Jan 13, 2024
This is an anime version of Jayden. He's Emunah's best friend whom she's crushing hard on. He's one of my favourite characters in my novel, The Quest for Immortality, so he features in quite a few book trailers.
seen from Canada
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seen from United States
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seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from Maldives
seen from Netherlands
seen from Canada
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
This is an anime version of Jayden. He's Emunah's best friend whom she's crushing hard on. He's one of my favourite characters in my novel, The Quest for Immortality, so he features in quite a few book trailers.
Replacements
The marsh burbled. The reeds shook. The water rippled. The beat rose.
Fingers, then hands, arms and whole bodies thrashed their way up through the water. Tacky grey-black feet touched firm ground. Joints twisted. Sopping hair slopped against leathery skin.
And then, one of them began to sing.
“We fen as fuck, draggin' rhymes through the muck, lay it down on the wasteland, beats in the wet sand. Words unholy, dripping out slowly…”
“Is this rap?,” asked Gran, looking up from her reader. “It looks like Thriller. Do you even know who Michael Jackson is?”
“Of course. Jackson plays for Arsenal.”
“But that’s… never mind.” She settled the reader into its recharge base. “Is this what kids are listening to now?”
“Oh, Gran… this is trashhop. It’s SO OLD.” Jeskola spat the words out with disgust, rolling her eyes with the mortification that pre-teens seem to pick up all of a sudden, like a virus. Wasn’t it only a few days ago that she’d been a child?
“I have to do a paper on bog bodies. That’s the ONLY reason I’m watching this.”
“We fen as fuck, hit you like a Mack truck. Drop you hard like the old ones, tossing back cold ones…”
Stacy shuffled into the kitchen and opened the cupboard. Seaweed-nut bars. Algae crackers. Instant laverbread tempura. Exoflour cookies with carob chips. Strawberry-flavored agar spread.
She picked up the Exoflour cookies and scanned the label, looking for something that might have grown on an old-fashioned farm, the kind of place she lived when she was Jeskola’s age. It was all bug ranching and sea farming now. Not much there. Maybe the sugar beets and soy oil.
She sat at the table and nibbled one of the cookies. It was sweet, crisp and lifeless. In a coloring book, it would have been a pale gray disc, unnoticed among sunny richness of the shortbreads, the darkness of half-charred raisins in the oatmeal cookies, the spicy bite of the gingersnaps playing off a base of mellow molasses.
The standard Cavendish bananas Stacy had always known had died off years ago, replaced by the more lemony Goldfinger variety.
Jeskola and her mother didn’t notice. They couldn’t have noticed. To them, these gray cookies were the world’s definition of cookies. These bananas were their bananas. The music Jeskola listened to was music. The kitchen lighting and countertop surfaces represented the way things always were. There was never any “before.”
All the things Stacy had known in childhood — lightbulbs, books, music, dances, language, the furniture in the homes, the fabrics she wore. Replaced. All of it. Faster, cheaper, more efficient manufacture and distribution. Strange materials. Shifted perspectives.
These people had no memory of truffle butter or Jamón Serrano. They didn’t crave the juice that ran out of August peaches. Why would they need those things? They had agar spread and carrageenan pops.
She put the cookies back on the shelf. In another life, she’d worked as a food critic. Now Stacy realized there were no more jobs as food critics. It occured to her that she was no longer even Stacy. She was Gran, the old one. The one who was out of time, out of sync, living in a world that didn’t exist.
“Will you read this, Gran?” Jeskola set her tablet on the table. “I’m gonna make kombu patties. You want one?”
“Sure. Why not?” Gran watched her granddaughter, the long-limbed, clever girl. Dark-eyed, like herself. Similar in facial structure, but more confident and studious than she’d been.
Jeskola moved boldly through the world that was hers, owning her space, right in her time. An improvement on the original. A worthy replacement.
GoodBuy
Lena waved at Michael from the doorway. She hated to interrupt him during work, but she needed to engage a second brain. “I’m going to the store.”
“Ahhh… hold on.” He disengaged from his headset.
Lena repeated, “The store. What do we need?”
“Okay. The store. Like the food store?”
“Yeah. Where they keep the food. We need milk and something for dinner.”
“Also coffee. The oranges have been nice. Maybe more of those?”
“Good idea. I’m going to try to get hot chocolate, too. It’s supposed to be cold tonight.”
“Do you need money?”
“I’m going to GoodBuy, so it shouldn’t be that much.”
“Ugh. GoodBuy?” He shuddered. “Really? Have we come to that? Well… good luck.”
Lena stepped into the bus. In the post-rush hour timeslot, all the worker bees were working. Now it was only Lena, an old man with a newspaper and a Chinese woman surrounded by shopping bags bulging with… what, exactly? Empty plastic bottles? Without people filling the seats, the bus seemed to rattled all the more.
She had her phone, but didn’t feel like looking at it. As much as she knew the rejection letters were impersonal (it was nearly the same text every time… she knew everyone must be using the same legal boilerplate to minimize risk), they still hurt somehow.
The electronic scanner at the door greeted her with undue brightness. “Good morning smart shopper! Today is a great day for GoodBuy! Insert your customer card and select shopping assistance now.”
The selections appeared on the screen in three flavors: a big, green Full Assistance button, orange for Normal Assistance and purple for Minimal Assistance. Of course there was also a smaller gray button off to the side for “No Assistant,” but nobody came to GoodBuy for that.
Lena sighed and pressed green. “Now that’s a GoodBuy! You’ll get the full discount package today. Put on your headset and get ready for smart shopping!”
She took the basket and headset. There was no way to adjust the volume, but she’d learned that if she moved the ear cups farther down, they rode on her jaw more than her ears, so the voice wasn’t quite as loud. Pro tip for the unemployed.
She briefly thought about writing it up as a blog post, but the GoodBuy social media team would probably just report it to the engineering team and then she’d have her ears blasted like everyone else.
All the promotional blah blah started right away, before she even got near the food. GoodBuy seemed especially self-congratulatory.
She chose a rolling basket and made a beeline to the oranges. “Hold on there, Lena! You don’t want to miss out on the luscious fruit flavor of JoosClens. These super-detox juice drinks are made with the flavors of pineapple, lemon, kale, spinach and ginger juice with just a hint of cayenne…”
It was hard to tune out, but she picked out the nicest-looking oranges and moved on to the bagged salads. “Salad is great, but no salad is complete without Baconauts! Launch your tastebuds into orbit! Baconauts have all the bacon flavor you love, but none of the fat. You’ll get a special deal on Baconauts today, Lena. Buy one, get one free!”
Baconauts. Okay. Why not? Michael liked them. She put two canisters in the cart beside the oranges and the arugula.
As Lena moved through the store, the voices talked, sang, made terrible puns, interrupted each other. It was madness. It was exhausting.
Turning into the canned goods aisle, she saw a long, thin retiree dressed in a navy blue rain jacket topped with a flowered scarf. The woman seemed frozen, staring, her crepe hand gently resting on a squeeze-ketchup display.
When she reached for a can of chickpeas, the Beano jingle triggered across the big screen. Undulating cartoon intestines shimmied to a synthetic samba. She tore herself away, but the jingle persisted until it was interrupted by the spiel triggered off a cracker endcap.
By the time she reached the ice creams, Lena felt dizzy and had to brace herself against a concrete column. Closing her eyes, she rested her forehead on a Haagen-Das poster. It was cool and smooth. She ached to take off the headset, but the sensors would detect that. Her discounts would begin to dissolve away.
She took a deep breath and checked the basket. Oranges, lettuce, tomatoes, hamburger, chicken thighs, chickpeas, coffee, paper towels, Baconauts. Maaaaalala Lemontina! Lemontina, I adore. Lemontina, give me more. Ma la la Lemontina!
Get out. Get out. Get out.
Lena struggled to navigate to the cashier, past the flash displays, past the bargain screens and the impulse buys.
Even as she ran barcodes across the scanner, the ads for items within grabbing distance played on and on. At last, the credit card swiped, it was almost over.
“You’re a smart shopper, Lena! Today you saved eleven dollars and forty six cents! Did you know you can double that in an Amazon credit? Just say or touch Amazon on the screen.”
“No, dammit. Give me my discount.”
Lena threw her headset in the bin, stuffed the receipt in the bag and ran out of the building.
She collapsed into a seat on the bus, thankful for the space, the cool air, the empty rattle. Oh god, the milk. The fucking milk. She’d completely missed the dairy aisle. No hot chocolate, either. Another failure.
I’ll get it at the bodega. I’ll pay double. I don’t fucking care anymore.
Six dollars for organic. Still a five-dollar savings overall.
Past the sticky window, she watched the buildings transform from low brick to shining steel and glass.
It wasn’t worth it. She knew that. The bus trip alone cost more than five dollars. It all felt like some kind of penance for the sin of unemployment.
The bus paused in traffic while the lunch crowd gathered, lining up for a turn at the burger counters and salad bars. Lena singled out a dark-haired woman her own age. She was vaping while she waited, laughing with a friend.
Ten more applications this afternoon. After ten, I’ll get into a bubble bath.
Moons of Jupiter gives a retconned timestamp of 'a thousand years since mankind invented the first spaceship', in contrast to the first book's 'ten thousand years after the pyramids were built and five thousand years after the first atom bomb had exploded'. The latter places the date just short of 7000 AD (the first atomic explosion being in 1945); the former only around 3000 AD (the first manned spacecraft being in 1961, five years after publication).
Technically, since the first manned flight occurred after publication, it could be 'one thousand years after an unspecified point in the future', but I'd say that accounts for a leeway of maybe 200 years at the most generous (we damn well better have gotten off this rock by 2156, jeesh.)
Even accounting for zeerust and the slower rate of technological advancement in the 50s, the 7000 AD timestamp always seemed excessively far-out to me. 3000 AD still feels awfully far given our current rate of development, but I can see it seeming reasonable in '56.
digital interface
Equilibrium
Equilibrium
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
2001