Non-Tolkien Stuff
Various things that are not about Tolkien

 

2036
A short story about the future. English translation. Click here for the German original.

Snipping Tutorial
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Bad Hair Day Quiz
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Elder Scrolls Parody

Dagoth Ru Comic
Episode 1: Ru-se
Episode 2: Ru-le
The Adventures of Ru and his faithful servant Hussu Zaina­mussu­shashu­nummi

Dagothlivion
Story: Dagoth Ru conquers Oblivion

2036

A strange future story I originally wrote in German and later translated. View the original here.

In the late evening of July 10th, 2008, while staggering home from a party through the streets of Cologne, I was caught in the remnants of hurricane Gamma, and as I just passed a building site, a huge, rusty sign with the inscription "Completion: November 2004" broke off and hit my head. Immediately I fell into a deep coma, and my death seemed certain. But luckily, just a few days before that, an obtrusive salesman had talked me into a contract for broadband internet. In this contract, a passage of microscopic small print ensured that I donated my body without limitations to scientific research, and thus I was quickly rushed into a special hospital and deep-frozen in an experimental cryogenic device.

When I awoke, a doctor bowed over me and waved with a stethoscope implanted in his nose. When he told me that I was now in the year 2036, the shock was such that I held my breath for a second. I recovered and noticed that I still held my breath, which struck me as slightly odd. The doctor calmed me down and explained that I was in quite a financial mess, facing a huge bill for the electrical power of the cryogenic device and, on top of that, an even higher bill for twenty-eight years of ridiculously overpriced broadband internet access - therefore the hospital staff had been forced to sell my heart and lungs. Well, he ensured me that the heart-lung machine I was connected to was working fine. I would have to push it around in a small cart from now on, but that was a small price to pay for my unexpected survival.

Still I was in deep debt, and I already saw myself spending the next few years paying for it by participation in more experiments, but luckily I was able to bribe the doctor with a five-percent share of my kidneys. That was no problem for me, as fifty percent of both these organs had already been transferred to the body of a local millionaire, who hoped that the additional kidney capacity increased his drinking performance at orgies. So I did not really care anymore about the loss of an additional five percent. In a dark night the doctor smuggled me out of the hospital, and I sneaked away, pulling my cart behind me. The last thing I saw of the doctor was his friendly face, illuminated by the small green neon ad flickering on his nose stethoscope, repeating the words "Drink Euro-Cola" over and over.

***

I was now ready to plunge into this new and wonderful world. The doctor had provided me with a few small coins, and the first I did was to buy a newspaper, for I had missed nearly three decades of world history. Unfortunately, only boulevard papers existed, the kind that do not have any world history. But I found something even better in the paper "Pic": a photo of me. It was accompanied by a short text that read: "DEAD MAN! He LIVES! He was frozen a hundred years. DEAD MAN, how COLD was it in your ICE-GRAVE?" I grinned; obviously journalistic standards had not degraded very much in the past decades. I decided to celebrate my new fame and headed for the next pub. There I bought a glass of tab water, firstly because I could afford nothing else, and secondly because I wanted to be gentle on my battered kidneys. It was in this place that I first noticed something disquieting about this future world. The friendly woman who served the water to me moved with very small steps, and I was rather shocked when I noticed that her legs were chained together at the ankles. Quietly I asked an unshaved, very haggard man on the neighbouring table about this. Instantly this man became very furious, unexplicably, but the anger was directed at the waitress, not at me. I grabbed his shirt and just narrowly managed to hold him back from attacking her and beating her up. Finally he gave me an explanation. Only a few years ago slavery had be re-established, though this word was never used - it had been replaced with "VLWs" for "Very Lucky Workers", which was an abbreviation and therefore modern. The unshaved man, who introduced himself as Yussuf, came from the European Province Georgia and was angry that he and his people were no longer the cheapest workforce available on the market. In flawless German - he had earned several doctors' degrees in his motherland and was an educated man - he complained to me how the VLWs had brought down the wages for immigrants. Years ago, said Yussuf, he still had been able to afford a bowl of rice per day. Since the introduction of the VLW laws he barely earned enough for one "bio-beer" per day. That was sufficient, for the beer was genetically modified and contained all necessary vitamins, but he missed the flavour. Yussuf worked fourteen hours per day as "Personal Program Manager", that was someone who operated the TV remote control for a rich Cologne citizen.

My house did not exist anymore, but Yussuf and I became friends, and he offered me that I could sleep at his place until I had found a home of my own. His place turned out to be a self-built wooden shack on a wide, desolate area in the northern outskirts of the city, the place where the old Ford plant had been located before GM-Daimlerford had gone bankrupt, but it was still better than nothing. On the next evening, when he came home from work, Yussuf took me on a tour through the city. I marvelled at the numerous changes, but what struck me as weirdest was the fashion of this decade, especially the fashion for women.

When I thought about it later, it came to me that this fashion could have been foretold even in my old time, for it was naught but the continuation of two trends which had already existed back then. The first was the continuing degradation of women to sexual objects. The second was a weakening of political symbols, a sense of "anything goes". In the Sixties a young man could provoke by simply wearing long hair, in the Eighties he already had to colour it green to achieve this, but again twenty years later everybody had the most ridiculous hairdos, and even t-shirts with Che portraits or pentagrams had entered the mainstream. These trends irrevocably led to the trendiest piece of clothing of the year 2036, the half-burka. That was a shapeless piece of cloth that covered all skin from the head to the navel; but below the waistline people wore nothing at all.

I have to explain this in detail because this type of fashion was responsible that my lucky streak finally ended. Because on our way through the city we passed several spots which Yussuf called "dangerous", and we had to run across them. One such spot existed but a few streets away from Yussuf's favourite pub. When we crossed it, I spotted once again one of these half-naked women, whose half-burka was pink and had little hearts printed onto it and the words "Suizide Bomba", and staring at her, I overheard Yussuf's command to run and stood still - one second too long. For suddenly a gang of five or six young men came running out of a dark corner and jumped onto us with wild, unarticulated screams. Yussuf shouted a curse in some kind of Caucasian language before he fell, several knives lodged in his body. I only survived because I feigned a heart attack and played dead, not very convincing for someone connected to a cart with a heart-lung machine, but I hoped the young rowdies would not understand such medicinal minutiae. I closed my eyes and felt hands investigating my pockets. But as neither Yussuf nor me had much money, the gang finally just broke a few parts off my machine - parts which were shiny and blinking, but not crucial for its function - and they retreated.

When everything was quiet again, I got up. My heart would have beaten wildly if I had owned one. Yussuf was dead. I staggered to the pub, and the friendly chained waitress allowed me to use the telephone. Some minutes later the paramilitaries arrived, a troop of mercenaries in the gray area between police and army. They were the ones to call in such a case, I learned, because the real police only came when Germans were killed, and the real army was busy somewhere in the Middle East. One of the paras could read and write, and I reported to him what had happened. He had a camouflaged uniform, a machine gun and in front of his face a round, yellow smiley mask to make him look more friendly. Then the paras thoroughly searched me and Yussuf's carcass and stole what the gang had left, a completely understandable behaviour, as these men were very badly paid. Finally they threw Yussuf's carcass into their jeep and left me without a single cent.

I was desperate - I had lost my only friend in this time and did not know what to do next. But suddenly I remembered the article in the "Pic". Maybe, I thought, I was still interesting enough for another article. I stole a small coin from the nearest dead junkie, entered an internet cafe and sent a voicemail to the paper's redaction. The answer came within minutes and exceeded even my hopes. As someone who had been in the paper once, I was now a Hyper-Cool-Idol. That was still a lesser status than Mega-Super-Idol, which required actually being on television for at least two seconds, but it was more than enough to ensure an interview in tomorrow's issue.

At first everything seemed to go well. "Pic" paid relatively well for nude pictures, and I at least had some interesting scars to show off. I managed to raise the price even more by having the pictures taken while I had sex with a Moldawian prostitute, which the reporter brought along. Thus, I calculated, I would be able to pay for my bio-beer for at least another week. The successful photo session made me careless, and I let the reporter trick me into making some critical remarks on the re-establishment of slavery. If I remember correctly, I said that it "made me sad". The exact wording I do not remember, for "Pic" did not print a single word of it. Instead, when I opened the paper the next morning, I read the following caption under an admittedly very artistic photo: "ICE-MAN: Why does he HATE us?" The European Province Germany, I read, had been on the brink of economic recovery, but with my words I had scared away the boom just before it could manifest itself. Now we were in for at least another year of stagnation. Thus I, the ICE-COMMUNIST, was a HATE-TERRORIST, maybe even as part of an international network, for was not, as "Pic" wrote under a photo of Yussuf's carcass, my best friend JUSUFF, THE BICKERING TURK?

In summary, this all was - for "Pic's" standards - really well-written and thoroughly investigated, so I was not very surprised that immediately a crowd of angry people gathered around me and started to throw bottles and stones. I fled, but the mob followed me. My only chance was to escape my hunters in a dark alley. That, however, proved to be an easy task, for the sun had not yet risen, and street lights had long been abolished, so there was a certain overabundance of dark alleys. Quickly I got rid of the jeering crowd, but one brick had smashed into my heart-lung machine and damaged it. While I was running along, a numb feeling crept into my arms and legs, and my head started to spin. Now my fate hung on a thin thread. As fast as my wobbling legs could still carry me, I hurried back to the hospital where I had woken up. I smashed a window with the brick, and here my luck returned; the gatekeeper, who had been alerted by the noise, was a VLW and could not run fast enough with his feet chains. I climbed through the window, and with a terrible effort I managed to lift the cart through it too. After this my memory gets a bit fuzzy. With the last energy the stuttering machine could provide I stumbled through a long hallway. Fey I seemed, or hate-terrorism shone like a horrible light from my eyes, and all doctors fled from my sight. Finally I found the blue glow of my cryogenic device, and I sank into it, ripped off the wires that connected me to the machine, and with a thud the device closed over me.

***

I slept for another three decades, while the climate finally succumbed to total collapse and the rising sea flooded the city of Cologne. For years I lay unconscious beneath the shallow, but very clouded water of the Bay of Cologne, while around me fierce battles raged between the last inhabitants of the city: mercenaries of a big private bank, which could afford the expensive genetic gills, and the local Monday Demonstrations, which never had been deterred by minor climatic inconveniences. One of these battles finally damaged the hospital, and my cryogenic device was washed out and drifted to the surface.

Luckily, up here the revolution had come at last. So I was fished out of the water on December 17th, 2079, by the crew of the aircraft carrier "James Robertson", which had been commissioned to keep an eye on the fighting. While I write these lines, I am sitting on the deck of this wonderful ship and enjoy the tropical breeze under the warm December sun. My new, artificial heart works perfectly. I am drinking a Pina Colada and listening to the cries of the mutant two-beaked gulls above me and the exalted voices of the Starbord Committee, arguing about the proposed fusion with the Lower Middle Ship Committee, behind me. The future, I have found out now, is not nearly as bad as we always think.

© Bqggz 2006