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He Traveled Everywhere

Tom Ball

    Roger said to me, “I feel I’ve lived a thousand lives!” Of course, he was almost 200 years old, and many didn’t make it past 1 month of life after being born with an adult’s body (with the memories of both parents). And Roger said, “I’ve been to all 97 of the Solar System’s colonies and all over the 7 continents of Earth and the numerous undersea colonies. Most were Utopias or tried to be, but some were fraught with peril and had crazy, unpredictable leaders and dangerous drugs and citizens. But I survived it all, and now I am going to the Centauri colonies, a 3-week journey. I will be the only one who has managed to go to all human settlements in Earth and Space. And I am awarding myself the first Traveler’s cup. Anyone who can duplicate the feat will earn their name on the cup together with highlights of their travels on video.”
    I said, “Show me some of the highlights of your trip!”
    So, he said, “OK, I’ll give you the highlights.”
    “My first lover in my first year of life was a shrew from Baltimore city state. She kept me chained in her basement and would love me every night. Finally, he strangled her to death and a few days later was rescued by police. The body stank in the summer heat and was full of maggots. It was a horrible way to start my life, but the judge absolved me of all guilt, and I was free to go. It was all recorded on video surveillance.” And he said, “The next significant event in my life was a trip to Miami city state where I took a job as a pro video golfer. It was an easy job, but he had to practice 10 hours a day to keep up and my job was basically to help people use the video golf technology. And I had a lot of friends and lovers. And then I started touring the World visiting pro video golfers who by that time had greatly outnumbered real golfers. But most of the simulated golf courses had the same software and I won a lot of tournaments. During these years I met a dream woman who sold dreams for a living. Many were recording their dreams with the help of dream stimuli, and she figured it was good entertainment. Her personal dreams were the best and I made some dream videos with her. He showed me some of the dreams. One was set in a World in which a light snow was falling, and I was an Inuit of the year 1850 and he and some men speared a whale with harpoons and then butchered it and ate the meat raw and I loved a woman in an igloo. I was just a guest in the small group of igloos. And my takeaway was how hard life had been for the Inuit.”
    “Next, I toured all historical periods and settings that were available. I especially liked the Wild West and 1969. I met many interesting people who were tourists and actors / actresses. In 1969 I met a loving girl who wrote books, like ‘Unreal Love,’ about impossible loves who got together and surprised everyone, and many here gambled on who would love who and many lost their shirts. And she wrote ‘A Dwarf’s Philosophy,’ about underground people who had large brains on a small body and believed it was safer to live deep underground from a World of nuclear threats. And I loved this girl hard and she drove me wild!”’
    “And in the Wild West simulation, I met a female gunslinger. She ran a virtual saloon of love in which she had high class hologram prostitutes. People enjoyed having sex with them. Of course, it was virtual sex, and therefore cerebral sex, but millions of people came to this lawless Wild West show. And I virtually loved this female and was amazed.”
    “Then I began to travel in earnest around our modern World. I was in the biggest undersea colony when saboteurs bombed the dome and I narrowly escaped. And then I was in Antarctica for the first city being built there and fell in love with a woman who was the main architect of the settlement. She was also a painter of sci-fi cities to be. Together she and I traveled all over the Earth and then went to Space. She submitted sketches for future buildings, and I played in golf tournaments, and designed virtual courses to fit the terrain. We both made a lot of money to pay for our travels. Then finally on Mars we broke up and went our separate ways. She said, ‘I am tired of traveling and want to go back to Earth for a rest,’ and I pushed on into other Planets and Moons. The highlight for me was loving a woman who had the torso of a woman and a vagina and the long body of a snake on Uranus’s Miranda Moon. She was the wildest woman I ever loved.”
    “And on Triton, Neptune’s Moon, I met a woman who told me she’d loved over 10,000 men and she was trying to love someone from every settlement. It occurred to me then that there were many ways to approach traveling through Earth and Space. But so far, she’d only found a lover in one-half of Earth’s settlements. But she said she was 130 years old and would live forever and achieve her love goal.”
    “I started golf clubs throughout Space, still designing the Web courses to fit the virtual terrain. And I was consistently in the top 10 virtual golf winners for 80 years before I finally retired and revisited my favorite cities and lived a life of leisure. I continued to meet lots of new lovers and new friends. One lover I met on Europa, Moon of Jupiter, told me, ‘My life was too easy. And you need challenges!’ I considered becoming a gigolo and did it for a while. The women clients seemed pleased with me and wanted more from me.”
    “Finally, I went to the Centauri System to complete my circumnavigations of all human settlements. And the colonies on the Planets and Moons of Centauri, got a lot of light and heat from the 3 suns. And the people here were decadent, not the pioneering type one saw elsewhere in Space. I loved a few of the women here and lived in the lap of luxury that had been created by the numerous advanced robot builders, 3 years prior to my arrival. I met a girl here, Cinderella, on Planet Far Out, who said, “My philosophy is to create robots that can think, but will not have the vote, to build even cleverer infrastructure like Holoworlds.” And I loved her. And we went together to one of her Holoworlds. This World was very musical and featured hologram copies of great musicians of today and clones of dead ones. And she said, I plan to make a fortune on the original, exotic music here.”
    He said, “I have never experienced music before that demanded my full attention with all the fantastic lyrics to focus on. And I especially liked, “Teleport Fever,” which was about colonizing distant galaxies with holograms. And I liked “Swift Justice,” which was about law and order in Space in the future, in which androids, holograms and humans were all equal before the law. And the ‘Song of Loons,’ about crazy future androids who would do things like, sing discordantly in a choir and do crazy deeds like love everyone who wanted to love them. No exceptions.”
    “And I stayed in the Centauri system for a month before taking off for Barnyard’s Star. The Planets there had just been settled one year prior to my arrival. On Planet Sybaris, I met a man who said his name was Kurtz and he had created a Holoworld of females who all reached orgasms when he did and there were hundreds of them. He was the master, and the hologram people would occasionally petition him like to give them more autonomy and freedom. Or to give them better orgasms. Kurtz meanwhile was totally debauched. He was basically a Lotus Eater and was out of it on the latest pleasure drugs. I truly felt I was on the edge of civilization here. And he shared a few of his mind-blowing lovers with me and I was amazed. I was quickly addicted to these women, and I asked Kurtz, “About his philosophy?” He responded, “Civilization is going down and he was just getting his kicks before Armageddon leered its ugly head.” And he and I got drunk and took the latest stimulant drugs. And he remarked, “I feel so free here beyond the reach of the mind reading spies; but I am sure they will appear here soon and ruin my fun!” I replied, “But to come all this way and just be a debauchee seems like madness.” He said, “Of course it is a mad World, like all the other human Worlds today. Madness is our destiny!”
    So this was his life in brief. And I wished him luck!

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