Tingles from Coast to Coast: The way things really are

Tingles from Coast to Coast: The way things really are: Things are really just an accident....it's silly to think that there is any profound or higher meaning....our awareness of life is just ...

The way things really are

Things are really just an accident....it's silly to think that there is any profound or higher meaning....our awareness of life is just a side effect of quantum conditions in the stuff in our skulls....we are unfortunate enough to have evolved to a point that allows us to recognize and question our place in .....in what?  In whatever you want to call it....."reality"?

In the wee small hours

Most decent folk were asleep an hour after midnight when the explosion rocked the area.....the lights went out, the telephone lines went dead.....sirens began to sound, and bells rang.....hidden in our basement office, we lit kerosine lamps and fell back on emergency drill, dispatching runners to predetermined offices of various police and security functions of the government.  Darkness was giving way to dawn when the lines started ringing again.....a while later current was restored....callers were asking us if we knew what was going on, but we had no answers yet. One of our officers returned from his trip to a close police station, to report that the fire was out now and detectives were starting to study the scene.....it looked like a bomb had been planted, it was not thought to be some kind of industrial accident in the power station.

Superior offices gave us the word to not release to callers of lower clearance the true nature of the incident.....they did not want the newspapers to be putting out extra editions stirring up fears in the public of anarchist mad bombers on the loose in the city.  But all resources were being mobilized to find exactly that....the mad bombers.....the detectives did find some evidence of their identity....in many small pieces at the scene.....it was beginning to look like their device had gone off prematurely, catching the madmen in their own blast of high explosives.....a wallet was found that had not burned....a name was associated through our files with another name.....and eventually the nature of the anarchist cell was deduced.....these findings are classified to this day, and the public will probably never know what really disturbed their rest that dark night.

Theory

A call came in one afternoon from an Admiral's office at the War College.....someone had gone missing, a theorist with access to the most secret aspects of current strategic thinking.  He had been on a short vacation, to deal with personal matters he had said....so some days had passed before anyone at his office even realized that he was out of contact.  He was unmarried....his known friends and relations did not know where he might be.....did the Agency have any file on him?

Our only entry under his name was a confirmation that his security clearance was of the highest level.....all we could do was speculate.....  Speculation sometimes leads to some good result.  Talking with his close associates at his office, one of our Field Officers ascertained that the gentleman in question had been morose of late.....distracted and glum, out of sorts .....personal matters?  In his rooms we found a book....The State of Man: Metaphysics of the Modern Age....a work of a fairly radical foreign philosopher, who freely disparaged the traditional ideals of established human society.

Of course the leadership of the War College were concerned that perhaps the theorist had been abducted by some clandestine intelligence organization, or had gone over to another government with his insights into our military thinking seeking profit, or for some other reason....perhaps he had other loyalties.....But some of us involved in the matter began to speculate that this lonely and seemingly depressed individual might have decided that the modern condition of humanity was something inherently unbearable.  He had last been seen on a tram that went to a resort area by the sea.....eventually his remains were found.....he had walked into the water with heavy rocks in the pockets of his overcoat.....a victim of metaphysical theory?

There's a woman screaming in my back garden

The caller said that there was a woman screaming in his back garden.....he gave me his address, and I quickly made a connection with an on going problem in that neighborhood.....checking with a Field Officer, I confirmed that the back garden in question connected with the back garden of an address where narcotics activity was suspected.  And not just any ordinary narcotic activity, but a new class of mind altering drug activity.....a rouge chemist once associated with Royal College was known to be somewhere in the city at the time.  He was thought to be tricking persons into ingesting a substance that caused visions that could be beautiful, or could be horrific.....

Officers were dispatched, who did not look like policemen of course.....they looked  like typical Club members who would belong in the neighborhood.....they approached the distraught woman and administered a sedative, so that they could remove her quietly from the premises.  A second team awaited word as to whether or not the suspected narcotics house should be raided .....the family resident there had political connections at a national level, discretion in order ......Eventually we were informed that the father of the young woman had been contacted by a higher official in the government and been given the current circumstances.....the father was in another city at the time and had no idea what was going on at his house here.  He authorized our team to proceed as they thought best .....

A son of the family and a number of guests from his social circle were interviewed after our people entered the premises.....the son directed our attention to a guest house in their garden, where the criminal chemist was found in a non responsive state, having indulged himself too much in his own concoctions.  Medical procedures restored the daughter to a better mental state.....the erstwhile professor was transported out of the Republic, that is all I know about his fate.....

A dark highway

An Undersecretary calls from a roadside inn....he and some friends had been motoring back from the seashore casinos when they came upon an altercation occuring on a lonely stretch of road in the orchards.....they heard what they took to be a gunshot, and two men sped away into the orchards on foot, leaving a man slumped over in an expensive model vehicle.  They investigated and found the man to be wounded and bleeding profusely.....they did their best to staunch the wound, and took both cars and the victim to the first light they found along the highway.....where the Undersecretary decided to call Agency, since he recognized the injured man as a member of a highly placed family, and so thought discretion would be in order.

I called our contact at the Sheriff's Office, and Deputies were dispatched to render aid.  A private clinic treated the gunshot damage, and the family made sure no mention of the incident was made in the press.  But something had to be done about these fellows who were watching at casinos for winners, and then waylaying them on the highway somehow.....here is where our Field Officers enter the picture.....we made a plan to catch the thiefs.  The management of the casinos and the rich folk that frequented them did not want publicity focused on the problem, so we operated undercover.

Our Officer played the part of a lucky winner....he bought a round at the bar, and then left the casino obviously flush with winnings.....heading back towards the city through the orchards, he found two men by the side of the highway.....one fellow appeared to be injured or in some kind of distress, while the other was calling and waving for help.  When our man stopped, the two ruffians presented revolvers and demanded cash.....our trained and skilled officer made as to reach for his wallet, but in fact pulled out his automatic pistol and shot the two men dead.  Officially, this never happened.....there was no Court publicity to trouble the gambling industry, and the unsavory elements heeded this warning that hijackers would be dealt with harshly.....I wrote all this up in a report, which is not open to press or public.....

The wife of the Justice

It was close to midnight when a call came in to the Agency number .....my shift was almost over, it had been uneventful for the most part.  The Hill District Precient operator asked me to wait as she handed me over to the Duty Captain.....he told me that a patrol had found one of the new private motor vehicles on its side in a ditch near the Enclave.....the wife of the Justice was scarped and bruised.....and very drunk.   The Captain was asking for assistance in locating His Honor the husband....his domestic staff was of no help, and Madame was incoherent yet.....

From notes we kept on His Honor, I speculated that he might be at this hour in the company of a younger lady who lived in the Old Castle Village area.....I did not relay this speculation to the Captain....rather, I dispatched one of our own Agency officers to the suspected address.  An Officier of some experience in this sort of situation was able to contact the husband, so that he could go himself to the Precient and conduct his wife privately home, to be helped by discrete medical persons....Nothing was written down regarding this incident by the Police.....the vehicle was gone from the ditch long before dawn.  But the Log on my desk carefully recorded names, times, places....Nothing was mentioned in the newspapers of course.

This is an example of the type of thing we dealt with quite often.  Some shifts were without incident, and some shifts verged on chaos......sometimes drunkenness and infidelity were the problems, sometimes it was gunfire and murder that made the telephone ring.....

Switchboard operator deluxe

In a sub basement down a dim hallway just past some Public Restrooms I finally found a door marked Do Not Enter Miscellaneous Agency.  I knocked on the door and it was swiftly opened by a tall, balding middle aged bearded fellow who reeked of Senior Staff....he gave me a wry little smile and welcomed me to the Agency.  I won't mention his name, just as I have not mentioned my own....discretion is the heart and soul of the Agency.....but if you read the newspapers you might have seen him mentioned from time to time, in some story about old families doing charity functions.....

We passed through an outer office where a nice looking young secretary smiled up at us from her desk as we passed, and then returned to opening the morning mail and sorting it into wire baskets....the Senior went behind his desk, and motioned me into the visitors chair.  He picked up a file with my name on the cover, and glanced at it as if to refresh his memory on some point. He noted to me that as Senior Expediter over the years I had dealt with many complicated problems, and had done a fine job in resolving them....he went on to say that my new Agency would not present me with any shortage of problems....we signed some paperwork, he gave me a gilded Shield from out of a desk drawer, and we stood and shook hands.
Then we went trough another door off his office into a room where a gentleman was seated at a telephone switchboard, talking into an upright mouthpiece in front of him, listening through a headphone over one ear.  He glanced up and offered a wink and a nod as we entered and stood by....
The Senior informed me that this person was at the moment acting in the capacity of Control Officer....and that he would be training me as to the duties of this position for a few weeks or however long it might take for me to be comfortable doing these duties on a shift of my own.  And so I entered the secret world of the Miscellaneous problems of The Government.....

A local official

I served for many years as a minor functionary in the Civil Service, dealing mostly with the problems involved in getting one Office to comprehend what another Office was doing.....or more likely, not doing.  This is a problem in modern government, since so may laws and regulations tend to stipulate contrary outcomes to the same situation.....the persons who have to untangle the twists and knots of it all are called Staff.....when one group of Staff conflicts with another group of Staff, it's a problem for Senior Staff.....usually people who are becoming grim and jaded and are longing already for Retirement....

An Expediter,  under the latest edition of the Omnibus Civil Service Reform Act....is someone who is tasked with bumping the heads of Senior Staff together until they actually accomplish something.....I thought I was about done with my tour in Civil Service after ten years as Expediter,  Senior Grade, when I was summoned one afternoon to the Office of Advancement.....where I was informed that I was being advanced.   I was being assigned to fill a vacancy in the Miscellaneous Agency.....to replace a sitting official who had met with an unfortunate accident.....of the fatal sort.  There would be a pay upgrade involved, and so larger responsibility would be involved also of course, and I was assured that the Staff involved at the proper level had every confidence in my ability to handle my new tasks.....oh, and you are now a Shielded Officer.

So at the beginning of a new work week I wended my way deep into a Government Office building I had never seen or heard tell of before, to begin a new phase of my career.....dealing with the type of thing that sticks to your boots if you step in it.....well, there was more pay and higher status involved, right?

an officier of the miscellaneous agency

In the old days, when things were under the control of the ancient Houses and the Royal Institutions.....before the establishment of the present Republic.....certain matters that required great discretion were routinely referred to what was called the Closet Cabinet.  The members of this cabinet were chosen by the Monarch at the nomination of the most powerful Houses.....dour and clever old men dominated this body, never calling any unwarranted attentions to their doings if they could help it.  They dealt with situations that never should have come about in the first place, in a proper and well mannered course of events.

Since the ultimate privacy of their decisions was gaurded by long standing tradition, they operated with effective impunity and were their own oversight.  Persons in high office and of privileged birth may well become involved in awkward affairs just as more common folk might stumble sometimes during their private lives.....the Cabinet was there to gloss over and make little of such unfortunate occurrences....money might change hands to buy satisfaction for one party or another.....or perhaps more forceful measures might be found be be in order....but whatever was done, was done under the table as much as possible....no one need peer into the Closet, that might be dangerous.

I am sure the reader understands the type of thing I am talking about....namely the kind of thing I would be foolish to talk about.....but some stories should be told....on moral grounds?  Or just to edify future generations as to the foibles of their forefathers.....But I myself have no tales to tell from the days of the Cabinet, since that body was superseded along with many old institutions when the Last Monarch abdicated and passed power to the Republic.  The Constitution of the
Republic has many clauses dealing with the division of  authority over this and that.....there is a sub clause deep in the document which hints at the necessity for a Miscellaneous Agency.....a body to do what the Closet Cabinet did under the ancient order of things...

Embarcadero lounging

    Some Pures were lounging on the embaracadero and a bunch of Cosmos came strolling along.....with studied indifference they ignored each other.....this is good, we like to keep the peace on the station.....of course Pures aren't really very pure in this day and age.....natural humans don't have blood nanos and cyber link implants.....but they are still more natural I guess than the Cosmos with their semi alien DNA and Machine Culture amendments....conservatives and liberals....the past and the future....right and left .......age old problems.....
     I don't know what I should call myself...I was natural born of a man and a woman, but during the last war I was mashed all up in combat down on a dirt ball and found half dead by a Machine unit that used Elder tech on me to keep me alive and eventually rehabbed.  ...but now my RNA doesn't quite jibe with my DNA.....and I think some Quarantine officials might say I was at least to some degree Cyborg, and so Undesireable in some local societies....mixed blood .....a monster?
     At least here on the Frontier we all have to tolerate each other .....just surviving sandwiched between Human Hegemony and Machine Establishment is enough trouble, without fighting amoungts ourselves......it all does make for a lively bar scene and nightlife...you can see any damn strange thing you might want going on around here.....and plenty you might not want ......
     Let me tell you about last Thursday late down on Whisky Street.....

Here I am now

Once I was one of many like myself, doing my duty in the service of the commonwealth.....this is what we had been brought up to do.....birth, school, then work.....myself and my peers worked in Space Service.....we seldom touched down on any planet, we lived in ships or sometimes on stations....we interacted mostly with intelligent systems of cybernetic nature.....other people were usually encountered in holographic projection.....we each had a domain to maintain in the whole scheme of things......the job was to oversee machine functions, because nothing is really automatic after all, as much as we might wish it were......at the beginning of my shift one day something went really wrong, an aberration in the quantum shifter rhythm sent my module just slightly out of consensus reality onto a divergent track.....I am here now.....but I'm not sure where here is.....or when it is.....

My module maintains integrity....I have air, water, food as usual....but I have no contact with the others anymore....I call out, but get no answer.....readings indicate that conditions outside of my module's singularity bubble are not standard.....basic physical constants are wrong.....subatomic structure does not compute as it should.....space time shift function is not functioning....I'm stuck in limbo.....no news broadcasts are coming in.....my shows aren't showing up in the evening...the lights still get dim when it's time for bed, and get bright again when it's time to go to work, but I can't do any work anymore.....I have no contact with system functions.......

Information resources are not any help, this situation seems to have no precedent in memory.....I am here now.....

The Expediting Officier

     An adjunct in a uniform I did not recognize led me down a dimly lit hallway to a door gaurded by two sentries armed with what looked like automatic shotguns.  They presented arms and clicked their heels as they passed us through into the meeting room where half a dozen senior officers and four stone faced civilians of grim demeanor were seated around a large oval table of some dark wood.
     I caught the eye of Admiral Dean near the head of the table, next to a civilian whose name I couldn't remember, but I knew he was somebody high up in the administration.  The adjunct closed the door as he left the room.  The Admiral motioned me to a vacant chair.
     "Gentlemen, this is Officier Tell, of the Expediting Branch." he introduces me to the gathering....
     " He will be our man on the ground in Port Martini."
    Oh great, I'm going to be the man on the ground again.  Sometimes I get tired of getting knocked down and picking myself up off the ground in some godforsaken frontier port with little or no support for law and order and all kinds of nasty hostiles kicking around.  But if something needs expediting....well, that's our job description...
     "Let's get up to speed and review the facts..."says the Admiral....



     I don't like the facts very much after they are laid out....it seems that the Establishment has moved a squadron of heavy cruisers into the Zone.....all the while denying that plain fact through diplomatic channels.....so Regional Authority on our side is asking for Treaty Forces to move some heavy units into the area quick like.....and the Buggers, as usual, are acting up.....zipping around I their fast- boats doing what they can to confuse and confound both sides.....so I'm getting on a hyper frigate in the morning and blasting off to Port Martini again, to expedite the situation......last time I was out there
I almost got killed....and almost got married.....and had a lot to drink.....and in the end they gave me a Special Service Medal and promised me six months vacation.....that I never got.....

     Aboard the hyper frigate Belle Chance six days out from Fleet Deep Sector.....

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.....

Hometown

Towards the end of the previous century, the pioneers from New Mars found this moon in orbit around a gas giant which itself orbited a Sol class star. The space lane out from human territory was following a dimensional twist down the spiral arm towards galactic center, and it came close enough to this system to make for a good drop point. On the edge of the stellar gravity well a ship could transition safely enough to hard physics and glide on to the moon's traffic control net. Before they established any details like traffic control, they had to get the basic infrastructure up and running. The first thing you do is probe the moon geology to find a stable point, and then you insert a chunk of neutron star as a gravity anchor, so you can build up a unity field to give you one gee on the surface, and hold down the air bubble.

The good folk who did all this work had floated a government loan, and were determined to pay it off as quick as they could, for the sake of their children and grandchildren. Being from New Mars, they came from a culture where their own ancestors had done this kind of thing themselves, they were just following an established pattern of colonial success. When somebody asked them what name Lane Authority should put on the star chart for their new settlement, they said that since this was going to be their home town from now on, why not just call it that: Hometown.

The years went by and the human swarm kept pushing down the arm, traffic kept dropping off the Lane and swinging down to Hometown as a rest stop, repair facility, grocery store, beer bar, entertainment center, whatever would sell, whatever travelers buy. After fifty years the loan was paid off, and Hometown was a full-fledged Local Government Entity of the Confederation. The dark energy feed off the Lane provided the data link that kept them in sync with the rest of humanity, they ran their clocks on Greenwich Mean Time, just like everybody else, their environmental systems pumped out day and night and the four seasons and more or less random weather just like on New Mars, or on ten thousand other gravity tap air bubble settlements.

Central-Standard Lines entered into an agreement with Hometown Council, and built a direct connection station right above the bubble, so that now regular scheduled flights are available from Hometown to anywhere Central-Standard serves; lay-overs and restrictions may apply. The transit and room taxes from this arrangement provide a hefty chunk of the Entity annual budget. Taxes on water export are another income source; ships always seem to want more water. And the fuel facility has been another good profit-point; the Lines offering stable contracts. There is a decent amount of in-system production of minerals and petrochemicals, so local hard-space ships are always coming and going, paying taxes and fees.

It's all big enough now that there are four high schools and a college, a large sports-complex, a vibrant downtown night life on the weekends, and many of the usual civic and social organizations and societies common to the human culture. And of course over the years there has been the usual festering growth of an unsavory underworld and an ever increasing mass of lost generation bored rebellious youth; folks who do not appreciate as they should the sterling values their forefathers have sacrificed so much for to build up in their Hometown.

serendipity

is that what you call it? The Green administration that had come in through the last election had targeted the depressed rural counties with clean energy projects......our town got a company in from Brazil to help finance a factory making the clever gravity-tap generators that the kids in California had come up with......so when we got sliced off from the grid.....and from the rest of our old reality.....we at least had some way to get electricity. The factory couldn't sell their units to the emerging nations like they had been planning to do, since there wasn't any money any more to begin with.....and no more emerging nations either.....so they just went ahead and gave away the stock they had ready to go to the folks around here......We've got ours sitting out in the back yard......just yanked the city meter off the wall and wired the house up to the tap after the factory boys had calibrated it to the local deep gravity phase-shift, or whatever.....anyway, it works.....there's only one channel on the TV though, from the College.....and one radio station, from Public Safety......

But things could have been a hell of lot worse.....we could be reading by candle light I guess....as it is, most cooking gets done on a wood fire of some sort, since there isn't any natural gas flowing anymore, and an electric range draws down the tap pretty fast.....you have to be careful with your current flow.....most folks run the fridge first, and then go from there......no more central heat and air.....except at the hospital, where they have a whole big bank of units.....

And it's a good thing this county had some good breeding stock on a few of the close in farms......you take the engine and all out of a pick-up truck, and then it might be light enough for a team of horses to pull it out into the woods......so you can get firewood for the winter.....a lot of closed up old fireplaces got renovated around town.....

And I use a bit of wood keeping the still going......good thing my grandpa had left all that stuff in the big shed......whisky makes a pretty decent currency in a barter economy......

by the middle of the 21st century

consensus reality was under constant stress from the pressures introduced by accident when experiments in quantum physics got out of hand.....a lot of historians tend to blame the Chinese, since they did not heed the warnings from the CalTech Group which started the whole thing.....the folks in Pasadena had predicted that excessive "dark force" manipulation could lead to undesirable and dangerous consequences.....but with the state of anarchy that came after the fall of the ChiComs in 2132, there was nobody to police the radicals in the Chinese universities, and they still had vast resources at hand....

So the South China Group went hog wild with the new gravity wave technology, pushing things to the extreme......they were trying to achieve an anti-gravity engine, to seize the high ground by levitating industrial complexes to Earth orbit.....but the complications of messing around with basic constants were not fully understood at that point in space-time.....and so the China Accident came to pass.....

The space station they had been trying to lift to orbit was instead transported to another layer of the multiverse, along with a thousand or so hectares of the Chinese countryside.....all that was left to see was a big hole in the ground.....

The newscasters said "This is unreal!" And they were right, un-reality had been introduced into our environment.....the "dark matter" that underlies the consensus reality had shock waves running through it.....so everything started "shaking like a bowl full of jelly".....

One thing that happened was that a small town in South Carolina was whisked away to an alternate history......the moon and the stars and all were still there, and you could breath the air and drink the water.....and there were birds and flowers and trees.....but there were no other people they could find anywhere close by.....and no electrical grid, no radio waves.....nothing technological besides what that had with them.....batteries that would soon run out of juice, cars that would soon run out of gas......drugstores that would soon run out of drugs......no trucks bringing in foodstuffs....you starting to get the picture?

(to be continued)

down towards galactic center

aboard the liner Belle Epoch fives days out of Port Martini, about to cross over the line into Machine Space......

Baylor studied his image in the mirror, adjusting his cravat, and flicking away imagined specks from his nicely cut frock coat.....he switched off the mirror and picked up his silver-knobbed stick, and left his cabin in first class headed towards the Casino.....all about him is polished golden wood and gleaming brass.....thick red carpet, artificial gaslight, late Victorian style notes of the decor shading into Craftsman and art nouveau touches.....Management had found just the right note, he thought.....to convey a sense of Edwardian decadence and luxury......his fellow passengers all play the game to the hilt.....ladies with corseted waists and bustles twirling parasols, gentlemen striding in polished black boots, etc....

The Casino is a marvel, a more sophisticated venue for gaming cannot be imagined....all is spot on perfect in detail......Baylor glides blithely to his accustomed spot at the roulette .....smiles and nods greet him .....he obtains chips and places them .....the evening begins.....

Several decks deeper than Casino, in the mechanical bowels of the great starship, a stealth droid is creeping through access tubes, up to no good I'm sure......Management is not aware of it's purposes.....it is not even aware of it's presence, if the plan is going well.....

A couple light years off the starboard bow, a Machine Dominion corvette tracks the quantum sign of the droid.....it also tracks the sign of the silver knob on Baylor's walking stick....

Back on Casino deck, Baylor is raking in the chips......Management scowls somewhat.....

in the dawning

I look through the narrow tower window and look out over the mists rising off the glades below the castle.....a fairy maid somehow senses that I am up and about, and comes through the stone wall in the strange way of the folk here, offering me cider and cheese and bread for a breakfast.....actually, what they call "first breakfast"....a little something before the early morning romp over hill and dale which all here participate in....dashing about in the coolness of the morning.....a little later folk will assemble on a terrace for proper breakfast, with eggs and kippers and bacon and scones....."breakfast wine".....and exotic fruits with names I do not know.....

I will run and dance and sport with the younger folk of the castle through the hours until noon, when a more formal meal will be served in the Great Hall......here Grandfather will take me in hand, and on into the afternoon I will receive the instruction that I was brought here from Earth to garner....

I learn of the noumenal, which is unknowable......my life here is beyond strange, which is why I was brought here still young......

events of note

I must attempt to record some developments of importance as regards the relationship between this sphere of reality and the next one over.....for three generations, since the time of the Green Magus, there has been a portal open to another world which is much like ours, but which is different in certain crucial respects.....mainly, on the Other Side, the "powers-that-be" are of a strange nature.....here in our mundane reality we may think and talk about and perhaps pray to the "powers" .....but with little actual effect to our daily lives.....our reality continues rock-hard and thick with unchanging sameness, not varying with the whims of free thought and poetic fancy....but just over the Border things are more free..... Mind has more reign over Matter.....

My grandfather often crossed over to the other side, and when I was a child he would tell tales of what wonders could be found Over There....and when I was twelve years old he took me with him once across the Bridge of Stars......of course I could be burned alive as a heretic by the Temple if I asserted this memory of mine as the truth....but it did happen.....

My grandfather took my hand and we entered the cave under the hill where the bonfires were made on holy days.....soon we were lost in utter darkness, but my grand-sire and name-sake did not falter on the path....down and down we went into the heart of Earth....."the Way lies Within"......somehow, in seeming contradiction of common sense, deep below the ground we came to an open glade with the stars crowded above us in marvelous abundance.....one bright star at the zenith flamed large, and somehow seized upon us and drew us up and away and beyond the reality we were born into.....

Flying and falling through the cosmos, we sped towards a circle of stars.....and on and on we went.....finally, we plunged down through air and clouds to a fair wondrous land of strange beasts and shining gentle persons who welcomed us, and took us into their castles, and anointed us with rich oils, and garbed us in fine robes, and told us we were welcome and more.....

The Maestro's party

settled into the rooms of the inn according to their varying status.....the Maestro himself and his Clerk into an upstairs apartment of some comfort, considering the forsaken wild country they found themselves in......our guide and myself took a smaller but clean and cheery enough room looking out over the courtyard, where the guardsmen and the drovers were to be housed about in the lofts over the barns and stables ......our horses and pack-mules were being cared for and fed.....the innkeeper had sent a boy to the Fort, with a message for the River Captain....asking for permission to continue our journey deeper into the Forest Lands.....the Clerk scowled and muttered as he considered the dwindling contents of the treasure chest, wondering what sort of payment was customary for a score of outlanders wanting to cross the border into the realm of the Nine Princes......

The River Captain sat in his tower, listening to his informers describe the strangers who desired to pass through his jurisdiction and enter into the High Realm......He sent the boy back to the innkeeper with the word that the Judges would be consulted in this matter....they would cast their spells and read the omens.....perhaps in a day or two some answer could be made to the Maestro's request to proceed onwards.....

Back at the inn, we listened to this advisement with the stoic resolve we had learned to cloak ourselves with when dealing with the peculiar laws and restrictions of this ancient tribal society, far from the ordered and sanctified shores ruled by the True Empire.....two years ago I had thought these lands towards the sunset to be nothing but a myth or sailor's tale....but the Maestro had shown us in his scrolls the descriptions of these lands.....and thus far the facts had been found to accord with what was written in the histories.....weeks on the leaping waves of great Ocean had brought us to the Three Kingdoms of legend.....and the Lords of Mystical Orders on these far shores had recognized in the Maestro a kindred Sage, and expedited our progress through the complexities of custom in the Kingdoms, so that we after some time and expense and dogged travel were now at last on the verge of entering the fabled Elder Domain.....at least so we hoped.....what would the Judges rule? How much gold would they need to cast a favorable portent?

In his tower, the River Captain and the Senior Judge carefully opened an ornate and heavy bound chest, and took out from it a certain flat piece of slate.....the Judge took a stylus of gold and scribed characters in Eldrich on the surface of the slate.......he described in detail the party requesting permission to proceed upriver......two-hundred leagues to the North, these notations appeared suddenly upon the other half of the piece of slate, which rested on a table in the sanctum of the Priestess Queen of Orm......this worthy dame read the words, and sent a girl to inform the Serene Prince......

Three Rivers Town

At Falls Junction the Maestro had hired a local man called Jentro to act as our guide and translator to the next settlement of any importance upstream and inland....a place called Three Rivers Town....we arrived around noon in this village, after four nights on the fairly well-kept road which followed the river, we ever climbing gently upwards from the coastal plains now well behind us.....of course Hangar the Hungry and his fellow men-at-arms swiftly located a likely looking inn where we might obtain some victuals of better grade than what we had been consuming on the trail.......this was our hope, at any rate.....the smiling innkeeper sat us all at a long table with benches, much like at a country inn back home.....his daughters and nieces quickly passed around bowls of ale to our company, while Jentro began the negotiations with our host.....after a few moments of conversation in the harsh-sounding local tongue, our guide spoke to us in plain language, telling us that we were being offered fried ham-steaks, bread-and-butter, and "spice-jar salad".....and more ale, or "a strong purple wine", should we prefer.....the Maestro inquired into the nature of "spice-jar salad", and Jentro explained that beans, beets, nuts, carrots, "hard root", and what all were placed in a large clay jar with vinegar and spices and flavorings from the local forest and allowed to steep until a certain perfection of flavor was obtained.....he spoke highly of this concoction.....we saw that other patrons were swallowing all this with good relish, so the Maestro agreed to this menu, after Jentro had established the tariff in the jagged little silver bits which were the coin in this part of the wilderness.....

Reflection

Reflection, originally uploaded by 99%: "Meh".

the bars never close

along the Port Martini docks.....so I was sitting on a chrome and naugahyde stool staring across the cultured rosewood bar at myself in the mirror amidst exotic bottles of trans-galactic booze at 0300 GMT, on a Thursday morning.....in the glass I saw a girl come in through the swinging doors off the boardwalk.....she looked lost....spaced out....

She sits next to me, nursing a Bloody Mary, still pretty lost and spaced seeming.....her story is bizarre.....she says she was on a ship that drifted over into another dimension....where she was captured by ghosts.....but some old dude from the 19th century had helped her escape....so here she was on the Frontier, in Port Martini.....a place she had last visited forty years ago according to the calendar.....but she could only account for three years having elapsed in her time.....

"Well" says I "Must be some kind of space-time trans-dimensional glitch going on here, I reckon."

She rolls her eyes at me and gives me a smirk...."Yeh, I reckon." she says....

The juke-box continues to grind out country-western stuff, and some kind of martian polka music.....mixed sparingly with ship-hop.....

"The government says I'm entitled to a pension....." she takes another sip...."I have to wait for a decision from some board or other before I know the amount...."

"Oh yeh? that sounds cool.....where are you staying now?" I ask, becoming interested......

Loop-variable quantum spacetime

Loop-variable quantum spacetime, originally uploaded by Ethan Hein.

metaphysics

While the ghostly powers-that-be began somewhat complicated negotiations with the Chief, and, through him, with the Fleet.....Maria and I remained in the condo overlooking the park of repose. I tried to explain to her what I myself understood about the similarities and differences between the human experience, and the experience in the ghostly realm, or spiritual plane....

"You see" I began..."All beings that might be called living beings participate in the set of vibrations that constitute the life force.....biological beings accomplish the tuning in of the essential frequencies at a chemical level.....any given element in the human body, for example, can be expressed as a particular wave-length of the music of the spheres."

I pause as she knits her brow and then nods. "Go on" she says.

I take of sip of my brandy, and continue...."Elements build into molecules, and molecules build into chemical compounds, and these compounds build into muscle and bone and all the things that make up an animal body. They also build, of course, into brain tissue, and nerve tissue.....and at some point in the evolution of sentient beings they build into the structures that are complicated enough to participate in the quantum looping which is the basic feature of what we call intelligent life. Thus, your flesh-and-blood self can be seen as a sort of antenna which picks up the all pervasive underlying pulse of Awareness.... allowing our species to be self-aware.....and thus fall from Eden....."

She frowns briefly at this point, and then smiles as she catches the allusion....

"Here on this mostly non-material plane" I press on...."The music of the spheres is received by antennae composed of resonant wave-forms of various light elements operating under a different set of physical constants than we encounter on our own plane of existence. Thus ghostly life is more fluid than human life I suppose you could say.....in that we by pure acts of will cannot alter things outside of ourselves....we must use hands and tools to manipulate our surroundings. But, on this plane, a person can, at a quantum loop level, not merely receive, but also transmit with ease....changing things in a direct manner."

"Enough metaphysics for the moment?" I ask....

She seems lost in thought.....

gaseous waveform interaction

vialet wave background, originally uploaded by Helder Magno.

Maria's questions

I found Maria on the terrace, staring out into the fog over the harbor.....she looked to be in her early twenties, and was dressed in the uniform of the Treaty Forces. She seemed to be pretty calm, for someone who had been abducted from humanity and brought to a ghost town. She turned as I approached, and gave me a critical look, frowning and backing away a bit.....

"Are you human?" she asked.

"Well, more or less..." I replied, quite truthfully. "You see, I have been with the ghosts for so long that the biological aspects of my human nature have been almost completely leached away and replaced with ectoplasmic analogs of the various bodily functions."

"What do you mean?" She looked confused.

"Would you like something to eat? Are you thirsty?" I asked...."You don't in fact feel any hunger or thirst, do you? Are you having any trouble breathing?" I asked her as gently as I could...Of course then she gasped, or tried to gasp....but her lungs couldn't take in any air....she was wrapped in a thin haze of ectoplasm, as am I.

"You see my dear" I try to explain....."Here in this dimension people did not evolve from animal precursors....they evolved from gaseous waveforms interacting with energy fields.....there is no need to eat or drink or breathe bits of matter as such....no need for the Ladie's Room either, you will find...." I tried to offer a bit of levity...

"Oh." was all she could say....

I went on to explain to Maria that if we could obtain the assistance of the pertinent powers or authorities .....we might be able to find out how to get her back where she belonged, before her nature was sublimated to any great degree......I would have to pull some strings, call in a few old debts perhaps.....she began to look hopeful, and asked me to please do what I could.....she had no desire at all to remain with the ghosts, if that could be avoided.....

"Then we'll go back to my place and start making calls..." I offered.....

Out on the street I asked her "What do you think of my ride?"

Silver Ghost

1915 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, originally uploaded by Jacob Tran Photo.

Ectopolis Police Department courtesy call

I've been living in a high-rise in a large ghost city for the last four-hundred years or so, if you can really call them "years"....if you can really call it "living"..... It's the 23rd Century on Earth right now, I think.....it was 1892 when I was body-snatched off of a square-rigger carrying guano from South America to Europe....I imagine that my ship-mates marked me down as "lost overboard".....but what really happened is that I was on the dog-watch when a ghost ship flying the Jolly Rodger came sweeping out of the fog, and I found myself suddenly flying away from my ship, in the arms of a ghost-pirate....with an eye-patch, a touch which I thought was just silly....

Well, they told me I could join up with them, or be tossed to eternity....so I said I would join up....I won't describe the initiation ceremony, it was disgusting....after many various adventures, the ghost ship returned laden with treasure and body-snatched crew members from sundry worlds to the great port of Ectopolis, on the Real Dead Sea ghost coast.....With my share of the loot I bought a little cottage on the edge of town, and as the years went by and the population increased I was able to sell the place for a good profit, and move into my current residence, in a nice part of the city, overlooking a fashionable graveyard....

Every once in a while some other human will show up here, and since I'm now senior human in the area, after the old chinaman left, I got a courtesy call from the guys downtown when a human girl named Maria was found wandering around the waterfront one morning....I cranked over the old Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and cruised on down to the station....

When I got down there and was introduced to this Maria, she had quite a few questions.....

Ectoplasm City

Ectoplasm, originally uploaded by PaulCoyne.

object of desire

Bobby-boy had a thing for Maria....that is the common perception of the other crew-members....but Maria doesn't want anything to do with that jerk.....Maria is coming up the passage from the engine-room when Bobby comes out of the galley and sees her.....he lusts after her.....and the ectoplasmic concentration here in the ghost-dimension is triggered by this emotional spark.....a ghost comes up behind Maria, and snatches her away.....Bobby stands dumbfounded staring down the now empty passageway......

Maria finds herself seemingly speeding through the void away from the ship.....she tries to scream for help, but nothing happens.....she feels as though she is frozen in an instant, but also moving through space and time in some way.....the ship recedes into the distance until it is gone.....

In the ghost-dimension, thought and action are pretty much the same thing.....if you think of something happening, it happens.....a "ghost", or a node of the ectoplasmic overmind, has pictured itself procuring what it was that the node of human overmind called "Bobby" wanted for himself....and so, since ghost-mind has the power in this realm, Maria finds herself gone from human company......she is transported to a ghost metropolis .........

Ghost Punk

Ghost Punk, originally uploaded by Alan Zero15.

more problems with ectoplasm

Stacy got pissed off when she reached for her hairbrush and a ghost came through the bulkhead and snagged it away before she could grab it.....a hairbrush wasn't so bad, but Charles had lost his sidearm the same way the other day.....ghosts with guns.....that's just wrong.....

The Chief was trying to make contact with some kind of chief ghost....he said that the last time he had been in this haunted dimension they had eventually encountered ectoplasmic authorities....ghost-cops.....and the cops had turned them over to Otherworldy Immigration, and they had been deported back to reality.....our normal reality.....hopefully the good ghosts would get us again this time, before some punk-ghost gangbangers found us and sold us to a freak show in Lost Vegas.....the Chief said he had heard of that happening.....Stacy didn't know if she believed that crap or not.....

Casper

Casper-Friendly-Ghost-1, originally uploaded by tlink21.

dang ghosts

Hans....Third Rate H. Benz.....had galley duty again....well, it didn't amount to much....all you had to do was kind of wipe up around the food processors and dispensers and smile at the others as they wandered in and out on their off watch hours, looking for something to eat .....Hans would just as soon lie low and take it easy anyway, this lost in space thing had his stomach in knots....it was one thing being on board the flagship or one of the carriers....that was like being back on a station, or even a city on one of the new worlds....but this being stuck with a hand full of other ratings and the crazy Chief on the smallest spaceship he had ever seen or heard tell of was something else....and they were telling him that they had left normal reality, and were in the realm of Ghosts.....

Hans dialed up a doughnut, and left it on the table on a paper napkin while he went to get a cup of coffee....turning around to get the doughnut, he saw a silvery blob suddenly appear out of nowhere, and glom up the doughnut! As quickly as it had appeared it was gone.....Hans started shaking and screaming.....

The Chief had to hold a briefing, and explain to the hands that, yes, ghosts were going to act like ghosts you might see in old cartoons or something....they could come through the hull of the ship and do pretty much anything they fancied.....they probably wouldn't hurt anybody or cause much trouble really....but if they sensed that you wanted something....like a doughnut, say....then the ghost folk might very well just take that....just to see why it was thought to be something desirable....Chief said he knew this, because he had been here before....but nobody had heard of this much, since Fleet had classified all reports of cross-dimensional experience....at the express order of Treaty High Council.....

Second Rate B. Scanlon, Bobby-Boy to the females aboard, had difficulty adapting to the current situation....he started acting a little nuts, looking scared and anxious, ignoring his duties, acting angry.....it came to a head shortly after the Ghost briefing.....Bobby-Boy started yelling at the Chief .....calling him a damned ass-hole who had gotten them all screwed by acting like a shithead and getting them all damned to some kind of bizarre Hell.....he hurled his coffee cup across Commons, aimed poorly at the Chief......

The Old Man ordered him to his bunk, under disfavor.....Scanlon told him to get fucked....military orders couldn't mean anything outside of reality! The Chief said "Systems, two gravities for Rate Scanlon." Bobby sat down real quick.

"You see how it is now don't you?" stated the Chief...."Systems control all objects on board this vessel, including human objects. And I control Systems.....by voice command if need be. I doubt if any of you can get our asses out of ghost space, so you all better just go along with my way of thinking....OK?"

Later, back on the bridge, the duty pilot asked the Old Man if he thought they could get back home somehow.....

"Affirmative on that son, all we have to do is find us a Casper."

"A casper?"

"A friendly ghost."

Space Ghost

Space Ghost, originally uploaded by DrPantzo.

out of the frying pan

Chief was seated at the command station on the bridge, with First Rate F. Seeley in the pilot position to his right hand.....Seeley was trying to make sense of the incoming data from the far sensor array.....but it all just seemed wrong.....the values were nothing he had ever encountered before.....

"Chief, what's going on? Where are we exactly? Navigation parameters are not reaching any coherence."

"Well, Frank, when the attack came the enemy released a whole swarm of advanced hunter-killers.....probably Machine weapons purchased from unregulated sources further down towards Center.....they took out the rest of the Group, and they were after Ready too.....so I did the only thing I could think of....I took us where a Machine won't go."

Frank Seeley sat and waited for the Old Man to continue.

"You see, the Machines fought a war once with the Ghosts.....the inhabitants of the next layer over in the Multiverse....and the Machines got their butts kicked.....so no Machine weapon will cross over the dimensional membrane....not even to fulfill a killer function in hot pursuit."

Frank thought about this carefully.....

"So, the sensors are acting strange because the physical constants in this layer of reality do not compute compared to the constants embedded in System?"

The Old Man turned and smiled at the pilot....

"You got it the first time, son.....things seem strange because they damn well are strange....we escaped getting blasted to bosons by going a little sideways during a jump.....enough to slide through to the other side .....we're in Ghost territory now....."

ambush!

Privateeer Space - Explore the reaches of space, originally uploaded by Liqueur Felix.

what a situation

I told that damn fool that we were pushing on into a region that wasn't safe.....but a Commodore of a Fleet Battle Group with her head up her ass doesn't listen very well to a civilian "analyst" foisted off on her by the politicians sitting in their offices back home.....back in Treaty space. I had been out here before, when she was still a Cadet at Academy, and I had been scared shitless that time, with us almost blowing the engines on the old Respect as we powered away from the hostile ambush......And here we were again, chasing after "pirates and hijackers" at the whim of the "important commercial interests "......

Trouble is, these "criminal elements and interstellar terrorists" are better armed than we are.....and they are on their home turf this far in from the frontier, almost to Machine Space.....The idiot bitch did one thing right, as far as I'm concerned anyway....she tried to get rid of me and my "paranoid fantasies" by ordering me to stand off from Fleet while she "punished" the enemy....she stuck me in a little Fifth Class with a junior crew she thought she could do without, and told me to go ahead and perform my analysis of the situation to my heart's content, just keep out of the way of the professionals.....

So the unknowns came out of nowhere and wiped out her Command.....and here I am, in a little tin can with a bunch of kids to babysit, with only a vague idea of how to get back to where any other humans are......

Ready

Gunboat-FFE, originally uploaded by kafka47ca.

Jefe

Maria didn't like what the Rotation said on the Duty Roster.....she had been moved to Engine Room on the Graveyard....well, at least she wouldn't be standing watch with that jerk-ass Bobby-Boy anymore.....but she was trained best for Comm, not Engines....whatever.....

"Hey Kim, how did the Old Man get to be Chief anyway? He's not an officer.....I don't even think he's enlisted....isn't he just a civilian with a Warrant or something?"

Kim gave her a blank look.....Kim is good at blank looks....."The Jefe is Chief because of three things, Maria....K, C, and P.....keys, codes, and passwords. It's true he doesn't have any formal Fleet rank to speak of, but he controls this vehicle, because he controls Systems."

"Five things really" interjects Stacy, ducking through the bulkhead into the station..."Keys, codes, passwords, voice recognition and biometric scan. All that makes him the absolute master on Fleet Auxiliary Vessel Fifth Class Ready.....detached from Command by circumstances....."

That sums it up pretty good, Maria realized.....the circumstances being that the rest of their battle group had been rendered into subatomic particles by the alien heavy weaponry.....the Old Man had jinked and twisted them through the chaos of the action, and they had jumped at emergency power as far away as they could get.....which left them out here god knows where, a dozen lost souls, ten thousand light-years from home.....

space elf

elf in the space .jpg, originally uploaded by www.maykee.com.

Greenwich Mean Time

After a three day drunk, I wandered out of my hotel room and down towards the docks.....it was December 2nd in England, so it is also December 2nd here in Port Martini, thousands of light-years down from the old Solar System....down towards the dense heart of the Milky Way....down here on the frontier between the ancient Machine civilizations and the worlds of man.....It was getting on towards evening in London, so the illusion of day was turning towards the illusion of night here in the artificial environment of the big rock-mounted space station called Port Martini, the center of Frontier Region Five, as recognized by the Omnibus Treaty.....my way to the dockside dive bars led me through a large public plaza, which for some reason was more crowded than usual.....oh, they are getting ready to light the Christmas Tree.....there is a simulation of a children's choir......

ghost in the machine

Laundry ghost! [365 - day 70], originally uploaded by jseft.

quantum entanglement and the ghost in the machine

maybe here we get to the nitty gritty.....what is that elusive something that lets mind slip around matter, like oil slips around the moving parts of an engine? What allows our experience of all that out there, outside of our heads? Common sense indicates that there is no re- action without action, it seems that things must touch somehow for interaction to occur.....we feel the spirit, we sense the mundane....what we sense of this gross and often horrible world can beat down our spirit.....and, hopefully, the glory of spirit that we feel in out hearts can somehow transcend this battering and carry us to higher things. But is this all just wishful thinking, or is there some science involved here.....does the quantum leap to a new paradigm have some correlation to what might happen actually happen when the spirit moves us?

Quantum Theory Christmas card

Quantum Theory Christmas card, originally uploaded by `miRЯim ⏠;⏠ ☮.

pluralism to the second power

a lot of people seem to have some kind of moral objection to the idea of a pluralistic universe....they want absolute certainty that their god is in his heaven and all is right with the world, in the long run....of course there is that nasty of problem of evil, but what they want is the assurance that in the end everything is One, and thus all warm and cozy and O.K........well, let's take a little look at the way things really are.....it's much more bizarre than a pluralistic universe, it's a multiverse....the Theory of Everything, which goes through the math and logic and finally reconciles General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, presents us with a reality in which physical constants are not constant everywhere.....so where does that leave the much loved moral constants?

Well, let's be pragmatic about this.....we are never going to actually interact with another layer of the multiverse, are we? So let's just concentrate on the world as we see it, and not worry about what goes on Over There.....but.....the here and now is in fact hopelessly entangled with the there and then.....the nuts and bolts of our perceived state of affairs, the quarks, the bosons, and what all....they need the other dimensions we can't directly reach through our senses to constitute the whole mess, the multiverse of pluralism to a higher power.....

What's my point? Well, just that you can't be too smug about thinking you have it all figured out....that things are as that seem.....that any authority is good authority.....

quantum wave-front in tune

103: Visualising the Unvisualisable?, originally uploaded by E8 Album HQR Initiative.

the big things are still there

on the Other Side.....the clouds of dark matter, for one thing.....and the vacuum energy behaves the same as it does in our mundane human reality....if it didn't, the ship wouldn't work. But many things are different.....perhaps most notably the time-flow.....that's why we can go "faster-than-light".....when we translate to the next plane over, hardly any time passes for us, on the ship, while the years keep spinning merrily away for the rest of humanity.....so when the ship slides off the astral plane back into "normal" space, we think we have traveled a long ways.....that always seems backwards to me, but that's how it works.

Time doesn't really "flow" in any direction after all, that's the crux of it....that's how we can get back home later, nothing has really moved from where we left it. There are still stars and planets and what-not on the other planes of reality, most of them anyway.....the "higher planes" tend to do without what we call the physical, the hard stuff of matter.....the folk there are pure energy.....but we don't have to deal with them very often on a simple trip like this one....all we are doing is re-tuning quantum probability wave-fronts a little sharp or flat, depending on which way we need to go, "away" or "back"......

When I'm off watch, I have to switch mental modes, and remember how to interact with other people, instead of singing harmony with the Powers.....to me, this is the hardest part....it doesn't help very much that my shipmates tend to treat me like some kind of weirdo.....a bona fide space-case, one who leaves mundane reality for a living.....oh well, there are perks....you've got a pretty high rank in the shipboard scheme of things, and cute young female passengers seem to find excitement in the company of the mysterious dashing Astrogation Officier....