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.