Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 23:56:13 -0500 Message-ID: <199702050456.XAA06216@asylum.apocalypse.org> From: "Kelly J. Cooper" Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [JWW] [HA] The Long Walk Home, part 5: "Upgrading on a Curve #1" Mail-To-News-Contact: postmaster@nym.alias.net Organization: mail2news@nym.alias.net Lines: 452 [ADMIN: Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4 have previously been posted here and can be found at http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/kjc/JWW.html The current story thus far - Jameson W. Walker, while shifting from the GateWay of the Worlds in Generica on the planet Nexus to another world known as "Shadow" (homeworld to Kardia Xvaramene) was blown out of her transport movement for reasons unknown (or non-existent) and abandoned on a yet another planet whose local name for itself translates to "Mudball." She is dreaming about events previous to her transport and trying to find a gateway off-world so that she can begin her journey back to Nexus. Her current path is toward a place called The City of Glass. Thanks.] ** --- < <<< --*-- >>> > --- ** "As long as we have hope, we have direction, the energy to move, and the map to move by. We have a hundred alternatives, a thousand paths and an infinity of dreams. Hopeful, we are halfway to where we want to go; hopeless, we are lost forever." - Hong Kong proverb ** --- < <<< --*-- >>> > --- ** Cradled high in a tree where several trunks split from the main, leaving a pocket of safety for a humanoid to curl up, Jameson W. Walker slept. And dreamed. To look at her was to see a humanoid woman, longish brown hair falling into her eyes. If we were to ask her, she would probably tell us that her eyes are dark green. But for now, we see only that her eyes are closed but franticly active behind the eyelids. Her skin is brown from exposure to hundreds, if not thousands of different suns to the point where we can only guess about her race. Strong fingers twitch their grip on the bag in her lap and a long sigh escapes her lips. She is dreaming hard, it seems - hard enough that moments and flickers of movement escape the lockdown on her motor controls of dream-sleep and shiver along her muscles. We might see what she is dreaming, if we looked hard enough in the right places, but there are so many other things to look at here. For she is an interloper on this world, and although she might look like a bit like its inhabitants, she is not one of them. She is not one of anything except perhaps one of a kind. A created being, cooked up from the genetic soup of one set of races who annihilated themselves on a world very far away, she is an anomaly. Looking closely, we can see her genes and how they neatly fit together in a way strangely similar but completely different from the people of this world. We can listen closely and hear the inhuman regularity of her heartbeat. Although, although - our untrained ears hear only what sounds like perfect rhythm. But we might agree on a standard and use it to measure the time between each clenching of her heart muscle and notice some slight irregularity. She is dreaming hard, it seems - hard enough to disrupt the machinery of her otherwise stable body. And while we are listening so closely to the sound of her heart we might notice the song of her blood. Does it sing to itself? It is teeming full of things other bodies don't carry, things that have enabled her to survives many hundreds of years living and many hundreds of deaths dying. Things that sing to each other as they dance through her body, doing their work. Things. Our senses are wondrous things, much more than we know, much more than our brains let us understand. But if we extend those senses to touch this sleeping woman, to push at her thoughts and probe her emotions, hoping to catch a glimpse of her dreams, we will find ourselves tangled, caught up in a barrier, a protective layer of horror and death-memories, woven like a cloak, layered like a suit of armor. It will catch us up and hold us like burning sap and our screams will be drowned out by the shrieking chaos and... and laughter. She laughs and smiles and thinks clearly but we might consider her insane. Her interface with reality is... fractured? Or perhaps multi-faceted might be the better term. But we are lucky. She is dreaming hard, it seems - hard enough to catch the attention of creatures who listen for such things. She has gathered a small audience with the loudness of her dreams. Fragments are slipping past her own defenses to project themselves outward and the intensity of the concentration of the beings gathered around her amplifies the visions for the rest of us. But only if we know where to look. The creatures know something is going to happen - they feel the tremors of possibility crossing ripples of activity in multiple planes. And instinctively they are hiding her from the Jack of Dreams, knowing he might interfere with the movement of this wildcard toward the game. We watch the creatures and see the visions. The creatures watch Jameson and see hope. Jameson watches the insides of her eyelids, but sees something else entirely. It unfolds for all of us like a shadow play with the figures gaining substance as we see them through her eyes. She is dreaming hard, it seems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [ADMIN] The following story contains topics which are not part of traditional fantasy fare. If you do not like seeing magic treated on the same footing as science, and if you have trouble with people doing complicated things that don't directly reveal the very whorls of their viscera, then you won't like this. Caveat lector. "You can say it one more time What you don't like Let me hear it one more time then Have a seat while I Take to the sky Gonna take to the sky" Tori Amos, "Take to the Sky" << * + * >> Jameson flopped down onto one of the soft chairs in the sunken area of the big room so that she had the big picture window on her left and the fireplace in front of her. She set her deck on the table in front of her. Slipping a pair of goggles on and jacking them into the machine, she leaned forward and reached out into the air. Looking at her, she seemed to be carving a statue out of nothing. From her own perspective, she was making contact with various databases in her system, setting up searches to compare the star coordinates she'd lifted from Kardia's cybernetic eyes with the data she'd collected during 700 and some odd years of recording the stars and uploading information from the databases of other civilizations. Finding the opening on this side of the gateway was easy and she set up the search for Kardia's homeworld to run in the background while she traced the simplest route back to the physical manifestation of that door on Nexus. Local information was relatively sketchy, but it sounded as if the slavers were cruising that area consistently enough for their patterns of movement to be noticed and recorded. In addition, the local townspeople had some gossip about mysterious strangers and the occasional outsider being adopted into a nearby mountain tribe. Probably folks who managed to show up between slaver raids. She'd have to dip further into the Generican gossip net to see if there were any new developments and find out if anyone had a rough idea of the strength and numbers of that particular slaving group. Inwardly, she grimaced. Slavers were always the least pleasant folk of those she dealt with on any world and her distaste for them ran deep. A flag notified her that the machine had found the star configuration she was looking for in a part of her system that was half made up of the Onari databanks and half culled from the 'kan's. It was in the outer fringes of both. She frowned in mild puzzlement at the 'kan symbol next to it. It was not a commonly used one and she didn't recognize it right off -- the quick ref called it something delightful and difficult to pronounce that first flickered with some strange complicated commentary, then essentially translated it as either "bad tasting food" or "bummer land" or both. The Onari markings meant, "Tech mixed magical; closed but permeable" and a later addition read "corp & net." The area was low mana, so magic was limited to the resources available. Energy rules. Interesting. That could give them an edge in that their attackers would be limited and very likely inclined to ration their usage. Or it could hamper them horribly if Kardia had trouble adapting what she was learning on Nexus to what she would be able to do on Shadow. The world had no natural doorways in or out, but entrances could be punched through so they were fairly near other realities. And, as Kardia said, a money based world. With an unconscious half-shrug Jameson began tracing possible routes out if they had to travel via doorways instead of a directly linked gateway. Logging two solid ones and a possible third, she made sure all of her findings were saved out to solid memory from the ephemeral memory area where she did massive data manipulations, and pulled her goggles off. Her eyes stung and watered and she pressed them lightly with cool fingertips, then rubbed her forehead above her eyebrows. Blinking and looking about, her eyes rapidly readjusted and she located a wall jack for datalink. Smiling, she moved to a chair next to the port and plugged her kludgey hardwired monstrosity into the wall and the back of her machine. She slipped into alpha state and stepped up into the net. Distantly she sensed the weaver. Leaving her be, she opened a link to the WorldGate and initiated contact with Traveller's databank. "HI!" The voice startled her and she looked at the link more closely. It peered back at her, resolving itself to a yellow smiley face button. "HEY! You've got an ONARI signature! Cool! You don't look like an Onari, though, unless of course your projection is different from your actual appearance, which means of course that you could look like just about anything and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, so what exactly are you?" Jameson blinked precisely three times before replying, "Adopted. I'm adopted. I look exactly like this on and off the net." "Wow! I just work here. I can look like a lot of different things and someday I wanna travel and go to a lot of these places I maintain the databases on, but for now I really need the payments and I like talking to people, or at least just about anything that thinks, you know, I'll consider to be a person, cuz I'm not prejudiced at all and a LOT of really weirdly configured things call us up for information -- some of 'em can't even really translate into a visual, just a sound or a color or like fuzzy blue moss even, and I don't usually get to talk to people who know what travelling really is, so I have to be careful what I say but YOU'RE an ONARI and you probably know more than we've got stashed in this whole library and I think that's really amazing." Jameson was looking mildly concerned, following the daemon's syntax, but caught up as he was completing his sentence. "Good thing you don't need to breathe." She commented. "Why?" It looked deeply curious. For a smiley button. "Um, nevermind. I need to download rates, liabilities and success predictions for a direct gating to these coordinates. Please." "My pleasure!" It chirped and almost immediately a small flood of data passed before Jameson's eyes. None were as bad as she'd feared. "Thank you. I appreciate it." Jameson began withdrawing from the connection. "Can I book you passage? How many in your party? Do you want me to wangle an Onari discount with the boss? Do you need data on any other worlds? Do you want to share databases? Do you have to go?" "Um. No. I'm not sure yet. No thank you. Not right now. Yes, perhaps when I return. Yes." This time it was the daemon's turn to pause and parse. "Wow. You're so cool. Bye!" Shaking her head and dropping smoothly back into the less virtual reality, she again disassembled her hardware hack and this time actually shut her deck down. Leaving the plug she'd made this morning on top of the her machine, she let her head fall forward while she attempted to relax the muscles in her neck. She really needed a better interface with her deck. It had been fine for a long time, but as her neural pathways evolved, connecting via patterns projected directly onto her eyes became more painful and difficult. Her eyes moved too fast and her mind no longer relied so much on visual input. "I think," a warm voice murmured in her ear as strong hands went to work on her neck, "I could help you with an upgrade." 'Raelf's hands and 'Raelf's voice felt like reverberating echoes of what they were when she'd first met him, before MAR and before... "That," she sighed softly back, relaxing slowly, "would be marvelous." "The trouble with your deck," he said when the tension eased from her shoulders and upper back, "The trouble with your deck is that it doesn't know you. It doesn't change and you do." She nodded once. "I picked it up a long time ago, early on in my travelling, and there's very little of the original left. Repairs. Upgraded the memory from the original magnetic bubble. Changed the virtual world modules, swapped in newer star-charting databases when I went 3-D, but... My mind isn't strongly psionic-inclined, so dropping into contact is difficult when the interface isn't designed to accomodate. But I can't manipulate that much data through a screen. I've been debating for years whether to have a jack installed or grow my own or something, but it just wouldn't pass in a retro-world. I could hide it from deep primaeval, but there are too many medium techs that run personal scans. And it would take a long time to teach my body to accept it." 'Raelf flipped around the end of the chair and landed in seiza, kneeling with his legs folded under him and sitting back over his feet. It left him looking up at Jameson from just below her eye level. "For sure. And you'd find out some ugly things on Kardia's Shadow earth. Place wouldn't like you much." Jameson frowned in mild surprise, "Why not?" "Your life support isn't really alive itself. Close, but it would slowly start to mess you up. The magic there is built out of the Life archetype, and it gets complicated." Her frown deepened, "Ah, what then? How long do you think it would take?" "Oh, three, four years. You can fix it yourself, though. Lex tells me you could do it. Mostly has to do with thinking of the little guys as really you, instead of something living inside you." He looked sideways at her. "I have no clue what Lex meant, by the way. He's been getting weird flashes. Hard to understand." Jameson smiled faintly, and 'Raelf quirked an eyebrow. "What? You think that's funny?" he huffed, making grandiose yet futile flailing motions. "Wah, you think I'm hard to understand, my heart is broken, sob sniff, I've confused my friends. They'll never invite me for ice cream now." He grinned. "Want some, by the way?" Jameson grinned in return. "Ice cream? Isn't it a little cold?" "Yeah, that's the best part. You sit here by a nice warm fire and watch the ... uh oh, we're high enough to get snow here, aren't we. I'm glad I don't have to drive a car down that hill." He blinked at the faint drift of snowflakes out the window, but it only lasted a moment before it turned back to rain. "And you eat ice cream and enjoy the luxury of being warm enough to want to eat cold food," he continued. "What you say?" Jameson's mouth found a smile, "I say 'Yes, Da, Indeed, Weh, Jea, La, Civ, and Okey dokey'." "I'm too lazy to walk," 'Raelf grinned, and _reached_ sideways with a conjurer's flourish. He held a small blue sphere in his hand the color of morning sky in high summer. "Hello, little wind," he said to the sphere. "Could you please bring me the two bowls in the kitchen over there, the ones on top of the pretty cold-air spell? Thank you, yes, you can eat the cold air when you finish." The sphere cracked open and a tiny humanlike figure with gauze wings flickered briefly on his hand before it zipped into the kitchen and returned, a whirlwind, carrying two bowls of dark chocolate ice cream. "Wasn't that harder than walking would have been?" Jameson juggled the bowl from hand to hand before she placed it on a throw pillow on her lap. "Nah. Well, maybe a little. More fun though. Most good magicians do their best work because of fun." She grinned and tasted the cold bitter sharpness of the hard ice cream and the contrast against the heat that was beating on her face. Luxury indeed. There was a strange flavor, though, some kind of mineral taste. She put the bowl down. "What Lex said, about thinking of my nanites as really me instead of something inside me? I do. Or, I thought I did. I've never been without them. I'm them and they're me and we..." She stopped abruptly. "I said 'we' didn't I? And 'them.' Damn." 'Raelf held up a hand. "Yeah, that's the thing. I know it's you and you know it's you but the Shadow Earth doesn't and you should be OK, I hope, if you just pay attention to them being alive because they're part of you. That place, it has trouble with spirits and bodies, wants them to be all separate for its magic, but it makes a mess if you try to add machines to the body, even little ones." He shook his head, sighing lugubriously. "But I can't loosen myself from my body, it's all integrated. That was part of the problem with that paste-eating, glue-sniffing servant of the Reaver, I couldn't divorce my consciousness from my body because I... it... we..." Jameson bit the inside of her cheek and looked thoughtful for a moment before changing topic, "So what were you saying about upgrades?" 'Raelf perked up like he had just been given his morning coffee. "Oh yeah. I've got some cool designs left over from when I was figuring out how to give Dash the live-forevers, and suddenly this one design jumped out at me. Well, Ilya pointed out that it had some promise, and it took some tweaks. It's a sort of resonator, works either magically at range, or in tech mode at pretty short range, touch mostly. Got to figure out how to hook it into your deck, though. The link for your side is real easy. It's just one nanogolem, you'd have to introduce it to your others and let them make copies if they like it. Mostly it hangs around in the sensory cortices, so it can give you info by singing in the same patterns your senses want to use. I put in some smarts, so it won't do things like scrambling the brain if you run into ICE." Jameson leaned her cheek against her hand, eyes slightly troubled. "I've been wearing the same body and essentially the same system for nearing on 800 standard spans. Outside of streamlining the only drastic change has been the... shall we say recent scrambling of my brains. There is residue throughout my consciousness of larger patterns than I had noticed in all my rude student ethnography and sometimes I have more trouble concentrating than I used to..." Her eyes lost focus, but only for a moment and she almost immediately continued, "But I've never introduced something thoroughly different and new. Never consciously made that kind of modification in my systems. Never... really... um... feh." She put the ice cream aside and slid around on the couch until her feet were slung over the back of the chair and her head hung down in front. 'Raelf looked down at her and blinked patiently. "You would think..." Jameson started and stopped, made a fish face then started again, "You would think with all the hellishly goofy stuff that has happened to me over the years that I'd handle change much better than this, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you? Well I would. Sheesh. I'm an old fart. Time to stick me in front of a vid screen and wrap me up in rubber diapers, I guess." She grimaced fiercely. 'Raelf's upside-down eyes were extremely innocent. "Nevermind." She uprighted herself. "How long would it take for you to grow me some new nanos?" "I've got the one guy done. If you want to try it out, the guy's not able to reproduce solo, so there's no hazard, and I can remove it by a segregation spell if it looks like it isn't doing well. I'd like you to try it first, so we can tell if it would..." "Cook my system? Torque my reality? Yah. Good idea." 'Raelf reached down his oversized sweatshirt, and pulled a pouch out, hung on a leather thong around his neck. He opened the pouch and drew out a flat white disk, some kind of ceramic. From the center, Jameson heard the faint chime of blood music, a very different tune, masked by the proximity to 'Raelf's constantly shifting sounds. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Jameson-who-is-dreaming whimpered softly and changed position, her hands moving jerkily with aborted reaching-out motions. We are shifting about ourselves, feeling her loneliness like a palpable ache in the heart. But we will stay and we will see this story through. (...to be continued in The Long Walk Home, part 5: "Upgrading on a Curve #2") -- p.s. [ADMIN] Parts of this story were written two years ago (but never posted) with Steve Hutchison (hutch@agora.rdrop.com), for the [HA] thread (the first 3 posted parts of which can be found at the above URL as well). See the ADMIN introduction to "The Long Walk Home, part 3" for more details. The character of 'Raelf is solely the property of Steve Hutchison and appears with his gracious permission. All rights are reserved to him. By him. For him. All of the above. (Jameson is mine, all rights reserved. Permission granted for archiving). In a not-too-distant timeline, 'Raelf and Jameson were both part of a war, a pretty big war, that was tracked in the [MG] thread (which can be found at www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/kjc/MG.html). Both left the final battle badly scarred in different ways - in the present time-line, both have long since healed. But the internal remembered story takes place only after the healing of flesh but before the healing of spirit. The 'Raelf here is still split along his elemental lines of existence. [END p.s. ADMIN] -- Kelly J. Cooper kjc@apocalypse.org Writer for Jameson W. Walker Keeper of the Mage Guild FAQ http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/kjc/dragon.html "Hold on... hold on to yourself - this is gonna hurt like hell." - Sarah Mclachlan