In a message dated 4/11/02 1:12:13 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Starrngr@aol.com 
writes:


       Well, I C&C'd the last chapter, so I should try to keep up the 
momentum... (:)

Tales of the Wanderer: Book Three: 
Chapter 0:  ‘Exposition in /Dev/Null’

       Mighod, a Unix-joke chapter title!  (And, after reading the rest, I 
have to say that it works quite well)

    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 

       Hmm...a bit awkard on that sentence.  I'd suggest "...microbes, which 
are inevitable but also harmless 99.9999%..."  Or maybe set off the 
"inevitable" aside with -- rather than commas.  Just scans a bit better, to 
my mind.

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.

       Ah, the hazards of interdimensional travel that they *don't* mention 
at the Academy.  What?  Muck didn't *go* to the Academy?  Well, that explains 
a lot...
       Nit:  "tank barrel".  I realize you're referring to the main gun of a 
tank, but "tank barrel" just doesn't...quite...work for me here.  But I'm not 
entirely certain how to fix it.  Maybe:   "...cars, the occasional business 
end of a Main Battle Tank's cannon... portal, the cannon barrel just went 
poof.  Wonder how the crew explained *that* to their CO.  Anyway, the best 
defense..."
       I dunno, I'm not entirely happy with that, but it's just a suggestion

    So, when this jump suddenly went weird, I was rather concerned.  
Quite simply put, the impossible… err, the incredibly improbable 

       Cute correction on Fred's part.  Nice bit of insight into his persona.

happened.  We seemed to be frozen in mid-jump… a possibility who’s 

       Two uses of ellipses close together.  The first one works, but I'd 
trade this one for a --

natural occurrence was .1e-666.  One time in a number so huge there 

       A number of truly...Biblical...proportions.  One might even say 
Apocalyptic.  Was that deliberate, I wonder?
       And I think you dropped a word or two.  That should probably be 
"...whose chances of natural occurrence..."

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 

       I'd drop the "at," and just say "...screamed 'outside 
intervention'..."

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, 

       That tense change was wrong, but I *think* that was deliberate on your 
part, given Fred's mention of a "recursion loop."
       The last sentence needs something to start it, something like "Anyway, 
we were in mid-transit 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.

       Mmmm...Maybe "not-so-good"?  I dunno, it works for me either way.  Let 
the grammatical purists fight over it, I'm sleepy...

    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 

       "has stopped"?  He's still talking about a past event, so it really 
should be "was stopped."  

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-

       Whoops, more tense shifts.  I'm not entirely sure which one you want 
to use here...

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.

       Again, more tense disagreements.  Also, "Sight" shouldn't be 
capitalized.
       Nice bit of description, though.  Having his consciousness processes 
continue while his system clock is hung must be a truly freaky experience for 
an AI like Fred.  Speaking as a professional electron pusher, I can begin to 
imagine just *how* freaky.

    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… 

       John...de...Lancie...?
       ...
       ......
       !
       You didn't.  You DIDN'!  You...did, didn't you?

    “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.”

       Well, you've nailed Q's persona, that's for sure.

    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?”

       Let me just say I'm really enjoying this conversation.

    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.”

       <banging head against desk...>

    Gee I wonder why.  Of course Q lets that pass; thinking about that 
fact is probably too damaging to his…

       Need comma after "Gee"

    “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.”

       Fourth wall?  WHAT fourth wall?  Then again, I guess Q is as good an 
excuse as any....

    Bwaaa?

       Utter confusion:  the mark of a truly advanced AI.  A less 
sophisticated intelligence would simply have said something like "Null 
reference, please restate."

    “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.

       Or as a title.  But with Q talking, you can just *hear* those 
capitalizations, can't you?   (:)

    “You’re quite correct.  And much more perceptive than even 
Heinlein was when he discovered the truth, even though he didn’t know it.”

       Mighod again -- a "Cat Who Walks Through Walls" reference!  I'd 
quibble about that last bit, though: if there was anyone who could match wits 
with Q, Heinlein would get my vote.

    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.”

       Is God an author, or are authors God(s)?  Or both?  Ibuprofen.  I need 
Ibuprofen...

    WARNING!  SANITY.SYS corrupted or invalid.
    (A)bort/(R)etry/(F)reak out?

       BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

    “Not at all.  It is simply not possible to be Q and not be sane.  

       Hmmm....You must not take "Voyager" as canon, then.  (:)  Or the novel 
"Q-Squared."  And frankly, I can't blame you.
       Then again, maybe Q has has an inflated opinion of his race's 
sanity....

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Authors.  Nor for their Avatars.”

       One might even say that a little insanity is a *requirement.*

    He just sat and smirked as I finally started pulling these threads 
together.

       He's good at that, I've noticed.  

    “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.”

       BUT!  If Fred and Muck are just tools, then doesn't that mean that Q 
is too?  After all, he just implied that the Q are subordinate to the 
Authors.  Of course, just how much can beings like the Q get away with when 
the authors aren't looking?
       Which further begs the question:  did YOU write this?  Or is this just 
a transcript from Fred of goings-on that happened while you were busy writing 
other chapters?  Just how much control do you (or any of us) have over our 
fictional characters?  Maybe free will is just something that happens in the 
gap between scene breaks...
       Okay, it's official.  I need painkillers.  And sleep.  Lots more 
sleep...

    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…

       Don't it, though?
       I'd drop the "; and" for a simple "--".  
       Comma after "wrong"
       Instead of "of course", I'd suggest maybe "as it turns out," or "as 
you've no doubt surmised, since you're reading this."  The "of course" just 
jars a bit coming so soon after Fred's abject confusion over what Q was 
dumping on him.


-- 
David McMillan, Imagineer at Large.  
Chief Systems Analyst and Integration Engineer, Exotic Technologies Division, 
KUKA GmbH.  Mecha and Weapons Design Specialist.
"Agent Mulder?  My name is Neo.  I believe I may be able to show you part of 
the truth you've been searching for.  I should warn you, however -- it's not 
what you think."
--     


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