Event Reference 1010011101-2

connect Nikolai ********

*plik*

Echo on.

load {{Event_Reference_1010011101-2}}

loading....

parsing narrative...

reticulating splines...

Load Complete.

/////////) Begin (\\\\\\\\\

A voice. "Is it working?"

Swirls of precipitation forming under a steel sky, a weather machine pumping out synthetic clouds of fibrous being, no heft and weight but crackling with the essential properties of a thunderstorm. From the throat of steel and barbed wire, nests of sharpened birds honed for pinpoint accuracy of flight, evasion, retrieval, communication, and information parallel processing, the cries modulated into spikes of code molding avian thoughts into fierce calculatrons....from the nests and from the roofs of masterful colossal constructions daunting the most feverish city designers of forgotten unforgotten times, spear rods clustered as in the eagle's claws, bound together to stand the winds of the storm about to charge one-point-twenty-one-jigawatts down the length of inverted spine, from the feet in the sky to the brain, the central nervousness center of operations prime: in the Laboratory, the scientist awaits the first illuminating bolts of lightning.

Min throws the switch along the wall, an impetus at best unimpeded by showmanship unlike hir dear colleague/master/slave/lover, the Scientist. It is a switch, it is either on or off, controls or does not. This one diverts--or will divert--the potential yet-to-come flow of electricity into the device on the table. There's no flourish or dramatic screaming over the howl of the wind.

All done,Doctor." The words paradoxically convey respect, disrespect, irony, reverence, awe, shock, and fear for the Scientist. Mad or not, he diverts the attention in ways unthought before the clearskinned lizard decided/was compelled/was hypnotized/cloned and modified/heavily persuaded/duped into working for the otter. Scattershot. Pachinko brain sending thoughts colliding into echoes of a future past.

Déjà vu.

(Sssh. We're not here.)

look min 1

Min 1

Shi's a toy lizard, indeterminate in gender or specific species, but with the usual anthropomorphic lizard build. Sleek, blunted head and nose, neck tapering in graceless lines on smooth skin to join a ridge down the back of the head and between shoulderblades. Long whiptail coils behind hir held just off the ground with some style, legs poised as if on the verge of sprinting. The most unusual property of this lizard is hir skin, or perceptual lack of it. There's a surface there, but it's entirely transparent. Underneath are smooth interlocking pistons and carefully crafted gears, oiled brass and chrome clockworks. They move but don't seem to have a direct connection to the movement of the lizard hirself...closer inspection will reveal that the mechanical parts are internal-projection holograms, and the body of the lizard is actually quite empty. The only part that doesn't fit the illusion of steampunk-style automaton is a tiny circuit-diagram on the back of the neck, engraved into the lizard's actual skin.

Knowing this doesn't make the eyes of the lizard any less compelling. The eyes are limpid pools of surprising depth and intelligence for a clichéd hack description phrase far overused. Okay, they're just these green, glittery, slitted eyes. Somehow, they don't seem like holograms. Maybe they're the only real thing about hir.

I don't recall having a helper.

(You're about to.)

The Doctor monitors all the esoteric gauges, dials, bubbling vials, alembics, rheostats, doodads, and other imagination-provoking apparatus of typical laboratories of those marked terminally sane yet at odds with the world's generally assumed view of things Scientist. The lab is dirty, littered with the remains of previous experiments failed and successful. In a feat of perception, the walls are as close as they need to be, yet floorspace for grand inventions and old trash never seems to run out.

"Hm!", says the otter. "Looking good, I have to say. Micto-fractures in space are colliding as predicted with concentrated ambion mass, breaking the narrative structure warping the right catastrophe-fold interference pattern."

(Quiet, you. No editing!)

look lab

It looks just like was described in the previous paragraph a colossal towering monument to half-crazed ideas everywhere across history and fiction. Collect Frankenstein's workshop and the parts from Doc Brown's mind-reading and time travel inventions, drop a dosage of Hyde, Professor Farnsworth, and Invader Zim alongside, shake, do not stir. Turn on its side and dump into a pile, then rearrange subcultural references to taste, highlight the imaginative side of all of the best/most insane of these, and pour into brain.

Okay, it's a mad scientist laboratory in the ground beneath a big cargo container. See what you want to.

Right now it's set up to receive the business end of a storm. Lightning rods fire down shoots into coils and distributor caps, looping into wiring. Miles of wires, all connected to a simple spherical device in the locus point. Do we know what it does? If we did, we wouldn't have built it.

There's a [door] out of the lab, as well as various [devices] we already saw the Doctor playing with.

door

Sorry, it's closed. More like, welded shut. Maybe he didn't want visitors....to escape.

@unlock door

You don't have permission.

Damn rerun. I've seen this show before.

Min 1 smiles and nods, smiles and nods. Hir simple brain comprised of electrostatic charges suspended in the air molecules inside hir hollow shell can't even begin to comprehend what the Doctor's talking about, so shi tells hirself/persuades mentally/is told by a voice inside. Shi's just good at following instructions, that's all. There's nothing to it, flip that knob, push that lever, watch the miracles and disasters befall us all. Them all, rather. The lab's rather protected/protective of else outside its walls. At least during an experiment.

The Mess groans, Downwarp spawning a storm that it's never been used to, considering the weather doesn't often change in the entropic environment. A vortex of clouds, as much as the image of a vortex runs unoriginally rampant through potent imagery of summoned power, counter-entropic forces, and insane mages. A few buildings get struck by the feelerpods of the Big One, the massive phallus of the mad god Electri-City, not yet striking here in this space/time/now reference. Not yet again, yes, again.

Haven't gotten to that yet.

(What, you were expecting linearity? )

It's asking too much for the author to be Oracular?

(Depends on whom the Author is.)

Resist the temptation, and the temptation shall set you free. Distractions aside, the storm brews still.

Min says, "Come on already!"

Min stares at the great domed struts holding the ceiling from collapsing under the weight of the apparatus, but not the rain from falling.

You say, "It's coming. Got the risk factor going well enough into the nonlocal future."

Min rolls hir eyes. The rain is stopped instead by randomized reverse-ionic fields repelling the individual droplets from entering the lab. It flies sideways much to the consternation of many of the residents of the other nearby modified cargo-containers. Bad enough it's raining in Downwarp, but sideways rain? "Doc, you don't even know what this thing DOES!"

The otter giggles. "Yeah, isn't that the fun of it? If I knew what it did I wouldn't have built it. I have guesses, dear, only guesses. And the will to make it happen."

Min shakes hir head, a gesture easily repeated enough times to prove a symbol of frustration but benign acceptance of the Scientist's masterful work. "If you say so." Always the acquiescence. As if programmed. But there is affection. Mystery. Or she's scared.

Wait...."you say"...?

look Doctor

Yeah, it's who you thought it was. A tall, lanky brown otter. On two feet, being as assumed somewhat human-shaped, cryptical or for no particular reason other than it's convenient. He's young in what passes for age, perhaps newly come to the Mess environs, newly created, minted, stamped, pressed, folded, spindled, mutilated....but let's not get ahead of ourselves. He wears a pristine white lab coat, and loose pants. His head has a full mess of lighter brown hair spilling down over his shoulders, unkempt as is perfectly befitting one of his psychoempirical profile.

(This is not quite the present you know. )

Or even unwrapped at Kalimass.

(Hush, you).

In another undetermined time--as without points of reference, history, or standard measurements it becomes increasingly impossible to measure what is, after all, a fluid property--another doctor mutters to himself over a bed of rose petals and salvia divinorum extract. He sees a black cat cross his path, which is likely not too unusual. Then it happens again. Which is silly and too much of an obvious reference. We'll let you do the deletion this time. (It looks like this)

Things were just about to start getting Crazy-Go-Nuts....

Fold back to the lightning. Yeah, there's the Big One now. See it in the mind, an invisible precursor charge leaps upward from the intentionally placed rods and the nests of the sentry-data-birds and the body of Min 1 and the standing-on-end hair of the otter. He's got fur, so it's also standing on end. What a feeling. Like the world's biggest bomb is about to go off. He would know, he's built all the ones that never worked.

At least, not that they worked in ways bombs usually are assumed to work.

This one does.

Min starts to float in the air, held aloft by sheer force of the current crackling into the grounding circuits and causing hir so-perfect illusion of clockwork innards to warp and interfere with itself. "This feels so good!" shi exclaims, lying to hirself at the same time as believing it. Shi was taught/deprogrammed/retooled to believe all manner of things, preferably the impossible, all before breakfast. As the causalmatic loop shunt cycle in hir brain repossesses, breakfast just hasn't quite come yet. But...it's breaking.

You say, "And believing makes it so! Yes!"

The Scientist grins. He knows his hold on the lizard is self-replicating. But that's not everything. The possibilities, oh the potential! If shi can be taught to truly believe, then shi may yet immanentize the eschaton....oh yes, and then there's the immediate attention matter required....

...he is levitating, suspended on the charge, a former image of a former laboratory forming in his mind, those nearby watching in disbelief...

*****

*****

...he is levitating, it is to be expected of course, the gravitons are reacting to the presense of weak and strong forces colliding with the will of Science to happen regardless of silly Laws of Physics. They're not so much actual laws, as they are guidelines...

Ions in the air buzz and hiss. The air parts way for the data charge packet sent upwards to be returned fivefold, seventeenfold, downwards. And so it does, rushing surges of infomatic lightning conveying the heat of the surface of the sun, jigwatts of required power (one point twenty-one to be exact), perceptual conduits necessarily open for transit of the need of Something to happen. It Is Willed. And the 'Box complies.

"Yes! Awesome! Yes!" The otter dances in midair, flinging arms akimbo and askew, laughing, in wonderment of his own work.

Min does not laugh, shi does not sleep. Shi is empowered. Electrified. Scattershot pulses rip hir brain, feedback into feedback. Does shi now dream? What does shi see? Mayhaps shi is actually, finally, realizing the Truth with a capital T. There are those who call this enlightenment.

It is a horrible joke. Hir memories are returning with it. Or what are presumably hir memories.

(A matter of explanation:

He had loved hir, once, you see. Or you don't see. Well, this is the truth. Once there was a mind the equal of his. There are always, but this was different. Shi was as genius as he. And just as sanely mad as he was madly sane. Yet shi was as destructive as he was creative. A matter to antimatter ratio of one to one. It was inevitable one would annihilate the other. Or both simultaneously. It was uneven. Rites of power clashed with mad schemes and unsane plays of domination and control. They were spiraling out of all restraint, threatening others. And the {One} decided to put it to a stop, so {Xe} cursed him with madness and hir with beatific simplicity of service... )

No. Too self-important, and dramatic.

(Telling it like it is.)

Say only they were in love. It's simpler that way. One doesn't need to resort to hyperbole.

He loved hir, so he finally, madly, destroyed hir. Reductio ad absurdum. Compression. Losing that essential part of him which was closest to him. Possessiveness is destruction. He now possessed hir, mind and body, servile and bound to his will...the only better way to preserve, to reserve hir backup-bitnome...always treating hir lovingly, carefully, locking hir memories away to save hir from hir own nature...

Getting off the subject at hand.

(The time is nigh.)

If you could know what time it really was...

A tear falls from warm brown eyes, the memories returning to haunt. Returning or recycling. Reduce, reuse, recycle. The eternal triptych. He doesn't know his free will has returned...it is enough that he could see what he had, and had lost, over again. There's nothing to cloud the brain now, only now.

Only the eternal Now.

********

The Device fires.

It has already fired.

(It has yet to fire.)

It is always firing.

{{{ Time stirs, spins on her skirts, and hiccups. }}}

********

Device? What? But I haven't made the Generator yet.

(Wrong Device. This was the prototype. )

Oh...you made the final version.

(So I did. )

look device

It's a simple-looking sphere of glass and metal, surrounded by a series of wires evenly distributed along the outside. Between the wires can be seen a silvery liquid encased within. The liquid reflects everything and anything, including what isn't really there. It seems to exist in many dimensions outside the typical.

There's a bluish-white light pouring down into wires, converging and activating the liquid, or perhaps creating it. It is caught in a moment, the moment at which you looked at it seared into time's retinas.

And it snaps time like a rubber band. Or a faultline.

Min screams, a datafold caught in the onrush flash flood of the information searing down from the construct that is the lightning bolt. Transmittance and download, modulation-demodulation encoded into the air, the weave of charge and electricity a suitable construct. Typical connectance to the {Other}, goodhood delusion, form of illusionary power structure. Shi looks down on the otter, refilled with wonder and knowledge and light and remembrance of who she was/is/is-to-come. Benovolance? Pity? Revenge? Power? Omnipotence?

The otter Scientist, distracted, bends towards his Device. It glows, but it stays glowing, the frozen moment crystallized. Yet he is still moving, so time is not stopped...it is splintered.

No kidding.

(Oh shut up. You're being too distracting.)

A timequake. Shivering, rippling, shuddering, alpha-temporal- and p-waves crossing, interference patterns reaching out and across impossible ur-surfaces. He falls. There/now but here/then and nowhere/when. If it can be said to have a direction, it is back, back, back into memories lost or deleted. He falls...returning to the source of the disturbance...oh. Oh.

Oh. THIS....it's been so long.

datasphere :: timequake

[concepts/Timequake]

** A slippage of time. Most often in the reverse direction, a timequake slides a person backwards in time to inhabit their previous history. For reasons unknown, those affected by the quake are disabled from tampering with time. They can only relive that portion of the quake that intersects their past, without being able to control or change the outcome.

**A timequake can be caused by many different factors. Due to the nonlinear nature of spacetime, the effect does not always follow the cause--an event in the perceptual future or past can trigger the quake.

He can feel himself being pulled. From the future to the past, across what passes for years in the grand Mess of things.

Min says,"I....I am awake. Was I sleeping?"

Min 1 has shunted the false memories into a self-destructive loop, those that reinforce servitude, compliance, mental malleability. Shi identifies them: quantifying statements stating that shi is a golem, an empty being given life, created by hir master to serve. These compound and conflict and collide with those snatches of data inflowed upon the aetheric datasphere: sensations, images, watchcams and public logs, details of a life not hir own, but what shi used to be.

A rival, a sidekick, a spy, a betrayer, a complex con artist, a thief, a lover, a true Other Half, nemesis, opposite....all these, not hir but HIM. What is the truth?

He cringes. Knowing what is coming again does not make it easier. It was difficult enough with the reappearance of the bolt-artifact in local space-time, as if it had always been there. Time has slipped up...shi may even now be free again...

I know the past, now. Perhaps I will know the future.

(It's already gone and left you behind, dear.)

Air crackles, while the rain above the flash of lightning stops itself midfall, some drops even falling up to rejoin the clouds. The Mess shivers. {Xe} labors to repair the damage to {xer}self and environs, knowing the full effects of the quake won't even show up for at least a hundred or more age-cycles.

"Nikolai."

The words shi speaks are charged with the bolt shi gravitates towards. Beneath hir feet, the Device still twists into time like a woodscrew, piercing the veil.

Min says, "You...diminished me. Used me. Stole my ideas. Betrayed me. Loved and lost me. I know who I am."

He turns around, catching his labcoat on a protruding corner of equipment, stumbling back. Shi is suffused, glowing angel of vengeance, even an electric halo of toroidal vortices spinning stable above hir head.

You say, "And the lightning bolt taught you this, eh? What imagination you have! I made you. You're a Golem. You don't have anything in your mind I did not give you, so you must be picking up some memory engrams from somewhere else. Trust me... "

Nikolai spreads his hands wide, to accept hir as shi is. Hoping shi will not dredge farther into the delusion. The illusion is surely seductive.

datasphere :: golem

[characters/golems]

**The making of a Golem is an ancient practice originating in Hebrew Quabbala, in which a human-like figure is made out of clay and then breathed life into with a magic scroll placed in the head. These were used by 'magicians' to perform tasks for their master and creator. It might even be said that a Golem was simply an inanimate object given a 'soul' or intelligence for a purpose.

**The more recent technological versions are usually made of something more durable, like softplas or heavy-duty latex. They can resemble toys or Bubble Dolls to some extent, but their main function is in general assistance rather than companionship. They may have genders, but most are neuter. Inasmuch as anything in the Mess needs actual work done, they are often the ones to do it.

**Golems are bound to obey the one who created it, or alternately the one who placed the technomantic seal on its neck. Since they are capable of thought processes and understanding simple commands, the seal suppresses the higher rational functions so they do not get out of control. As opposed to robots, golems often have partial memories implanted by choice of their creator, to give them a pleasing personality. Such memories might be fed through the public or private dataspheres, or embedded in the seals.

**The seals are generally regarded as unbreakable except in situations of extreme stress, which would destroy the simple body at the same time, thus being no danger in leaving behind an empty shell.

{{Notation: This text refers to an out-of-practice concept, as of 1100101011-5. See also Event Reference 1010011101-2}}

{{Sub-Notation 1: Memory-leakage and total personality replacement have been shown to occur in concentrated tests, but in general use the statistical likelihood of such errors are roughly equal odds to being struck by lightning from a thunderstorm in Downwarp. }}

Oh, please. Now you're just trying to be funny.

(It's a real document! Go look it up.)

Nobody's going to believe any of this is even canon, if you keep up this tongue-in-cheek style. As if it's not disjointed enough already.

(I have not yet begun to confuse.)

The outside world is silent, sound has crashed to a halt while the Device is yet functioning. But inside the lab time spins, leaps out long arms across intervening distances, collapses into whorls that remain motionless in the river. The lizard was standing too close to the device when it went off, but not in the bright searing flash of the lightning itself....close enough to receive highly disorienting signals to hir brain processes. Poor mad, sad doctor, forgetting such simple things as shielding his creation from electrical interferences. Especially in his world of sublight-flickering arcs, towers, circuits, power exchanges, and his way with the Spark. Formidable. Foolish. Shi is fragile, his creation, and believing too much in alternate ways of existence.

(editnote: Is it too much to believe that he could be so stupid to forget such a simple detail? May need to change this, if disbelief levels too high.)

I wasn't THAT mad back then.

....was I?

Eyes are open. Watching. Episodes of the past, he sees them together in this scene. Is it significant? Is it still going on? Impossible...that is himself with hir. Ripples, he can feel the ripples, traveling outward from the epicenter, backwards/forwards, direction and distance in time meaningless. For that matter, so is space and reality itself.

Or narrative integrity.

Min reaches out to the otter to embrace him in return. In return for betrayal. Hir thoughts whirl as fierce as the juiced-up cyclone outside. "No! My body...it does not go with my memories!"

Nikolai nods, smiling perhaps a bit too much. "Are you so certain they are /your/ memories, then? One can pick up all sorts of embedded sense-relics from the datasphere. It can be confusing if you don't know the connection is there. Your seal..." He points to the back of Min's neck, "...it's connected to the datasphere, and I think it must be receiving something..."

Time veers out of proportion and logic, long spiral arms connecting events and places not unlike the lightning sending feelers out in all directions. Seemingly unrelated happenstances collide and remerge, voices from past and future cacophony overhead. A quake has turned into a cyclone. Otherselves everywhen feel the aftershocks.

*** Interlude ***

Elsewhere, elsetime. A wizened old man takes a deep, rattling breath and leans on his walking stick near the top of a winding mountain path. Summoning final reserves of energy, he takes a swipe with the cane at several helpers lingering behind him, preferring to take the last few steps to the pagoda with dignity.

The Maker looks up from his calligraphy brush and rice-paper parchment covered in compact diagrams and mathematical symbols. He slides onto the bamboo mat on his knees, and bows low to the old man entering the doorway. The rolled-up sleeves of his long crimson and gold-edged robe tumble loose and run together over his folded hands as he bends his face to the floor.

"You honor me, Emperor of the World at the Top, with your presence. How may I be of service?"

The ancient one stands barely as tall as the red-robed kneeling one. He moves his hand sideways once, a swift chopping motion.

"Oh, get up. You know how I hate ritual. I merely came to check on your progress. What have you invented today, oh Nirukai, my wise sage and Master Maker?"

The sage straightens up with more formality, but with a knowing smile on his face. He sweeps a pile of drawings aside and pulls forth a shallow glass dish with a piece of damp cloth laying on the bottom. "You recall that before I arrived in your wonderful, beautiful Land of the Seventh Moon, your other mages had attempted work on a youth potion, which never worked."

The emperor gives a curt nod. "Indeed, and I had them turned to beautiful statues when they failed. Do you mean to tell me you have discovered their secret once more? I must remind you, I am almost past the Great Dragon himself in years, and immortality is far too important a prize for you to be gambling your life with."

Nirukai bows again, holding his hands out to present the dish to his master. "I hear and understand, Emporer. I may claim with no humility at all that I have uncovered their secret, and it was a sham. The other mages took you for a dying fool and would have vanished away with the very gold they now wear as statues. I have found a new method that is of the utmost scientific principles that I promise will extend your life, perhaps even reverse it. If I am also incorrect, you have the power to cause me to become like my servant." He gestures towards a doll-like automaton who stands stirring a large pot of chemicals over a bed of coals.

Taking the cloth strip from the dish, the Emperor places it as directed on his skin. "You have done well, my faithful servant. I will test this new...Nainooteku magic as you call it. I do look forward to one day trying out your Flying Dragon machina as well."

The sage bows once more, and resumes his lotus position next to the low calligraphy table. "You honor me again, Emperor. I will return to my studies in hopes that I might produce your sky-sailing chariot very soon. Then you would not have to endure such indignities as walking up the stairs to my lonely hill."

The ground beneath the pagoda writhes. The air and spaces between give a convulsion, a long arm of time spiraling uncontrolled even this far back of a whiplash. Crack.

The brass and wooden automaton ceases stirring the mix of nanotech slurry and drops the titanium ladle into the cauldron. It holds both claw-like grasper hands to its head, and with gears grinding and snapping under unnatural forces it does the impossible, as the small emperor and the golem's Maker look on in horror: it speaks.

"What....what is this? Where? This isn't...I'm not.....burns...hurts... What have you done to me, Niko...ahhgghh."

The frail figure is wrenched apart from inside with crunching, snapping, clicking, rending of gears, and leaking of reddened lubricant fluid. Outside in a cloudless sky, a single gargantuan lightning bolt flashes on the horizon.

The butterfly flaps its wings. And time moves on.

So....the story constantly reoccurs.

(I know, I'm starting to get a headache too.)

Where do you come up with these things?

(From you, of course! Which is a roundabout way of saying from me.)

Min cringes, and a shudder passes through hir.

Nikolai cringes and holds his head."Ow...I think I just experienced some temporal distortion of my own, and I'm not even directly connected to the datasphere." He falls into Min's arms, into the immobile crackling flame of the bolt, and energies rise and collapse in the Device.

False memories derived from datasphere sense-recordings. Which is true, which is false? Whose memories are these?

Betrayal. Shi was too powerful. He had to seal hir away, for the sake of the greater good. There was a battle, a conflict that broke barries of physics and cracked the world....he finally overcome. So he corrupted hir backup, and installed it in a servile body under his control...

Or as an experiment, to see how the psyche might be harnessed and subdued. Everything is an experiment to the mad genius, even life itself, even death.

Or was it simpler than that? Errors with the universe's backup system...a death in a tragic accident, then a failed or partial rebirth...like the alchemists of old to save hir he bound hir to a body, to a golem, so shi would not be lost. He would not trust the Mess to resurrect ever again. The more complex the system, the greater the chance of error...and this system was the universe itself. The error was compounded.

Do you even know anymore?

(It could all be true...or none.)

It burns. The searing energy released by the golem's embrace echoes around the otter and the lizard. Lies and truth, history and corrupted data, things that happened and never happened and are unhappening now. Shi surges against the Doctor, trying to overcome him, pure force of will yearning to BE, wishing that everything were true.

Min says, "I can't be a copy...I am the original! I remember everything...I remember you killing me..."

Nikolai pushes back, in a way, against the murderous urge to simply delete his poor crazed assistant, erase hir from memory and all records of existence. If he could only cut off the dataflow feeding hir the true/false engrams of what shi once was/is. He knew his control was on the verge of breaking...so he set up the Device to capture hir...before shi destroyed him.

@recycle Min 1

You don't own that object.

Too late, it's all too late to change things now. The swell of the wave has come and you are on the crest. Do you repeat history? Do you get a second chance?

I do.

The otter falls to his knees. It's too much, nearly too much. It was too much the first time around, before the timequake. Now it repeats...only he is on the outside looking at the spectacle...and he remembers the presence. Even during this event, there was a presence, something happened that he couldn't explain. One cannot change the past, because one has already changed the past.

(That presence wasn't me. It was you.)

I understand now. The Device was only an outcropping of the greater iceberg, another part of which was the SDG. I know who YOU are.

(Yes. That's how I am here. Now go do what you have already done.)

Reaching out, the scientist finds two minds, caught in the vortex, trying to destroy each other. Is this the first, or the second, or the third run through? What permutation of the Story is it now? To time it matters not, to him it matters not. He joins with himself, touching like mind to like mind, like poles to like poles, an impossibility. To the one in the lightning, and to the one fighting a merciless battle against his nemesis, there is a third. And more.

Nikolai recoils. There are others here. The shock of it nearly drives him mad. But he accepts, merging into himself, cradling around a part of him older and already half-mad, from a time connected on thin strands to the future. It is enough, it will be enough.

This time the creation will not destroy the creator.

Dr. Frankenstein will live.

This time we have help.

You say, "Min...I'm sorry...."

Again.

Nikolai exerts a control in the momentary timeslip field, nearly dissolved in the electrical inferno, on the brink of system death and rebirth. Datamanipulators seethe from conjoined whole-sane mind, undermining the lizard's frail connection to the Messwide backup archives, taking and twisting the metatag archetypes to merge with the moment, weaving hir into the timespace of one captured megabolt.

*flip*

@set Min 1=X

Forceable Flag set.

@deconstruct Min 1

Processing... done.

@set Min 1={eval:{time:{suspend:here,Min 1,indef}}}

##Error: Cannot set {time} to 'infinite'.

@set Min 1={eval:{time:{suspend:here,Min1,{rand:1000,999999}}}

Timelength set.

@bind Min 1=lightning bolt

Set.

(Sorry, wrong side of the scene.)

**flip**

The otter pulls away from the floating lizard, and slips time in loops and coils around hir body. He spins the half-exploded wires of the Device into a huge five-pointed star-in-circle with the lightning bolt at the center. Energy surges up from the protection circle, capturing the electricity...wooden worktables flow and merge with the iron instruments in the cyclonic magflux field, and begin to grow. Metal trees crash up through the ground outside the lab, waving their branches in blurred transmutation. And the soul/datastate/memoryengram/sentience/personality of Min 1 is sealed away, deep into the bound light of the blazing spark. For as close to forever as can be.

***Momentary Clarity***

Nikolai collapses to the floor of his ruined laboratory. "....what's done is done." It is done, as it was, as it will be, as it was written.

He nods. "With your help."

The other blinks.

You are aware of me, then. You're not supposed to be. Why don't I remember it this way the last time through?

Nikolai smiles a lopsided grin. In the cyclone of destruction a jagged metal shard cut deeply into his upper cheek, just missing his eye. It bleeds, one red tear after another. "Because memories can be erased, edited, changed, invented, or manipulated. Even on yourself. They are only data, after all."

I will never fall into that trap again. I know that much.

The younger scientist nods solemnly."I'm going to forget this. And I won't remember it again until I am you."

I wish I didn't have to relive it. Why?

(Because of my intervention.)

Right. Damn you. I wish I hadn't pulled you through that once.

(How do you know I didn't pull myself through? You're not even supposed to remember any of that.)

Lethe only works when it wants to.

(When I want it to.)

Nikolai says, "I won't pretend to know who you're talking to. It'll probably just make my head hurt...more."

(You'll find out soon enough.)

Nikolai says, "That's what I'm afraid of. Go on, get out of here. You've done what you came for."

Indeed.

***shudder***

The ground moves, liquifies, shimmies, palpitates, and goes spatially spastic. The otter doctor has completed his work...the binding is finished as planned. History will never repeat itself if this place is never rediscovered, if it drops from time completely.

Oh, yeah. There is that. Should get out of here. The otter turns to stare up at the final resting place of his former assistant/lover/servant/creation/golem. He feels the back of his head...it's bare, all his headfur singed off in the binding technomagical blast.

Shudder again. Need to get out of here. He runs towards the tunnel entrance embedded in the nearby building. Emerging into the outside world, he witnesses the gigantic tree crafted of light, carved against the ageless orange-grey of the Downwarp ceiling, surrounded by arcs of cyclotronic trees. His mouth drops open.

"If this ever returns to time...it will be beautiful."

The image fades, collapses into itself, into a bubble of nonbeing. This place will be historic, someday, but for now it will vanish into time's streams.

Nikolai takes a rodlike device from his labcoat pocket. He checks a readout on his datapad to be sure of his current backup status, and then places the end of the rod against the back of his skull. And fires. A ripple distortion wave tears through his body and decomposes it into smoke.

The forest and the Tree vanish.

The Tower has fallen, with the Fool.

[[[[[Nikolais Constellation-Quaternus, of the Quartz Lyceum raises his head from a sensdep meditation, stares into the sightless Void of the all-enclosing viscous body-suspension liquid, and utters a wordless thought that is recorded into the datasphere: "Yes. The infiltration of dreams is possible. We know no boundaries of linearity. It has already begun."]]]

(The cycle turns ever more. Dreams into other dreams, into the dreaming. )

(Everything has gone according to my plan. He won't even suspect. The Story is real to him now, as if it had always been. The future is constantly revising the past. )

##Memory Insert Complete##

{{END FEED}}

disconnect

*voop*