Meanwhile, back at the Ranch(o)...
Zaren Ankleweed
down the trail he traveled in a time that seemed not so long ago. He's stopped
by a few times in the past to have a look around, but a little voice insisted
he stop by again.
He glances about, trying to find a familiar path, but all around him he sees
fields trampled flat and left to wither. Ten years of Eternal September had
ground the landscape away to a dusty shell of it's former self, but as he
crested a hill, a familiar site graced his eyes: The Rancho Deluxe still
stood, a waypoint planted in time and cyberspace. A part of the world still
remained.
The world(s) surely hadn't ended with the turning of the millenium, but they
didn't stand still, either. Many of the fantasies of the past had become
reality. Communication had grown ever cheaper, easier, and faster. Dr. Mann's
augmented reality had not quite become realized as he envisioned it, but in
some ways, it had been surpassed. Technology had spread to places and uses
scarcely imagined just a decade ago; from desktops to laptops to little boxes
in your pocket, all able to reach out and touch an invisible digital world.
The early work that had to be put into getting oneself online had been
replaced by point-and-click simplicity, and with it, the endless hordes of not
just the n00b masses, but those out to make a buck from a dishonest day's
work.
As he plodded towards the porch, Zaren flashed back to two of the most reviled
names ever to pollute a terminal: Canter and Siegel. 15 years later, the
majority of 'Net users wouldn't even know the names of the ones who, to some,
"started it all". Even some of those who tread the weary trails elsewhere in
the alt., comp., and rec. fields might not know the names. But a few still do.
A proud few still remember, and wear that memory like a badge of honor - a
memory of a simpler time, when an honest discussion could be had without
having to swat away penis pill and "make money" ads away like so many
horseflies.
Still, it was good to be here for another visit. Some of the shingles on the
Rancho had begun to bit-rot a little around the edges, the place could surely
use a fresh coat of paint, and the garden had turned into a sanctuary for
weeds that other things that folks felt it easier to just avoid. Zaren settled
down onto the porch swing and took another look around. A batcat fluttered
it's way to him and curled up in his lap, purring and cleaning it's wings. The
mailbox was stuffed with pink envelopes, and had long since overflowed onto
the ground.
Still, it was good to be back. It always is.
--
"It's the information age -- | "You're a lefty... a Mac user...
everything gets saved | you’re Polish... *and* you eat
except for the human soul." | Miracle Whip? You're not from
-- Rev. Matthew Carey, | this planet!"
Vision Temple -- a former co-worker
Sourcerer
<rm>
Zaren Ankleweed <hellofro...@gmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
> Zaren settled
> down onto the porch swing and took another look around. A batcat fluttered
> it's way to him and curled up in his lap, purring and cleaning it's wings. The
> mailbox was stuffed with pink envelopes, and had long since overflowed onto
> the ground.
>
> Still, it was good to be back. It always is.
"Musta dozed off", Zaren thought as he stretched his arms and yawned in
the drowsy summer breeze. He got up from the hammock strung between two
cottonwood trees along the side of the Rancho and scratched his
head..."and must have been dreaming I was on the porch playing
with one of Source's catbats".
Then a snap and buzz hit him between his temples and he shook his head.
That had been happening for awhile now. It blurred his vision and
sometimes hurt. Friends said he should 'get a checkup, just in case'.
Snow began to fall, big cold- dry flakes. In the distance down the dirt
road he heard an engine and saw lights. Then it stopped, but the lights
remained on. When he heard the muffled slam of a car door, he stepped
back around the side of the Ranch and hid behind a cottonwood. He heard
scrabbling sounds at the front gate.
The man at the front gate read the tattered notices 'Fighting Ferrets Pep
Rally, Tuesday. Attendance is mandatory. Don't make me send the
dra...' and 'The technospiders ate my homework is not a valid excuse'.
He poked about the trellis arching over the gate and searched the ground
below. Lifting a rock he muttered "There it is", and held up a key,
waving it towards the low dark sedan on the road. In a moment a car
door slammed shut, the lights turned off. He waited a bit, shrugged and
opened the gate and walked in.
The wave crackled between his ears and he nearly fell to the ground. The
doctors said they couldn't find anything and to stop worrying about a
brain tumor. The snow stopped in a final fall of gold glitter which
melted away before he could inspect the flakes.
Poly suffered from it, too, and that made him both mad and curious. It
had taken years, but he thought he'd finally tracked it to its source.
He thought he heard voices, a chorus of voices, rising and falling, but
he couldn't make out the words. They stopped abruptly. Shadows seemed
to move in the trees, peeking out at him from behind the outbuildings,
and from the porch. The voices rose up again, pitched to laughter, and
then a long sigh, drifting off. Things seemed to scrabble in the tall
brown grass.
There it was in the middle of the lawn. A structure, a machine,
surrounded by a high fence. Mists rose from the near river, figures
danced in it like faeries in a mushroom ring. The moon rose -- the
wrong moon in the wrong place in the wrong sky, Sourcerer noted.
The crackling between his ears became more insistent. He pulled a sack
from beneath his greatcoat. He'd brought his tools.
"This is the problem", he said. There's a short in the Meta Metaphor
Machine. Eyebrown was sloppy, leaving it like this. Let's see..." he
touched to panel at the fence's gate.
This discharge knocked him to the ground, blood ran from his nose. "I'm
a dead man" he thought. As he blacked out, he heard a voice scream
"No!".
He was standing before the porch steps. A soft, pillowy hand had raised
him up and caressed him, and had held him like an infant. "My mistake", he
thought someone said. It was high summer, humid, the air redolent with
jasmine and bougainvillea. The chorus of voices became a murmering and
drifted into silence.
Sweet Poly came walking along the path from the front gate and past the
Meta Metaphor Machine. Sourcerer held his breath, but it did not touch
her. The wind rushed through the trees and autumn leaves fell in front
of her. There was a thumping in the little shed inside the Machine's
gated yard, as she passed.
He sat on the stop step waiting. Poly stopped, her toes tight up against
the first rise of the steps. She did not look up. She had walked the
length of the lawn with her head down. She would not look up at him.
"Are you frightened?" he asked.
"A little", she whispered.
"Of what"?
"That they will all be here, frozen in time, as if Father Frost had
touched them all with his staff, never to awaken".
"I looked through the window. It is dirty, but it is empty. They aren't
here".
Finally, Poly looked at him. Her eyes welling up with tears.
"I was afraid of that, too"
Sourcerer, walked down to her, took her hand and led her back into her
house.
--
(__) Sourcerer
/(<>)\ O|O|O|O||O||O
\../ |OO|||O|||O|| Mirroring the shadows of futurity
|| OO|||OO||O||O since 1993
Eugene Mosburg
Sourcerer <vag...@inanna.eanna.net> wrote:
[ ... ]
>There it was in the middle of the lawn. A structure, a machine,
>surrounded by a high fence. Mists rose from the near river, figures
>danced in it like faeries in a mushroom ring. The moon rose -- the
>wrong moon in the wrong place in the wrong sky, Sourcerer noted.
>
>The crackling between his ears became more insistent. He pulled a sack
>from beneath his greatcoat. He'd brought his tools.
[ ... ]
>"Are you frightened?" he asked.
>
>"A little", she whispered.
>
>"Of what"?
>
>"That they will all be here, frozen in time, as if Father Frost had
>touched them all with his staff, never to awaken".
>
>"I looked through the window. It is dirty, but it is empty. They aren't
>here".
>
>Finally, Poly looked at him. Her eyes welling up with tears.
>
>"I was afraid of that, too"
At an indeterminate location within the comforting embrace of
the Van Allen Radiation Belts, two devotees of the Consensual
Hallucination focus on the trajectory pointing to the Rancho
Deluxe. Ed glimpses Source and Poly with chagrin, turns to
Gene with a snarl.
"Happy now, ya bozo? You made her cry! She didn't need to
come back to an empty house; you've been ratholing Pop-Tarts,
E-Flat harmonicas, Doctor Who TShirts, for two weeks! Could
have kicked off a real Sh**-Or-Go-Blind party without breaking
a sweat."
Gene nods. "Just waiting for the right moment. Besides, what
if Ted Dziuba is right: 'Nobody cares but you!'"
"Are you crazy? He's a blogger! Don't send a blog to do
UseNet's job!"
"'Blogger'? Are those the same people who walk around with those
tiny little walkie-talkie pagers, try to make them spit out net
content the size of a postage stamp?"
"Not exactly."
As they make Rancho landfall, Gene and Ed spy a large unit of
unknown vendor origin and chipsec spec (everyone's kit looks alike
these days), processing at 102% of capacity -- if one gauges by
the roar of the power supplies and odiferous smoke.
"As near as I can tell," muses Ed, "the party's already begun.
Look! They've implemented a Petit-Fours Machine. I'm hungry!"
"Ummm ... Ed? That's a METAPHOR machine, subclass META. You've
gotta pay more attention to the message digest when you decrypt
these streams. What would Phil Zimmerman say?"
"I was preoccupied," counters Ed. "Did you see the look on Source's
face? He's going to need medical attention." Ed rummages through
their copy of the Book of Divine Physics until he finds something
promising. "'And, behold, a man came forth and prostrated himself,
saying 'Lord, if you will, you can make me clean ...'"
Gene sighs. "C'mon, Ed, that's for LEPROSY. Don't go for the
theatrical every time; he'll be good as new with far simpler
ministrations."
Gene and Ed finally make it onto the Rancho's porch. With more
time on their hands than cops on a stakeout, they settle back
and wait for their friends to arrive.
"Does your wife know you're gone, or for how long?" asks Ed.
"Shouldn't be a problem. No guy can go wrong when he heads out
the door with a nice long shopping list. Besides, we'll be back
before we left. And she can always find me."
"I've noticed that: for non-technical system users, she and the
kids have an uncanny insight into the 'Priority Interrupt'. Are
you sure they don't read the UNIX API's while you're sleeping?"
"Ed ... I would not rule it out".
=========================================================
Gene
Ed
/*
And I do not fear the Cold. No, not at all.
-- Cicada Queen
*/
po...@circuit-riders.net
Poly hesitated before getting out of the warm sedan. The trip had been so
sudden, so unexpected, and now she could hardly believe where she was. Was
it one of those real dreams she had sometimes? Looking up at the old house
through the melting snowflakes on the windshield, it looked exactly the
same as she remembered it, but dark and still.
How long had it been? She couldn't remember clearly. Life just...
happened. She remembered settling down with Sourcerer years ago in the
field out back, with camping chairs and coolers and picnic basket; their
Picnic at the End of the World. They had stayed out there a long time, and
once in a while he would go back to the Rancho, but his reports were not
good, and Poly didn't want to see it so altered. One thing led to another
and they had drifted farther and farther away from the Rancho, which had
been overwhelmed at last by the engulfing tsunami of commerce, and
abandoned for years.
She thought they'd moved on. They'd started a web business, lived in the
desert for 5 years, became interested in photography again, moved back
east, bought an old brick house in the neighborhood where Sourcerer had
been born and raised, put in a garden. Life was good but it had not been
easy, and the struggle had taken its toll. Sometimes they hardly
recognized themselves.
> The wave crackled between his ears and he nearly fell to the ground. The
> doctors said they couldn't find anything and to stop worrying about a
> brain tumor. The snow stopped in a final fall of gold glitter which
> melted away before he could inspect the flakes.
>
> Poly suffered from it, too, and that made him both mad and curious. It
> had taken years, but he thought he'd finally tracked it to its source.
The headaches were irritating, and at first they'd been able to point
to many sources: cracked furnace housing, not taking the time from work
to take care of themselves as they had struggled to make a living; but it
was the sense of missing something vital that really drove them crazy.
And then one fine autumn day Sourcerer announced that he was well again
for the first time in years, and could think clearly about more than the
day ahead. He set up his instruments again, and the feel of the controls
was good in his hands, it felt right. Immediately he realized that their
headaches coincided with the ebb and flow of a weak and erratic signal he
picked up coming from the direction of cyberpunk and the Rancho.
When he had told Poly it was time to go back and check in, she resisted
the idea at first. There were project deadlines looming, the holidays were
coming up, and the last thing she wanted to do was to revisit the Rancho.
It had meant so much to them, and it was painful to think of it as it was
the last time she'd seen it, overwhelmed by swarming spam and cross-posts.
They'd kept in touch with some of the Rancheros, but had lost track of
others, and that was painful also. But Sourcerer had simply started
packing, and soon it was time to leave, and to see what they would see.
The drive had been quiet - all she could hear was the ringing in her ears
and thoughts against being where she was. "You can't go back, so what are
we doing here? Is it possible to simply pick up where we left off? Will
the Rancho even be there?" The surreal, dream-like feeling increased, and
finally they pulled up to the house.
> He thought he heard voices, a chorus of voices, rising and falling, but
> he couldn't make out the words. They stopped abruptly. Shadows seemed
> to move in the trees, peeking out at him from behind the outbuildings,
> and from the porch. The voices rose up again, pitched to laughter, and
> then a long sigh, drifting off. Things seemed to scrabble in the tall
> brown grass.
>
> There it was in the middle of the lawn. A structure, a machine,
> surrounded by a high fence. Mists rose from the near river, figures
> danced in it like faeries in a mushroom ring. The moon rose -- the
> wrong moon in the wrong place in the wrong sky, Sourcerer noted.
>
> The crackling between his ears became more insistent. He pulled a sack
> from beneath his greatcoat. He'd brought his tools.
The world was out of balance, and the meta-metaphor built long ago by
eyebrown was the source of the signal that had reached them, giving them
headaches.
> "This is the problem", he said. There's a short in the Meta Metaphor
> Machine. Eyebrown was sloppy, leaving it like this. Let's see..." he
> touched to panel at the fence's gate.
>
> This discharge knocked him to the ground, blood ran from his nose. "I'm
> a dead man" he thought. As he blacked out, he heard a voice scream
> "No!".
>
> He was standing before the porch steps. A soft, pillowy hand had raised
> him up and caressed him, and had held him like an infant. "My mistake", he
> thought someone said. It was high summer, humid, the air redolent with
> jasmine and bougainvillea. The chorus of voices became a murmering and
> drifted into silence.
There was a bright blue flash and a shout, and she couldn't see Sourcerer
for a minute. The headache was white hot and then gone. She got out of the
car and passed through the gate.
[Neither of them saw Zaren hiding behind a porch column and trying to make
up his mind if they were who they seemed to be, or some kind of a trap
set for the unwary punk. He watched them and held his breath.]
> Sweet Poly came walking along the path from the front gate and past the
> Meta Metaphor Machine. Sourcerer held his breath, but it did not touch
> her. The wind rushed through the trees and autumn leaves fell in front
> of her. There was a thumping in the little shed inside the Machine's
> gated yard, as she passed.
>
> He sat on the stop step waiting. Poly stopped, her toes tight up against
> the first rise of the steps. She did not look up. She had walked the
> length of the lawn with her head down. She would not look up at him.
>
> "Are you frightened?" he asked.
>
> "A little", she whispered.
>
> "Of what"?
>
> "That they will all be here, frozen in time, as if Father Frost had
> touched them all with his staff, never to awaken".
>
> "I looked through the window. It is dirty, but it is empty. They aren't
> here".
>
> Finally, Poly looked at him. Her eyes welling up with tears.
>
> "I was afraid of that, too"
>
> Sourcerer, walked down to her, took her hand and led her back into her
> house.
"...this house where I was a bride, a lovely place and full of good
living. I think that even in my dreams I shall never forget it."
-- The Odyssey Book XIX, Line 579-581
Sourcerer inserted the ornate key into the lock and turned it. After a big
push and some swearing, he managed to force the great front door to open
at last. It swung in heavily, rustily, with a slow reluctant groan, and as
it gave way, the wind entered, blowing in a fresh current of air through
the dark and closed house. Hand in hand they crossed the threshold, and
the door swung shut behind them.
Inside it was dark and absolutely still; the power was out and not even
the cuckoo clock was ticking. Otherwise it looked exactly the same, except
that someone had taken the precaution of covering everything -- the
furniture, the lamps and chandeliers, and the electronics -- with white
sheets, as protection against time and dust.
"We may have visitors soon, Poly," Sourcerer said. "I haven't told you
yet, but I've been able to reach almost everybody, and they should be here
soon." He showed her the notes he'd received from Zaren, Gene, and Julia,
and Poly was very pleased! "Nobody knows where eyebrown is though, and I'm
not sure what to do about the meta-metaphor," he said. "We need power, but
eyebrown built it and I'm afraid he may be the only one who can fix it."
The news that old friends would be there soon was galvanizing. No
power? No matter. The Rancho could operate indefinitely in analog mode,
sort of like camping indoors. There would be plenty of time to explore the
house, but first things first. Poly walked into her old kitchen and felt
the years of intervening time disappear. The box of kindling by the stove
was full, and there was plenty more on the back porch. She got the fire
started in the stove, and started a batch of bread to have with tea later.
Sourcerer smiled at the site of Poly up to her elbows in flour, feeling
better already, and he headed back out to the car to bring in their
luggage.
He was startled but not surprised at the voice from the hammock on the
porch. "I knew you guys would get here. Let me give you a hand with all
that luggage." And there was Zaren Ankleweed, unfolding himself out of the
hammock, hand outstretched, big grin... It's good to see old friends
again! Poly watched them head across the lawn to the car through the
window, and then went back to her baking. She knew everyone would be
hungry by the time they arrived. The dust could wait.
T---A Sweet Poly
C---G
A-T Real life is a story told in cyberspace.
C
T-A
C---G
G---C
Sourcerer
Zaren and Sourcerer walked down the path to
the car. When he saw how packed the back seat
was he exclaimed, "Oi! That's a several trips worth."
Sourcerer chuckled, "Wait til you see the trunk".
Zaren tugged at a bag. It seemed mortared in.
"Poly would make a fine stonemason". Sourcerer waived
him aside and handed him a small item. He pulled
something that looked like a studfinder from his
bag and pointed it at the jam-full trunk. It emitted a
pale blue beam. As Sourcerer scanned, Zaren looked
at the item he'd been given.
It was a small book "Extreme Car Camping, or
Don't Leave Home Without It" by Sweet Poly, 2nd Ed.
"The first edition had "Xtreme", but I think Poly
was embarassed by the neologism, and changed
it for the 2nd"
The "studfinder" began to beep.
"There. That little blue stuffsack. Give it a tug"
Zaren did. He could pull it out without effort, and the
other bags and boxes shifted. Sourcerer did the
same with the back seat luggage, and they
began the task of carrying their loads onto the
porch.
"Gene?", Poly whispered. "Gene?", a bit louder. "Come help me
get this stuff into the house".
The parlour was piled with stuff sacks, boxes, bags,
and packs. Five sleeping bags, ten gallons of water,
three boxes of food...
"and a partridge in a pear tree", Zaren said as he
unloaded the last box. Sourcerer looked over the things
Zaren had unpacked.
"Oh. You were joking. I never know what Poly might
pack".
Gene, Zaren, and Sourcerer sat in comfy chairs in
the alcove to one side of the fireplace where Sourcerer
has his chair, lamp and table. It was a good spot.
Close to the fireplace, but out of the way, and with
a clear view of the front door and the kitchen.
"Oh no!", Poly wailed from the kitchen. She came
into the front room. "It wasn't flour", she said.
"Or maybe it was flour, once. Now it is something
else. She ran back to the kitchen. "Now its flour again!"
She stood before them looking grim and determined.
"There's a yellow sack by you, Zaren. Bring it with
you to the kitchen"
He returned and sat down. "Poly's brought a
5lb sack of flour."
"At least three, I'd guess" Sourcerer said.
"Gene's brewing tea"
"I hope he's using the water we brought".
"We're having fry bread, beans, and salsa" Poly shouted
from the kitchen. "Clear the table, guys"
Afterwards they sat in the big overstuffed chairs. Poly
noted Sourcerer was slouched down, his
legs stretched out. He did that when his leg bothered
him; he was limping by the time he and Zaren got
the last bag onto the porch, and he still limped when
he got up and went into the kitchen. He brought one of
the kitchen chairs and set it down.
"Look at it closely. You can see where it was repaired. It
got broken during the last Christmas party here. Now
watch. This may take awhile."
Gene pulled a bottle from his coat and set it on the
table. "Something to warm us on this dark night".
Poly leaped up to get the silver cups she called "muglets"
from a bag, but Sourcerer waved her back. "Watch", he said.
Two of the chair's legs cracked, splintered, and
collapsed. Three minutes later, it pulled itself together
and stood on undamaged legs. Sourcerer said, "If
you examine it, you'll see no signs of it having been
repaired. It will be like new. This chair has three states,
new, broken, repaired. I think anything that has changed
at any time in the Rancho can 'revisit' any of its former
states because the Meta Metaphor Machine has logged
it all, and for some reason it is cycling through everything
its logged. Everything that's ever changed state here is
in flux, especially living things -- such as us. Be careful".
"The main house, the Rancho Deluxe, its structure has
never changed, not since the day Poly built it, so I
think we are safe in here, but not from some things that
may be in here, like the chair. Right now, though, we all
need a drink". Poly got her muglets, and Gene poured the
Cognac.
Poly curled up in her chair under a sleeping bag, and Zaren
began to nod. Sourcerer looked at Gene.
"So, he continued is a low voice, anything that has not resided
here, not been grown or built here, might be able to do
what we cannot, which, at a minimum would be to buffer, or
redirect the Machine away from us, so we can get some
relief and think clearly"
Gene understood. He took a last sip of Cognac and
bundled up to go outside. He opened the door, stepped
back, removed coat, hat, and gloves.
"There's a white sand beach out there now. Tropical
summer."
Sourcerer smiled. "Wait a minute and it will change. I'd take
the coat with you.
"I'll see what he says about it"
"And then, Sourcerer said, we'll just have to wait for eyebrown.
His eyes closed and he breathed deeply, but he hardly slept
anymore, and wouldn't, he knew, until the Rancho was all put back
together again.
mpa
"It's here somewhere. It has to be."
He mutters to himself as box after box of electronic detritis yields its
contents to the floor of the workshop under his less than careful
investigatory barrage. So many years, so many different computers and
computing devices. Where *have* those last two items gone?
His family, upstairs in the non-cave portion of their abode, has learned
to ignore the rhetorical exclamations that emanate from below.
"Why do I still own three-and-a-half-inch Netscape 1.1 install disks and
ten different generations of computers?"
"Who left the lights on down here?"
"Has anyone seen my Crackberry?"
At least his wife and the boy had learned. She's had twenty years to
learn to "appreciate" his quirks and his son has ten already under his
belt, with a delightfully quirky and inquisitive streak that helps him
take his father in stride. The baby only knows him as the big man with
the beard and glasses who can type with one hand, hold her bottle with
the other all the while bouncing her on his knee and making up songs
that just happen to be about her.
A far cry from the Internet Adventurer(tm) he'd fancied himself in that
not so reckless youth, he stops for a moment to examine an old treasure:
A stack of floppy disks, labeled in black Sharpie pen. A1-A13 to start,
then other, similarly numbered sets that terminated in X. He shakes his
head, laughs, and says a silent prayer of thanks for guys like
Volkerding who really opened up the world via their work on those little
sets of disks. Slackware rocked.
"That's it", he snapped. "I know where I left them."
II.
For weeks he'd been thinking about it. Not constantly, or even daily,
but it didn't go without notice that he hadn't checked in on the Rancho
this year. At least once a year since he'd left, he'd accessed what was
left of his Rancho portal to look for signs of life and for old friends.
This year, it's mid-December and his work (in yet another belly of yet
another beast) and the new baby have pushed most other things aside and
he had let that ritual drive through the old neighborhood lapse.
He'd actually almost made it back a few years ago, the last time he'd
tried to get through the portal to the Rancho. But that was without the
gate codes and without his key. Without those, the portal functions not
much better than a dark looking glass, dimly reflecting a view of the
space he shared so long ago but in an eternal, time-out-of-time fashion.
Through the grey and oozing haze that had taken over the place, little
snapshots would appear on the face of the portal. Static images,
overlaid one upon the other, some familiar and beckoning, others just
reminders of [watch out, really bad cliche ahead] "a simpler time"(TM).
All but drowned out by TheNoise.
III.
"The Generator should take care of the rest."
He smiled, examining his work. "It sure is easier to do this with
multiple high-speed 64bit processors and 4GB of RAM than it was with
16Mhz and 2MB."
"So it's a cave inside of a cave inside of a cave, Papa?", his son asked.
"Exactly, buddy. My workshop, my cave downstairs, occupies the exact
same space as my old cave at the Rancho Deluxe. I just "can't get there
from here" unless I've got the key and the codes. Now that I've got the
key rebuilt inside this cave, I just have to re-calculate and
re-incorporate the codes. The Generator, the 'Meta Metaphor Machine',
will take care of the rest."
"Papa, that's crazy."
"I know, boy. But it's just crazy enough to get me an honorary degree in
alt.cp physics. Okay, I've got the key working on the codes so I should
be able to head to the Rancho sometime soon."
"Papa, how long will you be gone? I don't want you to go."
"Oh, buddy. It's okay. I'm not going anywhere. I'll be right here
with you and Mama and your Sissy. I'm just going to visit the Rancho at
the same time."
The ten year old squints and tilts his head slightly at his father.
"I just don't get it.... Have you seen my DS?"
And thus the conversation ends.
The father smiles and prays quietly in thanks for the blessing of children.
IV.
Back in the cave, he examines his preparations once more.
"Tea, Earl Grey, exceedingly hot................Check.
Bagels.........................................Check.
Ooze retardant cloak and sharpened killfile....Check."
He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
"Better see if someone can let this cloak out a little bit once I get
there. I think it must have shrunk a little hanging in the closet down
here all these years."
"Buuuuuurrrrrrrrrannng", the sound of a train whistle cuts the night's
quiet. He chuckles to himself, having lifted the old ws_ftp transfer
completion wav as the signal that the code generation was complete.
"Now I know *where* I'll rez at the Rancho but what I don't know is
*when*. These codes are freshly generated but the source, well, that's
at least a dozen years old. Well, as long as the Generator is working
properly it should help guide me in."
He fires up the the VM host software and waits for the guest to boot....
The last thing he remembers before everything goes black is his wife
calling down, "Hey, there was a phone message for you. I think it was a
real estate agent. He said something about a Rancho Deluxe."
By this point, the cave within a cave within a cave was running at
full speed and he found himself mesmerised, unable to move.
"Oh, this was odd.", she calls down. "The real estate agent said, 'Be
Careful, the generator may be acting up. Why would he say that?"
V.
"Son of a Garbage Truck!!!", he heard himself shout (or something like
that) as everything went black and his wife's voice faded off and
disappeared in the distance. Feeling his way around, he was comforted
to find he was still in his workshop. Tables, stools, mic stands. All
formerly tools, now part of an obstacle course as he finds himself blind
and apparantly deaf on both sides now instead of just one.
He makes his way to the stairs and pulls himself up them, through the
kitchen door and gingerly through the kitchen to find himself
confronted by a
"SHRIEK. Yikes. Whoa. It's you. Dang, you scared me for a second.
How did you get up here?"
That voice. He knows that voice.
"I'm sorry. I umm, hey. How did you get in my house? I know you,
don't I?"
"Of course you do, the woman says. Why are you, wait a second. Take
this thing off."
Suddenly the light floods back into his eyes and he's confronted with
a vision of loveliness.
"dot.mpa, How did you get upstairs without walking past me and *why*
is your cloak on backwards?"
"Cloak on backwards? oh, the hood...over my face...ahh. lol. Gosh
it's great to see you Poly. It has to have been 12 years."
"Don't be an end-luser, dot.mpa. You were just sitting downstairs
with us while Source gave Omar a backgammon-beatdown. I came up here to
get tea when we ran out and turned around to find you up here already."
"Everything okay up there?", comes a voice from below.
"Yeah. mpa just scared the heck out of me."
"Us too", came the voice that somehow reverberated through the whole
house even when uttering at the level of a whisper. "He disappeared in
mid-sip, leaving the cup and what looks to be about 40oz of Earl Grey
suspended 3 feet off the floor."
"Poly. I wasn't downstairs. I was home, trying to get here. I
haven't been here yet."
"That's silly", she said. "Did you get your brakes fixed yet?"
"Poly, what year is it?"
"What an odd question. Source, could you come up here and take a look
at him, dear? I think he might have hit his head. And bring my sewing
kit, too. This cloak needs let out a bit."
VI.
"Okay, Source. Let me see if I can get what you are saying. I just
happened to have arrived at the Rancho in 1996 yet you and everyone else
is fully aware that it isn't 1996 and you have all of the memories from
the intervening years intact?"
"Well, sortof. You "encountered" 1996 when you first arrived because
that's where the Generator slotted you. As soon as you were aware that
we were aware that it wasn't 1996, you resolved into meta-time again."
"So it was the same you and the same Poly that I encountered upstairs,
not a past version?"
"Actually, it was both. When you first encountered the past-us, I was
getting the last few things out of the vehicle and Poly was
reconnoitering the grounds. By the time you made it downstairs here to
the kitchen, we were all here together in 2009. Quite simple, really."
.mpa scratches his head, "So, where did the past-you's go?"
"They were/are us all along."
"So did I create some divergent timeline that will somehow fold back
onto ours at some later date, providing a major plot development?"
Sourcerer holds back something between a chuckle and a grimace and
proceeds. "This isn't Science Fiction, Michael. With the way the
Generator is behaving, we're lucky we can keep these things sorted out
as it is without resorting to a device like divergent timelines."
SweetPoly walks in with the altered cloak.
"Try this on for size now, .mpa. I think you'll like it. By the way,
why did you have it on backwards?"
"Thanks Poly, that's much better. Source explained the backwards part
to me too. Let me see if I can get it straight.
"You see, the Rancho has always been a reflective surface, made even
more so by whatever is going on with the Generator. When I passed
through the portal with my makeshift codes, I flipped onto the surface
of the mirror. The cloak, being wholly from here, didn't change
orientation and so I found the hood over my face instead of covering my
head.
"I've got a question of you, Poly. One I've wanted to know for years.
May I?"
"Sure, go ahead."
"How is it that, to get to my cave here in the Rancho, I have to walk
upstairs and, when I come up from down there I end up on the second
floor in the hall?"
"Oh, that's easy.", she says, sipping tea and eating the bagels he had
brought.
"There's always a risk of flood here so everyone sleeps upstairs. Its
the rule. Why should you get an exception just because your room is
subterranean?"
"But, if it's sub.."
"After all these years still trying to figure out how this place
works. Enjoy your tea, Michael. And grab a bagel before they are all gone."
.mpa
(On the other side of the Mirrored Shades, the opposite is always also
true.)
vag...@circuit-riders.net
<rm>
> "So did I create some divergent timeline that will somehow fold back
> onto ours at some later date, providing a major plot development?"
>
> Sourcerer holds back something between a chuckle and a grimace and
> proceeds. "This isn't Science Fiction, Michael. With the way the
> Generator is behaving, we're lucky we can keep these things sorted out
> as it is without resorting to a device like divergent timelines."
"At least the narrative is consistent. It's maintaining the unities
however...peculiar...they are here. It's all very logical, and that
would be useful if we were on the outside looking in." Sourcerer
stepped back regarding with bright eyes .mpa. "It is so good to see you,
my friend", he smiled and patted .mpa's shoulder.
"You were our second-best hope".
> SweetPoly walks in with the altered cloak.
"Mr. Cordialilty", she said. "He tries. Michael".
"It's true, though. The fact that the "Generator" is both a metaphier
and a 'machine', is due to Michael. He may be able to see the logic from
within."
> "Try this on for size now, .mpa. I think you'll like it. By the way,
> why did you have it on backwards?"
>
> "Thanks Poly, that's much better. Source explained the backwards part
> to me too. Let me see if I can get it straight.
>
> "You see, the Rancho has always been a reflective surface, made even
> more so by whatever is going on with the Generator. When I passed
> through the portal with my makeshift codes, I flipped onto the surface
> of the mirror. The cloak, being wholly from here, didn't change
> orientation and so I found the hood over my face instead of covering my
> head.
>
> "I've got a question of you, Poly. One I've wanted to know for years.
> May I?"
>
> "Sure, go ahead."
>
> "How is it that, to get to my cave here in the Rancho, I have to walk
> upstairs and, when I come up from down there I end up on the second
> floor in the hall?"
>
> "Oh, that's easy.", she says, sipping tea and eating the bagels he had
> brought.
>
> "There's always a risk of flood here so everyone sleeps upstairs. Its
> the rule. Why should you get an exception just because your room is
> subterranean?"
>
> "But, if it's sub.."
>
> "After all these years still trying to figure out how this place
> works. Enjoy your tea, Michael. And grab a bagel before they are all gone."
Sourcerer took a small pouch from his pocket and while fumbling for this
and that he said, "I don't know whether your Cave is in the Rancho but
not of it, or of the Rancho but not in it. Or both. Same with
Jennacy's Apocalypso Cafe. And where does Gene sleep? There may be
others, too. But all the Rancheros have a room on the 2nd floor. It is
not possible to get anything except "The Village" view of the Rancho,
unless one goes through one's own room. It's part of the old defenses.
Both mpa and Sourcerer leaned across the arms of their chairs towards
each other nearly whispering. Sourcerer was taking notes and mpa
appeared to be doodling; they passing the notebooks back and forth,
while Poly curried the buds on a small tray.
"Michael reminded me of something", she said. "Remember, eyebrown got
'looped' in time, too, once...wait...". She went to her bookshelf and
pulled down a ledger labeled "Daybook, St Poly's Infirmary". As she
reached for her lighter both exclaimed. "You're right!", then Sourcerer
held up his hand.
"I wouldn't do that, Poly. It was grown here".
Poly closed her eyes, shook her head. As she put the pipe and pouch in a
desk drawer, she said,
"Guys. Now, it's getting serious".
And heads together leaning across the small table between their comfy
chairs, the three began to study the historical records.
Sourcerer
> <rm>
> Both mpa and Sourcerer leaned across the arms of their chairs towards
> each other nearly whispering. Sourcerer was taking notes and mpa
> appeared to be doodling; they passing the notebooks back and forth,
> while Poly curried the buds on a small tray.
>
> "Michael reminded me of something", she said. "Remember, eyebrown got
> 'looped' in time, too, once...wait...". She went to her bookshelf and
> pulled down a ledger labeled "Daybook, St Poly's Infirmary". As she
> reached for her lighter both exclaimed. "You're right!", then Sourcerer
> held up his hand.
>
> "I wouldn't do that, Poly. It was grown here".
>
> Poly closed her eyes, shook her head. As she put the pipe and pouch in a
> desk drawer, she said,
>
> "Guys. Now, it's getting serious".
>
> And heads together leaning across the small table between their comfy
> chairs, the three began to study the historical records.
>
>
>
Not looking up from his note taking, mpa said "Sloppy work that
'machine'. Sourcerer snickered. Poly slammed shut Daybook
Vol 10 and glared at them.
"Stop it now! If it is "sloppy" who is to blame? Why would eyebrown
even bother with such a thing if he wasn't badgered...and don't you
point your finger at mpa, Sourcerer. You were a great help, weren't
you, Mr Gracious!"
"We were at war, Poly!"
"And when the enemy was beaten, when there was no one left standing
to threaten us, you fought among yourselves". Looking at their
downcast expressions, her heart softened. "I know there would have
been no Rancho or some of the Rancheros -- and maybe no recognizable
group at all for them in the first place, if you hadn't gone to war."
Looking at Sourcerer, she said, "I know how hard it was". They were
silent.
"It's okay, now,' she whispered and returned to reading Daybook Vol 10.
Sourcerer collated their notes. The meta metaphor machine was not
mechanical or electronic. It wasn't a biological organism, either, but
it had some qualities that seemed biological more than anything else.
"He used a dna slurry as a 'lubricant'? Lubricate what? Where'd he
get the dna?", mpa said.
"It might be -- I can't think of anything else -- it might be a
genetic machine," Sourcerer replied. "It makes sense in context.
Discussing human/machine interface, and getting hung up over
mechanical and electrical. Why not think outside that box and..."
"I've just come across the med demon's report on eyebrown's
encounter with poison ivy", Poly said. "He tried to reseed the lawn
where he'd scorched it, but instead of lawn grass, poison ivy
sprouted. At least I thought it was; it sure looked like it.
But it was something else. None of the effects he suffered fit the
toxicology, and I do not think eyebrown was such a rookie as to
confuse poison ivy with pot. So, something was already affecting
him".
There was a rustling in the room behind them. "Watch this, mpa",
Poly said. The eight comfy chairs and two sofas were covered
with white sheets. In serial the sheets gave off a loud 'whap!'
and hung upright in mid-air, then rolled tight as a giant's blunts
they flew across the room to land in a neat stack by the front door.
A moment later, they flung themselves back across the room, opened
up with a 'Whap!' and settled onto the furniture.
"I keep trying to see a 'ghost', trying to see who covered the chairs",
Sourcerer said.
"It was the Archidaemon, I'm sure", Poly said. "I left him here to be
the caretaker. It was his job to tend to the Rancho in our absence."
"Where is he, then?"
"I don't know. I hope he's ok. He would have shut down, I think,
once the Rancho was secured, with a 'wake-me-up' set for routine
maintenance, and an 'alert' if there were a problem".
"Well, there is a problem", Sourcerer noted. "So...wait...he would
have responded to the problem. This has been going on for at least
a year. Whatever it is, he couldn't repair it, even having access."
Mpa had been rummaging through their bags, filling a box with odds
and ends. "Let's see what it likes and doesn't like", he said.
They stood on the porch a began tossing -- and slinging, Poly and
Sourcerer pulled slings from their back pockets --things over
the perimeter fence of the machine. Metal, minerals, plastics all
met the same fate -- ripped to shreds as they crossed the perimeter
line, then in a "toing!" and a flash, the shreds vanished into
nothingness. With organics it was different. Meat, corncobs, and
a cabbage were all fried a crispy brown, but remained intact.
"Well, it seems to prefer organics", mpa said. "At least it
doesn't utterly destroy them."
Back inside in the alcove, Sourcerer said "I think it is a genetic,
not a biological, machine...so it needs an outside source for its energy.
Where does it get its dna? Only one possibility. The lawnmower".
"Are you saying it runs on grass clippings?", mpa looked both startled
and impressed.
Eyebrown's lawnmower was a device Sourcerer longed to ride, but never
had the chance. "It also had a kind of shop-vac and attachments. I
think he was tidying up more than just the lawn, and he was monitoring
the utilities, so he may have re-routed the sewage, too."
"The house-daemons got cranky because there wasn't enough for them
to do I recall, even though the place was often a mess", Poly said.
Sourcerer was leaning back and staring at the ceiling. "The Archidaemon
was made in the meta metaphor machine and so was that" He pointed above
his head. In the gloom of the high ceiling they could make out a shape.
"It's the beemice maze eyebrown gave them one Christmas. They loved it.
One reason why is the beemice aren't animals, but genetic material,
clones, replicators, and I think the maze was kind of like 'Mom' to
them I made them for the catbats as a food source, but the catbats
were so spoiled being fed by everyone that they never touched them."
Like acrobats, Sourcerer lifted Poly up onto mpa's shoulders and she
unhooked the maze from the ceiling. They set it on the table between
them.
"I think I can 'stop' them when they appear, and extract them. We can use
the controllers we used for beemice racing and direct them over to the
utility entrance of the machine. If they can get in and open the door,
we will at least be able to see inside, and I do want to see in there."
Sourcerer pulled a small console out of his toolbag, and set it on the
table, the beam directed at the mazehive. A 3d representation of the
mazehive appeared above it. He began plotting coordinates and setting up
time frames.
"If I can freeze an instant, we can stabilize it in our frame of
reference and extract the beemice."
"But, don't hold your breath."
The Fool
>
> Sourcerer collated their notes. The meta metaphor machine was not
> mechanical or electronic. It wasn't a biological organism, either, but
> it had some qualities that seemed biological more than anything else.
>
> "He used a dna slurry as a 'lubricant'? Lubricate what? Where'd he
> get the dna?", mpa said.
>
> "It might be -- I can't think of anything else -- it might be a
> genetic machine," Sourcerer replied. "It makes sense in context.
> Discussing human/machine interface, and getting hung up over
> mechanical and electrical. Why not think outside that box and..."
A tumble of black feathers thumped against the window sill, then flopped
onto the floor with a pitiful, "caaawwwwww!" A few moments later, the
feathers hopped back to the sill, shook a couple times, and composed
themselves into a large raven, just over two feet tall. It tilted a jet
black eye at .mpa and Sourcerer while opening and closing its black beak
a few times, no sound came out. Hopping up and down and flicking its
tail feathers, apparently flustered, it let out a random series of
kraaas and and clucks before a vaguely human sounding voice burst out:
"Holy fucking shit dudes! I thought I'd never remember how to get back
here. Too many years of being a legitimate operator. The net shrinks
when all you can see are the cowpaths that have turned into hiways.
Words become mundane tools, coated with an oily mediocrity. Daily
re-enforcement of identity piles up, until you find yourself stuck in a
body, tied to other bodies. Along for the ride, believing your own
bullshit and completely hacked, and not deviating from the program
because doing so means pain, social stigmatization and/or death. There
is no specific outward form to it, it's not Zorba's full catastrophe, or
'selling out', or 'lameness'. The result is that I had no clue where my
will to speak, let alone my voice had gone. Took me a couple weeks of
mindless contemplation, a comic book binge, alot of weed, and an entire
day of moody pacing, sighing, waiting, and grimacing like a constipated
goth.
Now that I am here of course, I find myself subjecting yall to an
expository dump. Fucking sloppy, and a lingering expression of the very
problem, a crushing self-consciousness emerging from hundreds of
impressions you imagine you made on others.
Even then, the best I could do was this, some conglomerate of Huginn and
Muginn, the crows in Portland, and the ravens from Campsite #1. Gimme a
sec."
The Fool
> Even then, the best I could do was this, some conglomerate of Huginn and
> Muginn, the crows in Portland, and the ravens from Campsite #1. Gimme a
> sec."
After watching the results of the experiment and hopping around and picking
up a few scraps of the organic matter that fell outside the fence, the
raven flew back to the house. He skimmed the ground on the way, a
couple bounces that looked mostly on purpose.
"It's a reality virus, a subtle infection in a virtual world in which
consistancy, knowledge (recieved or deduced), and expectations start
filling in the empty spots and the blanks, start shutting down the
network, by turning off the lesser used or expected paths as it
metastisizes into a reality.", squawked the raven. "It continued, "The
ecstasy of communication becomes the squawks of biz and the mundane
sociological congresses."
"I thought it might be The Future come a knockin", replied Sourceror.
"This is another vector by which the virus is transmitted, the shadows
of the future obscure what is here and now. What is in front of us is
forced into tracks that lead to our image of the future.", continued the
raven.
The black bird jumped onto the table to grab a nacho from the
broiler-pan, which had suddenly appears on the kitchen table. It threw
it up into the air, and swallowed it whole as it fell.
"We have just about enough critical mass in our present storyline to
counter-act the reality virus. If we can get the beemice pass the fence
and into the machine, it just might fix it.", he said with a bit of
cheese hanging from his beak.
Sourcerer
> The Fool <fo...@unroutable.com> writes:
<rm>
> "I thought it might be The Future come a knockin", replied Sourceror.
>
> "This is another vector by which the virus is transmitted, the shadows
> of the future obscure what is here and now. What is in front of us is
> forced into tracks that lead to our image of the future.", continued the
> raven.
>
> The black bird jumped onto the table to grab a nacho from the
> broiler-pan, which had suddenly appears on the kitchen table. It threw
> it up into the air, and swallowed it whole as it fell.
>
> "We have just about enough critical mass in our present storyline to
> counter-act the reality virus. If we can get the beemice pass the fence
> and into the machine, it just might fix it.", he said with a bit of
> cheese hanging from his beak.
"The beemice are cycling through their times in the mazehive. They liked
to linger. When I get a positive in the hive, the sphere replicates
it before the beemouse cycles out. I've got the template from the lab
upstairs. They're bee for bat and mouse for cat, but can be morphed
however we please. We've got four, so far. Three or four more should
do it".
While Sourcerer watched the sphere, mpa and Poly disassembled the
controllers, rewiring them according to mpa's sketches. The raven paced
the table between them. When he reached one end, he stopped, cocked his
head and regarded their efforts a moment, then turned and paced towards
the other end, only pausing to grab a nacho from the pan.
Then they went outside into the tropical night, humid and fragrant,
and stood off a few meters from the perimeter fence. They heard the
thumping coming from behind the utility entrance.
"That's what I heard when we first got here. Either something has come
loose, or there's something in there." Sourcerer set the sphere on the
ground. He looked back at Poly and mpa and signalled them. Then he
opened the sphere. The beemice spiraled up out of the sphere. Poly and
mpa guided them over the fence. They hovered before the door.
Sourcerer attached the Rancho's Minor Maintainer to the sphere and
powered on. The beemice merged together into a molecular ribbon, and
flowed into the locking mechanism, where mpa and Poly picked the
lock. The door swung open. Sourcerer focused the Maintainer. "Damn!
What is all that?", he exclaimed. The screen showed the utility room
littered with shreds of black material. He reformed the beemice, and
the controllers guided them to the console and had the beemice pile onto
the button labeled "MaintMode" until it clicked.
The tropical summer faded into deep winter, a bright, cold night, still
and moonless. Large snowflakes began to fall filling the air.
"We're all soaked", Poly said. "We need hot food and dry clothes; forget
the Meta Metaphor Machine for now. We can explore later and without
catching pneumonia. And it's Christmas!" Then she noticed the lights
were out.
"Uh oh. Powers out. Without the machine working, we'll have to find
the fuse box."
Poly took Sourcerer's arm as they walked back to the Rancho Deluxe. He
kept looking back to the machine and the detritus in the utility room.
Gene, mpa, and Zaren followed them rubbing their arms against the cold.
The Raven came up alongside Sourcerer, who turned to him and said,
"You look familiar. Don't I know you from somewhere? Arches? Canyonlands?"
It was beginning to feel like Christmas.