A lament for Stormbringer

I have forgotten what it is like, the experience of not having this black sword at my side. On my hip, in my hand, swung two-handed in an arc over my head. It is the source of so much strength, yet it will be the death of me. Dragons, tall ships. doomed princesses and even-more-doomed cities, it has doomed them all. Doom.

more....

Onward they walked, till at last Blue stood in the vault of the PowerMind. It was brightly lit, and crowded. More than a thousand robots of all shapes and sizes stood, watching her entrance with serious expressions.

A great blue eye appeared in the space above her, and the PowerMind uttered a single word.

“Speak!” it said.
At that particular moment, Blue felt smaller than she had been before. She was tiny before the magnificent PowerMind, and she felt it. She wanted to curl up in a ball and go away, never to come back. Something was very wrong here and she did not have the courage to face it. Still, she stood proudly, trying to summon the words. Finally, from somewhere deep within her, some place her Robot Mother put there through hours of loving attention, something lesson after lesson with Robot Six taught her, a conviction that the truth must be spoken somehow propelled words from her mind.

“Your excellency.” she began. “I have found unequivocal evidence that robot civilization began on planet Vulcan, and that robot life was preceded by at least one earlier form of living thing.”

The blue eye glared down upon her, beaming a harsh and steady malediction.

“In addition, your excellency.” Blue continued, feeling that it was too late to stop now. “Our solar system has been visited by an intelligent species that arose hundreds of million years ago on Vulcan, and is most likely, ancestral to our own.”

The blue light intensified.

“Its....impossible.” it blurted, clumsily. This was a PowerMind taken aback, surprised, even terrified.

“Let me present my findings, starting with the fossils.” continued Blue, and the robot spoke for three hours.

rough draft

The two walked, together past hexagonal bulkheads and down strange tunnels. Zero gravity makes a large place seem very much larger, because there is so little sense of where a person has just been. They walked over, or through, a vault with thousands of hexagonal tanks, all holding tiny creatures Blue could make no sense of. They were fleshy and green, not steely and grey. They had soft, feathery gills projecting from them, and tiny openings. With an admixture of awe and surprise, Blue realized that each of them had a mouth. Such a strange thing to have, and she was now seeing them in the flesh. Blue peered into a small hexagon, barely larger than her hand, and stared at the minute passenger.

“It is my duty to take care of my brothers and sisters.” said her new friend, as if that notion made any sense to Blue at all.

“Do they need to eat?” asked Blue,

“Yes, sometimes.” her friend answered. “Just like me.”

All of this was shocking to Blue, but she tried not to act too surprised. Her new friend was one of these things, whatever they were. Strange though, because despite the strangeness of her engineering, she was a machine, at least on the outside. Blue began to wonder many things about this strange new friend. Whomever she was, she had a name, though Blue could make no sense of it for the time being. She continued talking, but But blue lost her train of thought. Blue gathered from the things her friend was saying that each of these passengers had a name as well.

“What is it like?” asked Blue.

“What?” the visitor answered.

“To eat.” asked Blue.

“Wonderful.” said the visitor.

another

NINETEEN

Synestra twitched an arm in the machine, suddenly aware that she was really somewhere, and not projecting herself across time and space. In truth, this sensation, that of actually being somewhere, felt stranger. Synestra had eight wonderful arms, and about twice as many eyes, on retractable stalks. When it was time to leave the great machine, she would retract her arms one at a time from the strange devices and slither through the labyrinth of crawlspaces that was her home. Synestra had lived her entire life in space. She had no planet to call her own, and until just recently, no friends. She was indeed very lonely, till this wonderful day.

Synestra had an odd history. In her way, she might be the last of her kind, though she doubted it. Hers was a spacefaring race and she was lost, very lost, in her own future. Her ship could never go back. It is not possible to travel backward in time, the resulting paradoxes prevent it.

Imagine, for a moment, the situation where a person goes back in time and meets their own mother. Any contact at all with one’s own mother, or even with a person who ever spoke to one’s own mother would change the future entirely. Five minutes of conversation would cause any woman to change her schedule slightly. This slight change would change the exact moment when that same mother would, in the throes of passion, to conceive their next child. It could only be a matter of a second, but that would be enough. With all the sperm and eggs inside a person at the moment of conception, another person would be born instead, and the time traveller would cease to be. Having ceased to be, the time traveller would never go back in time. Going back earlier makes it worse, but the paradoxes are so great that the universe is mapped out into zones where travel is possible, and where it is not, and one’s own past creates a shadow, spreading outward at the speed of light in reverse-time, from the point where the time travel device exists, that cannot be entered. Synestra’s kind had neither sperm nor eggs, but the principal was the same. The good news is that the rest of the universe is fair game to a traveller of time and space, and Synestra was just that, a traveller. Her spaceship had been home to a whole crew of time travellers, but they were all gone, aged and taken by other ailments, and only Synestra was left to oversee the birth and upbringing of its next generation of inhabitants. She was the oldest of many brothers and sisters, her siblings being little more than spores, germinating in the ship’s nursery.

She had mighty machines, Synestra. Her kind had long since using their bodies for work. Her amazing nervous system, suckered feet and long tentacles, eyestalks and photophores, worked to control a vast collection of cybernetic appliances. That, combined with the fact she could project herself through time and space with the aid of opposite-light and un-matter, and Synestra could be and do just about anything she chose. Yet, she was lonely.

She had just met a friend though, a girl from a race far to the future of Synesta’s own. Her kind must have given rise to a race of pure machines. At some point, this system became uninhabitable to living things, but the nonliving creatures adapted and moved. It is for this reason that Synestra’s people became spacefarers. Even in her time, it had been necessary to adjust the orbit of Vulcan outward as Crimson became hotter with age. Her species did not call it Vulcan, of course, they called it Home. It had been a green and blue world with vast oceans and forests. It had cities full of her kind, and a host of visitors as well. Among those visitors, were people with two arms and two legs, who resembled the robot girl Synestra had just met, A combination of many efforts must have built this strange robot’s kind, with its beautiful face and hands, and its nimble mind. Synestra was in awe of what her people had created. Still, Synedra had things to show her. A million years or more in space had taught her kind amazing things. Her people had been to the limits of the universe and back.

An Excerpt

This is a very short excerpt of the novel I am writing for Ruby, years from now, when she is old enough to appreciate it. Whether she will be into space robots in the far future, fifteen years from now, I have no idea, but if I get the writing bug it is because there is an inner story within me that i can tap for the energy to keep something like this going for page after page. I am at 62 pages, by the way, and aim for two hundred.

EIGHT

Robot Six stood in the center of a great room, his single, red eye blazing with cold light as he stared at his companion, deep in thought. Robot Nine stared back at him with an unblinking eye of his own. The two were friends and rivals for so many years that all of human history would seem trivial in comparison. It was said by some robots that the original models, those created by Primus himself, were numbered one to one hundred, and these two were survivors from the beginning of time. Both robots knew this to be utter nonsese, of course. The two were survivors from an ancient time when all robots had numbers, rather than names, but even at the date of their manufacture, robot civilization on Astra was so far advanced that there were absolutely no records of its early days, or clues to its origins.

Robot Nine was a great black sphere with six gigantic legs emerging from its top and radiating outward like the legs of a great spider. Within this circle of legs were a smaller collection of arms, crablike, with elaborate joints and pinchers at the ends. The room was very dark, lit by a small light source near the ground, and the vaulted ceiling danced with shadows of this vast machine and its many legs. Now, however, all was still. This old machine was deep in thought, its gigantic amber eye stared back at Robot Six, unblinking.

“Too bad, all of this.” ruminated Robot Six, finally speaking. “Intelligent minds crave answers to questions about their origins, and when such answers are lacking, they naturally make them up to suit their needs. But power corrupts, and eventually such answers, however false, get incorporated into the structure of power. Lies become essential to its continued existence, and the truth is a danger.”

“Don’t pretend you have no ambitions of your own in this regard, Six.” spoke Nine. “If the doctrine of Primus is overturned, the PowerMind will have a precarious hold on the rest of us, to be sure. Over the years, and we have both seen this within the course of our lives, the PowerMind has increasingly asserted that Primus, as it will come to be in the future, will be an extrapolation of the PowerMind. In essence, it claims a version of godhood for itself, and that its continued existence and hold on power is not only necessary but absolutely inevitable.”

“It is true that I have had my disagreements with the PowerMind.” conceded Robot Six, “and I have always been of the opinion that too much power and authority are sunk into that collective.” The giant robot wheeled slowly across the room, its brain glowing beneath the glass dome atop its towering form. “And yes, granted, seeking an opportunity to do so, I would desire to create a collective of my own, not as a competitor to the PowerMind, but rather, an alternative.”

“That would be chaos, and we both know it.” cautioned Robot Nine. “Two leaders of equal stature represent no leadership whatsoever. An infinitely more sensible agenda is to seek to merge with it, as dominant components, and lead it along a path more intellectually productive and perhaps a bit less autocratic.”

“Granted.” conceded Robot Six.

It was an old argument on Astra, and it is an old argument on Earth; whether it is better to overthrow a government who has overstepped its power, or try to change it.

“All of this assumes your young protege will find something of interest.” continued Robot Nine, following his companion with an unblinking blue eye.

“She will. I have a certain amount of faith in her.”

A story about robots...if i do not post for a while it is because i am writing something....

A Story About Robots

This is a story about a shiny young robot named Indigo. Indigo was, or will be, full of questions. She liked to ask questions about her past, questions about the future, questions about why everything worked the way it did, and why things were the way they were. Indigo lived, or will live, on a far off planet, at a time so distant in the future that few people from our planet can comprehend such a span of time. Staring at the night sky, Indigo could barely make out the light from our own galaxy, the one we call The Milky Way. On Earth, we call Indigo's galaxy Triangulum, though it is so dim that we need telescopes to make it out. Indigo's eyes were, or will be, much better than even the most eagle-eyed human being that has ever lived. The inhabitants of Triangulum call their galaxy many different things. Light takes a long time to travel from our galaxy to Triangulum, and some small fraction of the morning sunlight you see tomorrow will reach Indigo's planet just in time for her to see it.

Indigo lived, but in a very different sense of the word than the way people, flowers, or goldfish live. Robots, even on Indigo's world, are machines, made of metal and ceramic, plastic and glass. On Indigo's world, robots are made by other robots, without any help from humans or any other creature. I call her "she", though robots have no true biological sex. Indigo felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, some felt like neither girls nor boys, and some robots felt like a girl one day and a boy the next.

Indigo's world was, or will be, called Astra. Astra is a cold white world with a blue sk¥ and purple glaciers as far as they eye can see. Winter lasts all year on Astra and snowdrifts cover the valleys and plains, reflecting red and blue light from the planet's suns as they rise in the morning, and swirling in great white clouds in the evening, to settle in the still nighttime silence. Nighttime skies are amazing on Astra, because the planet sits at the center of a great cluster of stars, and there are a thousand times more stars visible to the Astrans than we can see from the Earth. Astra was, or will also be, a place of great white-walled cities with tall towers, like icicles pointing upward. Between the buildings there are strange and beautiful streets lined with blocks of ice that look like marble, and strange sculptures, and strings of pale yellow lights.

On her world, some robots liked to play games, and others liked to dance and listen to music. There was a factory where baby robots were made, and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one. Sometimes the moms would come home to robot dads, and sometimes the robot moms would come home to raise the young one alone, or with other robot moms. Raising a robot is not like raising a human child. On Indigo's world, robots are raised in stages, as the child's mind is transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies as time goes on. Some robots grow into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. Some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. All robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. This meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

I am getting ahead of myself. Indigo was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. She also liked to dig through old artifacts in the museum, and to find the answers. She wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Indigo walked along the street of her city, a place called harmony, one sunny afternoon. Astra has two suns, and she could see them both clearly in the sky, a fat dim red one and a brilliant blue pinprick besides it. Indigo looked forward to sunsets where the red sun would disappear behind the horizon first, casting the world in strange blue shadows. She liked that sun the best, the blue one, because her robot mother had told her she was named for it.

Indigo was thinking. It was a happy day. She had just graduated from one hundredth grade. Her other classmates were dancing, or thinking about parties or trips into space, but Indigo was lost in thought, remembering a conversation she had with her professor, Robot Seven, earlier that day. Indigo had wanted to know what the first robot was like, and how it came to be that this robot was able to build other robots like itself.

It is true. On Indigo’s world, Robots go to school for one hundred years....at least some robots do. Other robots are built knowing everything they need to know, and those robots are very good to have around, but they are not very inquisitive and are usually content to sit in a factory fabricating sheets of aluminum. Intelligent machines like Indigo need an education, just like human children. Years ago, on Earth, some children could get by with a few years of school, and others would go for a full twelve years and graduate. Back then, on our planet, almost nobody went to college, which basically amounts to between four and ten extra grades. Ten extra grades? Who would sign up for that? Some people on Earth actually need the extra school. The more complex life has become on Earth, the more people need to go to college, and the longer our education has become. On Astra, life had become complex that many robots went through one hundred grades exactly. On graduation day, each robot receives a shiny black ring and congratulations from all the robot professors.

Today, on her graduation day, Indigo was thinking about a question she had first asked 90 grades back.

“If robots need other robots to build them, then who built the first robot?” She asked her tenth grade teacher, a glassy green android named Maia.

“The first robot was not built at all.” Said Maia. “He was called Primus, the one and the prime, and he was there at the beginning of the universe.”

“And Primus made all the other robots?” Asked Indigo.

“Oh no.” Said Maia, in that sepuchural voice of hers. All the other students had tuned into their frequency and were listening at this point. “Primus made a second generation of robots by himself, and those robots made another generation, and so on till now.”
“Who made Primus?” Asked Indigo.

“Nobody made Primus.” Responded the teacher, glowing with an inner green light. “He came into being at the beginning. That is why he is the one and the prime.”

“Why did he make us?” Indigo asked, noticing that students from other classes had tuned in.

“Because he was lonely, all by himself.” Responded Maia. “Since then, we have lost the power to build other robots by ourselves. Nowadays, we are less perfect than Primus was. He has since passed out of being into another universe, though he still watches down on his creation.”

Indigo knew not to press her teacher further. It did not make any sense to her that her race had lost the ability to do things they could do in the past. Even in the ten years since she had first been activated, she had seen robots learn how to fly through space in new ways, to create new kinds of music, and with the aid of special glasses, to see things that happened in the very distant past. Still, she kept quiet. Later she would learn that teachers do not know everything, and that the real key to knowing things was knowing when you did not know the answer. She would also learn that a lot of robots believed in Primus.

robot

this is a story about a shiny young robot, beautiful and full of questions, that lived on a far off planet very far in the future. she was named blue, though robots have no true biological sex, at least on her world. She felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, or neither, or both sometimes. on her world, some robots liked to play games and others liked to dance and listen to music. there was a factory where they made baby robots and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one and raise it, in stages, as its mind was transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies. some robots grew into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. all robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. this meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

i am getting ahead of myself. blue was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. she also liked to dig through old bones in the museum, and to find the answers. she wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

Brobee is probably a shambling mound.

Ruby is 21 months old, and we watch a lot of Yo Gabba Gabba together. If you do not know about the show, you have probably googled it by now, so i need not explain it. My question, shared by nearly every viewer, is what the HELL are the protagonists. Sure, you can give the lame Richard Dawkins no mystery answer and say that they are cartoony creatures made by the designer Kid Robot to communicate a sense of otherness and friendliness combined, and to look cool to parents as they deliver repetitive diatribes, in song, on the virtues of sharing. Yes, fine, but from a more in-universe perspective, as Wikkipedia would define it, what the bloody hell are those things?? Dear Reader, at Blood on a Spaceguitar, we are uniquely qualified to identify monsters, so let me share my taxonimic assessments of them.


1) DJ Lance Rock is a well-known club DJ and is a real person. He really does have a sister, named Kemba Russel, by the way...so his sister Kimba is real. His character on the show has significant magical powers, most notably the ability to fly, and of course, to animate and de-animate the inhabitants of Yo Gabba Gabba land. Interestingly, he cannot enter that series of pocket universes without the aid of Plex.

Yes, Gabba Gabba land is a system of four linked pocket universes, with a common electrical grid understood only by Plex, who alone has the power to throw a switch and turn the lights back on if they go out. None of these places makes sense from a geometric point of view because Moono and Brobie need to be transported to a separate set, through the usual white void Lance Rock occupies, to go to a family house Moono must frequently return to. Each is linked to one, or two adjacent partners via a series of square dimension doors, though there seem to be invisible freeways running through the void that DJ rock walks through as he comes and goes about his business.

Dimension door? You heard me. That is a Dungeons and Dragons term and I use it proudly, because only Dungeons and Dragons gives people a perspective by which to answer such dorky questions in a way that has some objective structure. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons can tell you who would most likely win in a fight between a vampire and a mummy (almost certainly the vampire), or a goblin and a dwarf (advantage to the dwarf, but they are hereditary enemies and would never be fighting alone).

So, I picked up my field guides, a smattering of Monster Manuals from the first and third editions, and my memories of books I have lost.

The five protagonists clearly spend much of their time in a carrying case, as inanimate toys, by DJ Lance Rock. He also has a second, rarely-used case containing the members of Moono's family. Thus, they are animate toys, who enter a series of toy universes, by a godlike overseer. This, of course, including the extraimensional goofiness of invisible freeways and wierd geometry, usually going from couch to coffee table, is exactly how children play with toys. A toy will become animate, teleport to another room in the kid's imagination, or follow an illogical freeway through the air, to enter the frame of reference of other toys.

1) Plex. Plex really is a magic robot. Robots do not occur in any D and D campaign I would play, but they occur in some. The character is about a fifteenth level magic user, who is unaware or unconcerned with his vast powers, and plays the role of a loving caretaker to the others. The creature has perfect common sense and is incredibly patient and tolerant, he also has a sense of fun, friendship and play, though the concept of fun had to be explained to him, though when he realized what it was, he was able to put a name on feelings he had clearly been experiencing. Wierd Al Yankovik wanders through with his circus on his own somehow, and Jack Black, running out of gas on an invisible freeway, gets stranded there for a while, but mostly, Plex is responsible for beaming characters into and out of these pocket universes. He can even shrink the toy characters into a smaller frame of reference, the underground world of the oskybugs, with his amazing powers. For some reason, the logs in Brobieland need to be dusted by him, indicating that he is a caretaker of Yo Gabba Gabba Land in many unspecified ways. Clearly, this place is a sort of metaphor for a day care center or preschool, and he is a sort of babysiter. Give him teleport, dimension door, whatever, as long as it is not a combat spell, he probably has it. The character has an armour class of ten, by the way, and one hit point, because he is rendered comatose and nearly destroyed by a snowball in one episode, though his other powers are vast.

Now things get fun. Each creature clearly has elemental properties, of some sort, because the four pocket universes they occupy have an elemental logic symbolized by the character. Toodies is a land of perpetual winter and snow, Brobie's is an autumnal forest, Foofa's is a land of spring and summer dominated by flowers, and Moono's is a rocky and warm desert or moonscape inhabited by ants and talking cacti. Moono we know to have a nuclear family. and we have seen adults of his species, but the others we have not seen as adults. Each is in the mindset of a small child, and each has been an infant at some point in its existence. Brobie is four years old, but we do not know the ages of the others. Only Brobie required a diaper as a one year old. They all possess a stomach and eat food. Even Plex, the robot, comes from a design that must spend some time in the body of a small robot, with the mind of an infant, so childhood is universal even to the robot, who has the mind of a sensible but nonauthoritarian adult, has a baby niece. Presumably, Plex's highly intelligent mind needs to be educated like that of a human in order to function.

2) Easiest is Toodie, who is clearly a white dragon, or a white dragon with some blue dragon ancestry. She is a creature of a pocket universe dominated by cold, possibly also inhabited by winter fairies, where frozen lakes exist and salmon and trout swim under the ice. She may actually be dragonkind, with some human ancestry as well, because though the most energetic and impulsive member of the group, she clearly has a good heart and is far from evil. Even among evil species, such as blue dragons, there are good individuals, especially among the hatchlings, and Toodie is obviously a hatchling. It was not much of a stretch for her to pretend she was a dragon in the dress up episode, as it is not a stretch for Plex to dawn a wizard's cap. Toodie is human enough to get a cold, however, and need to be treated by Anthony Bourdain, the doctor. White dragons have some connection to that para elemental plane at the intersection of the elemental plane of water and the negative material plane, and that explains ToodieLand. It is scary to imagine how powerful and dangerous she will become as she ages, it is good that she will be extremely well-socialized.



3) Brobee is clearly some sort of shambling horror. This is not to say he is evil, and in many ways he resembles the DC comic character, the Swamp Thing, who was a person of the greatest possible virtue, comparing favorably to even Batman.



The DC comics character is actually an Earth Elemental, of the specialized type that represent the living part of the plane that is influenced by the positive material plane, and Brobee, since he has a human stomach and many other human attributes, is most likely a creature with an elemental bloodline which also includes humans, a genasi...though his shape and appearance suggest some affinities with the shambling mound..... It is my guess that Brobee will reach a point where he will assimilate and devour everything in his path, growing to enormous proportions, and the "party in his tummy" will be a very real apocalypse for Yo Gabba Gabba Land.



4) Moono is quite clearly a cyclops, but there is more to it than that. Cyclops are actually described in the volume Dieties and Demigods, with the Greek Mythology Pantheon, a rather obscure source. Heraclitus writes of a good cyclops, and they are clearly not all stupid and evil. Moono and his family are nice even by the standards of YoGabbaGabbaLand, a place where no real violence can possibly exist and evil is impossible. He is nice, even among very nice little monsters. He among all of them seems to have the stuff of a hero about him, Toodee showing the potential for deception and cruelty and Brobee being downright maudlin at times. He has a beast within him, and in the bacchanal of childhood play, bites his intimate friend Foofa.



Since we see his whole family, my prediction that the adults of his species were not borne out by future seasons of the show, he is essentially full size, though he towers over the rest of YoGabbaGabbaLand and is a giant by human standards. His family is very much like a human family. Unlike Brobee, he did not germinate from a spore, or like Toodee, hatch from an egg. I wonder about some attachment to the elemental plane of earth, however, possibly through a lineage including xorn, which would explain his columnar appearance.



5) Foofa is certainly the hardest to identify, so here my taxonomic skills are strained, but I think I have her figured out.




She is clearly connected to the Elemental Plane of Earth, specifically that current of living things that runs through it. She and the swamp thing, and Brobee, could share a summer home there. In the DC comic, The Swamp Thing, it was called The Green, and developed in detail. She also has faierie affinities, as evidenced by her desire to play the role of a faerie or faerie princess at every opportunity. She is the most analytically intelligent of the four children, though Moono is very inquisitive. She and Moono seem to be closer to each other than to the other monsters, though the two female characters, Foofa and Toodie, also share a bond, as do Moono and Brobie. She is a vegetable creature, a fact made obvious by the flower perpetually in bloom on her head. She is shaped like a sack, though a cute one, and it is my guess that she is neotenically arrested in some sort of larval form. Clearly, her bloodline includes high elves, faeries, and probably dryads or nymps as well, it includes some monstrous plant creature as well, my guess being a neo-otyugh, explaining her understandable pathos at having the mind of a sensitive and intelligent young girl in a body destined to, or suited to, grow into a horrible, devouring monstrosity.

The Flatlanders

I suppose I should start by mentioning that I am an unreliable narrator. This is either a story of doomed heroic exploits, a journey to the underworld, and a starship, or it is not. I may or may not be a human being. These captors of mine may or may not be doctors. It is no difficult task to imprison a man, but to imprison an ageless superbeing-that is another matter entirely.
How did I get to this place? I remember an ice field, the longship frozen in stasis, crippled in a drift of methane snow, leaking atomic power, its crew salvaging swords and skins for survival, set forth along the surface of the dark, lifeless planetoid. Lucidity comes to me gradually as I write this. The rocket was impaled by a meteorite. Its reactors spilling radioactive coolant into the void between its two hulls, it is amazing that the feeble humans at the helm were able to set it down in one place? piece. Yes, piece is the word. Tarterus is a dark world, adrift in the cosmos, ejected from a now-distant solar system by a planet intent upon devouring its siblings, like Saturn, devouring its children, its gaseous envelope thick and spinning with helium argon envelope, the methane frozen ing gossamer fields, as drifting snow. Here, ice is as permanent as stone and the wounded rocket, perilously balanced on its aft fins, sent up clouds of steamy gaseous mist. Elsewhere, there was quiet, and twenty nine men did trudge into the ether black plain with little but their courage. Little did they know the fate that awaited them. Elder beings, vastly more powerful, had designs of their own for the men and their crude machine.
"Mr. Anaeus?" It was a voice not unlike a carpet sample-bland and ordinary and promising huge amounts of the same. It was a beige voice full of beige overtones.
"Mr. Anaeus, have you been listening? It is important that you stick to your schedule o medication."
A sliver of terrestrial sunlight filters through the mostly-clothed miniblind. It is a grand sun, a G2 on the Hersprung-Russell scale, and the inhabitants of this globe are not worthy of it. Institutional walls, more beige, surround my corporeal form. Air ducts. These creatures breathe gaseous oxygen, suspended in a mixture of other gasses. I hate their sense organs, generally speaking, limited to three of the seven dimensions of spacetime Still, there is something to be said for the eyes of this tree-dwelling monkey. So many nuances of color, a narrow slice of the multitudinous radiation from its magnificent sun. I am restricted to an unlikely brane. They think the world they see is all there is. They are like flatlanders.
"I am a prisoner here, and the medication you speak of is engineered to prevent my eventual escape. It immobilizes my limbic system, obstructs the puny cerebral hemispheres of this monkey brain from higher function, and prevents me from psychotemporal projection into the othe dimensions. This mind here..." I say, pointing a blunt digit at the shelly test beneath my furry covering, a cranium, "It is a tendril, an extensionn of a far greater being, imprisoned on a world so vastly different than your own that you cannot comprehend the smallest particle. You, sir, are a blocked exit, and these alkaloids you prescribe are no medicine."
The creature adjusts the crude, wire-rimmed lenses in front of his eyes. He is aging. These bodies wear out so tragically. Free of predators, because generations ago their ancestors killed mighty sabre-toothed beasts with stone-hafted spears, their ancestors are free to grow old and weak, surrounded by notebooks an sterile walls.

Anguish

Forty Thousand Years in Space

I reposted my crazy magnum opus, Forty Thousand Years in Space, on the molumbia page

Odious Yellow

Exterior Shot. A shadowy world full of creeping vines, sagging and ancient trees, everything in shades of grey, even the sky, checkerboarded with bilous grey cumulus. Black spitlizards sun themselves on the ancient trunks, the white sun poking between stratocumulus for a moment before ducking into the shade. Giant earwigs everywhere. Spiders the size of basketballs, sitting motionless in the absence of a breeze. The calls of a dozen different species of cicadas, neuroptera, tree frog, and katydid, mixed with the onerous bellowings of the hairy-faced humanmonkey. Two moons, in orbit about each other, high in the sky, hidden by tree trunk and cloud.

Parathaxes and Jubilinda slither to the surface, emerging from an underground nest meters deep. Both of them sniff the sky, lazily and with delight, tasting the scents of the grey jungle after a rainstor. Jublinda raises her dorsal crest and wraps her tail about a tree trunk, pushing her pearly moist skin into the polka-dot pattern of postcourtship. Parathaxes slithers under her and vibrates softly.

Parathaxes. Croaking in gutteral Lymbonese, a dialect shared between them but rarely pronounced so far north of the equator.

Odious yellow sausage engine engaged deeply mimicking muttering feldspar magnetism boom boom dust to dirt dirt to entropy sky to star star to cinder cinder to ash to earth to germ to brain to mind to here and now croak croak croak......

Jubilinda. Croaking a deeper version of the same dialect, her croaks drawn out and pulsing through the darkening jungle.

Deeply Circumspect.

The two watch the sunset together, both sure the universe will produce a certain amount of radio waves, and no more, for the greater good.