Monday, January 14, 2008

Futures: changeable or locked?

Today's oddment comes fresh from an odd sort of bush that sprouts rich, blue foliage that faded... and shrank... slowly before my eyes. The fruit was a double-bulb of dry, leathery rind, and the fruit (which filled both lobes and had a thin spread in the tissue connecting them) tasted differently: there are no words to precisely describe the taste of the upper bulb, as it might have tasted of sparkling sweet or heavy bitter, while the fruit of the lower bulb had a consistency of flavor highly unusual for such things. I sucked on a few small, granular seeds for a moment, but they melted in my mouth with only the flickering memory of their texture and... something else. A fruit of time, the past and the future. Perhaps if properly prepared, it might grant a vision of times to come, or clarify the perception of times gone. I'll soon see...

Idle thoughts wander through the mind of a fellow in search of a job. Thoughts like: "If only I had a guaranteed-accurate ironclad date of exactly where and when my next job would be, along with the salary and the nature of the job."
Followed with questions like, "What if I knew for certain that I'd get a job that I knew would suck?" or "What is the range of accuracy for a prediction?"
Ran Ackels (author of Immortal: RPG, currently published by Jikkarro Enterprises) once opined that prophecy had a range, with murky but changeable on one end, and diamond-clear and utterly unchangeable at the other. So, when folk go to a medium or other such folk who claim to see the future, should the accuracy of the forecast be selectable? A certain Mr. Deegan (www.dominic-deegan.com) allows his clients one question, which most of them waste by phrasing them to allow Deegan to accurately answer "Yes" or "No." And if there's a sliding scale, how should the consumer and the merchant establish the nature of that sliding? Hard-driving executive might be willing to pay top dollar for the clearest possible view of his future (which includes such delights as embezzlement, bankruptcy, a media-circus trial and a long, glamor-free stint in jail), but would he be willing to pay more for signs and hints about how his future might take another tack?

Might be an idea for a couple of stories in there...

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