'The Stick'
Aug. 6th, 2021 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boccaderlupoI dreamed I was visiting my mother's house. The night sky was a velvet purple. We stood in her driveway, and from above there appeared a strange formation of unidentified flying objects that looked like minus signs flying in a rigid pattern. They descended into the neighbor's driveway, almost menacing.
The neighbor, as it turns out, was inventor and meme creator Elon Musk. He showed us this, his latest invention: a device that looked more or less like a super-sized flashlight, purple with a kind of light on the end. It was, he said, "The Stick," and it was going to change travel forever.
Instead of cars, a person simply grabbed ahold of one of these sticks, which would lift you off the ground and carry you through the air. (You had to have a good grip, obviously, and there was no word of how one would deal with adverse weather conditions.) He showed us one, and with the press of a button he looped up and out of site and was transported, as if by an invisible elevator moving in a kind of half-sine wave form, to the other side of the neighborhood, and then back again. Our little crowd in the driveway oohed and aahed.
Best of all, somehow he had figured out how to do away with fossil fuels, and there was a little nuclear reaction inside each "stick" that gave it, for all intents and purposes, infinite energy. (No word on what might happen if these things exploded, etc.)
Clearly, Musk continued, you couldn't use this for all things. Trucks would still be needed for transport and such. But he envisioned a world in which everyone gave up their personal vehicles and instead flew through the air to their destination by means of "The Stick."
The car companies were incensed, of course, and were trying to destroy "The Stick" before it even came to market. So Musk was stockpiling all the prototypes in his garage. What could go wrong?
For what it's worth, I'm no huge fan of Musk, who I suspect is a charlatan, but I found the idea of commuters rocketing through the air with briefcases while desperately clinging to what amounts to a self-driving overhead subway rail kind of amusing.
The neighbor, as it turns out, was inventor and meme creator Elon Musk. He showed us this, his latest invention: a device that looked more or less like a super-sized flashlight, purple with a kind of light on the end. It was, he said, "The Stick," and it was going to change travel forever.
Instead of cars, a person simply grabbed ahold of one of these sticks, which would lift you off the ground and carry you through the air. (You had to have a good grip, obviously, and there was no word of how one would deal with adverse weather conditions.) He showed us one, and with the press of a button he looped up and out of site and was transported, as if by an invisible elevator moving in a kind of half-sine wave form, to the other side of the neighborhood, and then back again. Our little crowd in the driveway oohed and aahed.
Best of all, somehow he had figured out how to do away with fossil fuels, and there was a little nuclear reaction inside each "stick" that gave it, for all intents and purposes, infinite energy. (No word on what might happen if these things exploded, etc.)
Clearly, Musk continued, you couldn't use this for all things. Trucks would still be needed for transport and such. But he envisioned a world in which everyone gave up their personal vehicles and instead flew through the air to their destination by means of "The Stick."
The car companies were incensed, of course, and were trying to destroy "The Stick" before it even came to market. So Musk was stockpiling all the prototypes in his garage. What could go wrong?
For what it's worth, I'm no huge fan of Musk, who I suspect is a charlatan, but I found the idea of commuters rocketing through the air with briefcases while desperately clinging to what amounts to a self-driving overhead subway rail kind of amusing.
