Connector Waves Forest
"BOB" AND THE OXYGEN WARS
The SubGenius boasts about Time Control always sound like a bunch oftall tales, until you get a firsthand taste of the High Volt Age. One of "Bob's" Friends from the Future just clued me in, partway at least, and my scrambled synapses still haven't settled. How do I apply some of these crazy new ideas in time to help prevent or at least personally survive you-know-what?
Sometimes it seems like your luck has to balance out somehow, where you have to undergo a total bummer to set you up for something great you'd never have run into otherwise.
I was hoping this would be one of those times. A blown head gasket on an empty desert highway should be worth some sort of break to even things out, preferably before the sun melted me into the asphalt.
But so far all I was getting was a new and deeper appreciation of the word barren. Even the occasional scragglebush looked like it really resented being here, and wasn't about to put any more than the bare minimum of survival effort into it.
So much for shortcuts. I'd been walking for three hours and had seen only one car. The expressions glimpsed on the flyby were of dull surprise that anyone would even try to hitch a ride in this time and place-a feeling I could appreciate.
It was getting rather obvious that years of city life had left me in Pitiful shape. Only a few hours out in a hot but otherwise ordinary American desert and I was nearly wiped out already.
This was no longer just a matter of missing a long-shot job interview that might have helped me postpone lifting anything heavier than a paintbrush a little while longer. It was starting to look like all my stubborn resistance to changing times had caught up with me. When their basic survival necessities get threatened, most folks' interest in "art" evaporates quicker than piss on a desert bush, which got the unpleasant surprise of discovering that it could get even more resentful than it already was.
Shortly after that so did I. My crude pack of stuff salvaged from the car got its fill of bouncing and bellyaching, split open and scattered feeble expressions of American "culture" across the gravel. How appropriate. The phrase "World Without Slack" kept taking on new and more exasperating significance.
While I was crouching there, telling various inanimate objects how stupid they were and patching the pack by tying my shirt around it, all my arm and neck hairs suddenly stood up.
I turned around, and there was the smoothest-looking sports car I've ever seen, standing with the passenger door open. Instant floods of relief stmggled with major danger signals for control of my legs. There was no way I could have missed seeing that car miles ahead of its arrival. I'd been looking back a lot oftener than any logical expectations could justify. And even with all the smog that's crept into the desert basins, visibility was still at least twenty miles, on a road going straight over the horizon.
Want to read the rest of it go here:
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/classic/classictales/OxygenWars1.html
part two:
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/classic/classictales/OxygenWars2.html
