by Lela Oswald
Just then there was a knock on the hotel room door. His dad Rex motioned for him to go see who it was. Rex was wearing his big clunky headphones and focusing on his software engineering work on his wall air projected laptop. He wore his google glasses that allowed him to see what was on the air projections meanwhile the projections were invisible to everyone else.
Martin peaked through the hole and saw his sister who had come back from going up to the hotel room floor above to talk to their mom who was up in the hotel room above with the two youngest Orville siblings.
“Martin, I need to talk to you.”, said Magdalena.
“What is it? I’m busy designing the ride system for my new Mars Disneyland ride.”
“I know. So the thing is...I’ve been having dreams about you lately. I think you might be in danger. I need you to be extra careful,” said Magdalena in her concerned big sister voice.
“You want me to change my life beauce you had a DREAM? Your dreams aren’t real,” said Milo in an annoyed tone.
“It’s more than a dream. I think it might be a sign,” said Magdalena.
“You are so dramatic. Go write down your ideas in a book. I don’t need your distractions.”, said Martin as he rolled his eyes.
Martin put his headphones back on and watched the virtual pictures of musical notes go by on his headphones projector as he got back to work on his Mars Disneyland rides. Disney music inspired his ride building. He imagined that on Mars one day Disney songs would be like church hymnals. Groups would gather together to sing uplifting Disney songs and share messages of hope and inspiration from Disney stories. They would share a hardship in their life and then say how a certain Disney song or movie lyric helped them get through the tough time and how that Disney character served as inspiration during their life hardship. There was no cultural force more powerful than the story. Archetypes help their power throughout time and would have the same force on Mars that they do on Earth. They tie our species to the timeless eternal energy of the universe.
If the Disney song meetups did happen on Mars, Martin would surely go. He didn’t envision himself as a church pastor or anything like that since he was on the introverted side in terms of personality type. But he would enjoy singing disney songs in a group for an hour on Sundays mornings, that would be quite nice. Or any day of the week for that matter. Martin didn’t classify himself as religious but he enjoyed reading creation stories from different cultures. He was especially fond of the Greek gods and goddesses and Norse mythology as well. In a way Martin saw Disney as a type of religion. It drew people together through higher purpose. The purpose of reaching your potential, achieving your dreams, and helping others along the way. Maybe Disney services would focus on extracting philosophical lessons from Disney movies and applying those lessons to one’s own life in order to live the best life they could.
Some people misinterpreted Disney fans as worshipping a company or capitalism itself with Disney being a representative of corporate interests and late stage capitalism. But Martin didn’t see it that way at all, Martin saw the love of Disney as a worshipping of creativity. The worshipping of imagination and the enduring human spirit in the face of struggle and tribulation. Maybe future anthropologists would look back at this time and call this philosophy Disney-ism. Maybe they would see it as a religion no different than the other major religions of the day. Maybe they would look back and be perplexed that humans of the 20th and 21st centuries worshipped a mouse. Mickey Mouse. And they even wore mouse ears and other mouse iconography.
Martin noticed Magdalena was still staring at him and standing next to the hotel bed. Rex was in his own world working. With his headphones on he could barely hear their conversations. Magdalena walked closer to Martin and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Do you wanna come up to the pool floor with me and work on your Disney rides up there?” she said.
Marin looked at her skeptically, “Why?”
Magdalena wanted to keep him in her eyesight at all times, but she couldn’t admit that to him as her reason or else he wouldn’t want to go.
“It will be fun. You can work on your park ride engineering while I read. What do you say?” Magdalena smiled.
Rex had a feeling his sister was just being a helicopter sister but he obliged anyway.
“Fine,” said Martin. He pinged his dad a message saying that he and Magdalena were going up to the pool and would be back soon. He copied Magdalena on the ping.
Rex saw the message in his virtual pad. “Have fun, kids,” he said as he waved them off.
Magdalena responded to her dad’s ping, “Thanks, dad. We’ll be all set to go to the airport in 2 hours, I’m already packed.” Rex gave a thumbs up to Magdalena’s ping as Magdalena and Martin headed out the door and went up to the pool floor on the top floor overlooking the city. Up at the pool deck there were tables looking out from over 100 stories in the sky. Windows surrounded the pool area and deck area. Magdalena sat down at one of the tables and opened up her virtual pad via her tablet watch. Martin sat down next to her and opened up his tablet watch too. Magdalena started writing her newest book, a sequel to Wall-E. She was about half way done with it, it was a fan fiction book about what happens to the humans who had fled earth in the original Wall-E movie.
“I’ll be right back,” said Martin as he walked over toward the bathrooms that also served as the locker room exits to the pool.
“Okay” said Magdalena.
Martin went into the bathroom door but then continued on and walked right out the exit. He knew Magdalena would be her usual overprotective self if he told her that he wanted to go downstairs and sketch the lobby some more and get some details he had missed earlier. There were still so many details left on the hotel that he wanted to implement into his engineering schematics for his Disney hotels and Disney rides for Mars Disneyland. But he only had two hours before they headed to the airport for their flight so it was now or never. He would come back up in 20 minutes and Magdalena would just think it was an extra long bathroom visit. He would tell her he had to take a long poop. Ha!
Martin turned the corner after exiting the long bathroom corridor and then took the elevator down to the lobby. He played his Disney park loop background music in his virtual ear pods as the elevator descended. He couldn’t wait to log the dimensions for the elaborate hotel lobby into his charts. He would use it as inspiration for the Mars Disneyland flagship hotel.
As the elevator door opened he skurried over to the hotel entrance. He looked up at the lobby ceiling and squinted a bit to adjust his eye binocular focus and snap a few eye-screenshots. He entered all the dimensions into his tablet, so that he could come back to them later and play around with using the dimensions for other hotels or rides he was building. He had recently installed new engineering software that was most often used by factories to make mock ups of materials intended for construction use, so he would use these materials samples as the basis and then have the factory software make copies of it and different models of it.
He wanted to go get some specs from outside too. His parents always told the kids to never under any circumstance leave the hotel without them, but he wasn’t LEAVING the hotel, he was just going to stand outside and snap some visual screenshots with his eyes. Surely it was fine to go outside for only a minute. It was broad daylight. Martin walked outside.
The hotel bellhop looked in his direction and nodded. Martin nodded back. He walked out a little further and turned the corner. The bellhop couldn't see him anymore. Martin preferred to work in privacy so that people didn’t ask him what he was working on or why he was taking so many eye-shot pictures.
After snapping pictures for a good ten minutes he decided he had better get back up to Magdalena or she would worry. He decided to take a different entrance back into the hotel so it didn’t seem sketchy to the bellhop that he was out but the side of the hotel for ten minutes. Martin walked around the back of the hotel.
Just then he noticed a driverless can
slowly following him. It was probably just a drop off of food or laundered towels or other hotel supplies for the hotel. Martin walked faster. He was about to turn the corner any second.
The car behind him sped up. Martin started to walk even faster than before bordering on a jog. Surely he was being silly. He was just acting paranoid because of what Magdalena had said. Surely he wasn’t afraid of some driverless car that was likely dropping off soap at the hotel or was there to pick up the hotel’s trash. He was just on edge and this was all in his head.
Suddenly Martin felt a bag go over his head and a needle go inside his arm. He felt a shock of adrenaline followed by a deep wooziness and tiredness. Then everything went black.
Chapter 6: Rex Orville
Rex saw a ping on his tablet. “I’m downstairs checking out of the hotel”, said the message from his wife. “Brought Melody and Milo with me. You can go down next and check out with Magdalena and Martin.”
Rex gave the text a thumbs up. Rex worked from home for Google in an undisclosed location. He had been working home for many years, ever since Covid-19 made it such that all the googlers in the San Francisco Bay Area were mandated to work from home and then made it optional to go back to working in person. Most of the coworkers on his team were spread around the world anyway, so virtual video calls and chats were the norm for him anyway. In addition to working at google Rex had developed multiple startups. Karmatopia was one of them. Karmatopia tracked “karma” of consumers in an online reputation tracking system that brought transparency to government agencies and to capitalism by identifying corruption via crowdsourcing and through flagging of those who abuse online systems. The Traditionalist Party was not a fan of Rex’s technology and had an extra bounty on him for his technology in addition to the bounty for his google association leading his google team and developing technology that allowed for autonomous self driving vehicles and drones.
Rex worried about his family’s safety, but he knew they took many precautions. In addition to the internal net he made for his family to communicate with one another, he used additional security and encryption services to make sure their temporary identities were secure.
Rex still had family back in the US though. His parents Carmela and Derek lived back in Michigan. As did his brother Jim, sister in law Laurel, and Jim and Laurel’s adult children, son Jack and daughter Montana. Rex couldn’t talk to any of them since it put them at risk if they were ever questioned by the US government. He missed them but he knew it was for their own safety that they not know where he was.
Rex knew Carmela missed her grandkids, but she was still a very involved grandmother in the lives of Jack and Montana who lived near her, even though they were adults. She always kept in touch with them and let them know how much she loved them. Before she was a grandmother extraordinaire and a mom, Carmela had been a veterinarian. She was whip smart, practical, sarcastic, and sharp. She was the kind of grandma who kids love having around and who parents trust to keep their kids safe. It was too bad she wouldn’t get to see her youngest grandkids for the time being. Jim and Laurel’s son Jack was an electrical engineer, and he and his wife were expecting a baby, so Carmela was looking forward to being a great-grandma soon. And Rex and Laney would be great-uncle and great-aunt to Jack’s baby even though they may not meet him or her for some time.
Rex’s father Derek was retired like his wife and had formerly worked in industrial design engineering for a company that made car parts back before cars drove themselves. Many of his former coworkers in Michigan were part of the Traditionalist Party, which had a stronghold in Michigan, which was home to many former car companies that had all been consumed by the San Francisco Bay Area tech giants before the Traditionalist Party exiled said Big Tech companies out of the US.
Rex made a mental list of what he needed to pack for that evening. He would bring the emergency food storage, coconut milk, ghee, vegan protein powder, baby food with vegetables, pedialyte powders, medications, antibiotics, tylenol, advil.
Magdalena came into the room, “Dad, have you seen Martin? He was up at the pool with me and then he left and I haven’t seen him.”
“Did you check the other hotel room?” asked Rex.
Magdalena shook her head, “No, I’ll go there now. I just have an intuition that something is going to happen to Martin. I had a dream about it.”
Rex looked skeptically at her, ‘You and your mom and your wild dreams.”
Magdalena turned to leave and go check the other hotel room where her mom and the two younger siblings were staying. Rex watched her leave and thought about how much she looked like his mom, Carmela. Magdalena had her mother’s imaginative fanciful mind, her dad’s curls, and her grandmother’s intensity. She had a diverse array of interests from ballet to musical theater choreography to robotics programming. She and Rex would program miniature princess robots together from kits online, and make them dance to dances that Magdalena would choreograph. She made storylines and scripts for the robots to follow and little costumes for them. She was so humorous and creative. She was such a wonderful daughter in every way. A good big sister, caring and loving and protective. And an incredible person overall who cared about the world and always tried to be the best human she could be.
She lived a full life despite being in hiding from the government. But sometimes she would get lost in her own world and her own conspiracies. She would discover a dimension that sent her to another universe in her mind, and she would get lost in her own thoughts. The visions of sugarplums that danced in her head would carry her off on adventures beyond her understanding. She lived in a world of magic, but filled with a world of science thanks to her science heavy homeschool education. Not only did she see the magic of science but she saw extra layers of magic in the world. She loved pinterest and the new version of pinterest, Picturetopia. She especially loved looking at cells and biology pictures on picturetopia. She had even written a kids chapter book about a little girl who was given a fairy wand to different dimensions in the world of science where she solved mysteries in the world of science. She also wrote solar punk children’s books about a bright world in the future that was completely solar powered. She even wrote a solar powered musical complete with sun themed costumes.
Rex turned his attention back to the virtual newspaper he was reading. He liked to stay on top of the tech news each day. He used news aggregator algorithms to feed him the more relevant tech stories. He scrolled past headlines that described the political battle in the UK for predictive medical screening for all and not just after the fact free health care. People were demanding that the new body scanners on the marker would be available to all and not just those who could afford predictive scans that showed which cancers they were most at risk for in 10 or 20 or 50 years, so that they could act accordingly and trailer their health regimens toward reducing risk of the diseases they were most susceptible to contracting. Then they could also choose to opt into being contacted about future treatments or studies involving the conditions for which they were most at risk.
In Russia there was debate over serotonin and dopamine redistribution. Scientists had figured out how to produce serotonin and dopamine in a lab and reduce sadness in the population. At first the wealthy were buying up the “happy hats” that were basically caps that infused serotonin and dopamine into the brain. Then came movements to make the hats be covered by the national health care in the country. The hats scanned the brain to monitor levels of serotonin and dopamine and then upon measuring the current amount and finding it below the baseline amount for that person, an increase would be infused. The problem was, the baseline was always getting higher and higher due to adjusting to constantly higher overall averages with each measurement. This gave a constant happiness advantage to those who had purchased the hats in years prior when they were first released. Some radical equality politicians were calling for not only nationally covered happy hats and free happy hat upgrades with each new tech upgrade the hats underwent but also c
alling for those with top 1% serotonin and dopamine levels to have their neurochemicals extracted in order to redistribute them to those at the lowest end of the spectrum. Some doctors were saying this would be completely harmless and would benefit those at the bottom of the spectrum. And others were saying any lowering of someone’s levels was a violation of their mental sovereignty and tantimount of “neurological rape” or “brain rape.” Others called for a serotonin tax on those who measured in the top 1%.
Back in the US the newest political issue was legalizing shrooms. A bill legalizing ketamine and shrooms had been about to pass the US Senate, but that was before the Traditionalist Party took over. By 2828, marijuana had been legalized in every US state, and then the next battleground was over shrooms and MDMA and ketamine. By 2030, most states had legalized recreational use of non-addictive substances, but then MEhappy hit the streets. Mehappy allowed cocaine level concentration without the crash, LSD level open mindedness without the risk of endangering oneself due to being so out of touch, caffeine like clarity without the jitters, and MDMA-like oneness with the world. Mehappy was heralded as a creativity enhancer at first and was used by the cognitive elite and creative elite, but then it was discovered that Mehappy usage was correlated with brain tumors years later, and there was new pressure to criminalize it. Opponents of the measure argued that criminalizing it only gave power to those who traded the substance illegally and created a shadow market that allowed crime to thrive in a time when crime rates had never in human history been lower thanks to police drones with near 100% conviction rate on solving murders, rapes, assaults, and property crimes. Supporters of the Mehappy ban argued that public health protection was worth banning the substance even if it resulted in a spike in crime from illegal black market trade on the darknet.