A Bicycle Made for Two

Deactivation of Hal 9000

The most efficient animal on the planet is the condor. 

The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans.

But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. 

And the right computer... 

A friendly, easy computer that isn't an eyesore  but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a Tensor lamp... 

The right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. 

And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone's hands? 

Everyone in The World. 

We'd be talking about the most tectonic shift in the status quo since... Ever.

 The shallow hedonistic spirit of the nineties was too fragile to endure the cold of the vast twin shadows cast backward by an onrushing age of terror. Darker times were on their way, demanding a new clarity and rigor of thought.

I tried to articulate the outlines of the next trend by introducing to the pages of JLA a military-funded superteam called the Ultramarines, whipped up by Uncle Sam to keep the Justice League in check should their internationalist stance ever compromise US military security. By the end of the story, the Ultramarines had split from their paymasters and joined with a group of like-minded DC heroes in a hovering city-sized headquarters named Superbia, there to announce a bold new manifesto for change :

SUPERBIA HEREBY DECLARES INDEPENDENCE FROM ALL NATIONS AND OPENS ITS GATES TO SUPER-CHAMPIONS FROM THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH. WE INTEND TO SERVE AS A FIRST-STRIKE GLOBAL PEACEKEEPING FORCE. WE WILL KILL IF WE HAVE TO. IF WE HAVE TO, WE’LL LET YOU KNOW. TERRORISTS, DESPOTS, CORRUPT BUSINESSMEN … THE INTERNATIONAL ULTRAMARINE CORPS IS HERE. THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE.

As it happened, I’d almost exactly described what the next big development of the superhero concept would look like.

Meanwhile, I prepared myself for the oncoming zeitgeist by listening to Chris Morris’s bleak, brilliant, bad-trippy Blue Jam on Radio 1 every Thursday after John Peel. 

Oddly enough, I was beginning to find humor in all the things that had once frightened me. 

The prying eye of Big Brother, the aging process, loneliness, failure, and death were all just punch lines to the joke. 

I loved to listen over and over again to HAL 9000’s death scene from the soundtrack to 2001 : A Space Odyssey, and when Jarvis Cocker and Pulp released their masterpiece comedown album, This Is Hardcore, its unflinching evocation of middle age, stale waterbeds, and tinny bachelor pad music made me rethink my own lifestyle.

I was about as alien as I’d ever wanted to be, but I’d grown tired of one-night stands, drink, drugs, and the dating game.

It was time to get serious.”