Category: Technology

The Great Radiation Flood

The great radiation flood of 2212 was a tipping point for humanity and one hell of a shock for the US President of the time. President Rip van Trumplestein, a third generation Mexus, was just in the middle of a World speech on the success of the 98th Climate change programme when his hair started to singe in the midday sun in Fairbanks Alaska.

Anyways, as ‘Old Don’ (as he was known to his supporters) got doused in firespray by one of his bodyguards, news broke from the Earth Space Platform that 2 black holes had collided in deep space. The net result of this collision was a massive release of cosmic radiation that had, on that day, hit the Earth.

Radiation symbol

Of course ‘Old Don’ had been told about this several years before and he had dismissed it as ‘fake scaremongering’ originating from Sinosovurea, that was designed to wreck the ozone layer regeneration industry on Earth. Well having got that one wrong, and with his rather dodgy hair smoldering, Old Don went back to hosting ‘Play your Fossil Fuels Right’ a much-loved reality airplay show (well it wasn’t really loved but his cronies told him it was).

Meanwhile on Earth, regeneration of the ozone layer became a real priority and production of ozone in the upper atmosphere was rapidly increased, but due to the high energy requirements of ozone generation, Earth began to quickly warm up. Fortunately at around this  time, Professor Wai-Nott had advanced with his experiments on Bryllium and within a few months of the initial first flood of radiation, Earth had a new ozone equivalent layer to protect its former President’s beard.

Air Stars

Earth used to have film stars or movie stars or TV or music stars, when entertainment was totally dependent on some physical piece of hardware (TV, music player etc), that a user had to turn on and connect to the world wide thingummyjig wotsit, or whatever it used to be called.

But then the engineers at some company named after a fruit, suggested people could be simply implanted with a chip that would allow them to see and listen to performers essentially in the air in front of their eyes.

Image of brain

Of course, most people thought this was bananas (not the name of the company) as how would it work in practice?. I mean if you were sitting in a train would the images appear in front of your face and would everyone else see that and hear that?

Well no, actually it didn’t work like that at all. You see if you were in a public space the aircast would effectively play inside your head. You would see and hear everything you would on a physical display but it would be private, inside your head wherever you were. When you were at home or at work you could connect what was in your head to an external display.

Airplay technology led to a new revolution in entertainment and many performers were never actually seen live at all but only through aircasts (i.e. inside people’s heads) – some of these performers became cult figures and mega-rich. Hence the term ‘Airstars’. In fact, I often play one in my head and he’s 12 and a multi-billionaire – another one of the MacBeckham clan that bought Scotland centuries ago.