Elon Musk Day or: Johnny Rocketpants
Johnny RocketPants, twelve sols old, hops out of space bed after the robot gives him his energy enhancing, behavior correcting injection. With a pep in his step and his mind right Johnny is ready to conquer the world. The robot gives him a bowl of carbohydrate flakes. When he finishes eating the robot puts on a soft velvety covering and gives Johnny a hug to mimic physical contact necessary for healthy development. And then Johnny puts on his rocket pants and blasts off for school.
On his way to school Johnny’s rocket pants navigate him past asteroids and dying suns. But Johnny has no time for scenery. He is practicing his hand movements on his virtual 3D-theremin being projected by his hologram goggles. Johnny thinks he’s really bad at the 3D-theremin but he’s told it looks good to know an instrument. As he messes up the “Flight of the Cyborg Bee” for the umpteenth time his mother, Sarah RocketPants (who has no rocket pants of her own), holo-texts him. “Hi mom” Johnny says to the pre-recorded hologram. “My darling, hello, I hope you are well. I’ve gotten my reports about your 3D-theremin practice. And you are doing wonderful. So I don’t want you to feel criticized. But I’m not sure that it will be enough to get you into a top space academy. And that’s not your fault! Your playing is perfect. But even so I think it would be good if you started learning dejarik. This means you have to get up a space hour earlier to practice. But don’t worry you’ll just have to take an energy shot after lunch and you won’t know the difference.” The hologram of Johnny’s mother says goodbye. And Johnny says “Bye mom” and kisses the cold void of space in the direction of where the hologram just was.
Johnny’s mother finished her recording relieved to be done mothering. In the year 2044 StarScream PhrenFix Corp (in 2044 it was just known as Pfizer) responded to the outcry against the emotional labor imposed on parent by the biological instinct to care for their children. They created a cure in the form of a drug called Love No More. The drug would eliminate parents’ love for their children which held them back from fully actualizing and achieving their highest potential. Mothers in particular would benefit as they no longer were limited by the need for flexible work schedules to accommodate raising children which increased the pay gap.
The first versions of the drug required higher doses for women and did some damage to their carotid arteries. But they were all happy to deal with the side effects in order to no longer be slaves to domesticity. A few mothers were of course nervous to take a drug that let them abandon their children. But history records that once they learned that the state would now take responsibility for raising children they were happy to take the medicine. After all why should parents be allowed to raise their children? They didn’t receive any training. All they had was a biological need to protect their children from harm and an inescapable desire to raise them to live a happy life. But this was far from perfect. Parents made mistakes every day. Not only did parents damage children they were determined to be the number one source of inequality. Good parents unfairly advantaged some kids with love and good examples. But other parents had trouble caring for children at all. They were exhausted. They found that raising children didn’t come naturally. They yelled, drank, did drugs, and hit their children. They let their kids run wild unsupervised. Some parents even let their children play and didn’t keep schedules to maximize time for improvement.
And parents understood this. Which is why as soon as the working paper detailing the problems with parenthood was released awaiting peer review the Hillary Clinton Institute of Technocratic Perfection (HCITP) instituted the public boarding schools. After the first school was opened and ran successfully for a year the Agoges we instituted nationally without delay. The Agoges took children from their mothers as soon as the umbilical cord was cut to be raised by experts in child psychology. These were an immediate success. Some have said that there were some difficulties in the early years of the program. There are stories that in the year 2051 people used sharp sticks to make marks on paper to write letters. And around the age of seven some of the children started using these sticks to stab themselves in attempts at suicide.
But the people who believe this are conspiracy theorists who tend to live in the Outer Rim planets. They are gross and backwards and their skin is reddened from working in the ground out in the sun. They even wipe feces from their own behinds using just their hands and thin pieces of paper (paper is a material that are made from trees. Which are plants that grow in dirt. Plants are similar in cell structure to the foods “green” and “orange” which are extruded from the food synthesizer which supplies food to the feeding tube which comes out of the wall).
But even though this never happened the experts decided that children should be raised by their biological parents until the age of seven. Then parents should take the Love No More drug and give up their children. This solved all the problems and the children were happy and content. But despite the success of this revised plan it was later decided that children should visit with their parents a couple times a year, Christmas and the Summer Solstice (which was renamed Elon Musk day and then moved to add the third visitation holiday, Galactic Science Day for Peace and Development). Later parents were required to schedule phone calls to their children once a month, but by the time this was implemented the latest version of Love No More was so effective that most parents resented the requirement. But they were so grateful to the quantum psychiatrists at the Quark Collective for freeing them from this burden that most complied without their robots having to administer the punishment probes.
A supernova exploded only a million miles away from Johnny and his rocket pants needed to correct his trajectory. But he didn’t notice since he was thinking that Christmas was just 20 space days ago and he wouldn’t see his mom until Elon Musk Day. Johnny would never get very good at the 3D-theremin if he was always distracted from his practice like this.
But even though Sarah found all this mothering exhausting in the end she was quite proud of herself. Most parents assigned very few tasks for their children personally. And her orbicle mate, Patrice, assigned no tasks for his daughter. Guys like that weren’t going anywhere. And he was not handsome enough to not have power to trade in exchange for sex. He would have to exchange actual currency if he wanted sex. But she was proud of how much time she spent arranging his schedule to maximize the amount of time Johnny had for tasks. This showed she was a better parent than all the others who barely assigned any tasks. And the better Johnny does at tasks the more Social Credit points Sarah will get. And while employers say they only look at performance everyone knows having high a Social Credit score can put you in the running for promotions way before you’d normally be considered. To say nothing of the opportunities to increase her social standing by being able to brag.
“Hey Johnny!” Billy Oculus shouted.
“Hey Billy!” Johnny shouted back.
“How did you do on your part of the project?” Billy knew that Johnny’s robot wouldn’t permit Johnny not finishing. But he wanted to know if Johnny actually worked hard on it.
“I think I did a good job”
Billy was glad to hear that Johnny didn’t just blow through it, but just in case Billy had also done Johnny’s part. And Johnny knew he could count on Billy which is why he always chose him to be his partner. Sarah Supernova might technically get better grades. But Billy was reliable. Billy was for sure going places. After every Christmas kids are looking forward to Elon Musk day to see their parents again. So for the first Space History project of the new trimester there’s usually a lot of fighting over who gets to do theirs on Elon Musk. But Johnny is the coolest kid in school because even the other kids’ parents wish they had their own rocket pants. And Johnny is a kid, the only kid anyone has heard of, who has his own pair of rocket pants. So everyone always lets Johnny get his way.
Everyone knew from the poem that Elon Musk was the man responsible for making humans a space faring civilization, forever changing the fate of humanity.
In 2020 Elon Musk was at the ready
His new rockets landed tall and steady
In 2033
A trip to Mars was to be
On that first trip everyone died
But work began after all had cried
With lessons learned in 2043
The first colony Mars did ever see
But Elon was also a complicated figure because he had also been guilty of wrongthink. But he had wrongthink in an age before quantum psychiatrists had figured out the correct treatment for wrongthink.
So it was weird for Johnny when during his research he learned that Elon Musk had said some very dumb things in things called tweets, which was a primitive form of their Squizzledarts system. But instead of squizzledarts tweets used words to communicate simple ideas. Rather than injecting a replica of the other person’s synapse pattern directly into your eyeballs in order to perfectly transfer ideas that are impossible to put into words. But tweets were often misunderstood due to the use of primitive text to communicate. But you didn’t scream in pain like how you do when you get a squizzledart. So when they made the transition some preferred tweets to getting an injection into the eye. But generally people agreed that sharing your most complex ideas with anyone who wanted to read them was worth the trade off.
After Johnny and Billy’s presentation the assistant to the assistant teacher, Miss Woocares, asked the class if it was right for primitive societies to tolerate wrongthink? Sally Supernova proposed that they needed to cancel Elon Musk. Shortly after Elon Musk established the colony on Mars he almost lost his company when the HCITP decided that Elon Musk couldn’t spread dumb ideas and be allowed to have a platform. Sally argued that Elon Musk had accomplished his greatest achievement and since quantum psychiatry didn’t exist yet to provide the proper treatment of wrongthink at least he could be cancelled as he had changed society and contributed everything he could so was no more use to anyone.
But Billy argued that Elon Musk didn’t have the advantage of the emotion controlling drugs to regulate the dangerous emotions when he got them. So it was impossible to know if he really had wrongthink or just wrong feelings. And since this was the argument straight out of the prep book for the standardized test Miss Woocares felt assured that her class would probably do well enough to get her a bonus at the end of this trimester.
After Space History Johnny went to Math to download quantum physics equations into his algobox (a computer connected directly into the brainstem which figures out math problems for the wearer). As the algobox implanted neurons into Johnny’s brain to point from different types of questions to the right equations Johnny was again distracted. With all these distractions Johnny might end up average. This was pretty disappointing. His mom told him his dad, Horatio RocketPants, was some kind of inventor and that Johnny wasn’t showing the kind of aptitude his dad showed at his age. But that didn’t bother Johnny so much. Mostly when he felt bad about his dad it was because the robot had told Johnny that his dad was mining sulphur on Asteroid-9234783470230202934783979324 as punishment for talking back to his teacher. This really scared Johnny. And after he found this out he stopped talking back to his teacher or asking too many questions in general.
But the records in the Quark Collective showed something different. On the verge of their child’s 7th birthday Sarah said, “They can’t do this! Johnny is our child! He’s my child.” Her robot silently recorded this and sent it to the Quark Collective, just like everything else Sarah had said for her entire life. Horatio sat on his floating beanbag stone faced. Sarah’s soft features face twisted hard and cruel “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Horatio looked at her but didn’t move. “Are you so afraid of these fucking robots that you’re going to let them take our child without saying a fucking word?”
Horatio said “I’m not afraid of the robots” Horatio’s robot sent a signal to the house to take the punishment probes out of storage and have them readied in the cabinet.
“That’s it! All you care is that I don’t think you’re afraid of the robots?” Sarah said, “Fine, how about you don’t care about your son! Would you prefer I think that about you?”
Johnny lay in his bed scared. When his robot went in and out of his room to give him his drugs he could hear the shouting. The drugs helped quell his fears but they couldn’t get rid of them completely. They also couldn’t completely suppress the sadness he felt hearing his parents fighting. Even though he didn’t know what they were fighting about. Johnny wiped his eyes and got out of bed.
“I’m just thinking” Horatio said. “That’s it. I’m just thinking.”
“What are you thinking about that’s more important than this?” Sarah shouted.
“I’m thinking if there’s a way to get to the Outer Rim… hey buddy.”
Johnny appeared at the door “I can’t sleep with you shouting.”
“You could hear us?” Horatio asked.
“Yes, when the robot gave me my sleeping drugs.”
“And you couldn’t sleep even with the drugs?” Sarah asked
“No.”
“Well, we’ll keep it down from now on. Now let me put you back to sleep.” Horatio said as he walked over and picked Johnny up.
“The Outer Rim?” Sarah asked when Horatio returned.
“It happens”
“Some people escape” Horatio’s robot went to the cabinet to get the punishment probes “I’m not saying we should escape.” The robot returned the probes. “But maybe I could plead to the Kaiperium.”
Sarah softened “They’ll never let us go.”
Horatio “It happens. When I was a boy some guy my father worked with was allowed to go.”
“How? ”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it just him or his whole family?”
“I don’t know. I was sent to the Agoges pretty soon after that. And, of course, my father wasn’t really that interested in talking to me after I left. All I know is my father went to request as well.”
“Well, you’re here now so I know you didn’t leave for the Outer Rim.”
“No, they said ‘No.’ And my father came home.”
“So why will they say yes to you?”
“I don’t know that they will. I just know sometimes they do say yes. So I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to say.”
“I’m scared. This sounds dangerous.”
“Well, I don’t just want to see Johnny on Christmas and Elon fucking Musk Day. Do you?”
“You know I don’t.”
“So, I gotta try.”
Accompanied by his robot Horatio rode his rocket pants (the same rocket pants that Johnny now wears) to the Kaiperium of Scientific Perfection, which replaced the HCITP, and was his solar system’s local branch of the Quark Collective. In order to make sure any issue brought to the Kaiperium was important all supplicants were required to spend 3 days floating alone in the emptiness of space being supplied fluids by their robots but without food or the pain regulating drugs which allowed people to have so many electronic enhancements without suffering. After the 3rd day Horatio was granted entrance and asked to speak to the Minister. Horatio’s robot silently uploaded the contents of Horatio’s conversation with Sarah to the Minister’s intake box. So the Minister knew what Horatio was there for and couldn’t be bothered to see another pleading parent. So the Minister sent his secretary’s lowest paid secretary, Bartleby, to deal with the parent. Horatio explained to the poorly paid bureaucrat how he wanted to take his son and wife to the Outer Rim before they were given the drugs and had to give up Johnny. Bartleby asked about how leaving for the Outer Rim would protect the values of equality that the Quark Collective enforced throughout the galaxy. But instead of giving up Horatio said “I don’t care about equality”. So Horatio’s robot shot a laser beam through his head killing him instantly. The Quark Collective can solve the problem of unnecessary emotions. But the only solution to wrongthink is a full brain lobotomy. Bartleby was of course horrified that he wasn’t offered a bribe in exchange for a promise to enforce equality in the Outer Rim. Seventeen years after Horatio died Sarah Nano (née Supernova) would be sentenced to 3 years on a sulphur asteroid after offering a bribe to a better paid and less corrupt Minster’s secretary.
Horatio’s robot sent a message to Sarah’s robot. Sarah’s robot informed Sarah that Horatio was now dead. Sarah fell to the ground in tears. After a few minutes crumpled on the ground Sarah got up and went to the dining area. Slowly she moved her hand to the table. She gently wrapped her fingers around the laser knife handle. As quickly as she could she turned the laser on and tried to bring it to her throat. But in the second between turning the knife on and bringing it towards herself her robot remotely turned the knife off. Sarah backed away as the robot that had been with her her whole life methodically moved towards her. When it reached her it held her down and injected her with Love No More. She stopped crying but only out of shock at how shitty she still felt. Did it not work? She sat on the floor waiting to feel different. But it never happened. She didn’t feel any different at all. After a bit she got up off the floor, ate some orange from the feeding tube and sat at the table waiting to feel different. Hours went by and she still felt the same. Eventually Johnny got up and came to ask her for breakfast. She rolled her eyes annoyed by the neediness of this parasite. Sarah wondered if she really had to wait a whole month to send him away.