Thursday, January 10, 2013

Future Defined! Reaching for Beyond the Limits


 It is the year 3000. People, if that’s what you called them, are half humans/half aliens. They have space colonies on other planets because earth is overrun by androids. They live in space pods, which are like huge, fortress-like Tupperware, which keeps the species youthful and vibrant. This prevents people, er, species from aging. They don’t eat; they absorb energy in their Tupperware homes. They have space cars, which are computer-operated-they don’t need gasoline or electricity. They just put in the destination in the computer in the space car, and they are at their destination in a matter of seconds. They can travel to other planets by space cars.
        The latest craze is cryogenically frozen species or rather, humans. A millennium ago, it was being developed. Now it is the rage. The first cryogenically frozen woman is discovered in an abandoned laboratory by an android on earth. After the discovery, the cryogenically wonder is sent off to a brightly-lit laboratory, all sterilized with everything in stainless steel to Venus. The inhabitants, as are practically on every single planet, is habited by half-humans/half-aliens or huliens. They called it a most ‘curious find.’ When they opened it up, they asked, “Who are you? What are you?” They’ve never seen a real complete human species before. Up till now, aliens and humans species merge together with no thought whatsoever forming half aliens-half humans or if you will, huliens. Half aliens-half humans have been past down throughout the generations since man realized that aliens are just as intelligent as the next homo sapiens excluding androids. Even though they speak alien-speak, they also are fluent in English.
        “W-w-who are you?” Janie asked. “What is this place?”
        “We are Venusans,” one of the half aliens-half humans answered. “You are on the planet Venus.” This species has huge, bulging eyes. He has an antennae, crinkled face like a pitbull. He also has huge, pointy Spock-like ears. His fingers are pointy and scraggly.. His skin is wrinkly even though he is young. When he speaks, his voice is rough; it has an edge to it..
        “Am I dreaming?” Janie wondered aloud. “Nobody has even explored Venus yet.”
        “A lot of people have already inhabited the other planets.”
        “What about earth?”
        “What about earth? That planet is overrun by androids.”
        “Now, would you mind telling me who and what you are?”
        ;”One more thing: I was wondering what year is it?”
        The ringleader of the half aliens-half humans looked at the others, bewildered. They converse in their alien tongue for a while, “Just humor her.”
        “Okay,” the head of the group said, “It is the year 3000.”
        “What language were you speaking?”
        “Alien-speak,” said the ringleader. “Any more questions?”
        “Oh my God,” Janie said, astonished. “It is the year 3000! Can I get a mirror?”
        “As you wish, darling,” said the ringleader, leading her to a full-length mirror. “By the way, my name’s Isadore. What’s yours?”
        “My name is Jane. Friends called me Janie. Can I ask you one more question?”
        “Go ahead.”
        “What are you?”
        :”We’re huliens-a half human-half alien species. We’ve been wondering the same thing about you.”
“Oh, me? I’m a human.”
        :”Here you are, Janie. Here’s a mirror.” Isadore took her to a full-length mirror in the hallway.
When she went into the cryogenically-frozen chamber, she weighed nearly 1000 pounds give or take. Her skin and hair was dull. Now, looking at the mirror, she look so svelte and her skin, not to mention her hair, was positively glowing. 
“Oh my God, look how wonderful I look!” Janie is surprised by the image looking back at her. She can’t help saying, “The years had been good to me-I went from being an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan!” Janie kept admiring herself in the mirror. “Not to be vain or anything, but I look good,” turning every which way till she notices the hulien looking oddly at her.
“Don’t you huliens care about body image?”
        “No, we don’t,” Isadore replied.
        “Huh.” Janie said, turning away from the mirror.
        Now, turning to Isadore, she asked, “Do I have any living relatives or even some friends left?”
        Isadore replied, “You’ll have to go to the local geneticist to find out if you have any blood relatives left. I’ll give you the address.”
        After Isadore gives her the address, he says, “You’ll have to hail a space cab. I’ll help you since it’s your first time here.”
        When Janie got to the geneticist, she finds out that all hope is not lost. After filling out the necessary documents via computer, she is in! She finds out she has one living relative, Elizabeth Jane ‘Lizzie Janie;’ friends and close acquaintances call her LJ, who lives on planet Mars, a hulien. She is Janie’s great-great-great-granddaughter. (She was cryogenically frozen the day of her wedding. She had a baby before she got married. She wanted to get married because she had a baby.)
        So Janie hops on the next upcoming space cab, and off she goes! It did not even take her an hour; it takes her less than that to reach Mars. The cabdriver consults his GPS navigation system in his cab, and within minutes they’re there! (See how advanced technology is-now you have no possible way of getting lost!)
        Janie gets out of the space cab to pay the cabdriver, “Already taken care of, miss.”
        “Oh, thanks.”
        “Certainly, my dear,” said the friendly cabdriver. “Hope you find what you’re looking for. Good luck!”
        “Thanks, sir.”
Janie finally looks up at where the cab drops her off at: it is a huge-I mean huge-mansion. Gee, she thought, my relative must be rich!
        When she buzzes the intercom, a young-ish female voice answered, “What is your business?”
        “I would like to see L J. I’m her great-great-great-grandmother.”
        Silence, then: “Impossible! My great-great-great-grandmother Janie disappeared, never to be found again, so family legend has it. This I’ve got to see for myself!
        L J has human features, but quite a few things are different about her. First off, she has pointy, Spock-like ears and antennae, all the better to send messages across the galaxy. And that’s about it. L J’s skin and hair is positively radiant, and is as slim as a palm tree.
        “You’re Janie, my great-great-great-grandmother?” L J said incredulously upon meeting her face-to-face for the first time.
“Yep,” replied Janie, perturbed. “And you are L J? But you can’t be L J. You’re not even human!”
        “I am part human and part alien, and I am L J, your great-great-great-granddaughter,” replied L J. “And just what are you? I mean, aside from being my great-great-great-grandmother?”
“I’m a human being,” Janie replied sadly. “The last of its kind, as I’ve been told.”
        “No way!” L J exclaimed. “You’re the last of your kind? I don’t believe it! I really don’t! There must be some humans somewhere in this universe.”
        “So what happened to you?” L J continued. Family legend has it that you disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be found again, much like Amelia Earhart or something like that…”
        “I disappeared, all right,” Janie agreed. “I was cryogenically frozen as part of an experiment. My family was against it. I didn’t tell anyone and I mean no one about my whereabouts. That’s why no one knew where I was.”
        “Okay, I believe you,” L J said. “Come in, come in. Won’t you please sit down?”
        Upon entering the foyer, L J leads Janie to the parlor. She can’t help but look as she passes by each room. Everything is sterling silver as though everything needs to be sterilized. It is sterilized because the human race started dying off in 2050 because everything started to have germs so that’s why now everyone needs to live in a germ-free environment or perish, just positively perish! That is also why humans and aliens have merged together, forming the new species: huliens. It looks like a science laboratory, but, in reality, it is Lizzie Janie’s home. They finally reach the sitting room, but from Janie’s viewpoint, there isn’t anywhere to sit until Lizzie Janie shows her where to sit: on pods. People sit on pods, where it’s all sealed up although there are holes to talk right through.
        “So what’s the year 3000 like?” Janie asked when they finally settle down. “For example, do you have an entertainment center?”
“Oh, do we!” L J exclaimed. “We built this house from the ground up, and we made one specific room most specially for our entertainment center. Wanna check it out?”
“Sure thing!” replied Janie, falling into Lizzie Janie’s steps. “Can you hook it up to all throughout the galaxy?”
LJ replied with Janie close behind, “Sure, if you want.”
        They enter one of the most largest rooms in the house. This room, too, is made out of sterling silver. But the entertainment is, to Janie, mind-blowing! I mean, every single surface is covered with one or another kind of entertainment hardware. Some are laid out in disuse; others are just plain out-of-date but still in mint condition.
        Upon entering the entertainment center, it brought tears to Janie’s eyes. She starts to feel nostalgic for her family that she left back in the 21st century. She had a wild brother who loved-just positively loved-hi-tech gadgets who passed the love onto her, his only sister. As kids, they were a team-she was the Bonnie and he was the Clyde. He was older than her by two years. They were inseparable until the day he left for college, got married and have kids. (Yes, in that order.)
Her parents were often proud of her brother rather than of her. She decided she better made her own path in life, so she did all these experiments. One of these crazy, off-the-wall experiments was that she got cryogenically frozen. Being cryogenically frozen was a work-in-progress back in the 21st century, but she went for it anyways. Her parents disapproved of her experiments, so she told no one, including her best friend, her brother, because she knew it would get back to her parents because her brother was more close to her parents than her. After her brother moved out, she tried all these crazy, cockamamie schemes.
Now she is starting over, trying out all these experiments yet again because she wants to find a way to either go back in time when she was first cryogenically frozen or to discover a way to make human contact with an actual human. Instead of being tested, she will be the one concocting the experiments this time around. She’s taking crazy chances. She’s always been a risk-taker, bending the rules when she didn’t agreed to them. Her brother, however, was just the opposite.
As she reminisces, she feels saddened that she no longer has her brother to share this with and runs out of the room, nearly crashing headlong into Lizzie Janie’s husband, a hulien who looks like a human except for his tentacles and pointy ears.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Janie exclaimed. “What-you’re another half human-half alien?! Is there any humans left?!”
“Better go after her,” L J’s husband said. “She seems upset.”
Janie runs out of the room, with L J close at her heels.
“I know you’re upset, but the world is full of huliens-half humans/half aliens; plus earth is overrun by androids,” L J told Janie gently.
Janie cries, “What I crave is human contact, not your ‘huliens’ or whatever you called yourself now. And I can’t communicate with androids-you control ‘em.” Janie covers her tear-stained face with her hands, running out of the huge Tupperware-like mansion. .
L J thinks for a moment. “I think I know of a place where there’s only humans around. Some of our huliens gave birth to human babies, but we sent them to the orphanage.”
“That’s terrible,” Janie commiserated. “But I’m thinking about humans that I can relate to, not babies.”
“See ya,” Janie said tearfully.
“‘Bye!” L J said cheerfully. “Cheer up!”
Janie hails the first space cab she sees to go back to Venus, where she first starts off.
She is, to be frank, in a state of shock. She keeps saying in a monotone over and over again, “I can’t be the last living human alive.” She is in a state of shock for maybe 24 hours, then she falls into a state of depression. She crashes in with one of the huliens in their Tupperware houses. The hulien finds her, not the other way around. It just so happens to be the ‘ringleader’ of the huliens, Isadore although there’s no such thing as leadership; everyone is independent, on their own; it is not a police state, thank god! Janie thinks the huliens have a ‘ringleader’ because that’s how her kind works.
        Isadore knows that Janie is in a state of depression. He didn’t know what would cheer her up. He finds out from her that she is depressed because there’s a lack of human contact in the universe, as of now. So he gets her a feline-android to keep her company. Originally named 3PX-579, she renames it Kitty-Kat or Kits for short. It gives her the motivation to work harder than ever before.
She decides she better get started on doing experiments on making human contact. All those experiments she did a millennium ago sort of are engrained into her brain. And with a college degree in biotechnology to back it up, she decides to setup her own laboratory; in the past, she has always done her own experiments with help from only her faithful assistant, Jananne. But now sadly, even her faithful assistant is gone too, so she has her faithful companion feline android, Kits, to make up for it although it is no comparison to the real deal.
She decides to make human and some sort of animal contact by using satellites with the sounds of practically anything-I mean anything. She sets up three huge-I mean huge-satellite dishes, facing them toward the universe, which connects to a radar screen to see where the sounds are coming from. She comes up with a device that tells the difference between android, half humans-half aliens or rather, huliens and real live humans and animals, if those still exist. Wherever there are humans, there are bound to be animals. 
After a few backfires, she finally surprisingly comes up with a human signal. It comes from an underworld of humans called the Untouchables who haven’t merged with aliens. This planet, Spaceverse, which is a billion light years, maybe eons and eons, away, is unreachable.
She didn’t see any reason to go to the trouble of reaching out to them. I mean, why bother? Although she gives up hope of uniting with her kind, she remains in contact with them through teleportation traveling back and forth through the space time continuum. Both Janie and the Untouchables are jubilant to find someone of their kind still cohabiting this universe in this day and age
But teleportation isn’t enough; it didn’t satisfy her need for actual human contact for Janie and animal contact for Kits. She and Kits wanted to have actual human contact and to see actual animals. So she decides to create her very own space pod that could surpassed light years beyond light years in a matter of seconds. When you’re on it, you feel like you’re rraveling through time not through the space-time continuum, which in fact, is what you’re doing.
After a billion and one (that’s an exaggeration!) almost successes and failures, she actually pulls it off! With a pull of the trigger, Janie and Kits are off! Whoosh! She travels through the time-space continuum in a matter of seconds! The minute she gets off the ship, she is greeted by one human, and then another.
 Most of them have pets; some don’t. They even see a kitten, Fluffy; her owner is a lady named Rachel-Ann. Both Janie and Kits get along famously with Fluffy and Rachel-Ann.
Janie is so happy to be amongst humans once again that she didn’t even care if Kits is a feline-android. Oh, to be surrounded by humans once again! She feels overwhelmed with happiness! Oh, there is much rejoicing going on! There is singing and dancing! Hooray! Happy days are here again! Oh, yeah, boy! She rejoices with the other humans. She no longer thinks deathly thoughts because now she has something to live for. She felt depressed when she discovered that there’s no human life in the universe; but her experiments haven’t yet failed her yet. Rejoice! Rejoice! Hallelujah! They won’t ever go back to the place filled with huliens because they finally find what they are looking for: true human and animal contact!
Moral: Dreams are possible, you just have to have the motivation to attain them. Everything’s-and I mean everything is within our reach!
                                                                                                       
                                                                                                Connie Cyndi Chu 

No comments:

Post a Comment