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.....