Dawn of the Dish-People: Part III

I was about to call out again when my dish-friend’s voice came back. “Whew, sorry about that, we had some problems we had to deal with…”

“What happened?” I asked guiltily.

“We just had this huge pulse strike our magnetic poles, shook us up for a while.”

“What?!?” I asked.

“You ever experience such a thing?”

“Not personally,” I stammered, “actually I don’t really know.” Was I somehow responsible for this? “Everybody okay?”

“Well, we lost a few citizens but we went to a ‘Global Emergency’ and pretty much hunkered down and took care of it. I suppose we have you to thank for not losing more than we did…”

“Uh” was all I could say. My stoned mind raced back to first year physics (switched to English after that one, Christ, the math!?!) wondering if the electromagnetic bond between atoms in the spoon, or my hand or the water had somehow disrupted their infinitely tiny little planetary system. Finally a legitimate excuse for not doing the dishes: untold millions of subatomic lives could be lost, man! Unless of course I’m crazy which is most likely the case.

“What I mean is” Pardblook explained, “that before we discovered your existence, the nations of my planet couldn’t do anything together, fighting over stupid things, in fact the same types of things for millions of years.”

“Sounds like Earth,” I added unconsciously, more to myself than anybody.

“You guys still do the war thing?” he sounded sorry for me. For us.

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t like to think about it, honestly.” I thought about the India/Pakistan conflict, a vague but threatening blob in my mind involving a situation in which nuclear weapon use is being talked about almost as casually as if they were sandwiches. “I guess I feel like a decision is made by very few people and things get all heated up and all of a sudden whole populations of people are killing each other.”

“What do you fight about,” Pardblook asked sadly.

“As far as I can tell, since the beginning of time it’s been about either land and access to resources, or religion.” I responded. Its funny (as in ridiculous) that it breaks down like that, but I still think that covers most wars fairly adequately when you come right down to it. “You know, I had a Prof in university who always urged us to remember that all borders on all maps were first drawn by human hands; that if you look at the Earth from space there are no little squiggly lines all over everything. All you have is a lot of water and a bit of land and the beings that eke out an existence on and in it.”

Pardblook sighed. “I know it all too well. My world suffered the same problems. Right before we established contact with you there was talk of one nation blowing up another before the other bombed them first, that was the thinking, you know? However, when we had unquestionable evidence that we were not alone in the Universe, we realized we could no longer afford to think as a bunch of little squabbling back-yards. Because of you, twenty years ago all of our nations amalgamated into one big one, in which ‘everybody votes, everybody can read and nobody starves’. That was the motto and it turned out to be a pretty damn good one.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. So then we took all the world’s militaries and converted them into Global Repair, Preservation and Emergency Response Systems. We took all that destructive energy and knowledge and used it to build a cannon on one of our moons designed to blow up potentially apocalyptic asteroids. We find it’s a whole lot more productive than killing each other. Saved our asses twice now.”

I remembered hearing about a near-Earth orbit-crossing asteroid not too long ago, one of those cosmic near-miss situations. I also thought about NASA and other worthy organisations getting poor funding while the U.S. has just developed another brand new pilot-less bomber plane. Remote controlled destruction and mayhem, you don’t even have to leave the sanctity of your top-secret, nuclear bomb-proof stronghold these days.

“We discovered we had a lot of resources and man-power when everybody didn’t have to fight each other anymore,” Pardblook continued, jolting me out of my extremely depressing thoughts. “We were able to colonize two of our moons and a few of our surrounding planets within just a few short years. It’s been a renaissance, and this conversation between me and you will be in the history books forever. Many thanks, Remy,” he said somberly, “for everything.”

‘And I’d had nothing to do today,’ I thought to myself. A side thought was pulsing through my brain, which swivelled and focused on it. “Twenty years ago you amalgamated into one nation and it’s because of me? How long have we been having this conversation, Pardblook?”

“Well, twenty-two years I guess now? How long for you?” The joint had made my concept of time a little sketchy but it was either 15 minutes or two hours. I settled on forty-five minutes and said so.

“Coupled with that dish and sink comments you made earlier, our meta-physicists assure me that from your point of view, twenty-three of our years could indeed appear to be forty-five minutes in your time.”

I thought about those pauses Pardblook would take and come back with some kind of kooky vote or something. “Since our conversation began,” Pardblook informed me, “many people have written papers and received awards for discussing the nature of our existences, your world and mine. One of the more popular theories called ‘Cosmic Relativity’ states that an individual’s concept of ‘the Universe’ is relative to that individual’s position in it. Our vast unfathomable Universe is the subatomic world of your dishes. In this system, time also becomes relative to the orbital level of your existence. One orbit for us takes our year, but to you it’s less than a blink of an eye. However,” he continued, “as small as we are to you…”

“I dig,” I said, tripping. “As small as your world is to me, I may be that small compared to the next level of existence,” I finished overtop of his voice. What pride I felt for my hungover mind for arriving at this thought. What great weed. My Sun is someone else’s subatomic particle. “So my vast unfathomable Universe might also be wholly contained in somebody else’s sink too, I guess.”

“Or their shitter,” Pardblook joked. “That’s ‘Cosmic Relativity’.”

“And I ain’t jack-shit!” I blurted. I gotta say I was laughing my ass off.

“I guess,” he continued, “you suffer no transmission lag then?”

“Uh, no. Pretty much instantaneous. What’s the lag on your end?”

“About eighteen months if there are no intervening religious movements or world disasters like that electromagnetic pulse.”

“Religious movements?”

“Oh yeah,” Pardblook sounded tired. “See the religious types see it as some kind of affront that we still talk to you. They try to pull the plug all the time.”

“What for?” I demanded. Religious dish-beings…

“Well they think that your existence is an affront to their belief, since you’re not a god or anything, just an average joe. It means we aren’t the center of creation anymore, hell, we might even be completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We must be if we’re ‘in your dishes’ right?”

“Do you feel that way, Pardblook?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he admitted, “but then I think; is it such a bad thing to be insignificant? To be this infinitesimal cog in some broad overarching plan, the scope of which nobody will ever know or even adequately grasp? I find insignificance actually gives me a sense of personal freedom, you know?”

“Yeah I catch your drift there man.” I laughed. “Your story reminded me of something that happened on my planet. This guy Galileo…” I paused for a second. “You ever hear of Galileo, Pardblook?” You’ll most likely never learn for yourself so let me tell you; when you spend a hung-over morning conversing with a brand new civilisation created inadvertently by your own bad housekeeping skills, you learn to check out all the angles. You see a couple new possibilities on the horizon, so to speak.

“Nope,” he responded “buddy of yours?”

“Famous scientist” I responded. I had asked because I was beginning to wonder if I were communicating with the type of parallel Earth universe ideas you used to only come across in the comic books. “See, previous to this Galileo guy, the dominant mode of thought was that our star -we call it the Sun- revolved around our planet – which we call the Earth. So Galileo gets the idea from this other guy that it has to be the other way around, but Galileo actually proves it. But the religious types find this thinking kind of threatening, because if we’re not the center of attention anymore, maybe we’re not the most important thing in the Universe after all, you know? So what happens to him, the Church places him under house arrest till the day he dies! And for what? Something everybody on earth now takes completely for granted as a universal truism! But the kicker,” was I rambling? Screw it. “The kicker is this: he was put under house arrest in like the early 1700s. Well, one day the Church came down off their high horse and admitted they’d kind of shit the bed on the whole house arrest and book banning, so they went and ‘pardoned’ Galileo for his non-crime, do you want to know what year that was? I’ll tell you: 1992! Hah!! That’s three hundred years, man! This comin’ from the guys who are always saying you gotta turn the other cheek! It took ‘em over three hundred years to turn their sanctimonious cheek for one of the greatest minds in history!”

Whew, I was nearly out of breath, and took the last slurp of my coffee. My stomach was threatening a revolt by performing slow somersaults due to its lack of solids to absorb the powerful java. My brain was involved with the dish scenario, so it decided to stick to its guns. “I often wonder what scientific discoveries or advances were sacrificed due to his internment, his lack of freedom. You know? I mean, maybe he could have discovered gravity instead of Kepler and Newton and those guys. Never know I guess.”

I was sort of lost in my thoughts as I imagined this old bearded lonely man, totally discouraged for proving the single most important discovery of his time, arguably ever. I was getting melancholic when Pardblook jolted me from my reveries.

“Well you’ve certainly caused a lot of fuss this time,” Pardblook informed me. “The religious types are outraged at you (and me, by the way) and everybody else is outraged at the religious types. Meanwhile our scientists are very curious about this discovery you mentioned called gravity. Is it something we might find of use? It’s not a weapon or anything is it? We don’t need any new creative ways to kill each other around here, thank-you very much.”

“Gravity?” I asked. What kind of scientists didn’t know what gravity was? They seemed to have no trouble understanding everything else I said and their world seemed quite similar to mine. “You must have a different name for it. It’s the force that holds you to your planet and holds your planet in orbit around a star etc. Your scientists must have a word for that?”

“Aah, of course,” Pardblook responded confidently. “We call that Magnetism. The one force in the Universe from which all things flow…”

“Hold on,” my brow furrowed and my brain chose precisely that moment to softly detach itself from the left side of my skull and back to center again.
Just like that, the backburner thought shifted and blossomed and I remembered where I heard that song. My girlfriend Faith slept over the night before and she set the alarm for herself. I have a clock-radio and choose to use a fuzzy and warm golden oldies station to wake up to instead of that monstrously evil buzzing that some people –savages- use to jar themselves into the world everyday. The girlfriend had set the alarm but left before it went off and it took nearly the full song for me to muster the strength to turn it off. That’s where the People-of-the-dishes had heard ‘Age of Aquarius’. Whew.

I returned to the topic at hand. “We have magnetism here too, but we have another force called gravity. I guess it works for the larger stuff, beyond the atoms and particles and stuff, like when you get to planets and satellites and stars…” how could I simplify this, I wondered. “Matter,” I said finally, “masses.” How could they have gone to other planets and moons and stuff if they didn’t even know what gravity was?

“What do you need another force for?” Pardblook returned. “Our scientists are kind of stumped. You say electromagnetism is responsible for atomic and molecular interactions, but larger items use this ‘gravity?’ No matter how big the mass, it’s still just a collection of atoms, right? Well, a collection of atoms is a collection of magnetic energy...”

“Well yeah,” I began, realizing it had been a while since I’d last thought about any kind of physics whatsoever. “But the interaction between masses is called gravity, I’m pretty sure it’s a different force…”

“Pardon me,” Pardblook interrupted, “but you say that an interaction between masses, between bundles of magnetic energy, is not an magnetic interaction but an entirely different one?!? Are you joking with me, Remy? We can’t afford to joke man! I’m getting old, you know!”

“I’m not joking!” I shouted at my dishes. What did he mean he was getting old? “Look, I’m not a scientist okay? What if I went and got somebody to explain it to you?”

“You could do that?” he asked. “Certainly, our scientists would be very interested to learn of this extra force of yours.”

“It’s not an extra force!” I shouted again, exasperated. To them somehow it was, I realized. “Just hold on,” I urged my subatomic friend. “I’m going to get an expert on this.”

I ran out of the house in my flip plops and bath-robe, with a beer I’d somehow picked up in the process. I jumped into my car, my mind racing like fire. What I clearly needed to do was get a scientist from good old Earth to talk sense to these guys, because I was confusing myself.

Time seemed to be an important concept to keep track of in this case. I realized that by the time I was fifteen minutes away, that my buddy Pardblook at his level of existence would probably have aged considerably in what is such a short span of time at my level of existence! If he was even still alive! What’s a half-hour of my time compared to his world? This would have to be a pretty big transmission lag, wouldn’t it?

I liked Pardblook and realized that I didn’t say goodbye to him. I hoped he would be still alive and if not, then that whoever was voted in as his successor would be just a dude, like him, average joe. Some of that stuff he’d said was actually starting to make sense to me too. Imagine a world so like ours but no more wars! Everybody eats, reads and votes! Explore space! Imagine a universe in which there was just one force that governed all physical phenomena! Kooks these people of the dishes were, but let me tell you, some of that kookiness I could catch hold of and make my own, you know what I’m saying?

Dawn of the Dish-People: Part II

One of the Great Truisms of life is the unequivocal fact that you are some type of nutcase if you believe your dishes are trying to communicate with you. Another Great Truism, though lesser known, is that a bachelor’s kitchen sink is the ideal primordial funk for the genesis of new life. Consider it: What range of random grotesquerie exists within that sink? What grand melange of food particles, booze, and leftover soap-scum from previous, hopelessly abandoned cleaning attempts? What unknowable grunge and undreamt of filth? Perhaps the more important question is precisely how long has this random concoction been left to mix and rot together? Is there really any legitimate way of knowing?

Oh yeah, I know how this all sounds, believe me. I’m only too aware of the clichés about people hearing voices and doing crazy shit, guys in loony bins that wear aluminum foil hats to protect themselves from alien thought-control rays and shit. I know about that stuff. But what can I say, it was happening to me and it felt legit. What would you do?

“You might be interested to know,” the voice returned after another slight delay, “we just had a vote and the majority of us do not believe you are the creator of the Universe. ”

“That's a relief,” I said, getting perplexeder and perplexeder, and still more perplexed. Dig my democratic dishware, voting and shit. “What are you talking about?”

“Okay, it’s like this: We intercepted your radio signals about eleven years ago and discovered that we are not alone in the Universe, that something was transmitting a signal uncommon to our usual cosmic background and that it had a beat. The discovery of the beat led to the discovery of musical tones, and finally our scientists were able to sift through the music and get to what they assumed were words. Once the words were isolated, it was nothing for our linguistics experts to decipher it and learn your language in all its delightful nuances, intricacies and contradictions. We certainly had a laugh about onomatopoeia, let me tell you!” He chuckled, as did I, though I hadn’t the foggiest notion why.

“Some of our brightest mathematicians are developing logarithms” my dishes continued, “that should some day give us the history of your existence within a few decimal places!”

I farted long and gustily. Back-burner thought moves to the front: Where did I hear that damned song? The gray matter that carried the relevant information was still adhered to the side of my cranium. Need liquid. Thought returns to back-burner.

“Eventually our scientists were able to broadcast your message around the world and it was this lofty sort of tune which led some of the religious types to believe it was a message from the creator of all things, and the scientists disagreed, saying that it was another civilization. Quite a caffuffel went on and finally it was decided that the only fair way to communicate with you was to pick a citizen chosen completely at random by our very best computers. So I’m like the middleman, your average joe.”

“No shit,” I responded, “that’s a pretty heavy responsibility.” I smoked a joint in sympathy.

“You’re telling me?” the voice laughed. “So, not a god huh?”

“Only in the sack,” I responded, exhaling long and deep (where had I heard that song, c’mon man!), “No, I’m just your average joe, like you.” Was this really happening? The herb relaxed me a little bit though, took the edge off the weirdness of the situation, funktified it up a little. “Fortified with funktitude” I unwittingly said aloud.

“Pardon?” asked the voice.

“Nothin’,” I responded. “Hey listen, my name is Remy.” Which is my name by the way.

“Pardblook” he said introducing himself. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, stellar” I said. My brain was thinking about a little coffee and my stomach thought it should take priority, having lost on the whole milk-cereal thing. My brain won. Because it calls the shots, baby.

“Hah,” he chuckled politely. Apparently I’d punned in there somewhere? “So where is your planet or system located, Remy?” he continued.

I went about the machinations of coffee preparation, careful to not let any water fall into my suddenly loquacious sink, don’t want to fuck with the mix just yet, you know? I also slugged back a large gulp of water directly from the Britta in the fridge, some of which sloshed over the rim and onto my bare toes. I thought back to my first year astronomy course. “Outer edge of the Milky Way Galaxy.” There’s five years and untold thousands in student loan for you. Bastards’ll never take me alive, I swear it.

“Milky Way huh? Never heard of it,” said Pardblook, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“And you?” I intoned, “are in my kitchen sink.” Pardblook paused again while my coffeemaker gurgled noisily. I never clean it and the coffee is delicious, these are two facts which you may or may not link as cause and effect. Me, I’m indifferent.

“Well,” Pardblook spoke when he returned from wherever, “coupled with that dish comment you made earlier, our meta-physicists assure me that from your point of view we can in fact be considered to be located in your sink. Logical, doesn’t sound very dignified though does it?”

“At least it’s not the shitter,” I added helpfully.

“I suppose. Hold on a second, would you?” he asked. I looked at my coffee-maker which had just stopped gurgling. “I’m not going anywhere” I drawled casually, and I wasn’t. I poured myself a coffee and checked the fridge knowing full well it was completely devoid of meaningful food (possibly a couple more experiments in there, too) or coffee accoutrements. Always have sugar though, I always lift a handful from the coffee joints (napkins too, tons of napkins. Often double as shit-tickets. Love wipin’ my ass with Starbucks man, love it. Do it every day). Without thinking, I grabbed a spoon out of the sink to stir my coffee.

The human brain sometimes becomes so accustomed to performing some actions that it’s like the higher functions just turn themselves off and let auto-pilot take over. That’s my only explanation I have for turning on the faucet of the sink with which I had been having such a nice conversation. “Pardblook?” I called cautiously.

“Hold on Remy,” was all he said, gravely. I waited anxiously and sipped my coffee. I wondered what I’d say to anybody who showed up in my apartment right about then. Anxiously waiting for my dishes to collect themselves. Praying they would be okay. Anxious to resume our conversation. Not bloody much, is my guess.

No Juice Chapter 3: the Dirty Rogue Rules of Existence

I found Frenchie outside a small tent, not too far away from the Warpig. Just far enough he’d probably say. “Some light show, uh?” he asked me. “Worl’ comin’ to and end or what?” I shrugged. What the hell did I know?

I’d instantly liked the fellow, in spite of having been somewhat of a prisoner when I’d first met him and in spite of him having openly taken advantage of the fact. He’d have taken anything he had a use for. This was the way, these days and I’d lost more than a pack of smokes and a battery in the days behind me. Would lose a lot more in the days ahead of me. Or maybe that was all over since I’d become a Dirty Rogue.

A Dirty Rogue. Did things just get better or worse? Am I more likely to survive or die? I’d found the T-Rex and realized the quest had only now, after all these many years, just begun. Frenchie jumped up, gave me a thorough inspection.

“Two arms, two legs and a head?!? Well done, bro!” Frenchie gave a mock roar, his fingers splayed to mimic claws, “T-Rex didn’t want to eat you?”

“Nope.”

“Recruited you, huh?”

“Yup.”

“Stealin’ juice?”

“Looks like. T-Rex says I’m useless as bugger-all til I do.”

“Truer words never spoke,” he pointed at me, serious for probably the first time. “Welcome to my world, Media.” He pulled an honest-to-god actual cigarette and to my amazed eyes, lit it.

“I haven’t seen a cigarette in…” I tried to figure it but couldn’t, “well, a long fuckin’ time!”

He took a deep draw. When was the last time I’d seen a cigarette? “I know,” the cat winked, “I mus’ be the las’ smoker in the worl,’ uh Media?” He probably was. “Da filters I foun’ somewhere in Germany. Leaves ain’t real tobacco but it reminds me of it.”

It’s a deeply ingrained habit, the smokes, making my mouth water just looking at it. Amazing, to have outlasted nearly all our other addictions, all neatly trumped by the biggest, most wide-ranging addiction of all: Juice, or lack thereof, priced all other addictions right out of existence. Like your booze, need your smokes or dig your crack? We’re out. Forever. What are you going to do now?

“Dirty Rogues is a big operation,” he began, jarring me from thoughts, I mean, is he going to let me have a drag off that thing or what? “you wanna know what any big operation is all about?” he quizzed me before answering his own question. “Juice. You know ‘dis, right?” I nodded. It made sense.

“We get it where we can find it. Barter for it when we can, take it when we got to,” he shrugged like what’re you gonna do, y’know? Around us the campsite was coming to life, Rogues shaking sleep out of their eyes, grumbling against the Fates and cursing the T-Rex. Quietly.

“Any military has an infantry, since da dawn of time,” Frenchie continued. “T-Rex sees us as his infantry. Cuz he knows the essential fact ‘a da Oil Wars: putting bullets into somebody is a peripheral task. Done only when you absolutely must so as not to waste any of dat which should not be wasted. On a battlefield full of assholes that are trying to steal from you every bit as much as you are of him? It’s shit like this, make him a great man. I don’t like him, not one bit, but…” he trailed off, maybe enjoying his smoke or maybe just not wanting to talk anymore about the T-Rex. Great man or no, they called him the Thunder Lizard for a reason.

“Anyway, da T-Rex,” Frenchie got himself back into lecture mode, “da war trumpets blasted and everybody else was hyped to fight Eurasia and the Russkies, everybody all full of blood-lust piss and vinegar, comprend?” I understood it. So did any citizen of a Nation at war, which at that phase was a pretty all-encompassing category. “All da udder squadrons and battalions and platoons and everybody couldn’t get out der fas’ enough to kill an’ be killed, belly full of anger an’ a heart full of fear.”

I remembered it well. There was an awful lot of fear going around and who could blame anybody? It turned out that it was a situation where the other guys did something awful to us and they were coming to get us so we had to go over there and fight them kind of deal. And I distinctly remember charges that this faction or other of them ate the children of their enemies. So, there was that. You just have to fight that stuff right?

“Not da T-Rex,” he smiled and nodded like he’d thought of the idea himself, “an’ not da Dirty Rogues neither. Fuck ‘dat. He jus’ kep sendin’ us back and forth to the supply depot, a different Rogue each time, claiming to be from a different division. Said da same thing to each Rogue before he sent ‘em, da same thing I’m gonna tell you when I’m done yammerin’ away at the moonlight.” He took another deep haul. He’s gonna smoke the whole goddamned thing, I remember thinking, right in front of me. Fuck’s sakes.

“First supply clerk dat caught wise to me got smoked wit a can of Campbells Chunky Style, I ‘tink it was, eh?” He laughed as if it were just yesterday he’d brained some poor bastard with a can of soup. “An when T-Rex heard I didn’t pick up dat dented can and put it in my loot-bag with res’ of da loot he kicked my ass all over the campground.” He laughed, “an’ whose to say at this late date dat I didn’t deserve it. Not me, not you and an’ not nobody. I’d murder for a can of Chunky-style.”

“Me too,” I agreed. Why not?

“A few of us caught on right quick to da T-Rex’s thinking. I think me, it’s because I’m French,” he smiled and shrugged -as if to say is it not dat way?- “but da T-Rex had his one good eye on da prize, the only prize der can ever be in dis War. Who can keep da pieces on da board and, more importly dan dat?” He held his finger in the air and waited for me to finish it…

“More importantly than that is who can keep the pieces moving. The longest.” I paused. “Til the end.”

“C’est ca!” he beamed, approving of the answer and giving my head a knock as if to test it’s ripeness, “To the end! You gonna be just fine stealin’ juice, Media.”

“My name’s-” I held out a hand.

“Forget it, whatever it is,” he advised/ordered. Ordered?? “ You Media now," he laughed as if I had no say in that matter. Which I guess I didn’t. “Fuck it. A good name nick-name is not to be wasted!”

Frenchie had packed everything up neatly and I helped him load everything into the back of a pick-up truck with some fairly extensive armor modifications. Others were also loading and a boy of about ten was already in the back, placing each item with maximum efficiency. Turned out making yourself useful was the only way you’d last in this outfit. Not just the T-rex’s orders but the way of life for a Dirty Rogue, a code which every last Rogue held sacred.

“Anyways, you wanna know what he told dem Rogue troopers on their pantry missions, you ready for da rules of your bran’ new existence as one a’da Dirty Rogues?”

“Lay it on me.”

“Make you a deal”

“Fuck! What?”

“Deal is I teach you to steal juice and you make me famous, uh?” We both laughed. It was ridiculous. Famous amongst whom? “You tell da worl’ ‘bout Frenchie and his band of thieves in da tyrannical T-rex’s Dirty Rogues,” he howled aloud like a werewolf, for no reason I could discern. “So when Frenchie he go back to la belle provence all da ladies know his name and abilities, oui?” Werewolvian howl now explained.

“Deal, what’s the goddamned rules?”

“Scrapper!” he bellowed, and the ten year old boy looked up from his task. “What’s the first rule of Resource Acquisition?” Kid frowned like it was below him to be quizzed on something so deeply ingrained. He dropped a rolled-up sleeping bag in a pile and held up a single finger,

“Juice first, Frenchie!”

"And?"

Kid sighed like he had no time for something so obvious: “…food and water second.” “Medicine third. Weaponry fourth.” He held out the required number of fingers for each task. It made perfect sense to me as soon as I heard it and it would rule my days every waking second I was to be a Dirty Rogue.

We rounded the corner and came upon Acquisitions. They looked no different form the rest of the Dirty Rogues: racially and gender mixed, filthy and cold. The only difference from any other squadron in the Dirty Rogues was there were more children in Acquisitions than anywhere else. Frenchie would explain it to me later, that kids were essential in getting into small places, and quietly when they want to. When they were fit to be soldiers they’d fight the good fight like anybody else.

Some of the kids you’d see amongst the platoon were biological children of the Rogues themselves, others kids had been absorbed by the platoon where necessary. Kids made good soldiers, as horrific as that would have sounded Pre Peak. They were naturally adept at it, saw life as a game, didn’t take up much space and didn’t eat as much food. Maybe we’d all burn in hell for exposing them to a life of war, but I had a good idea we were all up shit creek on that front anyway.

Of the twelve gathered before me, five were under the age of thirteen I would have guessed, three boys, two girls. The rest were adults in various stages of preparedness. My first thought upon seeing the assembled group was not the battle-hardened soldiers I knew them to be, but rather a couple of close-kit families on a campsite. One fellow leaned up against his fast-track, playing his guitar for the assembled children who watched him play as if it was magic. Gone were the distractions of the past, the videogames and television. Post Peak, the guitar was making a huge comeback.

“One foot on the brake and one on the gas, hey!” the song was slower than the original I had heard so long ago in Paris, he played it a little moodier. American driving tunes was the hottest nostalgia around, the last big trend to hit the internet before the whole thing just fizzled out. “Post my face wanted dead or alive, take my license and all that jive because I can't drive 55.” He had a strong voice and played the guitar pretty well.

“Frenchie!” exclaimed the youngest of the group, a girl of probably about eight years.

“Ah, bonjour ma petit,” he smiled at her as he swooped her up into his arms. “Comment cava, uh?”

“Bien,” she responded shyly, fearful of me. I was a stranger here, and in this wartorn world a stranger was something to watch carefully.

“I teach dem all French,” Frenchie told me in a prideful aside, putting the girl back to the ground. “Dey say when dey are young is best for people to learn da new language, eh? All the children in Resource Acquisition speak French. Can save your life if you’re ripping off Eurasians.”

“I saw a big, big star last night Frenchie!” the little girl informed him, “the biggest I’ve seen in my whole life! Did you see the big star?” A troubled look washed across his face before he turned back to her.

“Oui, Aurora” he responded to the girl simply, “I saw the big star also.” The star was one thing, the shimmering globule was another.

“Where did it come from,” Aurora persisted in the way that only a child can.

“Je ne c’est pas,” he shrugged at her, “but do you know who might have an idea is our brand new friend Media.”

“Do you know where the big star came from, Mr Media?” Aurora asked me, more comfortable around me after being introduced by Frenchie. The Quebeccer turned and waited for an answer the same as Aurora did. The team around me had started loading their stuff on the back of another modified pick-up.

“Have to be a supernova,” was my guess. I’d taken astronomy in university, the one science credit I needed before moving on with my real passion, journalism. I had enjoyed the course though, marvelling at what we know and don’t know about Life, the Universe and Everything. I was the last generation of Oil-Age students, and I often wondered what the world would look like when and if we could some day return to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake rather than simple survival. The libraries had been sacked and pillaged for heat in the last several winters and the Internet, maybe the last vestige of man’s intellectual accumulation, was lying dormant for the foreseeable nonce, waiting to be switched back on by whoever had the juice to do it. Maybe aliens. Maybe God. Maybe the T-Rex. Maybe nobody.

“What’s a supernova?” Aurora asked me, as Frenchie picked her up and settled her into the back of the pick-up beside the guitar player and a woman who may have been her mother. I hopped in across from her as Frenchie got into the front and gunned the engine.

“A supernova is when a star explodes and dies,” I informed Aurora who had waited patiently for my response. She looked troubled at this, and no wonder.

“That’s sad,” she said. The motherly figure beside her looked a little troubled at me. Though young, Aurora was probably no stranger to death and I think I could have phrased it in a more indelicate manner. I’d been on my own and fighting for my life for so long that social exchanges were still a trifle difficult, especially with kids.

“It’s not really sad, Aurora,” I began explaining, “that star does it all it can then blows apart in a beautiful explosion of light and fury which goes on to make other stars. So that star becomes a bunch of baby stars.” I thought it was something like that, but it had been a long time ago since my uni days, and only since the big black-outs had I been thinking as much about astronomy. I think we all were. You had to.

“Emmett!” Frenchie bellowed from the front, “give us some tunes, for chrissakes!”

The fellow with the guitar, Emmett, started strumming another rocking tune and the children all clapped their hands appreciatively. A few of the adults, myself included, smiled as well, as he sang:

“Here they come! The boys in the bright white sports car! Waving their arms in the air! Who do they think they are? And where did they get that car?”

I’d never heard it before but I liked it.