Agent Orange - Inconsequential

 DOA’d

FROM THE JOURNALS OF AGENT ORANGE:

Data. So much lost data.  Some people think they have a lot going on. They don’t. They might have a lot of activities, responsibilities or distractions compared to those around them, but there are a lot of those around them, and then many more around them. If the average person visits 3-15 countries in their lifetime and there are close to 200 countries on Earth that means the average person is missing out on a minimum of 185 countries. Even the countries they visit are never fully explored.  In the case of a large country you might, under a vigorous schedule, in one week, explore .00001% of the country. In a smaller country more, but still, your hard-earned approach to 1% would be a pitiful attempt to “see it all”.

So if we all group together, and I truly mean “all of us”, we don’t fare much better.  Twenty nine percent of the Earth is landmass. Of that twenty nine percent, humans occupy less than one. So you could say our Earth data has some extremely large holes in it. If you wanted to make a comparison you might say that if the set of ALL information were an ocean, the entire collected human experience would be a single plankter (yes that’s the singular form of plankton) floating about aimlessly. I won’t even dwell on the idea of how plankton are so inconsequential that they are almost never spoken of as individuals, which is why you didn’t know what a plankter was before now.

In case you’re not feeling incredibly small yet, I’ll continue. Our numbers so far have only included the Earth.  The best approximation of the number of planets in the universe is probably around 10^24 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. We inhabit one of those. That’s not taking into account moons, asteroids or even just, space.

The numbers are just about beyond comprehension. A septillion planets. So yes, you could say, no matter who you are, you’re missing out on quite a lot. Did I mention that these numbers don’t take into account the dimension of time?

Okay I’ll stop.

CHAPTER 1

 The girl kept screaming.  The crowd shifted ineffectively. More screaming. The man continued running calculations.

“He’s gonna fall,” said a random, ineffectual, voice in the crowd.

Hold on. Four more seconds.  The man fidgeted, willing the screen to display a solution.

The seconds ticked by. The tension in the crowd built.

Ding! The screen locked, a solution highlighted.

The man crammed the lamp he was holding into his backpack, partially zipped it and started off at a run. He jumped onto the hood of a silver Honda, then to the roof. He kept running, vaulted onto a yellow Nissan SUV, up the windshield, to the roof again and then dove into the air.

By this time people had noticed the movement. A large white man, possibly wearing an orange floppy wig, dressed in a suit, with a backpack, and he was running over the tops of cars. The novelty of the sight definitely beat the banality of a cat hanging from a tree.

There was a moment when more than one person in the crowd expected the man’s suit to suddenly be replaced by a skintight jumpsuit and cape, but that never happened. Instead, the man extended his arms, grappled a low branch of the tree the cat was hanging from and catapulted further into the air. Looking not at all surprised, he landed feet first on the thick branch on which the cat was hanging.

Unfortunately the movement of the branch was all that was needed to shake the cat free. There was a gasp from the crowd and a scream from the girl, but the man seemed to have planned for this. He was already falling and had hooked his knees over the limb. He reached, down this time, and grasped the feline in both hands. The crowd cheered. The girl screamed.