Orkney

Fàilte, agus slàinte mhath, my loyal readers. I am still in Orkney. I thought that by this time I would have ended up in Iceland, but something about the north coast of Scotland and Orkney itself has kept me here a while longer. The emptiness speaks to me, somehow. Perhaps I just needed some more time wandering the wastes while I recover from the events of last year.

I had a quick look around John O’ Groats, but there wasn’t a lot going on, and the sea was calling to me, so I hopped over to Stromness and hid the cloaked minicruiser carefully in plain sight. I’m not saying where, since I haven’t left yet and I don’t want any of you lot snooping about trying to find me and make me sign your tee shirts. Oh, wait - I haven’t made any tee shirts for you to buy yet, have I? Oh well, merchandise is for later when I finally get bored, I guess.

Orkney feels like what it is: an island community. Stromness Pier is full of local atmosphere. There are ferries, lifeboats and other vessels, dockside trade, tourism, hotels… all the stuff you encounter at any other sea town, only packed into a smaller space. There’s an arts centre, and also a gallery. But what I really wanted to see was the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness. I suspected that they might be part of a Gorpulonian comms hub. I’ve had a quick look and I’m still not entirely sure. I think I need more research. In the mean time, I’ve grown quite used to the local beer and have befriended a local retired couple who think I’m here researching marine wildlife. It’s a decent enough cover story, although I have to be careful not to let them introduce me to anyone who actually knows the subject, or I could get into deep water. Haha.

That’s all for now. Depending on what I find out about the stones, I may or may not end up in Iceland by next week. Hope you’re all enjoying the weather. It’s been a mite windy here! And… Happy New Year.

Splash Landing

Well, readers, here I am, standing by the rotting wheel of an abandoned water mill and gazing upstream at a choked-up mill pond. Apparently this is where the thing came down all right. The tracking data was quite accurate, I’m sure of it. I’m dictating this remotely, since I’m a bit dubious about the hazard level, to be quite honest with you. The scans were not very specific about the composition of the meteorite, and I can’t rule out the possibility that it was something sent to do me harm. I think I can see a freshly shattered branch on one of the trees, so it looks as if I should be able to locate the thing easily enough.

I’m back at base now. I’ve retrieved the object and placed it in my vault for observation. It’s definitely artificial, but the markings on it look to me like Gorpulonian text, which would mean it’s just a harmless sensor that’s de-orbited. The Gorpulonians are a strange species, but pretty friendly if one ever meets them. That doesn’t happen often, as they are the galaxy’s lurkers, and generally try to avoid contact with other civilisations, choosing instead to observe them and take notes. It’s pretty hard to imagine their motives, really, but to my knowledge they’ve never shown any sign of aggression unless provoked. I think I’ve previously mentioned that I discovered an abandoned relay of theirs at the Moon’s L4 Lagrange Point, so it was probably paired with a few sensors like this one.

I’m glad to have retrieved the thing because I don’t want the authorities snooping around and if they found it they could become troublesome. It probably had a cloaking device when it was in orbit, but if the power cut out then its descent might have shown up on military radar.

Anyway, enough about my mundane daily life. How are you all? Celebrating Solstice? Or maybe Christmas, or some other holiday? I’m planning to spend the northern winter exploring more of the planet, which might seem slightly odd to some – especially those veteran readers who remember that I have a habit of taking underwater trips around the British coastline, sometimes on foot.

I’m beginning on Christmas Day, which should be quiet in this area, by nipping up to Orkney to have a look around. I hear it’s a most fascinating place, and I’ve never seen it up close. After that, I’m going to nip across to Iceland, and then think about how to tackle the Americas. I’ll be taking the minicruiser of course, but also a few tools and clothes that will help me to blend in undetected by the locals. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you know how to make yourself look like a menial worker going about some mundane task.

So my next report might be more of a travelogue. In the mean time, all the best to you and enjoy whatever winter break you’re allowed.

The White Stuff

Interesting. The whole place is covered in water ice, and temperatures are lower than anything I ever knew in Hampshire. It’s hard to describe the appearance of snow-blanketed mountains in early morning light, but perhaps you’ll understand, if you’ve ever experienced it. It was only 264 Kelvins last night, and the moderate breeze has stopped water drips in their tracks and draped everything in crystals. Jalaa would have appreciated the spectacle, I think.

Last time I mentioned that I was thinking of exploring. I did have a look around, and I’m happy to report that apart from the scenery there wasn’t anything to worry about. There were a number of sheep, but to be honest they looked a lot more worried than I felt. I believe a sheep’s life consists of one long stretch of worrying from lamb to carcass, which makes those signs warning people not to allow their dogs to worry them a bit redundant, in my opinion. I mean, it would be like forbidding people to throw lit matches into a campfire. All the sheep is going to do is file the dog under “yet more worry” and continue its neurotic cycle of panic, regardless.

My explorations were curtailed after a couple of days when the weather turned colder. I suppose I could have continued by using a thermal envelope field, but I was concerned about meeting people in the mountains. It might have been tough to explain why I wasn’t wearing warmer clothes, and I don’t want to arouse suspicion. Wim Hof gets away with it, but only because he already looks a bit mad so people kind of expect it.

I’ve had to be careful to maintain the camouflage around the entrance to my base, because it’s all too easy to forget about footprints and other disturbances. The way I manage this is to make sure that when I’m near the door I activate the gravity planers I keep in my boots so that I hover just above the snow. I have to make sure nobody’s around, of course, and it took a little practice to get my balance sorted out. I did fall a couple of times, but hopefully the marks in the snow won’t be identifiable. People only ever notice footprints, not other marks, because they don’t look properly.

I’ve just taken a look at the external camera feed, and I think it’s getting dark already so I’m going to sign off now. I’d like to leave you with this thought, though. If you're absent-minded enough to switch a light off instead of on when entering a room, not noticing that it was already on, then you're probably a Nerd.  If the first phrase that enters your head on that occasion is "parity error", then you're definitely a Geek.

Topography

Well, my loyal followers… just in time for the winter break, I finally have rock over my head. The base is finished!

It’s taken a while, largely because of my principled stand on environmental impact. I wanted to completely shield the place from prying eyes, and at the same time make it possible to reverse the building work when I eventually leave, replacing all the rock I removed from inside the mountain – down to the last molecular bond where possible. I expect you can deduce that this isn’t an easy task at all. It involves a number of devices whose capabilities would make your military commanders explode with desire, so I’m not going to discuss any details at this point. Let’s just say that there’s a loch hereabouts that came in pretty handy and currently has a temporarily raised water level.

I’ve moved my equipment into the place now, and all that remains is to set things up the way I want them. I used to be fond of looking at the scenery through my windows, and I’ll miss those. However, I think a judiciously deployed drone or two will enable me to make some remote viewing walls.

I’ve downed tools for the moment. I definitely need a break, and I’m thinking of exploring a little. There’s a river flowing near here, and I’m guessing it might be interesting to follow that and see what I find. I might even do some walking in the mountains.

“Mountains” is, of course, a relative term. Some of the mountains I’ve encountered in my travels through space have been no bigger than what you people would probably call a hill. Those on the planet Demeron, for example, are mostly about fifty metres tall, but because the inhabitants of that world are around the size of my fist and slow-moving at that, they make quite a big deal of climbing them – which I think permits me to use the term.

At the other end of the scale, we have the great artificial Prodigy Mountains found on the Hoops of Ladrigal. These are upwards of eighty kilometres tall (and I’ve never climbed them, so I had to look that up), and were deliberately made to be impressive. They were built by Ladrigal themself a very long time ago when the Hoops, a concentric and angularly offset series of ringworlds, were constructed around a star near the part of the galaxy that’s about 120 degrees spinward from here. One day I’d like to visit and make the trip up the easier path. The view is spectacular, but one needs a good pressure suit built for hiking.

Anyway, I digress. I just wanted to mention that I’ve been watching your recent moon shot with great interest. I note that the capsule is on its way back at the moment. It’s good to see progress, despite the primitive state of your space technology, and I sincerely wish you all the best with your endeavours. Who knows, perhaps within my own life time (which is admittedly appreciably more than yours), I may get to see you inducted into the Federation. I think I might even shed a tear.

Right, I’m going exploring. Another update soon. Be good!

Hoolies And Hooligans

 “’Twas a stark nightie dorm,” to quote that famous book about the horrors of a girls’ orphanage.

No, wait, I have that wrong, don’t I? There was no such book.

“’Twas a dark and stormy night.” Yes, that’s the one I actually wanted.

Well, it’s not exactly true… but it is certainly a windy night here in the forest. “Blowin’ a hoolie,” as I believe the local expression is. So far the minicruiser remains fairly stable, and in fact the wind is quite welcome because it’s removed the growing number of leaves that had drifted onto the top of the cloaking field. Too many more of those and I would have had to perform a rolling manoeuvre to ditch them. A small handful of leaves unsupported by twigs near the treetops would go unnoticed, but there were getting to be more than a handful, and I don’t want anyone to detect my presence.

Talking of my presence being detected, I’ve already moved the ship once. That forestry vehicle I mentioned in my last update got a little too close for comfort. I admit I hadn’t noticed that there was a track in the area and was alarmed to see how close it came. An hour later when the coast was clear, I moved up the side of the mountain a little, staying below the treeline. That’s probably why it’s so windy.

The underground base is proceeding pretty well, though much more slowly than I would have hoped. I’m unsure whether this is due to my being chilled out from all that meditation or whether it’s a side effect of grief at losing Jalaa. Either way, my heart’s not quite in it. Perhaps I should go and destroy something with my quantum field disruptor. The trouble is, there’s nothing here that deserves it.

I’ve been watching the internet traffic. It seems that lots of you are angry a lot of the time, so not much change there. Looking at what’s been going on, I can’t really blame you. It seems there’s one human in particular who’s currently the focus of a lot of rage, and I must admit he does seem to be a bit of a Qwazhoog. (“Quazhoog” (n) – a delicacy eaten only on the planet Frexigg, made chiefly from an organ of the same name belonging to a Grrugglil, said organ doubling as both ovipositor and anus.)

Tell you what, when I get my equipment properly configured and I’ve settled in, maybe I’ll deploy a few hundred drones to police Low Earth Orbit, hack into a certain set of satellites and modify the firmware so that a certain social media site is suddenly blocked on every router. Sound like fun?

To pass the time when I’m resting in the evenings, I’ve been trying a few anagrams. “Quantum Field Disruptor” yields “quadrupled if strontium”, which is quite interesting – perhaps I should review the materials I used, just in case. Then again, it also yields “Trump squared into fluid”. That gives me an idea for a soup…

In The Woods

Greetings to one and all, from Bonnie Scotland.

I’m making progress. I used my minicruiser to return to Earth, and I’ve found a place in the mountains where I should be safe from scrutiny for a while. I plan to create a hideout here (don’t worry, there will be zero environmental impact), but it will be a longish task. In the mean time I’ll have to rely on tactics such as hovering on antigrav in the forest canopy with the cloak enabled. The gravity planers do make a little noise, but I’m kind of relying on the local weather conditions to mask that, and I’m well away from any walking routes.

I have to admit that it’s a rather beautiful place. I’d got quite accustomed to meditating in near-geostationary orbit while looking at the stars, yet there’s something about a sky being above (as opposed to all around) that feels quite special.

Jalaa’s ship is still where I left it. I’ve configured automatic placeholding, and I’ve also set up an alert in case anyone comes aboard – partly for fear of intruders, but also, I must confess, out of a wistful desire to be proved wrong about what happened. Whether Jalaa returns or not, the ship will remain, as both a beacon and a tribute.

I’ve already called in at Mike’s place to have a chat. He’s doing pretty well and appears to enjoy being a Scot! He’d run out of whisky, though, which was rather inconsiderate of him. Anyway, he’s not too far away so it should make things more efficient in future if we need to meet.

Got to go now. I think there might be a forestry vehicle snooping about so I need to keep an eye on that. I’ll be back with another report before long!

Grief

Thought I’d never post again, didn’t you? Or perhaps you imagined another Patience Race. If only that were the reason. You see, it’s been a horrible year. Back in February, I lost Jalaa.

I don’t even know whether she’s actually dead; all I know is that all my efforts to rescue her have failed – and when I reveal what happened you’ll doubtless understand why.

Jalaa was one of life’s naturalistic mystics. She loved to experiment with reality; to squeeze it here and see it bulge over there; to probe the limits of energy density, time dilation and quantum entanglement. Basically, she was full of joy and the cosmos was her toy. Life with her was mostly chilled, but with bouts of intense stress scattered throughout, marking the moments of her bolder experiments.

I’m still not entirely sure what she was trying to achieve, because she didn’t confide in me. She’d been working on wormholes, so possibly she was trying a new method of creating time dimensions or something: I don’t really know. I finished my meditation session one morning and padded over to the observation window to look at Earth, and immediately noticed the anomaly.

It was a quivering ring of light, almost invisibly thin but surprisingly bright, floating between the ship and the planet, at a distance I had to check from instrumentation because it was too hard to gauge via eyesight. It turned out to be about a thousand kilometres away, which meant that the thing had to be about fifty kilometres in diameter at least. Analysis took a while and wasn’t completely conclusive, but my best guess is that she was attempting to create a toroidal wormhole and it collapsed, sucking her inside. The external cameras don’t show anything too clearly, but Jalaa appears on the images, suited up, operating some kind of field generator – and after a single frame filled with bright light, she and the instrument are gone, replaced with a shimmering string across the field of view. I think it had momentum away from the ship, because it was initially very close and later moved towards Earth.

Don’t worry – I have tracked the thing and there’s no way it’s going to hit you. Its path seems unaffected by gravity (which is extremely odd in itself) and it will simply leave the solar system without impacting anything as far as I can tell. I’ve tried everything I can think of to open up the wormhole again and release my friend, but anything I tried was ineffective, and plenty that I thought of trying was too risky. I suspect that some form of circulation is taking place within the loop of string, so that its contents follow the same circular path for eternity. In some ways, I hope Jalaa is not still alive – from her perspective, given the time dilation and the motion, I believe she would have seen the entire future of the cosmos played out within a few minutes (accompanied by insane rotational speeds), followed by the evaporation of the wormhole during the heat death of the universe, finally releasing her after all of that time had passed, to expire within an hour or two, seeing only blackness. Not a pleasant fate.

As you can imagine, I’m struggling to cope with this at the moment and it will be a while before I can return to my usual lifestyle. I don’t feel like living aboard this ship any more, that’s for sure. I sent this message off to Mike, but he didn’t reply immediately. My enquiries revealed that he has apparently moved to Scotland, and I’m considering following him. The way I feel right now, a bleak winter in the mountains would just about suit me.

I apologise for the downer, but hopefully you understand. I’m resilient and I’ll get over this eventually, at which point normal service will be resumed.

Dszira out.

Orbit

Hello, kids. How’s everyone doing? Mike asked me to send you an update, as I’ve been so quiet. Sorry about that! The truth is, I’ve been getting rather comfortable with solitude. You see, I’m in orbit.

Yes, I decided to hand in my notice and leave the flat. It was a bit of a nightmare getting all my equipment out of the various underground storage vaults I’d managed to build during my tenancy, but I had a little help from an old friend, who turned up in January. Jalaa says hi, by the way: she’s here with me.

We positioned the minicruiser at a high Earth orbit, about 48,800 km out. That’s beyond Geostationary, for those who are interested – which means that the planet rotates faster than we revolve around it, and we see the surface moving to the east. I find that more pleasing, as it just feels right, somehow, despite having to magnify the view to see it more clearly. Low orbits feel hurried and frantic, which isn’t always what I want. Besides, it’s getting a bit busy down there, and we didn’t want to be spotted. Our orbital period is just shy of thirty-six hours, which means we see a nice variety of views of Earth with different lighting conditions from the sun.

Got a pretty nice view of comet NEOWISE from here, too. I’d send a picture, only I can’t because if it fell into the wrong hands it would be evidence that these diary posts are real. C’est la vie.

So in the last few months we’ve been building our own home up here, using transmutation plants and raw material mined from the Moon’s L4 point. By the way, there’s a disused Gorpulonian observation relay there. Not sure why they gave up watching you, but I thought you should know.

If anyone’s wondering whether my exile is due to the pandemic… it isn’t. The chance of that virus having any effect on my biology is effectively zero. It’s not the biological viruses that bother me, it’s the psychological ones. It’s been sad to watch your societies crumble as your minds are led astray by a broken system. I wish I could help, I really do, but you have to find your own way.

If I sound less angry than usual, that’s because I am. I’ve entered a new phase in my life. Jalaa has shown me how to get in touch with my more peaceful side and live in the moment. She’s such an inspiration! For the avoidance of doubt, we’re not a couple, just really good friends. I’ve known her since I took a holiday in Pulchrinima, which is a beautiful planet on the other side of the galaxy. She was running a rehab centre there at the time, and I reckon I wouldn’t be here to write this if it weren’t for her perseverance. I was far too wild in those times, and frankly a bit of a jerk too.

So, there’s my brief update. I may have more to say later on, but I’ll sign off for now. It’s time for our meditation, and the observation bubble’s facing Saturn for the next hour.

Good luck with all your various viruses. Peace.

Gifts and Stories: Dim Their Glories

A very happy decade-digit-flip tomorrow, to those on the Gregorian Calendar!

I’m sitting here by my firing roar, sipping a brand of glassy and telling watchivision. Or something like that, anyway. And, considering the time of year, I thought it a good plan to examine this whole issue of giving gifts.

You daft little creatures with your commercialism and your fake goodwill do make me laugh! At least I’m happy to admit I’m an amoral vindictive arsehole. Look, if you’re going to give each other nice things, just do it: don’t wait for a proscribed time. It makes it all feel terribly forced, like a stiff handshake and even stiffer mouth-smile at the wedding of someone you despise. What’s the point? Do it throughout the year, or don’t bother. Most of the stuff you give each other serves only to line pockets anyway, and falls apart or gets thrown away.

Where I come from, nobody gets worked up about this stuff. If you want to help someone out by getting them something they need, you just do it. Gratitude is seen as a condition placed on the transaction, and therefore rude. It’s better to just lob something somebody’s way and forget about it.

One year I got an antigrav gazebo for one of my favourite cousins, since I knew she needed one, living as she does over a lake of mercury. It’s pretty hard to build stilts in that stuff. I didn’t expect even a thank you card for it, and why would I? I had the means, she had the need. Then again, we had one hell of a party there one night with the Polavvian Ambassador – so if you really want to be picky, I kind of got my payback in backhanders from the feds. Got to be said, though: watching a star set over a lake of mercury is a unique experience.

Now, I suppose I also need to discuss Santa – which is a bit more complicated. As I’ve mentioned, my culture has a rather stoical attitude to gifts. However, there are legends in our ancestral past, their origins now obscure. They tell of a rogue Noble called Hoorob, who lost his fortune betting on a shtangah race and subsequently took terrible revenge on a particular gang involved, who he was convinced had cheated. Shtangah are very delicate creatures, and can be nobbled simply by tying two of their legs togther. Since they have at least seven hundred legs, this isn’t always noticed by the officials. Anyway, as legend has it, Hoorob visited every member of the gang in turn, killed them, and stole all their treasure (this was a long time ago, when we used actual rare material resources as money). This amounted to such a vast fortune that he was able to invest it far across the galaxy out of sight, on a planet called Threng, whose very existence has never been proved. The annuities on this investment allowed him to return on a regular basis to deliver gifts to everyone back home, with the exception of all the descendants of the gang members he had slaughtered. Eventually, of course, due to interbreeding and so on, this came to include almost everyone on the planet, so his visits were less and less arduous and fewer and fewer gifts were received. The last individual reputed to have received a gift from Hoorob was a tiny old woman who lived in the mountains far above an equatorial town named Psunanimis. Apparently she was the last person on the planet who possessed no genetic material from the slaughtered gang’s bloodlines, and Hoorob gave her a potted plant that ate other people, which she placed outside her cave to prevent anyone bothering her. Because of this, it was about ten years before anyone realised she had finally died and Hoorob was no longer in business.

Well, allegedly. Nobody knows where Hoorob ended up, nor even whether he was real in the first place. There are some similarities to your Santa Claus myth here, though perhaps he also has a few things in common with Robin Hood. The strange coincidence of the name “Hoorob” has not passed unnoticed by yours truly, and in the past I’ve attempted to find an underlying reason – but so far, I’ve turned up nothing.

I won’t write any more about Christmas at this point. I mean, I suppose I could write about the actual beliefs… not only Jesus but the ancient Yule festivities and gods and Norse and Germanic influences, and goodness knows what else. But that stuff bores me, to be honest. Believe what you want to believe. Just don’t let your beliefs dribble out of your own brain and contaminate anyone else’s and we’ll all get along. Personally, I’d like to think Jesus existed. He seems like a cool dude I could have done some Whoofweed with.

You Call That Rain?

It’s wet again. Still, at least that isn’t plasma raining down on us, capable of vaporising our bodies in an instant. And, believe me, I know what that’s like. In fact, they used to make us play… hmm, I’m not sure I can translate the original word as it’s kind of a cultural reference, so I’ll have to do my best and come up with one in English in a minute. It’s played in a hypercube in a bubble of upgraded spacetime, along a second time dimension. This means that the game is over before it’s begun, which effectively rules out gambling. That said, some disreputable charlatans persist in fleecing unsuspecting tourist punters, who end up earlier regretting their gullibility – yes, earlier, not later: it’s confusing as hell having two time dimensions.

Okay, I have a name for this thing. Tesseraction. Not great, but it will serve for now.

Tesseraction is a somewhat cerebral contest, but physical activity is involved – in a way. The idea is to build a continuous sequence of slices of standard spacetime, and there is a physical subgame that plays out in each one. The rules of this subgame are chosen before the main game begins (actually, after it ends… but I don’t want to get into all that yet), and part of the attraction of Tesseraction is the creativity of the judges who come up with these rules.

In the first slice of spacetime at one end of the arena, the subgame is played under the normal laws of physics. The subgame players, of course, have to be simulated beings with artificial intelligence, because they are deleted once the subgame ends. All of their actions in each slice – from beginning to end of the subgame – determine the best move in the next slice, just as with a position in chess. A “move” consists of making a copy of a slice, performing certain allowed modifications to the laws of physics to try to alter the outcome of the game in the new slice. On the next turn, the other player attempts to preserve the outcome of the subgame as it was in the previous slice.

Part of the appeal of the game is that, every so often, the physical laws will be accidentally altered in a way that leads to instability and makes the game arena explode. The contest, of course, is then declared a draw.

At this point, the more astute among you might be wondering why I stated that the game is over before it’s begun. The reason is complicated, but involves a two-way dependency between the AI subgame players in each slice and the actual players of the game. The subgame players can also alter the laws of physics in the real game arena, which is why it’s played in a special bounded region of upgraded spacetime, to prevent the entire universe from being flipped like a cosmic pancake and folded flat. Because of this, there’s a tendency for reality to flicker chaotically between two orthogonal axial orientations: one in which the subgame arena slices are “real”, and one in which the original reality is “real”. It’s kind of hard to explain without a lot of horrible equations, but the upshot is that, from an external viewpoint, the entire arena collapses into a final state with a game result, before it’s even begun. You see, the Pre-ordination Principle, which is one of the Laws of Multiple Time Dimensions, states that when multiple solutions to Arrick’s Law can exist due to expanded dimensionality, a cyclic hyperfield always results, and has a hyperspherical curl given by the coefficient found in—

You know what? I think I’m in danger of losing most of my audience at this point, so I’ll stop here.

The short version of the story is that, when I was at school, we were made to play this game in plasma rain, with only the altered physics of our arena for protection. Despite the small bonus of being able to enjoy the feeling of having won while on the way to the match due to the time reversal, it wasn’t all pleasant. Watching the plasma splatter against the cosmic boundary surface certainly focused my mind, and it made me the stubborn, driven Space Lord I’ve become today.

So don’t come complaining to me about rain.

The Final Hit

What up, puny humans. It’s been a few weeks, but I thought I’d better pop up again and let you know what I’ve been up to. It’s been a bit of an unusual October for me.

Around the start of the month, the whoofweed arrived at New York. I’d been tracking it all the way, and progress had been good – apart from a bit of a crisis at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, when a few thousand of the drones had inexplicably decided they weren’t up to the challenge and had begun moving in circles and figures of eight. Some of them had even meandered for a couple of days until their tracks formed the shape of a Palovvian pictogram meaning “pigheaded”, which I can only take to be the drone equivalent of “sticking it to the man”. One has to wonder about the cause of this odd behaviour. I’ve never heard of quantonic AIs being affected by drugs before, but with whoof, one never can tell.

Anyway, as I said, they all arrived at New York City in the end. However, at that point, I lost control of the guidance system. I’m not certain what happened, but, despite all my commands being acknowledged, there was no change in their heading or speed. I plotted the path, and found that they were all heading upriver!

By the time I’d made up my mind what to do, they’d already reached Poughkeepsie and were massing by the shores of Franny Reese State Park. At this point, I had to assume, despite all scientific reasoning to the contrary, that I was, indeed, dealing with a bunch of dope-crazed robots. I was out of options, so I sent a self-destruct command. Luckily, the priority code seemed to make it immune to the previous insubordination, and it actually worked.

I’ve never murdered that many consciousnesses before, but that’s what happens, I suppose, when we meddle with the universe’s inherent patternism to provide ourselves with useful servants.

There wasn’t much of an explosion, of course. I mean, not large enough to flatten a whole town, at any rate. Each drone destroyed itself using a miniature quantum disruptor, which ripped apart the fabric of the Wave Equation Substrate, causing the drone to spread itself out over a ten light-year radius as pure energy in less than a millisecond. It’s a neat little trick, and, if the energy’s diffuse enough, even the Feds can’t pick it up.

However, the fish in the Hudson River most certainly did pick it up. The cavitation caused by the disappearance of millions of drones sent out shock waves that not only killed thousands of fish but also threw them high into the atmosphere. The thunderous sound and subsequent piscine rain startled many of the locals. I spent the next few days giggling as I tapped into the transmissions of bemused local radio DJs talking about “Tuesday’s mysterious biblical storm”.

As for the whoofweed, I can only assume that it survived. It’s a pretty hardy little plant. I guess we can now look forward to centuries of whoof-tainted water passing through New York City. I’m not sure whether any non-human species will be affected by the drug, but it’s going to be interesting finding out. As for the human inhabitants of the Big Apple, let’s hope I’m right about them being immune. If they aren’t, we could be looking at a new San Francisco on the East Coast.

Glorious

Hello, humans. We need to have a talk about food.

I’ve noticed that the stuff is ubiquitous here. Everywhere I go, there are restaurants, cafés, ice cream stands, supermarkets, convenience stores, snack vans, vending machines, overpriced junk food kiosks at cinemas, pub lunches and charity dinners. I mean, fair enough, you need it to survive. But you seem to treat it with blasé contempt, and you reserve your aesthetic reverence for fine art, architecture, literature — and, depressingly often, TV celebrities.

You will probably be unaware that, in my original form, I have at least a thousand different types of taste receptor in my mouth (almost half of which are not even on my tongue). So I think I’m in quite a good position to enjoy the subtle nuances of cuisine. When I first arrived on Earth, I was astonished at how strange the food tasted. Then I realised that I was picking up a lot of variations that seemed undetectable to the human palate. Since then, things have improved a little. Through certain meditation practices I learned in my youth, I’m now able to ignore those variations and experience an approximation of the rather blunt appreciation that is the sorry fate of the average person. I’ve long considered my evening meal an art form, and I like to prepare it with assiduity, though I don’t always get a chance, due to my numerous projects.

So, my sense of taste is one of my most treasured assets. And here’s the thing. I really need it. Or at least, I did.

On the planet where I grew up, roughly 70% of all the ostensibly-edible plants and animals are actually toxic to my species – often fatally so. We have evolved probably the most sophisticated chemical senses in the galaxy as a result, and most of them work pretty much perfectly, even in young children: it’s instinctual. Without this adaptation, we’d all die before we could even open our eyes. Yes, we eat from birth: there are no mammalian traits such as lactation on my home world. Sucking sustenance from another begin? Where I come from, that’s called parasitism. The very idea! Yes, I know you evolved that way, and I know you get all sorts of other stuff from it like immunological molecules, although I’ve never quite been able to work out why you can’t just have those retrofitted, as we do.

Naturally, when I came to Earth and modified my body to pass for human, I tried to leave as many olfactory and gustatory systems wired up as possible. It was tricky to calibrate them to work with the human form, and I kept spitting out my food in restaurants in disgust because I’d got the wires crossed and it tasted like oomizagong poop. Actually, that still happens to me sometimes in certain fast food chains, though I admit I’m not entirely sure whether it’s my calibration that’s at fault in those cases, or whether their food genuinely does taste as if it’s been through the intestinal tract of a particularly gluttonous mud-eating herd animal. Perhaps I’ll never know, unless I actually persuade one of you curious monkeys to accompany me across the galaxy for a comparison test. Any volunteers?

I was going to rant on at length here about how in some parts of your world food has become a new drug; how its supply has devastated vast areas and caused ecological issues; how you’ve trivialised its acquisition to the extent that you’ve forgotten its origins… but I think you know all that already.

So I’ll just leave you with this final thought.

There’s another thing on this planet that needs fuel to run, that has to stop and fill up with it — and this fuel is everywhere, and it’s mundane, and taken for granted, and costs a lot of money, and damages the environment. You know what I’m talking about. Come on, humanity, add some finesse to your food — because surely you can do better than your cars!

Having a Triffid Time!

I was right about the whoofweed: stealing it was a lot of fun. But don’t tell anyone about this, okay? I know I can trust my online audience (by which I mean, of course, that if anyone squeals I’ll pass their details to the nearest migrating drillworm queen – and yes, that’s as bad as it sounds).

So here’s the kicker, anyway… I moved it!

Yes, I moved the entire plantation. I did a two-day sweep first to check their security rota, and it turned out I had a ten-hour window each day in which to act. So I set up a waterdrone factory and programmed it to produce enough devices to do the job in the time required. The cameras were sabotaged first of course, and then every whoofweed plant was carefully uprooted by a single waterdrone, and all 3.4 million of them are now migrating, en masse, to a new home. It will take a while to get there, as it’s quite a distance and waterdrones are not very fast with delicate loads, but… well, you get the picture. The whole damn thing has gone a bit Huorn on them (or Birnam Wood, if you prefer The Bard to Tolkien), and I’m beyond tickled. Of course, I diverted a few plants to another location, where I can pick them up once the heat is off and enjoy a personal supply of whoof for a year or two. I’m looking forward to chilling out.

Am I crazy? Actually, no. The only reason I dared go ahead with this stunt was that I discovered who was running the plantation. It wasn’t the dread Pintoffnya Clan after all, but someone I happen to know from my youth. I’m not going to go into details, but let’s just say I owe him a taste of his own medicine, and this is a sweet way to deliver it. Perhaps one day I’ll tell you the story.

Anyway, I’ve monitored the comms for the last couple of weeks, and there’s been a hell of a lot of interesting chatter – some of it extremely amusing! My old enemy was spitting mad at first, and tried to blame his mercenaries, who immediately told him where to stick it and left. That was stupid of him. But the next day he got a visit from the feds! I caught the encrypted broadcast containing the interview, and it was interesting. I could hear the relief in his voice clearly as he invited them politely to check the tip-off they’d received, knowing by now that they’d find nothing. Must have been bittersweet. He escaped a pretty bad rap, but he doesn’t know who helped him out. With any luck he’ll think it’s the Pintoffnyai, in which case he won’t dare interfere: believe me, I know. This guy’s a coward.

That leaves me with a few million whoofweed plants on the move under the Atlantic, and I’ve honestly no idea what to do with them all once they arrive in New York. All sensible suggestions gratefully received.

Whoofweed

Well, this is simply hilarious! Someone has been planting Whoofweed on the sea bed off the coast of Scarborough. I’m starting to think I know why there’s been so much police chatter going on recently.

Whoofweed is also known as Pentafolio demensiensis – although the only person who knows it by that name is me. Latin names fascinate me, and since there’s no Latin outside of Earth, I like to invent my own, for certain alien species of import. And Whoofweed is of great import, especially to interstellar crime.

It’s an underwater plant (obviously) with the somewhat dubious distinction of being a near-universal narcotic. In other words, almost every intelligent species in the galaxy can use it for psychedelic recreation. The handful of exceptions include Polavvians – which is one reason they make more trustworthy cops – and also you humans, bless you. You have no idea what it’s like to take this junk, and you never will.

I’ve chewed a little whoof in the past, when partying with a friend from Grootix Academy. The effects are almost impossible to describe, but mostly involve the feeling that you’re individually conscious of every single cell in your body. It’s as trippy as a trip through triple wormhole, though it can be inconvenient when you have an infection of some kind.

Anyway, I came across the vast plantation during my little underwater excursion, and when I say “plantation”, I’m being serious. There are several square kilometres of the stuff. This is evidently a well-funded operation, and I was careful to leave no sign that I’d found it. I’m almost certain that the police are biding their time, questioning people and investigating every little crime they can find, until someone lets something slip about the perpetrators. They clearly don’t yet know where the product is being grown, and are trying to find out so they can bring in evidence.

This leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. Or is it a trilemma? I can contact the feds like a good citizen and let them know the location, claim my reward and hope nobody wants revenge; I can wait and see what happens; or… well, no. I couldn’t just steal it, could I? I mean, this is probably being run by someone like the Pintoffnya Clan. You’d have to be a crazed lunatic to want to mess with those guys. They like to eat people’s faces for dessert. And I don’t mean after killing them first.

Maybe I really am crazy, then.

I’m going to put some thought into this. If I can figure out a way to grab that massive stash without being caught, it could be fun.

Cross Talk

In my last message, I seem to recall saying that I was looking forward to a “quiet Summer”. Now, had just one of those two concepts failed me, perhaps I would have shrugged it off. I’m sad to report that so far, both of them are letting me down badly.

Of course, I’ve known worse rain. Significantly worse. I’ve survived rain made of sulphuric acid that ‘fell’ (if that’s the word I want) sideways, so by comparison the British weather is kind of tame. That said, it would be quite pleasant, for a change, not to feel that the plants were getting the better end of the deal – not to mention the ducks.

But the lack of Summer isn’t the issue, of course. It’s more the lack of quiet.

I’ve mentioned (see journals passim) my intense dislike of those who worship at the altar of the decibel, and you might be assuming that I’m about to moan about some noisy all-night barbecue party, or perhaps an amateur mechanic machining a new crankshaft for a Morgan at 10 p.m. However, this time the noise isn’t coming from anything human – or even terrestrial. It’s coming from my police scanner. My Local Federation police scanner. The damn thing has picked up so many reports in this sector, it’s like watching one of those movies in which strange events start occurring all over the place, and then we eventually find out that there’s an alien invasion going on.

I really hope it isn’t that. I’ve had enough of other aliens for now.

I think I’ll go for one of my long underwater walks.

Disillusioned But Happy

Apologies for the slight delay since my last report: I took a few days off after my ordeal, and I – wait, why am I apologising to you lot? I’m a Space Lord. Never mind.

This will be a brief but hopefully interesting update. After a few days of unwinding and trying a new brand of drinking chocolate, I thought I’d better check my spying devices to see whether anything had happened on Mars. But – and here’s the interesting part – I couldn’t find the stream feeds.

At first, I thought there must be some system glitch, or a fault in the device hub. But I looked much more closely, and found that I’d never installed the devices. I mean that literally. I’m not saying it was as though I’d never installed them, or that I’d installed them and then flown back to Mars in my sleep and destroyed them. No, nothing like that. I mean that I checked my stores, and they were all still there.

Then I remembered that I’d been unable to find Psi-spy the second time I searched, and I’d assumed, at the time, that I’d just screwed up my attempt to hack the hyperwave web encryption. Now, though, I started to wonder. This was a mystery, and it needed investigating. I set off immediately to return to Mars once more.

I must say, I was relieved to find the hideout was still there. I’d been starting to wonder whether I’d dreamed the whole thing! I entered the strange place once again, and made my way to the fan room.

I almost lost my cool when I saw what awaited me. Every screen in the room was showing a face – but this time, not my own face. No. It was the face of Maria Thessifus! And every one of them wore a silent smirk.

It took me only minutes to piece it all together, during which I took a much more detailed look at the device I’d placed on my head before. I can now say with 94% certainty that it was a memory injector. It had faked every one of my odd experiences – the infinite recursion of mind-piggybacking myself; the investigation into Psi-spy; being trapped for so long under the headset; and of course, my installing the spying devices as well… all of that was induced in my own mind by this machine, to distract me. Maria had left this strange installation on Mars to divert me from the L3 point, should I ever go looking there during Saturn’s opposition.

Honestly, I really admire her attention to detail. This was beyond evil! A pity for her that it didn’t work because of the dead pod that never received the mind backup. We all have bad luck now and then, despite our genius.

This time, I did destroy the entire place from altitude – being careful to avoid the gaze of NASA by synchronising my actions to their absence from the sky. They might notice a few rocks out of place, but they’ll probably just think they missed a landslide.  Now I’m rid of Maria T. for good, I’m looking forward to a quiet Summer before I set up precautionary defences in preparation for the likely forthcoming winter riots. Good luck with that, by the way – I hope you all have water stockpiled.

The up side of this whole episode is that I do not, after all, have to revise my world view to encompass psionics. I’m not sure whether I’m relieved about that or not: even I, deep down, would kind of like magic to be real.

Chasing Pebbles

It was as I feared. I found Maria T’s spare pod at the L3 point, and my probes had picked up a signal from it a couple of days ago. Presumably it sends data on a regular basis, in case it isn’t received. Given that it would now make no difference, I decided simply to destroy the pod and then go looking for whatever receptor might have got the message near Saturn.

On the way there, I had another look at Psi-spy. Or at least, I tried to. The Galactic Web seemed to know nothing of its existence, which was a bit odd. I mean, it had taken me a bit of digging around last time to find it, but this time there was no trace of the company at all. Was it possible that they were on to me and had put up some extra hack shields? It wouldn’t surprise me.

I got to Saturn and began a laborious search of the rings, that being the last place I’d managed to find one of Professor T’s pods. It took quite a few hours, during which time I also scanned all the moons I could, to make sure they were clean.

The scans of both moons and rings all came up negative, which I found particularly exasperating. There had to be a pod here, surely! I switched to a visual search, which soon took its toll on my eyes. I won’t list any of the names I was calling Maria at this point, but several of them are actually banned in some parts of the galaxy.

Pausing only to get some sleep for an hour or two, I resumed the search and was about to give it up, when at last I spotted something. It was almost invisible! A tumbling spot of black, falling through the rocks that made up the ring system. It was quite lucky I managed to see it because I wasn’t expecting it to be tumbling. A pod would have attitude jets…

I moved in closer and used a tractor beam to stabilise it. A quick scan revealed the truth: it had suffered a power failure! My heart leapt in anticipation, but I had to be sure it hadn’t sent data out to anywhere else, so that meant boarding the thing. I popped across in an EVA suit and spent an hour figuring out how to access the dead computer without enabling the comms relays. And I had my answer. The pod had been dead for over a year! Long enough, in fact, to mean that there wasn’t any chance of its having sent out any data that could harm me.

It’s been quite a circuitous trip, I must say! But, having destroyed the pod and completed my visual scan, I’m now confident that Maria T is gone for good. Finally, I can breathe easy again. I’m looking forward to a day or two back on Earth doing not much at all except drinking hot chocolate.

Release

I’m free – but I need some questions answered!

When you last heard from me I was in quite a pickle, having entered a strange mental state in which I seemed to occupy infinitely many universes at once. Got to say that’s one of the toughest things I’ve ever tried to describe, and really you have to experience it to understand. Here’s what happened next.

I spent several hours doing my best to find the exit keyword for the device, using some of the password-hacking techniques I’d learned at the Academy. I was quite rusty, and although I covered the vocabulary space in roughly the right path, I probably missed a few regions here and there. But in the end, it made no difference, because it wasn’t a word that finally released me – it was an action.

After hours trapped in one location, I’d begun to feel the need to urinate. I ignored it for as long as I possibly could, but in the end… well, you know how it is. Due to my anger at being held against my will, I wasn’t exactly going to lose any sleep about peeing right there in the room, and I decided I would have to do exactly that. But as soon as I unzipped my suit, the device let go of me! The infinities receded rapidly, dwindling until the last few of them flitted away from me like terrified birds. Carefully, I removed the headset, breathed a sigh of thanks, and then went to relieve myself in the designated place. I’m not a monster.

I returned to find everything as I’d left it, with the infernal machine sitting there innocently, like some child’s plaything. A thought struck me. This was no toy, it was a work of exquisite engineering. Whoever had built this place was unlikely to have skills enough to make it, so they had probably bought it.

A few minutes exploring the computer finally paid off by yielding a receipt from a company called Psi-spy. Not the most pronounceable name, but it instantly raised a shrewd suspicion, and I visited their store front to find the listing for the device. I had to do a few sneaky things to access the place too, since it was well hidden. Clearly their business was, how can I put this, not 100% legitimate.

It turned out that the odd device was a ‘remote psionic piggyback probe’. I honestly thought psionic devices were the stuff of myth, but it turns out I was wrong. In future, I’ll try to remember that, just because Analemma doesn’t sell something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Anyway, when I realised what the thing was designed to do, everything made perfect sense – and I was filled with satisfaction at solving the puzzle, blended with horror at what it implied.

My stalker (yes, by now that word definitely applied) had been taking free rides in my mind with this device, and I hadn’t even been aware of it. Perhaps by now you’ve guessed what happened when I put it on: an infinite recursion generated by my own mind giving a ride to my mind, which gave a ride to my mind, which gave a ride to my mind… and so on. In the world of real physics, this process would have had a limit somewhere. But psionics isn’t physics, it’s basically magic. I’d entered a new phase in my life, in which I’d have to accept that things were not as they had previously seemed.

Obviously I needed to destroy the place. I couldn’t have people spying on me like that! Climbing rapidly to altitude in the Minicruiser, I lost no time in obliterating the hideout.

Ha! Don’t tell me you believed that? Of course I wasn’t nearly so stupid. Why would I destroy evidence in such a manner? Evidence that could allow me to find my stalker? I’m disappointed if you underestimated my cunning to that extent. No, I put a plan into action to trap my foe. First, I reprogrammed the remote probe to target chickens on Earth, one at a time, moving on to a new one only when each died. Given the way most chickens die, I thought this just about unpleasant enough. Then I applied a secure lock to my configuration change to prevent the machine being retargeted. I’m hoping that this busybody fan won’t realise I’ve been here, and will just think it’s malfunctioned. In addition, I left a few spying devices of my own around the place, well hidden. I needed to know who was doing this, because (and I’m going to be blunt here) they needed to be dealt with, by any means necessary, ranging from memory erasure to severe forms of death.

After a quick scan to check nobody had returned, I left Mars and headed to the L3 point, my original objective. I’ll be in touch later to tell you what I found there, although I’m not hopeful. I’ve now missed the opposition of Saturn, so my chance to destroy whatever Maria T had left there may have passed.

But at least there’s only one of me again. Infinity, seen up close, is nowhere near as cool as you might think.

The Tube

I hope you’re able to read this. I don’t even know if this is the right Earth. Come to think of it, I’m not sure this is the right me.

Some really weird stuff has been going on! As Marvin the Paranoid Android once acerbically put it, “I think you’ll find reality is on the blink again.”

It began as I cloaked the Minicruiser and began descending towards the relay station, preparing to give it a brief but decisive dose of Quantum Field Disruptor, which would cause its wave equation to randomise, flinging all its constituent particles into their fields as incoherent energy (yes, it’s my favourite weapon).

As I reached for the trigger, I noticed something odd: the relay station had no antennae. Somehow, the scan hadn’t revealed this. Perhaps it had misinterpreted a rock as an antenna or something like that. Who knows? Anyway, it stayed my hand for a second or two – and during that second or two, I committed an error to which I too often succumb: I got curious.

So of course, after that, I simply had to land and explore the place. There was no other option.

It was pretty hard to find the door by eye: the facility had been well concealed, in such a way that even a future Martian colony might not discover it for centuries. When I finally spotted a triangular outline in the rock and found the catch hidden in a conveniently dust-storm-proof crevice, I entered with some caution.

The interior felt wrong. I immediately realised that the cushioned flooring and oak panels were hardly Maria T’s style. And besides, why would she furnish a simple relay station that way? My curiosity was burning by then, and I began mapping the whole place.

There were rooms made for dining, recreation, sleeping… clearly, someone lived there. Or had. No life signs had registered on the scan, nor signals that might emanate from an AI. I didn’t find any cryostats, so that left only two possibilities: either the occupant or occupants were away for a while, or they had gone for good.

And then, I found the fan room, and even I felt helpless and baffled.

No word of a lie: it was covered in memorabilia, images, screens rolling continuous news stories… the works. It was a homage to one person, and one person only. Whoever lived here had an unhealthy obsession such as I’d never seen. And the object of their adulation, dear reader, was yours truly.

That’s right. I’d stumbled on the living space of an Owota Dszira fan. And at this point, I could ask, “all right, which of you is it? Comment below please, and put me out of my misery!” Except that would be stupid. Nobody who reads this blog has a secret hideout on Mars, unless I’ve seriously underestimated my audience.

I just couldn’t grasp what I was looking at. There were images of me working on my Cockpoppies in my lab (where had they got those?); video of me piloting my Minicruiser; even photos from the Academy. Unbelievable. I felt like the introverted winner of a reality TV show.

At one end of the room was an odd device, of a design I’d not encountered before. It had a headset attached to it, and a simple interface consisting of a green button. The headset was about my size, leading me to suspect that my unwitting host was humanoid.

I’m not sure whether the bizarre surroundings had addled my brain, but I’m sorry to say that I was rather foolish. Yes, that’s right: I decided to put on the headset and press the green button, to see what happened. I regretted it immediately.

It’s very hard to describe what happened next, but the best I can manage is to say that it was like being launched in a railgun with magnetic loops, only the acceleration was insane, the loops got closer and more numerous until a tiny space within my head seemed full of an infinitude of them, and then… BANG! It happened.

Dear reader, I wish I could explain what happened, but I can’t. Something quite mystical, and currently still beyond my powers of analysis. It was like being infinitely connected to my surroundings. Every slightest twitch of my head made me extremely dizzy, as if everything had an odd sort of inertia to it, space and time lagging behind my movements. I tried pressing the green button again, but nothing happened, and I guessed that the only way to stop this thing was to speak a voice command. I also tried to see whether I might be able to remove the headset, but the moment I touched it, an alarm sounded – so I decided that might be a stupid idea. Who knew what the thing was doing to my brain?

And, believe it or not, I’m still sitting here in this room, trying to think of how to escape. I’m sort of getting used to the feeling of infinity, but it’s like looking through a tube of endless universes, and it’s starting to make me feel sick. I managed to use my comm pad and write this account, which I’ve sent off to Mike for publication. I’ll give you an update when – or if – I ever escape this surreal booby trap.

O Rly?

Last night I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. The Minicruiser was configured for the trip, including a new Quantum Field Disruptor cannon I’d ordered recently from Analemma, just in case; I’d checked all the camouflage devices around my place; the fake composter was still undisturbed, hiding my wormhole power source; and the commsats were all green. I was actually kicking back with a glass or two of a new ‘tipple’, as I believe it’s called: Anarchist Alchemist from Brewdog. It’s a name that resonates with me, for obvious reasons. And just when I was completely at peace, anticipating an easy victory in my mission, an idea exploded in my brain, shattering my mood.

I’d overlooked Mars.

With all my perfect planning and cunning schemes, how could I have missed the most obvious relay station available? Groobashi Pul’xih! I need to up my game. And in case you’re wondering – yes, it turned out that our mutual friend, Professor Thessifus, seemed to have done exactly what I have just implied.

The next hour or so was spent carefully scanning everything I could think of (well, as carefully as I could after those drinks). Not just on Mars but beyond, to the outer gas giants: Uranus is actually in a feasible relay position at the moment. But after all that, it was Mars. It was always Mars. The place is simply too convenient, with its proximity, its thin atmosphere and its weak magnetic field. My deep radar picked up a tiny, partially-underground structure right at the equator, cleverly disguised as part of an escarpment to avoid the gaze of NASA. The reported probability of its being a relay installation was 98%.

So now I’m on my way there. I didn’t really have any choice, and my plans to spend the weekend visiting Iceland have had to be shelved. But my contact there, Alexandra, is happy to wait. It’s all right for her – she has a damned comfy house carved out of solid rock, and plenty not to do. Hot spring jacuzzi, my arse… and I wish I meant that literally. Of course, you’ve probably guessed that she’s not really human. Perhaps I’ll tell you more about her some day.

I’m approaching orbit now so I need to sign off so I can get the ship into stealth mode. I’ll report back when I can.