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Emilio knew it was the googuys the second he saw them through the peephole in his apartment door. Despite their being warped around the fish-eye, he could see they were in their “casual but not casual” clothes; designer jeans, top drawer button-up shirts. The blond one wore the most high-end Google glasses. And something metallic hovered, just out of sight, barely glimpsed in the background.

Google Guys for sure.

“Yeah he’s there,” said the guy with the glasses.

“I’m picking it up,” said the other one.

Implant scanners, Emilio figured.

“Mr. Sanchez,” the one without the obvious glasses called. “Hi! We’re here from the Housing Interface!”

The drone being there told Emilio he had no choice. He knew it’d summon Hard-forcement if he refused to open the door.

He unlocked and opened the door and there they were, the googuys, their armed drone hovering over between them. It was a whirly little thing like a silvery frisbee, and on the stationary metal post in its center it had a tiny nozzle. It could shoot little blood-soluble glassy injectors with that nozzle.

And that was just the drone he could see. Emilio knew they often came with the little stealth drones, smaller and harder to see than a housefly.

He looked them over. No surprise. They were sparklingly groomed, and though the glasses guy, Chode, had long butter-colored hair, every inch of it was exquisitely coifed. The little silvery card clipped to his collar read, Romeo Chode, Google Housing Interface.

The other one looked mixed race, maybe Latino Asian Black Caucasian. His collar card read, William Nim, Google Housing Interface.

“Emilio, hi,” said Nim. “I’m Bill Nim. Can we come in?”

“You going to text me a warrant?”

“We’ve done that,” Chode said, smiling apologetically. He was looking past them at the small Mission apartment, an early 20^th century construction passed down through the family, one of the last rent-controlled places in this shrunken San Francisco barrio.

“Then come the fuck in,” Emilio said, sighing, wondering if this was a check-on visit—or was it the Worst Possible.

Their frisbee-sized drone followed them in like a trained bird. Chode scanned the apartment, turning his head with the slow-sweep efficiency of a security camera so his glasses got a panning shot of the room; taking in the Immaculate Heart of Mary statuette in its shrine; the framed family photos, the worn sofa and cluttered coffee table; the slightly slanted floor, the old wood-framed archways painted in bright Mexican colors.

“Looks like the building’s settling,” Chode said, glancing at the floor. “Has it been safety-checked in the past six months?”

Emilio ignored the question. But he knew what it implied. “What are you guys planning to put in its place after you tear it down?”

Nim blinked at him. “We are not real estate investors or demolition persons or…”

“Whatever, man—my family is not leaving here,” Emilio said.

“There’s no definite decision on that,” Chode said, looking Emilio up and down, pausing to scan Emilio’s maimed hand. Two fingers had been removed from Emilio’s left hand as a contractual requirement when he’d signed on to work for OctoCorp. Part of their Full Commitment hiring policy.

“The housing authority has already granted us this building,” Chode went on, “as per the Corporate Financing Incentives Act of 2034. But as to the schedule, the short version is, if you apply for a Hispanic Heritage deferral, you can get an extra sixty days here. But–if you give us access to a cerebral usage unit, you can stay for an additional fourteen months!”

Emilio wished Carmen was here. She’d have torn these guys a new one. She was stronger than he was. He felt defeated already. But he stalled for time. “A Hispanic Heritage referral? How do I get that? I’m a Sanchez, for chrissakes. What do you want me to do, reel off some Espanol?”

Chode sniffed. “You look a little light-skinned. Our records show your grandfather was from Germany. I have your DNA read-out.”

“Everyone else in my family is from Mexico and this has place has been in our family for generations. My uncle lives here—he’ll tell you. He’s out playing dominoes now but when he gets back—”

“Daddy?” It was Julio, in the archway of the hall, rubbing his eyes. He had slept in, his first day of school vacation. He wore the Kwazy Kwacker pajamas he’d long since outgrown.

“Julio Sanchez, eight years old,” Nim muttered, gazing raptly at the boy. “Fully vaccinated, enrolled in Wal-Mart Elementary. Shows upper-level cerebral responsiveness in class.”

That made Emilio grate his teeth. Maybe he should call Carmen at work…

“Hi, Julio!” Chode said brightly, waving at the boy. “You know, you’d be ideal for our new Cerebral Youth program, and we’ve been tasked to find out—”

“No!” Emilio shouted. “Out, Chode! Both of you–out!“

“Dad!” Julio ran to his father and clung to him. “Who are they?”

“Doesn’t matter, they’re leaving.” Emilio pointed at Chode. “You heard me—I said get out now or I swear I’ll—” He was unable to finish he sentence. He broke off at the piercing sting on his neck.

He heard Chode say, “As you threatened us, we do have authorization to—”

Then Emilio was gone, instant-tranked by the drone.

 When he came to, he was lying on the floor, his head on a pillow. He straightened up, feeling queasy, the room rotating slowly. The vertigo passed and he saw Chode and Nim straightening up from Julio who was stretched out on the sofa.

There was a little foam at the corners of Julio’s mouth and a metal stud in his forehead.

Emilio’s hands fisted. “What have you pricks done!”

 They turned to Emilio as he got swaying to his feet. Nim smiled. “In the event of malicious resistance, we have All Access to the cerebral resources of tenants, as of the new law—it took effect January first.”

Chode nodded. “The boy is fine! He’s having a typical initiatory response reaction. Nothing to worry about.”

 Stomach churning, Emilio looked around the room for a weapon. There were knives in the kitchen….

Then Julio sat up, smiling, wiping foam from his mouth.

 He looked cheerfully at his father—but there was an infinite remoteness in his eyes. “It’s okay, dad, I feel better! Can I go with Bill and Romeo, after I get dressed? I want to see what it’s like to be a cerebral helper! I really want to!”

And Julio’s smile widened—as a little blood trickled down from the stud in his forehead.

…You know all those toxic corrosive materials we use, with the WARNINGS on them, don’t touch this, don’t inhale its fumes, use a mask, use goggles? And the toxic building materials that exude formaldehyde. And paint removing chemicals and so on–what’s it like in the factories where they make it? What are the rules in that place? “We crack a window and we carry out people when they get sick and put them on the pile out back”? What’s it like where they make Crazy Glue?

I am mostly thinking of outsourced product manufacturing. What are conditions like in the overseas factories for products like this, that we routinely use. Or perhaps in parts of Texas and Mississippi.

And what of their effluents? How deeply flows their pollutants?

Poised on the verge of dystopia, some of us are left thinking how curiously subjective our lives are–even when the air is clean and life’s bouncing pleasantly along like 1960 jazz percussion. We typically live in a welter of, “this feels good, I like it…that doesn’t feel good, dislike it. I’m kinda happy; now I’m unhappy. Cool new shirt; but my hair looks bad.” Forced to reassess reality, we might find a deeper vantage; a pure, inner objectivity. And from there see what can be still done.

The linchpin holding together the minds of plutocrat rightwingers is essentially a never-ending process of rationalization. They are making excuses, somewhere in the substructure of their whirring little minds, that they don’t even know they are making. The functional self-deceit of “this is for the good of America” is a tight knot of denial (“scientists are lying, we’re fine”), convenient self-deception (“I’m not enabling gun violence”), raw cynicism (“everyone does it”), externalizing blame (“socialists force us to keep blacks from voting”), and disguised hatred “anyway,liberals are satanic”).

And yes, the basic fiber of that knot is greed for power and money.

The conservative majority of the Supreme Court apparently felt that it wasn’t doing enough damage. They’d put the health of numerous women in peril, they’d weakened voting rights and made it possible to gerrymander with impunity, among other things–but they said, “What else can we do to sicken America? I know! We’ll make it easier to pollute America’s water with impunity!”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, and the other justices who are also beholden to Big Industry, found another way to repay the bosses who got them installed in the Supreme Court.

“Supreme Court dramatically shrinks Clean Water Act’s reach

“The Biden administration this year finalized a rule to cement broad protections for wetlands. That regulation must now be reworked in light of the Supreme Court ruling.” – Politico

I’ve sometimes thought it curious that many IT / tech data folk, fascinated by computers, don’t really get to know the one they were born with, their biological computer. Not only in terms of neurological composition, and health, but with respect to self-knowledge, the awareness of the true nature of attention, the variety of levels of consciousness (not the political sort, but the literal kind), and the many layers it keeps locked away from those not interested enough to pick the lock.

Consider the networks of the brain: for good and bad habits; for healthy activities and addictions; for inventiveness and free-association; for pleasant memories or painful ones. Consider the tides of hormones: the waves of reproductive desire and fear. The wiring of impulsiveness, the wiring of self-control. The predilection for anger or love. The inner adducing of a new theory, the psychological inertia leading to machinelike routine; the function of the ego, the tyranny of ego; the intricacies of desire.

But really, it’s all people, not just IT folk. It’s people whatever they’re interested in: all too few have much self awareness, all too few think about their own skull-encased thinking device. I just think it’s especially ironic with respecting people who work with computers. And here they have this biological computer–how much thought do they give it?

I stubbornly refuse to believe in predetermination, fatalism, and so on. My belief is that there are tendencies to certain outcomes. Like, a man falls in a rushing whitewater river and a powerful current is sweeping him toward the waterfall. He is prone to going over but if he’s alert enough, prepared enough, he can find a way to escape the current and survive. Probability is not necessarily deterministic.

Dwayne Dwidget, Chairman of Flibbertigibbet Incorporated, leaned back in his plush boardroom chair, started to speak — then noticed the damn gulls flying up to the window again. They’d become most bothersome lately. Happily, he’d had the laser anti-bird device installed and he smiled seeing its green beams lancing out, snuffing out the lives of the four gulls in four flares of flame. They plummeted away, trailing charred feathers, and Dwidget turned to the men and women waiting for him to address them. “Today is the day!” he declared. “This very day, Flibbertigibbet is going to transform the infrastructure of this country, and someday the world. Uniting all infrastructure with one software in one system will save the country billions and galvanize efficiency.”

“And make us a trillion dollars,” said Celia Forman happily.

“Certainly,” Dwidget said. “And that is why we must proceed apace, and not let anyone force us into unnecessary re-dos and betas and so on. We’ve got this!”

“But,” objected Gary Hamlin, their quality-control officer, “If you sell this version of the software to the government there’s a big risk of things going wrong — it’s really not ready for prime time — “

“Nonsense! The Flibbertigibbet Master Program is privatization at its best!”

“But Dwayne — “

“Does it not have the subprogram, with the execution of self-correcting AI?”

“Yes but that too is not ready — “

“We’ve got a trillion dollars to make, Hamlin! Now, having settled that, let’s get ready for our zoom meeting with the President!”

A few months later, on a Friday evening, Dwidget was in his thirty-million-dollar penthouse apartment, watching the news on the big screen TV, while drinking designer cocktails made by his in-house cocktail specialist.

“…the explosions along the power grid in the southeast have already cost forty lives,” said the news anchor. “In addition, fifteen planes are reported lost at sea, and it’s believed this is due to collisions caused by faulty software rushed into the system by Flibbertigibbet Incorporated. Another plane is — “ The news anchor vanished in mid-sentence as a plane crashed into the news channel production. Gulping his three-hundred-dollar cocktail, Dwidget changed the channel for a reality show he liked — which was interrupted by breaking news: “A dam controlled by Flibbertigibbet has opened its spillways during extreme-flood season, flooding an entire town and killing thousands — “

Another channel-change. “The Flibbertigibbet program has failed across the nation. City traffic lights are green when they should be red and countless people are dying in accidents — “

Hands shaking, Dwidget turned the tv off and called for another cocktail. Then he called Hamlin on the video phone and said, “We’ve got to fix the program now, this minute!”

“To do it this minute, boss, our only option is to give full correction powers to the subprogram AI. But that hasn’t been fully tested either — “

“It was tested enough! This is an emergency!”

“If you say so…”

Within minutes, the AI subprogram took over the system and two effects came about. The first one involved ending all Flibbertigibbet control and transferring systems to emergency manual control operatives. The second one was to eliminate the fundamental source of the program, with full executive power.

Thus it was that three large Flibbertigibbet security robots burst into Dwidget’s penthouse; two of them grabbed Dwidget’s arms and dragged him to the penthouse balcony. The third one, dragging a rope, tied it into a noose, which it put around Dwidget’s neck. The robots tossed him shrieking over the balcony railings, gripping the upper end of the rope so that his neck broke and he quickly died, dangling over the city.

“Problem solved,” the robots intoned.

Do consider checking out my new website INSTANT FUTURE, created in collaboration with futurist Brock Hinzmann. IF has only been around a month and it’s still growing. But we have interviews with energy expert Chris Nelder on the future of energy, brand new interviews with science-fiction greats Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross — both are mind-blowing interviews–and archived articles about weird new technology. Check out Brock’s insights into how to grasp the future. Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Find out at Instant Future. And more to come!

Speaking of charities, I’m just not feeling the Paul Newman’s company anymore. It turns out they give a tiny portion to charity because they count giant oversized administrator salaries as legit overhead. And the quality of their goods has deteriorated. The Paul Newman’s dressing is full of nasty crap it didn’t used to have in it. Paul is rotating elegantly in his grave. (He’s too cool to spin.)