Let’s check in with Grandad to see how much we need to keep it on the too-cool.
“Grandad, let’s say you were reading an old story, something from Shakespeare maybe, with some modern explanations to help you understand. If I asked about the book, ‘does it rad an occasion glimpse, blast on the fast-past to the real-time, keep it on the too-cool’, you would understand the meaning, right?”
“No Sweetie, not really. I hear you talk like that. Your real-speak. Thankfully, you and your friends don’t talk like that all the time. I might get half of the intent. That phrase isn’t too hard though. I think you’re saying, does the author occasionally explain the book content to help a modern reader better understand the meaning of the text.”
“You have your AI running an interpretation algorithm on your s-loop all the time, don’t you?
“True-go.”
“Funny. True-go. Okay. Thanks Grandad.”
“You bet.”
I haven’t thought much about it. But we don’t tend to use our culture-gen real-speak when addressing Grandad. Or others of his generation. It’s like my generation is bilingual. Has there been that much cultural language drift?
Anyway, I better stick with an early turn of the century writing style. Let’s get this thing going.
***
THE LAB
Begin Journal. August 5th (again). I’m going to try to get through a Journal catch-up to August 21st, the main start of the invasion, the landing. But for us, this whole thing really got started with a visit to the lab on August 5th.
Grandad invited us on a tour of the new science laboratory that recently opened near Seattle. Mia and I could bring two friends. It wasn’t as though Grandad didn’t know who those two friends would be. I called Tom and Bill, knowing they would be excited. Tom answered.
I’ll admit, I was excited to see the lab as I placed the call. “In-synch for a wind-up ace-man?”
Tom was ready for some action too. “Tight. Done grinding?”
Work is done, time for summer fun. “Perked. Funs-up.”
Tom wanted the dope. “We’re freed. Into?”
I had something on the top. “Back pass, that new lab, staff to tow. Grandad has placed.”
Tom had his s-loop on speaker by that time. This is a thing now. “You hear that Bill? We are VIP for the best show in town.”
Yeah, it wasn’t hard to sell, not to them at least. And it was wonderful, at first it was. The lab had sections devoted to numerous branches of science. It’s a big deal laboratory, employing the latest experimental holistic approach to science. Many scientific disciplines with potential beneficial integration synergies all under one roof. The brochure said something like that anyway.
Robotics. Artificial Intelligence. Genetics. Medicine. Agriculture. Even space travel. I don’t think we’re nerds exactly. Not that there is anything wrong with being a nerd. If liking science stuff means you’re a nerd, well, deal with it. Good, we’ll leave it at that.
There we were, wandering around all googly eyed. I woke from my tech-daze long enough to think: we must be worse than a bunch of little kids visiting Disney Land for the first time. Then I went right back under. We stopped at every display, took the whole tour. And we had a lot of questions. The scientists were way too tolerant. Grandad seemed to know most of them. I suppose we got special treatment because of that.
We saw nanites through purpose-built and super powerful microscopes. They’re basically tiny machines. Let me help you understand the size of a nanite in case you haven’t seen very many. A nanite is so named because of the scale, the size. It is almost as small as a nanometer. A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick. So, yeah, a nanite is small.
We saw human-sized robots too. Those are coming along. Artificial intelligence. Scary-smart. Advances in medicine are moving fast. There is constant headway in agriculture, more food, less soil degradation. Genetics. I hope they know what they’re doing. There is an awful lot of gene mixing going on these days. It would be fun to have a pair of wings someday though. That would be pretty cool. I must have said that out loud, because Roll said I would be too heavy to fly, even if I had wings.
He received a good sock on the shoulder, of course. “You trying to say something Roll?”
We were having a great time. But the day had grown long. The science guys had moved along; most likely they had enough of us by then. Really, it was time to go, and we wandered over to Grandad who was getting a dip from the water cooler. Then ... boom. Massive explosion. There was glass flying. Smoke was swirling. I saw flames, an actual flame-cloud. That would have been awesome in and of itself if I didn’t think I was about to die. Sirens and horns were blaring; then Grandad was pulling us all down to the ground.
It ended as quickly as it had begun. Well, the explosion and fires did. But if we are being technical, the massive explosion was only the beginning. You’ll see.
Like Grandad said later, almost like he was trying to make it all seem like part of a show. “Real flash-bang stuff.” Yeah, there will be plenty of that in our future. Real flash-bang stuff.
Foam fire retardant was spraying all over the place. Giant fans kicked on to pull out the smoke. Doors clanged. Some opened, some shut. And there we were, wondering what in the world had happened. None of us was hurt too badly. We all had cuts from broken glass. Each of us had an assortment of goo all over. That would be goo, plural. Goos? Anyway, there was an assortment of goo colors. It really was disgusting.
Medics arrived. They cleaned and bandaged us. Then a helicopter came and took us to a nearby military base. Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Madigan Army Hospital is there. It gave the impression the
