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attached is Totw 3.0, for you're review.
--
Starrngr -- Ranger HQ
HTTP://home.talkcity.com/TheSanitarium/Da_Muck/
"You wear a Hawaiian shirt and bring your music on a RUN? No wonder they
call you Howling Mad..." -- Doc' (As Rabid).
-- Attached file included as plaintext by Ecartis --
-- File: totw3_0f.txt
Tales of the Wanderer: Book Three:
Chapter 0: �Exposition in /Dev/Null�
Don�t let Muck fool you. A portal between Fica of any kind is
nothing to be taken lightly. Aside from the power requirements, which
are quite severe, there is a little matter of cross contamination to
worry about. You know, when something that�s not native to one Fica
gets transported along with you. Not so much air or microbes, those
are inevitable after all, but also harmless 99.999% of the time. It�s
the macro objects that you normally worry about. Things like people,
cars� tank barrels. I�d experienced my first and hopefully only panic
attack over that incident. However, it looked like the gods of chance
had smiled on us, and instead of also passing the wrong way through the
portal, that tank barrel just went poof. The best defense against that
sort of occurrence is to keep the portal open a no longer than
necessary.
So, when this jump suddenly went weird, I was rather concerned.
Quite simply put, the impossible� err, the incredibly improbable
happened. We seemed to be frozen in mid-jump� a possibility who�s
natural occurrence was .1e-666. One time in a number so huge there
wasn�t a word for it, only a symbol. A chance so small that it
screamed at outside intervention. Normally, once I�ve managed to wedge
open a portal between dimensions, Muck and I experience a short flash
of near blinding light and then we�re through. But we seem to be
hanging here, in the middle of that white nothingness, something that�
sorry; I was getting into a recursion loop there. With, as I saw it,
both ends of the portal still wide open; I�ve already explained why
that would be a not so good thing.
I began to notice other anomalies. Being an electron-based
intelligence instead of a chemical one, I�ve lived my whole life to an
internal clock; while not consciously aware of them, they�ve always
been there, like a heartbeat to a human. Only now my �heart� has
stopped. Which means I should have stopped. Still, I experience on�
and I�ll never be able to say for how long. Maybe it was only a nano-
second; maybe it was centuries. Like a Human, one of the ways I notice
time, and hence my internal clock cycles, is by the changes in values
my various senses report back to me. Like you, I interpret them as
Sight, sound, feel� only its like I�ve been connected to a giant stasis
loop that keeps feeding me the same set of �sense� information every
time I poll them� until that changed.
Someone appeared in my passenger seat; the fact that one sensor
input alone was changing compared to the rest only confused me yet re-
assured me at the same time. My program� soul� whatever you desire to
call it was continuing to function. It was the rest of the world that
had stopped; like someone had pressed a universal �pause� button that
affected everyone but me. Well, my consciousness and the John de
Lancie look alike who�d just appeared in my front passenger seat�
�Universal pause function? A quaint, but amazingly accurate
symbol, I suppose.�
A telepathic John de Lancie�
�Hrrmph.�
With an attitude.
�I do happen to have a name, you know. You�ll remember it
yourself in a moment or two but I don�t feel like waiting. I am Q.�
Spiffy. Juuuust spiffy. The embodiment of phenomenal cosmic
power and the temperament of a bored ten year old. No possible good
can come of this. I wonder�
�My quest? To recover the Holy Grail.� He paused, then
continued, �European or African?�
I really should have seen that coming. Of COURSE an omnipotent
being would know one of Monty Python�s best gags. Now, if he�d only
let me get a word in edge�
�Because you find it irritating. Almost as irritating as I find
the voice they programmed into you. Or, maybe I feel silicon should be
programmed and not heard.�
Whimper.
�Finally, someone who shows me the respect I deserve. Not at all
like Jean-Luc.�
Gee I wonder why. Of course Q lets that pass; thinking about that
fact is probably too damaging to his�
�You�re a find one to think. You were just about to insult
someone advanced enough to qualify as a god. Well, it really isn�t
your fault, I guess. Its your author�s.�
Bwaaa?
�You, and he,� Q indicated Muck, �Aren�t human. You�re Avatar.�
Authors? Avatar? One of the things I�ve done was pick up as much
local knowledge as possible in each of our stops. At this point, I�d
committed not one but two versions of Webster�s on backup storage, but
their definitions certainly didn�t seem to match Q�s inflection. It
seemed more like he was using it as a proper noun rather than a
description.
�You�re quite correct. And much more perceptive than even
Heinlein was when he discovered the truth, even though he didn�t know
it.�
Q sniffed, and if he were human, I would have thought him
�miffed�. I briefly considered just ignoring him till he went away at
this point, but what little I knew about him came from downloaded Star
Trek scripts and the like. It seemed rather unlikely, and the odds of
these people being right were�
�100%. They are Authors, *THE* creative force which all others
must abide.�
WARNING! SANITY.SYS corrupted or invalid.
(A)bort/(R)etry/(F)reak out?
�Not at all. It is simply not possible to be Q and not be sane.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for Authors. Nor for their Avatars.�
He just sat and smirked as I finally started pulling these threads
together.
�That�s right. You, and he, are just tools, a creation of the
highest power in the cosmos. Just thought you�d like to know. Not
that it really matters, since you won�t remember any of this once I�ve
gone.�
And, with that, he vanished in a flash, and time seemed to un-
stick itself as well; and we finished shooting through to yet another
world. He was wrong of course, I remembered everything about our
little �encounter�. Makes one wonder just what else he was wrong
about�
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