A Stop to Smell the Roses

In this election…

…we have candidates who will allow marriage between a man and a woman, man and a man, woman and a woman, man and woman and woman and woman and woman…

Have they been reading my browser history?

The Stupidity Engine (an original piece)

I’m not usually much of a writer. And this is quite long, just a warning. But here goes! (The *** comments are footnotes.) (comments are nice, too!)

“The stupidity engine,” he stated incredulously. He wished he wasn’t becoming such a master of that emotion. 

“Yes, the stupidity engine!” she replied to him, just as non-believing that he had never heard of it before. And she explained it to him. 

The stupidity engine, as he found out, worked something like this. Several years after he had been frozen, some brilliant scientist with nothing better to do discovered that human thoughts have physical mass. It was soon realized that if they have mass, they must also have an energy associated with them. He didn’t catch the exact science — there were far too many acronyms thrown at him for that — but what he did catch is that eventually, someone figured out how to harness the energy of each thought. And there mankind ran into a curious thing: a thought’s energy to intelligence ratio was not linear. It behaved quite similar to a cosine graph, so that the most idiotic and the most brilliant thoughts were both very energetic** (**This was later explained by a theory. Naturally, intelligent thoughts had a lot of energy*** [***Science expected this and polished their diplomas when it was announced]. The stupidest thoughts contained the same amount of energy, the theory went, because stupid ideas are often backed with the same amount of enthusiasm as intelligent ones — this is now believed to be the reason for the filmography of Michael Bay.), while the mediocre thoughts actually sapped energy from the world. The first known engine to harness this phenomena was the intelligence drive, calibrated to be powered by the presence of the worlds greatest minds. Of course, it performed beyond expectations in lab testing but wouldn’t power an electric toothbrush once it was being marketed to corporate executives. 

Science soon realized its mistake, though, and quickly built the first prototype of the Stupidity Drive about 45 years ago. While it failed lab testing*** (***Except when interns were nearby), once put into commercial use it propelled our society into post-scarcity (matter replicators were created some time before this, but deemed too inefficient to be useful). They sold almost instantly everywhere — about a quarter of America was glad to find their stupidity drive didn’t work in their house and sold them for ridiculous profits to the other three-quarters, who found that it worked wonderfully. 

When the drive caused the collapse of the market economy, in what historians refuse to call the Idiotic Depression*** (***Out of professional etiquette, they claim), the government stepped in and tried to regulate stupidity. Of course that only worsened the problem, so eventually the scientists who started the whole thing got back together. They fixed the problem quickly by deciding to harness as much stupidity as they could and send it off the planet as a farce — so they built a spaceship powered by stupidity. 

By this time enough research had gone into thought-base drives that they discovered different types of thoughts generated different types of energy, which could be harnessed and used most efficiently in different ways. Again, the physics contained too many syllables per word for him to keep up. The testosterone-filled stupidity of American sports was being used to power defense systems. The government, previously a bureaucratic nightmare of petty squabbling, became an important power source for computers and data systems overnight. Scientists prided themselves on running labs with Intelligence Drives, but refuse to say what capacity they perform at. The rap music industry powered Wall Street, and residential and civilian areas of the nation are powered by a single generator hooked up to YouTube.*** (***He was surprised to learn that YouTube still existed. “Oh, God no,” she said. “It was outlawed by the government in 2020 for being too stupid. Luckily some rogue programmers archived every video with over a million hits — that’s what the government uses now.”) “At one point,” she mentioned, “a generator each was put into the DNC and RNC to see which would generate more power, but both blew out as soon as they were plugged in. Overloaded system, dontchaknow.”

He hazarded a “Is that so?” as she led him through the decks of the ship. They had been walking along a military-like deck, and now passed through a guarded checkpoint to a much nicer section of the ship. He felt like he had stepped off of an aircraft carrier and onto a Carnival Cruise.

The spaceship that was built was half Enterprise and half luxury cruise liner, it seemed. That is, half of the decks were devoted to the crew, guns, cargo, etc., and the other half to storage space for fuel –- people having stupid thoughts and doing stupid things while generators picked up the energy.

He worked up the courage to ask her where they were going*** (***She had certain intangible qualities** [**Her personality, for one.] that had kept him distracted from the posted directional signs). 

“To the nice part of the ship,” she replied. “To where you’ll be staying.”

THE WALL

HOLY SHIT THAT WAS AWEESOME CAN’T EVEN THINK STILL REELING IN AWESOME AHHHAHHAHAHAH pics to come later but they won’t do it justice.