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.....