named Angel who was bending over the sink. She turned around and looked at me with those scary red monster eyes. I freaked out, ran, and ordered the door locked behind me and called Tammy.
        "We have a serious problem," I said. "Angel is going through withdrawal."
        "What? I left her a dose, someone must have stolen it. I'll be right there." She came running down the hall holding her fone. "How bad is she?"
        "Bad," I said. "Redeye bad."
        "Oh, no," she said. "I'll be right back, try to keep that door closed. If she gets out we're all dead."
        "Wait! Where are you going?"
        "To rig up a spray bottle. This is going to be very dangerous but it has to be done." She ran to her quarters.
        I had an idea and pulled out my fone. "Computer," I said, "what's the best way to knock that bitch out?"
        The fone said "Parse error, there are no female dogs on board and 'knock' is not in context. Please rephrase."
        Who programs these God damned stupid things, anyway? Back when computers were new, speculative fiction movies had computers that could think. These stupid computers sure can't. God damn it, I was going to have to talk like I went to college... only I ain't went to college, damn it.
        "Uh, how can I..." I had to think a minute. "Make the woman in cargo twenty two go to sleep fast with the least amount of harm?"
        The fone said "waiting until she falls asleep naturally would cause the least harm." Stupid computer.
        "What will cause her to, uh... lose consciousness quickly with the least amount of harm?"
        "Replacing the air with an inert gas would accomplish the task," it said. Whatever the hell an "inert gas" is.
        "Okay," I told it, "replace the air in cargo twenty two with an inert gas."
        "Please choose which inert gas you wish to replace it with."
        God damn computers! "What gas will knock... uh, put her to sleep with the least damage?"
        "Nitrogen, he..."
        "Computer, replace the air in cargo twenty two with nitrogen and then open the door when she goes to sleep."
        "Complying."
        The door opened, and Tammy came running back carrying a spray bottle. "It's okay," I said. "She's not conscious, I knocked her out."
        "Wow, John, remind me not to piss you off," She said. She took care of Angel while I finished my inspection. There was some minor damage to her sink, and I wondered what the hell that crazy animal was trying to do. As I was leaving the room, a medic Tammy had summoned rolled in.
        I'd do the commons and sick bay after the engines and generators.
        Everything was fine down there, all things considered. The generator was a little warm, but readings said it had been a lot warmer at seven.
        All the engines except seventeen were fine. Seventeen had shorted out; we were lucky the alarm went off or either the generator would have probably been damaged so bad it would have to be rebuilt, or the rest of the engines might have fried, or both. I logged it; the robot was already working on it. We'd be fine with only one engine out. At one time earlier in the trip I'd had three or four that weren't lit, but there are a hell of a lot of the huge things.
        I checked out the rest of the monstrously big things. That's where I spend most of my work day usually, downstairs inspecting engines since there were so many of them and they all had to be inspected.
        I trudged back up the five damned flights of stairs and decided to have lunch before finishing inspections; it was already twelve thirty and I was starved.
        I had a cheeseburger and Afghan style fried potatoes for lunch. Destiny had a steak chef salad, joking about pork. Her pig jokes made me think about the German woman.
        "I still have a little more work," I told her. "Engines took forever today because of number seventeen, I spent half an hour on just that one alone. I still have to inspect the sick bay and commons. Want to go for a walk when we finish eating?"
        "Sure," she said. "I'll come along."
        We finished eating and walked to sick bay. I inspected it and we went into the commons, where Lek and Tammy were drinking coffee and eating turkey sandwiches. Lek was still wearing clothes and acting pretty damned ladylike for a dropper. Tammy was doing some damned good work with that one, she should be proud.
        We got back home at two or three and destiny put on an old two dimensional comedy western named "Wagons East". It was a really silly movie and we laughed our asses off watching it. Destiny said that part of this one had to be done in a computer because one of the stars, the fat guy who played the wagon master, died before they finished shooting and they had to map his face to a body double. She said computers used in movies was still really new when that one was made.
        When it was over we ate a poor man's dinner; prime rib, baked potato, salad, and wine. I only drank one glass, I hate hangovers. Especially wine hangovers.
        I did have two beers while we watched The Underpass. That's a new one, you guys probably saw it already.
        We listened to some old classical blues and cuddled when it was over and went to bed.

"From its creation by DoD contracts and grants to research institutions, there have been aspersions cast by those easily dismissed as "fringe" commentators, on the nefarious, or at least covert, motivation to create the Internet. Conspiracy theory may have been met by reality in recent months with now commonplace reporting, first by Wikileaks and later, in the more extensive Edward Snowden revelations. It is still almost canon, that NSA mass-surveillance and warrantless information analysis occurred through coopting the burgeoning Internet, and diverting traffic in a way that is counter to the ideals of its creators and promoters. But what if the social, commercial Internet were always intended as a sort of giant honeypot? The idea would still seem farfetched, if it weren't recently disclosed by William Binney that the NSA is recording 80% of all US phone conversations â" not simply metadata. Closer examination of the record shows that ARPAnet was being used to clandestinely gather information on the legitimate activities of US citizens â" and transmit the information to the US Army Intelligence Command NSA â" as far back as 1968! According to articles published in 1975 by MIT in "The Tech":

  "via the ARPANET, a computer network connecting more than 50 government agencies and universities throughout the country. The network is funded by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)... The information, according to intelligence sources, was transferred and stored at the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA), at Fort Meade, Maryland. The Army files were transmitted on the ARPANET in about January 1972, sources say, more than two years after the material â" and the data banks maintained at the [Army's] Fort Holabird facility â" were ordered destroyed."

MIT officials were worried 40 years ago, about this abuse of interconnected TCP communications and the complicity of their own research scientists. These concerns arose at the height of the Watergate fallout and downfall of President Nixon for illegal wiretapping and information theft allegations. The danger of Government "record keeping" was outlined by Senator Sam Ervin, in an address to MIT that was also profiled in the same publication. Clearly, this did not begin in the last decade, and clearly pre-dates the 2001 "Global War on Terror" pretext. It is important to remember, the NSA was an almost unknown agency at this time, and was chartered to strictly forbid intel on US citizens and those dwelling within US borders."