I do not know which is more disturbing: An Icelandic girl grunting, hiccuping, and choking out a song of pure breath or the swelter of harmonica that's slapped on top, like a bad peanut butter job, uneven, maybe ground down into the bread a little too much in places.
I looked at the insides of my eyes today. There's this strange world veiled by the vitreous and aqueous humors. Actually, there's two of them, separated by meat and bone; each one gated behind fluid and existing parallel to each other.
Still thinking about the future today. I worked on the swamp story, squeezed out a few hundred words, felt a little ill for my efforts, saved and closed.
Mostly the future feels big and dumb in my head. The future is slow and pointless when it comes to what we imagine to be the important things, dribbling into non-existent past-due space operas when really it's all about communications technology. Your TV will have call display, but I'm not getting a cottage on the moon. There will be no Grey Alien migrant workers, getting high off packets of space gas. At least I can write about them.
Decades from now the Steve Jobs Memorial Memeplex, speaking through a hundred thousand speakers capable of receiving wi-fi, will announce the launch of the Mac iCell. Besides being a cellphone, mobile web-browser, camera, capable of containing all known music ever, able to download and display text, images, video and all that shit for you -- it will also be small enough to be injected directly into your bloodstream. It will work its way to your nervous system and there you go! You won't have to worry about drunk-dialing so much as drunk sub-vocalizing. The iCell's nucleus will come in a variety of colours, but you'll need an MRI or electron microscope to see. Load the syringe and shoot up, Johnny! Then call your mother.
Or, hey, Bob, you know Old Bob. He's an oracle, used to live down the street. Precognitive. He drinks to forget what's going to happen. Oh, sure, he shouldn't -- family history of alcoholism, he's not eating enough anymore and he always smells like shit. You know what science fiction taught us, what Buffy the Vampire Slayer taught us. You see the future, you see the bad shit, the apocalypses, you see all the death and violation. Like Isaac Mendez on Heroes, painting images of his own corpse, head sawed off and brain eaten. Precogs don't get flashes of finding their car keys ten minutes from now and not being late for work. So Bob, he drinks. It's all a bit pathetic, sure, but the neighbourhood has an agreement: Leave him alone. Let him drink. Don't ask him any questions about what's coming, because he'll either shout and throw bottles at you, or he'll tell you. We can't blame him for the drinking, because he's stuck thinking about the future all the time.
In the future, little kids will grow up dreaming about leaving the Vancouver Island Outer Wal-Mart Projects to move down to the Downtown Core, make it big. Mostly they'll end up working at a crap drugstore for couple months before some drunk bladerunner mistakes them for a replicant and BANG.