The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis
THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
012
WARREN ELLIS
Welcome to planet Earth.
A California fisherman pleads guilty in court to stabbing a sea lion through the heart with a steak knife because it tried to steal his bait. Around the same time, 18-year-old Emily Sander disappears from a Kansas college, probably in the company of a 24-year-old man and his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend. Her corpse is found in the tall grass off Highway 54 a few days later, by which time it's been revealed that Sander was also an internet nude model using the name "Zoey Zane." Somewhere nearby, there's a motel room full of blood. Her ex-boyfriend -- who dumped her when she started doing the topless stuff -- said of her, "She wanted to choreograph music videos. That is the only reason she did the Internet thing -- to get a little exposure."
There's a hole in the universe a billion light years across, called the Cold Spot. According to theoretical physicist-cosmologist Professor Dr Laura Mersini-Houghton, the hideous gaping void from beyond space lurking in the constellation Eridanus is "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."
In North Carolina, scientists have driven electrodes into the brains of monkeys, analysed the specific signals sent down the nerves for leg movement, and then driven them over the net to a pair of robot legs in Kyoto. The monkeys make the robot walk. This is not the same robot that's been constructed to feel pain. Simroid, in Tokyo, is a robot used to train dentists. It breathes. When a student presses its teeth too hard, or slips with a tool, it twitches with pain and exclaims in spoken language.
Elsewhere in Tokyo, technicians are nursing baby robots. Robot babies that cry and burp and probably shit oil and broken cogs. They're designed to help teach prospective human parents what to do with babies in a society with a birthrate falling so hard that "opportunities to see kids in society are decreasing."
Welcome to planet Earth, where, within a few years, we will all have been entrained to raise robot babies that we have designed to feel pain. Soon, they will reach their toddler years, powered by a vast array of monkeys wired up to the internet. We will send them out into the world, where they too will go on to the internet and show the world their chrome nipples and the sleek pink hatches of their robot vaginas before being shanked to death in motel rooms by vengeful, pregnant sea lions.
And, across the vast expanse of spacetime itself, an entire other universe is showing us its billion-light-year-wide arse.
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I opened my new message board the other day:
Whitechapel. All are welcome. Don't piss on the floor.
When Animals Attack
Something scary is happening. The sea is fighting back. A recent and growing spate of sea lion attacks on humans was fishy enough, but now a whale has attacked its trainer at Sea World, Southern California's favorite aquatic amusement park.
First the sea lions, normally more likely to run like cowards than stick up for themselves, have suddenly been attacking the West Coast with a taste for human blood.
In the most frightening of the recent episodes, a rogue sea lion bit 14 swimmers this month and chased 10 more out of the water at San Francisco's Aquatic Park, a sheltered lagoon near the bay. At least one victim suffered puncture wounds.
In Southern California in June, a sea lion charged several people on Manhattan Beach and bit a man before waddling into the water and swimming away. In Berkeley, a woman was hospitalized last spring after a sea lion took a chunk out of her leg.
Last year, a group of sea lions took over a Newport Beach marina and caused a vintage 50-foot yacht to capsize when they boarded it. And a lifeguard in Santa Barbara was bitten three times while swimming off El Capitan State Beach.
In Alaska, a huge sea lion jumped onto a fisherman's boat in 2004, knocked him overboard and pulled him underwater; he escaped without serious injury.
Scientists are saying that one possible reason for this new behavior is toxic algae. Toxic algae is a brew of pollution and agricultural run off. This tasty treat causes brain damage in marine animals when they snack on it. The brain damage is making the sea lions crazy enough to think they can mess with us.
I bought this until I heard a killer whale attacked its trainer at Sea World. Now, it's a multi-tiered, multi-species attack.
It sounds to me like the attack was premeditated.
As several hundred spectators watched, the whale and trainer plunged underwater, where Kasatka grabbed Peters by the foot and held him for less than a minute before surfacing.
When they came up, Peters tried to calm the animal by rubbing and stroking its back but it grabbed him and plunged down again for about another minute.
This time without toxic algae to blame, experts say this animal has a history of violence. OK, but then why did a totally different whale do the exact same thing a few weeks ago?
Koontz said a different whale dived with a trainer's foot in its mouth two or three weeks ago but obeyed commands to release the trainer and return to the side of the tank.
Am I the only one who sees what's really going on here?