Category: future

RickRock’s Brother now Immersed in Scandal

Speak4U recently launched its advanced Persona service. Providing people with a way to use their time more efficiently, public figures can have their programmable personas represent them at events or interviews. Personas are linked to cerebrum bio-chips implanted into the human they represent.

One of the first exponents of Speak4U personas was Earth’s biggest airstar, Rock Quarrey, the younger brother of Rick Rock. Recently one of Mr. Quarrey’s Personas was accused of improper comments towards an event avatar. Similar accusations were made against RickRock earlier in the year.  Representatives of the Rocks have denied that the Personas thinking is linked to theirs. Whilst investigations continue, Rock’s management team have pulled all Personas from public places. 

This is the second such scandal to hit Speak4U and the Rock entertainment dynasty now teeters on a knife-edge.

The Silurian Silkworm Affair – Act II

Onwards and Upwards

As I felt the ship start to move slowly upward, I watched my Rubanon companion as he busied himself again, this time at multiple console screens. He was alternately tapping away at and then staring for a few moments at one screen or the other, presumably as the results of his tappings were displayed. Though a robot, to all intents and purposes, due to clever body sculpting, Cat looked like an ordinary domestic cat. However, unlike the genuinely ordinary moggie, Cat has really serious airs and graces and conducts himself as though he were the Crown Prince of the Universe. As a consequence he really was the most annoying of companions, frequently doing things without telling me and never fully explaining what was going on from one minute to the next. He was supposed to be my assistant and bodyguard but often it felt as though I was the servant and he was the master. You see, being an Intergalactic tax inspector was not the most popular of vocations and many an inspector like me had found this out the hard way through a variety of means, including painful death. So Cat was there primarily to support me with facts and figures but also to ensure that clients behaved themselves and that I returned to Earth in as few pieces as possible. As mentioned, he has a Rubanon outer skin which makes him pretty indestructible, though a T. Rex nearly bit him in half once. Now that’s a story – and of course, once again, I can tell you, I saved his bacon on that mission.

And me? Well, as I’ve indicated I am an Intergalactic Tax Inspector (an ITI). Wow, and what a job. I would never have dreamed of a job like this when I graduated from my local Learning World at the age of 27 with 137 digital badges covering topics from languages, alien lifeforms, history, lasers in society, through to communication skills, martial arts, and mathsomics. I was fully expecting to drift from homework to homework earning variable sums of credit. How lucky I was to be recommended by one of my old tutors (who obviously realised how talented I was) for a government-sponsored fast-track civil service programme. Fully expecting to become a government official, proofreading and air publishing new galaxy laws, I managed to get on the wrong hoverbus outside the new trainee transit station and the next thing I knew someone was taking my arithmetic capabilities to a new level and telling me that I was going to become an ITI.

So here I am, several years later earning a good salary, traveling the galaxy with my trusty (ha ha) companion Cat, checking out the tax affairs of individuals and major corporations across many globes. Despite all of our constant bickering, we had been on many missions together now and had become known for dealing with complex tax investigations. Over the years these investigations increasingly had less to do with tax and more to do with saving the Earth from one dastardly alien plot or another.  Of course, he (Cat) would have many believe that much of my success was down to him. But I knew better. I had lost count of the number of times I had pulled his furry tail out of the fire. We sometimes would undertake missions on good old Earth, in between our space travels, and here again, all of my skills and staggering capabilities came forth to ensure I succeeded, helping to make Cat look vaguely useful in the process. Cat acknowledged my skills, only recently telling me that my capabilities rivaled the most intelligent amoeba he’d ever studied. Cat was currently writing up the thesis for his 15th Doctorate degree!!. Boy, what a know-all!!

To be continued….

The Bees Knees

In recent decades, hornet-like insects that were first brought to Earth inadvertently from Siluria on imported rugs, have been progressively devastating the bee population on Earth. This has had inevitable consequences on key crop production as all attempts to control the problem with pesticides have failed.

A new growth company, BusiNeeds has come up with a solution. Artificial bees. The so-called ‘Buzzar’ is an AI or mini-robot that works just like a bee, landing on flowers and leaving with pollen sacs attached to its mini robotic legs.

The Buzzar not only works like a bee but looks enough like a bee to fool the Silurian hornets into attacking them. However, when a hornet takes on a Buzzar it gets more than it bargained for, as the Buzzar’s legs are flexible and strong enough to wrap around the hornet’s body and crush it.

In just completed field trials, not only was crop pollination unaffected by the presence of hornets, but the hornet population declined rapidly, whilst at the same time the natural bee population rose markedly.

Airpods

It was in the late 21st Century when SkyPad first experimented with modular airborne housing. Done at the time as a response to overcrowding in parts of Asia, the early lightweight rectangular living modules were a great success. Despite some early issues associated with waste disposal, once SkyPad adapted processes for such things exploiting technology used by space travelers, this approach to dealing with overpopulated parts of the planet became mainstream.

For years however, all pods were identical rectangular units that could be fitted together to form a floating district. Each unit however could rapidly and selectively be disconnected from the whole for maintenance or refurbishment.

A recent collaboration between SkyPad and Duplo has finally broken the architectural mould for floating districts. People can now purchase living pods in a full range of colours and shapes. This means that not everyone now needs to live in an airpod with regularly shaped rooms. The Psychological Directorate for Healthy Living has applauded this change as a major step towards addressing a range of personality disorders linked to airpod sickness that can be associated with the bland regularity of traditional airpods.

Mergers outstrip Marriage

Mergers are now officially the most popular form of recognised union between two people. In 2222, mergers made up 57% of all formal multiple-person relationships, with marriage and civil partnerships making up the balance.

In a merger, none of the partners undertakes to remain faithful to the other or others, though any key inter-dependencies like children, property, and possessions are guaranteed defined proportional support from each partner for either 5, 15 or 25 years depending upon the nature of the merger. Facilitated and managed by AdulterUS, mergers are strictly enforced. The social thought network element of AdulterUS actively supports individuals in arranging extra-merger relationships with full disclosure to all formally connected partners.

97% of couples in mergers rate their quality of life as high and consider themselves happy and fulfilled. Half of the remaining 3% are serving life sentences in state renovation centres.