Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Book Club Club Club Club Club. It's the Cool Zone
Speaker 2: Media book Club. That's the jingle. It's the same every time.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you're talking about, it doesn't change.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Cool Zone Media book Club. I'm your host
Speaker 3: Maria Giljoy with me as my guest as Mia.
Speaker 4: Woe he ya, Hello book club chanting. We are, we
Speaker 4: are booking, We're clubbing. It's a good time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. Two weapons, books and clubs. Books are
Speaker 3: weapons in the pen is mightier than the sword way.
Speaker 3: But also if you put one in a big sock,
Speaker 3: like ideally a hardcover and a big sock, that's also
Speaker 3: a reasonable weapon. That's not what today's story is about.
Speaker 3: In the slightest, Cool Zone Media book Club is your
Speaker 3: weekly reminder that fiction is fun. Where I read someone
Speaker 3: a story, and today I'm reading Mia story. I'm reading
Speaker 3: Mia story by someone named Nick Mammaitas. Have you ever
Speaker 3: heard of Nick Mammatas by any brandam chance? No, Nick
Speaker 3: Mammotas is awesome. Nick Mammotas is a very hard working
Speaker 3: fiction writer who writes just a honest stuff, especially short fiction,
Speaker 3: but not exclusively. I guess I could just read you
Speaker 3: their bio or his bio rather. Nick Mammatas is the
Speaker 3: author of several novels, including The Second Shooter and I
Speaker 3: Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's Best
Speaker 3: American Mystery Stories, tour dot Com, Weird Tales, Asthma, Science Fiction,
Speaker 3: and many other venues. Nick is also an anthologist. His
Speaker 3: most recent title is Wondering Glory Forever All Inspiring Lovecrafty
Speaker 3: and Fiction. Nick's fiction and editorial work have been variously
Speaker 3: nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Locus, and
Speaker 3: World Fantasy Awards. But the story is about clowns. It's
Speaker 3: not really about clowns, but there's a clown in it,
Speaker 3: and so that's why I'm reading it. That's not why
Speaker 3: I'm reading the story. But I think it's clubby. This
Speaker 3: is a story about space lasers and clowns and clown down.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, didn't give you enough of a warning about what
Speaker 3: you were signing up for. This story is called the Flare.
Speaker 3: The Light Brigade has a flare for the dramatic, or
Speaker 3: at least the absurd. What I can tell you is
Speaker 3: that they're located somewhere in the western end of the
Speaker 3: Great Basin in California, and that I drove to meet
Speaker 3: them in a car I rented at what's left of
Speaker 3: the Reno Tahoe International Airport. Ten flights daily and on
Speaker 3: Sundays eleven, that one being a quick hop to Vancouver.
Speaker 3: Just to hang on to the name International do not recommend.
Speaker 3: I traveled north in the early evening, when the temperature
Speaker 3: was bearable but not so cold i'd need to heat
Speaker 3: the car and waste precious juice. There were no charging
Speaker 3: stations once I passed Pyramid Lake, but the brigade promised
Speaker 3: that they already had power sufficient to reach our my
Speaker 3: model te They also promised that I would instantly know
Speaker 3: where to pull off the highway and pick up my liaison,
Speaker 3: and they were right. Desert roads are always lonely, and
Speaker 3: when the sun finished its descent, the only light came
Speaker 3: from a failing Beaklin TM low orbit billboard and my
Speaker 3: ride's headlamps. They were not even any animals prowling the
Speaker 3: bush near the highway. No quick flashes of glowing eyes,
Speaker 3: no glintse of track or collars in the shadows. Nothing
Speaker 3: suddenly there and then gone in a blink. Both literal
Speaker 3: and figurative, just brush and a low sky like black slate.
Speaker 3: There was, however, on the shoulder of the road, a
Speaker 3: circus clown, complete with red nose, great flipper shoes, and
Speaker 3: a comically oversized hitchhiker's thumb. She wore a pair of
Speaker 3: reflective yellow genie pants, a floofy sleeved crop top just
Speaker 3: as vibrant, and a single red rose upon her left breast.
Speaker 3: The clown's hair was pale blue and pink and pointed
Speaker 3: straight up, a bit like the flame from a gas burner.
Speaker 3: Turned all the way up, going my way, I asked,
Speaker 3: She docked and entered the car headfirst, like an animal,
Speaker 3: or at least someone unused to being a passenger in
Speaker 3: anything smaller than a bus. I almost ate a mouthful
Speaker 3: of her cotton candy colored hair. It was stiff, coated
Speaker 3: and dried glue quick clowning around funny face, Hong Kong,
Speaker 3: she said, as she squeezed her funny nose. It was
Speaker 3: half broken and sounded like a wounded animal. But she
Speaker 3: did her best to compensate broken animals. But trying our best.
Speaker 3: That's what life has been for the past fifteen years.
Speaker 3: The light Brigade had invited me out to their secret
Speaker 3: headquarters to witness and write about the launch of their
Speaker 3: home brew laser satellite. Just two years ago, the Brigade
Speaker 3: had created and uploaded open source plans for the improvement
Speaker 3: of your backyard photovoltaic receivers to convert solar powered laser
Speaker 3: energy into good old DC electricity. It was a provocative
Speaker 3: move by this assemblage of hackers, engineers, and from the
Speaker 3: look of the looks of the clown under employed performance artists,
Speaker 3: especially provocative since there was and there is nothing for
Speaker 3: photovoltaic receivers to collect that isn't just coming from the Sun. Already,
Speaker 3: solar power satellites have been on the drawing boards and
Speaker 3: some of the most hopeful PowerPoint slide presentations ever created
Speaker 3: for almost seventy years. Indeed, there are a handful of
Speaker 3: microwave transmitting satellites in low orbit right now, but they're
Speaker 3: not pointed toward the Earth. Instead, they are oriented towards
Speaker 3: the four long Wang weapons platforms located thirty five thousand
Speaker 3: kilometers overhead, to keep them powered up and ever ready
Speaker 3: for war. But that the Light Brigade wants you to
Speaker 3: know is going to change. We didn't travel much more
Speaker 3: than a mile before the clown, whose name was Elektra,
Speaker 3: told me to pull over and get out of the car.
Speaker 3: She pointed her novelty thumb at me, then dug it
Speaker 3: into my ribs as if it were a pistol and
Speaker 3: she a mobster. It was fine, all part of our agreement.
Speaker 3: The night was frigid, but it's the kind of cold
Speaker 3: that's a relief, like walking by the open door of
Speaker 3: the store you could never afford to enter a freelance
Speaker 3: journalist's salary. She kept me waiting outside, where I took
Speaker 3: nips now and again from my flask while she programmed
Speaker 3: a new route into the car's navigation system. Then stepped
Speaker 3: back out and said, want to sniff my flower? Before
Speaker 3: I could even say yes, it's squirted, and something sticky
Speaker 3: that smells of lavender hit me full in the face.
Speaker 3: I woke up blindfolded, still in the passenger seat of
Speaker 3: my car, but definitely off road. A hard jostle sent
Speaker 3: my head up to the roof and nearly lost consciousness
Speaker 3: A second time, Easy said, Electra, we're close to the Shonzai.
Speaker 3: I was intrigued to hear that bit of Mandarin. It
Speaker 3: meant she trusted me. Shonzi distant strongholds beyond the reach
Speaker 3: of the emperor in ancient times, Shonzi bandit bands resisting
Speaker 3: centralized power. In the merely pre modern era, Shonzi underground,
Speaker 3: non hierarchical factories for knockoff cell phones with extra features,
Speaker 3: and spider Man action figures in turquoise and purple instead
Speaker 3: of red and blue. In the recent past and today,
Speaker 3: Shonzai meant all those things and something more. I had
Speaker 3: a million questions, but I wasn't going to ask them
Speaker 3: well blindfolded. It was another thirty minutes perhaps before we
Speaker 3: pulled up to the Shanzai. Stay in the car for
Speaker 3: one minute, please, the clown said. She stepped out and
Speaker 3: closed the door. I could hear other people milling around,
Speaker 3: and they made me wait for much longer than a minute.
Speaker 3: But finally the passenger door opened, and a man's hand
Speaker 3: pressed against my chest and told me one sec He
Speaker 3: took off my blindfold and then stepped back and said
Speaker 3: get out. There were six of them, including my chauffeur.
Speaker 3: They introduced themselves. A couple shared their pronouns and won
Speaker 3: a brief list of headmtes only the clown and a
Speaker 3: woman with whom she was now holding hands, said welcome
Speaker 3: to the Light Brigade. We launched at dawn. They spoke
Speaker 3: in an eerie practiced harmony like creepy twins in a movie,
Speaker 3: then broke into laughter. And you know what else is
Speaker 3: like creepy twins in a movie?
Speaker 4: Man? You know, I thought you were gonna go for
Speaker 4: the launching it done one, but that one's funnier.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, launching it done. Oh I kind of no.
Speaker 3: I feel bad. I feel like that should have been
Speaker 3: the that should have been the ad pivot. Well, you know,
Speaker 3: there's no going back. It's a forward only medium. That
Speaker 3: they say classically about pre recorded audio. It's just like radio,
Speaker 3: and that it's here's ads. Listen to them, or press
Speaker 3: the forward fifteen seconds button a couple of times, maybe
Speaker 3: six times, whatever, until you hear the jingle music again,
Speaker 3: and we're back. The brigade's rules were simple, no photos,
Speaker 3: no extensive physical descriptions. They let me know that none
Speaker 3: of the communicative tech I might have, including my watch,
Speaker 3: would work out wherever they were. I could only talk
Speaker 3: to the clown, her girlfriend, and one fellow who agreed
Speaker 3: to answer questions if I addressed them just to him,
Speaker 3: and if they were sensible. There had been a vote
Speaker 3: about my presence here, and it was a tie, so
Speaker 3: everybody one, according to half the Shanzai, I wasn't there,
Speaker 3: so why a clown suit? I asked, over a meal
Speaker 3: of grilled grow meats and pine nut soup. We were
Speaker 3: sitting outside a top military surplus sleeping bags on the
Speaker 3: ice over floor of the desert. I wasn't allowed inside
Speaker 3: any of the structures, but I am allowed to say
Speaker 3: that they appeared to be hoop houses with opaque plastic
Speaker 3: canvases stretched over the frames. We needed helium, said Electra
Speaker 3: the clown. She casually confessed to a series of crimes
Speaker 3: involving an illicit helium smuggling ring that caters to the
Speaker 3: more nostalgic members of the ultra rich for their children's
Speaker 3: birthday parties, her infiltration of the same, and a sudden
Speaker 3: and perhaps violent hijacking of a truck of canisters. Her
Speaker 3: girlfriend rubbed her back as she spoke of brandishing a firearm.
Speaker 3: How she convinced the truck driver that helium was as
Speaker 3: flammable as hydrogen through sheer force of will, And what
Speaker 3: a challenge. It was unloading the truck in a safe
Speaker 3: house and then slowly transporting the canisters in ones and
Speaker 3: twos to this location. I kept the suit because I
Speaker 3: knew you'd stop for it, she finished. Who could resist?
Speaker 3: Nobody can resist, said the clown's girlfriend. Electra had told
Speaker 3: me much about the plans of the Light Brigade, just
Speaker 3: from sharing that one anecdote, the brigade would not be
Speaker 3: launching a microwave transmitting satellite. These six people were likely
Speaker 3: the whole of the organization. There was no broad movement,
Speaker 3: no multinational organization stealing and smuggling, borrowing and building to
Speaker 3: create the means to provide free power to the masses.
Speaker 3: May I see your raccoon, I asked, Yeah, said the girlfriend.
Speaker 3: You can call me Robin, by the way, Tracy, said Electra,
Speaker 3: who finally took off her large wig and plucked off
Speaker 3: her nose and tossed it into the wigs cap. The
Speaker 3: other person, who agreed to speak to me only if
Speaker 3: I asked sensible questions, identified himself as Lee. Though as
Speaker 3: Lee was the one with the headmates, I knew that
Speaker 3: agreement might be altered at any moment.
Speaker 5: It was like that.
Speaker 3: Raccoon is a portmanteau of rocket and balloon, a twentieth
Speaker 3: century technology obsolete for a full century. A balloon hoists
Speaker 3: the rocket up into the upper atmosphere, then the engine
Speaker 3: ignites in the rocket, usually a solid fuel number can
Speaker 3: get even higher without needing all that much fuel. In
Speaker 3: the nineteen forties, raccoons were used for atmospheric and meteorological study,
Speaker 3: but or quickly superseded by liquid fuels and rockets capable
Speaker 3: of reaching orbit from the ground. Raccoons were still technically useful,
Speaker 3: but the missile synic doocic of war. Even when there
Speaker 3: was no possible worry that an upper atmosphere mission would
Speaker 3: be targeted by an enemy, the very fact that raccoon
Speaker 3: seemed easy to shoot down was enough to mothball the
Speaker 3: inexpensive flexible technology. Tracy and Robin were happy to show
Speaker 3: off the disused minute Mann silo. The moon was new,
Speaker 3: and for obvious reasons, the Light Brigade kept its work
Speaker 3: areas dark. We're not worried about the police, per se,
Speaker 3: Robin explained. As we picked our way through the bush,
Speaker 3: led by nothing but the lights of our wristwatches, my
Speaker 3: little ball of light found a scorpion on the desert floor.
Speaker 3: It didn't scuttle away or flex its tail, and I
Speaker 3: too found myself frozen, both terrified and feeling the cold
Speaker 3: of the night air for the first time. Tracy knocked
Speaker 3: the iraqnet away with her oversized shoe. Be careful, she said,
Speaker 3: but she wasn't talking about the scorpion. Not a minute later,
Speaker 3: both women grabbed my forearms and kept me from taking
Speaker 3: a fatal step down the concrete tunnel they were leading
Speaker 3: me to. The silo wasn't capped, and the rocket sand's
Speaker 3: nose cone was much smaller than the Minuteman for which
Speaker 3: it was originally designed. There was a low concrete building
Speaker 3: on the far side of the lip of the silo,
Speaker 3: but it was dark enough, and I'd been focused enough
Speaker 3: on where I've been stepping, but I hadn't noticed it
Speaker 3: at all. They wouldn't talk about the missile very much,
Speaker 3: except to saying that it was a solid propellant rocket
Speaker 3: and that its fuel was environmentally friendly Hexa nitro hexa's
Speaker 3: iso wurtzsustain, a word that danced on their tongues even
Speaker 3: through their giggles, but that utterly confused my transcription software.
Speaker 3: More importantly, and why this fuel was used during this
Speaker 3: straight conflict, is that Hexa nitro hexa's iso wurtz tain
Speaker 3: burning rockets don't leave much of a visible trail. Thanks
Speaker 3: Nick for including that word twice in the story so
Speaker 3: that I had to read it. Thanks good looking out.
Speaker 3: I realized the ladies could toss me into the hole.
Speaker 3: They both had strong grips on my arms. This wouldn't
Speaker 3: be the first bunch of hackers or makers or burners
Speaker 3: or post rats or socialists or whatever the Light Brigade
Speaker 3: was hoping to be calm out here in the Great
Speaker 3: Basin to simply devolve into madness. It's a good one,
Speaker 3: I said, idiotically, not that I've seen too many up close.
Speaker 3: The balloon the satellite. My clever idea was to give
Speaker 3: them a reason to lead me away from the silo
Speaker 3: rather than truck me down into it for whatever blood
Speaker 3: baptism they thought would help the mission. We'll show you
Speaker 3: everything except that which cannot be shown, Tracy said. Robin
Speaker 3: giggled at that none of this was helping. Except for
Speaker 3: the small cement pillbox by the silo. There didn't seem
Speaker 3: to be any other buildings around their grips didn't lighten
Speaker 3: up as they led me off into the night, like
Speaker 3: two prison guards bringing a drunk to a holding cell.
Speaker 3: I was a little tipsy. Robin began making an unusual
Speaker 3: clicking noise with her tongue and cheeks. I opened my
Speaker 3: mouth to say something, but Tracy put a gloved finger
Speaker 3: to my lips. They stepped lightly, and I aped their
Speaker 3: tentative shuffling, thanks only partially to the hold they had
Speaker 3: on my arms. The beam of watchlight passed over something
Speaker 3: and vanished into it. Then Robin disappeared for a moment,
Speaker 3: only to come back, holding the Knight in her hands
Speaker 3: and directing my attention to a flight of cement steps
Speaker 3: going underground hyperblack. I said, you were echo locating drones
Speaker 3: are everywhere, and satellite's too, the Tracy, as she nudged
Speaker 3: me onto the top step. Satellites are everywhere. There's one
Speaker 3: in the subterranean warehouse into which I was walked alone
Speaker 3: at Tracy and Robin's urging. It was not quite as
Speaker 3: dark as the hyperblack tarp's top side, but it was
Speaker 3: pretty dim. Lee, the third member of the Shenzai who
Speaker 3: deigned to speak to me, sparked an old fashioned cigarette lighter,
Speaker 3: perhaps ten yards away. Everything from his eyeglasses to the
Speaker 3: size of the room was bigger than I imagined it
Speaker 3: could possibly be, except for the satellite itself. He wouldn't
Speaker 3: show me the whole thing at once, but casually walked
Speaker 3: a tight circle around an object roughly the size and
Speaker 3: shape of a very nice propane gas grill, of the
Speaker 3: sort your parents might have once owned. It's the kind
Speaker 3: of thing you might look at and be compelled to say,
Speaker 3: what a butte, and then offer a pull from a flask.
Speaker 3: But I resisted, I should not have. This is just
Speaker 3: the laser, Lee explained. His eyes were obscured by the
Speaker 3: triple refraction of the firelight and the lenses of his spectacles.
Speaker 3: A few more watts and he'd be the one shooting lasers.
Speaker 3: Diode pump alkali. We get potash from the desert. How
Speaker 3: do you know it works, I asked, How do you
Speaker 3: know any of it works? The laser, the satellite, the raccoon.
Speaker 3: Why are you asking me, Li said, because you think
Speaker 3: I'm a man. Examine your biases, madame. He extinguished the
Speaker 3: lighter with the top of his thumb. Somewhere behind and
Speaker 3: above me, a clown nose honked for second after that,
Speaker 3: I didn't hear the echolocational clicking behind me. Journalists say,
Speaker 3: or they used to say, don't bury the lead, but
Speaker 3: I have done just that. I simply wasn't expecting the
Speaker 3: story I ended up living through. Here's the lead. Fifteen
Speaker 3: years ago, third party transnational belligerents used laser satellites in
Speaker 3: low earth orbit to attack both Chinese and NATO positions
Speaker 3: along the Taiwan Strait during the Second Battle of the
Speaker 3: Davis Line and now the Nutcraft. The satellites existed in
Speaker 3: multiple sweet spots. Their orbits were too high for anti
Speaker 3: aircraft fire or drones to take out, but too low
Speaker 3: for the orbital platforms to target without possibly striking their
Speaker 3: own forces on the ground. They were big enough to
Speaker 3: pump out lasers, capable of melting flight decks and combusting
Speaker 3: individual sailors unfortunate enough to be standing in the wrong place,
Speaker 3: too small to be spotted amidst all the other war
Speaker 3: drunk in the skies until they warmed up and started
Speaker 3: firing deadly enough that both said I had scored propaganda
Speaker 3: victories by blaming the other for violations of the laws
Speaker 3: of war insufficiently destructive to be anything more than a
Speaker 3: political anomaly. After the fact, ten fatalities, dozens of casualties,
Speaker 3: mostly blindness and other vision impairments, some second and third
Speaker 3: degree burns. A single human pictogram in the infographic detailing
Speaker 3: the carnage of the battle, made special by the asterisk
Speaker 3: explaining what had happened. The simple collapse of the world
Speaker 3: petroleum supply brought both sides to the negotiating table soon enough,
Speaker 3: and with the Treaty of Taipei, a significant population exchange,
Speaker 3: and the launch of Long Wang, the peace of pure
Speaker 3: exhaustion settled upon the world. But not here in the
Speaker 3: California Great Basin. I asked Lee one further question, could
Speaker 3: this be weaponized? And then I got a whiff of
Speaker 3: Tracy's clown flower and fell down. Then woke up, this
Speaker 3: time just before dawn, in my car and not where
Speaker 3: I left it, parked on the grounds of the Light Brigade.
Speaker 3: The car's controls had been locked and my hands cuffed
Speaker 3: behind my back. I didn't think they'd knocked me out,
Speaker 3: stuffed me into my ride and programmed it to make
Speaker 3: a sharp right turn into a desert so that I
Speaker 3: could be cooked like a potato and die. I thought
Speaker 3: I was going back to the airport. The cuffs, I
Speaker 3: guessed were the typical police issue that any security guard
Speaker 3: with the universal key could unlock for me after I
Speaker 3: rolled up to the parking lot attendants little box, probably,
Speaker 3: and as a bonus, I was going to need to
Speaker 3: pee before the car got me to my destination. Though
Speaker 3: JA school one oh one, start with softball questions, as
Speaker 3: the source might wig out or just end the interview
Speaker 3: if you begin with provocations. But I was thinking of
Speaker 3: this article as a puff piece more than anything else.
Speaker 3: Check out the product and personalities, throw in a charming
Speaker 3: anecdote or two, and post. The fact is that there's
Speaker 3: never been a decent business case for peace full laser
Speaker 3: transmitting solar powered satellites. Historically, they don't collect enough extra
Speaker 3: solar radiation to make it profitable to build, launch, and
Speaker 3: maintain them, no matter how dark the black one paints
Speaker 3: their solar panels, no matter how much helium one steals
Speaker 3: from the children of billionaires. In our post oil nineteen
Speaker 3: degree celsius era, when a cloudy day is practically an
Speaker 3: economical holiday and cheap and shiny photovol take collectors fill
Speaker 3: the parking lots of most defunct strip malls. There's just
Speaker 3: no profit to be had. The only laser transmitting satellites
Speaker 3: that have ever been commercially deployed were used for space
Speaker 3: to space communication or wide scale high detail mapping. Those
Speaker 3: and the Davis line direct energy weapons fifteen years ago.
Speaker 3: You know what else promises to be commercially for one
Speaker 3: thing but feeds into a culture of war?
Speaker 4: Is it the space lasers you can buy from our advertisers.
Speaker 3: Yes, go buy a space laser because that's a thing
Speaker 3: that you can do and would be moral and there's
Speaker 3: nothing complicated about that.
Speaker 5: Here's some ads.
Speaker 3: Welcome back, unless you have cooler zone media, in which case,
Speaker 3: well it's still welcome back. But it's just welcome back
Speaker 3: for me talking about ads to me talking about coming
Speaker 3: back from ads. Aren't you so glad that you pay
Speaker 3: a small amount every month in order to not hear
Speaker 3: ads but instead to hear Margaret toss to ads and
Speaker 3: then come back, because really, tossing to ads is the
Speaker 3: high point of her day because it's where I can
Speaker 3: make sir joke. Anyway, here's the story. The sun begins
Speaker 3: to bubble up on the horizon. In my rear view mirror,
Speaker 3: I see a black ball dragging a gray arrow up
Speaker 3: into the sky and tell the mirror to start recording.
Speaker 3: If I'm a war reporter, now I might as well
Speaker 3: get some good visuals from the model t's tiny hatch.
Speaker 3: I hear a voice say, oh good, you're awake. Tracy
Speaker 3: kicks out the armrest between the rear seats and unfolds herself,
Speaker 3: legs first out of the trunk, then slithers into the
Speaker 3: front passenger seat. Sorry, there was a coup. She glances
Speaker 3: down at my wrists, ah, handcuffs. Also, they're after us
Speaker 3: by now? Probably you uh? I start? I am a
Speaker 3: legitimate master of the circus arts, Tracy says, who is
Speaker 3: after us? I say, there's a lot to know, now,
Speaker 3: who what when journalism is inscribed upon my nervous system? Robin,
Speaker 3: the investors, Tracy says, not all of them.
Speaker 4: Of course.
Speaker 3: We raised funds to buy the silo via the blockchain,
Speaker 3: so most of the people funding the project know little
Speaker 3: more about it than already real estate guaranteed twenty percent return.
Speaker 3: And no, not Robin. They are three on site investor
Speaker 3: Onbud's folks tied us both up and went to get you.
Speaker 3: Robin and I have built up a tolerance to the
Speaker 3: spray they knocked Lee out with it, though there's not
Speaker 3: much to do in the desert, so Robin taught one
Speaker 3: of the investors how to echo locate. Sorry, also, I
Speaker 3: talk a lot when I'm with a new person. Sorry
Speaker 3: about that too, Where why?
Speaker 4: How?
Speaker 3: I should have been clearer, but I'm too confused to
Speaker 3: make my question specific. How did you escape? Is answered
Speaker 3: wordlessly as Tracy picks the lock on my cuffs with
Speaker 3: a paper clip. Where were she and Robin locked up?
Speaker 3: Hardly matters. Tracy probably just shimmied out of whatever they'd
Speaker 3: bound her with. Why is a bigger question. Light Brigade
Speaker 3: really isn't a weapons project. I promise it's just you know,
Speaker 3: Tracy says before trailing off. Her face is as red
Speaker 3: as the desert twilight. We're going all the way to
Speaker 3: the airport unless you can pick the ignition or the
Speaker 3: door locks, I say, so, just start from the beginning.
Speaker 3: How do you prove to people that your laser transmitting
Speaker 3: solar powered satellite actually works if all it does is
Speaker 3: give randomly placed receptors a third more juice? Now and
Speaker 3: then it's proof of concept. We need dozens of them
Speaker 3: in sun synchronous orbits. So blow something up just once
Speaker 3: for some venture capital funding layer for the dramatic. Well, ah, no,
Speaker 3: I realize the truth of the business model. Blow something
Speaker 3: up whenever one of the investors want something blown up.
Speaker 3: Pollution free, energy efficient ninety five percent of the time
Speaker 3: to pay fixed costs, and a profit center in privatized war,
Speaker 3: not dramatic, absurd? And why me? In the rearview mirror,
Speaker 3: the rocket ignited and took off a star and a
Speaker 3: quickly faded star filled sky. It's mostly the car, Tracy says,
Speaker 3: because it's easy to track. But I know she waved
Speaker 3: a hand. Her fingers were very long and thin. People
Speaker 3: hate journalists, and the ending one would make worldwide news.
Speaker 3: He are, I am a Light Brigade's publicity person, but
Speaker 3: my idea was just to bring in a journalist, not
Speaker 3: to people hate mimes too. I found myself saying, I
Speaker 3: am a clown and we're not going to her. Gaze
Speaker 3: flicks towards the rear view. It's rare to see a big,
Speaker 3: old gas or car on the highways anymore, since there
Speaker 3: were few operational gas stations but a fast four to
Speaker 3: three point fifty pickup is bearing down on us. Is
Speaker 3: that Nambud's person's car? It is, Tracy says. They probably
Speaker 3: figured out that I escaped with you. So how do
Speaker 3: we stop the car? Can you pick the ignition like
Speaker 3: the cuffs? Pick this, Tracy slowly the ignition? No, of
Speaker 3: course not. You have to hack these things and I can't.
Speaker 3: I came here to get you out the second the
Speaker 3: car stops in the airport lot. She shrugs, exaggerated. A
Speaker 3: stage performer can't resist an audience. They want witnesses, maybe
Speaker 3: a terror angle to make sure you're on the news.
Speaker 3: It's up to me to stop the car. Least have
Speaker 3: my hands now. Of course, there's the issue of the
Speaker 3: pickup truck on her tail. Circus arts are powerless, and
Speaker 3: I'm no techi. What can journalists do except watch and
Speaker 3: write what they saw for pennies. Ah watch, ah, pennies.
Speaker 3: We drove far enough that my watch is in contact
Speaker 3: with the rest of the world again. I take it off.
Speaker 3: Put on your seatbelt, I tell Tracy, as I put
Speaker 3: on mine. I hand Tracy my watch and tell her
Speaker 3: to log in under her own account and report the
Speaker 3: model t were in for drunk driving and drunk riding.
Speaker 3: Her fingers are nimble. She does it in a few seconds.
Speaker 3: It takes me to dig my flask out of my pocket.
Speaker 3: The interior turns red, and out of the steering wheel
Speaker 3: comes a breathalyzer tube, and a sickly sweet female voice
Speaker 3: urges me to blow just a little a gulp. I
Speaker 3: swish and gargle and swallow, then blow. The car stops
Speaker 3: hard a clax and sounds inside, and the voice, now
Speaker 3: with a testy edge to it, warns me that this
Speaker 3: car is fully locked and will move no further. Into
Speaker 3: a retrieval truck arrives. Try to stay loose, I say
Speaker 3: more to myself than Tracy, who can certainly manage that
Speaker 3: trick better than I can. Booze aside. The ford slams
Speaker 3: into the rear. I see nothing but a white explosion
Speaker 3: before me. I found out what happened immediately after the crash,
Speaker 3: only weeks later. I broke my nose in three ribs
Speaker 3: and really wrecked my back in those inexplicable ways that
Speaker 3: can never fully be healed. Stuff happened to my literal
Speaker 3: spinal fluid, one of the few substances we can't just
Speaker 3: laidle out of a vat pour into someone. Tracy was fine.
Speaker 3: She wriggled out over her airbag, kicked out the front windshield,
Speaker 3: and then skidobtled around to see the ford. It had
Speaker 3: pushed us a good half mile up State Route thirty six,
Speaker 3: ate the back half of the Model Tea and nudged
Speaker 3: up between my shoulder blades. The ombuds folk were alive
Speaker 3: inside the wreck, unconscious and crushed between half a dozen
Speaker 3: air bags. We'd had a few seconds to prepare ourselves.
Speaker 3: They'd been completely surprised. Tracy pulled me from the wreck
Speaker 3: and dragged me past the side of the road onto
Speaker 3: actual desert sands. A streak of blood and other liquids,
Speaker 3: like a great stroke from the paint brush, making a
Speaker 3: trail behind me. It was good she would be able
Speaker 3: to find me a few minutes later through all the smoke.
Speaker 3: Then she dashed down the road and found my watch.
Speaker 3: I came to fairly quickly. The thinnest sheet of ice
Speaker 3: lay over the sand. In ancient Egypt, servants were sent
Speaker 3: out each morning before dawn to ever so gently scrape
Speaker 3: the millimeter of frost that would form upon the dunes
Speaker 3: overnight and collect it into a small cup so that
Speaker 3: the Pharaoh might have a small cup of Sherbert with
Speaker 3: his breakfast. I got two licks in before every molecule
Speaker 3: of H two O vaporized. With before my one good eye,
Speaker 3: I guessed that the satellite had just then passed overhead.
Speaker 3: As both my rental and the Ford F three fifty
Speaker 3: burst into flames, I felt the soles of my feet blister,
Speaker 3: the sense of having toes vanish as flesh blue flew
Speaker 3: off bones. It was good. That meant my spinal cord
Speaker 3: was still functioning. When I woke up again, I was
Speaker 3: lying on the back of the cargo bed of their
Speaker 3: trievil truck. I screamed at the sky for an hour
Speaker 3: as Tracy negotiated with my watch in an attempt to
Speaker 3: re route the truck away from the airport vehicle's rental
Speaker 3: office and to a hospital. In her other hand, Tracy
Speaker 3: gripped a mostly melted license plate. I remember that she
Speaker 3: kept having to take a new pictures of it and
Speaker 3: upload them to a satellite link in order to be believed.
Speaker 3: When she and Robin visited me in the hospital a
Speaker 3: week later, she showed me a scar on her palm
Speaker 3: that was shaped like much of the letter. W Lee
Speaker 3: sent my watch a JP three g depicting a big
Speaker 3: eyed owl holding flowers and wearing a sash reading get
Speaker 3: well soon. That was somehow worth four and a half
Speaker 3: million dollars to a soft be auction bot on the
Speaker 3: Worldwide Hive. Like all freelancers, I am uninsured, but that
Speaker 3: gift paid for all my medical expenses save painkillers, so
Speaker 3: I've had to find another way to get addicted to them.
Speaker 3: I live in a tiny house on the roof of
Speaker 3: an apartment building, the first story storefront of which is
Speaker 3: the sort of very much not Irish pub that journalists
Speaker 3: enjoy drinking in. I get my pills from sympathetic colleagues
Speaker 3: and well wishers. It took me a long time to
Speaker 3: file this story, but when it's posted, I'll have a
Speaker 3: few extra coins to buy some rounds for the gang.
Speaker 3: Other than the pub for pills, pints and peanuts, I
Speaker 3: stay in bed, very much not healing. I can pay
Speaker 3: my rent and buy my grow meats thanks only to
Speaker 3: a peculiar fact. Somehow, the photovoltaic collector on the roof
Speaker 3: of the shipping container I call home consistently collects a
Speaker 3: third again of my energy needs at a rate twenty
Speaker 3: percent over its own listed capacity. I'm able to sell
Speaker 3: the extra electricity in my batteries back to the local utility.
Speaker 3: Every three months. The electric company sends me a check.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's a fun story. I feel like, Okay, before
Speaker 6: I say anything further. As the child of people who
Speaker 6: work with light, I need the issue of warning about lasers,
Speaker 6: which is that they are very dangerous. They are very
Speaker 6: very bad for your eyes. Even looking at a laser,
Speaker 6: just being like pointed at a wall, like the diffraction
Speaker 6: from that is enough to fuck up your eyes. Don't
Speaker 6: mess around with them. You will go blind. Okay, it
Speaker 6: may take a while. They're very bad for you.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 7: Yeah, now that I've issued the laser disclaimer, Yeah, no,
Speaker 7: I like this story. Okay, so I asked, I asked Nick,
Speaker 7: I'm going to start doing this thing where I asked
Speaker 7: the authors to give us, give us a little bit
Speaker 7: of a I was like, do you want to, you know,
Speaker 7: say anything about your story? And Nick said, if, dear listener,
Speaker 7: you have the sense that the flare is informed by
Speaker 7: a deep skepticism of techies and burning man, you are correct.
Speaker 7: It's really it's a really interesting synthesis of a bunch
Speaker 7: of the worst ideas that any Wood had, Like the
Speaker 7: it's called the murder market, that there was this whole
Speaker 7: thing for a long time where there was supposed to
Speaker 7: be this scheme where that there was like an assassination market,
Speaker 7: oh effectively, uh huh, where yeah, you could like put
Speaker 7: The theory was that you could just keep putting money
Speaker 7: into it and eventually like the price would be high
Speaker 7: enough that someone would do an assassination and kill the person. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and everyone I knew insisted it was run by the FEDS.
Speaker 7: I don't know if it was run by the FEDS.
Speaker 4: I think it was run by not very weird people
Speaker 4: on dark web. Yeah, but yeah, this is this It
Speaker 4: does sound like the exact kind of idea that these people.
Speaker 3: Would go totally They're like, oh, we're going to bring
Speaker 3: free energy to the world, and the world's like we're
Speaker 3: actually doing good on energy. Everything else sucks, and they're like, well,
Speaker 3: free energy. It's totally not murder laser definitely not. No,
Speaker 3: And I like the like you have the the people
Speaker 3: who are genuinely excited and trying to do the good
Speaker 3: thing and then like but the way in which they're
Speaker 3: funded causes them to do bad thing. Yeah, I totally
Speaker 3: don't have any sympathy for that. I totally don't know
Speaker 3: what that's like at all.
Speaker 4: Don't get in bed with the crypto billionaires. It's always
Speaker 4: a bad idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I wonder I didn't I didn't ask exactly
Speaker 3: when this was written. I wonderful it was before the
Speaker 3: NFT crash or if this is predicting its return, But
Speaker 3: like it fits within the context of this world they're
Speaker 3: describing very well.
Speaker 5: So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I like stories that are just still I like stories
Speaker 3: that just like accept that the world is going to
Speaker 3: be very different very soon because of climate change, but
Speaker 3: then like still have like relatable normal people within it.
Speaker 4: So the world may burn, but there will always be
Speaker 4: only semi employable, incredibly broke.
Speaker 3: Journalists totally, and then the not really irish pub that
Speaker 3: they all hang out at. Well, that's that's book club,
Speaker 3: if Mia, if people, where can people find you? I
Speaker 3: mean it's funny because like, most people probably are listening
Speaker 3: to this on the feed of your podcast, but they
Speaker 3: might be listening to it on the feed of my podcast.
Speaker 4: So that's true. Yeah, I host the podcast. It could
Speaker 4: happen here. You can find it where presumably where you're
Speaker 4: listening to this who also have it could happen here,
Speaker 4: assuming that it's not already, It could happen here. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I guess you can. You know what, No, I'm not
Speaker 4: gonna plug my Twitter.
Speaker 5: Screw that.
Speaker 4: Don't go on there. I don't want to be responsible
Speaker 4: for any of the people listening to this being on Twitter,
Speaker 4: So don't find me now.
Speaker 3: Twitter is in the process of doing what this story
Speaker 3: is making fun of. It is in the process of
Speaker 3: becoming from tech utopianism to tech dystopianism very quickly. Okay, well,
Speaker 3: you can find me on coolby Boulded Cool Stuff, which
Speaker 3: might be where you're listening to this, or if it's not,
Speaker 3: then that's where you can listen to me. Every Monday
Speaker 3: and Wednesday, I tell you about history. And Nick asked
Speaker 3: me to plug the the anthology he co edited with
Speaker 3: Alan Datlow. It's called Haunted Legends, finally available as an
Speaker 3: ebook at all Electrons stores, and that's the next phrasing
Speaker 3: of it. After thirteen years of being print only, is
Speaker 3: a good chance to bring back the spirits of ghost
Speaker 3: stories for Christmas, so go check out Haunted Legends. Nick
Speaker 3: is very good taste in stories as well as writing
Speaker 3: good stories, and I will also hopefully have good taste
Speaker 3: in stories because I'm going to keep reading them to
Speaker 3: you every Sunday from now until I'm not doing it anymore.
Speaker 5: Bye.
Speaker 1: It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 1: monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.