Greg's Blurty

The Next One I'm Not Going To Write
This one is going to make much longer to not write than what is usual for me. The fifty pages I have so far, plus the advance copies of it from dimensions where I have actually written it tell me that it's going to be more than a thousand pages long. And I can't not write a thousand pages in one or two days.

Not anymore. I'm too old, now, and this one might take up to a week or maybe even longer. I really should start listening to Suzette when she tells me I need to go get one of those new fangled rejuvenation procedures because my lack of ability to do just about anything in a reasonable amount time is really straining her frustration tolerances.

That's another story for another day, though. Today's story is the plot of this latest novel I'm not writing and it's all about Wendall Trance, the CEO of TrinCorp, which is one of the biggest multi-planet corporations in the Known Universe (The KU). You've probably already guessed that this one is set in the future and I'm happy to tell you that you're right.

And what I'm about to tell you will probably lead you to further guess that this one is, in large part, a response to my frustration to living in 2008 and it being not all that much different from 1978 (Or even 1968, since we have a Vietnam again, and thank you, President Bush, for that). And you will be right about that as well, because my future world is a lot like this one.

People still drive cars, watch TV, go to the theater (Just as people have been doing since 2000 BC, when the Greeks invented theater, even though they didn't. We had theater long before we had Greeks but they get the credit and I'm far too busy to argue the point), go to movies, argue with their spouses, worry about money, argue with their kids, etc etc etc, but the important thing is that they still buy things. They uy almost all the same things that we buy plus a few new ones.

And that's where companies like TrinCorp come in. They produce and sell almost all the things we want and need, just as all the big companies do today. Except, in SurWorld (That's my working title for this one), the biggest of them are multi-planet rather than multi-national.

And TrinCorp is one of the biggest of the big. And you should really consider buying a few shares of TrinCorp (Yes, there is still a stock market for people to play in the future) if you haven't already done so, because it produces the number one cigarette (smoking is still frowned upon by some but when all the diseases it allegedly causes were cured, governments got out of the tobacco game and the practice was left entirely to free market forces and now 73% of all adults on Earth smoke and 38% of all kids and those numbers are fairly representative of the entire KU), not only on Earth and all it's colonies but also on 41 other planets and that is its' biggest profit center. But that's not all it does. In addition to tobacco (42 different brands), it also has top selling whiskey, rum and gin brands. It also has a few very successful restaurant, oil change and brothel chains.

TrinCorp has other products and services, of course, but the ones I've mentioned account for 93% of its' post tax profit so I don't feel a huge need to go into the other ones. For one thing, it would be distracting and time consuming and as it is, I barely have enough time to get to what this novel is really about.

And that would be SurWorld and it's the brainchild of Wendall Trance. He found an uninhabited habitable planet, similar to Earth, just a bit larger than Earth, though, that is not the territory of any planet. And he populated it with people, mostly from Earth and there are a few from other planets, too, but they are very similar to Earthlings.

And the whole point is to let these people grow and evolve and develop and study them every step of the way. Yeah, it's basically a marketing survey on a very large scale. And that makes the whole thing controversial from the start. A lot of people objected from day one when the original settlers (Dubbed the Adams And Eves by the press) were placed in the idyllic Garden Of Eden where they were instructed to be fruitful and multiply. They did it willingly (Who wouldn't?) and they didn't pollute their offspring with outside ideas because their memories had been stripped clean.

The deal was that they were to spend 900 years on SurWorld, being fruitful and multiplying and then they would be scooped up and returned to one of the massive space stations ringing the planet where their memories would be restored and they would be given a huge amount of money and then be returned to their former lives.

They weren't there for nine hundred of our years, though. TrinCorp engineers developed Time Bubble Technology for this project and what it does is accelerate (Or slow, reverse or even stop) time on SurWorld but to anyone living there, it seems like time is flowing at its' normal rate. It's a lot like changing the speed on Sim City.

Things progressed pretty much as expected and the rate of time flow was slowed down at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution so it could be studied more in depth. And the whole thing has been a gold mine for historians, sociologists, economists and every other branch of science but the big payoff is for marketers. And that is good because that was the whole intention of the whole thing to begin with.

And that's the premise of SurWorld. Some of the problems that crop up are governments and pesky special interest groups that try to ruin the whole thing. Then there's the problem of maintaining focus as SurWorld becomes a popular tourist attraction. Then there were the products and technologies that developed there that were popular and useful and while that was good, it further complicated running the facility.

What it comes down to is a project that is too successful and no one really knows what to do with it. That covers all the basics but if you still want to know more, just go to a dimension where I have written this one and listen to me talking about it on Coast To Coast next Saturday.

Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: Coast To Coast AM----Art Bell, WOC AM 1420