time ran out of control

when the technicians activated the preservation vibration projector the idea was that the situation on the home world would be preserved like a fly in amber....well, not exactly....there would still be process occuring, but controlled process....controlled be those who were paying for control....that seems fair....but they had not taken all variables into account....they did not really understand the way time relates to matter....when their device began to shake the nature of reality, time got out of hand....millions of years suddenly poured over the planet, like a flood from a broken dam.....the population watched in awe and horror as a fast-forward blur of the centuries reeled rapidly onward....carrying them to the dusty desolate present .....the desert planet the humans found eventually....a side effect of the preservation ray left the wraith like folk in the condition they exhibit now....part material, part vibrational resonance in essence....ghosts, disembodied personalities....condemned to never die, but also to never live in a natural fashion....an arrogant cult of would be experts had messed with things that should not be messed with....and so their empire was lost long into the artificial past....and they were left to drift only semi-real through the sands of time....

that's what she said

When the wraith folk interact with us they appear as very pale and sallow looking humanoids, almost skeletal......the shes with long white hair almost to the ground.....and the hes with equally overlong beards.....there is always a sort of mist hanging around them, even in the heat of the day.....I've never seen them eat or drink, but they do smoke cigarettes.....the she-wraith who for some reason decided to haunt my front porch sat and chain-smoked as she told me this story:  Once this planet was green and fertile, with large oceans....there was abundant wildlife, and plenty of land in crops.....beautiful cities arose over time, and science progressed until space was conquered, and other worlds were reached and colonized.....as the mother planet of a growing empire, this world was bathed in wealth and glory.....the citizens lived in plenty, poverty was unknown.....but some people are never satisfied, some people wanted more than nature granted....they wanted to be immortal.....to keep what they had forever.....a powerful group of politicians and academics funded research into altering the nature of things seeking ways to keep systems from decaying over time.....formulas were developed expressing relationships between space, time, gravity, sub-atomic and quantum level mechanics.....and biological continuity......the time factor was isolated and posited to be what must be acted upon or altered so as to arrest harmful change.....experiments were performed aimed at changing the relation the ground of being has with duration.....this involved constructing a complicated orbiting apparatus which would pump a strange new particle vibration into the upper atmosphere......something went wrong.....

cute little she-wraith

after the ghost swap-meet had been going for a few months the excitement settled down ....Lone Port had been a Spacebook sensation long enough....now it was all just another business, with paid ads scrolling on sidebars of pad screens everywhere......the former population of our desert dirt ball planet sold and traded off a lot of stuff....some cruise liners visited our systems, dropping down tourists and newscasters and con men....you get the picture....but pretty soon most of the good stuff was gone....the ancient art works went for big bucks, but now all the wraiths had to offer at their booths were old pots and pans and bags of used clouthing, not interesting any longer. But a lot of graduate students were still hanging around....seems like every xenohistory department in a thousand universities was getting papers submitted about the Ghosts of a Great Empire.....the wraith race had once upon a time been a thriving interstellar culture....back when dinosaurs roamed Earth, around then anyway....but they as a people had gotten too big for their britches, you might say....they tried to pull their whole population up by their boot straps to god-hood...a mass transendence that backfired on them....my little she-wraith who came back out to my cabin in the flats with me one night has told me the whole sorry story....

posted on Spacebook

Danny Boy used his Sea Breeze account and got a little holo posted on Spacebook promoting the Galaxy Famous Swap Meet From Beyond Space and Time and Local Farmers Market.....he did a good job, the silly holo got millions of hits....you see the desert rushing up at you as the old shuttle drops down from the station, and you whiz over the dirt runway and skid to a stop by a bunch of tents and pavilions set up between the spaceport and the town proper.....the sun is setting, it is the evening shuttle run....the wraiths from the past on this planet flow up from the ground in a dramatic and mystical fashion....music begins to throb from loudspeakers.....the biggest crowd we could get together from kilometers around begins to enter the grounds, acting jovial and excited in really cheesy fashion....us desert rats ain't great actors really....but it all falls together somehow....the real kicker is the stuff the wraiths have brought to barter....nobody has seen things like this before....suits of armor for giants.....beautiful little works of art....ancient swords....paintings, drawings, everyday household goods from a million years ago.....and kilos of cactus apples from us locals too.....what else do we have to offer....where the hell did all these wraith-folk come from all of a sudden....with all this cool stuff?  Well, turns out they did come straight from Hell....the Hell their culture fell in to from it's own hubris....if an old fart like myself can use a word like that.....it's all a long story.....

Dora

Actually, her name is Midora...Japanese ancestry....married to Danny Boy, the Irish ancestry barkeep of the Sea Breeze pub in Lone Port on a mostly desert planet out on the edge of known space...of course she is known for her sushi....I have never actually tried that stuff myself....raw fish, I don't know....I'll just stick with something off the grill, please and thank you....anyway, Dora's other claim to fame, besides her California rolls, is her ability to deal with the wraiths....the ancient denizens of this planet....sort of cartoon ghosts is the way I see them....mostly come out after dark....walk through walls....weep and moan a lot....they have a fascination with our technology....they love television, and game consoles....they will steal your tablet if you aren't careful....where was I....oh yeh...Dora can sit down and do this meditation trip where she can actually summon certain of her wraith friends even in broad daylight....and get them to deal with her on business propositions or whatever....they love sushi, is part of it....well, one afternoon I was in the bar and Dora called up this she-wraith from the space and time when this was a planet with a thriving native population....and Dora, acting on commision from a group of local busisness folks, put forth the proposition that maybe the wraiths could set up a more or less organized flea market or swap meet at the edge of town around dusk on weekends maybe....instead of just popping up at random like they had been doing for decades, maybe things could get more organized....we human folk could get them all the video games they wanted, and they could get rid of whatever garage sale items they had on their hands from the days of their former glory....everybody could make a little profit....we here could export something besides cactus apples....exotic artifacts don't take up much shipping weight usually....maybe we could even get some tourist trade going if a major spaceline carrier saw some potential here....we could do some upgrades on the orbital station....might get some jobs going for us down and out locals, you know?

I got bored

so I went out to the barn and ran a dianostic on the systems of my old Solar-Flyer biplane....it all looks good so I taxi it out to the dirt strip out back and fly on over to Lone Port....the shuttle is still there, hasn't gone back up to the station yet....I tie down and head for the Sea Breeze....a damn bar in the middle of the desert with a nautical theme....fish nets hanging around, beach virtuals, whatever....damned cheap pitchers of local draft....the usual suspects are there....you don't really want to know about them....my usual stool is vacant, so I assume it and order a brew and a shot.....Danny Boy, the ageless barkeep, inquires after my health, etc.....I tell him all is fine....he goes back to washing beer glasses....a nasty looking prospector type dude kinda leans to one side on his stool and rips off a whiskey fart....nothing like drinking in a class joint, I alwaya say....I ask the fart dude if he has had much luck lately out in the sands....any thing out there worth any bucks? Dude allows as how one night over towards Oasis Three a she-wraith from the Old had come into our reality and offered to trade him an ancient mystic battle-axe for anything electronic....so he had swapped his tune player for a two meter tall art work from another dimension...a beautiful aritifact....he had a broker working on it....seeing what it might go for back in the civilized zones....he was feeling pretty good about the whole situation...we sat and drank for the rest of the afternoon...then we got some ribs and onion rings....sometimes I've had wraiths from the Old drop by my place out in the nothing...maybe I should see if any of them want to barter cheap goods for priceless objects from the Other Realms....

thunderheads to the west

the double boom and the contrails in the hard blue sky....the noon shuttle is dropping down towards Lone Port...pick up the pad and thumb on the video from the spaceport landing strip....dust and noise as the scrorched old bird makes it down one more time....the bright orange bus drives out from the terminal....anybody new coming dirtside? probably not...put down the pad and pick up your beer....squint out into the wavering desert air....mid day heat....a plume of yellow dust rising overthere on the jeep trail ....somebody heading from Dead Springs off towards Witch Mountain....must be one of the Tyson boys....another pull at the beer bottle.....the wind starts kicking up....radar on the pad shows a system headed up out of the gulf....thunderheads starting up over the far mountains....doubt if any rain will get down here today....might be flash-floods in the foothills over that direction though....hope any prospectors out that way have their electronics on....those flash-floods can be scary....remember that time my brother got caught out at Split Mountain....back forty years that must be now....devil dogs got him out in the Terrible Lands not long after that ....he should have just stayed here in the Bad Lands, instead of messing around out there in the Terribles....looking to strike it rich somehow, find something strange to sell in Port....plenty strange things out there still, even after all the years....this whole damn planet is too strange for a lot of folks....well, that leaves more for us, the oldtimers....not that many of us left on this mean ball of dirt, out past the edge of any real civilization....nobody much out here to pester you anyway....there's some of them skank crows over that way....wonder what died for them to eat?.....maybe a sand hog....it's getting too hot to sit out here, even in the porch shade....finish the beer and head inside and look for some kind of lunch.....

more Wandering City lore.....

The Captain and the Adept are in the main lounge, as the starclipper dashes recklessly on through the twists and turns of the astral plane interface with common reality......

"Captain" says the Adept...."I have been told that your City wanders through both space and time.....can you elucidate this concept for me somewhat?"

The Captain tries to explain: "The Wandering City to us who are natives of the place does not in fact wander at all.....it stays in one place and one time.....while the cosmos wanders around it in a disconcerting manner. You see, before the Event that gave rise to the edition of the multiverse which supports this particular galaxy....and the others visible from this one.....the City was already in existence.....in fact, it has always been present....even before what you might call the beginning of Time."

The Adept offers a wide-eyed look, knocks back a dram of whisky, and says "Pray continue."

"You see" explains our Captain..."The foundation of the City is a nexus of dimensional planes....a very rare thing sprung directly from an accident of Chaos.....the normal pulse of All-that-Is does not effect it's history.......the probability-lines and quantum flux of Physics that knit together the space-time of the rest of the Milky Way can't grab a hold of it enough to make it behave in any sane fashion. It might be found in one spiral arm or another....or out at the Rim....or deep down in the Core.....or before your Sol was formed, or long after that star is but a memory.....the City abides, biological and mechanical races of beings come and go....vast empires rise and fall.....the City is still there, beyond eternal."

The Adept frowns, ponders for a moment, and asks...."But you can bring us to this strange place somehow?"

"We are half-way there already, my friend. I was born there, so I share in the essence of the Beyond Nexus, and am thus always linked to it, however much everything else wanders around it."

"So you are not really Human, but of a race from outside of, or before.....this plane of existence?"

"No, I am a Natural Human. I was born of a man and a woman who left Yorkshire, England, in the time of King John.....the one who signed the Magna Carta.....they were abducted by aliens....who sold them as slaves in the City Market.....it's a long story."

meanwhile

half-way down the Boardwalk on the edge of the Wandering City, Old Wyrm starts another day.....crawling out of bed and heading towards the bathroom it tries to remember what day of the week it is.....it's belly slides in the familiar groove in the floor of it's cave as it drags itself with massive claws ......it belches fiery gasses, and farts a smoky cloud....too much wine and sweetmeats after dinner....again.....it considers what it might find in the larder.....some cold fowl and a pork-belly will do for breakfast.....and some litres of coffee....some melons......pan dulce?

The crowds for the midway sideshows don't begin to build up until well after noon.....it has the whole morning to get it's head together.....first it needs to go over the racing forms for the Velodrome and the Late Meeting.....should check the bank-account online.....should turn on the news and see how the various galactic wars are progressing.....those always affect the stock-markets.....it grumbles to itself and inspects it's horrid array of fangs in the mirror.....it takes a bucket of mouthwash, gargles, and spits into the tub.....

It drags into the kitchen, and growls at the coffee-maker, getting it started.....

thousands of light-years behind, the star-clipper swiftly slides it's boson-greased keel along the membrane between elemental reality and the astral plane.....speeding our cast of characters towards their destined confrontation with Old Wyrm, and all that such a meeting implies for mankind.....and for the dragons.....

we are dragon-mind

wetware in mechanized brain-buckets.....hell of a way to make a living.....it's a nasty job, but somebody has got to do it.....actually, it's sort of a relief from pure transcendent bliss....that can get tedious to some personality types.....so we got talked into doing a retro-corporeal stint in thick old reality.....the mud from which we evolved ......there's two sides to this: the up side is that we are now exposed to heart-warming interactions with cuddly flesh-and-blood folk that cannot be found anywhere in the higher realms.....the downside is the heart-ache that goes along with things like pain, existential despair, and simple mortality......which we as a race left behind when we elected to transcend.....

Why are we here.....that's what mortals always want to know.....we know why we are here aboard this ship chasing after the Wandering City....that's a more specific "why".....we're here to seek out a dragon who stayed behind.....the dragon-powers in the current administration feel that no one dragon should compromise the consensus by refusing to go along with everybody else in leaving the merely physical galaxy behind to the mammals and the machines and the bugs and all the other disgusting beings that pestered us for so long.....

The Last Dragon so beloved of the news media is thought to be still enjoying itself safe in the haven of Wandering City.....appearing as an attraction in a carnival sideshow! You can see how this might upset the more staid and holier-than-thou type dragon politicians and moral pundits.....it's seen as a disgrace that must be rectified.....so we two dragon-mind mates have been contracted to drop down to the old ways and find the freak who causes such consternation is some circles of proper society.....

Once we found passage to the City, things have gotten somewhat interesting.....we are not the only ones seeking the Dragon.....our shipmates of a human nature are also seeking the Old Wyrm.....to learn the esoteric wisdom of dragon-kind hermetic philosophies.....this all might get interesting.....it seems that there is still a ways to go before any of us reaches our goals.....we are on course at the moment, but we might be in for a bumpy ride.....

smokin' ghost host

After a week subjective human time into the voyage chasing the Wandering City I was rethinking some assumptions I had made about my passengers.....to begin with, the folks I had taken to be a bunch of scumbag dope-heads on the lam from a deal gone bad turn out to be nothing of the sort....they are in fact an esoteric shamanic cult seeking wisdom that might be hidden in the City.....what they are smoking isn't really a "recreational drug".....it's a spiritual catalyst that allows the user to reach a mind-state conducive to enlightenment and growth as a galactic being....

Adelia, a young lady of the group, was telling me the other day something I hadn't heard before about mutants like her who had some machine cultured DNA in their genome....machine made biots apparently all have a quantum communication link bred into their brains, so the Machine Ghost in the God Cloud processors can be in constant contact with any linked individual, no matter what their spatial-temporal situation is.....machine children are never lost....

And the dragon-mind pair.....of course they are linked to Dragon Realm at all times by a transcendent wave function....so I'm the most isolated entity on board it seems.....even ship-brain is linked always to Galactic Navigation.....my own link to the Wandering City isn't really much more than a scent on the star-winds....not any solid connection with any band-width to speak of.....but the dragons and the pilgrims still need me as pilot, since not even God Cloud or Dragon Realm have any information about how to get to the City.....it just wanders too much....

Adelia

is my name.....I am of mixed-DNA.....human science would say roughly 70 percent Earth derived, and the balance a mixture of "natural other" and "artificial manufactured"......manufactured by the machine cultures down towards galactic core.....my current partners on this trip are of similar make-up, except for Elder who is a complete natural human. It seems that the Captain of the ship is also full natural.....and I've never seen anything like the dragon-mind brain-walkers before.....I've seen full bore machine entities of course.....and cyborgs abound along the frontier.....but I didn't know that any Transcended race would sometimes go slumming in sticky old mineral reality.....

The Captain thinks we're just dopers on the run.....well, that's how we presented ourselves. But really we are pilgrims on a spiritual quest. Perhaps the dragon-mind is on a quest too....looking for something they left behind? That's just a feeling I have.....but since joining this clan I've been able to develop intuitions that I see as trustworthy.....or as trustworthy as "empirical fact" or "logic"......One thing I have determined directly is that the dragon-mind does leave the brain-walkers at will to wander around the ship.....and even go outside the ship.....that's a benefit of Transcendence......Elder goes with them sometimes, as he is Adept.....I'm still just a student.....trying to gain practice.....

Elder says that when we reach the Wandering City spiritual progress will be facilitated ......the culture there is even older than machine culture.....the Wanderers carry secrets from very rarified and powerful realms.....the Captain must be from the City to know how to get there.....maybe there is more to him than I think.....I'll ask Elder .......but now it's my time for sacrament and meditation.....Practice leads Within to Clarity.....

Far ahead of the ship the City spins and twirls on the undercurrents of dark energy like a leaf in the wind as it plunges endlessly onwards......surrounded by eons of clutter and flotsom it streams between the stars almost as fast as light.....time dragging slowly in it's environs while the centuries dance blithely by in the gravity wells of star and planet......

dragon-mind brain-walkers

real sleazy characters in my opinion.....but they came up with the money, so we lifted out of the gravity-well of that putrid dirt-ball called Holy Shiriz and started building up velocity towards event capability......the walkers were machine-tech of a pretty high grade, triple shielded and scan hardened.....with unknown weapons potential.....and dragon-mind is so damn old and eerie that I can never really get a grip on what motivates it.....why leave some ancient brains clumping about on this plane in mechanical walkers when the rest of your race has transcended to a higher realm?

The two I had on board must have drawn real shit-jobs to be stuck in this reality. The only other passengers were a family of dope-pushers, who had paid some big bucks at the last minute to get away from some other family of dope-pushers who were after their scalps.....at least they were more-or-less human, compared to the walkers anyway.....the pushers had to be maybe half bugger-mutation from what I could tell.....they didn't care where we were going....they stayed too fucked up to care much about anything....

But the dragon-mind did care very much about our proposed trans-reality vector.....they were determined to intersect space-time lines with the Wandering City of myth and legend....well, I can do that....I've done it before.....I was born there....it's in my blood....so when we get up close to the speed of light in a week or so and things start getting all strange in the peculiar way they do in that situation, I am confident that my mind-melt will flow in harmony with the traces of home-song left by the City in it's eternal transit of the galaxy....

This old tub is designed to be a one-man job....my crew is only a few machine egos who sometimes manifest holo-fashion to interact with passengers.....take their breakfast orders, direct them to the sky-lounge, that sort of thing....I run a class act....sure....believe that if you want to.....the brain-walkers don't eat or sleep anyway, they don't need food or clean linens....they just want to plug themselves into a wall socket now and then.....the dopers don't care about clean linens either, but they do want to eat and booze all the time seems like.....this might be a long strange trip.....

We are at 90% light-speed, and I lock myself away on the bridge, with the holo-egos left to look after things, take care of the passengers and routine ship-systems.....sitting at the command-station I am enveloped by the sidereal wave flux at a quantum level, so that my Attention becomes a thing of such sharp focus that it cuts through the clutter of star-burst and dark-matter swirl and time-bubbles and all that and fastens itself onto the faint clear call of the wake of the Wandering City......my hands interface with the manual control matrix, and, in a pilot-trance.....I direct our course through various reality-splatter to an auto-lock on my birthplace, as only a native can do.....it is our heritage that guides us.....

The dragon-mind expresses pleasure when I inform them that everything looks OK as far as getting to the City goes.....should take about forty days human-subjective....don't know what that means in dragon-time.....the dope-pusher people go "Cool captain dude, right arm!" So I sit around with them for a while and smoke some.....nothing much else to do outside of physical reality in automatic hyperspace transit mode......but I'm wondering why the brain-walkers are so intent on reaching the City.....hope they aren't going to stir up any trouble.....