[Archive] Ten Eleven, early draft

This was a draft of a story I'm actually still working on. It's about space. Space stuff. It's a big thing but this was mainly me getting the feel for a couple of the characters. I've been chewing on this one off and on since I was a teenager.

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Ten leaned forward, resting his head in his hands with a sigh. Dull, unfamiliar music filled the silence in the otherwise sleepy rest-stop bar. Telling time off planet was an exercise in personal accountability- night and day were relative terms, for the most part, and places like this had no peak hours. The black void of space outside the windows, coupled with the dim, flickering lights gave the effect of a perpetual too-early-in-the-morning. The atmosphere was almost relaxing. Luckily, the wobbly wooden chairs huddled around the cheap plastic tables were just uncomfortable enough to keep any unfortunate soul sitting in them from nodding off.

The swish of the bar’s door sliding open caught Ten’s attention for a moment, but it was just another tired looking stranger slumping through the doorway- just like the last twenty or so. Ten tapped lazily at the tablet resting between his elbows- he pursed his lips, seeing that another hour had passed from the last time he’d checked the time. He leaned back in frustration, and the chair groaned a creaky complaint. This is stupid, he thought. He’s always late, but this is a new goddamn record. Ten kicked the bag at his feet in frustration. The best part is, when he does get here, he’ll just tell me this thing is more garbage, as usual.

Ten glanced out the window beside his table, looking out at the handful of ships hanging motionless from the docking-arm. The arm looked short, from the tight perspective, but it stretched out for half a kilometer away from the station, making the sphere shaped ships look like marbles, and the angular little shuttles like matchboxes.

Except, as Ten looked closer, one of the ships wasn’t motionless. Looking like a ratty ball of tinfoil, the skipper-ship drifted slowly to one side. It was ugly to look at, with a gaudy metallic green paint-job. As the skipper drifted, it almost grazed the docking armature of the freighter beside it, but it seemed like a small emergency thruster kicked on at the last second, pushing it jarringly back in the other direction. Looking closer, the skipper wasn’t actually docked, despite the docking boom for its parking space being fully extended.

Huh, he thought, is it trying to dock? The idiot pilot must be steering it manually. Maybe the gyro is busted. Ten’s own ship was docked out of sight, at the far end of the docking-arm. There were several closer spaces open now, but the rest stop had been unusually packed when he’d pulled in. Three fucking hours ago. Ten gritted his teeth, feeling like he could almost hear the straining clasps engaging as the skipper finally managed to dock itself, the several inches of misalignment between ship and boom forcing the safety clasps to twist the rigid causeway into position. Moron. That’s a great way to ruin the seal on your docking port. Enjoy sucking vacuum when it tears free.

Several minutes passed after the skipper managed to dock, and Ten found his thoughts wandering as he looked out the window. The little station was in orbit around a cold ball of ice, itself orbiting a star far enough away to make it hard to distinguish from the other stars in the background. The faint silhouette of the little planetoid was beginning to crawl into view.

Ten was startled out of his star-gazing by the abrupt sound of the chair opposite his scooting across the plate-metal floor. He glanced up to see an aged, portly man heaving himself into the seat- the chair creaked a very angry objection, but managed not to give out.

“Staring off into space, are you?” Ten grimaced at the pun. The other man’s flushed face twisted into an odd grin.

“Was just watching your shitty parking job. That was you, right? In the Christmas-ornament with thrusters soldered on?”

The man shrugged. “You take what you can get. S’hard times, these days. Maybe a bit more compact than my old ship, but I get where I need to go on time.”

Stupid Porthos, Ten thought as he watched the old man crane himself around in the chair to flag down the bar’s waitress. The man’s disheveled clothing and greasy hair were, unfortunately, a familiar sight to Ten. Always just scraping by. By his own design.

Ten leaned forward again and tapped his tablet “You have a really weird definition of ‘on-time’, asshole. You said we’d meet at tenhour. Does your clock need synching, or- wait, let me guess, you have an excuse all lined up, don’t you?”

Porthos turned back around to face Ten. His face was, as usual, an unreadable collage of wrinkles, rosacea and grizzled scruff. “I was in a meeting.”

“A meeting?”

“With a client. The meeting went long. Out of my hands” He turned up his knobby paws in a shrug, as though to demonstrate how empty they were.

“I’m sure. Whatever, I don’t care, let’s get on with this, now that you’re finally here” Ten turned to the side and leaned down to open up his satchel “By the way,” he said, looking up for a moment “Do you mind telling me why I couldn’t just send you photos, or a scan or something? I know we usually meet in person but I was on the other side of the damn arm.”

Porthos shrugged as the waitress made her way over to the table “Faster this way,” he said, curtly “and besides-“

“Faster for you, maybe. I’ve got to go all the way back. What are you doing out this far anyway?”

Porthos cleared his throat, dismissing the question. “And, besides- oh…” He cut himself off as the waitress approached with crossed arms. There was a look of worn-in boredom on her face.

“Well?” she asked.

“Ah, just some water please. Warm.” Porthos offered the woman a congenial smile.

“Warm? You want warm water?”

“Warm water, please, yes. That’s all”

The waitress rolled her eyes “Yeah. Allright.” She turned and walked back to the bar, shaking her head. Porthos turned his attention back towards Ten.

“Besides,” he continued, “transmission is never secure. Lord knows how many hands touch that data before I get to see it. Some of my clients are very fickle- I don’t want scalpers catching wind of a hot item before I get the chance to make the first offer!” Porthos pulled an oily rag out from some crevasse in his jacket and began to pat his equally oily forehead with it.

“Whatever you say,” said Ten, pulling a white box from his bag up onto the table with a grunt. The item had some heft to it. “You’re a weirdo, but you give fair prices, so I shouldn’t complain.” He pushed the cube, about a hand’s breadth wide, towards the old junkman “So what is it?”

Porthos frowned, and pulled down a pair of thick glasses that had been hiding in his tangled grey mane. He took the box in his hands, feeling his fingers along the edges. The box had few distinguishing marks, aside from smudges of dirt and grease. A seem bisected the cube through the middle. There were faint markings along one side- or perhaps just slightly cleaner regions.

“There were handles on this at some point.” Porthos grumbled as he turned it over in his hands “Did you break them off trying to open it?”

“What?” Ten snorted “I didn’t try to open it. I didn’t know it could be opened.” Ten drummed his fingers on the grungy plastic table, watching Porthos continue to turn the object over in his hands. After a quiet moment he said “So… it’s a box? I knew it was something, but you mean there’s something else inside of it?”

“Yes, it’s a box, obviously” Porthos spat, digging his fist into his jacket to look for something. Cursing, he pulled his jacket open, looking down into it as he dug through a bulging inside pocket “The markings are gone,” he mumbled “But it’s clearly an ARBET box”

“So… what does that mean? What’s a... what did you call it?” Ten looked up. The waitress was walking back towards the table carrying a glass of water.

“An ARBET box” Porthos repeated “An Alliance Research Bra- oh!” he glanced up startled as the waitress plopped the glass of water- warm water, down onto the table, nearly spilling it. Porthos reached out his hand, touching the glass.

“Warm enough for you?” the waitress asked, scowling.

“Yes, actually, it feels perf-“

“Great, here’s your bill” She slapped a slip of paper down onto the table, and turned, leaving briskly.

“Jeeze, do you know her or something?” Ten watched as the waitress, rounding the bar, spoke quietly to the bartender, who looked over at the table and shook his head. Porthos pulled a small paper packet out of another pocket “That waitress acted like you… what is… what are you doing?”

“Mind your business.” Porthos responded, dumping the powdered contents of the packet into the water. The water immediately turned cloudy and yellowish- and after a moment began to froth slightly. The cloying, fermented smell of instant-beer was suddenly clogging the stale air around the table. Porthos stirred the drink with his finger and then took a long gulp from it “Mmmm- ahh, now then,” he cleared his throat “Where was I?”

Ten rolled his eyes, “You were talking about… ARBET?”

“Right, yes. ARBET stands for Alliance Research-Branch Experimental Transport”

“So… it’s some sort of experimental… box?” Ten stared blankly at the dingy white cube.

“No! No, argh-“ Porthos took off his smudgy glasses to annoyedly clean them “No, the box itself isn’t experimental, it’s for transporting experiments, fool” Porthos stuffed the no-less smudgy spectacles back onto his round nose and pulled what appeared to be a screw-driver out of his jacket “As I said before, lots of hands touch stuff when you ship it. These boxes were made to make sure experimental samples didn’t get contaminated along the way”

“Why didn’t they just transport their boxes themselves? Wouldn’t that be safer?” Ten watched curiously as Porthos delicately slid the screwdriver’s flat tip along the box’s seam.

“You’d think,” He replied “But those fiddly bastards apparently used to ship whole freighters of these things back and forth between facilities… back in the day. I’m sure they had some tight contracts with the shipping lines, but still, you can’t be too careful when you’re a weird scientist, I guess.” The screwdriver caught on something, just under the lip of the seam “And they were all about efficiency” Ten jumped in his seat as the old junkman suddenly jammed the screwdriver into the seam, making a grinding chunk noise.

“Lucky for us, the locking mechanism broke off of this one a long time ago. Or was broken off. Whatever- if it was still on, you’d never get this thing open” Porthos twisted the screwdriver further in. “All I have to do now is break the seal- should pop right open!” The old man’s tongue poked out between his chapped lips as he worked.

If I’d known he was just going to pry it open I wouldn’t have wasted the goddamn trip. Ten watched, frustrated “And, that’s not going to… damage what’s inside?”

“What? No!” Porthos shifted the screwdriver to the other side, and began to twist again “I mean… There could be anything in here, really. Anyway, no way to know what otherwise!”

Ten opened his mouth to object, but the box began to hiss out a puff of air before he could speak, and indeed, the top half of the box popped up. Setting down the screw-driver, Porthos carefully slid the top half up and off of the box’s contents. Both men craned themselves over the table to watch as the white shell, now removed, revealed a smaller cube inside, this one rusted and metallic, with thin tubing covering its surface in some areas.

“Great,” said Ten, leaning back into his chair “Another box. Do I have to watch you open this one too before you make me an offer?”

Porthos leaned back in his chair, and sipped his drink. His eyes flicked up from the strange object to Ten’s annoyed face “Twenty-thousand.” he said.

“Twenty-thousand! Are you serious?” Ten reached out and took a hold of the object. I was expecting a hundred credits, tops. Is this a trick? He lifted the odd cube out of the lower half of the box. It wasn’t that heavy. Apparently the… experimental transporter had made up a good bit of the weight. “But… but what is it?”

“I’ve got no idea, boy, do I look like a scientist to you” As he spoke, Porthos dug around in his ear with his pinky. He did not look like a scientist.

“Then why are you offering so much? What’s your game? You’re obviously lying!” Ten pushed the object back down into the white shell and began trying to fit the top half back on.

“I’m not lying- I’d have offered you the same amount before I even opened it. It doesn’t matter what this thing is, I know people that will pay fortunes for the contents of one of these boxes. They don’t turn up often.”

Ten watched the man’s face, still not believing him as he spoke. “Right. Your connections.” Who you never introduce me to, Ten thought to himself. The top of the box wouldn’t join back to the bottom, but it was close enough to being closed and Ten scooped up the dingy cube and shoved it back into his satchel “I’m not selling-“

“Then you’re an idiot” Porthos interjected.

“I’m not selling yet. I don’t sell anything I don’t know what it is.” Ten slung the satchel’s strap over his shoulder and crossed his arms “Tell me who’d know what this fucking cube is for. I know you know someone, you always do” Ten glared at the old junkman, and Porthos glared right back. After a tense moment, the old man seemed to relent, and sighed as he stood up and adjusted his jacket.

“I tell you what,” Porthos said, downing the last of his drink “You’re good business, so I’ll do it your way. Wouldn’t trust ya anyway if you weren’t untrusting” He picked up the slip of paper with his bill on it, looked at it, and grumbled. “My guy’s a short jump from here. You can come with me. Won’t change the price anyway. As I said, don’t matter to me what it is”

Ten stood up, hefting the bag “I’d have to be crazy to ride anywhere with you in that thing you call a ship. Is there even space for two people?”

“Ha! It’d be cozy, for sure. Haven’t cleaned out the trash recently.” Porthos walked over to the bar to scan his credits with the ill-tempered waitress. Ten made his way over to the door and waited, walking in toe with the shaggy junkman as he made his way out after settling up.

“Look, just… ride with me in my ship”

“I’m not leaving the old girl at this dump.”

Ten rolled his eyes “Fine. Your ship is tiny, we’ll just put it in my ship’s hold, I’ve got nearly nothing in there right now”

“Oh? Just unloaded a good haul then?”

“Ugh, I wish. I had a great haul. It was fucking confiscated”

Porthos shook his head “Stupid boy, you were scrappin’ around Luz weren’t you? Didn’t I warn you?” The walk down the docking boom was long and cramped. Ten pulled his bag tighter against himself as the two walked- the thin walls of the boom always made him uncomfortable. “That new president they got don’ want no-body mucking around in their space. Even if it’s to clean up their garbage”

“I think you mentioned it, yeah. But there’s a lot of nice shit floating out there, and they can’t patrol the whole fucking orbit constantly”

“Constantly enough to catch you, apparently. You know, I hear they send repeat offenders down to the surface for a trial.” Ten scowled at another of the man’s jokes. Luz d’Amanhecer was a gas giant.

 

***

“So they just kicked you out? Just like that?”

The question hung in the air for a moment. Zeph sighed, watching as the queue of people moved forward in front of her by a few inches. The stuttering old man at the front of the line was still talking to the android at the front desk- that hadn’t changed. Maybe some poor fuck gave up and abandoned ship?

“Zeph? Sorry, did I say something weird?”

Zeph set her mug of formerly-hot coffee down on the side table beside her chair “No, ah… no, it’s just more complicated than that” she replied. How did we even get onto this subject? Why does this always seem to come up? She pushed her fingers through her hair, pushing the black tangles out of her face. She looked like she’d recently pulled herself out of bed- which wasn’t too far from the truth, depending on your definition of ‘recently’, and ‘bed’. Euphonia, of course, looked like a freshly folded dinner napkin, with her finely ironed pant-suit, and her perfectly pruned sculpture of hair.

“Basically, we… agreed as a community to accept The Company’s offer. Offers, rather. We each got separate offers” Zeph shrugged and tried to smooth out some wrinkles on her slacks “As I said, they wanted our station’s orbit clear, but they were setting up shop either way.”

“Setting up shop? You mean they were going start building even if you guys had refused the offer?” Euphonia’s red-lipped, too-small mouth pursed into a puckered, anus-like arrangement. The expression was a poor facsimile of confusion, or perhaps pity. Her eyebrows didn’t move so it was hard to tell.

“Uhm, pretty much. They’d already purchased the land rights for Hannon’s Moon. They’d brought all their ships into orbit. There wasn’t a lot we could do about it. Zoned orbits are based off local industry, not the other way around. So if we hung around, it would be our fault for living next to an antimatter plant”

Euphonia stared blankly “I… think you lost me when you started talking about zoning honey. If your station was so great, why didn’t you guys just… I dunno, put up with it? Who cares what they do down on the surface?”

The line inched forward again. The old man had left the desk with a stack of papers to fill out- actual papers, not digital documents. A stack of papers that thick were likely registration forms. The process of registering to operate as a courier was pretty straight forward, in theory. Apply for your license, register your ship, register yourself as an entity, and so forth. The problem was that each jurisdiction had its own unique bureaucracy to navigate, and none of them communicated with each other with any semblance of efficiency. Which meant waiting in a lot of lines in a lot of different places. That didn’t even include the process of renting a warpdrive.

“Well, we could have. That’s why they made us offers rather than just waiting for us to bug off of our own accord. And we talked about it. Well, like half of us did. A whole fuckload of people took the offer immediately.” Like Tenny. Asshole. Zeph sipped her coffee, and continued “Anyway, us folks that stayed around to think about it talked about a lot of things. Installing radiation shielding on the station. Hiring a firm to establish official rights to the orbit. Moving the station- that was a dumb idea, but we did consider it. When it came down to it, their offer was generous. Enough of us were willing to accept at that point, and the rest couldn’t maintain the station on their own. Felt bad for them, but whatcha gonna’ do.”

Zeph glanced over at Euphonia. Her face was lit up blue by the mini-tablet she was typing out a message on. She looked up “I’m listening, don’t worry!” she lied, her eyes flicking back to the screen.

Zeph sighed, and leaned to one side, resting her chin in her palm. There was a young woman at the front desk now, whisper-shouting to the nonplussed android behind the desk. She looked about as frazzled as she sounded. Zeph watched her coolly over her mug as she took another sip of coffee. Something about form rejections and re-filing fees chirped out a bit louder in the woman’s tirade over the rest of her frustration fueled murmurs. Poor idiot, Zeph thought, watching the android pull out a paper form- again, actual paper- and laid it on the desk, tapping her polished alabaster finger to indicate a specific article and subsection. A specific article and subsection that the irate woman had absolutely, definitely read and acknowledged. That is your signature right here on this line, isn’t it Ma’am? What’s that Ma’am? No Ma’am, I’m afraid I cannot shove this paperwork up my own asshole. Not only do I not have an asshole, it is clearly indicated on page three, paragraph four that-

“Zeph? Zeph are you there, honey?”

Zeph did her best to suppress the smile that had grown across her face, and set down her coffee mug, looking over at Euphonia, who was directing at her another poorly imitated look of confusion, or perhaps constipation “Ah… sorry, uh, what’s up? Spaced out for a sec.”

Euphonia’s eyebrows actually twitched “I just… I’d asked why you guys had to move? Like, at all, you know? What was the big deal about… The Company you said? With them building a whatever on the surface?”

“Because they’re building an antimatter plant?” Zeph responded.

[Archive] Teleporters

This one's a bit older, written in 2014. As the title suggests, it's playing around with the idea of teleporters.

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Teleporter. It’s one of those funny words… like refrigerator. You know what I mean? Words that sound kinda silly if you think about them for a minute, if you let the word just sort of sit in your head without its meaning attached to it. But words like that become so common place… I don’t know, it’s like your brain just gets used to the sound of it. I suppose that’s just how language works, but, like, I could imagine some dude from the nineteenth century writing a science fiction story with, like, a “refrigidization apparatus” and that would sound totally bizarre, but it would just be a box that makes shit cold. Anyway, I’m rambling, but teleporters are like that, right? You first see them turning up in old movies around… what, the 1960’s? I’m not really a film buff, but Star Trek had teleporters I think. After that, the word crept into everyday language. But like a lot of stuff, it was just a word for an idea. Hell, folks were pretty certain for a while that teleportation was impossible- that is, instantaneous transmission between two points. And, to be fair, the image most folks had in their minds back then of how… well, how something like that would have worked- well, that is impossible. I’m not even sure if you could really call what we have now the same thing as that- but whatever, I mean, it accomplishes the same thing, so the name stuck. 

                I may not be too savvy on old films, but history in general’s always interested me. I mean, speaking of teleporters… it always gets a chuckle outa' me when I think about it. I mean, back in the twenty-first century, right around the turn of it, man, people had all the components. Maybe not refined as much as they needed to be, but all the right shit had already been invented. It’s a lot like computers, actually, come to think of it. There was this guy, I don’t remember his name, he had made like… I don’t remember if it was just a model, or just, like, the designs for it, but he’d basically invented the first computer- and this was back in the mid 1800’s, man, basically a hundred years before the first real computers actually came about. But the poor bastard couldn’t get funding for it. Ok, so that isn’t exactly what happened with teleporters, but man, it’s the same shit. They could have been made way earlier. Not that it would have been terribly useful to have back then. Folks only lived on one planet. Would have been silly, really.

                And that’s the key there, I think. Shit usually doesn’t get invented until there’s a need for it, and for teleportation, that need came about when we needed to move between planets. We figured out pinging in the 2080’s, but that only works with pure information. For everything else, the speed of light is a hard limit. And for a human body it’s way less. Traveling close to relativistic speed will turn most things to mush. So yeah, that was a puzzler, I’d imagine. Free long distance calling, anywhere in the galaxy, right? Still, pinging was kinda useless if we had no-one to talk to.

I remember my first time. It was weird, you know? Back then I didn’t have a lot of money. I’d never really thought of traveling- and no one in my family had ever gone- heck, I didn’t know anybody who had. I was, honestly, scared shitless. I remember it being explained to me like… a big camera comes and takes a picture of your atoms. They have to put you to sleep to do that to make sure its precise. And when you wake up, you’re there. That’s it. That was all there was two it, and, though that is a pretty simplified explanation, that is literally what happened, subjectively anyway. The facility was enormous, of course, but all you see is a little waiting room with a front desk. When they call you back it’s like… it’s hard to describe. It’s like the place was a hotel with only one room. They had a table that you could set your bags on, and then there was a bed. A nurse came in and gave me a shot and I was out.

Waking up was way less pleasant. I imagine it had something to do with where I was teleporting to. The place was a bit backwater. Also, by the way, in case you didn’t know, teleportation is not instantaneous. That is a big fat fucking lie. Like, maybe it’s different if you’re zapping between Earth and Alcie Three where they have like, a hundred freaking hangars, but for most places you can be in a queue for several days. Or more. I was waiting for like, two weeks. That place was a real shithole. They said they had to wait for a new shipment of one of their material cartridges because, apparently they didn’t have any sequestration stations set up near the freaking tele-port. How asinine, right? It was probably potassium or something obscure. They said they don’t get people too often, usually just processors or encryption blocks. Whatever. Anyway, its usually way more pleasant, but at that  place it sucked. They didn’t even have a room to wake me up in, I literally woke up next to the vat after they’d thawed me, or whatever it is they do. It was really unprofessional, actually, I felt like a piece of luggage. Oh fuck, I’d almost forgotten about that part. I had to wait two months for those mouth-breathers to tele my luggage in. Fuck, I sound like such a snob, I can hardly believe it- but honestly, I’ve done this so much sense then, like… I don’t know, I guess it’s like I was saying before. You just get used to things, but seriously, I think it’s important to have some standards.

Whatever. What was I even saying? Oh yeah. Two months. I mean, it was fine really, my business there took about that long anyway. Right, if I hadn’t mentioned, that’s why I got to go in the first place. My boss ended up having surgery or something that month, so I had to go. The little town the tele-port was in really grew up around it, and I happened to learn a bit more about the process while I was there, because… man, let me tell you, I was way curious. I really hadn’t believed that guy when he’d said you just go to sleep and you end up there like fucking magic. I mean, I knew the basics, but… well, it’s kind of a weird thing to wrap your head around. I mean, the basic idea is you’re 3D printing a person, right? But it really isn’t even remotely like printing a sandwich or a book or something. There isn’t any way to vectorize a person… well, I mean, not to the same extent anyway. And, as you can imagine, imaging a person’s energy state is a little more complicated than making sure the lettuce is cold and the bacon is hot on your printed BLT.

I actually spoke with one of the dudes that helped wake me up- well, more than spoke, he gave me a fucking tour. We even went out for drinks when his shift ended, real nice guy, his name was Erich. I think. It’s been a few years. Anyway, he took me back to show me the printing hangar- apparently he does this a lot, most places don’t just let any old fuck-off go back and ogle the machinery, but it’s all open there, so, lucky me, right? Anyway, it’s a long walk, so while we’re going, he tells me a bit more about the imaging process. Basically, it’s like… I guess the best analogy to draw would be an MRI? It’s able to look at every molecule and atom though, like, super precisely. Erich didn’t really have a full grasp of it himself, said it had something to do with a stupidly strong magnetic field and then, somehow, directing a focused stream of pings. The first part gives detailed information on what sort of atoms you’re looking at, and precise locations. The second part gives the delta-vee, spin, what-have-you. And then they read the entropic information too somehow. He wasn’t sure. I really don’t know, I don’t imagine its important. Anyway, that 40k or so petabytes of molecular data is what gets pinged. The info is received instantly, and then printed whenever they fucking feel like it I guess. I’m being a child, I know, but it’s really annoying, they literally never mention that part. It makes perfect sense though, I mean, the reading part is really quick, but printing can take a while, and most ports only have one or two printing hangars.

So anyway, we get to the part of the facility where they do the printing orders. Its massive, let me tell you. I’ve seen pictures of these things sense then, but they don’t do it justice. Material tanks freaking everywhere. Those get pumped the enzyme stations, recombinators, and several other things that I neither have names for, nor understand the purpose of. Basically, shit gets pumped to this… it’s this long armature that passes over the printing media, and, according to Erich, is covered in molecular machinery that assembles whatever it is that’s getting printed. And, I said the printing process takes time ,but that was in comparison to the scanning process. That armature was flying. It was building up layer by layer a crate- a fancy old wooden one, probably full of oranges or something equally retro.

It was interesting to watch. I’ve never seen a person being printed, but it’s gotta be a similar process. I asked, and Erich said the procedure was pretty much the same for printing something alive, but that the printing temperature had to be calibrated more carefully, and that it actually worked a bit faster when it was doing a human teleportation- honestly it was hard for me to wrap my head around, and still is. I don’t really get how, like… I mean, you’d think blood would start going all over the place, or something, but hey, it clearly works.

Whatever, that’s… eh, kinda grisly to think about. It was a pretty big leap, in the beginning, to make that jump to printing a person. Obviously the tech didn’t spring up out of the ground in one piece. Shit, people had been printing food for decades at least, less complicated stuff for ages before that. And even after there was a high enough confidence in the scanning and printing tech that a human being could be reliably printed… its still, I mean, it’s a big leap to print them with an intact consciousness. My father used to tell me that when he was a kid, he figured that scientists would have figured out how the brain worked by the time he’d grown up, but we never did. Best guess we have is that every person’s brain is similar enough, but the process of growing and developing over a lifetime builds a unique neural network that’s almost impossible to generalize. Our AIs are just a brute force approximation of human sentience- and I mean, it’s close. Better than close really, but there’s a big difference between making an intelligence from scratch and understanding our own. If we had any real grasp of the way the brain worked… shit, we’d have like, brain implants, and telekinesis and other wacky sci-fi crap. We’d be able to manipulate memories, or whatever. It was thought that we’d have to crack that nut in order to really print a conscious person, but that didn’t end up being the case, obviously. Really, we just had to take a picture of what was there, and then copy it. We didn’t have to understand it. We just needed a better camera         

Understand of course- and I don’t think I can say this enough- teleportation isn’t dangerous, and it never was. Its actually a pretty big misconception, and it comes from, ultimately, I think, the misconceptions folks had way back when about how a teleporter would work. Like I said earlier, it really doesn’t work like that at all. There’s no beaming of molecules, or quantum bullshit or getting your genes mixed up with a fly that flew into the teleporter with you. It’s a bit like how we imagined flying machines would involve giant flapping wings. Anyway, it’s just a big fancy 3D printer. Nothing is actually getting ‘teleported’ at all. That’s the rub. Really, the technology is more akin to a giant 3D fax machine than anything else

That raises more questions than it answers, I know, I know, and it confused the fuck out of me too. It actually came up while I was at the bar with uh… What was his name? Right, Erich. Remember I said we went out for drinks after the tour? It was pretty cool, actually. Really retro. Bars on earth are so noisy, but this place was real quiet, like a fuckin’ saloon from an old western. I was really into it, he got a kick out of that. Anyway, we printed a couple cheap vector beers and got to talking, and he mentioned the whole fax machine analogy. I was like, yeah, I actualy know what that is. He was impressed, but as I took a long drink he kept looking at me like he was waiting for me to make some connection that was less than obvious. I’ve always like cheep beers, to be honest, by the way. There's something appealing to me about the homogeneity, but that’s just me I guess. Anyway, the whole fax thing went right over my head, so he just explained it. I probably won’t do it justice but the thing is… uh… Well, you go to the tele-port, you get imaged, and then your molecular and entropic data is pinged to wherever it is you were planning on going. And then you wake up. Or rather, both of you wake up. 

There’s the you that gets printed, and then there’s the you that got scanned, and you and that other you diverge the moment you get imaged. I imagine it’s pretty unsettling, actually, when you wake up. You be like “did it work? Am I there?” And they’d be like “No… no, you’re still the original, sorry” Or at least, I imagine that’s how it goes. From my perspective, I’ve been the me that wakes up at my destination each time. I have no idea what it’s like to be the original, honestly. And to tell you the truth, I try not to think about it. Because while, subjectively, I may have memories from an, at this point, long life of teleporting here and there, objectively, I was created wholesale the last time I was teleported, which happens to have been yesterday, actually. I one day old. My memories were created at the same time I was. If we had the ability to design a human being from scratch, and write original thoughts to put in his head, he could be printed just like any of us. He could be made with memories of being a vampire for three hundred years. He could be written to have memories of a square sun and a polka-dotted sky. It’s freaky, right? My stream of consciousness is not even twenty four hours old, but I have memories of a whole life lived before that.

I’m really making it out to be spookier than I should, if I can be honest here. Really, you could argue that your stream of consciousness blips out every time you go to sleep, and a new one starts in the morning. I’m not a philosopher or a neurologist, so what do I know. Anyway, as for the you that gets left behind, the original you, what you do after you visit the tele-port is your business. From what I’ve heard, there are three basic ideologies. First, you could kill yourself. It sounds morbid, but if you want to move to another planet, leaving one of you behind on the old planet would be a bit silly. I don’t know. I think, even knowing that there’s another you out there, it would make it hard to do the deed. The second ideology is the opposite. Let’s say you have business you need to attend to in person on another world. You tele yourself, and then you go about your business as usual. Your tele-clone does whatever it needs to off on the other side of the galaxy and then offs himself. Its efficient, if you think about it. No need bothering with a return-tele. Still, I kind of imagine it’s the cowards way of dealing with it. It’s stupid though, really, because if you can’t kill yourself, what makes you think your clone would be able to?

The third option is just forgetting about the issue at all. That’s what I do. In my line of work, I rarely return to the same planet twice. I don’t have any idea what my clones do, and I don’t really care. It’s their business, really. Or mine, rather. You know what I mean. I know some folks just keep instances of themselves in places they would otherwise need to tele to and from regularly. It’s bad form to have more than one of yourself running around on the same planet at the same time. It’s even illegal most places, but it’s a hard thing to keep track of, so I’m sure it happens frequently to folks like me. Ah well. If I ever bumped into myself, I think that would be alight. I’m not sure what we would talk about. I guess I’d ask him what he’s been up to. Hmm.

[Archive] Apollonian Sphere

I'm not sure where I was going with this one, honestly. Another from 2015.

---


...
Is this thing on? Hm, yup, allright, I see the tape goin'. Can't tell these damn little buttons from each other anymore.

Guess I'll just start in on it then.

Thinking back, I find it hard to believe that it was a coincidence. We only went to the moon once, just once, and they found the sphere then- what if they had landed beside a different crater? What then? Maybe, I think there are others. Maybe there was one in every crater. Maybe. But Apollo brought back just the one. That said, it isn't as though we needed more. But lord-in-heaven, what else could be up there waiting?

Any larger and it wouldn't have fit. Also fortunate was the object's weight. A large sphere, bigger than ah... a beach ball, I suppose. Its an odd size, and there isn't a good frame of reference, but it was a bit more than a meter in diameter. Brass, at first glace. That was how Armstrong described it. A giant brass ball, featureless, but for a dusting of regolith, with a fine patina, and glossy enough to reflect the astronaut in fine, if distorted detail as he brushed the dust off it's glassy surface with his glove. That day was filled with new experiences for humanity, but somehow... seeing that thing on the video footage, hearing Armstrong's voice describing it... It hit us all in central command so much harder than even those first iconic words of his. "One small step" indeed. Something else had been there before us, and that was both awe inspiring and terrifying.

As I said, the sphere was light. Strangely light, even for being on the moon. As though it were a hollow shell of aluminum, but tapping it, he said it did not feel hollow. Sonar tests back here on earth confirmed it was... whatever it was, through and through. I remember Aldrin called it the Moon Ball, but some how, giving it a whimsical name never seemed to do it justice. Most of us just referred to it as the Sphere, if that wasn't ominous enough.

The Sphere's peculiar, astonishing properties did not end with it's composition. We ran several careful tests on it, but it was when we hooked up two leads to its surface and applied a current that we began getting the strange results. It was a complex process of discovery, though a mostly tedious one, and I won't get into it, but the end result was that we began to discover that this Sphere was some manner of computing device.

Understand, back then, 'computer' was not yet the household term it is today. But even in the contemporary sense, this thing was not like any computer in the traditional sense. First of all, supplied with a problem, the processing time was instantaneous. It seemed to have infinite internal memory, though there was no real interface, so accessing any of this memory directly eluded us. Rather, once we uncovered the language on which it operated, we could posit to the Sphere basic questions and it would present an output. This language was, on the surface, a sort of binary. But it was more complex than this. The Sphere seemed to be capable of subdividing problems infinitely, creating sub-binary languages for each sub-process, if that makes any sense. I recall McConnell calling it a fractal-binary, whatever that means.

I am not doing this justice, but the main point is that we were able to deduce that it was accomplishing its computing power through instantaneous, infinitely complex subdivision of any basic quandary worded to it. And then it broke.

Now, understand, I mean 'broke' as in, it literally cracked. Its functionality was not harmed at all. But breaking, in this case, is a very peculiar thing. We on the research team had had us a long debate about whether or not it would be wise to attempt to open the Sphere up. After all, we had only vague guesses as to what its insides looked like. It was clearly a powerful tool, but could more be learned from an autopsy than through non-invasive testing? I imagine any team unlucky enough to examine a captured extraterrestrial would have to make the same decision. But we couldn't decide. Coincidence again worked in our favor. Though I suppose it would be less pretentious to simply call it an accident. We'd been very dainty in our handling of the thing- and rightly so, I suppose, seeing as all it took was a radio bumped from its shelf by a careless shoulder to crack the thing open.

Again, I use a euphemism for precisely the manner in which the Sphere 'broke.' As I said, it was not hollow, and so it did not split like an egg. Rather it was as though the outer surface was a delicate membrane, like a soap bubble, and when the radio struck its surface, this bubble burst. Visually, for a few moments, its appearance remained unchanged. And then it was like it was crumbling, but in a way I can give no context to describe. The sphere quickly fell into a pile. The pile consisted of four large spheres, roughly somewhat larger than a basket ball each of them. And then many smaller spheres of varying sizes, the largest of these about baseball sized. The smaller the spheres were, the more of them were present in the pile, down to hundreds of marble sized orbs, and millions perhaps like grains of sand, and an uncountable number presumably making up dust that comprised the finest substrata produced from the Sphere's 'breaking'. I have no reason to doubt that there was no end, either, to how small the spheres were, grains finer than the finest dust. Perhaps even atom sized, and smaller. I'd bet you that all of us that were in the lab that day still today have little bitty dust-spheres stuck in our lungs. Whatever the sphere was made of, it was not traditional matter, and had no atomic structure to speak of.

Following that even, we broke other of the lesser spheres as well, and the result was identical to the first breaking, only scaled down. You see, we found that each of the spheres operated identically to the first, initial Mother sphere. Even the grain sized specks showed no discernible difference. And why should they? If each was composed of an infinite number of smaller layers... well, infinity divided by two is still infinity.

But breaking the sphere was important you see. One sphere alone could solve only basic problems, because only one simple thing could be asked of it at a time- even if it was processed instantaneously, it provided little use for more complex questions. This is why we constructed the network. Keeping the spheres separate, yet linked electrically to one another, we were able to create simple circuits based around the phenomenal properties of each Sphere sub-unit. This allowed for complex problem solving, logic gates, loops, everything. All of it instantaneous.

The perplexing properties of the Sphere... we formed a sort of explanation for how it functioned. A working model anyway. It was paradoxical, you see. The properties of a Sphere on the whole could be explained if you assumed that each of the smaller spheres making it up were a network of resistors or capacitors. Going down a layer further, we could imagine that the network of spheres inside each of those resistor or capacitor spheres could result in that sphere's properties as a resistor or capacitor. And you can keep on going down the rabbit hole this way, infinitely.

[Archive] Suitors of the Giant

Another short story from around 2015, this one was mainly a device to explore the difficulties of first-contact with aliens.

---

They didn't come here for us. The Suitors' home world had developed as a satellite of a gas giant not unlike our Jupiter, and they arrived in our solar system looking for a world similar to their own- for the purposes of colonization as far as we know. They must have been surprised to see the night-side of our little gem sparkling down here a few light-minutes away. Its interesting, you know? They say the conditions on earth, our peaceful little plot of space, are only the way they are because of Jupiter, the giant protecting us from many of the asteroids or comets that might otherwise barrage our little planet. That, apparently, is what makes a giant's moon as common of a place as it is for life to form, or so they told us. They'd never seen another planet quite like ours before. The Suitors could never meet us face to face- at least not in the flesh anyway. They required a very different atmosphere than us. They needed oxygen, of course, but far less, and much more moisture in the air.

I remember the day of first contact in a dreamlike way. Their approach was not boastful or offensive, but cautious. They watched us for several months, hiding around dead Jupiter in their reflection-less ship. We would later learn that the Suitors had only ever made contact with one other race, and that it had resulted in a grave loss on their part, though they would never discuss with us the event in any detail, only that it had happened quite some time ago. I'm happy, to think about it, that we did not scare them off. To watch most of our fictional depictions of first-contact, you'd think we were convinced that aliens had the single minded goal of conquering our measly little planet, and I suppose you could speculate that we were projecting, right? I mean, to look at human history, we have a long history of subjugating one another, it's only fair to assume we'd extrapolate that out into space, right? But we had matured, I think, by that point. I like to think we had. At any rate, it seems they were understanding, if only because we shared so much in common with them.

They had a name for themselves, though the exact wording escapes me. Something a bit silly and self-referential like our own 'Man-the-Wise' you know. I guess that must be standarad. At any rate, language doesn't work the same for them. To hear them 'talk' to each other... theres alot of touching, and then it sounds like a dolphin and a crab trying to have a conversation. As I said, dispite apperances, we really do have alot in common with them.

They evolved, like us, from a per-sentient brachiating creature that moved down to the ground and developed tools, had manipulating appendages and big brains. They spread out, conquered their planet, fought among themselves for space, resources, religion, and developed complex societies, and finally graduated out to the stars- a step we had only barely flirted with at that point.

It was funny actually- funny to me, I mean, I'm not sure if they have comedy- anyway, it was funny, they seemed surprised, actually, that we had space ships at all. To them, I like to imagine, it must have been as if they sailed into shore in a nuclear submarine, and found that the native children had some-how cobbled together a functioning sail boat. We couldn't cross oceans, but we were, in fact, mariners.

Anyway, I'm getting side tracked, I was talking about first contact. I've mentioned where we were similar, but the differences are what matter at first. Unfortunately, there really isn't any way to say 'we come in peace' to a civilization utterly foreign to your own, evolutionary parallels not-withstanding.

The Suitors were pretty clever though. They had intercepted just a little bit of our media, apparently, and had some how figured out just enough of our body language from it to send their message. The clip they played was from an old western- it was just people waving to one another. That's it. A few looped clips of people waving to one another. Like, holy shit, right? If they had that, they must have seen other stuff, like war films, or pornography, right? Maybe they were just... hedging their bets?

Anyway, in case you're wondering, no one thought it was a joke- we would have, sure, but they sent it while orbiting right up above us in the atmosphere- that said, I'm sure Russia was still convinced America was fucking with them or something, but yeah.

I know as much as I do only because I was part of the little team slapped together to figure out what to do. I know what you're thinking, and it was just like in a movie. You don't seriously think the American government has some sort of 'alien-contact-team' on hand do you? And no, the world didn't just turn to the United States to figure it out on their own- as nice as it might have been to present a unified front to the Suitors, there was no way anybody was going to get along with each other with so little time to prepare. To the Suitor's credit, they ultimately ended up making contact with every nation that wanted to speak with them- but as it turned out we were the first to legitimately try and communicate. I hear China tried to send them some sort of message, but it just isn't that simple. They needed some kind of baseline for human communication before anybody could talk to anybody, in the traditional sense.

So they had us. They didn't scramble us from across the nation, the Government just grabbed what they had laying around in arms reach. We were all from D.C. There were a handful of biologists and astronomers, a few generals and senators, the vice president (the president herself was squirreled away somewhere in case they nuked us I guess) and me, a linguist. An interpreter, specificaly- not my ideal career parth, but thats life for you.

I felt a bit like an afterthought, the lot of them were all pretty strong personalities, so I stayed quiet for awhile. A good bit of time was devoted to just trying to interpret the message they'd sent us. We had it all there in front of us, the video message playing on repeat, and a smattering of photographs of their ship spread out on the table. I remember thinking 'holy crap, this is actually happening' and it was pretty surreal. Anyway, one of the generals was convinced it was a trick. Like, they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security or something by sending us footage of cowboys waving at each other. From a human perspective, it makes sense- it was pretty easy to imagine the message like, as being ironic, or something, but as far as I could figure they knew exactly what they were doing.

They didn't send us pictures of themselves- they look a bit like octopuses, by the way- and they didn't try to talk to us in their language, which would be barely audible to us, much less intelligible. It was their attempt at a baseline greeting, no implications. Just 'Hello'. The senators were mostly concerned with what they wanted. After all, they had to want something otherwise they would have either never shown up, or would have obliterated us on sight, due to us being a huge threat, I guess? They were freaked out- I can't blame them for being a bit scared, but seriously, right? The vice president didn't talk a whole lot. He'd actually been an astronaut when he was younger, and I could tell all of this was really blowing his mind. Well, it was blowing all of our minds, but yeah. He just sat there, feet up, examining those photographs of the ship.

The ship was really a beautiful thing. It wasn't a saucer, lets get that horse shit out of the way. It was dark, very non-reflective, and faceted like a stealth bomber. It had some sort of symmetry to it, but there was no way of telling which end was the front. it was just like a big black cut gemstone. Not a lot to discern about them from that, other than how totaly alien they were to us.

So I started forming a plan. We were the home team, so the onus was on us to try to talk to them. Learning their language would come later. But first things first, we needed to say 'hi' back, right? After everybody had talked, discussed, worried, yelled, blustered, etc. etc. I took the floor, and did my damnedest to pretend to know what I was talking about. No one really had a better idea than mine- but the scientists at least seemed to be on board with me, and we formulated our response. It was pretty simple, just a video of us waving at the screen. We wanted to let them know they'd gotten something right.

---

The politicians ended up taking a back seat. They figured there wasn't a lot they could do until we could actually communicate with the suitors. The biologists were waiting- or perhaps salivating for a picture of them, and the generals and the astronomers were busy discussing the ship. That really left me to figure out the whole language barrier thing. I guess that's why I was there, right?

First of all, the only way we had of communicating with them at the time was with video clips. It was weird, but I made due. I had to go in with a few assumptions. One, that they understood the concept of written language. Two, that they would understand the gesture of my hand pointing at something. I didn't have a lot to go on, but I figured that if they could pilot a space ship across the galaxy and send us a video of some fuckoffs waving at each other, they could probably figure out my primitive monkey gesturing and scribbles. So I got some note-cards and a pen, and started taking pictures. I started with the basics.

Pointing at my self, labeled 'HUMAN'
picture of the earth, labeled 'EARTH'
picture of the sun,
picture of....

I kinda drew a blank after that. There was a lot of earth stuff they'd need a bit more context for first. So I looked at what they'd already seen.

Picture of dudes waving: 'GREETING'
picture of their own space ship: 'SPACESHIP'

and then I did some numbers too. And I compiled all that into a video and then sent it off to them.

And then we waited. We only waited for a few hours, before they responded. And what a beautiful response it was, let me tell you.

"GREETING HUMAN GREETING SPACESHIP GREETING EARTH GREETING [photo of what we're pretty sure is their home planet] GREETING [picture of a group of Suitors] GREETING"

There you have it in all its glory.
They'd re-cobbled my slideshow into that order and added a few images of their own. The committee about had a fit. The astronomers started to drool over the picture of their planet, and the biologists flipped out over the picture of honest-to-god aliens. Let me tell you by the way, they look weird. Like, I was expecting little green dudes or something, to be perfectly honest. It was hard to determine scale at the time, but they were a bit larger than ourselves. Very centralized body plan. Several long appendages in a ring- uh... kinda shaped like a witches hat, right? They had this long bit that went back into a kangaroo-tail like shape, and then the 'brim' was folded up with the legs coming off of it. On their tops they had two big empty looking eyes, and on the underside they had a couple orifices and another pair of little focused eyes, along with another slender pair of appendages. They wore coverings on all of their arms and legs, and some had markings around their uh... faces. The stuff on the underside. Anyway, yeah, weird looking. The inside of their ship- we determined that's where the photo was taken- looked remarkably similar to the inside of one of our space stations. Wires and gadgets all over the place.

---

That's as far as I got. The plan was for the main character to give a bit more backstory about herself, and I had a part planned later where the Suitors showed humanity the secrets of space travel or something. 

Basically, this project got totally shelved after the movie 'Arrival' came out, because they essentially took a similar concept to this story and made it ten times better, haha. Its a great movie, you should absolutely watch it.

[Archive] sword_axe.exe

This is a short story I never finished, started sometime in 2015

---

One corrupted class file. That was all it took.

In the world of virtual realities, time was not a meaningful concept on a global scale. That is to say, time is a variable thing, depending upon where you find yourself. Everybody knows that 'time is an illusion' as they say, but practically, one can apply this truism to the way the human brain interprets the flow of time. This is the reason behind why a boring task can seem to last an eternity and something fun can seem to fly by, even if both take the same empirical amount of time. This is also the reason why, as a child, the future seems like a distant, far away thing, but as an adult, the years may seem to slip through your fingers in comparison. The human mind's experience of time is governed by the release of chemicals. This was easily exploited when we began to electronically uplift the humble mind.

Immersion into netspace is intermediated by the Plug. The plug is sort of digital expansion pack to the brain. One of its main functions is regulating the experience of time- first of all, it is important that every individual in the same server are proceeding at the same rate-of-experience. Without that, there would be metal lag, and communication and interaction would be impractical. Second, this is important because, as it turns out, your typical mind processes at a snails pace. Its no fault of its own, of course. Neurons can only function so quickly. In this way, the Plug is a bit like overclocking the brain- and though that sounds dangerous, its actually quite natural. The mind does it all the time when it is dreaming. Diving frees your brain from having to manage an entire body. Allowing the Plug to manage sensory input allows for more efficient information processing, using digital neurons in tandem with flesh.

Anyway, this is important to understand, in order to fully grasp The Queue. Diving into a particular server requires quite a bit of synchronization. This process is completely automated of course, but between having to do several hundred regulatory confirmation requests and agreements, and confirmation reports of those requests, for the sake of redundancy, between the server and the local host, and then the process of syncing, credentials checking, so on and so forth... the process can take years. Subjective years, of course. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you've got to understand, the system all this runs on... its global. there has to be several degrees of communication between varying levels of technological advancement. And then, because your mind technicaly classifies as an uploaded consciousness for legal reasons, when you dive into a server that exists physically in another country, you're effectively crossing a border, so customs has to get involved. And then, remember, you're dealing with human minds here. People, not just packets of data. Redundancy is important. So its a culmination of all these things, technological considerations, politics, bureaucracy.... years. Again, subjective years, but its still years.

So, what does this mean? It means when you lay down in bed, and you plug yourself in, you can expect a wait of ten or twenty minutes before you're dropped into the server you dialed into. And then, if you want to leave, or transfer to a different server, you can expect a wait of ten or twenty years before your exit sequence begins. If the server is particularly busy- or if you're in a particularly high-experience-rate server, the wait can be closer to fifty subjective years. A smart player puts their name in the Queue the moment they drop in.

Understand, there are other options. A local server can have much more reasonable Queue times, but unless you're lucky enough to live in China, the local servers are most likely to either be garbage, or constantly full. At least that's my experience. Understand, this whole "years" thing isn't too daunting when you remember we're only talking about time measured in minutes or hours in the real world. A body could drop in for a decade of adventure after breakfast, and be done and awake in time for lunch. You know, its funny, politicians used to worry that with the advent of immersive virtual realities, society would grind to a halt. Quite the contrary. When you've just finished several decades of living in a fantasy world, waking up and doing some manual labor for twelve hours is no big deal. Also, maintaining connections with other people in the real world is more important than ever. Its important to carefully schedule dive times if you want to play with your friends. Otherwise, you might end up dropped into a server several years ahead of your buddy and have to sit around twiddling your thumbs. Let me tell you, its a pain in the ass.

Anyway, all this stuff is fascinating, but let me get back to the real story. Corrupted class files. Specifically one corrupted class file.

The server was an older one. Not extraordinarily old, but old enough that it still had a fairly simplistic way of handling various base game-play extractions. Really, from the players perspective, this sort of thing is immaterial. The human brain already parses things into categories and hierarchies; many of the older game systems took advantage of this to streamline the way they handle user experience. Anyway, it was old, based somewhere in Ukraine I think. It was odd though, I recall, because it was a pretty big server, several million player slots, and yet, it always had a really low player count. That said two things to me right off the bat. Either there were some odd game rules that didn't interest the majority of players, or it was corrupted somehow. We hear all sorts of ghost stories about corrupted servers- servers run by mind hackers that trick you into half a century of data mining, or something else more perverse, but in reality, there are hundreds of watchdog groups that flag those sorts of things before they even get off the ground. There wasn't a whole lot of info floating arround about it, and I'll be honest. I was curious.

Lots of old servers handle weapon types as abstractions to help it calculate the way NPCs use weaponry, and to predict typical usage patterns for players. Physics calculations have to be pretty complicated to be believable, and immersion is important in these kinds of worlds- in case I didn't mention, this was a medieval class server. Typical ren-faire shit. Castles, dragons, killing ogres, etc. etc. Its a popular trope. I was like, why not right? I hadn't done any good old swordplay in a long time. I'd spent a couple centuries in a combat world last weekend, and it was still pretty fresh in my mind, using a sword. Ah, I love swords. That ring of steel on steel, the finesse of combat. Kiddie servers hold your hand and make you a master swordsman automatically, but the hardcore servers, those put you in direct control. I lived for it, for awhile.

So I drop. It was immediately obvious that this was gonna be a long haul. Dropping in alone took a solid hour. I decided to to spend the time fooling around in the server's physics sim sandbox, which I downloaded. A nice little empty white space to dip into this particular world nice and easy. It had an odd feel to it. Older worlds usually do, especially when you've been playing somewhere more modern for awhile, but it wasn't really noteworthy. The directory had some items to spawn in to play around with- naturally I went to drop in a sword to practice with. Strange, I thought, as I flicked through the folder labeled weapons. Axes, hammers, a bow with arrows, a flail, a whip... notice anything missing? No swords. Not even a dagger. I was so confused. What a weird oversight. Was it some sort of joke? I decided the sim must have simply been slapped together. I spent the rest of the wait playing solitaire.

I've been here for twenty years. I'll still be here in another twenty, though I queued the very moment the drop went through. I spent the first fifteen with a boy I met on my third day in, Yatcha. Beautiful Romanian boy.... likely young enough to be my son, but he never told me and I never asked- I just have a bit of a sense for it. At any rate, it makes very little difference here. I could have been a ninety-year-old man, and it wouldn't have mattered to him. In netspace, you are the person you present yourself as. Why would flesh matter in a place where minds meet? In meatspace, I'm a forty-year-old advertising illustrator. I have dark wiry hair, my breasts have never had a shape that you might describe as perky and my stomach has been battling for the last twenty years with my bottom for which could sport the most unattractive species of curvature. But I'm in good enough shape, so I rarely give my appearance much thought. In here- the server is called aлекссвіт23, but the world is called Archicoria by the locals- in here, I'm short, slight, sharp featured, but not serious in the eyes, fair haired and slim fingered. I'd have been an elf, if the world allowed it, but this place was human only.

By Yatcha's estimation, this server had hosted a kind of peaceful game at one point. There was only one large city, with several little shires around the countryside, but beyond that was seemingly endless woods and mountains. Perhaps it was a frontier game- in other words, survival based, not combat based. As a result, aside from tools like axes and hammers, and hunting utilities like bows and arrows, there was no combat weaponry built into the game engine initially. Combat related classes would have been put into secondary engine components- as even if you wouldn't encounter a sword in typical game play, a thoroughly fleshed out physics system would still let you forge one if you were so inclined- but none of the engines main routines were tied into those combat weapon classes....

And so, one little corrupted class file- namely the one for swords, and sword type weapons- left the server otherwise intact. Typically, a file like that would be much more integral, and tied to several other routines. For instance, a typical hack-n-slash style game might spawn hordes of enemies for a player to encounter, decked out in armor and weaponry. And if one of those needed to spawn in with sword-in-hand, if the sword-class file was shot, the whole system could come to a screeching halt. But the only enemies here are mindless monsters. And there are no crypts or dungeons to loot that might hold swords in their proceduraly generated chests. It was all a very peculiar situation. Some kid, presumably named Alex- or Aлекс I suppose- must have cobbled together a standard class combat server from a survival template- and then apparently abandoned it.

I've never really understood the appeal of those sorts of 'frontier' style worlds. There's only so many times you can build a cabin, raise a barn, grow a farm.... Its listless. Yatcha and I did all that- his company made it much more pleasant. Fun even, in the beginning, but that may have been more about the sex than the cabin building. Anyway since he dropped out I haven't let anyone else get quite so close to me. I work better on my own anyway.

---

I never wrote more past this point. This was meant as a sort of prologue/re-write. I'd previously written a bit more in this world, which follows below. 

Prior to this point, the setting wasn't a virtual reality, but some sort of fantasy world with either a political or magical reasoning for the lack of swords.

---

It was unlike any axe I'd ever seen. Long in the blades, the handle growing thin between them, but short and sturdy at the grip. As I hefted the weapon, I then understood the purpose of the iron cross bar right above the grip; thin as the blades were, this 'guard' would protect your fingers when fighting. Most peculiar, but surely quite functional. At the top, the corners of the two blades curved inwards slightly. Only, slightly of course. Truly this tool flirted with the forbidden. If they had curved inwards any further, one might be deceived into imagining a a singular point present at the tool's top. The thought unsettled me. I have never laid eyes on a 'sword', Lords forbid, but the thought did cross my mind that this axe was designed to resemble one.

Scandalous, yes, but the letter of the law was met. The axe's owner examined his shoes closely the whole time that I held his blades in my hands. As I returned it to him, he nodded calmly, but I could see the sweat running down over his temples. There was no doubt in my mind that he knew precisely what it was he carried.
The traveler slipped the peculiar axe into a specially designed sleeve hanging from his belt, and then pulled his cloak tight around him to conceal it once more. We shared a glance.

"I've never seen another axe quite like that one, stranger" I said to him, quietly.

"Neither had I, to be honest" He shifted uncomfortably "It is not mine. I'm delivering it for my master to a man here in town" His eyes shifted uncomfortably from side to side, and his voice lowered slightly more- I leaned in slightly to listen as he spoke, glancing down again at his waist, the long form of the blades in their pouch forming an odd shape under his cloak, as though he were carrying a baton "This man... the instructions were so strange, if it had not been for such a large sum that he paid, ah..." The man cleared his throat.

"And he asked it to be delivered?" I questioned him gently- the more we spoke, the more uncomfortable the man seemed to become, fidgeting as he was. I scarcely doubt I could be blamed for my curiosity, though.

"Ah, y-yes, he uhm... he, my master's client, uh, he ordered it by courier, you see. Very odd! A hefty sum, and very precise instructions y-you see" His hand fell down to his side, resting on that short handle "He also requested it to be delivered at night, ah... to avoid attention, I would imagine" The man- I should rather say the lad, for, recalling him now, I remember him being very slight in build, and soft in the face, though I had not noticed at first, with his hood and the flickering light- anyway, he gave me a very nervous look. I looked back at him plainly.

"Yes" I spoke, clearing the slight pause "I imagine a thing like that would have the town talking." He gulped slightly, and then his brow raised, and he reached into his cloak, as if remembering something. The boy produced a single gold coin. He awkwardly pressed it into my hand, and then looked back up to meet my gaze. I could only raise an eyebrow and accept it- I'm not one to gossip, but if I were, I scarcely doubt a single coin would buy me off. At any rate, he nodded, seeming further relaxed.
I sighed, and took a step back "Alright then. I'd advise you to keep that thing hidden. And stay out of trouble." He nodded and scurried off into the city. I stretched a bit, and sat back down at my guard post beside the gate.

I could only shake my head. If Teorick had been on duty that night, the boy might have found himself in a cell tonight. That axe was... suspicious. But I don't like to cause a fuss, you see. So what if the blades were long and thin? An axe can only chop, and with no true point, that tool certainly couldn't stab. I can only imagine that delivery of his was to a very wealthy eccentric.

***

For a moment there, I seriously thought I was going to soil my self. Dreams of skinning that idiot Yarden alive spun through my head. He'd specifically said there'd be no one watching that gate on Feastday night! If that blessed bastard of a guard hadn't been half drunk, I'm certain I'd have greeted the dawn from the hangman's noose. That isn't to say that I don't think the little tale I wove wasn't adequate- it is simply that there aren't a great many situations where a good look at my weapon wouldn't raise quite a many suspicions.

After darting around the corner, I took a deep sigh of relief- a quiet one though, of course. I pulled my hood back, and un-stuffed my hair out from the back of my cloak. You know, its funny, I used to hate being mistaken for a boy. Lords bless my lack of curves. I sat down, and pulled out my map to review my game plan- and to calm my nerves. After all, I'd just flirted with the first of many a myriad way in which this scheme of mine could come crashing down on top of me. I slipped my hair back into my cloak, and donned my hood again, after catching my breath- I couldn't dally too much. Long night ahead of me then. I could feel Wyrmtongue shifting a bit under my cloak as I slipped through the empty alleyway- I'd need to adjust it's sheath, it still didn't sit quite right, though I'd adjusted the straps several times that night already. Still, better for it to loose easily than risk it catching.