Encounter While Waiting for Transport by David C. Kopaska-Merkel and W. Gregory Stewart "For real adventure you can't just mess around with kid stuff: wormholes subspace star-shot time travel cryogenics swapping genes" he said, then spun this tale of climbing out of one bubble universe, somehow dancing across the continuum in which they're all embedded, and slipping down a hole into another, like in The Magician's Nephew. (Holes in this part of Creation (if you go in for Creation, or the panMythicConcordance, if that or else Holes in this part of Just What it IS) do a choke-neck spiral down to a pointparticleimpossibility or a piece of String...) I thought he was going to say something about how he came from another universe much cooler than this one and I was going to wonder out loud (but only just) why he ever left it and be all DEFENSIVE about my paltry three dimensions but he interrupted my interruption like he had some kind of temporal fugue going or maybe he was just firing on a better class of brane cylinder "...feet up to yer ankles in quantum foam and your head stuck in one dimension of a Calabi-Yau quandary while you wrap your ass around the Far Horizons of the first 3 dimensions and wait for your table in the 4th which is ALWAYS late when you don't tip the maitre d' enough, well, or anything..." blah blah blah. (there are only 11 ways to die, and only one of these has anything to do with Einstein at a distance - the rest are Darwinian somehow - but here's the thing about a multiverse spawning infinite sub-verses at any/every point o' choice - it was invented by dweebs who comfort themselves with the thought that even though they don't get the girl in this life, they can still kick sand back somewhere else.) but of course this is not what he meant: "There's something about a Brane transplant and I've got a case of surebellums so alien it's not funny in my transport and well you see I've got to move them before the Expiration Date (two months from last Wednesday by your reckoning but almost 3 years ago by mine) and this Irish fellow runs the bar out by the spaceport he tells me you might be interested or know someone who is." I am about ready to show him the bum's rush because I've heard this story plenty of times on planets a lot more sophisticated than this, when he pulls out a sample and I have to admit it's like nothing I've ever seen: ticking wild paint job and what looks like a V8 or better under the hood so I've got a portable with me and we jack the thing into it... ...now, there are some places, some planets, that just scare you the second you see 'em. there are sounds that take you back to bad times and smells... you see where I am going with this. this was every place like that and every sound and every smell and oh! I did gag most emphatically and he laughs, "There now, and didn't I tell you? That's a Hell in a handbasket, isn't it!? Get over it, man, and LOOK. Would you look at the thing?" and this is something I did try to do, to look "There in the wet places, there in the dark. Do you see? At the shore, do you see? At the edges, where the tiny gods go to die where the primary mumbles 'dawn' from time to time. There, do you see..." ...and I suppose I did see, or I did begin to see, while every twitching part of me cried to be blind or drunk or both. both, best, actually, and all this after 37 seconds, so I yank the jack and grab the Jack and pour a shot and hand it back and empty the bottle and stare. and stare... ...until I don't care where he came from and I'm about to tell him just what he can do with his toxic alien brain furniture and I'm making a note copying it to my symbiote to stay away from this particular waystation the next time I have to kill time on this sorry orb that's way too close to the edge of everything and way too far from anything that spells Home: nucleic-acid based life instant food mass-produced entertainment robot-made garments with familiar logos conspecific sexual partners |