The Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 2: Research

He stared into the darkened ceiling.
The concept of “bureaucratic efficiency” had been an oxymoron since the creation of bureaucrats. His request for a separate space to simply sit and think quietly was almost unheard of in that day and time, so the agency disregarded it. Instead, he got a ship like all the others. It [...]

The Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 1: Travel

In the ancient literature, they called it “hyperspace.” Lacking the conceptual tools for discussing the means for spatial displacement which didn’t require actually crossing the space, they came up with a word which missed the point, but was still popularly used. The technical explanations were not his specialty, but he was aware enough to be [...]

Couldn’t Have Guessed

He never expected to live this long. In the middle of his first century of life, nobody could have guessed how simple it was to remove most of the artificial pollutants. All that business about “natural” nutrients pretty much revolutionized medicine, once the calcified establishment lost its grip on things. Replacing the technology which created [...]

Global Deception

“I’m out of my mind right now. Please leave a message.”
It was a clever joke on the t-shirt. It was no joke to him.
As he sat on the stone wall, the sound of water trickling gently in the fountain behind him, he was sure he was going mad. Half-turning to look, he wondered if the [...]

Meanwhile, Out There on Mars

Merzan stroked his ocular extensions with seven-fingered hands. Okay, not really seven fingers, since two were thumbs on opposite sides of his palms. It gave a different meaning to “opposable thumbs” but no humans would ever get the joke. Merzan and his kind had no use for humans, except as a source of some useful [...]