Yar's Plume

[stoneforger]

It was uncomfortably chilly on the night we saw each other last. I remember methane snow flakes and carbon ice had given the landscape around the Plume an unusually eerie feeling. Even a long displacement such as the one I was going through now could not approximate the feeling. The memory somehow made the hair on my back rise. A distant, logical and pedantic part of my troubled, aching mind sought to inform the other part - the instinctive impulse driven part - that technically, I had no hair. No back for that matter either.

 

If I really had to be true and faithful to that stream of thought, I should have insisted on telling myself that I had no brain either, no corporeal existence of any kind. In a sense, it wasn't even me waiting to re-integrate across the other end of the Plume. It was just a taste of me, or rather an idea of me, a gestatum: a complete mental state, a simulacra of my mind in even the tiniest brane-induced wormholes and superstring matrices that made me who I effectively was. Yar had said on our first meeting that I shouldn't worry and fret about the process much: I had no soul to displace, so even if he was the devil he could do me no harm. I'm still not sure whether or not he really joked about it. Can't really tell; the Olos seem wonderfully impervious to serious talk. For one thing, it makes the process endearing. It's almost fun. Apart from the waiting.

 

Oh, the terrible waiting. The long, sleepless waiting - the nanoseconds that stretch into infinity and twist and bend and bog me down every single time. I asked Yar about that in numerous occasions; he simply said that it depends on the person. Seems that even if I am the only one in thirty-two billion souls that can confer with Yar across the Plume, I'm not that suited to it. Sometimes I wish I wasn't at all, other times I wish I could just turn the switch and displace as if it was as normal as breathing. Sometimes I wish I could just steer away from the Plume, get lost somewhere where I could not be found. Like taking a sabbatical.

 

Yar had cautiously advised against that. It was probably because he believed I couldn't do that, and as with pretty much anything, he was right. The technical term the collective of Nobel prize winners and multiple patent holders came up with was 'double glazing'. Look, but not touch. Some kind of appropriately demure punishment for being a flee in the scale of cosmic evolution. Still, what a ride.

 

It was long, and arduous, and for the better part boring. I played out a lot of fantasies involving myself. It was an advice Yar had given me and had paid off. I simply had to imagine it, merely think about it something solid and irrefutably real, and it would make sense and appear. I could grow limbs, swim in oceans of lava, fly like unicorn across the rainbow. There were no bars or limits: in the realm of transluminar wave-particle inference entity projection, I was more than king; I was God.

 

Outside, in the real world, I was the envied treasure of the human species, the sole man capable of communicating with a higher intellect across the vast distances of the stars, bringing back science, lore, truth, and answers. It didn't really matter what the people thought: I had heard stories that I was a demon, that I was the devil. That I had made up everything Yar had freely taught me. The hotshots believed me though: they couldn't yet understand the details, and could exactly comprehend or describe the mechanism, but they knew that in those few seconds, my mind had been displaced for an unknown distance, and when it had arrived, it was a completely different kind of monster.

 

A new breed of devil, that's what I had become. Too valuable to throw away, too dangerous to let be. So I displaced: I spent the time leading all the sorts of life I wish I had the opportunity to live. And then I talked with Yar. The rough bits, the ones I couldn't really understand, he just put them along inside my mind in what he called 'lunch boxes'. The nice bits, those we would talk about over and over and reminisce afterwards and recall with sharp lucidity and infectuous desire, those were why I still did what I did, why I displaced.

 

It wasn't what I brought back with me for the doctors to divulge to the world; I couldn't care less. My real world, my true life, the one I did not imagine but the one I saw and touched, even through a copy of mine, even spread across a thousand different selves, it was still mine; and I would cherish it and hold it fast against the echoes of my splintered soul even after I had found a way to blow my brains back in the lab.

 

Until then though, I had the faintest idea of a chill running down my spine. I think I saw snow falling lazily against a frozen lake, and Yar's shadowy outline doing figures like a kid on New Year's day. I heard him then, and could see his smile even if he didn't have a face:

 

"What took you so long? Grab a pair of shoes. This is gonna be real fun!"

 

I think I laughed harder than ever, even more so thinking that no one could hear me out here.

 

In the lab, my screams were dulled by an underground anechoic chamber.

 

It was chilly again, after all.

[Mesmer]

Αν και κατάλαβα αρκετά, σε κάποια σημεία μάλλον χάθηκα, λόγω άγνωστων λέξεων ή ίσως να ήταν τα αγγλικά που δεν με βοήθησαν αρκετά. Πάντως, για το μέγεθός του είναι καλό και λέει με λίγα λόγια όλα όσα θέλει να πει.

 

Η ιδέα είναι αρκετά καλή, χωρίς να μας δίνει πολλές λεπτομέρειες, κι αφήνει μια αίσθηση δέους. Θα μπορούσε να αναλυθεί λίγο παραπάνω, αλλά καταλαβαίνω την έλλειψη περισσότερων πληροφοριών αφού γράφτηκε στα γρήγορα. Κάποιοι επιστημονικοί όροι ίσως να ήταν περιττοί, μιας και μπορεί να μπερδέψουν κάποιον που δεν γνωρίζει τι είναι πχ οι βράνες (για μένα ισχύει το αντίθετο, μ' αρέσουν οι επιστημονικοί όροι).

 

Νομίζω ότι είναι η πρώτη σου συμμετοχή στις Βιβλιοθήκες. Καλώς ήρθες κι εδώ, λοιπόν!

[stoneforger]

Καλώς σας βρήκα! Για τα αγγλικά ίσως είναι ένα θέμα, αλλά πραγματικά με βολεύουν περισσότερο. Όσο για την "ορολογία" έτσι κι αλλιώς δεν γίνεται να έχουν στέρεα βάση σε κάτι που με το ζόρι αγγίζει τις 1000 λέξεις. Συνήθως αποτελεί πιο πολύ "χρώμα" ή γεύση (flavor) παρά την ουσία.