It's beginning to look a lot like Quatermass

A blogger at LGM updates us on the saga of Bertha, the 7000-tonne tunnelling machine currently stalled in the Seattle substrata after it encountered the wrong kind of soil and overheated and blew a seal NO WAIT WRONG JOKE. It does not auger well for the future.

One option is for Seattle to just leave Bertha there, entombed and mothballed.* That way a future feudal society will discover it, reactivate its systems** and use it in wars against neighbouring city-states. Having first dealt with the descendents of the original crew who were trapped within the machine when it was sealed off. Why is there yet no dystopian SF novel with this plot?

Fortunately the future Seattle will have the Oregon Realm of Wicca to its south as a buffer zone shielding it from Emperor Norton VII's attempts to annex it into the San Franciscan Empire. IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY the Silverberg short story. The greater military threat will come from the Vancouveran Protectorate to the north.

However, I am skeptical about the entire story, if only because Bertha is depicted as resembling the circular scraping mouth of a lamprey fitted onto a giant fleshlight. This MAKES NO SENSE. Any fule kno that the canonical design for a tunnelling machine employs a helicoidal cone.

More likely the official story is a cover-up. History proves again and again that Bertha has probably run into a long-buried alien spaceship -- a relic of the Martian campaign to pass on their traits to our hominid ancestors -- and the authorities are stalling, worried that one wrong move will activate the ship's long-dormant psionic energies, with the resultant mass hysteria and genocidal rioting and cities on flame. This ALWAYS HAPPENS. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.



* The mothballs are necessary to avoid moth problems.

** I assume that Bertha is nuclear powered. If not, WHY NOT.

Job for you

This is lifted Holus Bolus from the very wonderful Bad Science Blog produced by Ben Goldacre.
I don't have psionic hardware experience but I reckon some regular readers might, ZRM and Thunder to name just two. Note that there is no unit of currency given for the salary since earth papers haven't got a quatloo symbol.