Fiction: Avatar Remaindered: 21

Storm over Lake Ebb (a salt lake), watercolor and gouache painting by Rita de Heer

The Dream, or Was It?

Sard woke. How many more times would he have to wake in this story? When we gamed in CAVE, we don’t bother with night and day. It was always day. He let his thoughts continue on to CAVE.

“Oh look, he’s waking up,” said someone. A girlish voice. Sard turned to see her but there was no one with him in the rock hole. Huh. “Where will we have him?” said someone else he almost knew. He started to try to remember him.

“We haven’t seen him do anything real yet.” Different boy. Just figuring how many players is all I have time for? “Can you believe that it’s one of the avatars in that suit?” First boy again. “I thought they’d all been cast out?”

“Let’s try that village at the edge of the salt lake,” the original girl said.

Sard gave up.

Someone sounding a lot like Gre…Greg?…chuckled. “You mean Sard and Srese Yonker, and Youk Kerr? You are a dim-witted bunch if you’ve forgotten them already. Do it. I want to see Sard in that village. I want to see how Sard reacts.”

Being warned, Sard held onto stone left and right. He heard swearing off stage, scoffed at himself. Yeah right. How did I even know that?

He closed his eyes—his thoughts went fuzzy and his whole body shook—bones, flesh, heart and head. His ears funnelled in a loud incessant buzz. This doesn’t sound like somewhere I want to be. He pinched himself. Ouch. I’m awake?

He opened his eyes. Where is this place? Village at the edge of the salt lake reverberated in his thoughts. Can’t see either a salt lake or any houses. Only thing he could see straight in front was the underside of his stair-set of drawers that he’d had since childhood.

Was it them at an arm’s length distance? He marvelled running his fingers over the silky timber undersides of the fourth, fifth, and sixth drawers. He leaned forward. I wonder if the crabby life-suit entity brought all my treasures in the drawers as well?

Stop. I don’t want to give the damned life-suit entity the satisfaction. He lay back, thought about the drawers themselves to distract himself. Old and older, maybe the oldest piece of furniture in the habitat, according to Ghulia, and inherited through her from her forebears.

Passing concrete objects down through the generations shouldn’t even be possible, given the anonymous way they were made. How did she manage it? And why the drawers here—he looked beyond the staircase they were part of, and through an open doorway—in this lime-stone white house at the edge of a salt lake?

No one out there. No. Wait. A bunch of people dressed in white, walked half-heartedly, even hesitantly, out on the salt. They all wore a thing over their eyes. Looks like a swim-mask, people. You look ridiculous. He felt his face. No mask himself.

< You don’t need virtual-world goggles. You are wearing me. >

Sard laughed. I am wearing a life-suit colonised by an AI entity. It confirmed his suspicions. Apart from that, I am inside a virtual building somewhere, as well as in an actual rock-shelter.

“He went in here,” said a voice he knew. Greg came into view, also with swim-goggles over his face, and leapt up the stairs. Dust from between the treads spurted into Sard’s face. He was under the stairs he saw, recognising the boxed-in treads. They are the drawers containing my life.

< You’re wondering how a life-suit knew about your drawers? >

“Not really,” Sard said. The way the entity said ‘life-suit’ gave the game away. If it was a game. Preening and so superior, as if an ordinary life-suit was far beneath what the entity itself was capable of. Which might be true, remember that.

The people watching or involved in the interactive play, seemed to think they were involved in a game. Sard listened interestedly to the stomping on the floor above, and the high, excited voices up there. Everyone ran up and down the stairs at least twice each.

Then the search continued in the room alongside the stairs—with him in plain sight he would’ve thought—and then the room beyond, a kitchen maybe. Plenty of people called out they saw him whenever someone thought they found him.

Nobody did, though he wasn’t hiding particularly, just laying on a pallet under the stairs. All they had to do was glance aside. But they of course wore the goggles that were in the control of the entity that also controlled the life-suit.

< These people have had things too easy for far too long. >

Whatever the stupid entity meant with that apart from the glaring fact that it—the entity—was now in charge. It now seemed to Sard that Gammy—the AI owner of CAVE who once was Gamester—a regular human being who had his brain pattern uploaded into a computer—had ruled by division. All energy-chewing tasks were separated. Life-suits could not communicate with the virtual goggles. Gammy’s strategies were to preserve the system for as long as possible.

This entity obviously had no such desire. He wouldn’t be surprised if CAVE ended during its reign. Did it even know what it wanted? And what did it know about Sard’s people? Because how easy was it in fact to know that every move you made was being judged, and if you didn’t come up to the expectations of the pernickety AI in charge, you’d be moldecked without regrets? You were told a fantasy that you’d be reborn. Better luck next time, people had learned to say to each other.

Who, or what, was this entity?

“Got you!” Greg said. He’d shoved his mask up on his forehead. He grabbed Sard by an arm and dragged him into the open. “Let’s get you into the daylight. I knew you’d be somewhere in plain sight.” He stood Sard on his two feet.

“I’m surprised to find you in the game, oh noble warrior,” Sard said. “It’s quite a short trip, it seems, from standing back all your life to suddenly being as involved as any Tom, Hinny and Darren.”

Greg hesitated. He dropped his hands from Sard, and tore off his mask, which squawked as if the life-suit entity had an audio channel in it, and it resisted. His dazed expression cleared to the one Sard recognised as the Greg he knew.

“Same old Sard. You calling me out?” Greg said.

“Just wondering what the hell is going on?” Sard said. “Not like you to be taken in by anything an AI serves up?” He replied with the same tone Greg gave him.

Greg frowned. “An AI? Other than Gammy, you’re saying?”

Sard gestured at the houses made from blocks of pristine limestone, at the sheet of white glare beyond. “When did Gammy ever serve us up with this? Or peopled it with swim-goggles and a life-suit at the same time? I think he’s been overwritten. You probably know better than me what with.” He didn’t dare go further.

Greg grinned. “What’s it like, wearing it?”

The thing in the life-suit slammed Sard to the ground hard enough that he hurt. < Next time stay where I put you. >

Next it slammed Greg down beside him. It must have, no way would Greg ever purposely throw himself down beside Sard and lay there winded and looking concussed.

Thinking to check Greg’s life-status, Sard put his hand on Greg’s chest. The AI messaged Greg and it reverberated up Sard’s arm. < Don’t make me over-write you as well. >

It could do that? “Drop the mask,” Sard mouthed at Greg.

Greg nodded minimally. Freeing his fingers from the mask’s strap, he leapt to his feet. “Come on, Sard. Let’s go. Save yourself.”

The life-suit squeezed Sard the way he had come to know. The python trick. “You,” he gasped. “You save yourself!” The life-suit picked him up and forced him to run at Greg on four feet, like a beast.

Greg grimaced horror, turned and ran into a corridor.

< Your body lies on the plateau. There is no going or coming other than with me. > < Wait here. >

The life-suit forced Sard back into the hutch under the stairs.

Fiction: Avatar Remaindered: 20

A scene in the Great Dividing Range by Frances Guard … this only a few metres downhill from the plateau

Mark 1 versus Mark II

The breeze all around Sard slowed. What is the problem? He glanced up. His wing’s air cells lost their fat sausage look as he watched. He didn’t plummet, but started circling downward in a tight spiral. A different kind of breeze.

< Very nice. A lovely scene in my latest entertainment. >

Ignore. Still spiralling downward, he looked between his feet, and watched the plateau become a dangerous landing ground of a stony floor with boulders and tussocky vegetation here and there. He clenched his jaws. Needs must.

< You’ll need to bring us nearer to the home ridge for me to transmit your doings. >
Sard pulled on the brakes, then on the strings above them, to try and slow his progress. He intended landing to the left of the chasms.

< I warned you-ouou-ou! >

Mark II’s voice faded out. Thanks be the universe. Sard touched down, and ran along a narrow stony slab for a half dozen paces while remembering to yank down hard on the strings to the rear of the wing to empty out the cells.

He stopped without tripping and the wing fell over and around him. He dropped to his knees and after catching his breath, untangled himself from strings. How can I test that Mark II has really gone?

Do nothing. Rest up. He grinned. It’s a plan. He tented the wing over the vegetation. Crawled under and made a comfortable nest.

The life-suit pulsed. Damn, he was just asleep. “What?”

< Input of energy is required. >

“I doubt it when I’m resting.”

< At rest the organism needs 70 units of energy per hour. The support system an additional 30 units to be able to maintain shelter from the elements. >

Sard lifted the flap of the wing. Dark night with only the stars. “Go to sleep. I don’t need you.”

— — — —

He woke shivering so hard his teeth rattled. Get up. Move. Warm up. He tried leaping, windmilling his arms. Stumbled. Trembled. The life-suit wasn’t working? His gut felt hollow from hunger. “Wake up! Wake up!” What was the correct instruction again?

< Wake up is the correct command. >

“Frosty.” Sard laughed despite his gut pain. Relief, probably. “You’re right. We need food. Though there isn’t that much left.” He upended the pack over the wing. Only a few food packets tumbled out.

< Think the food types at me and I will compute the eating plan. >

“Okay,” he thought, then said it. “Two of Greg’s savoury potato cakes. Mulberry and fried grub slice, my favourite, so only one of those. Sweet potato slice, not my favourite, so four pieces of that. Six cubes of mock cheese. Half a packet of shake mix.”

< There is choice. With enough water we can have many days of rest. Seven days if things need to be done. Half that with hard labour. >

“Seven days, of course. Even I understand we can’t stay here and expect to live. What can I have?”

< The fried grub slice. Two wet fingers dipped in the drink mix. >

“And that’s it? I could eat the whole lot, no problem.”

The suit made no answer.

“Just joking. You’re making me eat my favourites first. Less temptation. So what’s required is me getting us to a place where I can get more food. Do you know any?”

The only answer was the wind whistling among the sedgy tussocks. “Of course you don’t. My apologies. Do you have any suggestions?”

Negative on that too.

After a while he recalled the suit’s original programming. Cuffed himself on his forehead. Fool. The life-suit doesn’t understand anything not connected to it. And this is that programming back in spades. The one I yearned for. Fool again, for taking so long to remember it.

Eyes open, Sard-man. Ears, all my senses. A low wind soughed and rustled the vegetation, also low. Sard clambered up the nearest taller than knee-high boulder. He stared in every direction, trying the imprint everything in his memory.

Half the circumference, to the left, west through north to east, he sensed rather than saw the drop off. In that 180 degree half circle, the vegetation, the sedgey tussocks and low shrubbery stopped abruptly about ten metres from where he stood and were backed by blue sky. Ten metres, that’s not a lot.

He overpowered his instinct to instantly move in the opposite direction. From west again—the direction behind him—but through south to east this time, the same vegetation types went on and on and became a brown haze. Remember, though, the chasms intermittently and not visible until you get near. He looked for the smoke specifically. Sniffed. Something he remembered. From Greg teaching him? He hardly remembered Greg. Did it matter? Can’t smell smoke or see any. What about the breeze, then? Where’s that going?

The breeze came whistling over the edge of the escarpment in the north (on his left hand) and went south (to his right). Smoke and smell both would be carried away from him. He stepped down from the boulder. Peered closer at the surrounding landscape. Underfoot were rivers of bare rock and islands of grit and stones bearing the plants.

This is a desert as much as the red sandy one below. Barring the spinifex down there nearly the same vegetation. Probably the same animals. No birds the whole time I’ve been looking. Except … he glanced skyward. A raptor up there, would you believe. What is there down here for it to eat?

If in answer, a finger-length red-and-blue locust hopped from one bush to the next. Before Sard could think what to do about it, the bird swooped down, grabbed the insect and was up and away again. A little raptor. Hobby falcon. Too small, too fast and too smart to catch. The insect. Red-and-blue. How was that camouflage? The bushes. Ah. Little red flowers. Blue shadows.

Got to find something bigger than a little raptor or more than a single locust. Both of them need too much energy to catch. But also, I can’t stay in one place here the same as I couldn’t stay in the dip down there after I ate that one single rat. But still. If I can find a dip here, maybe I’ll be able to catch a rock rat. Make a fire and cook it. There’s no one up here.

He packed up the wing as well as he was able in the circumstances, not being able to lay it out flat on the ground. Make that he crumpled the wing’s cells to his chest to empty them, and gathering in the cloth, stuffed it into the backpack. But he gathered in the lines methodically and after coiling them inserted the bundles neatly between pack and fabric. Set the pack on the boulder and shrugged into it.

Set off away from the edge of the land toward a region—he scoffed at his continuing internal pretentiousness—where the vegetation seemed taller. That might signify a depression where any rain on this benighted plateau might have drained to and the veg as a consequence had grown taller.

Following the rivers of rock he was easier on his suit-legs, less cutting from the prickly vegetation. No answer to that. The incumbent version of programming was not nearly as chatty as the other.

< Following the rivers of rock will take you twice as long to get anywhere and using more energy. >

Uh oh. It’s the Mark 2 program back. How did that happen? Sard trembled. He felt the shiver go through him from his throat to his toes, him trembling from the fright of being encased in an unfriendly entity. His mouth dried. His outer covering, aka the fucking life-suit, narrowed its elasticity—somehow—resulting in a length-ways squeezing like that python trick way back when.

My own stupid fault. I thought at it—I’m still gaming it when I should know better by now. I told it I was following a rock river. And it answered me. Proving right there, that this is the other program.

He stopped, walking and thinking. To his left he could hardly see where the veg cut off at the edge of the plateau to his north. I’ve come too far south. He zigzagged back north to his safe zone. Keep walking. Get really safe. Falling off the plateau might be the lesser of the two evils.

After a long time hard walking, he stopped again. Stood there, pack still on his back. Not giving the entity any more clues than need be. My shadow getting quite long. Sun sets in the west, behind me, and I’m not even going to check that. Need to find somewhere to lay down and sleep.

The moment the sun sank all the way below the horizon, the air cooled. Damn. Nearly cold. He half expected—hoped—the suit to instantly tell him to get into shelter. Suit obdurately silent. Walk walk. The runnels of stone became harder to see. Shadowed shrubs. Almost dark, I might as well say.

Put his foot down on a place that wasn’t there. Huh? His knee collapsed and the rest of him plunged after.

He fell deeper than how he remembered a dip in the landscape. What is this place? The pack on his back pressed him down while he lay on … he felt about … on rock. Struggling out of the pack’s restraints he looked up at the edge of the ground where he’d been. Rock edges all around, the dusk grey sky beyond. The depression was maybe waist deep?

Down where he was, there were already black-dark places. A bunch of ledges over hollows? If I had a flash light … don’t need one, I have a life-suit. Grim dark thought—what else don’t I know about it?

Should he appreciate the fact that the exterior of the suit started to glow? Didn’t know it could do that either. Is Youk really so far ahead of everyone with his programming?

< A silly boy who dressed Roman style for his capture by the clay faces. >

What? Youk? Captured?

< You should attend to the shallow business of surviving in this hole. >

The suit squeezed him to get his attention is what it felt like. Is that the way to talk? A thought that might have got to it because the exterior of the suit started glowing. In patches. His right side leg and arm when he had his head turned that way because of the way he lay, but now directed his gaze into the overhangs there.

Three separate overhangs no higher than about fifty centimetres. No deeper than a body sheltering. Their gritty floors scuffled. A lot of random handprints medium-size and small scattered about. People getting comfortable in the only shelter available, that might mean.

Sard rolled to his left side slowly enough to give the suit the chance to light up the dark on his other side. One side faded. The other lit up—greenish, then bluish then white. Good approximation of a flood light.

Yep, the suit knew what he meant. His thoughts or his actions. Whatever.

This side the holes were both deeper and higher. The adults would’ve slept here, he thought. He searched for large handprints and found them. Also the imprints of weaving. Rounds and sloppy ovals.

< Where they rested their baskets. I must know who they are. >

Yeah right.

< Sleep. I will study the matter. Perhaps this benighted community has technical expertise I need. You do not have enough energy stored to serve both me and your body, and I will take most of it. You will need to cover yourself. >

Huh? He could parse that out but was in fact he was too tired. He registered the last fact and pulled out the circular underlay that was to have helped him do magic. Hmph. He lay where he lay and covered himself.

Fiction: Avatar Remaindered, 19

Photo by Alan Bass, Paraglider at Lennox Head

Testing Himself, Testing His Wing

Sard sighed. There, all his disappointments, gone. He breathed deep for starting again. Have a look at a map. Redirect my travel. It’s still only middle of the morning.

< We’ll cross the right arm and be on our way, swinging round northeast and then southeast. >

That’s Youk’s program, it’s the one that says we instead of you + I. Sard summoned up an argument. I want to go west and southwest so I can rescue Ahni. CAVE lies southeast. Why there?

< It’s a question of reach. CAVE’s signals reach no further than the outer arc we are standing on. >

Why does the Mark II version want me in the home range and is so blatant about it? I’m pretty sure that Rider switched off the need for signals between the life-suit and CAVE. Why else would he have talked about the delta which is so much further? Mark II is so sure I need it, that it thinks I’ll just fall in with its plans? That is so like Youk. He snorted.

Staring out across the canyons, he wished he could fly. Well, fly properly. No way was he going to trust himself to his ignorance crossing the chasm. I’ll fall like a stone and end my story.

< Attention. >

He attended, reluctantly, but what else was there? The life-suit made a series of images. Sard harnessed up and dragging the wing behind him. Sard running into the wind. The air cells filling and the wing lifting him. Sard drifting across the chasm to the far side.

Where did the life-suit get all that info? How? It’s nothing like Mark I which complained whenever I asked it something it couldn’t touch. He smiled at the reminiscence. The only thing I know about tech programming is that superseded software stays on the hard drive unless they are purposely deleted. My program is still in there.

“One problem I see is that the air above the chasms might not hold us up this time of day.” What did he know? He was just marking time, giving Mark II more rope to hang itself. “We crash into the chasm, another storm, and then what?”

The life-suit looped the Sard-harnessed-up-and-drifting-across-the-chasm sequence.

“Another problem is this sea-breeze stroking over the chasm and replacing cold air with warm. My wing would take me north out over the junction and then if we were lucky to that side. I’m not risking that either.” Whatever. His voice squawked like a lone seagull’s when he talked down into the chasm.
Again the life-suit looped the Sard drifting across the chasm sequence.

Youk programmed the damned suit with that streak of stubborn? How? If I didn’t know better I’d suspect an AI identity. Which should be impossible with the walls CAVE installed to prevent that kind of takeover.
Sard stepped back from the brink. All this is taking time I don’t have and I know enough useful things to get me across. He bent his thoughts to lessons back home and all the research he’d done. The sun warms the land and hot air rises should be enough to get me across. There is no alternative other than walking back and joining the road and why would he risk his life again like that?

He broke a couple of stems from the nearest clump of spinifex and set to splitting them into short fibrous lengths. After laying a handful on the stone at the rim, he turned to work on the wing. He had had it in and out of the pack so often to camp under it that the lines were utterly tangled.

A little past noon the spinifex stems he launched boated down slowly. He lay out the wing and shrugged into the still separate harness, then loitered at the edge. A breath, just an air of warmth, touched his face when he leaned forward. He stepped back. “Won’t hold us yet.”

The life-suit showed Sard crouching and turning in under the lines and crossing them in front somehow. Then apparently he was to gather the wing in his arms and throw it forward into the air fountaining up in the centre of the gorge.

“I take it that this is you telling me to get ready. Good idea, for a change.” He arranged the wing like an extra long train on a wedding dress. He grinned. Like it was one of Srese’s over-the-top designs. He stepped over the strings to the jump-off stone and connected the brakes to his harness. Threw a couple of pieces of grass toward the middle of the gap.

They twirled up.

The life-suit made a picture of late-afternoon light. Sard sinking in air past its peak heat.
“Okay! Okay! So do me that launch again. Step by step!”

The life-suit waited for each achievement as Sard turned and twisted and gathered lines in his hands and with his fists full castled the wing’s fabric onto his arms. How will I have enough strength to fling it all the necessary distance, metres of string as well?

The suit allowed the strings to droop down the cliff. The next move was the preparation for shooting-the-tiger-with-the-bow, a tai ji move.

“But my hands, the wing?”

< The hands as for flinging the net. >

A virtual performance, long ago. He had no time to sweat over Youk’s perfidies.

< Do it and attend to my count. >

Sard tightened his muscles for the screwing-down move to the right, gathering his strength for the fling.
The suit pulsed. …four … three …

Sard flung the wing into the air above the gap. Stepped back as the wing unfurled in front of his face, smooth as smooth. The wing floated up so leisurely that he barely felt it take him from the ground. Above the depth he tensed himself for the fall. The harness straps tightened around him and he didn’t plunge down.

He twisted his body into an air punch. “I did it!” The whole assembly, himself a part of it, rocked. Sard’s heart in his mouth. The wing flapped and righted itself. Sard crouched in his harness for the touchdown the moment he crossed the gap.

Wind and wing had other ideas and they took him high, and then higher as he circled the Y junction in slow loops. After he fought down his nausea—seasick, up here? No thank you—he started to enjoy himself. Not that he dared shift his hands into a different configuration. No way did he want to encourage a twirling back down to the chasm.

What Sard enjoyed was seeing his options. If he forced a landing in the cup of the Y, he’d be going backward. This observation despite that a minute ago he’d intended that. From the height where he looped and swayed, he could distinguish camels and herders—with lots of both of them—and even the pale brown of many clay masks camped right next to a green place in the southwestern quadrant on the coast, that he would assume to be the swamp. Seeing them like that—as a force to be reckoned with—Sard decided he couldn’t help Ahni, he’d be throwing his life away.

Next loop round he studied the life-suit’s second option. All the land that lay to the west of the Y shape of the canyons, was a downward sloping desert covered with the saltbush and spinifex mix. He’d be alright for water but what would he be eating? Rats were the only life he’d seen. And he’d be in Mark II’s control.
He studied the area some more however, he might need to know it one day. CAVE’s home ridge bounded about a third of the farther edge, backed by the ocean which was bigger than he ever knew. West of CAVE’s ridge wandered a maze of single file dirt paths looping and traversing a nearly straight double track path suggesting the camel herders also used carts.

In the north east, his third option, were more of the single file tracks mazing round a set of cart tracks travelling in as straight a line as was possible. Interestingly, all the tracks stopped at the edge of an escarpment that even from the height where he soared, he could not clearly see beyond. The horizon in that direction glittered, that’s all that his augmented avatar eyes could see.

He looped again trying for higher by briefly tilting the brakes so that the forward edge tipped up slightly. Ha, it worked! He rose on a slow slant. Except that now he had his back to the escarpment and still couldn’t see beyond it.

A stony plateau a long way down and beneath his feet was all he could see of his third option. It lay to the left of the Y shape when he imagined the place where he’d taken off from. If that plateau went all the way till it met the wall closing the delta off from the desert, Sard expected to see one of the cities he’d heard about, on the point of the so-formed elbow. Zeolite.

Beyond the escarpment were flatlands cut into rectangles. Cropland maybe. The vast glitter bordering the fields was the inland sea if his geography sources were correct. A sluggard river, guarded by ancient crocodiles, was said to maintain a seeping flow at the base of the plateau. Out of his sight, it was still a fable, a mighty river that had been reversed and now flowed, however slowly, in the opposite direction.

Fiction: Avatar Remaindered, 18

Chasm in the Ragged Ranges, Australia, by Richard Woldendorp 1986

Into the Chasms

Sard was half an hour more in the life-suit’s python squeeze—he watched a shadow lengthen—before it released him from its squeeze. He rolled to his feet, slung the pack on his back, and set off into the east. He sneered about the irony of it. Like, how I can get away from an entity I need to wear to survive? The sunset behind him gave him a long bulky shadow, a shadowed path to walk along. Just walking along in my own shadow. Not a squeak out of the damned life-suit.

Walk. Walk. His attention had to be on his feet, no more tripping. Put them out front one by one. Left. Right. Left. He walked until it was too dark to see. No moon tonight? No answer. He stopped, dropped to the ground and lay his head on the flap of his pack. Tired beyond.

Woke once to a great moon staring down, lighting up the scene with its cold silvery light. Moon. Good to know. He turned on his side. Closed his eyes.

He missed the sun’s rise though the sky was still the blue that was kind to his eyes. He frowned. Why did he even need to notice that when he wore the life-suit? Not a squeak out of it all night and he was hungry. What’s going on? Forget the suit, just wear it. Make tracks while the cool lasts, Sard-man. The swamp beckons.

Today, resting during the heat while waiting for plants to bleed out water would be his jig. Tomorrow he’d hit the swamp and there’d be fresh water. It’s a plan. He dug into the pack for the snacks bag. A couple of Greg’s best and half the water.

Walking, he kept the sun to his right. A bulky shadow slogged through the loose sand to his left. He intended looping out far enough that he wouldn’t meet any camels. Then, at half dark, he’d jog for the swamp. Walk. Walk. The land unending. The sky was starting to look too big, too bright. The sun? Well, he didn’t even glance over that way. His shadow was crisper in its outlines. Maybe look for a place to lay up?

Beginnings of what looks like a gully here. Wrong direction in that it’s going northeast but is becoming narrower and deeper and shutting out more glare. Go with it. A narrower sky meant less sun, less light, and not the endless distances to look at. Might even help his life-suit keep him cool. If it’s still available for that.

The silence oppressive. Down in the gully that was more noticeable. There’s no pleasing you, Sard-man, he thought in his mother’s voice. Hmph. Where was she right now? Not back home, he guessed.

“You mean you escaped because I escaped?” he said to break up the silence. “Your work on me was done and all you had to look forward to was the moldeckery? If that’s how things are run, I wish you good health, wealth and wisdom.” Little echoes of his voice sounded like people in the background, just around the corner of an outcropping of rock. Down deeper into the canyon the resonances stayed closer, as if a small crowd of friends surrounded him. Who would he have? “What friends? I walk friendless.” A lower voice resembled the burble of water or the hum of aircon.

Skinks that lay sunning themselves on ledges scuttled away as he approached. But when he stopped for a spell, they’d poke their heads from among ferns and mosses in the crevices where they hid. “That’s right, nothing to fear from me.” His mood lifted. What if he was approaching his destination? He’d been walking long enough. The chasm seemed to swing from side to side and could easily have led him northwest. He imagined it widening into the kind of lush swampy valley he’d travelled in dozens of stories.

The stone walls surrounding him dulled. The gold light-and-shadow play on the chasm floor faded. He tripped over nothing. Where was he? The air overhead grew moist as a thick cloud replaced the strip of blue sky above. Need to find shelter. He glanced along the base of the cliffs. Good hole there. Nice sandy floor.

He hadn’t even bent to crawl into it when the rain began. Long rods of hard, wet, fast-falling water. He huddled against the base of the cliff to wait out the shower.

Water trickled down the cliff. In a minute he was standing under a spate. < Climb. > What’s that? Someone finally awake? Luckily he’d strapped his pack securely this morning. < Climb, oh stupid youth. >

Caught you out at last. Different voice, intonation and different words. There’s two of you, right? But he did start to climb. I’m not hurrying, I don’t want to slip. So he was only halfway up when he heard the roar. Of water. He knew it instantly. Acting on instinct alone, he grabbed any ledge and handhold, shot up the rest of the cliff dragging the so-and-so pack bouncing behind him.

He saved himself. Duh, Sard-man. Not like you didn’t know. Many old-time games featured a rush of water through a narrow chasm originating in a far off rainstorm? At the top there was only rain, hard and fast. Visibility nil. He crawled through it until he reached a slabby height by feel alone, a little island above the swirling flood. < You are dry and moderately warm. > I’m not listening. You’re the wrong program.

While he sat there, the light went from grey afternoon, to dark metal dusk, to black dark night. He worked on tripping the life-suit’s new program. The old program now seemed preferable, it didn’t judge him.

When the moon rose, he shrugged into the pack’s harness and set off wading among the shadowed spinifex tussocks and clumps. Need a safer place. He tried to keep parallel to the misty black crack in the landscape that was the chasm in the far left of his field of vision.

After a time of walking—sloshing ankle-deep now through fast disappearing water—a second crack appeared on the right. Huh? He blinked. The etched meander didn’t disappear. He stopped, compared the two openings. Different, because there were two chasms, one on each side? Or the same chasm, because he hallucinated? He stared eyes wide open. Frowned with eyes peering. No difference. Too hard to see. A good time to lie down and sleep, maybe. Not interested in breaking my neck, falling down a chasm I can’t see properly. Moonlight making a mockery of shadows and distances.

— — — —

Sard stood on a stone slab elevated all of about half a metre above the plain with a hand above his eyes, the life-suit’s management apparently absent, studying the landscape. Never mind the missing guide, he could manage quite well will his Big Eye lenses. At a point near the horizon, two hand spans to the left of the place where the sun rose, the two chasms seemed to join. A mist or a light smoke rose from that spot.

He scrolled though his memories for stories and movies and virtual performances featuring similar effects. All he could come up with was that mist might be the spray of a waterfall. Or plain old water vapour, the land drying under the sun. Smoke could be due to a bush fire.

Or a camp-fire. That meant people. His mood rose. How he missed having other people around. Even meeting up with the traders would suit him. The chance to free Ahni a bonus. He hoped the people, if it was people, stayed long enough for him to catch up. When he stepped off the rock, he felt so superior—deciding all that himself, he didn’t need either of the life-suit’s entities—he could’ve been walking on air.

He arrived at the junction roundabout mid-morning. His suit, whichever of the two entities, refused to allow him to the edge with his pack still on his back. < Our centre of balance is awkwardly placed. >

“Peevish,” Sard said. “I know you now. You are not my favourite program.” But he dropped the pack away from the edge before he went to stand on the lip between the two chasms.

Sheer cliffs on his right and left sides with a deep canyon continuing northwest if he finally had his directions worked out, making a Y formation. A river in full spate in the bottom with nowhere to walk alongside even if he wanted to risk his neck down there. Not the pleasant green valley he’d envisaged. The smoke or mist still far away was the biggest disappointment.

He slumped away from the view. He’d so anticipated people and the end of his solitary exile. The land made him an ant lost from its nest and smaller with every step he took. The sky was worse. Always far away. Always blue and cheerful or with cloud and impersonal storm. Sun moon and stars. Unreachable.

Reading …

One of my quarterly goals (Third Quarter) for Discord.com’s The Writing Cartel is to read at least one book a week. Going all right with that goal. I’ve probably read two books a week up to now but that progress may slow when I try to continue my writing progress in the new WIP and finish the old WIP.

Getting distancing happening in MELD to be able to re-think the last couple of chapters is my second goal. The idea is to enable the supporting MC into a stronger role ready for part 3 of the trilogy.

I’ve just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Its fantasy and the world building is out of this world. I loved the main character … he’s a great thief but absolutely the worst skilled murderer in the Gentlemen Bastards, needs other people to save him quite often; lots of twists and unexpected turns in the plot.

The thing that surprised me most, considering I was reading fantasy, was the late introduction of magic … probably about a third way in before it was used. By then I’d almost forgotten there was such a thing as magic. The culture in this world is so well thought out. Commerce is there, being used for scams by the Bastards. Twelve acceptable religions and one unacceptable all have their place. there are plenty of poor people, middle income, and rich all trying to live their own lives. Festivals are fabulous, including the shark combats.

There is a lot of killing murdering dueling sword play and other more intricately inventive ways of getting rid of enemies. lots of swearing. Most memorable line? Memorable lines, I should say. More than I can say. A great read … it will be one of my favorites this quarter.

LEGO Masters’ Australia 2020

For something completely different, helped along considerably by losing my internet link and having only ordinary television, I started watching LEGO Masters. Much less depressing than everything else on offer.

My interest in Lego began when I received a box of red components, the approximate size of a pack of cards, way back in my childhood. Both my brothers and I were given a set each as presents before our family left on the first of of its sea voyages.

I think my set probably represented the build of a little red house. I recall a red framed window-piece, bits of red roofing-tile and some red eight stud bricks for the walls.

It’s an off-the-planet experience for me to see a bunch of eight adult teams race each other and the clock to produce amazing masterpieces using all the colors available, pressing thousands of small pieces together and coming up with astounding themes. The builds tonight required the interpretation of a fairy story.

Apart from the sheer inventiveness of the projects, the thing that grabs me most is the complexity of the meta-world that surrounds the Lego phenomenon. There’s Lego-specific jargon to describe, for example, each Lego piece. SNOT pieces? Only users will know what they mean. And as for acronyms? There may be a dozen that probably even the Urban Dictionary doesn’t know.

And there’s a language for critiquing the builds. How else would the best be chosen, you might ask? But seriously, this language rivals the language invented to describe post-rock music that I studied last year. One of my interests is how specialist terminology can help or hinder enjoyment of the art they describe. In the case of Lego-critiquing, the Lego specific terminology definitely helped me to see and appreciate the different projects’ intricate complexities.

World-building: Strings (2004)

Strings (2004) is a film acted by marionettes though it could be said that all the actors are puppeteer-marionette-pairs. This reading would help explain the only instance that a part of a marionette handler is seen.

A problem for me personally is the lack of subtitles in lieu of the absence of living lips to read. Hence, the intricacies of plot and story, for me are gappy. It’s a coming-of-age story.

A king kills himself and leaves a letter explaining–the letter is taken before his son can read it–and not knowing any better, the son goes out to avenge his father. There is a happy ending, but not before the scene (above) where the prince makes it home to witness his sister’s death.

It’s easy to become so engrossed in the Strings world that one would forget that marionettes are dependent on their human technicians and human voices for every move, every expression, and every placement in a scene.

In one scene a human foot is seen hastening up a stair out of a cellar after the puppeteer apparently drops their character to the ground with a definite and frightening crash.

I wondered about the editorial decision to leave that scene as-is. Is it that the foot can be seen as a reminder of who the agents are in this entertainment, or is it to remind viewers of the technical skills that have got the story so far? Either of those could then be seen as instances where the viewer trips and falls out of the story. A no-no in fiction in general that I didn’t want to suspect of the producers.

After some thought, it seems to me that there was no possibility other than a deux ex machina moment, literally a god-in-the-machine, to explain how that character came to be in that cellar, and that the puppet’s handler as portrayed by her foot represents that god.

While I knew that there is much more to world-building than concrete nuts-and-bolts world design, seeing in Strings how dialogue and character actions translate into very specific cultural metaphors, had me on the edge of my seat.

On the Plain of Death, for example, the soldiers’ strings snap-freeze and break. In a contrasting war scene portraying war with a desert people, death is signified by strings burning.

“We are all connected,” says the Prince’s desert princess. She glances at the string-filled heavens where all strings go, and where, above the clouds, it is believed that strings are connected. The pair making love is symbolized by their strings mixing and weaving together.

Writers of science fiction are warned away from metaphor. (Card, 1990) Yet in Strings, the outcome of many of the actions hinge on, or are influenced by marionette-specific metaphor. One of many such actions is the outgoing king committing suicide by cutting his own head-string. He isn’t buried, but god-like, is strung up on a wall.

The Prince’s sister tries to stop him leaving her by holding onto his hand-strings.

A pair of children quarreling get themselves tangled up in their strings.

The Prince’s uncle goes to receive a prophecy from a bunch of ancient puppets, bunches of slack stringless limbs, with only their head-strings still intact.

The gestation of a baby is signified by being carved from an appropriate wood. At the moment of its coming-to-life, light-filled strings descend from heaven that are reverently attached to the head, hands and feet.

There are dozens more of such moving moments.

If a story is to be more than a theatrical experience, it needs visual backdrops, props, and processes for the characters to interact with.

The Prince is of a people who have plenty of water in their land. Rain is common at times of great sadness. Raindrops on sad puppet faces in lieu of tears is a nice extrapolation.

Cells in a prison are delineated by overhead frames that contain prisoners’ strings and restrict their movement.

When all strings attached to the living rise up to an unseen heaven, it makes sense that hooked machetes, for instance, are a preferred war weapon. An enemy can hook in and cut an opponent’s head-string to kill them. Or an enemy will gather all their target’s strings and cut through the lot with one fell stroke to deliver an even worse fate.

Slave drivers use a weapon reminiscent of a carpet hook to in-gather the strings with which to control their captives.

The tents of the desert people are truncated into architecturally natural shapes to allow for the ascent of strings to the heavens.

Again, these are only a few of the instances. Watch the film, is what I’m saying.

There is a better quality version than the one below available on SBS, an Australian free-to-air television station.

Strings

How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (p91-92) 1990, Orson Scott Card, Writers Digest Books, NY.