About 15% of email is ever read by a human, and less still is so written. If Nigella has her way that’ll only go down.
The Web, too, and IM chatter; p2p traffic, torrents, whatever, as long as it’s machine-to-machine nonsense. Who cares if a few cable users grumble about upload speed? Because she’s protecting them, all of them. She’ll hide their friends-only entries and their little crimes, bury them in the hiss, make the server farms in McLean whine and tremble with the effort of digging through her digital static.
She’s doing her part: noising up Echelon.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
“You said this was a water world,” frowns Iq’tha.
“Maybe the oceans are under all the photosynthetic biomass.” Mringash pokes at a slightly sparser region on the holoview, in the third planet’s southern hemisphere.
“That’s another thing,” says Iq’tha. “Didn’t you say there had been some kind of apocalypse? This is a healthy biosphere! It’s covered in leaves!”
“I’m honestly at a loss, Captain,” Mringash admits. “Maybe one particular plant was immune to the effects?”
“Ah, yes, their hypothetical ultraweapon. What was the name?”
“Judging by phoneme frequency before their radio broadcasts ceased,” says Mringash, “we think they called it ‘kudzu.'”
Friday, September 7, 2007
“Go ahead,” says Baba, “try it.”
Malki props the quarter under one finger and flicks it along the top of the desk. Before it’s even completed one revolution, it simply stops and stands on edge.
“Impossible,” she murmurs.
Baba nods grimly. “It took years of backbreaking labwork, but we did it. This is the only place on Earth truly free of spin.”
“But that’s just it! The planet has to impart some angular momentum, like in toilet bowls, what’s it–Coriolis force?”
“Nope.” Baba crosses his arms and smiles. “As long as we’re in this zone, the world is completely flat.”
Monday, September 10, 2007
Forsythia steps off the bus in Unintended Consequences, New Mexico and crushes half of the last breeding pair of an unidentified lizard species whose scent glands produce a compound that would have cured Duchenne’s disease (allowing a merciless global tyrant to survive to adulthood [and in turn give humanity its only chance to colonize another solar system before going extinct themselves]).
That stuff happens all the time in Unintended Consequences. Douglas Adams would have loved it.
But what Forsythia notices is the oddly low doorknobs everywhere. It takes her a day to understand: this town is composed almost entirely of kids.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
“I am the rightful heir to the Throne of Peter!” insists Stephen III.
“Only because I was taken prisoner,” sneers Constantine II. “You and your Lombard pals! Well, I’m free now, and my first act is going to be shipping you off to the heathen isles!”
“You can’t!” shrieks Stephen III. “I’m excommunicating you first!”
They both reach for the inkwell at the same time. Pope touches Antipope, and the resulting explosion is only barely reshaped by the magnetic reactor field.
“There’s gotta be a cheaper way to do this,” sighs Captain Tyne, as the ship hurtles off toward Alpha Lyrae.
Friday, September 14, 2007
The sun turns a blind eye to this sort of thing, although she shouldn’t, after what happened to Ceres.
At least Saturn got Jupiter to give him a ring, although after all this time they still haven’t set a date. Whatever Pluto and Charon are doing together, it got them disowned, and now Venus is spurning the advances of her opposite number. He’s calling her bluff–looking elsewhere.
Mars makes it clear, by the waggle in his orbital axis, just what he would like to do if they ever happened to fall into each other’s gravity wells.
Earth blushes. Millions die.
Monday, September 17, 2007
“Arr,” says Gilbert. He’s a pirate! He lives in the Strait of Malacca.
“Avast!” says Gilbert. He boards a ship! It’s carrying various spices.
“Hearties!” says Gilbert. He takes some prisoners! The prisoners will live out their lives in Malaysian sex rings, addicted to heroin.
“Ahoy!” says Gilbert. He goes into port! He drinks a charming amount of grog (rum mixed with water).
“Shiver me timbers!” says Gilbert. He contracts syphilis! He has difficulty obtaining antibiotics.
“Yo ho ho!” says Gilbert. He grows paranoid! Later he gets stabbed in a brawl on deck.
“Ghrhghh,” says Gilbert.
Yay for Gilbert!
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
“So,” says Uri, “do they work?”
Neko traces a little star in a pile of spilled Sweet ‘N’ Lo. “That’s not a very interesting question, really,” she says. “I study spells from a number of hermetic and religious traditions–and alchemy, which is some of both–not with the intention of casting them, so much as determining the processes of thought that shaped the human condition. Occultism led to alchemy, and alchemy, in some twisted way, led to the scientific method. It’s fascinating, because science’s greatest triumph is the refutation of the magical worldview–”
“Right, but,” says Uri, “do they work?”
Thursday, September 20, 2007
“If you feed it enough broken glass it makes a washing machine,” Darby reports.
“A glass washing machine?”
“Steel drum, plastic housing. Which–to reiterate–is completely impossible without…” Darby shrugs. “Transmutation? Alchemy?”
“Unless it’s just exchanging it somewhere,” says Vance. “White hole, wormhole…”
They look through the viewport at the battered black box, covered in that weird fake Cyrillic. One of the techs is pouring in a bottle of ’09 Riesling.
“If it comes out as water, I say we blow the thing up,” says Darby.
“There’s an idea,” murmurs Vance. “What do you think it makes out of explosions?”
Monday, September 24, 2007