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Visions of Jupiter
Visions of Jupiter
Visions of Jupiter
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Visions of Jupiter

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This book presents three stories of speculation about how things are, might become, and might have been. Taken together they provide a glimpse into my visions of the world. You'll find I live in a strange and absurd world, but so do you; often the world is enjoyable precisely due to that absurdity. I hope reading gives you a chuckle, and then you hesitate and wonder, even for just a moment.

~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~

Once the conflict finally began, the war didn’t last long at all. Our early efforts, our initial salvo, started a dramatic collapse in business. The aliens themselves inadvertently made their situation worse.

We were very careful that our campaign didn’t hurt any living beings and we really didn’t want to damage property, but we certainly didn’t stop short of humiliating them. There is a practical limit to how long people will continue going for pizza to places where aircraft are noisily circling near the ceiling while spraying silly string over the food; there's a limit to how often they will go to a burger place where remote-controlled cars attack their ankles and set off stink bombs.

We used that intolerance to our advantage.

Naturally our enemies spun some of our more dramatic assaults into news stories and spurious allegations alluding to bogus claims of evil domestic terrorism (which the media love, as it falls under the heading of not letting any good catastrophe be under-exploited and this got a lot of extra mileage from the rather confusing events). We suffered through the usual tortured prose on the important role of entrepreneurial businesses of which the burger stand was the quintessential example.

But we countered, with a rumor mill that was computerized and lethal. We had synchronized denial-of-service attack systems on their websites, supply chains, and our street teams tweeted countless (alleged) grievances against the chains. We had bloggers and pundits of all sorts at our beck and call, who were happy to promote the idea that food should, in fact, have actual nutritional content.

We had the muscle. We had the best story. We were the underdogs and they, the evil corporate empire. We even had the brand name: Fast-Food Wars.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 16, 2019
ISBN9780463505229
Visions of Jupiter
Author

Tilly Jupiter

Tilly Jupiter escaped to this time & space continuum a few years back (so she claims) with little more than a wicked sense of humor, a perceptive eye, a love for story, and little patience for fools. But that is quite a lot when you think about it. Ensconced in a remote bunker, she writes stories that strike fear into the hearts of the mediocre and chortles endlessly about the fact that some people think it is fiction.

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    Book preview

    Visions of Jupiter - Tilly Jupiter

    Jupiter

    THE ALIEN FAST-FOOD WAR

    This story is dedicated to Harlan Ellison for no particular reason, except that he was an early bright light for the author.  And the Gary in this story is definitely not a friend named Gary Gonnella, because the author never, ever uses people's real names (or faces, as far as that goes) in these stories.  It's only a coincidence that both Garys like remote-controlled models.

    THE BEGINNING

    At the end of it all, at the very end, Gary and I climbed up to stand on the highest hill we could find overlooking the scene. You couldn’t actually see the building itself, but we knew it was burning. We had a great view of the smoke as it rose in a black cloud and then spread to the west before being pulled apart over the sea.

    It looked every bit as final as it was.

    I’m going to miss the place, Gary said with a sigh.

    It had to go, I said firmly.

    They had the best burgers I’ve ever had, he said, stifling a sob.

    Still…

    I know. You're right, he said. I'm just saying that it’s just too bad that there was no other way.

    Actually, I’m glad, I said, but he didn’t hear me. His thoughts had gone off, rising with the smoke of the now-obsolete world of big-chain, fast-food places.

    Yes, they were gone now. Every last one of them. There was no longer a fast food outlet anywhere on the entire planet. The smoke we watched billowing from the remains of Bernie’s Best Burger Emporium marked the successful destruction of the last fast-food retail outlet in the United States. Our colleagues in Europe in Asia had finished their work well before us. That was no disgrace, though. After all they hadn’t had to deal with quite the emotional backlash that we had faced — the entrenched addictions that fueled the passionate and impassioned attempts to stop us.

    Ironically this milestone was not the result of some ecology movement or health-food uprising. It was not engendered by any vision of a better future for our children. It was the result of a simple vendetta. We'd declared war.

    We could've all gotten along fine, but when the aliens began fucking around with the frequencies we used for controlling our model aircraft, well, they had no idea of the wrath they were unleashing. Once the cadre of model aficionados found out exactly where the disruption of their beloved creations came from, they mobilized and soon it was all over but the shouting.

    Of course the aliens hadn’t done anything to us on purpose. It was just a mistake. That only made everything that happened afterward seem kind of funny when you thought about it. Hindsight gives you that kind of perspective.

    In the beginning, no one had known anything about the aliens. We didn't know they even existed until the very end. Not only that, it wasn’t until the remaining diehards among their number finally realized they were doomed and tried to negotiate, attempted to buy us off, that we found out the truth. The truth, however, was devastating. We all had trouble believing that, without anyone knowing a thing, the aliens had taken over the entire fast-food industry. They had managed quite a coup de burger.

    Obviously, we didn't accept the offer the aliens made. Their terms weren't satisfactory and so, they are gone now too. But that means that the world, our planet, is once again safe for remote-controlled model aircraft — or RCMA as they get called by aficionados.

    I must confess that I know nothing about those aircraft — just that the industry they are in overlaps the toy industry with aeronautical engineering. Aerospace development often used them, RCMAs, to serve as prototypes for new wing configurations or testing other design elements.

    I’m not entirely sure there isn’t a lot more to it than that. There probably is, but then my specialty is social media and my only hobby is computer games. In this struggle, ny role was to serve as a consultant. Originally, The British Model Flying Association hired me to work for them in London. Later, they shifted me to work with the international umbrella group when the effort, well… took wings.

    I should mention that I don’t know any more than anyone else about the aliens themselves either. Not really. I doubt anyone does. Yeah, Gary and I met with them a couple of times to see if it was possible to reach a compromise. Believe it or not, on a social basis, meeting casually, we hit it off with them pretty well. When Bernie (of Bernie’s Best Burger Emporium) and his wife Doreen had us over for a cookout, we all had a nice time. Everyone was pleasant, but that didn’t resolve our differences. Neither side was going to budge even if Bernie made phenomenal burgers — for an alien, that is.

    We didn’t even care about the bugs. The bugs themselves were never the problem. Okay, I don't mean that were any real bugs in Bernie’s food, and probably none of any kind when we ate at his house, but that was the real problem. Once we learned that the aliens had been putting nanosensors--microscopic data collector--in the food they served at the fast-food outlets, the media needed a catch phrases. Some clever woman wrote a headline--Bugs In Our Food. That nailed it. It went viral, so to speak.

    I should point out that these bugs never hurt anyone. It wasn’t anything like that. They were nothing more than protein-based sensors that activated when they entered the bloodstream and then transmitted data to a warehouse in Omaha via some satellite relays the aliens rented from a company in Banglore. Twenty four hours or so later the sensors dissolved into soluble protein, and no harm done. No physical harm. They might've even improved the flavor. Who knows?

    So the bugs themselves weren’t the issue. And the people I worked for didn’t even care that they were collecting data on us. From their perspective, the entire problem was

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