Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 00:01:16 -0500
Message-ID: <199702050501.AAA06524@asylum.apocalypse.org>
From: "Kelly J. Cooper" <kjc@apocalypse.org>
Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
Subject: [JWW] [HA] The Long Walk Home, part 6: "Upgrading on a Curve #2"
Mail-To-News-Contact: postmaster@nym.alias.net
Organization: mail2news@nym.alias.net
Lines: 545



[ADMIN:  Parts 1 through 5 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.]

              **   ---   < <<<   --*--   >>> >  ---  **

(...continued from The Long Walk Home, part 5: "Upgrading on a Curve
#1...)

  We are watching Jameson W. Walker dream and we are watching other
beings observe her as well.  Perhaps even more players in this game
watch us...

----------------------------------------------------------------------

"logic dances you from here to there not very far
        making sense can't tell you where you are"
				- Sam Phillips, "Signposts"

			     << * + * >>

>'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.

Her curiosity intensified.  "Could I hold it?"

"Sure."  He handed her the disk.  "Don't touch the top unless you want
to invite it in.  It's not very mobile, you might have to give it some
help entering."

She nodded, not looking at him.

The entity was very polite, but the strength of its music was far out
of proportion to its size.

"It's alive," she whispered.  "Not just a machine."

"Right.  I gave it some of my life pattern.  Not safe to make new life
without a lot more research."

"Uh huh."  She swallowed.  "It sounds more like a nerve cell than
blood."

"Yeah."

She closed her eyes, and let her finger touch the surface of the disk.
It moved onto the finger, but couldn't move itself through her skin.
She sent a tiny drop of blood out to investigate the entity.  It
_bowed_ in greeting, a courtly, sweeping bow that included a floppy
cap with a huge feather.  She chuckled.  The analysis mechanism probed
it thoroughly and returned a verdict of "harmless."

The drop of blood sank back into her skin, bringing the entity with
it.  She directed them to copy it.

"How many should I make?" she asked aloud.

"Less than a thousand.  They install just before the optic chiasm,
just after the cochlear nerve, and in the limbic system.  If you want
them to work with smell, they can fit there too, but you'd have to
make a lot more of them.  I think."

She set the copy limits.  Something was immediately wrong.

"What are these things made of?"

"Gold, orichalcum, mithril, and star of iron."

"What?"

"Metals of alchemic origin..."  

Jameson interrupted, "Uh..."  She panicked for a moment at the thought
of pure magic in her system.  "What about places where magic just up
and punts?  That's part of the reason I've avoided a plug -- I'm
afraid of the tech failing or mutating in an anti-tech environment.
Goes the other way too.  You've been to the borderlands.  What happens
if magic gives out?"

"No puroburemu," 'Raelf said.  "Same mechanism I used for Dash and
Kardia, same approach I use for my boards.  It still works, runs off
of a sugar metabolism like the other nerve cells.  Range goes down,
though.  Radio connection is by capacitance bridge, you'd have to
touch your deck instead of being near it."

"Ah."  Jameson looked relieved but still curious.  "The metals don't
change?"

"Well, yeah, but they change back once you run into magic again.
While you're in the Mundane Places they work as well as your own
repair system.  I hope, that is.  The design works in simulation, but
I haven't tried it in a human.  Tried it in me but I can't slow my
pulse very much since that whatchacallit, paste-eating, glue-sniffing
servant of the Reaver, I like that.  Anyway, they last four seconds
before they go crunch, which is not bad.  I even tried going
non-magical for a few minutes and I think it worked but it went away
as soon as the magic came back because I changed state."

She blinked invertedly and he shrugged in reply.

"So it shouldn't matter -- it's an off-the-shelf spell, I use the same
thing for my board, like I said, it goes magical again as soon as it
can."

"Uh huh.  So what if I need to repair them?"

"Gold is gold.  Orichalcum is fixed mercury, so mercuric oxide would
work, and mithril is star-of-silver, so simple silver works.  Star of
iron, just use iron.  The latent pattern will convert them once you
get back to where the magic works."

"Oh.  Mercury?"

"Sorry.  Information carrier archetype, and power supply."

Jameson smacked herself lightly on the forehead for effect.  "Of
course."

"Anyway, there's traces in your ice cream."  

She grinned outwardly and directed the fabricators to find the
materials in her stomach.  After a moment she opened her eyes.  "I
thought you weren't time travelling lately," she said.  "So how did
you know?"

"Lex said you'd agree."  'Raelf nudged her ice-cream bowl.  "Eat
up, you need the supplies."  

While she ate the ice cream, he looked at her steadily, eyes flashing
from red to blue to green to brown to night-black.  

"You know," he said, "Dasham had a similar reaction."

"To what?"  

"You laughed when the critter said hello.  She said that when her
nanogolems moved in, it was like watching a colony moving into a new
continent.  She also says they worship her, which I hope she's
imagining."

Jameson swallowed the last spoon of ice cream, savoring the melting
sensation on her tongue.  "Mmm... Worship?  Maybe not.  Why?"

"They're not supposed to.  I think there's something weird about
Nexus.  Maybe it's the social axiom."

Jameson eyes half-closed and her head tilted to the right.  A smile
was playing on her lips until she parsed what 'Raelf had said and
looked at him oddly.  "What?"

"Oh.  Some universes shape the mind as much as they shape the physical
laws.  Nexus has a kind of low social axiom, so that complicated and
organized societies tend to break down.  Not as bad as some places.
There's a whole branch of reality that got blocked off -- my buddy
Marcel came from there.  Strange place.  If you say, go to a section
where social is low, then the people just don't organize, they _can't_
think about it.  And if you try to do things that are too complicated,
the place tries to rewrite you into its own model.  Really ugly if you
don't have enough of the local version of time karma.  I saw one guy
explode once.  Place sucks bad.  Even before they had their invasion
problems the Travellers had warning stations on all the access points.
They're blockaded now.  Too many dinks trying to be the Ultimate Dark
Lord, draining their neighboring cosms of probability."

'Raelf took half his ice-cream and ate it in a big chunk.

"Anyway, the Bismanians are really pushing the envelope here, but
they're not gonna explode from it.  Just have problems with slipping
back into feudalism."

Jameson blinked.  Her vision had doubled momentarily, as a gentle,
quiet presence moved into place, then vanished from her perception.
"I've noticed that effect before.  Never seen an explosion.  Had some
wretched head-aches myself.  Developed a kind of go-with-the-flow on a
larger scale way of getting around the rewrite.  The Bismanians are
compensating with that dead-pan common sense of theirs.  I think
they're in place."  She put the pillow aside.

'Raelf looked briefly confused, "The Bismanians?"  Jameson gave him a
look dripping with ironic metaphor and he grinned, "Ok, ok, let me
check..."  'Raelf pulled a magnifying glass out of the pouch and
peered at her for a moment.  "OK, you up for a few quick tests?"

Jameson arched an eyebrow.  "What do they involve?"

'Raelf stuffed the magnifying glass back in the pouch and pulled out a
palm-sized black box covered on the outside with an ugly jumble of
crystals, feathers, bits of wood and bone, and a small phial of some
liquid that looked suspiciously like blood.

"I send a signal and you let me know if you can sense it, and if it
matches what I describe."

Shrugging, Jameson nodded, "Go ahead."

He turned one of the crystals halfway round, and the colors in the
room shifted strangely, becoming somehow flatter and at the same time
more intense.

"That's the visual.  You should be getting a duplicate feed from the
nanogolems."

"The colors are too low resolution," she said.  'Raelf looked at
something on the box in his hand.

"OK, they're copying the color information from normal human sight,
looks like you've got more bandwidth.  Huh, it looks like they're
aliasing some colors because they think you're colorblind.  Your
visual system is kind of kinky.  Tell 'em to quit that."

She nodded and whispered instructions through her blood.  The room
returned to normal, with a small friendly blinking dot in the space
between her eyes.

"The dot's a telltale, so I can tell they're operating?"

"Yup."  He touched another crystal and a tone began to run up and down
the scale, the very low end making her bones shake in their sockets,
the high end almost enough to cut glass.

"Wow, you got good bandwidth, how come you don't go nuts with all that
sound coming in?"  'Raelf touched the crystal again and the sound sped
up in its shift, and became louder and louder, until it was almost
painful, then back down until it was just below the whisper of blood
pooling in a sleeping body.

"Filters.  High energy sorters.  I suspect part of my brain has been
given directly to a funky kind of personal classification.  Handles
all my senses, actually.  I know a significant portion is
semi-conscious because when I'm distracted or altered I have to
perform a sort of wide-awake re-install of various filters.  Just
about all the info gets used.  The rest is either packaged or
discarded -- I've never been competely sure."

'Raelf touched a third crystal.  She startled -- there was a warm spot
running over her body, jumping from limb to limb along the branches of
her nerves.  It was joined a moment later by a cool spot, then by
pressure, then a very mild itch, then similar pain, pleasure, and
finally a single spot of hyper-awareness.

"They'll share calibration info," 'Raelf said, "so I don't have to
torture you or anything so they won't exceed your limits."

"Appreciated, I'm sure," Jameson said wryly.

"That's most of it, except the two that stationed themselves in your
extra sensorium.  You can check those ones out, I don't know how to
calibrate blood music."

She smiled and looked _elsewhere_ for a moment.  "Got them.  OK, now
what?"

"Now I take a look at that deck."  He picked up the headset and looked
at it, tsk'ing.  "Visual induction, huh?  Bet you could get a nasty
headache."  He put it on, and Jameson jumped, pulling it away from his
eyes.  He looked at her, surprise on his face.

"Sorry.  Didn't mean to be so abrupt.  It's not safe any more.  Too
much neural feedback.  And I don't think you've enjoy having my
brain-prints all over your pretty eyes."  

'Raelf shrugged.  "OK.  I can get the info from the guys in your head
anyway, if you put it on."

She sighed.  Just the simple VR room -- it shouldn't be too bad.  The
image built around her and the familiar ache started in her forehead,
like sinuses filled with lava, tightened down by a white-hot glowing
band wrapping around her forehead and under the back of her skull.

"Got enough," 'Raelf said.  She turned it off with a small noise of
relief.  The pain subsided, as she pressed the cold pillow where the
ice cream bowl had rested against her forehead.

"That thing is hurting you real bad," 'Raelf said.  "You're growing
back nerve paths, Jaime.  Not worth it."  His hand on her shoulder
felt unusually warm, and a sort of heat was spreading out from it.

"No," she agreed.  'Raelf pulled a yellow plastic box out of the
pouch, and handed it to her.  She stared for a moment then realised
that it was a tool kit.

"How about you take out just the sensory interface part, leave the
drivers and everything, while I tinker my sender unit together."  She
nodded, and popped the cover to her deck.  The interface was hacked in
anyway.  She smiled, remembering the old helmet that it had replaced.
It didn't take her very long, once she figured out the soldering iron
that had no plug and took no battery.

'Raelf was gone... no, there was his amulet, the amber one he used for
recording things, and the pouch and a flat white disk of ceramic about
a foot in diameter, and the magnifying glass fastened by a clamp was
positioned over the top.  Something very small moved on the surface of
the disk.

She peered through the glass, and there was a tiny figure doing
something to an even tinier object, something like a bug.  It looked
up and waved at her.

She sat back.  After a second, there was a flash of color and 'Raelf
appeared next to her on the floor again.

"Whew.  Takes it out of you," he said, shaking his head.  After a
moment he used a long needle to pick up something off the disk, moving
it to a flask of brackish blue gunk.  He did the same thing again,
moving whatever it was to a flask of yellow opaque stuff.  After a few
minutes the contents of the flasks separated into a brown scum on top,
and green and transparent-blue below, respectively.  He said something
to the contents of each flask in turn, and the brown stuff crawled
out, into his hands.  He smiled and dissolved it into sparkles that he
absorbed into himself.

Jameson just watched him.

"Got it open?  Cool!"  'Raelf leaned over the deck eagerly.  He
muttered something under his breath, which Jameson did not quite
understand, but there was a <<ping>> of non-sound a fraction of a
second later.

He poured from the flask of greenish viscous goop into her deck, over
the area where the interface had been, and then from the second flask
that now made a disjointed buzzing kind of music.

"First stuff is the interface.  Second stuff is a maintenance
contract, should let you make upgrades as needed."  He waited for the
two substances to settle into place.  The greenish mixture began
moving around, squaring itself off, and settled into place looking
something like a set of chips.  The buzzing stuff crawled over the
whole deck, before it settled down into a glaze over all the surfaces.

"Wanna try it?  I think you'll have to rebuild any shorthand images
but the sensories should all work fine."

Jameson was watching the goo sliming her deck with a faintly puzzled
look on her face.  She nodded absently at 'Raelf and reconnected
various important bits that had gotten shifted when she opened it and
then relaxed and reached out.  It was like moving after being still
for too long -- awkward and overshooting.  She felt briefly like an
adolescent dealing with constant growth spurts and unaware of her own
strength.  Trying to relax, she slid into ephemeral memory, where she
did most of her work and she found herself in a great yawning void.  A
brief moment of panic before her new internals picked up on her
expectations and a dazzling system of pointers danced in front of her.
Reaching out, she found all the layers of systems and files easily
brought into her work space and just as easily folded away.  Smiling,
she told the deck to power down and opened her eyes to 'Raelf
balancing on one hand, in the middle of a coffee table.

"Sorry.  Didn't mean to leave you bored."

He looked up and did a smooth tumble that left him back on his feet
and bowed, "Not at all, not at all.  You like?"  

She grinned widely, "I like."  'Raelf looked pleased.  "Now, how is
this going to help me move in the web on Shadow?  Other nets I used a
translation function in the deck, interfaced with my goggles and
filtered things through the ephemeral memory.  Or, with adaptable
systems like the house's net, was able to extend my consciousness.
But, since I can't disconnect my mind and body, I've just always had
to stretch.  So, what's the scoop for this cone zone?  And do I need
any kind of physical contact?  Proximity?  Or should I continue
routing through my deck like a good cowboy?"  

"Woah, hang on, so many questions!"  'Raelf laughed in dismay.

"It didn't have a help icon," she said archly.

"Truth.  OK.  Yes, it will help you move in cyberspace, just make sure
you have some decent ICE on your side.  Most ICE won't be able to mess
with you anyway, you organize your thinking differently and I somehow
doubt you'd let some program talk your heart into stopping."

She grinned wolfishly.

"OK, so, the deck is still your interface.  You could probably pick up
on someone else's deck, by touch, but it would be just about as nasty
as it was using the visual inducer.  Your deck will link with any net
or deck that you tell it to, by inductive couple if it's touching, or
if you have magic then it can use the remote-control trick to link up
to any system that you have an integral piece of.  You know how to do
contagion magic, right?"

Jameson let all her breath out in a long slow sigh and nodded
reluctantly.  "I know it.  I tend to not use magic -- I'm nervous
about becoming dependent upon it and having it fail on a mundane
world."  She paused a moment in thought, then recited sing-song, "That
which once touches is always in contact, law number two, contagion."

"Yeah, well, 'always' is too strong, but yeah."  He let his feet slide
out sideways until he was in a full split, then began stretching
forward.

"The thing with magic, yes you can use it to link up, but watch out.
Shadow Earth, the lines of power go from astral into physical, and if
a mage with an attitude sees your power line going into your deck,
it's possible to send a bolt of pure maliciousness down the line.
Won't hurt the nano, but might hurt the deck if they don't shunt it
off in time.  Also a good reason to keep it touching you rather than
having it home in on your signature.  But you should have ... hmm.
Maybe two, maybe three kilometers of reach, before the signal starts
to get attenuated by the noise there.  One other thing though, there's
a trick you can do."

"Will it hurt?"  She watched him shifting from a full side split to a
front-and-back split.

"Nah.  Not unless you let it.  Take a look at the utility folder on
your deck.  No, don't bother touching it, I want to see if it's gonna
follow the spec."

She shrugged, entered alpha state and reached specifically for her
deck.  The world flickered briefly, then vanished again into the
sparkling field of pointers.  One of them was marked "utility" in the
strange 'kani script -- except it might also mean "toys" or "bag of
slaves".  She traced the pointer and it led to another sheaf of
pointers:
     "fortress/foxhole/kite"  "real_world/stellarium" "raid/off/flit"
     "gun/grenade/excalibur"  "bolt_hole/go_hither"   "there_there"

The one labeled "real_world" was glowing faintly blue, so she touched
it.  It unrolled around her, and she was seeing the Lighthouse, and
herself as a glowing web of complex fire, and 'Raelf with one ear
notched and looking thin and bedraggled, his fur thin in patches, and
the fire in the fireplace looking back at her warmly.

She smiled.  "Things have a whole lot more... er... personality this
way."  She just barely bit back saying 'poor kitty cat' when she
looked at him.  "Will this allow me to perceive magic consistently?  I
can see it reasonably regularly only because it has a weird
integration into normal reality.  Or I can hear it, in the blood of
the worker.  Sometimes the magic specifically, mumbling quietly to
itself.  Various magics are noisy and some smell different as well --
especially alchemy.  But I don't intuitively perceive it, like
Kardia's eyes.  Although," she frowned briefly in thought, "I suppose
if I dedicated enough mental CPU to coordinating those various inputs,
I'd get a more consistent perception."

'Raelf looked at her and flickered very suddenly black, then returned
to his more usual tarnished gold color.

"You're running the astral link.  Opens into the same, uh,
interpretation of astral that I use and Kardia uses.  Works a lot like
a truesight spell, but you might find some things can hide or lie
about what they are.  Takes practice to get around that.  It'll be as
consistent as your VR because it's running through that software on
your deck."  He groomed back a stray whisker.

A chiming sound filled the room, growing rapidly closer.  Next to
'Raelf, a sparkle of light grew suddenly into a complex shape, a
silver eight-faceted snowflake made of lace mirrors.  "Well," it said,
"What are you two technophiles up to now?"

"Wow," whispered Jameson.  "There's always something new under the
sun."

The sparkle peered more closely at Jameson, then laughed with the
sound of glass chiming.  "You've got new eyes in," she said in a
softly accusatory sing-song, "No fair peeking."

Jameson grinned and glanced down to see herself, make up of thousands
of tiny lights inside a normal human aura.  "Whoa.  Look at me, I'm a
christmas tree."  She watched her aura change as she grinned.
Blinking, she dropped out of alpha and opened her eyes to the world as
she was used to it.  Running both hands through her hair, she sighed
and stood up.  "That's gonna take some major getting used to..."

Ar'Elya stood in her neutral human form, leaning against 'Raelf and
smiling.  "You look happy.  Good to see you smiling again."

Jameson glanced down, a faint flush warm on her throat.  In a rough
voice she said, "Thanks," so softly they almost didn't hear.  In
another moment her mood shifted again and she smiled.  "Got my deck
fixed up so my brains won't fry next time I go net-running."  She
looked sheepish as she scratched behind her right ear, "Which, by the
way, I think Kardia and I need to talk to you about.  But for now,
I've got a meeting with a certain young Journeyman."

Pausing in mid dash, she asked, "Do either of you have any further
information on Kardia's homeworld?"  She rattled off the coordinates
quickly. 

'Raelf and ar'Elya glanced at each other then looked back to Jameson
with the same faintly predatory gleam in both pairs of eyes.  'Raelf
grinned with many teeth and ar'Elya purred, "What's it worth?"

Looping her bag over her shoulder and folding her arms across her
chest, Jameson stood looking at them speculatively.  "A story.  A good
one.  Creation tale.  It was a gift.  Pick your audience and I'll give
it a good telling."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

  The Jameson-who-is-dreaming sighed almost peacefully and settled
more deeply into her sleep, a faint smile of warm memory on her face.

  Her audience, meanwhile, having claimed the best seats in the house,
now hunkers down to see how the game is going to play out.  And their
audience does the same.

--

p.s. [ADMIN]

Parts of this story were written two years ago (but never posted) with
Steve Hutchison (hutch@agora.rdrop.com) and Penny Hutchison
(penny@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 the property of Steve Hutchison and Ar'Elya is
the property of Penny Hutchison; both appear with the gracious
permission of their writers.  All rights are reserved to them.  For
them.  Of them.  In chaos we trust.  (Jameson is mine, all rights
reserved.  Permission granted for archiving).

In a not-too-distant timeline, 'Raelf, Ar'Elya and Jameson were all
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).  All
three left the final battle badly scarred in different ways - in the
present time-line, they have since healed.  But the internal
remembered story takes place only after the healing of flesh but
before the healing of spirit.  The 'Raelf in this story is still split
along his elemental lines of existence.  This is the second part of
their interaction.   [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
"For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams" - Edgar Allen Poe