That song (Timbuk 3's 'The Future's So Bright (I've Gotta Wear Shades)') was, along with a compact disc my Mum found for me many years ago, the spark that led me to write a short science-fiction novella called 'Tea With Mr. Seixas', regarding out-of-space-time time-travel, a 18th Century Portuguese organist and keyboard composer almost forgotten because of the colossal Lisbon earthquake in the 1750s (a decade after he. Sir Carlos Antonio Seixas, died and was buried in a cemetery that itself was disrupted and destroyed by it), save for works he composed preserved in the Vatican's collection, and details mentioned in the Bibliotequa Lusitania, collected and published in the late 1700s, and a man out of time riding a vehicle whose technology would not be invented for another hundred years and fifty, who in that way was no longer a human entirely, and would never return from where and whence he came.

I know I didn't originally see it in terms of the Cold War, most of which my lifetime missed (I would assume 'The Future's So Bright' was a paradoxical reference to the looming threat of thermonuclear war, and the man in the song raving about how well he'd do in a nuclear weapons program or advancing nuclear physics to that end), as much as marvelling at what that technology could and would do when I understood the breadth of it (in layman's terms, anyway) after the fact. I remember learning about what Wormwood (Chornobyl) was, not that it was intended as a nuclear refinement facility (we assume), but what a single core meltdown because of an accident that could happen anywhere with reactors like Chernobyl's could (by like, I mean specific nuclear-power generator varieties, like our home-made CANDU and America's Tokamak, or experimental fusion cores, and not nuclear generators in general, which were not identical to Chernobyl's sarcophagized remains in original design and transfer methods) do to the earth (and water table) for a considerable radius from the accident's plant and grounds.

I was fortunate in that way, that my learning of the Cold War was mostly dammed away from me until it was over and done with (by that measure) and the Berlin Wall being dismantled from both sides.

The human experience, brought into our in-character selves, manifests in our characters and online avatars in different ways. I see yours, Jenora, not only as an idealism of nuclear fusion made into a living star-person-cat who would much rather create by example and change (entirely noble in itself), rather, but your person's human optimism translated into your own Jenoran self, who acts with the care shared by you both. You contained the future, as all living things do, that you would share with the world free of the shackles set by the threat of nuclear extinction, even if it was and would only be a threat in our world. Despite the horror imagined and that could have been, your generation faced it with optimism, and maintained it after that, welcoming to that end one day we of later ages into the world you helped create, and helped preserve.

You honor me, Ma'am. <hug>

-2Paw.