Pastoral

My dear readers, you find me in a relaxed mood this week, for which I make no apology. We all need a break now and then, and although I spent a few days on edge after my trip to the control hub of the Scotland-destroying hyperspatial Solar plasma conduit (I really have to think up an acronym for that!), I soon realised that if a swift retribution were to come, then it would have come within a couple of days. It seemed that whoever left the device here had scarpered without installing any hyperwave alarm systems to alert them to intruders.

So I decided I would try to forget about the place until something happened. I’ve set up AI monitoring on the Fed wavebands so that I can pick up anything criminal going on in local space, but so far it’s just been the usual petty misdemeanours like Whoofweed trafficking.

In the mean time I’ve been outside a lot. Despite the persistent low temperatures, Spring is here now and I’m enjoying the countryside. It’s not as if I have to stay in my base for any reason: the spatial anomalies that led to duplicate bases in other mountains all collapsed when I destroyed the generator, and as far as I can tell all the other mountains have been restored to solid stone. I’m guessing there was some new tech involved with that: I’m not sure how a hyperspatial network can collapse and reverse the damage it did inside solid objects, but I could speculate about this: possibly the technology they use creates some sort of dual reality in which the original structures still exist but are obscured by the new ones, a little like a dominant eye situation in which an object is invisible because only the non-dominant eye is seeing it. I think this would involve higher dimensional trickery – perhaps up to 22 spatial dimensions – but even my mathematical skills are unequal to the task of defining the requirements, let alone finding a solution. We may be dealing with a genius here.

Have a good weekend, and try to enjoy the world while you still can: it’s only a matter of time before some other destructive alien comes along and spoils everything, and I won’t always be here to prevent them.

On a Sailing Ship to Nowhere

Some interesting developments in the last week!

The control hub was pretty easy to find. I had obviously realised straight away that it must have motive power, to remain aligned with the Earth while closer to the Sun than Venus is. I also reasoned that they were probably using the stealthiest form of acceleration possible. I did an optical scan for stray light, and sure enough, it was there. A solar sail – very sneaky! They were sailing the solar wind to exert a suitable force vector on the motion and keep the hub in place.

I cloaked the minicruiser before approaching, of course. Since I was coming in along the radius, the reflected sunlight would have made me very visible otherwise. I passed the sail and managed to get within a few hundred metres of the hub, then slowed down for a look.

The design was extremely elegant, apparently based on the same hyperspatial structure it generated, which I have to admit I found rather beautiful. Certainly it wasn’t any kind of Utnepi design, though I had already kind of ruled out those particular Galactic pranksters, since this was hardly their style. They prefer harmless fun with low risk to bystanders. That said, I still haven’t quite forgiven them for building that anomaly that I foolishly wandered into one time, ending up halfway around the Earth!

I wondered about the Gorpulonians, but it didn’t look like their construction style either, and the direct and dangerous meddling seemed uncharacteristic of them as well: they prefer to lurk.

For a brief moment, the idea flickered across my mind that this might be the work of my former nemesis, Professor Maria Thessifus. But she was dead. Surely, she was dead! I knew that with 99% certainty, and the only reason it wasn’t 100% was that I’m a good Bayesian.

Perhaps, then, this was somebody new.

Passive scans showed no signs of life. I wasn’t keen on using an active scan in case I made my presence known. For a moment I thought of vaporising the thing, but the problem with that was that I wouldn’t ever discover what had been going on. Knowledge is the best defence.

In the end, I used a robotic probe. I sent it on a curved trajectory, cloaked until it was on the other side of the hub, to give the impression that it had come from the other direction. It soon found a hatch, and I was able to collaborate through an encrypted hyperwave link to get the thing open. There wasn’t a whole lot of security, which surprised me. The other thing that surprised me was that there was no airlock inside the hatch: it was simply a corridor that led to a control room, and the place was completely airless. Watching the whole thing remotely through the probe, I was fascinated. I’d never seen anything quite like this! There was no interior lighting, at least in the usual wavelengths. I wondered whether the beings that built this thing used infra-red, or similar, to perceive their environment.

Whoever they were, they were not here. The probe took only five minutes to verify that the place was deserted, it being quite a small structure. I decided to go and investigate, though of course I took suitable weaponry on the outside of my suit – in this case, a modified Quantum Disruptor that would cause severe damage to internal structures without resulting in any sort of explosion (the lack of air would make it even safer).

It took me a couple of hours to figure out the tech, this being something very new and different. In the end, I discovered the shutdown sequence for the hyperspatial structure, and managed to activate it. It took about ten minutes to collapse – it was a rather difficult operation, due to the unstable nature of entropic n-hedra. Once I had it shut down, I found the structure generator, and indulged in a bit of light but irreversible sabotage with my disruptor gun.

I was not disturbed during my investigations, so I’ve now concluded that the whole thing is automated. This does not mean, of course, that whoever built it will not eventually return, and for this reason, I’ve not destroyed it. I want to be able to observe them if they come back to check up on things, so I’m leaving the hub in safe mode, as bait. I’ve set up a few early warning devices to alert me if anyone approaches it, but I’ll also begin regular scans farther afield so I get the most warning possible if anyone enters the Solar system.

So, there you have it. No fights to the death, no space battles, just a mystery and an extreme danger… to Scotland. That part baffles me a little! Why would an alien species pick on Scotland as a particular part of Earth that they wanted to damage or destroy? Have they picked up old TV or radio broadcasts and decided they hate the sound of bagpipes? (Personally, I quite like it.) Perhaps tartan patterns hurt their eyes… who knows? Personally, I doubt any of that applies. For an alien species to pick up radio signals and single out Scotland from all the strange and horrific news reports from around the world that they would contain seems bizarre.

Maybe they just don’t like mountains.

The Shape of Things

Greetings, people with mundane lives. You may recall that last week I was alarmed to discover what seemed to be a plot to kill me by opening a portal into the core of the Sun and enticing me to step through it. It’s not the first time my life has been threatened, but I have to say this is probably the most melodramatic murder plan I’ve ever had directed at me. Somebody out there, I reasoned, had no sense of subtlety or style.

But now I’m beginning to doubt that this is about me at all.

Last week, after I had calmed down a little, I began to study the locations of the mountains into which the portal opened, each one housing a copy of my base. All of them were in Scotland, and the pattern was therefore constrained by topography, but we aren’t just talking about three dimensions of space here. A hyperspatial branch structure such as this can only exist in four different geometric configurations, and I wanted to look more carefully at the overall shape I was dealing with because I had begun to suspect something.

Both divergent 18-cell lattices were ruled out, being unsuitable for irregular sections in space-time (they couldn’t have fit a random pattern of mountains that was in constant motion as the planet rotated). That left just two possibilities: a stellated entropic six-dimensional n-hedron and a nine-dimensional Möbius manifold. The latter, I soon realised, was also ruled out because the probe had returned from its journey many times and had not been turned inside out once.

So we were dealing with the stellated entropic 6D n-hedron, which confirmed my worst fears (I’ll come to that). That meant it wasn’t easy to tell how many “faces” it might have (a face in this case being an entire instance of my base). On the other hand, such an object has a definite centre, and that would make an ideal location for a control room. After a rather difficult session working through the mathematics, I came up with a location for the centre. Of course, I had to take into account the face that was in the heart of the Sun, but that was all to the good because without that one the centre would have been inside the Earth, which would have presented some logistical challenges. Instead, the actual centre was just inside the orbit of Venus.

The thing I’m afraid of is that this weapon was not designed to kill me – after all, it seems far too elaborate; a sledgehammer, as they say, to crack a joke. If that’s true, then I can only suppose that the intention is at some point to open a valve and connect the solar core to all the other faces at once, flooding Scotland with brief eruptions of hypercompressed fusion products. I say brief because the event would quickly destroy the weapon itself – but it would operate for long enough to lay waste to the beautiful wilds of the Highlands. I have to stop this!

I’ve observed the putative hub location carefully for the last few days, and I believe there might be something there. I can detect hyperspatial power conduits running along the radius, based on the faint effect they have on interplanetary dust. I think I was right: there’s a power source there, and tomorrow I’m planning to pay it a surprise visit. I’ll get to the bottom of this, mark my words. I just hope I’m in time. I expect the weapon hasn’t been completed yet, or it would have been used… unless they’re planning to blackmail the government? Unlikely. I mean, what do humans have that anyone else would want or need? Don’t get me wrong, I like you funny little creatures, but whimsy doesn’t have much of a market value in the galaxy.

I Smell A Wumpus

Readers, I’ve had what you might call a very narrow escape. Someone has been trying to kill me, and I’ve blundered through the whole thing without so much as a flicker of my usual alertness to danger. Living in orbit for so long has definitely atrophied my cunning and paranoia to the extent that it’s made me vulnerable.

In my previous update, I described a strange phenomenon whereby a hyperspatial portal node had turned up in my hallway, leading to multiple duplicate copies of my base, each one in a different Scottish mountain. Over the next few days, I explored them extensively using a bubble field generator attached to my belt, and I managed to catalogue all the mountains involved and their respective hyperwave resonances. By Thursday I had listed over a hundred, and was getting rather tired of the task, not to mention feeling rather anxious about the responsibility that had descended onto my shoulders. Taking care of the environment is a priority of mine and is one of the conditions of the Galactic Non-Interference Treaty, but although looking after a single mountain was easily within my capabilities, there are obviously limits.

On Thursday night I had an idea, which I don’t know why I hadn’t had before. I could modify my probe, adding a bubble field to it as when I had sent it through the first time, but include a hyperwave tuning API in its firmware so that it could explore everything autonomously and complete the catalogue unattended.

I sent it out five times before realising that I’d forgotten to program it to take GPS surveys and open the door for photographic evidence before returning. That was a little tricky to do, and it took me until Friday morning. On Friday I repeated the five missions to add the full data, and then set it up to run through the remaining frequencies so that I could relax.

On the third mission, it failed to return.

At first, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take this. It could easily be a fault in the drone, or in my programming. I was about to activate my own bubble field and step through to retrieve it when – at long last – my paranoia kicked in. What if the probe had encountered something dangerous?

By Friday evening I had constructed a new device that was heavily armoured, and whose sole purpose was to send a high-bandwidth hyperwave stream to a relay satellite to transmit full sensor data as rapidly as possible before anything could destroy it. Hyperwaves can penetrate all normal matter in the universe except black holes, so I was confident I’d receive some data: I’ve actually used one of these devices in the past to test weapons by placing it inside the blast zone and recording the data for the 100ms or so that it survived due to its protective shields. If a probe of this type could survive for a tenth of a second in a superhot plasma, I was sure I’d get some sort of information from this one.

I got two microseconds.

At this point, I was thanking my lucky stars for the return of my paranoia. Whatever had destroyed the probe, I would have stood no chance against it. I analysed the data carefully, noting the temperature, pressure, and approximate location (which can be deduced based on gravitational lensing). When I found the answer, it explained everything.

The probe had ended up in the heart of the Sun.

I don’t know who is responsible for this horrific piece of trickery, but I’m terrified that I almost fell into their trap. In order to survive the next few weeks I need to become the Space Lord I once was. I had grown too lazy and too contented during my time with Jalaa.

I sincerely hope there will be another update next week. If there isn’t, don’t worry too soon: I might just be busy… 

The Warren

Well, that’s a bit odd. I seem to have accidentally done some creative hyperspatial architecture without even being conscious of it.

Let me rewind a little, as this needs some explaining!

I was getting up the other day after a very pleasant sleep, and as I crossed my entrance hall I detected something strange. It was a very faint sensation, but I thought I recognised it. At first I didn’t quite believe that a spatial fork could have spontaneously manifested itself in my base, so after breakfast I went back out into the hall with some sensor equipment, fully expecting to be proved wrong. But the evidence was right there on the readouts: a multi-way fork in space, accessible with the correct hyperwave resonance generated as a bubble field around my body, if I did it carefully. And of course, by this time I had cottoned on: this must have been a side effect of the anomaly, in which case it could be seen as a kind of farewell gift from Jalaa – although whether it would prove interesting or dangerous (or perhaps both) remained to be seen.

Not being one to ignore an opportunity, I got to work. It took a couple of days to construct the bubble field projector and test it using a pre-programmed probe. The probe vanished at the expected location and returned successfully within thirty seconds, bearing video footage that showed… guess what? Haha, well it showed the entrance hall of the base! OK, so we were dealing with duplicates. I wondered how many there were, but I knew it would take time to calibrate everything and do a survey. For now, I was ready to explore.

I spent another day or so kitting out my tool belt with a larger bubble field projector so I could set a resonant frequency and put myself through the portal. I made a very careful note of the resonance of the original base, of course, so I could return. And then I tried the same frequency I’d used with the probe.

The new place looked identical to the old one, though the kitchen hadn’t been used for days so I knew the copies had been made a while ago, which fit with my hypothesis. It was when I decided to check outside that I discovered just how interesting this situation really was.

Outside was a mountainside. But it was not the same one. GPS indicated that I was in Scotland, but around a hundred miles from my original base. The door in the rock wall was perfect, as though it had been designed deliberately by me – but of course, the location was a different shape, and so this seemed to me to require disbelief to be suspended about as much as a light-year-long pendulum over a supermassive black hole. In short, I just couldn’t accept that it had happened. How could a natural process have resulted in a second copy of my base in a different mountain, with a door camouflaged in the rock just as with the original?

I set the resonance for home and stepped back through the portal, then tried another frequency. Again, I was in an identical copy of the base, and again, it was in another mountain, this time only about ten miles from the original.

Abso. Lutely. Bonkers.

I’m going to continue exploring this labyrinth, as I’m not quite comfortable with it yet. I don’t like unexplained mysteries! However, if it turns out to be harmless then I suppose it might be a rather useful way to travel.

The Boring Bits

I’m back, with my regular insight into the mind of a Space Lord. What can I tell you this time? I was pondering that last night, and I concluded that perhaps, when you’re reading of my exploits, you begin to wonder how I fill the more mundane portions of my day. So here’s a run-down of a typical day, chez Dszira.

Sleeping arrangements

I prefer to sleep in a flat gravity region – this is what you would probably call “floating”, although that’s not really accurate because if you’re floating in Earth’s gravity that usually means there’s some motive power holding you up, which in turn means that you’re still experiencing acceleration and it just feels as if you’re lying on a bed, even though there’s nothing below you. In my case I use a genuine gravity planer, which creates a region of flat spacetime, so that my body responds exactly as if I were in intergalactic space without any nearby gravitational bodies. This isn’t recommended for human beings over the long haul, since it interferes with their growth and all sorts of health issues arise with weakened bone structure etc. Needless to say, I’m fine on it – except for a minor impact on my circulatory system, which must be corrected for during the first hour or so after rising, by means of artificial pumps. Since I’m already a cyborg to some extent, this isn’t a big deal. I had the pumps fitted after graduating, when I decided that travelling was my thing. I find the absence of gravitational gradients during sleep to be beneficial enough to make it worthwhile. There’s less cause for interrupted sleep or distraction of any kind, and if I happen to be recovering from an injury it also helps to reduce the pain.

Waking up

My alarm is internal and works silently, by stimulating my brain into a wakeful state. This has the advantage that it can be programmed to wake me more slowly if it’s likely to be a lazy day without any urgent work. Generally I like to rise fairly early by human standards – around 5 a.m. I usually get about five hours of sleep a night, but I’m capable of spending at least a week without any sleep with hardly any ill effects, so it’s quite easy to adapt to whatever crisis is plaguing me by simply putting more waking hours into working on it.

Breakfast

It’s quite hard to describe the food I like to eat in terms that would make sense to you, but a lot of it is constructed from Earth proteins and various substances commonly found on riverbanks. Every now and then I have to harvest things and fill up my processor, but I’m fine as long as nobody sees me carrying armfuls of vegetation down the road. Of course, it’s much easier now I live in a mountain, as you can imagine.

Not everything I eat is alien to Earth, of course. I like a lot of your food, and although I have a slight problem with Marmite (see my previous account), I can consume almost all of your standard fare if I have to. Coffee is awesome and always features in my mornings – and I love a spot of whisky in it now and then.

Morning routine

These days I tend to spend an hour in meditation, unless there are any alerts on my console. It’s something I never used to do until my sabbatical with Jalaa: she’s reminded me of certain good habits that I’d neglected in my zest for adventure. It might disappoint you, given my description of the sleeping arrangements, to learn that I don’t meditate while floating in mid air. I find gravity to be very important for me to feel grounded during the process.

Following meditation, if there are any urgent messages or sensor reports to attend to, I’ll divert my day into one of action. For example, if the police scanner has picked up news of the Feds entering the system, I’ll often need to find out what they’re up to. If not, I often go out for a walk to get some Solshine and exercise.

Lunch

I skip lunch. What’s the point of the thing? It gets in the way of important projects.

Afternoon and early evening

This is time spent studying and working on projects – sometimes writing these blog entries. I have a very focused mind and can work for hours without getting diverted.

Late evening

I like to “switch off” if I’m not doing anything important, so that means playing a game, or making music, or perhaps browsing through Earth entertainment channels to find out what you strange apes are obsessing over at the moment. I find your news channels laughably incomplete, your dramas educational, and your educational content far too rare – but I do like to keep up. Sometimes I join in on the web with some social media conversations. If you ever think you’ve spotted one of my secret identities, then perhaps you have. No prizes, though.

There, that was probably more boring than you’d anticipated, right? You thought I’d be playing 5D chess with AIs and secretly taking trips to neighbouring star systems to destroy things, didn’t you? Well… I’m neither confirming nor denying those possibilities. This post was meant to be about the mundane stuff anyway.

A Brief Update

I’m on my own again, readers. Jalaa and I parted company, quite amicably, and she has now left the Sol system.

It doesn’t surprise me any more, though it was a shock at first. With hindsight, I can say that she hadn’t quite been the same person since she had returned. I can only speculate on whether this is down to spending time undergoing strange phenomena, or whether it’s because she’s not a perfect copy of the original. I haven’t even mentioned that second possibility until now, as I didn’t want to upset her, but it’s not out of the question. Connectome restoration is a tricky business at the best of times, and this one took place in bizarre circumstances.

We did have a nice week at Mike’s place, exploring the coastline, watching the farming, and generally chilling out. But now that Jalaa has gone, I feel it’s time I took up residence once more in the mountain. I have some interesting projects I’d like to work on, involving multiple time dimensions and how they might be used to improve agricultural yield. My desire to travel seems to have abated for some reason. I’m sure it will be back one day.

I’ll keep this one short, but I’ve no doubt I’ll find reason enough to become verbose again soon.

Coming Round the Mountain

Right, let’s begin. What date is it again? Oh right, yes, the 11th. It was yesterday that it all happened, wasn’t it? You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve been a bit frazzled, and it’s no wonder, given that the past week has lasted a month.

How do I explain this? I suppose I should pick up at the first relevant story point. That would be February 10th – the first February 10th, that is… well, from your point of view there’s only one, isn’t there? Haha! Sorry if I sound a bit crazy. I assure you there’s a good reason. Come to think of it, if you were to go back and read the very earliest posts on this blog you’d likely conclude that I really am mentally unhinged. Of course, I’ve always maintained that the reason for that was that the translation software I was using in the days before I spoke good English wasn’t of the highest quality – and I’m sticking to that story.

Where was I? Oh yes. Yesterday (from your point of view), I did my routine check on the base, and found that the power had come back on. As you can imagine, I was keen to get back there. What if the minicruiser had been returned by the saboteur? What if someone had broken in? But try as I might, I couldn’t persuade Mike to drive me there immediately as he had meetings going on for work. I was forced to pace around the house in a state of extreme distraction. Eventually he finished work and was kind enough to provide transport.

I suggested he wait at the car park while I hiked up the mountain. When I arrived, I approached the door of the base very cautiously, alert for signs of movement. My multitool still indicated that the place was live, so I gave the command to open the door. The next few seconds were a bit of a blur, and I still can’t make out exactly what happened. All I know is that the whole place seemed to shimmer around me and there was a bright light for about two seconds as I stepped into the vestibule. And my heart sank, because I knew what this was. Back on Grootix I’d taken a foundation course in metatemporology, and we’d been made aware of the danger signs of the various topological kinks in spacetime and what could happen to the unwary explorer, should they intersect with one of them.

I proceeded to the control room and checked the date on the console. It was January 6th, the same day I’d received news of the commencement of the mysterious radio transmission from the artefact in my vault. I checked the readouts. Sure enough, the signal had started less than a minute ago, just as I was walking in through that time portal. Definitely not a coincidence.

My fine-tuned instincts kicked in, and I entered a command to inhibit security reports. Luckily these are sent in a batch every five minutes and the last one had been sent before I arrived. It was vital that I didn’t alert my other self too early that I’d looped around in time. Causality is a harsh beast, and will kick your arse if you abuse it.

While I was standing there wondering what the hell to do next, the screen lit up. Somehow the artefact had hacked into my system! I was so terrified that I almost pulled the plug, but as I reached out my hand something made me pause. I looked more carefully at the data. The damn thing had sent me a message, and the message was a little obscure, but I thought I knew what it meant. It said: CONNECTOME RESTORATION: AWAITING POWER SUPPLY.

I sat down heavily in my chair, and for a good five minutes, I wept a little, my head in my hands. If I was right, it was vital that I perform the required steps at exactly the correct times. I needed to supply power to the artefact, because the word “connectome” had startled me into belief. I believed with all my soul that I knew exactly whose connectome was going to be restored. Had she somehow effected an escape from the anomaly? Why inside an old Gorpulonian sensor satellite? Well, I guess… why not?

The problem was that I couldn’t do anything to alter the timeline of my other self, or else I’d risk ceasing to exist. I had to make sure that everything I remembered happening last time would happen again exactly as before. For a start, that meant that I had to begin diverting power to the artefact at the right time. I consulted my multitool: the stupid thing still thought it was February, but I left it alone because I wasn’t sure whether changing the date might prevent access to past events. I scrolled through the archives, looking for the log of the power drain, which it seemed had happened on January 25th at 1342 UTC. So that meant I would have to sit tight in the base for the next nineteen days, deliberately avoiding any comms with the outside world. Good job I had a supply of recreational software and a mini gym.

I won’t bore you with the details of that two and a half weeks, because it’s already bored me enough – apart from the moments when I was ready to scream in frustration about having to wait. I could have released my friend sooner, but that would have broken causality and risked an end to me.

When the time arrived, I was ready: I had set up a software agent to re-route the power, lock the door from the inside, program it to re-open the door and unlock the vault when the power returned to normal on February 10th, and then delete itself to avoid leaving a trail of evidence, just in case. Fifteen minutes before I knew the other me was about to arrive, I set it to trigger after two minutes, and nipped out of the door to hide in the trees. I was, I admit, finding it hard not to laugh. It was now very, very clear to me who had stolen the minicruiser. And I’d already planned a location where I could hide out for a couple of weeks.

It was dead strange trying to keep out of sight and seeing my other self turn up in that forest. From memory, I knew when he would be distracted enough by trying to open the door for me to sneak over to the minicruiser. Tempted as I was to spend more time gazing at my other self (good grief, have I really got a head shaped like that?), I took off promptly and engaged the cloak, leaving him flabbergasted on the ground. His face as it gazed up at me was a bit tragic. Poor guy.

Those two weeks were the worst of it, to be honest. I returned to Iceland, of course. It’s pretty easy to hide from someone when you know where they are and can be certain they won’t go back to the place you’ve chosen, but I was still very worried about anyone else seeing me, in case of chaotic temporal influences. It was pretty dull sitting in a cloaked ship in a snowdrift for two weeks, but hey, I’ve had plenty of practice at that: for details, see my previous account of the Patience Race.

Finally, February 10th arrived (again), and I made sure I was in position to see myself enter the time vortex and disappear. This was the most nerve-wracking moment of all, of course. But I was not disappointed.

Jalaa walked out of the door, looking rather confused.

I approached her cautiously, thinking she might not be quite the same, but I needn’t have worried: she recognised me at once. It was some reunion.

“I thought you were gone for ever,” I told her.

“Why? What happened?” she replied.

It turned out she had no memory of anything that had taken place inside the anomaly. I asked her how, in that case, she was able to escape in that satellite. She had no idea. Between us, we came up with a hypothesis: the Jalaa that entered the anomaly managed to extract her brain’s connectome from the anomaly’s entry point somehow and project it into the data banks of the satellite as it fell in alongside her, and her last act was to send the satellite towards Earth. How she managed to do that when she could not escape herself, we may never know – and I’ve no idea how we got lucky enough for it to fall near my base. But in the end, what has happened is bittersweet – Jalaa is back, but there’s another Jalaa, whose fate is uncertain and possibly grim. I still grieve for her.

As for the time loop, we can only assume that it was some kind of ripple from the anomaly. Such things are often not quantifiable without a computer bigger than the universe, so metatemporologists usually fall back on intuition.

Mike, of course, was waiting in the car park, completely unaware that I’d been back in time. After everything he had done for me, I felt he deserved the full story – and I didn’t want to tell him while he was driving, so I flew us down there in the minicruiser, cloaked of course, and explained that we would follow him home.

The outcome of all this is that Jalaa and I are back at Mike’s place for a while. He seems to like her, and is happy for us to stay until we decide what to do. Of course, she may want to return to orbit to continue her experiments and perhaps mourn her other self. I’m not certain how I would respond to that.

Time, with whom I’ve finished my duel and shaken hands, will tell.

A Break in the Country

Hail, humans! I thought I should give you an update, as it’s that day of the week again. But the sad truth of the matter is that I’m still not really any closer to finding out who stole my ship.

I’ll be staying with my publisher, Mike, for a while. In the end I gave up trying to use my brain to break into my own brain-proof hideout and did the sensible thing: I got a message to Mike and he came and picked me up. His spare room is small but comfortable, despite the time lapse motion control gear and photographic stuff cluttering most of the surfaces. He also keeps good whisky, of which I approve.

I’ve been spending a lot of time online, trying to trace any hints in the newsfeeds that might alert me to an answer. Who stole my ship? What’s going on with that artefact in my vault? Why is my power still down? It’s frustrating, this feeling of powerlessness. I suppose I sometimes forget that my resourcefulness often depends on technology. Also, I have to be honest, all that time I spent in space with Jalaa had made me less sharp-witted and more contented – I’m simply not used to solving mysteries and scadding about having adventures any more. I need to rectify that because I had forgotten how much fun it was!

But first… I need my ship back. And it occurred to me today that perhaps the best thing to do is wait it out. Eventually, whoever stole it is likely to make a move and reveal their location, although I honestly have no idea what I’m going to try to do when that happens.

In the mean time, I’m enjoying the change of lifestyle because novelty is my thing. Mike lives in a rural area and there’s plenty of wildlife to watch. Sometimes we get visits from pheasants. It seems to be on the same days that I can hear shotguns across the valley, and I’m starting to wonder whether they’re really as stupid as they look. For the avoidance of doubt: I mean the pheasants, not the shooters.

That’s about it for now. I have to go, as I seem to have picked up a really weak signal of some sort on my multitool. It’s probably nothing, but I should check it out.

Locked Out

I don’t know what to do.

There, I said it. Bet that came as a surprise, eh? This infallible, invulnerable Space Lord is out of ideas for once. My minicruiser’s been stolen and I’ve been locked out of my base. Yeah, you read that right. I’ve been right royally duped, and no mistake.

It began while I was exploring Iceland. I got a message alerting me to an emergency back home. The object I’d retrieved from the water a few weeks ago had stopped transmitting, and a couple of minutes later, it seems all the power systems failed at the same time. I don’t know for sure what caused that, but I can speculate. I’m guessing the object had something to do with it. Perhaps it was syphoning the output of my fusion plant for some nefarious purpose. In theory, the vault should have remained sealed because there’s a power failsafe on it. However, a physical seal isn’t always sufficient to keep more advanced forms of technology trapped, for which I often rely on more esoteric measures that require power, such as gravitational node compressors. I now have no idea whether the thing is contained.

Of course, I immediately aborted my trip and returned home to investigate. While I was poking about around the entrance wondering whether I could activate the door without the internal power, I was startled to hear the minicruiser take off behind me. I was alone in the woods on the mountain, unable to reach any of my usual technology, and with only a pocket multitool and a couple of basic weapons on my person. I’ve no way of flying out of here, and I can’t figure out where the hell the minicruiser might have gone. It’s also a mystery to me how the hell anyone else knew how to fly it.

You know in the science fiction movies when some pilot encounters an abandoned craft and despite never having even seen it before, is somehow able to identify all the controls and fly it? Yeah, that’s complete pungra dung. There’s no way anyone could have got into my ship and in the brief few minutes I was gone, figured out how to make it take off and fly smoothly away, engaging the cloak while doing so. I’d give that odds of over a million to one, easily.

My weapons can’t make a dent in the walls of the base, but I’ve used them to blast out a hole in the ground and to light a fire to keep me warm. I hope nobody comes snooping around. Luckily my multitool allows me to connect to the web, so I should be able to get this message out. I’m going to have to sleep rough, but with any luck I’ll think of a plan of action by the morning.

Who the hell stole the ship? Whoever it was is frighteningly clever, perhaps as clever as I am. If you see any news reports of mysterious aerial attacks somewhere, you know who to blame for supplying the quantum disruptor. Sorry about that.

Glacier of Lakes

Greetings, one and all, from Iceland!

Yes, I left Orkney a while ago, after I found that the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness were nothing to do with an alien species after all. My initial inspection had indicated a faint hyperspatial wave that appeared to be emanating from the stones, but when I checked again I found that it had stopped. It’s quite likely that it was a normal transmission between two points elsewhere in the galaxy and had just happened to pass through Earth at the time I was taking a reading. It’s a very unusual event, but it’s not unknown.

So I proceeded to Iceland, and I’m now exploring Vatnajökull, the huge ice cap that dominates the southeastern side of the country. There are volcanoes down there, and I have to be careful because they are still known to erupt, causing enormous flooding events. You might well ask why I’m poking about on a huge ice cap. I don’t really know, to be honest. I do seem attracted to wilderness at the moment. Perhaps I’m trying to pretend that humans don’t exist – I do have a misanthropist streak, as you probably realise, and really I only stick around on your planet because it’s entertaining watching what goes on here. It’s like what you call a “soap opera”, only with far more characters and more confusing plot lines.

In other news, I’ve had an update from my base about the object I recovered in Scotland. I’m glad I placed it in a controlled area, because apparently it has begun to transmit some sort of radio signal. This won’t make it out of the vault, of course, but it proves the thing is still active. In a way, this is good: it suggests that the cloaking device probably didn’t fail, which means the military authorities won’t be aware of its presence. I have instructed my AI systems to attempt to interpret the signal and get some clue as to what it is. My hunch is that the satellite is trying to contact the observation relay at the Moon’s L4 Lagrange point, in which case the thing really is Gorpulonian and will be harmless… but I’ll keep an eye on it.

I don’t have much to say at this point: I’m spending my time watching local wildlife – this includes a few birds and an occasional arctic fox, which is quite beautiful. I’m heading down to the more populated areas soon and I’ll report on that later.

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.