Aquarionics

This morning, I was entirely weirded out when the lights in the hallway of our block of flats appeared to follow me.

The light outside the front door was on, and as I walked towards the lift they switched on and off in sequence, a controlled pool of light that followed my every move.

The lights in the lift weren’t working properly either, and only the one near the door has ever worked properly, so I wasn’t that suspicious until I got to the lobby of the building, and once again was followed out by this flowing pool of illumination, silence save for the “click” as the light behind me switched off, and the light ahead of me switched on.

Outside was darkness, strange despite the bleak midwinter cold for my phone claimed 8am, and I double checked my possessions – Glasses, Phone, Keys, Wallet – as I buzzed myself out of the building.

I was distinctly unprepared for the spotlight.

The darkness above me was absolute; none of sun, moon or stars to indicate the presence of the sky, a few street lamps bathing the world around them a distinctly sodium orange glow; but around me and cast very obviously from above me was an oval of white light that pointed in front of me. As I stepped forward it followed me exactly, and I looked up to see what cast it.

There was nothing there at all. No bright point of light to blind me, just a deep velvet darkness that swallowed the universe, and no visible source for the spotlight that followed my every move. I stepped backwards, forwards, ran sideways, dodged left and right. It followed exactly. I lay down on the path and it grew larger to encompass me, I walked under a bus shelter and it vanished; only to reappear as I passed the shelter by.

The streets were empty, although I could see the spotlights of others far ahead of me. The occasional car passed in the darkness. I walked on.

* * *

A few other people were in the office working, though almost anyone who had seen the news had taken its advice and stayed home. We sat, glued to our chosen information channels. The darkness, apparently, was absolute. Nobody knew where the spotlights were coming from, who controlled them, or why. Reports from confused satellites reported the absence of stars, although whether that was due to their absence or a dust cloud or something nobody seemed quite sure.

The sun still appeared to exist, international temperatures were as normal, plants would grow. Animals across the planet – all in their own tiny spotlights, none as bright as those I had seen – were panicking. The spotlights themselves appeared to indicate something, some peoples’ being dimmer or brighter according to no known measure. The advice was to keep calm and wait for the smart people to work out what was going on.

Nobody ever did, and so we sit in the darkness so many months later, watching out over the field behind our flat, the occasional light flitting across the field as a rabbit runs for its life, the light suddenly going out as it escapes down the rabbit hole.

(This would be the opening of chapter two, had the main character not had second thoughts about who he was and become the protagonist of a completely different book instead. Since I have nothing better to post today, you get this. Sorry about that. I like it mostly because it contains the phrase “Some bastard had installed the sun in my living room” (Note: This text contains an amount of commas that would cause grown editors to wince. I know. Sorry.))

2 – Beep.

Fast forward a couple of hours.

This room is a more expensive version of the previous one. That is, the ceilings are lower, but the flats are purpose built and people have their own mailboxes. It is furnished stylishly, yet effectively. A bookshelf dominates one wall, a bed another, and there’s a desk and doors to the kitchen and other handy places. Every single surface is stacked with clothes, books, DVDs and/or tea cups. You may call it chaos, or entropy, or just a mess. I call it Home, because I sleep here. Temporarily.

I have, in fact, quit my job. Exceptionally so, in fact. I am more quitted from that job than any man has a right to be.

You may consider that printing my resignation letter on enough A3 sheets to wallpaper my bosses office is overkill, but I would counter with the fact that it leaves nothing left to describe the action of neatly papering not only his desk, but also all its contents individually in further copies of my notice.

I gave him a full twenty seconds to appreciate this yesterday morning before a postman – my brother, as a matter of fact – asked him to sign for a special delivery version of the self same letter. This didn’t go down well, as you may imagine, and I spent the rest of the day wavering between drunk and sober as different people came to congratulate me. And now, terribly hungover, I was being woken up at some gods unfair time of the morning by beeping.

In this digital world, it is occasionally difficult to identify precise sources of beepery. It could be a lorry reversing somewhere outside, or a bread machine, possibly an expiring smoke alarm battery. My computer, for example, beeps when it gets mail about other computers being unhappy, this being a major part of my job. It is difficult to precisely determine the differing frequencies of these with your head under a duvet, so I carefully let down this barrier between myself and the outside world.

Some bastard had installed the sun in my living room.

Careful reconsideration a little while later brought me to the realisation that it was not, in fact, the sun. Or rather, it was merely the rays of the sun coming from its usual position somewhere a way away. Adjusting my eyes to daylight took a little while, as did finding my glasses, but I eventually got up and into the process of making tea in preparation for my first day of jobhunting. Kettle, Tap, Beeps, Water, Boil, Beeps, Mug, Teabag, Water, Wait, Beeps. Hmm. Beeps.

It wasn’t the bread maker, or lorries reversing. The smoke alarm was silent, and the computer didn’t need to tell me about things I was no longer being paid for. What the hell was that beeping noise?

In the corner, plugged into the wall as it had been for almost two years now, was the mobile phone I’d bought a week before starting the job I’d just left, who had given me a work issued phone which I had been using pretty exclusively ever since. I recognised the phones insistent “You have missed calls” beep at almost exactly the same time I remembered the one person who had its number. My dive for the phone would have been more impressive had I not tripped on a box and stabbed myself with a coffee table on the way.

In World War One

• Forty two million people were mobilised for the Allies
• There were twenty two million casualties on the Allied side.

• There are less than ten people alive left who fought.
  

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
  To children ardent for some desperate glory,
  The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
  Pro patria mori.

  In World War Two

• Over 10% of the 1939 population of Germany were killed. 16% of Poland.
• The soviet union suffered 10,700,000 military deaths.
• The UK lost 382,600.

• One of these was John Brunt

  The point of Remembrance day is not war. It’s not really peace, either, and anyone using it to push any political agenda is doing the Service a disservice. It’s the unspoken social contract between those who go to fight the powers that would attack our country and those who survive: That if you go and fight, and do not return, we will remember them.

  You may disagree with the current war, where the direct threat to our lands is diffuse and not really counterable – and possibly enhanced – by direct action in the lands of others, but this war is not all wars, and these reasons are not all reasons, and those that die of these decisions did not make them.

  And so we remember them.

Minor design evolution on Aqcom, not that – in the age of RSS readers and Livejournal – anyone ever visits actual websites anymore, but we try to spruce up the place for the occasional search engine visitor. New banner for a couple of weeks – advertising Bioshock, massive surprise – and replaced the “what do you mean, I can click them?” picture navigation down the right with something a little more logical. Still working on how I’m going to integrate twitter onto the main page, I might follow Mr Keith’s lifestream idea by aggregating the content from Stalker.istic (Which I should integrate Facebook into at some point).

One of the things in the new sidebar is a link to my new fiction thing, which went into the world on Sunday. Stuff happens on it weekly, or should do at any rate. I might move the day of the week, because it appears that if you do anything on Sunday it gets lost in the TL;DR effect of getting up to date on a Monday morning.

One of the great questions of the universe is answered by Eric Burns

It’s very dark.

A door opens a little bit, spilling a glass of light down the stairs to pool on the floor, activating a defence system that is as ancient as it is broken.

“This is a test” it announces, in the type of voice Big Brother (the oppressive state, not the depressive TV Show) would use to ask you to relax and enjoy your shoes, “of the emergency broadcast system. Were this a real post, an annoying buzzer would have sounded”.

An annoying buzzer sounds.

A faint blue light illuminates the darkness, and you see you are in a room of junk. The room is obviously divided into several sections – unhelpfully labeled “Words, Pictures, Projects & Worlds”, but within that there is no order at all. The Project section appears to be just a steel shelf with some boxes on it, the Pictures section has been entirely walled-up and replaced with a door labeled “flickr”, and the Worlds section is slowly working on its fifth inch of dust, like a Blood Elf on level 65.

From two areas of the heavily over-populated Journal section – which isn’t apparently labelled – two plastic figures arise and begin a Socratic dialogue.

“So, we are being complained at once again, because we never update the site.”

“This is true. But what would we update it with? Currently our life is composed of sleeping, waking, working and attempting to relax by playing computer games.”

“You could talk about Work.”

“Fine thing for you to say. You’re not the one who’ll be a) Fired, b) assassinated and c) Fired again. You know what happened last time we talked about work here.”

“They’d probably be fine with some of it. Besides, it’s got to be better than nothing.”

“Bet? A whole entry of ‘Today I had to fix the [REDACTED] model, because the [REDACTED] part of the [REDACTED] layer was reacting badly when [REDACTED] fed [REDACTED] the [CENSORED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] 64 bit [REDACTED], And I had to [REDACTED] the [CENSORED]ing [CENSORED] [REDACTED] that [REDACTED] couldn’t [CENSORED]ing do’. Not only would I confuse everyone, I’d bore them to death”

“What about the LARP thing?”

“Which LARP thing? The LARP thing where I stormed off in a huff for the short-, probably medium- and possibly long-term basis because what they want out of the system is incompatible with what I want? Or the system where my character [FOIP]’d the [FOIP] and then was convinced to [FOIP] the [FOIP] and so did so in limerick form?”

“What does [FOIP] mean?”

“Find Out In Play. It means I can’t tell you, because your character doesn’t know, and it is far easier to keep a secret In Game if you don’t know about it out of game either.”

“Ah. But what if I don’t play Maelstrom?”

“Sucks to be you, really”.

“But anyway, there must be some parts of your life worth blogging about.”

“Not really. My life is incredibly boring right now. Apart from the gas board thing. And even that’s a two line story”

“Go on, tell it then”

“I did. But I did somewhere else. Then it got Metaquoted, and I discovered other people – possibly ones who don’t feel that we should have stopped with the damn lolcats by now – found it far funnier than I did. Proving that I have absolutely no idea what people will actually like when I write stuff.”

“So write more, and you’ll find out.”

“An interesting theory, but one that is fundamentally broken for one good reason.”

“Which is?”

“The clowns will eat me”

“What?”

“I want to do something special. I want to write something that makes people… laugh, cry, whatever. And I went though a stage of doing a lot of pretty good stuff, all of which I can’t stand now. And then I stopped, because I got to the point where I could write something that would rock your entire world – well, probably not, but you’d really quite like – but would never get any feedback because it’s simply… what I do. The downsides of success are that when you fall, you fall hard; and when you’re maintaining height, people can’t see you’re flying. Plus, I find it hard enough to believe people like reading what I write, the idea that I get the reaction “It’s not as good as your last one” is just terrifying. So I do nothing. It’s easier.”

“You cannot claim you were writing good stuff on one hand and then claim you’re crap at all of this on the other. Be consistent.”

“Yeah. Consistency, I’m crap at that too. This is the ego boost of the metaquotedness fighting with my natural self-depreciation. I am large, I contain multitudes”

“So your life is dull, so no Journal. Your tech is mostly work, about which you may be able to talk one day but not now. You’re not adding anything to Worlds because you don’t think it will be good enough, despite there being nothing there now. And Pictures?”

“No batteries in the camera”

“You’re hopeless.”

The figures fade back into the area they came from, the blue light dies, and the pool of light dries up as the door closes.

Soon everything’s quiet, calm, peaceful and still again.

It’s very dark.

…and the ground felt strange beneath my feet. Less solid, somehow, less there. There was the sound of thirty children being very, very quiet, and I found that disconcerting so I opened my eyes.

I wasn’t standing on anything.

That is, I’d walked off the edge of the box, as I’d intended to, but instead of landing on the crash mats, I was there, three feet in the air in my white gym socks, shorts, T-Shirt. My teacher fainted and I distinctly remember the sickening crack as her skull hit the floor.

She fell, we said. Nobody ever mentioned it again.

I can fly.

I’m not any kind of super hero, or at least not in the four-colour underpants-over-your-costume sense. I don’t have super strength, it’s just that anything I’m flying with is weightless, is flying with me. If it touches the ground, it’s heavy again, a fact that’s almost killed me several times.

How? I just… push in the right direction and I go there. I don’t know how high, really. You’ve read the story of Icarus? I think of it every day. One day if I go too high, will I pass out? What happens if I pass out when flying? do I fall? do I hover there, in the way of passing jet aircraft?

People know. My brother knows, as do my parents. They don’t understand, but they know.

And…

…and now you know too. I’ve been wanting to tell you since we met, and more so since the engagement, but I promised not to tell anyone else. I don’t know what I’d do if you left me and told everyone; but then, I don’t know what I’d do if you left me anyway.

Thats it, really. That’s why I wanted to come all the way out here, just to tell you that. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you before.

That’s it. Monologue over. Now.

Will you fly with me?

The morning was crisp and cold when I woke up this morning, I should remember to turn down the fridge as it means I have to leave it to thaw whilst I have the epiphany. Ephiphany was good this morning too, I wish Esel would tell me where the new supply comes from, I’m sure the delta will hit soon and I’ll have to find my own :-Z

Morning descoured and wrapped around my shoulders (Stole mornings may be out of fashion, but I’ve never been known to kick the echidna) I set off to catch the elephant downtown before the rush. Annoyingly, I was running later than I thought, and had to wade though thousands of them rustling around my transter just to get to the phonebox and from there get my ticket into town. I’ve never seen town so busy on a January before, even with the sails on it was clipping away at barely sixteen reefs. There wasn’t really any way we could bring in the reasons in time, so we just had to accept another diamond onto the plate. Twenty five this fate? I’m pretty sure we’re going to get resaled if this goes on much longer, and town will have to up ships and sale off somewhere slower, like March.

With the fire break came the yellow, and we hurried under the grand arifice of the depot bridge, watching the elephants shuffle back into their phoneboxes and the fiddly little umbrellas of the rainproof-violins before it cleared out and we could get back in to knotting the sales down and keeping the bats from flying loose off the town centres, all too late for one poor shop which, embattled with a massive understock simply couldn’t cope, and flew off the edge. Fortunately we managed to get it tethered before it did any real damage, but I think the time has come to go shrinking for a new wicker basket to call office.

This morning, a wormhole opened up in my tea cupboard.

When I say “This Morning”, I don’t actually mean “This Morning”,
obviously, it’s just that when I use the phrase “A wormhole willon haven
be opening up in my tea cupboard yestormorrow morning” people look at me
strangely, so I’m being forced to restrict my use of future pronouns
until such time as time resolves, or dissolves, or possibly revolves.

You see, I have recently moved into my new flat. It is a nice new flat,
with heating and lighting and also gravity, and it has fridges and
microwaves and shelving and books and jam and televisions and
alarm-clocks and beds and computers and cables and cds and beer and wine
and screws and allan keys and jumpers and candles and mannequins and
bags and coffee and hats and blankets and pillows and laptops and jam
(yes, more jam) and Christmas hats and headphones and boots and phones
and laundry bins. However, I have moved into this new one room flat from
a two bedroom terraced house, which also had a garage, and so have had
to resort to… unusual methods to place all the items that were once in
my house into my new flat. Partly, this was achieved by the use of Ikea
and gratuitous use of boxes, but this fell apart when faced with the
small issue of my tea collection.

I collect tea.

I also drink tea, by copious amounts, but I always seem to be buying
more tea at a rate faster than I can actually drink this tea. This is a
constant, so if I start buying less tea (as has happened since I moved
to Bedford, a place with – and say it quietly lest anyone hear you – no
real tea shops) I will find myself drinking less tea. Previously, this
was solved by devoting a shelf of a cupboard to tea, and then ruthlessly
throwing away tea I wasn’t drinking, but the new flat has little space
to devote to such frivolities, and so I was forced to get a portable
dimensional expander, which I sourced from eBay, knowing full well that
it was unlikely to be properly certified. the PDX arrived a couple of
days later (After being held by the post office, since they tried to
deliver it while I was at work). You may not have seen these devices, I
suppose, since they haven’t yet shipped officially from their native
Japan. basically, they take a limited space, and then by some means (and
here I’m somewhat at the mercy of my own poor translation of the
Japanese manual) reach into another theoretical dimension where the
container was built to a larger scale, and provide you with access to
that extra space. The further up you scale the space, the more unstable
it becomes. It’s revolutionising the cargo shipping industry, as you can
well imagine, although commercial use has yet to really catch on, as the
instability is difficult to insure against (If it fails, the entire
contents is probably lost in the one case, and replaced with something
entirely random in other cases, probably as a result of a “Switch” with
whatever the cupboard was being used for in this alternate dimension.
Theories, obviously, abound). Anyway, I installed it into a reasonably
useless shelf (The kitchen builder had apparently wanted a shelf four
inches high by twelve deep) and managed to stack my tea inside the now
archive-boxed sized opening. (Obviously, the front of the shelf was
still only four inches high, but it now was right before a large drop
that appeared to go right though the solid bottom shelf and end
halfway down the bread maker under the unit. A most weird sensation,
to be putting your hand though a shelf that patently isn’t there). And
so we went on for a couple of weeks.

This evening just after I’d got back from being home for the holidays, I
was packing away things when I discovered a box of boxes of tea that I’d
somehow missed last week, but as I was adding the last couple to the
extended shelf, something went wrong with the unit, and the shelf
collapsed. My arm, still trapped inside, stopped the unit from
collapsing cleanly, and a wormhole opened up in my kitchen cupboard.
After a great deal of effort I managed to pull my arm free of the hole,
only to discover that I’d gone back to some time mid last week. I
immediatly did what any self respecting geek would do after such a
traumatic experience: I went and talked about it on IRC for a while. It
was somewhat to my surprise that my doorbell rang a couple of hours
later with some representatives in black suits from… well, I don’t
suppose I’m actually allowed to say who they were from, but their
existence is interesting to say the least.

Anyway, after the kerfuffle of closing up the wormhole and documenting
it all, and Christmas and such it’s been a pretty hectic couple of weeks
around here, so I’m sorry to say that I didn’t realise that in this
revision of reality I hadn’t posted you all your christmas cards yet.
I’ll get round to it at some point soon, but sorry about that.

Yours Faithfully,

Aquarion.

(Ten percent of this story is ninty-five percent true, fourteen percent
is sixty-five percent true, thirty-five percent is only five percent
true, and all the rest isn’t)

It came in the morning, in the post like everything else, along with the bills and the statements and a magazine about something I don’t understand that I apparently asked for at a convention I didn’t go to.

I missed it, to start with, as it was under the CD I had been waiting for for months, but there it was, in a handwritten golden envelope with my name and address clearly marked.

“You are invited to celebrate our wedding, on September 9th in Camelot.”

It was signed “Art and Jenny” as they aways did, and there were instructions to get to the coach, and I wondered how I was going to get back from then.

---

As he went sliding down the corridor – and who had waxed the corridor that morning? – I heard him say a word, and I knew it was the key to the final door, and behind that I would find the numbers. Now, though, I was watching him flail ineffectivly as the corridor tipped him towards the stairs. I turned before he fell though the crack, and wondered if the house would kill me too.

---

I pushed, and the wall slid back at my touch. The walls either side extended smoothly, unpapered and unpainted, revealing windows that looked out over gardens that weren’t in Cambridge. I pushed at the walls between those windows and again the room extended outwards, the crisp summers day outside those windows pulling away as my touch extended the rooms width another dozen feet. It was only seconds it had taken to turn this closet into a room bigger than my entire old flat, and I wondered old the magic that created this house could be, and how much of it I could learn. The room, though, was too big, and I was going to have to find Cath to see how you pulled it back in again. In the meantime, though, I went to get another door from the garage. I wanted to explore that garden.