Sci-Fi Film Fiesat: The Swingin' 60s - Volume 5: Mind Blowing Ris of the Machines by Chris Christopoulos - HTML preview

The number one chairman.

For many he’s the devil in disguise

Who’ll drag us all down to our demise,

Fearing this self-proclaimed savior of all,

Will suck the world into his ego’s black hole

He’s an Alpha Man,

He’s the bogeyman

Is he an Alpha Man and a Superman?

Or is he a stupid man and a little man?

Or is he just what we believe him to be,

Filling a void with what we want to see?

He’s an Alpha Man,

He’s a hollow man.

***************

Words Unheeded

Bedraggled clusters of humanity gather around loudspeakers Amidst the scorched desolation of an urban landscape Once ruled over by flocks of pigeons.

As people seek hope from tenuous crackling threads Of words from their leaders,

A single pigeon lies on its back

On top of a truck’s hood, deaf to the message

With its wings out spread –

Unnoticed - and quite dead.

************

Shooting for the Moon

You’re rudely dragged awake from sleep

and a night full of forgotten dreams

by the incessant farting of your phone

and its insistent ‘get the hell up’ screams.

While you mumble, bitch and moan,

your bed abruptly begins to empty itself

forcefully of your flabby and flaccid form.

You know you have no say as you stagger

to the bathroom bearing a bloated bladder,

not before tripping over the bloody robo vac

and cursing the roving autonomous little shit.

You then head to the kitchen for a breakfast

prepared by the overly attentive AI house assistant.

What possessed you to name it ‘Jeeves’

and give it a posh British butler’s voice?

Without asking, Jeeves activates a wall panel

turning a Van Gogh field of sunflowers

into an over-caffeinated female news anchor.

See then Artemis shooting an arrow at the moon

as the talking heads on screen “ooh!” and “aah!”

while all the crowds and viewers sway and swoon

over a myriad of ‘firsts ’ and gush and go gaga

at how even brother Apollo had been out performed.

And there you stand in your saggy tatty baggy underwear waiting for mind to catch up and sync with eye and ear as you learn that you are the crew and they are you and we are all together; so see how they fly higher, further and faster so far up in the sky,.

Suddenly your phone whimpers and whines

like the yappy needy little mutt next door.

Like Pavlov’s dog you immediately respond

leaving Artemis to admire the moon’s backside.

Message says your work at home job is now extinct, given over to one of Jeeves’ smarter AI cousins.

On screen NASA’s PR machine weaves words

with which to console you about how much

Artemis holds the key to humanity’s purpose

while you stand there wondering what to do next.

Suddenly you start wondering and pondering -

Would 50 billion one dollar bills stacked high

reach as far as Artemis way beyond Earth’s sky?

What if the stack collapsed and fell back to Earth?

Five bucks for each person or a thing of more worth?

Teeth that get fixed and the best health care for all?

Food for the hungry and kindness for the soul,

while for the homeless, a roof over their head;

and all kids having the chance to learn and play

instead of thinking that next day they could be dead?

Your doubts though are soon folded up and put away as you watch ultra HD images of moon and Earth.

“Such resolution!” all on screen gasp and gush

but then you wonder if any of the pixels contain

any hint of the cratered moonscapes and terrain

that humanity has managed to create in Ukraine,

Gaza, Lebanon and Iran or the red maria in Sudan.

What of the rivers and tributaries of the displaced?

Can you trace their uncertain courses and destinations?

Will they show up in these dazzling cosmic snapshots?

“This shows what humanity is capable of achieving!”

a voice from space intones to many viewers unaware of the FIRST human journey beyond Earth to another world on Christmas eve 1968 when from a fragile craft crackling voices bore messages from Genesis to all of us on the good earth: where presidents and men with a dream were shot dead; where protesting students were gunned down in universities; where US race riots and violent protests in Paris erupted; where a carpet of bombs was being laid in foreign lands; where body bags brought back the dead from distant wars; where humanity itself faced the eve of its own destruction; Those crackling voices had dragged us back from oblivion, and for the FIRST time humanity caught a glimpse Earth’s beauty and the fragility of the flawed blue marble as viewed from space.

A message of hope, and unity flowed forth from the words:

"And God saw the light, that it was good:

and God divided the light from the darkness."

But humanity soon grew bored, preoccupied and distracted while suffering collective amnesia and so here we are again.

You standing there beginning to yawn and fidget and fiddle with your phone, fretting about the economy and the cost of guzzlene while dreaming of buying a shiny Chinese EV or NEW robo vac or whatever you’re told on some screen what you really need.

The media spin masters say there’s a race to be won and win we will: around the moon; to the moon; on the moon; beyond the moon; onward to Mars; 400.000 miles, 40 million miles, a billion miles; trillions of miles to the nearest star system; thousands of light years across the galaxy, millions of light years to other galaxies and more!

Once we gobble up all the rare earth minerals on our rare Earth

we’ll dig baby dig and drill baby drill our way across the universe.

Victory to humanity divine when we become gods with Zeus!

In the meantime his daughter will continue to fire her arrows while we continue to hurl our own arrows at one another and you my friend may as well go back to bed and slumber and dream forgotten dreams of your complete insignificance in a vast universe that views your existence with indifference.

*Images generated by Chatgp t

(except for last two in above poem which are from the Artemis 2 mission)

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