From Labcoats to Rags
Mar. 31st, 2011 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonAs the American job market continues to limp its way towards a tenuous recovery, one community tragically remains adrift in the stagnant waters of the recent economic downturn. I am speaking of course of the Mad Scientist community.
Time has not been kind to these visionary psychopaths of yesterday’s tomorrow. Gone are the lofty promises of a 21st century threatened by the rampages of giant robots, test tube bred dinosaurs and remote controlled flying saucers. After all what use has the super-villain of today for a budget incinerating sub-orbital death ray… not when a five dollar box cutter can haunt the dreams of a nation for decades to come?
I’m standing here in the subterranean bowels of Bunker Epsilon, with the infamous Doctor Clank. Around us the former high tech headquarters of the insidious Brainstorm Empire has been completely gutted out, the teleportation platform dismantled, the command array broken down and a hollow interrogation room echoes with the drip of a meek leak. Scattered in the corners of the otherwise empty android bay tool boxes, stacks of plywood and cement bags. For in nine months the husk of Bunker Epsilon is going to be converted into an upscale luxury condoplex. – offering ‘the comforts of high rise living in the safety of an underground bunker.’
Doctor Clank: “It’s a damn shame is what it is! I mean it seems like only yesterday me and Tesla’s Brain were down here unleashing our Zombot’s for yucks on the local yokels. Now whaddya got? The ultimate gated community – with a built in strip mall; all’s so none of the mole yuppies have to risk going topside to rub elbows with the great unwashed masses the next time they buy their frappucino deluxe. Well let me tell you something about Bunker Epsilon, we were good for the community. Yeah you heard me right. Sure, we might’ve unleashed the occasional hoard of pitbull headed gorillas on an unsuspecting public, but y’know what? We not only added a little pizzazz to their otherwise uninspired lives, but we created jobs in the process too, damn-it!”
Doctor Clank lights an illegal endorphin laced cigarette in clear violation of the No Smoking sign posted along with the building permit and the odd scrawl of vandalism. I ask him to clarify his last statement.
“Well, I mean think about it. For one thing you had all the construction work it took to fix up the damage, somethin’ say like my giant mechanical spider swarms might inflict on downtown, Boobsville. A lot of money to be made there let me tell you and don’t even get me started with the insurance companies and that whole racket. Hardware stores boomed, restaurants were packed, tourists flocked in hopes of snapping their picture in front of real life Zombot. But the big mullah was in your local SciCorps patrols to ‘thwart my insidious plans and such’. And lemme jes remind you that in all’s my twenty seven years in mad science, not one, count ‘em one civilian death! Hey, what I can say…? I’m old school. But I digresses…, so yeah, Uncle Sam’s SciCorps created a lot of jobs fighting us super villain types and not just by putting hover-boots on the ground, or air, as it were. There used to be a time when yer lightning tanks and laser rifles were built here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.”
Doctor Clank refers of course to the recent privatization of the American Anti-Mad Science Industry to paramilitary corporations such as Black Thought and OverWatch. OverWatch in particular, has been in the news of late concerning leaked reports of illicit interrogation techniques on members of the mad science community. However with SciCorps budget slashed to a trickle and increasingly louder calls from the Right on Capitol Hill to dismantle the agency entirely, many communities have no other choice than to hire out these corporate mercenaries.
These financial troubles have also been compounded recently by the private sector’s aggressive outsourcing of their mad science needs from Asia’s competitive marketplace. For it is here that one finds what the Economist magazine has dubbed, ‘The Tiger Scientists’ and the rising trend of third world Sweat-Labs, where child-laborers are forced to toil for pennies a day over disposable Destructobots and volatile canisters of anti-gravity fuel.
In an undisclosed village in Malaysia, we are standing inside one of thousands of PaxOn Invisibility Formula Plants. Where translucent skinned children exhaustively labor unprotected over spewing chemical vats while under the supervision of floating Eye Droids squawking the orders of remote Lab Managers. As the chemicals leak from the plant into the water supply, the indigenous population has begun to become invisible. Most disturbing, is that many cases of invisibility eventually reach the eyes, so that they can no longer process light and soon go completely blind. Yet with lax environmental laws, a populace cowed into submission by local generalissimos and operating under the aegis of an indifferent West addicted to patented InvisoCreamä skin care products, few speak out in protest of the treatment inflicted on this remote workforce.
Now we’re standing in front of a local Casa Depot, amongst the ranks of patient immigrant day laborers we find several mad scientists milling about in the slim prospect of employment. Bedecked in patched, stained white lab coats and goggles with cracked infrared lens, they are joined by their rusted Servobots and mange ridden gorilla assistants. Their offers to destroy their neighbors once and for all or to be outfitted with sparking cybernetic limbs go ignored by the frequent pick-up trucks trawling for cheap labor. Some of them have been reduced to making quick cash doling out illegal neuro-boosters or black market doses of telepathine to their fellow laborers on the side.
This is the grim face of mad science in America today. But what will become of these once iconic, if not cartoonishy evil, futurists who enriched our visions of tomorrow with spectacular adventures and ludicrous threats? Only time… and money will tell.
"Damn it, Miguel... tell El Jefe that his panther man won't be ready for another five minutes!"
Time has not been kind to these visionary psychopaths of yesterday’s tomorrow. Gone are the lofty promises of a 21st century threatened by the rampages of giant robots, test tube bred dinosaurs and remote controlled flying saucers. After all what use has the super-villain of today for a budget incinerating sub-orbital death ray… not when a five dollar box cutter can haunt the dreams of a nation for decades to come?
I’m standing here in the subterranean bowels of Bunker Epsilon, with the infamous Doctor Clank. Around us the former high tech headquarters of the insidious Brainstorm Empire has been completely gutted out, the teleportation platform dismantled, the command array broken down and a hollow interrogation room echoes with the drip of a meek leak. Scattered in the corners of the otherwise empty android bay tool boxes, stacks of plywood and cement bags. For in nine months the husk of Bunker Epsilon is going to be converted into an upscale luxury condoplex. – offering ‘the comforts of high rise living in the safety of an underground bunker.’
Doctor Clank: “It’s a damn shame is what it is! I mean it seems like only yesterday me and Tesla’s Brain were down here unleashing our Zombot’s for yucks on the local yokels. Now whaddya got? The ultimate gated community – with a built in strip mall; all’s so none of the mole yuppies have to risk going topside to rub elbows with the great unwashed masses the next time they buy their frappucino deluxe. Well let me tell you something about Bunker Epsilon, we were good for the community. Yeah you heard me right. Sure, we might’ve unleashed the occasional hoard of pitbull headed gorillas on an unsuspecting public, but y’know what? We not only added a little pizzazz to their otherwise uninspired lives, but we created jobs in the process too, damn-it!”
Doctor Clank lights an illegal endorphin laced cigarette in clear violation of the No Smoking sign posted along with the building permit and the odd scrawl of vandalism. I ask him to clarify his last statement.
“Well, I mean think about it. For one thing you had all the construction work it took to fix up the damage, somethin’ say like my giant mechanical spider swarms might inflict on downtown, Boobsville. A lot of money to be made there let me tell you and don’t even get me started with the insurance companies and that whole racket. Hardware stores boomed, restaurants were packed, tourists flocked in hopes of snapping their picture in front of real life Zombot. But the big mullah was in your local SciCorps patrols to ‘thwart my insidious plans and such’. And lemme jes remind you that in all’s my twenty seven years in mad science, not one, count ‘em one civilian death! Hey, what I can say…? I’m old school. But I digresses…, so yeah, Uncle Sam’s SciCorps created a lot of jobs fighting us super villain types and not just by putting hover-boots on the ground, or air, as it were. There used to be a time when yer lightning tanks and laser rifles were built here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.”
Doctor Clank refers of course to the recent privatization of the American Anti-Mad Science Industry to paramilitary corporations such as Black Thought and OverWatch. OverWatch in particular, has been in the news of late concerning leaked reports of illicit interrogation techniques on members of the mad science community. However with SciCorps budget slashed to a trickle and increasingly louder calls from the Right on Capitol Hill to dismantle the agency entirely, many communities have no other choice than to hire out these corporate mercenaries.
These financial troubles have also been compounded recently by the private sector’s aggressive outsourcing of their mad science needs from Asia’s competitive marketplace. For it is here that one finds what the Economist magazine has dubbed, ‘The Tiger Scientists’ and the rising trend of third world Sweat-Labs, where child-laborers are forced to toil for pennies a day over disposable Destructobots and volatile canisters of anti-gravity fuel.
In an undisclosed village in Malaysia, we are standing inside one of thousands of PaxOn Invisibility Formula Plants. Where translucent skinned children exhaustively labor unprotected over spewing chemical vats while under the supervision of floating Eye Droids squawking the orders of remote Lab Managers. As the chemicals leak from the plant into the water supply, the indigenous population has begun to become invisible. Most disturbing, is that many cases of invisibility eventually reach the eyes, so that they can no longer process light and soon go completely blind. Yet with lax environmental laws, a populace cowed into submission by local generalissimos and operating under the aegis of an indifferent West addicted to patented InvisoCreamä skin care products, few speak out in protest of the treatment inflicted on this remote workforce.
Now we’re standing in front of a local Casa Depot, amongst the ranks of patient immigrant day laborers we find several mad scientists milling about in the slim prospect of employment. Bedecked in patched, stained white lab coats and goggles with cracked infrared lens, they are joined by their rusted Servobots and mange ridden gorilla assistants. Their offers to destroy their neighbors once and for all or to be outfitted with sparking cybernetic limbs go ignored by the frequent pick-up trucks trawling for cheap labor. Some of them have been reduced to making quick cash doling out illegal neuro-boosters or black market doses of telepathine to their fellow laborers on the side.
This is the grim face of mad science in America today. But what will become of these once iconic, if not cartoonishy evil, futurists who enriched our visions of tomorrow with spectacular adventures and ludicrous threats? Only time… and money will tell.
"Damn it, Miguel... tell El Jefe that his panther man won't be ready for another five minutes!"