They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially colonized it. So, technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!
Mars, for Arnie, was a new place, and it meant a new life, lived in a new style. He and the other settlers, both big and small, had made in their time on Mars countless minute adjustments in a process of adaptation through so many stages that they had in fact evolved; they were new creatures now.
‘We are v-r-r-riends!’
The lift doors opened, and Citizen Captain Joanne Hall—known to friends and family as “Froggie” for reasons which remained a deep, dark secret from the officers and crew of PNS Schaumberg—strode briskly through them.
*PS—K364, that was an inspired quote (IMHO of course)
Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.
Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.”
They’ve evolved beyond the need for conventional bodies. They must be an advanced species, millions of years ahead of us.
Actually, about fifteen kilograms of me are quite human…
“Calling them a ‘battery’ is like calling me a ‘computer’, or Tino there a ‘meat-sack.’”
“Computer, please recharge this battery so we can armor that meat-sack.”
Well, little meatbag, looks like it’s just you and me, stuck in a horrible past… where I know the result of every horse race ever! To the track!
You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.
They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardioplate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stiktytes. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search&seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentive. They used fingerprints. They used Bertillon. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn’t help much. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology.
And what the hell: they caught him.
After all, his name was Everett C. Marm, and he wasn’t much to begin with, except a man who had no sense of time.
Who’s the time guy?
When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.
Captain’s log, stardate unknown. We are trapped in a savage parallel universe from which we must escape within four hours, or I will face a death sentence at Mr. Spock’s hands.
“Barry is from another universe.”
“Cool! Whoa! So the theory of the multiverse is true?”
“True? Oh yeah. Big time.”
“Barry, are we losing our minds?”
“Could be, Other Barry, could be. Because even though I can see Archer’s every freaking move, apparently it’s impossible to kill that idiot from frickin’ space.”
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
“I said I did, Man,” he answered plainatively. “We can throw rocks at them.”
"Bog’s sake! No time for jokes!’
“But Man,” he protested, “we can throw rocks at Terra. We will.”
“We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.”