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.