Asteroid to Meteor to Meteorite

By Jonathan Quincy Graves

“Just look at this mess!  I thought you boys at SMILE (Space Matter Interception and Liquidation for the Ecosystem) were supposed to be on the ball.  You run that place, don’t you?”

Fred opened his mouth to protest that he was only a senior shift supervisor, but Marge continued.

“You’re always bragging about how sophisticated your systems are, and how we are all perfectly safe from this kind of damage from asteroids or meteors, or whatever you want to call them.”

“They’re asteroids until they enter the atmosphere, dear, then they’re called meteors,” Fred interjected, setting the record straight on that point, at least.

“Don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking to you.”

“Yes, dear.”

Marge glared at him for a moment, trying to decide whether his last polite response could be considered a further interruption.  Deciding to let it pass… this time… she continued, “And look at my vase.  That was a genuine ceramic piece with a rutile-blue glaze from the 21^st century—practically priceless.  Now it’s just a pile of broken clay.”

“I can fix it, dear,” Fred said, with no real enthusiasm.  He’d always thought that that one and only piece of pottery in the entire dwelling, placed on a stark white pedestal in the middle of the room, was particularly ugly.

“Well of course you can fix it.  You can just suck up all the little bits and pieces, dump them into your Mendall doodad, and it’ll come out looking exactly as it did before; but it will no longer be a genuine historical artifact, now will it.  Its value to a discerning collector will be practically zilch.”

Marge paused for a moment to underscore the message that she was a knowledgeable and discerning collector of priceless antiquities.  Then she considered whether Frederick’s last input had constituted another interruption, and whether it was too late to call him on it.  She decided it was and, it wasn’t.

“Don’t interrupt.”

“Yes dear.”

“And didn’t I specifically tell you I wanted the latest ProtoBeam aperture covers over the windows?  But no, you insisted that the much cheaper Hewlett Packard screens were more than adequate to keep all the little flying things out of our dwelling.  Well, wrong again, Fredo, that meteor thingy came flying right on through, taking most of the window with it.  If you look close enough, you can see it lying on the floor over there.”

“Meteorite, dear.  When it came through the window, it was a meteor, but now that it’s on the ground, its kinetic energy spent, it’s called a meteorite.”

Now that was definitely an interruption, and a brazen one at that, but Marge hated to repeat herself so she glared at her disobedient husband until he dropped his gaze to the floor.

Once she was satisfied the message had gotten through, she continued: “So how could you let this happen?”

This time Fred held his tongue.  He was not going to make the mistake of interrupting her again.  The silence grew until he looked back up to Marge’s face and saw the anger building as she waited for his answer.

“W-well you see, dear,” Fred stuttered and cleared his throat, “it was a freak occurrence.  This small—no bigger than a zip-plane, really—asteroid came at us on a trajectory out of the sun.  We spotted it too late to deflect it, so I opted to disintegrate it.  Unfortunately, it was very dense, and some pieces survived atmospheric entry.”  His voice dwindled somewhat towards the end of his explanation.  He could see from Marge’s glare that she was not finding it very satisfactory.

What were the odds, he wondered, first, that an asteroid would be on such a trajectory; second that it would survive the disintegration beams at full power, and finally, that a fragment would find his house, come through his window, and destroy her ‘priceless’, genuine 21^st century, rutile-blue glazed, ceramic vase.  And greatest insult of all, expend all of its energy so that it lay there, a grain of sand in the corner of the room, as testimony to his failure.

Marge let the tension build, then said, “I’ve had a long talk with Aunty Isabelle this afternoon, [Aunty Isabelle is one of Marge’s pet names for the dwelling AI.] and we’ve decided to move up your regularly scheduled discipline session.  You won’t be spending this evening with your low-life buddies at the sensi-bar,” she sneered.

Snatching her husband by the ear, she commanded, “Come with me.”

Marge led Fred to the media room and pushed him down into his Laz-Y-Boy Envelo-Chair with its genuine faux-Naugahyde upholstery.  Aunty Isabelle activated the electro-nuclear restraints Marge had Fred install, holding him in place, and the chair molded itself around him.

“Have fun, dear,” Marge said with a smirk, “I will go spend an hour or so with my Kindle Experiencer.”

Fred had been in this situation before, and as the world dimmed around him, he both dreaded and somehow yearned for what he knew was about to occur.

With no apparent break in time, Fred found himself standing in front of Marge in their bedroom suite.  Except it wasn’t really Marge, but a much larger, younger, and more attractive Marge (she had done the programming with Aunty Isabelle’s assistance).  She was dressed in what might have been called in an earlier age, school-marmish attire, and Fred was a much smaller, less coordinated Fred, barefoot, and wearing juvenile flannel pajamas.

“You have been a naughty boy,” the not-Marge said.

In the back of his mind, Fred knew, or almost knew, this was not real, but it was as real as modern technology could produce.  And, as far as he was concerned under the present circumstances, that was damned real.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Freddy responded.

“You will be sorry, little boy.  Come here.”

Freddy approached, reluctantly, as the could-be-Marge sat on her vanity stool and adjusted her skirts.  When he was in position, the might-as-well-be-Marge seized his pajama bottoms and whisked them down to his ankles.  Freddy tried to resist, but his reflexes in this reality were just a little too slow and his muscles just a little too weak for him to mount an effective resistance.

In no time at all, Freddy had been stripped from the waist down, and placed over the this-reality Marge’s knee.  With no further delay, mommy-Marge began an extensive warm-up spanking with her firm hand upon his nicely presented, delightfully squirming, quickly pinkening bottom, while continuing to scold her ‘little’ man.

Freddy could tell that he was in for a long, hard session.  He had seen the classical, syntho-wooden hairbrush artifact on the vanity within easy reach.

END

Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Quincy Graves. All right reserved.  Please do not repost or use for any commercial purpose without written approval from the author.