SOFT vs FIRM [FICTOID]

When will this meeting ever end? Senator Don Boogle wondered.

They were entering the 7,300th year of the Senate Select Committee on Facial Identity Recognance Markers (FIRM).  The committee had be in session so long thanks to NASA’s time-warping Stretch-Out-Forever-Technology (SOFT).

NASA initially started SOFT as a way of allowing interstellar travel by mucking with the space-time continuum but it worked out exactly the opposite as intended.

While creating a bubble in the cosmic fart of time, SOFT actually made time stretch out longer for those inside said bubble.

Eager to turn their scientific sow’s ear into a budgetary silk purse, NASA fobbed SOFT off on bureaucracies that hesitating to committing themselves to any course of action until after the issue had been thoroughly analyzed, debated, discussed, and dissected.

Thanks to SOFT, a meeting could take place over hours -- days! -- years! -- in subjective time yet only a second would elapse in objective time.

The FIRM committee convened to discuss the legislative proposal that everyone should have their birth certificate tattooed on their forehead in the form of a barcode visible only under ultraviolet light.

Needless to say, this provoked quite a degree of outrage among various groups and special interests:  Civil libertarians, defense lawyers, religious fanatics of all stripes, etc., etc., and of course, etc.  In fact, the only people supporting it were the tattoo artists and ultra-violent ink suppliers.

Senator Boogle didn’t flee the Senate cloakroom fast enough and got trapped on the committee.  Thanks to side-effects of SOFT, people in the space-time bubble didn’t need food, air, water, or bathroom breaks.  Sleep was also impossible unless one was already asleep when SOFT got activated (they thought Senator Ditch Drainage managed to figure out how to snooze and take a 500 year nap while in SOFT but it turned out he was just dead, lucky bastard).

Senator Boogle hoped the committee would last only a few days at most, but here they were, one third of the way into their eighth millennia and the bureaucrats running the show couldn’t care less about wrapping things up, they were still obsessing over whether the microphone cords should fall on the left or the right, fearing one choice or another might reflect political bias.

© Buzz Dixon