Artemis II

 'Woah, what the heck was that!'

EekBok pulled back hard on the left joy, leaning to his left more out of sensation and the pure thrill of the craft moving around him, TooBop. 'That, my friend, is the hoomans.'

TooBop, leaning forward in her seat, looked in every direction, trying to see what had flown by, out of sight for a moment until EekBok manoeuvred the vessel around, and there it was, a little spherical cone drawing away from where they sat. 'I knew you said it would be more impressive than the comet, but I didn't think we'd get this close.'

'Yup, I told you we'd get to see it. Would you believe it's been 54 years since their last visit? Oh, recently, there's been a little more traffic up there in their orbit, a few go out to what they call a space station.' Pointing to the right of the hoomans capsule, 'There. Nowhere near as far as a loop around the moon.'

'Why so long between turns?' asked TooBop, looking at her friend, knowing he'd have the answer.

'Well, that's something we speculate about all the time, it's weird. My view is that they came up here the first time as some sort of competition; the craft came from two different points on the globe, then they just stopped. I tell you what, though, they've not advanced as much as I thought they would’ve.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, look at it, it's pretty much like the one I saw 54 years ago, it's literally just falling through space, falling back to their planet.'

TooBop squinted, or what would pass for a squint, the magnifying eyelid passing over her eye, bringing the capsule closer. 'You're right, I can't see any form of propulsion.'

'It's great, isn't it. They're so primitive, yet think about the maths they're doing, it's like the stuff we learnt in high school.' EekBok paused, watching them fall toward the earth, in awe of what he saw. His kind had once been like these hoomans. So basic, daring in what they were doing, so fragile.

'So why are they back?'

'Oh, again something we don't know. My theory? All sorts of things, they're overpopulating, and the last couple of years they've had pandemics, wars, floods, fires, famines, all sorts of stuff.'

Pausing momentarily to look at TooBop, her eyes were fixed on the scene playing out before them. 'Don't get me wrong, they've always had these things, they just seem to be happening more frequently now.'

TooBop was amazed — she didn't realise her friend was so knowledgeable about hoomans. 'How do you know all of this?'

By way of answer, EekBok continued, 'The Faculty of Hooman Research says there are all sorts of reasons for them being back, one of them being that they are getting ready to abandon their planet. Some of them, anyway.'

'Hey, what's happening now?' TooBop had stopped squinting out the windscreen and had turned her attention to the screen on the centre console, pressing the thumb joy to zoom and track the capsule. 'What are the orange and white things?'

'Oh, their parachutes — that's how they're slowing themselves down. They're doing a controlled crash.'

'Crash!'

'Yup, that and landing it in the water. They'll slow it down enough not to hurt the hoomans inside. Like I said, pretty simple tech, literally a funny-shaped container flying through space, nothing more. To see tech like that, you and I would have to go to the Museum of Ancient History.'

'Oh EekBok, this is so, so. I don't know, scary. I'm scared for them. Do you think they'll survive? You know, in the longer term?'

Salivating Seagull

 

'Aaargh, aaargh. What are you doing?' Sylvia, the seagull, called as she landed next to her friend Percival. Percival the Pelican.

'Well, can't you see I'm trying to eat this here battered fish?' answered Percival in his deep baritone pelican voice.

'You can't do that here, you dopey pouch-mouthed bird, it's a road, you'll get run over.'

'Well, I can't fly with it, I've tried. There is so much salt on it that when I hold it in my bill, I salivate so much it fills and weighs me down to the ground.'

'I can carry it.'

'C'mon, pull the other one, you're a seagull — you think I came down in the last shower?'

'What do you mean?'

'You buggers gorge yourselves.'

'C'mon Percy, Maaate, would I lie to you?'

'As sure as eggs.'

'I'm just trying to help, I don't want you wiped out by a car.'

'Alrighty then, you promise you won't fly off with it?'

'Swear on me Nana.'

'Right then.' And with that, Percival flicked his bill, and the battered fish landed in front of Sylvia. 'On ya Nana it is.'

Asleep at the wheel

 

Several years ago, actually, do a count back, it was probably around 2006, so twenty years ago. I had a book on my shelf: Asleep at the Wheel by John Nieuwenhuizen. Now, to be honest, I meant to read it. It was by an Australian author and was primarily about Australia on the Superhighway.

Now, in 2026, I have to say that was quite a quaint idea, the superhighway. To be honest, though, it was only ten years earlier, in 1996, that I'd finished my degree, learning to code in Pascal, coding in COBOL, HTML, and the internet was all new.

The truth of it: my eldest, now 18, was born the same year as the iPhone. The reality is that the book I'm talking about pre-existed the iPhone. That is a realisation as I am writing this.

Anyway, I didn't get to read it. But what I have realised is that I had these thoughts in my mind then, twenty years ago. Has technology gotten away from us humans? I think this is what appealed to me about the book. Yes, it was about the superhighway and titled Asleep at the Wheel.

I think I romanticised it, romanticised it in that here was someone else, a kindred spirit, who had some of my beliefs, my considerations. I imagined the book would have been about the blind capitalist leaning into the use of technology in an unregulated way, where corruption and over-inflation were all over the place. This, though fictional, as I had not read the book, I did not know, nor could it have predicted the Dot-com Bomb of the noughties.

A house move later, and some spring cleaning, the book disappeared from my shelves, never to be read by me. Now, its residual is a note on the backlog of story ideas I have for my annual foray into Story-a-Day in the month of May, and there it has rested for the last couple of years. Until now.

Today, I'm trying something a little different, a story of sorts, a story about how the title of one book has been on my mind for twenty years and even today still holds relevance beyond what I believe the original author had in mind.

Since that dusty tome left my shelves, we have had the iPhone, the standard setter for the smartphone, arrive and iterate seventeen times. Yes, seventeen times. We're now on version 17. This device and its clones turned us, and not just Australians, into screen-obsessed automatons.

In my travels around the world, from Vietnam to Spain, New Zealand, and beyond, you see them everywhere, everyone looking at that little two-by-five-inch display. They are everywhere, to the point where I am now self-conscious about using my phone and take paperback books to read on the train.

It's the physicality of these little devices that has enabled things like Facebook, created in 2004, to be mainstreamed into our lives, flooding our brains, before Instagram, Twitter (now X), YouTube, and more. Personally, I no longer use these. I still have a Facebook account, and my daughter had me on Insta the other day, yet living without them makes no difference to me. To the broader society?

The odd thing is, 'Social Media' is comically one of the most anti-social things I have ever come across. In every way. People will sit opposite each other in a restaurant, the glow of their little screens lighting their faces, ignoring the person across from them. Looking into another world that is not physically with them.

How teenagers use this is phenomenal. I remember when bullying occurred at school in the old days; it stayed at school. Now it comes into the home on the invasive little screens, as it knows no boundaries. I was out walking today and watched four very young teen girls walking towards me, phones in hand. As they passed: 'I've pushed Sofie', god knows what she's pushed them into. And what would Sofie push back into them, and would the Sofie pusher simply absorb it or share? Let alone when.

Then we get on to how anti-social these social things truly are. Dating apps. I work in a university, and we struggle to get the kids on campus to connect. They don't. I watch it with my own daughters and the effect of these little two-by-five-inch glowing demons upon them.

It's a bit of a crisis. Don't get me wrong, both the internet, the superhighway, and social technologies have done great things. When the pandemic hit, the organisation I worked for, TAFE NSW, barely missed a beat because of these technologies and was able to play a big role in NSW's community transition through COVID-19.

Yet here we are. If John felt we were asleep at the wheel way back in 1997, that's when it was published; what would he be thinking now? Today, there's a view, and I know there are studies and numbers to support this, that we are living in the most connected society in human history, yet in the most isolated ways ever. We're losing our social ways.

Now, though, AI, artificial intelligence, is here. What and how will that affect us? If we haven't managed ourselves particularly well through the last three decades of technology, how are we going to manage the next ten?

These little devices have taken away our attention and broken our social connections. Is AI simply going to steal our purpose? Knowing the political, community and societal response to everything that has preceded it, we all need to wake up before we veer away.

References/background:

• https://www.afr.com/companies/hacking-through-the-hype-of-the-new-19970505-kb1ij Article was May 5 1997

• https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2022/10/19/222031/vale-john-nieuwenhuizen/

“I want to be brave.”

Brave, to be brave, it's relative, isn't it? 
No, I don't think so, it's in the little things.

Yeah, there are big events that happen, Bondi and more. 

Medals are given for bravery to civilians and soldiers alike.

But is it relative or in the little things? 

It's in everyday life, in everything.

To be brave could be in an instant, 

where you simply speak up or step in.

Can you know if you're brave or will be? 

Especially if you've never been tested.

But what is it to be tested, what would it be? 

Would it be in a crowd, a calamity, or between you and another?

I know I've been brave before, in all sorts of things. 

The doubt, though, if I ever stop to think. Would I do it again?

In need, I hope I am, I hope I do, because 

I want to be brave for you.

Ring, ring.

The hissing whistle filled the room, accompanied by steam pouring from the spout of the kettle, billowing, condensation first forming then falling from the rangehood. Water running down the backboard like rain down a windscreen in drizzling weather.

Ring, ring.

The seamist white marble benchtop upon the island, grey foamed, red phone, an old phone, retro people would say now, historic or antique according to the children of the house, beside it a brown wood-turned bowl, a functional aesthetic mix of fruit, yellow, orange and green. The sink on its far side, stove top damp, wet to the right, the green of the garden, white flowers punctuating the hedge beyond.

Ring, ring.

Cups overturned dry in the dish rack, a single teaspoon accompanying it. The tea towel is pinned hanging over the front of the shut cutlery drawer. Neat, tidy, orderly, even would be the description, people had passed through this space, breakfasted, caffeinated, rinsed dishes and departed, yet the hissing whistle.

Ring, ring.

The room, a space, the unspoken social place of many a house. Conversations had with one filleting a steak while the other sips a red. At the island bench. You can imagine a man, cup in hand, having picked the paper from the stoop, reading the day's news at hand. None of this, though, just a stillness broken only by the rattle of a kettle boiled dry.

Ring, ring.

Wood floors, real wood, not floating, the original floorboards the width of red oak, not something you can buy these days, polished to the point that they shone, not reflected but shone, a honey brown, the natural knots and grain, the eyes of the wood, a renovator's delight.

Ring, ring.

The dark red pool, dull yet reflecting, not flowing but expanding away. She lay there, her white-blond hair a contrast against the burgundy liquid sheen, her white shirt, pristine, a further juxtaposition to the red upon it, running from the middle of her back to the floor. A cold, hard, seamless stainless steel stub of a knife handle protruding, the blade sunk deep.

Ring, ring.