Disillusioned But Happy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chasing Pebbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O Rly?

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

I’d overlooked Mars.

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

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

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

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

Loose Ends

I’m a little tired. I was up until quite late last night building a new hackhub for tapping secure satellite comms. More on that later. Also, the local pathetic farts were up until 1 a.m. compensating for their pathetic farts via their chrome exhausts. I would have gone out there and disintegrated them with my plasma laser, but this is not really the best time to be drawing attention to myself. You see, I don’t want to worry you, but I have an inkling that Maria T is still with us.

It’s my fault. I should have done a complete sweep of the Solar System last time. I could have kicked myself when I saw the faint locator signal on my deep space probe log. After the Halbarrat Incident, you’d think I would have learned. Now, there’s a memory. Those poor people… well, strictly speaking they weren’t people. Plants can be subjugated too, and if you’ve never seen fields of food crops stretching to the horizon in every direction, being harvested by their terrified vegetable cousins, consider yourself lucky. When the Perifuerra were cornered by the Galactic Razor Squad their final act was not surrender but wilful, suicidal destruction. I shudder still to think of it. When the fire came, I’d say it was a release for all of them.

I’ve said too much, never mind – pretend you didn’t read that.

So my probe had picked something up at the Sol/Earth L3 point, opposite the Sun – clever, because humans haven’t ventured out there yet. You can’t just leave stuff at L3: it needs a stable orbit. And luckily, that orbit, at certain times of year, is wide enough to peek around the solar disc from our point of view. Anyway, I’ve calculated that at the time I destroyed Maria T’s backup pod at Saturn, there was a clear line-of-sight path to L3. This means that the pod could already have relayed a mind backup to L3, and I have a hunch that’s what took place.

What I’m not sure of is why nothing’s happened since then. Possibly there’s a fault in the pod, or perhaps I’m actually wrong and what I’ve found is nothing to do with Maria T. But I need to check it out because the other possibility is that there is another pod around Saturn that I missed, and the L3 pod could still contact it.

I plan to take a trip out to L3 in a couple of weeks on July 9th, because Saturn will be at opposition. This will make it impossible for the pod to talk to anything at Saturn as Sol will be between them. Thus I should be able to destroy it without any chance of its ‘phoning home’. One thing I’ve learned about Professor Thessifus is that it’s impossible to overestimate her cunning.

Until my trip, I’ll be scanning Saturn carefully for signals, just in case. And then there’s the hackhub: I’ll be using my new toy to intercept as many Earth transmissions as possible, in case I hear anything that might reveal her presence. I might not get many chances to update the blog, but keep watching: I’ll be about.

Oh, and before I go, here’s a little guessing game for you. One of Earth’s large commercial enterprises was set up with money from another star and is being run by an alien in disguise. Have fun figuring out which one.

Signs And Portents

Well, this is embarrassing.

Where to begin? Well, of course, it’s been a while… what? Oh. Mike says more than a year. To be honest, I can’t quite remember how long one of your years is, but I know it’s quite a time to wait for your favourite incognito space lord to release another exciting instalment.

No point beating around the phzoothsh. The truth is, I screwed up again. I ended up as software for a while, and I couldn’t terminate the code – I hate it when that happens. I’ve also been running on accelerated time, so I can’t remember a damn thing about my recent life in this universe. I’m going to have to revisit all my past journal entries and get up to speed.

Sorry – this is probably just confusing you. Let me start again.

Recent events in human stupidity – er, I mean history – had convinced me that something is up. I couldn’t bring myself to believe this could possibly be reality (if there even is such a thing). I began to suspect that we were in a simulation, but I wanted to know for sure. I’d been struggling to come up with a reliable experiment that might answer this question – and a couple of years ago I managed it. I built my own universe simulation.

The key to my idea is Fractal Geometry. Whatever applies in a sim is likely to apply also to the host universe: it’s a self-similar structure. However, the point at which this stops is the ‘reality’ level. That’s how my experiment is supposed to operate: I measure how similar my sim is to our own universe, and then, based on certain markers I’ve devised, I can calculate the likelihood that our own universe is simulated.

A simluated universe – even a range-limited one such as mine, with just a handful of detailed star systems plus an illusory long-distance physics – requires an enormous amount of power. Luckily, my experience in wormhole construction stood me in good stead there, and I managed to leach the energy of a rotating black hole around twenty thousand light years away (I had to get Mike to convert to your units there, so I hope it’s correct). I concealed most of the hypercoils beneath the ground, and the only visible part is covered by a plastic cylinder behind my shed. The landlord thinks it’s a composter, and that’s fine with me. I hope he never tips any grass cuttings into it, or they’ll instantly evaporate and singe his beard.

Things were going quite well, and I was gathering a lot of data remotely. But it wasn’t enough! I quickly realised that some of the data required close personal observation of the civilisation I was building, so I began working on a way of downsaving my consciousness into the sim.

Anyway, this was all about a year ago. Given that my sim world was still very primitive I had to prepare my sim self carefully for defence, but it wasn’t too difficult. I made quite a few interesting observations while I was inside, and had expected to exit after a short time – about a month, which would have been eight minutes in our reality, due to the accelerated time frame.

Unfortunately, there was a bug in my code. Yes, I know that’s implausible – but I’m not perfect.

There was no way out for me. I was trapped within my own creation. Luckily, I had placed my body in stasis in our universe, so it was safe, but there I was, in a universe I knew was artificial, unable to reveal that fact to anyone around me for fear of spoiling the experiment. I was armed only with my immortality and a handful of fairly mundane tricks that my knowledge of how the sim worked enabled me to perform – stuff like turning matter transparent and guessing what people were thinking. These abilities enabled me to earn a living in various places as a fairly sought-after illusionist and mentalist, moving from country to country as my longevity became too obvious, and changing my identity.

Eventually, people started to talk about the coincidence of suspiciously similar performers turning up over thousands of years of history in different countries, and I began to become a legend. But most people thought it all part of my act, as though it were some sort of PR stunt, and they dutifully applauded and went home wondering how I had built up such an elaborate mythos. If only they had known.

After eleven months without any word from me, Mike began to get a little worried, bless him. It’s not as if I’d never been away before, but after the last time we had made an agreement that I would notify him before disappearing for more than a few months at a time. Upon visiting my flat, he managed to find my stasis room and deduced that I was in some sort of trouble because of the mouldy remains of my lunch that were sitting on the table nearby. If there’s one thing he knows about me, it’s that I would never start a year-long experiment on an empty stomach.

So he pressed the shutdown button.

He tells me he was terrified of killing me, but trusted my design abilities enough to assume that I would have built in some failsafes. Luckily, he was right – and although the simulation was terminated, my mind was also restored to my body. My mind, of course, was now five thousand years older – and let me tell you, that makes one slightly grumpy. I was pretty angry for a couple of days, before I remembered that I could restore the sim from a backup.

But I soon realised that the backup contained my sim self as well, so I would have had to go through the tedious process of removing all traces of myself from it before restoring. Due to my notoriety in the sim universe and the impact I’d had upon it, this proved impossible. In the end I had to restore a backup I’d made before I entered it, which lost me a year of work (or five thousand years, depending on how you look at it).

So here we are. And the story isn’t over yet! Because the next thing that happened was astonishing.

Having seen the way my sim species had turned out, I’d been less than pleased. In fact, at one point I’d been worried that they would destroy their planet, leaving me alone to roam a dead world. After Mike rescued me and I restored the older backup, I tried to think of a way of letting them know that they should be more responsible – and it occurred to me that I could leave them a message based on their culture. A subtle hint of sorts, using symbology from one of their stories – a story that told a tale of morality, and honour, and kindness. I chose a symbol carefully, and etched it into the surface of one of the other planets in their star system.

Shortly after that, they found it.

The effect was not quite what I expected. I thought they would either laugh it off as coincidence, or change their thinking overnight. Instead, the media buzz about the symbol sparked small changes around their world, and little by little, I saw their society begin to diverge from the hellish path, which, due to my previous immersion in it, I knew it was destined to follow had I not intervened.

And then today… well, today I saw this news story about the Star Trek logo they’ve found on Mars.

I honestly don’t know what to think. It could well be coincidence, of course. It could have been there all along, or maybe whoever is monitoring our progress paused time and etched it lovingly, their souls aching for our folly, desperate to save us. Perhaps, in some strange way, the event is related to my own similar actions, and if I hadn’t done the same this outer message would never have been written. I sort of like the idea that the self-similarity might be enforced despite causality violation.

But I do know one thing. If it’s a message, it means that someone out there has seen our future, and that it isn’t pretty. We should think about that.

Empty Vessels

It was almost 303 Kelvins today. For a British ‘bank holiday’, that seems to be a break with tradition. But it gave me the opportunity to do a little field anthropology, i.e. ‘people-watching’, which is an occasional hobby of mine. I was particularly interested in the behaviour of young human males when the weather is hot. Many of them appear to enjoy broadcasting their stupidity loudly to anyone in shouting range, by partaking in a curious activity that seems to have developed in sports stadiums. When gathered in groups, particularly when alcohol has been added to the equation, they will break into a chorus of something that could only in the most generous of terms be described as ‘singing’. It sounds more like an over-extended rendition of the first second or two of someone vomiting heartily.

This is strictly a tribal activity. I have rarely seen an individual participant, unless he was extremely drunk, and even when two are present, it’s not that common. The threshold number appears to be three. This has nothing to do with the ability to produce harmonies, and everything to do with the ability to produce the threat of harm. These hapless phenotypes are the walking embodiment of a genome fashioned in our brutal past, when beating one’s chest was the best way of finding a mate. To witness their ritualistic roaring is to play audience to the astonishing process of testosterone transforming into air vibrations.

Everything I’ve described above, of course, has been occurring for some decades (at least since the 1970s, I’m assured by my editor, who was there). However, a more recent variant has come to my attention. When the human larynx is unequal to the task of asserting dominance through sonic torture, those with enough credit or hard cash have the option of purchasing some form of internal combustion engine attached to either 2, 4, or (sometimes) 3 wheels — and most importantly of all, sporting 1, 2 or 4 exhaust pipes. Often these are modified deliberately to be as loud as possible, breaking asunder the peace of all and sundry for no better reason than to make the statement: I AM HERE. Yes, we know you are, and we wish you weren’t. Some of us go further, and wish you would crash and die.

I’ve speculated many times about the exact psychology behind loud exhausts. I’ve heard people say that large cars might represent subconscious compensation for inadequate genital scale — and based on this assumption, one possible conclusion is that guys with loud exhausts are secretly ashamed of their pathetic farts.

But perhaps the truth is much more straightforward. Perhaps they simply are pathetic farts.

Poorly

I’ve been away for a while. I’m sorry about that. The reasons are pretty complex, and involve a rather unexpected plot twist concerning the molecular biology of my body. I’ll attempt to explain.

As you may know, human proteins — and hence most human anatomy — are coded by DNA, which is a molecule whose basic geometry is a connected double helix (although the higher levels of coiling to which this is then subjected are quite beautiful too, in a fractal sort of way).

My biology, as you might have expected, is a little different. My species employs a more complex structure for its protein coding. It’s rather hard to describe, but try to imagine a double helix with a third strand running through the cenral axis. Instead of pairs of bases, I have triplets. This means that errors are more easily corrected because of the increased redundancy, which in turn makes me far more resistant to radiation damage. The actual bases come in seven types instead of four, and are grouped in fours instead of threes, theoretically allowing 2,401 different codons, though in practice there is extremely heavy redundancy in that part of the system, which, again, allows for very effective error correction. Of course, the vastly reduced mutation rate this promotes makes me  highly resistant to genetic damage, although it also means that evolution on my planet has been proceeding extremely slowly: it took over a hundred million of your years for my species to emerge from our non-sentient predecessors. It’s a good thing conditions on our world allow plenty of time and security for such extended prehistories.

But I’m getting a little technical, so let me cut to the chase: I’ve been ill.

It was something I never expected to happen. My cells are constructed from many of the same amino acids as yours, though not the same proteins (and of course I have a few additional tricks up my veins). Earth viruses cannot affect me because RNA means nothing to my biology and is ignored as an inconsequential irritant. The toxins from bacteria could cause issues for me, but I’ve not yet found any bacteria that can live in my body, let alone multiply there, so again, they are inconsequential. When I eat your food I can break it down into many of the components I need, but I have to supplement my diet with certain enzymes to ensure that I get those compounds that I can’t obtain from the food.

It turns out, however, that there is a substance here on Earth that can destroy one component of my cellular chemistry. The problem, for a long time, was that I didn’t know which substance it was. All I knew was what it was doing: it was disabling the biological systems in my cells that regulate the production of muscular proteins. The result, unfortunately, has been that I ended up looking rather deformed, and I’ve had to hide from public view so as not to scare the children. Oddly enough, most of the worst effects of this condition have occurred in my face and my arms, with the result that I took on an appearance similar to the cartoon character known as ‘Popeye’.

I briefly considered getting an anchor tattoo and a pipe, and earning some extra cash performing at festivals, but decided it was infra dig. Instead, I continued my research to attempt to find the source of this problem. It was getting quite hard to operate the controls on my molecular analysis rig with my chubby fingers, but I finally identified the culprit as a by-product of yeast. Yeast, of course, is a tricky little organism, and I hadn’t considered, at first, that it might be involved. It was only when somebody was discussing the brewing of beer on Twitter and mentioned Marmite that I realised I’d recently developed quite a liking for this strange stuff — and also that I would have to cut it out of my diet immediately.

I’m back to normal now: it only took about a week. I suppose if I ever want to go for that festival gig when times are hard, at least I know how to achieve it. I could even substitute a jar o’ the good old brown nectar for the more conventional can of spinach.

But regardless, I’m sure you can imagine that the phrase ‘it’s a Marmite issue’ has now taken on a whole new set of sinister overtones.

Small vs. Far Away

I can’t believe it’s been over a week since my last update! I suppose it’s true that time flies when you’re having fun. In fact, several researchers have looked into this over the last few decades, and found that there is some evidence to support the existence of a hitherto-undetected ‘fun field’, which may be linked to the time dimension in ways that we cannot yet fathom. This fun field is not of the same type as the standard fields you humans have already discovered in Quantum Field Theory, but it acts in a roughly analogous way.

The latest recommendations from our best academic institutions are that governments should use caution when granting permits for centres of entertainment. This is to avoid the possibility that too large a concentration of fun in one place may drain away so much time that space will expand asymptotically to compensate, possibly resulting in a new universe. Some of us like to speculate — usually while taking our chemical stimulant of choice in the evenings — that this may be how our universe formed. And if, perchance, the entertainment in question was some form of sexual pleasure, the phrase ‘Big Bang’ takes on a whole new meaning.

But this was supposed to be a serious post, and I should return to my main point! I have indeed had fun for the last week, though you’ll be pleased to hear that it wasn’t enough to create a new universe. No, I’ve just been taking a little exercise: hiking through various scenic locations around the world. I’ve stood on the summit of Everest; run through rain forests of the Amazon; camped in the Grand Canyon to watch the night sky; and finally, played megaparkour in Tokyo by jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper using my hoverboots.

In all my travels, I never once connected to the internet or picked up the latest news. There were some exceptions, of course. You can’t avoid seeing the news in Tokyo, for example: it’s everywhere. But you learn to screen it out, and since I had my universal translator disabled most of the time and could only understand English, it wasn’t too bothersome. The result was a sense of peace within my mind, and it made me realise what the problem is that you humans are now facing.

The problem is that you’ve become fully connected. Not only has your ‘village’ grown from the traditional size of a few hundred people to several billion, but also you can access information about anywhere in the entire world, instantly. This brings all those foreign locations that would previously have been considered exotic, directly into your lives, and removes their mystique. They become vicariously mundane to you. Gone are the days when a traveller would come into town, book a room at the local inn and regale the populace with tales of faraway lands. Faraway lands are no longer so interesting, and people have begun to look within communities for novelty instead of looking outside them.

But the important thing to remember is that this is an illusion. It’s a fantasy. Just because you’ve seen the Great Wall of China on YouTube, you imagine yourselves to be explorers. But these are pixels on a screen, changing colour from frame to frame, and vibrations in the air of your comfortable room, conveying the sounds of a distant world into your head. They are no substitute for the reality of travel.

If you want to understand this, find a video online that contains footage of, let’s say, the inside of a restaurant in some place that you wouldn’t ever dream of travelling to. Watch the video and try to place yourself in that world, as much as you possibly can. Imagine the noises, the smells, the taste of the food, the people’s faces. Then go to an actual restaurant near where you live, and compare the experience. Is it even remotely close?

The restaurant example applies to everything else, too: people, language, politics, recreation, entertainment, education… the list goes on. So I just wanted to speak directly to all those who have wanted to travel and have never got around to it: if you can afford to do so, DO SO. In my opinion, as an impartial observer, nothing would benefit the human species more, at this crucial point in your history, than an increase in global perspective.

Spam

Spam interests me greatly.

You probably realise that I’m not talking about cold pressed meat, although that is a fascinating topic in its own right, so I understand, especially to Vikings. No, I’m referring to the unwanted messages that everyone constantly receives over the web of lies. Sorry, I mean the internet.

When I first heard that this was an actual problem on this planet, my reaction was — I’m sorry to have to say — laughter. It’s never been an issue for us out in the wider galaxy. For one thing, we have a more sophisticated distributed trust certification network. But there’s another, much simpler reason: if anyone tried mass marketing via hyperwave message, they would very likely end up being tracked down and having all the flesh melted off their head by a large proton accelerator. We have a slightly more lenient attitude to vigilantes than you do on Earth.

Anyway, out of curiosity one day, I began examining some of this so-called spam. It was not a pleasant experience. The worst thing was seeing the same bizarre phrases repeated again and again. Let’s just say that if anyone ever comes up to me in the street and offers me ‘this one weird trick’ to solve one of my problems, I shall happily introduce their head to Mr. Proton and his friends and show them the weirdest trick they’ve ever seen.

I was initially rather baffled when I saw the emails. I’d say that over 99% of them are written in English so bad that even I could spot it a light year away, and I’m not exactly fluent yet. Surely, I thought, if these things are mostly con tricks, then the con artists should be like the ones I’ve seen in movies: smart, dapper, intelligent, well-versed in etiquette, riding skills, perhaps an ace at seduction, and of course, polyglots. Bad English is a dead giveaway!

It was then that Mike pointed out something that I’d forgotten too easily, and which can be summed up in this rather neat little couplet:

Consider just how stupid is the average human prat:
Now realise, fully half of them are stupider than that!

Actually, I must digress here for a moment. The above joke may seem hilarious, but it’s mathematically unsound. It assumes that the median and the mean are identical, which does not have to be so.

To illustrate, imagine you had a simplified IQ scale that was always an integer from 1 to 10, and you sampled four people and found that their scores were 1, 2, 3 and 10. The median would be 2.5 and the mean would be 4.

Another aside: this also undermines that old saying, known as Grelb’s Reminder, that “80% of drivers consider themselves above average”. The point, of course, is that this is meant to sound ridiculous — but it’s possible for it to be true. Of course, in that case, the other 20% would have to be utterly atrocious drivers, in order to drag the mean level down a lot. Actually, now that I think about it, that sounds about right to me.

Where was I? Oh yes, the stupidity of people in relation to spam. Here’s an idea that I think could work, if you really want to get rid of spam:

Automated time-wasting.

I’m serious. These days, bots are commonplace and the technology, as we’ve seen in the recent social media scandals, is fairly advanced. Someone just needs to work out a way of making bots reply to spam automatically, and tie up the resources of the senders. The point is, it’s dirt cheap to send millions of emails, but what’s not dirt cheap at all is running store front servers, payment transaction handling, online support answering questions etc. Give the bots fake credit card numbers and get them to fill up as much time as possible in the initial contact, before placing an order, having the card rejected, and then complaining about it endlessly, tying up further time on the spammer’s end. If a million bots are all doing this at once, they’ll never cope: they’ll be out of business in a week.

I offer you that advice free, of course. Note that it applies only to spam intended to sell things. Other spam has more nefarious purposes, such as installing malware, phishing for data etc. In those cases… well, feel free to forward them to me, and I’ll be happy to track them down and pay them a visit with my proton accelerator.

Anagrams and Time Off

I know some of you Earthlings are celebrating Easter shortly, so I thought I should wish you a happy one. It’s something to do with cutting off a rabbit’s eggs and nailing it to a cross, isn’t it? Sounds barbaric. Anyway, Mike has come up with an anagram, and suggested including it in my next post, so here it is:

Owota's Fantasy Diary = Nasty toad of airways.

Thanks, Mike. Of course, you could also have made “Sanity stood far away”, and even the far more polite “A waystation for days”, which fits the whole point of the thing far better, don’t you agree? [Okay, you’re right — MT]

Mike also pointed out to me that “Professor Maria Thessifus” is an anagram of both “Assume offshore airstrips” and “Famous airship fortresses”, and has suggested that I should double-check that Maria T doesn’t have any secret Steampunk bases based on small islands in the Atlantic. That’s taking the thing a bit far, in my opinion: they’re only letters!

Actually, he does have a point. I cannot assume that my new enemy is gone for ever. I destroyed her mind backup pod in orbit around Saturn, but let’s remember that when Saturn is the other side of the Sun, it would not have been possible to receive data from that one. I can’t help wondering whether she installed a second one somewhere else, and I think perhaps I should go and check soon.

I’ve managed to find the time not only for R&R but also maintenance. I’ve been overhauling the cloaking device on the minicruiser, and I tested it by taking it for a spin around the coast of Great Britain. I even managed to buzz the Houses of Parliament undetected. I was tempted to drop a bounded fusion device on them, but that probably would have been considered bad etiquette as well as being a breach of the Galactic Non-Interference Treaty. I’m sorry, but for now you’re stuck with them. Your move, voters.

On a lighter note, I’ve discovered this wonderful drink called Hot Chocolate. Why did nobody tell me this existed? It’s like being kissed in a hot spring by an Amazon warrior woman made of candy… except inside out.

Cat and Mouse: Saturday

Hello avid readers! It’s time to welcome me home at last. I’ve had quite a day, I can tell you. When I last recorded an update, Professor Maria Thessifus had been killed, then restored from a mind backup into a new body clone. Given her state of confusion (as evidenced by the fact that she had not immediately resumed chasing me), I surmised that this was an old backup and that she would have to get up to speed by reading her blog entry from the other day.

I wasted no time, although I was a little miffed that my minicruiser’s cloaking device was out of alignment and had to be adjusted. This cost me vital minutes, but it was crucial work if I wanted to remain undetected. Once I was in orbit I transferred to the Earth Lagrange L2 point to set up my instruments. I was sniffing for remnants of the original transmission of the mind data from the backup pod, hoping for reflected signals to arrive after ricochet from multiple Kuiper belt objects, back and forth across the solar system multiple times, each taking hours, over the last two days.

This, as you can imagine, was a long shot.

My equipment is extremely advanced, with molecular membrane antennae and miniaturised quantum computers to perform the nightmarish fourier analyses that this would require, given the vast number of reflected signals that would have blended together like images in an enormous Hall of Mirrors. Sadly, it was not enough. After an hour or two of gathering data, and a further hour analysing it and finding no clear directional source for the signal, I proceeded to Plan B.

A brief scan via my remote probe revealed that Professor Maria T was still in her office in Hamburg. I am not a natural gambler, and the next part was a leap of faith that made me slightly uncomfortable, I have to admit. I made the assumption that the Hamburg location would also be the location from which the request for another mind restore would be sent, in the event of her death. I deployed a ring of membrane antennae in orbit around Earth in the plane of the solar system. Again, I was gambling: I assumed that the mind backup pod was somewhere in that plane. I hope you’re keeping count of these!

I then activated the microdrone I had previously concealed in Berlin, and it covered the distance to Hamburg in about 100 seconds. Damn, those things are fast. I wish I could build them, but I can’t take credit I’m afraid: I get them on mail order from Analemma, which is kind of the galactic version of Amazon, only it’s allowed to sell evil weapons.

Now came my third and final gamble. I hoped her window was open. Three times, I had relied on luck. I was feeling a little nauseated, frankly. I don’t like loose ends. But it paid off. The microdrone found its target, and a death signal was picked up by fourteen of my antennae. I projected the signal outward and found it was heading for Saturn.

Making a mental note to collect the antennae later, I punched the co-ordinates in and warped over almost all the way there, which took all of five seconds. I positioned myself directly between Earth and Saturn, waiting.

I had to wait a further hour for the signal to arrive. Luckily, I had brought a deck of cards with me. I do enjoy your Earth games! Did you know that there are so many permutations of a deck of cards that every time you shuffle one thoroughly it’s almost certain to be a sequence that nobody in the whole history of your planet has ever produced before? Of course, I’ve produced them all, by placing a robotic shuffling arm inside a multiverse multiplier… but that was on Grootix when I was at college, and even I can’t afford to own that sort of equipment, so you can stop worrying: it’s still the case that nobody has produced every permutation yet — on Earth, at least.

The signal arrived, and I waited for the reply from the pod. When it came, I pinpointed it to within about 100 km. It was still going to be tricky, but I wasn’t too worried.

That is, until I noticed that it was right inside the rings.

I had to admit she had style. It was a perfect camouflage! It made finding it very arduous, and it took me a good three hours of nosing in and out of the ring material. But I finally got it! Can you believe, the thing was only 10m long? The rings are 1km thick, so we’re talking needles and haystacks. My eyes are still tired.

Having blasted the pod into dust, I returned on warp power, and waited. Of course, it wasn’t over at that point because a new clone would be waiting for the light-speed signal still en route — or so I imagined.

I had quite a nasty shock.

The signal arrived, all right. But there was some sort of failsafe in place, probably triggered by two deaths within a day or two of each other. It downloaded the data, but it copied it into multiple clones. I used a probe to count them, and there were fifty-two. When that figure came up on my screen, I used a word that would have got me expelled from Grootix Academy for sure.

The rest of that day was rather dramatic. Obviously I couldn’t be sure of killing all of those clones before one of them got me, it was too risky. This called for a more intelligent approach. Remaining in orbit for safety, and constantly alert for a launch from Hamburg just in case, I busied myself with the data I’d collected during the return signal from the pod. I had to decode the format used, but there wasn’t any strong encryption on it. I mean, why bother, right? The stupid humans would never even recognise what it was anyway. A process of elimination gave me the likely patterns used to push an update to the clones. I reasoned that this would be a feature, given that I have such a thing myself. Sometimes new information reaches the pod and needs to be made known to the current living copy. It’s a way of creating memories of things that would otherwise be unknown.

In the end, it was laughably easy. I sent a faked signal with information about a certain Lord Dszira, who had been detected hiding out at a spot in the middle of Antarctica. Watching the Thessifus clones join forces and converge on the bait was amusing. I had already programmed the slow fusion bomb to deploy from my silo in Argentina, and sit there beneath the ice, having melted its way down, waiting for them to arrive. The survey teams may one day be baffled by the odd crater there, but maybe there will be a conspiracy theory that the US government were testing a secret weapon. And maybe it will just end up as a regular item doing the rounds on the internet tinfoil hat sites. Nobody will seriously believe it at that point. In fact, I may give it a small helping hand. I need to go now and start joining a few chatrooms. See you later!

Cat and Mouse: Friday

In some ways, things have been a little dull since my last entry. Having watched Maria T’s life signals for an hour and found that they were not moving, I concluded that she was resting, and probably as confused as a politician. That was good because it implied that she hadn’t been conscientious about making backups. Take a lesson from this, humans! Always back up your data. This copy of her was from a few days ago, and I think it must have been made before she kidnapped me. I had to assume that eventually she’d get around to reading her own blog entry and would pick up the trail from there, but her confusion gave me some extra time to act, and I used it.

I drove through the night and made it back to Calais, where I dropped the car and caught a train home. For the past three hours I’ve been gathering all the equipment I’ll need. Finding a mind pod in deep space is not easy if it isn’t broadcasting data. They tend to be almost invisible to radar, and rather small. I’ll have to use guesswork as well as technology. I’m planning to set off later tonight. No time to sleep, when Maria T could be laying her next plot against me! I’ve pinpointed her position, and it’s an office block in Hamburg. I suspect she rents it as a business facade to conceal her activities. She probably already knows that I’m going after her pod, so I’ll have to use extreme caution.

By this time tomorrow, it should all be over… one way or another.

Cat and Mouse: Thursday

I ended up in a cave in the mountains, waiting for a whole day. Professor Thessifus was unexpectedly slow to respond to my deliberate false trail leading to the nearby village. Luckily, my experience with Gook’s Patience Race stood me in good stead.

When she finally arrived in the village, I was monitoring her from a drone (one of the pieces of equipment I retrieved from my East European emergency stash on my way up here). She was quite sloppy with her camouflage this time! She’d taken the form of an old woman, but the utility belt was a dead giveaway, visible from a 500m altitude by virtue of my advanced optical stabilisers.

When I hit the KILL switch and saw the image track in towards her head, I almost felt sorry for her. And for the poor villagers — I expect the explosion left quite a mess.

It seemed too easy. And of course, it was.

I was on my way home today via the tedious process of car rental. Why can’t you people just have decent teleports? It’s damn inconvenient. Anyway, my sensors suddenly alerted me to Maria T’s life signals somewhere in Hamburg. I realised, of course, what had happened. She had remote mind backups, just as I do, and had been restored into a spare body clone. This means that I now have to destroy her backup pod before killing her, otherwise she’ll just do it again and again — at least until she runs out of body clones. Bloody annoying situation.

The question is, of course: when was her last backup? Does this copy of her even remember kidnapping me? Does it remember hacking my data? I hate unknowns, and there are too many of them now.

Cat and Mouse: Tuesday

[I’ve now received a full set of diary entries from Lord Dszira - this is the first. Turns out he was the one who re-enabled my account, of course! He’s resting at the moment, and asked me to post these on successive days. I hope you find them enlightening. — MT]

Owota here. I hope this reaches you. I’m writing it on Tuesday 20th, but I’m going to ask Mike not to post any of these entries until the crisis is over, in case it gives away my location. I have just re-enabled the blog account password so that he can give you updates, but I haven’t been able to communicate with him yet. I see that he’s posted a message. I also see that someone else posted a message too! I’m not happy.

This Maria T character truly is a pest. Things began to go awry on Sunday, when she managed to intercept me in Prague while I was attempting to sneak up and ambush her. It’s amazing how many mishaps befall people in Prague, from the assassination of Good King Wenceslas over a thousand years ago to more recent disasters, such as the time Michael Palin fell over in a bathroom there and hurt his finger. But I’m rambling — I must keep this short, as I believe Thessifus is monitoring all the EM bands, and I’ve used the emergency laser receiver I installed on my assistant’s roof to transmit this message to him securely. It’s a good thing I have that swarm of microsatellites to act as reflectors. I’m now extremely glad of the weeks I put into that project.

So anyway, I discovered that the only reason Thessifus was able to hack my accounts at SPLAT and the GPR was that she (actually ‘it’, but ’she’ is easier) is a polymorph capable of such finely detailed mimicry that she can pass for me in biometric tests. This is, of course, a lamentable oversight on my part. I should have added two-factor authentication to my security options — but the trouble is that the GPR is near the galactic hub, and even hyperwaves take over an hour to arrive from there, so logging in would have been a task requiring the patience of a domino-toppling technician. As for SPLAT, forget it: they never did have robust security.

The fact that she’s a polymorph is, of course, the reason Maria T was able to ambush me in Prague. She was disguised as a road-sweeping machine at the time, and I was too busy trying to find her house on a map to notice the smell of foetid garbage and the smooth scrape of motorised brushes approaching down the street behind me. Before I realised what was going on, I’d already been ‘taken to the cleaners’. I did manage escape from the refuse chamber by activating the unload circuit and tipping the entire contents onto the road, which caused consternation among the inhabitants of Prague and brought the police running. However, I wasn’t prepared for the resourcefulness of my adversary: she somehow managed to levitate me a thousand metres into the air while she evaded capture below, and later brought me directly down her chimney. I know it sounds corny, but I think it was some form of tractor beam.

She attempted to imprison me in a diamondite chamber, and I honestly think she planned to leave me there for ever. The only reason I was able to escape was that she had not thought to remove my clothes. I always keep a spare crystal lattice disruptor lance in my underpants (who doesn’t?), and I had only to wait until she went out before using it to collapse the entire chamber into a pile of what looks, to the untrained eye, like crumbling burnt toast.

I am now in the Tatra mountains, playing a fine game of cat and mouse with my enemy. Since you are reading this, you’ll know that it ended well, but from my point of view, I’m still unsure what’s going to happen to me. Maria T has set up quite a network of informants and sensors, and it’s taking all my time just to move around the countryside undetected. I think she’s spitting mad that she can’t find me, which tickles me nicely. I’ll give it another day before I make a move. After all, it’s fun to imagine her squirming.

Apologies

Hello everyone, it’s Mike Torr here. I apologise for the brief disruption to the blog recently. As you will be aware, the account was hacked by a mysterious character who now seems to have vanished — as has Lord Dszira. My account credentials were reset by person or persons unknown, and I was then able to log in again to post this update. I have no more idea what is happening than you do, but I’ll update you the moment I have any information. I’m slightly concerned, but not overly so. Owota has been in worse scrapes than this, and has always managed to pull through.

I’m leaving Maria T’s post up on the blog, for context. I do not, of course, endorse its content.

Under New Management

Well, hello there, you lowly humans. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Professor Maria Thessifus, but feel free to call me Professor Maria T if it makes you more comfortable. I always think it’s preferable to shorten surnames instead of forenames, don’t you? So much easier to maintain anonymity. Not that I need to, of course. You will probably have guessed that it isn’t my real name, anyway. My real name is very long and impossible to express in syllables amenable to human pronunciation.

Now, I know you were all hoping for an update from Lord D. I’d love to oblige you, of course, but allowing him to send a message would mean letting him out of the diamondite chamber in which I’ve trapped him, and he’s a slippery fellow. In fact, he’s so slippery that he almost evaded me yesterday as I kidnapped him on the streets of — well, the least said about that, the better.

It was a simple matter to obtain credentials for posting to this blog, of course. To one who has already stolen identities across the galaxy and overcome the security firewalls of the Galactic Patent Register, hacking a blog platform on Earth is child’s play. I’ll be in charge for the moment.

Don’t worry, I shall of course release Owota in due course. I just need him to stay out of the way until his patent appeal expires, at which point further appeals will be disallowed and I’ll receive royalty payments for cockpoppies in perpetuity. He’s been rather modest about his achievements, in fact — those little flowers are on order in hundreds of star systems for various reasons, and should net me a tidy fortune.

So, I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient, readers! Lord Dszira will be gone for quite a while. In the mean time, there will be no further updates.

Thessifus is victorious!

SPLAT Goes the Weasel

Some of you may remember that, back in 2011, I won the Nobel prize for Poppycock after successfully testing a new type of very hardy, spiky plant which I dubbed the ‘cockpoppy’. You may also be aware that I missed the award ceremony, having been absent at the time during the infamous multi-dimensional game of cat-and-mouse the feds and I played with the pranksters from the Utnepi sector who had constructed an illegal spatial anomaly in the Cotswolds.

In the last entry about this, I mentioned that my award was listed as ‘posthumous’, and that I would correct this error in ‘Huckleberry Finnly fashion’. Well, today, I attempted to do exactly that, with somewhat alarming results. I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Poppycock prize is not part of the human Nobels, of course. It’s awarded by an unofficial secret organisation called the Society for Promotion of  Lurking Alien Technologies, or SPLAT, whose business is to improve the lives of humans via technology developed by incognito alien philanthropists. You’re welcome.

As for the cockpoppy itself, it was successfully deployed in many pilot sites, although I was asked to modify it to make it invisible to people. The committee apparently felt that my enthusiasm for drawing attention to it via luminosity didn’t quite conform to GOSAD (the Galactic Official Statute of Alien Discretion). The plant is useful wherever there are cracks between paving slabs, plenty of pedestrians, and the possibility of bears. It took a little experimentation to get the leaves to spread away from the cracks in such a way as to make its presence almost undetectable by feel, while still doing its job.

Another matter came to my attention recently, and I must address it. Some of you, I gather, will be wondering — perhaps not for the first time — whether my brain is firmly rooted in reality. After all, you will protest, this whole thing about bears is from a children’s book, isn’t it? It’s not real! But you’d be wrong, at least in a way. Every year a couple of thousand people disappear without trace in the UK, where I live. There are obviously many reasons for this, including certain visiting aliens who are somewhat less friendly than yours truly, and who like to conduct experiments. However, a few dozen of these incidents are indeed caused by bears.

No, not that sort of bear.

‘Bugbears’ have not been studied in detail yet, but we believe that they are four-dimensional flat creatures that exist in a parallel space, so close to our own reality that they can just about reach out and touch it, although it takes effort. This is what I meant by ‘flat’: they have very little ability to extend themselves along the extra dimension, but in three dimensions they are anything but flat, and are somewhat similar to giant octopuses. Indeed, the recent statements by scientists that the octopus appears to be practically an alien species interested me greatly, and I couldn’t help wondering whether these organisms might be related to bugbears somehow.

What’s baffling about the bears is that they tend to have obssessive intolerance to certain things. Some of them react exclusively to events that hardly ever happen — for example, the bugbears in the space parallel to Grootix get enraged if someone farts into their own ear. We only know they exist because a visiting boonargle performed the trick for a dare, and witnesses saw hundreds of disembodied tentacles intrude into our spatial dimension, grab the unfortunate victim and pull him out of sight. One wonders whether our universe is like some sort of giant vivarium to them, and whether they regard us as pets, and are removing those that displease them.

Unfortunately, the bears that hang around Earth’s space are far more easily provoked, and sometimes, very rarely, one of them will take to sitting in the parallel space beneath paving slabs, admiring the geometry. Should someone be unfortunate enough to step right onto one of the cracks, they are pulled below, in a direction that doesn’t exist and therefore probably rips all their atoms apart.

What the new strain of cockpoppies is actually doing is acting as dynamic camouflage. They focus the light from the sky above, and bend it around themselves, sending it through interdimensional space to the eyes of the bugbear, who accepts the premise that the foot is not crossing the line, even when it is.

But I digress. Today I entered the SPLAT headquarters to tell them that rumours of my death had been greatly exaggerated, and you can imagine my surprise when they stated that they had never heard of me. I demanded to see the Journal of Botanical Engineering, which was where my research had been published, and was outraged to note that the author’s name had been changed to ‘Professor Maria Thessifus’. Subsequent digging also revealed the same name now listed on the Galactic Patent Register. Presumably this imposter moved in and hacked my account while I was away chasing the Utnepi’i, and is now raking in the royalties. I don’t know how it was done, but you can rest assured that the hunt is on. She will be made to regret this: nobody pulls a fast one on Owota Dszira! I’ve sent a hyperwave to the GPR requesting suspension of royalties pending appeal, and I’ll keep you up to date on the progress of my vendetta.

Oh, by the way… to those who care, Happy St. Patrick’s Day from one who knows what it is to have genuinely green blood.

Beware the March of Ideas

It’s the Ides of March, apparently. This is the day that Stabber got seized. Or was it the day that Caesar got stabbed? I always get confused. Anyway, it’s probably irrelevant, since it’s notoriously difficult to be specific about dates that far back in time — and, more to the point, nobody gives a fig either.

At lunch time today I dropped into a café. I really must get the parachute fixed on that ejector seat. Anyway, they were kind enough to furnish me with both coffee and… well, furniture. I had a few hours free this afternoon, so I spent a minute or so browsing the second hand book shelves. At length, I selected a volume about the local area.

I was feeling a little peckish after my flight, so before nestling at the tail end of the establishment, I took a gander at the food. Unfortunately, I mispronounced ‘currant bun’ as ‘current pun’, and got a bit of a shock when I bit into what they’d supplied. I just hope they didn’t overcharge me.

The coffee was refreshing. I could tell because it came with an hourglass that kept revolving alongside it. It’s a good job I wasn’t in my mac, because I think a spinning beachball would have cleared the table faster than the Cincinatti Kid. While I waited, I sat and thought about assassination. Not any particular assassination, you understand: just the general concept. It struck me that it’s simply one of the more extreme manifestations of a mind’s efforts to edit reality to suit its expectations. Or is it one of the more manifest expectations of a suit’s efforts to edit the mind and get real about its extremities? I think the linguistic module I installed when I got to Earth may be in need of servicing.

Anyway, to get back on topic… we all know that killing is wrong, right? And two wrongs don’t make a right, although three rights make a left — but listen up: left or right, a wrong is just wrong, and backward. I’m down with that.

But what about the trolley problem?

You’ve heard of the trolley problem, I assume? Basically there are two supermarket aisles, and a trolley is heading for a stack of 500 tins, and you have to decide whether to push it the other way and knock over 100 tins instead. Or something like that. Never understood what the big problem is, myself, because I’d never manage to hit either stack of tins, given that trolleys have minds of their own. Yes, they really do, actually. They’re installed at the factory and programmed to cause maximum back injury and inconvenience.

But I’ve strayed from the topic. Where was I? Oh, I can’t concentrate now, sorry. I think it’s all those shocks I received from that current pun. For now, I’ll just wish you a Merry Treason Day. Mind your backs.