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Monday, February 25, 2008

Large Men tal Data Files

This is Steven Petrick posting.

My memory of things earlier in my life tends to be better than my more recent short term memory. This is bothersome as you might imagine. That long term memory storage does get in the way of other things though.

This weekend the Sci Fi channel showed one of its usual poorly done (from my standpoint) made for TV films titled "Living Hell".

I am over fifty years old (fast approaching 52), and thanks to my father rather addicted to reading science fiction. Dad, of course, had collected sci fiction for some time before he introduced me to it, so I have read stuff that goes back to the 1920s. One of the stories I read had a plot very similar to "Living Hell", so much so that nothing that happened in the film was really "new" to me. I cannot remember the name of the earlier story, nor the name of the author, but the story clearly pre-dated nuclear weapons.

In this story (it was a short story) a scientist invents a new medical miracle (rather than a biological weapon). This is a form of cells that can be used to help heal scars and burns. A sample of the invention is being flow across the country when the plane crashes in a remote area, releasing the sample. The sample feeds on the bodies of the passengers and crew, growing all the while. It then starts feeding on the local animal and plant life, getting bigger (no satellites, not much air activity, and no one really looking as the growth to size started after the search for the crashed plane had been abandoned). By the time it is finally discovered by man it is basically already too late. Great efforts are made to stop it, including building walls of fire (it just keeps expanding until it finally smothers the flames), bombing it (might have killed some portions, but there is just so much of it that all it really did was splash it around) and chemical attacks (if I recall correctly). It just keeps growing.

Finally the scientist who originally invented it hurls himself into it after giving a letter to a reporter. In the horror of the moment the reporter does not read the letter.

The growth continues, all man can do is keep running from it. Doom is inevitable.

Suddenly, parts of the growth start attacking other parts. The parts attacking look diseased. The diseased parts keep spreading. The reporter opens the letter at this juncture and learns that the scientist was dieing of cancer, and had sacrificed himself in hopes that his cancer would infect the growth.

The story pretty much ended there, man is saved, and there is this huge putrid mass of dead tissue covering the area of a state.

So you see, there is this large data file (not the only time it has happened, there have been several sci fi films made, like "Screamers" where on watching them I could immediately identify the earlier story it was based on because I had read the short story) in my mind. Probably several thousand sci fi stories that I cannot on a daily basis access (no need to), but seem to come readily to mind when presented with the appropriate stimulus.

One wonders what I might be able to accomplish if so much of my mind was not filed with trivial sci fi stories and bits of history and tactics and logistics (the great interests of my life).