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.