Fiction
“The Last Issue of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal”
Mario Daniel Martín
Translated from the Spanish by the author. This story originally appeared in Number 11 of TerBi, Revista de la Asociación Vasca de Ciencia Ficción, Fantasía y Terror, pages 73-84. The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Sarah St Vincent Welch, who helped him de-Spanish the English of this translation.
Trope: Last Issue of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal
Category: Brain to Brain 1-d Open Message
Subcategory: Text-only Pamphlet
Code: δ1256Sagg23mondragón44FCSS7θΐ –ΦΩ
Date: 23 Saggiatore, 1256AG (21 December Greg-2820)
Physical Location of First Release: Asteroide Mondragón
Author: Undisclosed (triple δ-anonymity)
Language: HS-Broca-I-Classical-English
Neuro-induction devices: Not applicable
3D Synesthetic Simulation: Not available
Multisensory Arrangements: Disconnected
Genital Pathway Stimulation: Disabled
Parsing Instructions: This text message is composed of 6 parts. An optional quotation (MC-0), and 5 compulsory sections (MC-1 to MC-5) are to be read in the provided order. No response or acknowledgment of parsing is required.
Rebroadcasting Status: Unknown (δ-encrypted)
Message Content 0: Quotation (Optional).
Of all these Formes of Government, the matter being mortall, so that not onely Monarchs, but also whole Assemblies dy, it is necessary for the conservation of the peace of men, that as there was order taken for an Artificiall Man, so there be order also taken, for an Artificiall Eternity of life; without which, men that are governed by an Assembly, should return into the condition of Warre in every age; and they that are governed by One man, as soon as their Governour dyeth. This Artificiall Eternity, is that which men call the Right of Succession.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (3BG; Greg-1651)
Message Content 1: Preface
This is a one-dimensional text-only pamphlet from the Space Farm Arcadia Conglomerate in the Trojan Walden IV Belt. We are using this archaic channel of dissemination to avoid the monitoring of its source of redistribution. We apologise for the lack of multi-sense meta-data. We recommend delta-encrypting when rebroadcasting the information inside the orbit of Jupiter.
To avoid confusion about the dates mentioned in the pamphlet for those residing outside the Thoureauvian Conglomerate, we have included after the standard Galilean date the corresponding date in the obsolete Gregorian calendar.
Message Content 2: Purpose of this pamphlet
Pope Urban MVIII, the Solar System Leader of the Coalition of Leviathanian Companies and Royal Chief Executive Officer of the New Australia Mining Company, announced today in his residence in Kalgoorlie IX the closure of the scientific meta-journal Interplanetary Asteroid Mining in its neural-induction multi-sensory format. The closure has been linked to the recent acquisition, and subsequent cultural refurbishment, of the Jovian Open Space University by a consortium led by the China-Cola Corporation and the New Australia Mining Company.
As a group of scientists residing inside and outside Asteroide Mondragón, we want to repudiate this unjust measure. Also, we would like to make it known that an inter-galactic formal complaint will be lodged with the Interstellar Court of Alpha Centauri by the Thoreauvian Free-thinking Sentient Being Coalition condemning the meta-journal closure and the subsequent blocking of its archives.
Message Content 3: A brief history of the meta-journal
The journal was first published in bi-dimensional e-paper flexible display format in 955AG (Greg-2519), under the name The Interdisciplinary Journal of Asteroid Mining. The publication quickly became one of the most influential free-inquiry scientific journals in the homo-homo scientific explosion of the 9th and 10th centuries after the long climate-change-induced Penumbra Scientifica (or Scientific Dark Age) in the societies of our source planet. The open character of the journal was clear in the editorial of its first issue: ‘We aim to make asteroid mining accessible to all terrestrial sentient beings, and to stimulate the peaceful use of space resources for the benefit of science’.
The journal can be undoubtedly credited with providing the tools and discussion platform for the Terran conquest of the Inner Solar System. It also defended the now almost completely extinct assumption that space was the inheritance of all Terran inhabitants and their extra-terran descendants, irrespective of their genetic configuration and cognitive uplifting history.
The technological changes that saw the rise of neural-reasoning mental-induction science dissemination platforms in the late-10th century required the journal to change its name to Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal. There were many scientific milestones influenced by the meta-journal under its new name. It was a strategic outlet for the distribution of extra-solar first contact negentropic thermo-ethic information in 998AG (Greg-2562), and it coordinated the election of Terran representatives to the Proxima Centauri Treaty that resulted in the conditional incorporation of the Solar races to the Via Lacteal Scientific Confederation in 1003AG (Greg-2567). In the internal reconfiguration of Solar politics and scientific priorities caused by the rapid absorption of alien science, its most remembered achievement was, undoubtedly, the push to change the Solar System Unitarian Calendar to equate year zero with the birth of Galileo Galilei (1556 in the old Gregorian calendar) which was only successful among some planets and asteroids of the Thoureauvian Conglomerate. Unfortunately, the area of the Solar System controlled by Leviathanian companies preferred the Fordian calendar, and some of the Free asteroid-states inside the orbit of Venus still use the Gregorian calendar.
The meta-journal has a history of tolerance, showing an open approach to the socio-genomic changes of the 11th century, though it always had some critics. It was the first scientific meta-journal to appoint a Neanderthal-homo as editor of its Hominid sub-meta journal in 999AG (Greg-2563), and strongly supported the crucial intergalactic judicial case to grant full consciousness rights to homo-cetaceans and homo-canines in 1002AG (Greg-2566). It was also the first scientific meta-journal to produce specialised multi-sensory access options in non-brocal languages in 1017AG (Greg-2581), which eventually spawned a series of sister-meta-journals in most Solar languages. However, the Rodent and Pachyderm Leagues never agreed to create sister meta-journals in their languages, and have routinely dismissed the publication as an outlet for legitimating homocentric expansion and hegemony.
Today’s closure of the Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal can only be interpreted as a deliberate attack on multi-speciesism. The announcement is only available in homo-sapiens-based broca-I languages. And the behaviour of Urban MVIII in the last decade suggests that there could be other motives behind the decision to cancel access to one of the key sources of Terran science, in effect, it can be argued that it is the final step in rewriting scientific history to boost the personality cult of the new Pope.
Message Content 4: A brief biography of Pope Urban MVIII
Originally born in the provincial Jovian Greek Abbott Point Asteroid as Nikita-Mustafa Arredondo-Li in 944AG (Greg-2508), Pope Urban MVIII won his first reincarnation in the Broken Hill L4 branch of the New Australia Mining Company (henceforward NAMC) for being a scientist when he was only 99. He credits himself with being the chief mental architecture engineer in the legendary scientific team that pioneered the use of nano-carbon tubes with platinum and iridium axon skeletons in the quantum cerebellum GJ-88, the base of most reincarnation quantum cerebellums in operation today. A closer look at the scientific publications of the time in private repositories shows that he was consistently a third author in the papers published then, and he was clearly not the leader of the research team behind the momentous discovery. After the NAMC acquired the rights of the meta-journals Reincarnation and Transhumanism, Longevity Nature and Neuro-resurrective Science, Arredondo-Li obliterated them from the public record.
A neural-induction communication in Volume 368 of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal outlining the procedures of implantation of the quantum cerebellum GJ-89 in homo-chimeric resurrections to speed-up the creation of new mining workforces was the only remaining evidence of the modest role the Pope had in this breakthrough. All witnesses of these facts, including the leading co-authors of the original papers, however, have been purged from the NAMC scientific institutions and denied quantum reincarnations in the Hominid Empire II. Consequently, they cannot complain about the new Pope’s crude attempts to rewrite history.
Arredondo-Li was subsequently reincarnated two times in different administrative roles during the expansion of the New Australia coalition of asteroid-states to the Hildas, when he became Chief of the Board of Directors of the new overarching company-state. He is credited with the drafting of the pact that allowed China-Cola, and its associated companies to get control of the Board of Elders in the Hominid Empire I. This resulted, among other things, in the monopoly of the mining of the Hildas and the Jupiter Greek asteroids by the NAMC after the Jovian Lagrange 5 War (better known as the Free-speech War), that restricted the exercise of open access science to the Jovian Trojan Asteroids.
Pope Urban MVIII is no stranger to controversy. In spite of being the viviparous offspring of a Hobbesian homo-homo mental police father and one of his homo-bonobo sexual slaves, he chose to reincarnate as a pure homo-sapiens entity from his first reincarnation onwards. He also changed his name to Clive Joh Abbott-Palmer and refused to speak ape-based broca-II languages in public. When accused of being a human-supremacist by the Thoreauvian Chimpanzee-Bonobo Ecological Trust in the Trojan Walden Belt League he simply responded that he had the right to moral enhancement. He later justified his choice of a homo-sapiens corporal configuration as the only way to rise in the ranks of the NAMC, a fact that is even more necessary today after he himself changed the citizenship laws of the company to require all the directors and prelates to have purely hominid brain power and corporeal configurations in 1055AG (Greg-2619). This was extended in 1078AG (Greg-2642) to the civic charities run by the New Australia Public Service. He controversially excluded homo-kangaroos and homo-emus from the top ranks, in spite of their symbolic materialistic importance in a period of rapid expansion of the company-state to the Hildas and the massive increase in chimeric migration to the space farms that provided the ATP fuel for the increased sentient capital acquired.
Arredondo-Li’s attempt to exclude homo-dingos from the New Australia Regal Army in 1080AG (Greg-2643), however, was repudiated by a large rebellion inspired by the homo-panda rebellion of the China-Cola Imperial Army in 1079AG. After the rebellion of his own homo-Thylacine praetorian guard in 1082AG, homo-marsupials and homo-canines again became prominent in the middle ranks of the NAMC. Some of them were even allowed to progress to the corporate elite, especially in the frontier asteroids of the Hildas L3 frontier, where in 1096AG (Greg-2660) a homo-echidna was ordinated as a governor-bishop in spite of her refusal to reincarnate in a homo-sapiens configuration. In spite of this and other similar cases, hominid (mainly sapiens) assimilation after promotion remains the norm in New Australia.
As a corporate Solar System royal, Arredondo-Li (or Professor Abbott-Palmer, as he insisted on being called publicly) is predominantly remembered as the orchestrator of the ascendency of NAMC as the leading mining company in the Solar System (mainly through the destruction, acquisition or forced amalgamation of other asteroid mining companies and cooperatives). It is estimated that by the 1090s, seventy percent of the space farms’ building materials in the new frontier between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn were provided by the NAMC. The company also secured the exclusive rights for the planetisation of Saturn in 1098AG (Greg-2662), and the controversial dismantling of its rings to provide the water needed for the colonisation of the area.
The rapid expansion and forced amalgamation of independent free asteroid-states in the Greek L4 Jovian area and the new Saturnine frontier after the usurpation of Enceladus generated the need to manage a large number of prisoners and refugees, which were derived to penal colonies scattered through the company dominions, and later to franchised penal facilities in second-tier companies such as Monsanto-Burma or K-Mart-Colombia. In 1108AG (Greg-2672) the NAMC ventured into providing penal colonies for other non-mining companies and the recycling and mental retraining of chimeric and hominid sentient capital. Their mental police also franchised the cultural assimilation techniques that made it feared and revered throughout the Hominid Empire I. In fact, it has been argued that the systematic disregard of the Charta of Chimeric Rights by the enforcing consent arms of the NAMC and its close ally China-Cola created the conditions for the creation of the primate-centric Hominid Empire II.
Under Abbott-Palmer’s iron fist management, the NAMC also branched into religious-entertainment and genital technology, especially after the hostile take-over of the Berlusconi-Vatican Corporation during the collapse of the Inter-planetarian Trade-Stock Market in Ganymede in 1124AG (Greg-2688). The Amphibian Coalition denounced his subsequent transformation of the leading company of The Religiosity League into a propaganda machine for the Tantra-Biblical Movement, which, after the schism of the San Sissino Synod of Terran Churches of 1156AG (Greg-2720), effectively obliterated spirituality from the Hominid Empire II. The so-called God-spot genes were replaced with tantra-ecstasy genes in all the humanoid-based sentients, who were forced converts to Tantra-Christianity. The subsequent acquisition of the Lust and Sensibility senso-drama chain from the Disney-Monaco Corporation in 1188AG (Greg-2797) has also been linked to the need to expand the market for genital upgrading technology among the hyper-sexed newly converted chimeric masses.
In spite of his known anti-chimeric views, Abbott-Palmer stated that the new company (that resulted from the incorporation of these religious entertainment entities into the New Australia conglomerate) was open for business with all Solar System companies and Free states, irrespective of the percentage of hominids in their management ranks. This allowed him to peddle the perpetual-erection-double-penises and anal-lubrication technology that made NAMC the first exporter of those sexual enhancement devices in the Solar System since 1204AG (Greg-2768).
Abbott-Palmer is also known as a military strategist. During his second reincarnation he successfully fought with the Solar coalition that ended the brief extragalactic Vogon Empire invasion of the Jovian moons. He credited himself with leading the Solar forces in the recovery of Ganymede, even when Thoreauvian forces were the first to take over moon’s presidential palace in the last offensive against the Vogon invaders.
Following becoming a signatory to The Inter-Galactic Peace of Andromeda, Abbott-Palmer was reincarnated as a hyper-homo-sapiens-sapiens. He promptly obtained the necessary votes from all Leviathanian companies operating between the Jovian and Martian orbits to be anointed Solar System Pope in 1255AG (Greg-2819). More importantly, his choice of the papal name of Urban MVIII generated a great controversy among the dwindling free scientific community, as it was the first time since the birth of the scientific method that the name of Urban was recycled to name a Hominid Pope. The fear that this would harm the free exchange of scientific ideas, which we expressed at the moment of his anointment, has been fully realised less than eight Terran months after the Pope’s ascension. The purchase and prompt closure of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal is another of his long list of explicit symbolic gestures to stir the hominid masses across the Solar System against multi-speciesism. In a brief communiqué, he declared ‘free-loading hominid technological information is over’. Additionally, he rebuffed the Canonical Catholic Church apology on the Galileo Affairin 428AG (Greg-1992) and promised a return to the obsolete Gregorian calendar in the whole extent of the Solar System, which was interpreted as another provocation in the Thoureauvian Conglomerate. Urban MVIII also expressed that rodent, pachyderm, equine and cetacean chimeras should stop complaining and that, instead, they should be grateful for their genetic uplifting. He is quoted to have said ‘without the help of the hominids, they would still be cannibalising each other in the Terran swamps.’
Message Content 5: A call to action
There is a call lead by Cetacean Asteroid Mining, a sister-meta-journal legally residing in the Asteroide Mondragón since 1213AG (Greg-2777), to repel the closure and restore the Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal archives. The call includes a request to return the benefits of space colonisation to the inheritance of all Solar System sentient beings, and not just a minority of homo-sapiens and their homo-canine and homo-marsupial allies. The call has also been strongly supported by the Eusocial Interplanetary Fraternity (and their associated meta-journal Social Insect Asteroid Recycling), as well as the Feline League, the Porcine, Bovine & Equine Guild, the Argonautoidea-Octopodoidea Network and the Bird-Dinosaur Solar Coalition (and their associated scientific meta-journals).
Science is not just a tool to reverse-engineer the magic of the alien races or to mine methane-rich planetesimals in the Oort Cloud. Nor is it just a way of having a better simulated orgasm with your favourite stellar porno-diva/o. Science is a legitimate pursuit of all the Solar System Species. It brought us to the most remote corners of our Solar environment and it is allowing us to reach and colonise neighbouring stars. More importantly, it allowed us to survive the self-destructive path of the traditional Hobbesian homo-homo anti-ecological cultures which converted our source planet into an unrecoverable rubbish bin. We encourage all our fellow scientists, irrespective of their chimeric configuration, to defend Classical Open-Source Science at this crucial moment in the history of Solar intelligence.
Cetacean Asteroid Mining has also produced a senso-documentary on the History of the Asteroid Mining Meta-Journals to exemplify what was best in Thoureauvian Terran Cultures. It also contains an attached video-manifold with a supplementary multi-sensory chronology of the development of Thoreauvian scientific achievements, including an unbiased account of the uplifting of most Terra-based species. You will be able to access it by telepathing the 1256AG (Greg-2820) archive of the Phi-Dolphin Eco-Network, where you will also find multi-sensory-hyper-link copies of the now repudiated Sustainability Pact of Terran Churches of 659AG(Greg-2223) and the badly disregarded Solar Declaration of Chimeric Rights of 1032AG (Greg-2596).
If joining this intergalactic formal complaint doesn’t jeopardise your future reincarnation prospects, we urge you to support the move, as scientists of all species have already done, and to disseminate this pamphlet among fellow researchers, scholars, digital personas and technologists. However, if open support for this cause puts the prospects of pursuing Classical Open-Source Science at risk in your area of enterprise, or will make you an easy target of the hominid mental police, simply wait until more decisive action is required in the predictably turbulent times to come.
End of message δ1256Sagg23mondragón44FCSS7θΐ -ΦΩ
Mario Daniel Martín is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at The Australian National University. As a creative writer, he has published 12 books (4 novels, 4 books of poetry, 2 of short stories and 2 of theatre plays) as well as more than 70 individually published short stories and poems. His latest novel, “La inevitable resurrección de los cerebros de Boltzmann” can be downloaded from the website of Ediciones Ayarmanot in Buenos Aires: https://www.edicionesayarmanot.com/p/la-inevitable-resurreccion-de-los.html
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