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T H E C O N V E R S I O N B U R E A U
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RECOMBINANT 63
By Chatoyance
Chapter Two: Bubble In The Sea
Project Bucephalus - Orientation
January 1st
I still don't truly understand why I am here. I don't belong on a project like this. I don't know enough. I barely even have a doctorate - honestly I faked and scammed my way through most of it. My advisor was a friend of the family. Most of the committee was too. I am proud of my dissertation, I won't say otherwise there. Teaching An Old Nano New Tricks: A Brief Examination Of Where Nanotechnology Failed, And How Its Promise Can Yet Be Fulfilled. It was good work. Solid work. But that said, I don't belong here.
I don't know where 'here' actually is. I think it is underground, or at least inside of a mountain. I catch whiffs of the scent of ancient mold and earthly dampness, despite the constant - and sometimes loud - churning of the ventilation system. Everything is plascrete and crystalex, and the doors are vault doors, heavy and imposing. There are no windows at all, though there are false windows in certain areas with holographic views. The entire complex feels both cutting edge and run down at the same time - or perhaps it is closer to say that it is likely an old site of some kind, re-purposed for what we are doing here.
I don't say 'trying to do here'. It has been made abundantly clear that there is literally no place for failure. We either succeed, or we - and every human being, indeed the whole of the human species - will perish. The public do not know yet that the world is ending. We have just seven years, starting today. Seven years before the world ends.
It started with a single image, taken from a spy satellite scanning the North Pacific. Last year, on April the 22nd, that was the day they first saw it. The 21st, nothing. Then BAM, the next day, a ten meter wide pearl from nowhere, half in the water, and half out, and it was growing. It wasn't floating, and it didn't move relative to the continental shelf. Not a millimeter. By the 23rd, it was thirty meters in diameter. 28.8558,-142.414221 -the precise location of the beginning of the end of the world.
By the start of May, the Pacific Anomaly - that is what they were calling it at the time - was a hundred meters in diameter, and they had aerostats and carriers and every kind of exploratory vessel imaginable out there. Submersibles confirmed it was just hanging there, a perfect sphere, a bubble, half in and out of the water, somehow locked in place relative to the crust of the earth.
They showed me the early images - it was quite something. You could see it was a three-dimensional hole into another world even then. There was this sped-up video, taken from aboard a carrier circling the anomaly. The ship went all around the thing, 360 degrees, and from every angle it showed this desert, stretching off to infinity. It was like looking at a gigantic mirror ball, only the reflection in the curving mirror was not the Pacific Ocean at all. It was this strange, colorful desert, with a deep blue sky, blue like skies used to be before the global smog permalayer. At first, they thought it might be some kind of time gate that led back millions of years, when the continent was where ocean is now. But that ended when the aliens made contact.
Holy motherfucking shit. Aliens. Aliens are real. And they do not look like UFO aliens.
Well actually, they do. They really do, if you see them square on, from the front, with their face turned toward you. Big eyes, small mouths, tiny looking nostrils, square on from the front, they only look like they have two legs. Get a gray one without a mane, and in the dark, it would look just like the classic UFO 'Gray' alien so many people have claimed to see. Except for the ears, of course. They have big ears on top of their heads.
From the side, the aliens are quadrupeds, with hooves and a coat of hair. They have enormous heads, large ears and very short, neotenous animal muzzles. They look like ambulatory equine fetuses. They possess full manes and tails, though. Everyone here calls them 'ponies', because that is the closest thing on earth we have to them. They don't look like what real equines looked like, but perhaps, if something vaguely equine were to evolve, or be deliberately uplifted somehow, then such a creature might end up looking like the aliens.
They are intelligent, and they have language and technology. Not advanced technology though. Apparently their level of advancement is around the 14th or 15th century. They don't have or understand industrialization. Oh, they are very, very colorful. Baasch the xenobiologist - apparently that's a real thing, he's very proud of the title - thinks the bright colors are to confuse predators. Whatever the reason, I am talking every color of the rainbow and then some. Tan, hot pink, livid green, blue - you name it. They are like a race of colorful parrots.
They have their own language, but apparently they have learned ours. All of ours. I don't know how. Maybe they have been watching us for ages, nobody seems to know. They have a leader, and everything we know, we know from her. But that is apparently going to change. Eventually we will be meeting and interacting with these beings. The thought makes me feel giddy, and also a little like I might throw up. It's terrifying, and amazing at the same time. Or maybe it is incipient xenophobia. I have no idea how they have technology without hands. They do not have hands, or any kind of grasping organ I can identify, at least from the images of them through that sphere in the Pacific.
Oh, their world is deadly. Apparently their world isn't in our universe. The hole - my higher ups call it a 'Rucker Gate' - leads not to another planet in our galaxy, or another galaxy, but to an entirely different cosmos. They are aliens from an alien universe, and we've been told that the laws of physics there are very different. Holy crap. Just.... holy crap.
The physics of their realm are not compatible with ours. A few ships got too close to the hole, to the bubble, and the crews started to burn. Their flesh began to necrotize and turn to ash. One ship grazed the bubble when this happened, because the crew was unable to pilot the vessel. They showed me the video, from several angles.
The part of the ship - it was one of those medium sized ships, a cruiser or a battleship or something, I really don't know ships - anyway when part of it passed through the bubble, it changed. By changed I mean - it really changed. It just turned into something gooey and pink, with striped red and white bits and big lumps that looked for all the world like gumdrops or maybe big sticky gems. I don't know what it was, but that part of the ship became it, and that stuff wasn't very strong and immediately collapsed into the sea. By the time the ship drifted past the bubble, a third of one side was just oozing into the sea, and the ship was tipping over. I saw the compartments and and chambers inside the ship as it fell over, bodies falling out into the sea, into that goop that used to be the ship. They didn't tell us if anyone lived or what.
Today was Initial Orientation, you see. Basically, they just threw everything at us for six hours to see what might stick. I don't know how to take any of this. Three days ago, I thought I understood the world. Today, I have just learned that an alien universe is expanding into the Pacific, and there are intelligent aliens living in it, it is deadly as hell, and even brushing it can turn a ship into something that looks like ice cream and candy bits. The aliens are colorful, technological horse fetuses that can build cities without hands, somehow. And they have an alien queen.
Not a queen, she apparently insists on the term 'princess'. That is the highest she will go. She can speak our language, and, according to Gerste, our orientation guy - maybe our manager, I'm not sure - she can read minds. And more, he says, much, much more. Over the next week, we will see some of what else she can do. Reading minds - this is pushing my credibility, but then, I saw a ship partly turned into goo. I don't have a basis to make any valid statements about any of this. Yet.
There are twenty of us. I met Baasch, the 'xenobiologist' - that is truly a thing, really? Since when? and a woman named Saulnier, I think she's a physicist. I don't know the rest. I've always been bad at remembering names. Fortunately, everyone has badges. Baasch was impressed with me being a biotechnologist, well, until I scoffed at his title. It sounded fake. I mean, studying alien biology? Three days ago, I would have bet my life savings on there not being even one example, ever. Boy, howdy was I wrong.
They wouldn't tell us what it is that we are here for yet. I guess they are seeing who folds, who breaks after seeing all of this stuff. They are introducing it to us in stages. But they have repeatedly told us that this is important. That the world will end - though not yet how that is supposed to happen - and that it is our job to make the answer work so that all humanity will not die.
No pressure, obviously. And there is an answer, apparently. They already know what needs to be done to save everyone, they just need to make it actually work. So that's a relief, apparently. Someone asked why we just don't blast off into space and colonize the moon or mars or whatever. I don't know who said it, but everyone in the room just stared at them. I worry that whoever it was won't be back tomorrow. One thing they made clear was that this was about saving as much of humanity as possible, not just a few dozen, or hundred people who we might be able to ship off to the moon. Man, I feel sorry for that poor jerk suggesting moon colonies.
I don't know what the solution is yet, but it's apparently real, and it can work if we can make it work, but it won't be easy. There are twenty other groups like ours, and we will all be working together to try to crack whatever the hell the big fix turns out to be. The whole planet is at our disposal, all the resources we have left, everything. This is priority number one, and nothing else in all the world matters anymore, just this.
We were sworn to secrecy, and to serve until we succeed. There is only one penalty for failure, and only one way to withdraw, and that is a bullet in the brainpan. That was another thing they were really careful to make clear. This is a completely zero-tolerance situation. We are in until we win, or we die. It is a lot to take. I guess that means that anyone who can't hack any of this is pretty much dead meat. Man, I feel sorry for the moon colony guy. Maybe he'll be OK.
I am scared. I am really scared, and it's hard to go to sleep. I keep trying to think that this is all some psychology experiment, some Milgram test or something, but those videos just had something about them that said they were real. Real aliens. A real alien universe. The planet is doomed. And I am one of the big push to save humanity.
Like I said, I don't belong here. I can't even imagine what good I will be. Physics, sure. I can see that. Even 'xenobiology', whatever it is they do. It sounds pretty appropriate to the situation. But basic biotechnology? Implants and nanotech? The stuff is pretty much useless except for making food, and I wrote my thesis on how much more could be done with it. Someday, with the emphasis on future. As in, not now.
I'm going to hit my special books, and see if I can relax. They let us bring a chest of personal effects. I think I need to tumble-bumble pell-mell down a few watercolor hills tonight more than ever. Thank wonderment for my antique book collection.
Project Bucephalus - Excursion
January 8th
I saw the Barrier today. Up close. I was utterly terrified.
It took a day and a half to get there, out in the middle of the North Pacific. It is now very clear that no expense is being spared with regard to any of us. My group is Group 12, of 20 such teams. I figure there are about 400 of us, altogether, if each team has twenty members on average. I overheard Mayoss - he's our neurochemist - describe us as the Manhattan Project of our age. I do get that vibe, I have to say.
We travel in and out of wherever it is the complex is located in large vehicles with no windows. It takes about an hour to get to whatever the perimeter facility is. We boarded something new, this time, a kind of big trailer, only with comfy appointments inside, but of course, no windows. I felt us being lifted up on cables - the whole thing swayed very disconcertingly. Two hours later, we were allowed to leave. We spent the time watching a movie, one of the modern, forgettable things. 'Favela Love' or somesuch - it was one of those combined Bolly-Holly musicals. Interestingly, I saw Baasch wiping his eyes at the climax - I guess xenobiologists are softies. Saulnier - she just tried to ignore the whole thing and spent the time catching up on journals. Serious type, Saulnier.
When we were allowed to leave, I expected we would be on an aerostat. Big surprise - we were on a jetcopter, burning fuel like there was any left in the world. We refueled twice, landing on these massive carriers at sea, sleeping aboard one of them. The carrier was named the Stennis, apparently, and we were welcomed by some Admiral named Holt. They had pretty good food, which surprised me. I mean, it was really quite good. I didn't expect that.
After our short stay on the Stennis, we resumed our jetcopter trip to Platform One. The thing is a large, floating structure that constantly runs engines in order to maintain an exact distance from the Barrier. Everyone calls it the Barrier, you can hear the capital letter in their voice. Everything seems to be said with capital letters when it comes to project Bucephalus.
Platform One is the size of a couple of football pitches and has some buildings on it, but mostly it is just open deck. There is stuff below, but we never got to take a tour. The whole structure is automated, and run by a dedicated A.I. We didn't get to learn much more than that. Apparently, time was of the essence.
The platform floats right up next to the wall of the Barrier, our side of the cosmic bubble - and it is huge now, let me just say that. Huge. We were informed that it was half a kilometer in diameter now, and still growing. The speed of growth is not constant. Sometimes it stops for a while, then the sphere expands again once more. It never gets any smaller. I am getting a hint from that as to what the big 'end of the world' danger likely is.
Whatever the deadly radiation is that spills out of the damn thing, it has a pattern to it, one that they already understand. I heard talk that it was some fractal thing, and that it worked a little like electromagnetic waves - there are areas of cancellation. That was the reason we could approach the Barrier at all, much less stand right next to it and poke stuff into it. Platform One constantly orbits the bubble, doing its best to stay in a shadow, where waves of whatever the death rays are cancel themselves out. It isn't always possible to avoid exposure entirely, which is why time was such an issue - we had a window where we wouldn't be burned, and we had to get in, and get out, before that window closed.
The radiation is serious, and it messes with reality on the quantum level. Apparently they regularly have to replace the A.I. because it gets blasted sometimes. The platform can't always move fast enough to stay in the shifting sweet spots. They lost Platform Zero altogether - the quantum computer was destroyed when it couldn't move fast enough due to choppy seas, and the thing slammed into the Barrier and turned into butter or something. It's insane. I got to personally see how insane.
We were led up to the Barrier three at a time, the twenty of us (except for Saulnier and Mayoss who didn't have a third), and each group was allowed five minutes to dick around. We were each given a little metal bucket thing filled with sticks to prod the bubble with. There was a glass rod, a steel rod, a wooden rod, neoplastic, copper, silver, a tree branch (I have no idea where they got those), and the leg of some animal. I didn't ask any questions.
I stood on this little overhanging stage that can be extended from the platform. I was with Belden (internal medicine) and Malcolm (evolutionary biology). The ocean was behaving itself, and there were rails around everything, but it was really pretty scary. I just stood there with the instruction to keep one hand on the rail at all times, and poke the Barrier to observe the result. We were all cautioned that touching the Barrier with any part of ourselves would mean immediate retirement from the project, so we were really, really, really careful.
So I stood there, hanging on to a metal rail on a stage extended over the open ocean, less than a meter from the outer boundary of a half-kilometer sized spherical anomaly protruding from outside our universe. I was sweating like a pig, my hands shook, and I wet myself a little when my foot slipped and I almost had my hand go through the Barrier.
I picked up the glass rod, and basically poked the wall in front of me. The sphere is so huge that it just looks like a big wall. The curvature is really difficult to accept or perceive correctly with something that large. The wall shimmers. It kind of looks like how a soap bubble looks, and there are gleams of light that sort of ripple over it. Things look slightly distorted through it, though I would be hard pressed to explain just how. Like thick glass maybe, or water.
The other side was a desert, just like I saw in the videos in orientation. It's a very colorful desert, lots of reds and pinks and tan shades. The sky on the other side is just the bluest blue you could imagine. And the sun was very strange. It was clearly a different time of day in there - we arrived just after lunch, about 1:15, I think, but it looked like late sunset beyond the wall of the Barrier.
The surface of the desert landscape is about two meters or so above the level of the ocean. Below that, I saw a cross-section of what was under the surface of the alien land. Sand and rocks, all flat to the edge of the bubble. The thing looked like a gigantic terrarium. I didn't see anything alive on the other side, though Beldin swore he saw a cactus-like plant in the distance.
So I jab at the shimmering Barrier, and the tip of the glass rod goes into it. The instant it penetrated the surface, the glass changed. As far as I could tell, the end of the rod became sand, just like the desert. The sand fell onto the desert, and made a little pile. I thought, OK, that makes sense - glass is just melted sand, after all. I felt pretty smart in that moment.
Then I stuck the copper rod into the Barrier. The part that went in looked like it shattered, only the bits were not copper anymore, and they did not fall. I swear on my Golden Books that the result was butterflies. I have never seen a living butterfly, of course, but I have seen videos of them, and what that rod turned into matched those videos perfectly. The little creatures flew away, into the distance, except for one.
One of the little butterflies flew back toward me. I freaked out, and that is when I slipped - though I caught myself - and the little creature did a loop and then darted back into the other universe. That is also the point at which I wet myself. I wasted a full minute just trying to recover from that. Our handler for this trip - Johnson or something, I can't remember - yelled at me over the loudspeaker to continue, time was limited. I jabbed at the Barrier in a daze with the steel rod and the neoplastic rod, and they just turned into what looked like little candies - peppermint, if I had to guess - and some sort of pink petals, like from a flower.
The last thing I poked the Barrier with was the tree branch. It was old, and dead, and dry, but when I stuck the end through the rippling wall, the wood came to life. While I watched, the wood repaired itself, gained missing bark, and sprouted a stem and a living leaf. I pulled the branch back and just stared, open-mouthed at the end of the thing. I was afraid to touch the altered end, I had no idea what it might do to me. At this point I was thinking 'maybe nanotech! Maybe that is why I am here! Maybe this is a universe of nanomachines! That's it! Little nanomachines that really do work, and alter matter at the molecular level, maybe those quadruped aliens are secretly super-advanced!" It all made sense to me, at that moment. They didn't need hands, they probably just commanded the nano's to make whatever they needed in the moment. I thought I had it all sussed.
Later, back on the jetcopter, out over the sea, we all compared notes. Malcolm said he had the same reaction with both the wood and his branch. Beldin's steel rod turned into something like a dark brown syrup of some kind, and his copper just dissolved into the air. He figured it became air - he did not get butterflies out of his copper rod. Even so, I swear it felt as if there was some underlying algorithm to the bizarre transformations of matter occurring
For example, all of us, not just Beldin and Malcolm and me - everyone in group 12 had the same result with the wood rod and the tree branch. In every case, the wood came alive, and began to sprout leaves and stems, and grow bark. Something more than randomness was involved, I think that was clear to everyone.
We spent another night on the Stennis, and once again Admiral Holt greeted us. Everyone treated us with great courtesy. I was surprised by that, I guess I figured we would be the 'eggheads' and given a cold shoulder. I've certainly had no love for anything even vaguely militaristic, myself. But they were great to us.
That night, I shared a cabin - I think that is the term, but it was more like a multi-room hotel suite. Carriers are huge - with So-yeon and Chawla. So-Yeon's a genetic programmer for one of the genegeneering giants, and Chawla's specialty is nanotechnology. She and I had a lot to talk about - she designed some of the little buggers that I referenced in my thesis. Apparently I got a few things wrong. Good thing my advisor wasn't in the room!
So-Yeon openly stated the anomaly acts like magic. Chawla and I kind of stared at her, figuring that there was an issue with language or something but no, she chose her term very carefully. I argued - and Chawla agreed with me - that magic is just a word for something you don't understand yet. I truly believe that.
But Yi just came back with a very uncomfortable notion - we are dealing with a completely alien universe on the other side of that Barrier. We only have seven years.
What if we just don't have the time to understand what we observed? What if the human brain just isn't capable of understanding alien physics?
I had to admit she had a point.
Gwenhwyfar carefully lay the notebook down. She had needed to go to the loo for some time and had been holding things to the point it been necessary to cross her legs and bear down on her own nethers. She thought to run off to do her business and run right back, but then recalled a countless list of stories she'd read over the years where the major plot point was some character taking their eyes off of what they were supposed to be minding for only a moment, leading to inevitable turmoil. The funny thing about books was, even the craziest of them was based on some truth, and Gwen wasn't about to be caught moaning and stomping for discounting a bit of narrative.
Thinking the better of it, Gwen carefully bundled up the tattered notebook like a diapered child, and barely made it to her feet with nary a leak on her own part. She dashed for the facilities, holding the notebook to her chest. She set it down on the plascrete, and put a foot on the cover for good measure - she wasn't going to let any common fictional plot reach under the stall and snatch themselves a drama from her carelessness.
When she was at last unencumbered, Gwen went to the alcove where she'd stowed her backpack. She had a sip from her water bottle, and grabbed the bag of Mexi-Korean Nanoritos to take with her. She looked around the warehouse until she found a proper little fortress of books, and settled herself down ensconced in it like a Laird in a castle. Holding the notebook between her legs, she opened the bag of Nanoritos and bit into a chip - spicy KimChee and Jalapeno goodness attacked her tongue like an squad of Blackmesh putting down an insurrection. Her tongue did not yield, but the battle was a fierce one with much of the screaming and the horrors about it.
Gwen leafed through the notebook, noting more loose blueprints for the other five nanodevices. Each was a different shape, and likely it was that they worked together to transform a human body into an Equestrian one. Flipping through the pages, Gwen found a slip that answered a request for 'more of the thaumatically active organic suspension'. Tucked deep near the spine of the book was a torn note to remember that 'quantum components cannot be used!' The words were underlined several times, apparently it was an issue of some concern.
She flipped idly to the back of the notebook. In the middle of the blank back cover, was a tiny, tiny message, looking for all the world as if it had been written by a mouse with a shaking paw. Gwen had to squint her eyes to read it, and she wished she had a magnifying lens to help. Finally, with a bit of work, she made out the miniscule letters.
I'm sorry.
Oh Celestia, forgive me.
I'm so sorry.
I'm just so sorry.
The tiny, handwritten message grabbed Gwen by the heart and mind. There was no bloody way this book was leaving her clutches now, the devil take the consequences! If she had to hide the thing or steal it away altogether, she would see the end of it. It was a dangerous thing, of course, but then knowledge always was, and secret knowledge the more so.
But this particular circumstance was more important than mere facts, truth be told. Gwen smiled to herself. This was about knowing the heart of that red-haired girl in the photo, now. The lass only known as '-Me!' She'd clearly been given cause to cry, and if there was one thing Gwen couldn't leave be, it was the tears of a soul in sorrow. Gwen had to know why that tiny prayer had been written, and nothing in either universe was going to get in the way of that.
The chips burned like the screaming of the damned in Gwen's mouth. That she should have brought a soda was quickly becoming a subject of some reflection for her.
Gwen found her way back to where she had been reading in the book, and settled in, as best as a person can with Satan tapdancing in cleats within one's yap. 'Alright, miss 'Me!', what happened to you next...?
So what is with all the commas in the description?
At the heart of every Conversion Bureau is 'potion', the nanotechnomagical serum that converts a human into an Equestrian. But before the Bureaus the serum had to be created first. This is the story of how the first successful conversion serum was developed, and of the humans and ponies that made it possible.
There, I cleaned it up a bit for you.
1870245
Thank you, MrPones - I made use of your cleanup directly.
I was very nervous, when I submitted this story, and I made more than a few errors. For the first time, I forgot to provide genre tags, and had to resubmit. And then I got the art wrong. And clearly, I messed up the commas.
I was afraid of more... trouble. And truth be told, I am being harassed again, but I have taken care of it. Blocked and a note sent to Wanderer D about the issue. Fortunately, this troll is not a scary one, just a pathetic spammer of insults. Blocked now. Sigh.
So, that is the reason for all the commas... me being nervous about being attacked again.
Thank you for your help.
1870290 Well OK, if that's apparently the cause of the commas... No offense but you REALLY shouldn't take ANYTHING said on the internet seriously at all. I mean, what can they possibly ever do to you to harm you physically? Could just be me talking, seeing as nothing said to me online has really made an impact on me.
But that isn't really my problem, just here to help with that description while picking away at my own fic.
Be seeing ya.
1870347
One time, about nine years ago, someone showed up at my door from the internet. Just like that. They'd tracked me down and come all the way from New York.
Fortunately, they weren't there to harm me, they had gotten it in their head that I could save them, that I would somehow lift them up and make their life all better, like magic, and they were there expecting just such to happen. It was a sad moment for the both of us. The poor soul was nice, it was just really sad.
So, as a result, I do rather take what is said on the internet a little more seriously than most, because crazy comes in both nice... and nasty, and no person is ever truly anonymous.
The framing narrative has kind of a Neverending Story vibe to it now.
So not even metal passes through the Barrier, as you reckon it? Metals occur naturally, just like wood. Steel is an alloy, so maaaaybe it gets unmade, but copper and silver are both naturally-occurring. Even with steel, I think it'd have knocked them for a loop to see two separate tubes of iron and carbon come out the other side.
1870452
The key is in our mysterious (!) notebook author's observation that she felt there was an algorithm at work behind the changes the Barrier induced. It is perhaps not functioning blindly, but with gathering purpose.
I'm guessing 'Me!' is Doc Pastern. If so, I feel very sorry for her knowing the likely cause of that inscription.
P.S. May I suggest changing the background of the DNA Helix/Pony line-break to transparent rather than white (if possible) so that it matches more of the themes rather than just the light one?
1870712
I would have to entirely redraw it to do this, and... I still would have the very same problem with all of my other works, all 700,000+ words worth of them. I've done a lot of little unique details like that. I don't have the time or energy to keep changing everything whenever some new optional feature is introduced.
It is... just too much. I am sorry. It's just too much.
1870780
It was just a suggestion; don't worry about it. I generally read on dark on my tablet and medium light on my desktop and therefore notice it.
If and ONLY IF YOU want to change it though, it's not very hard to do with something like paint.net or photoshop. Just use the magic wand to select the main part and then invert the selection to get the background and then delete it or fill it with alpha. Again if and ONLY IF you'd like to make these changes I'd be happy to deal with the image part for you. A sample that took me about thirty seconds to do is located here. The anti-aliasing around the components will always make it look slightly wrong on the darkest backgrounds but it blends in fine on the greys.
Just to re-iterate again while I'm happy to help, you should only make these changes if you really feel you want to. I don't want to pressure you into doing any additional work at my behest; especially when you take the time to bring us such brilliant stories.
>that shoutout
>AllMyYes.jpg
Doing a wonderful job thus far Chatoyance, really curious to see the curtain lifted on your potion's development, and how it compares to mine
1870791
I am very sorry you don't like my stories. What you have offered cannot, in good faith, be described as any kind of review. What you have written is more properly described as a hate manifesto.
The Conversion Bureau stories are disaster stories where the courage, inventiveness and adaptability of Mankind, as well as his historic shortcominges are examined during a global catastrophe. Although Man, to survive MUST change form, his spirit is not dimmed. This is the core value of the TCB genre.
Anyone who has truly read one of my novels, all the way through, would understand this implicitly.
I am very sorry that you very much do not like my stories. It's OK not to read them. There are thousands of other stories on Fimfiction, please find some you do like, and then read those instead!
Good bye!
Dear Chat,
Another great chapter! I also really love the Manhattan project vibes.
I noticed the downvotes on some of the postings, and understand your feelings as you stated in the comments above. I agree with Mr. Pones on this. Don't let the bozos drag you down.
BTW, isn't it just a gas that the internet, a tool of awesome power and a boon to all mankind, has manage to produce evidence of members Phylum Cnidaria posting on blogs and fan fiction sites. This may be fascinating, but it is not statistically significant and should not be taken seriously.
So, please save your energy for what brings you (and your readers) joy: writing more stories!
In wondrous anticipation of more,
Dafaddah
1870922
It's kind of funny actually. I just checked out his profile. Looks like he signed up yesterday just for the sole purpose of showing us that lovely review.
Love your stories, Chat! Keep at it!
Thanks for the new chapter, Chatoyance! Sorry to hear that people are being annoying again. Everyone needs a hobby, but some people aren't very good at picking them, it seems.
Yeah! More TCB techno-antics! I can't wait till the crazy experiments start, and people begin to loose their moral compasses/lunch.
The "Serious Business-ness" of everything is very well-realized, and I get a big kick out of the dramatic irony in the sustained buildup to the narrator's understanding of things most of the audience already knows.
I also thought it was a nice touch that the narrator is charmed by her military hosts, contrary to her expectations. It's easy to dehumanize soldiers, though of course that's the whole idea with half of them.
My guess is the barrier's treatment of metal objects has to do with the history of their manufacture, as opposed to their status as being made of natural elements. The whole of what makes magic "magical" is that it's meaning-driven instead of physics-driven, so the metal rod is really a sample of a whole supply chain, carrying the essence (omg!) of everything it touched and was made for, and not just a collection of copper atoms.
I know that in this setting magic is described as a substance ontologically over and above matter and energy, just like Descartes always dreamed, but is it ever said whether it's the same kind of ordinary matter over on the Other Side?
I love the moment of genre savvy paranoia. Mainly because it seems like something I would do.
I dread seeing what some of the early prototype potions will do, and yet the possibilities tantalize... In any case, seeing "Me!"'s reaction to Celestia (if she meets her) and the goal of the project should be hilarious.
1870419 Well shit, that's kinda weird.
I totally get Gwen's fear. If the apocalypse ever comes lurching around on rotten feet, I'll know every trick in the book to get away from them, except, I'll fail rule 1: cardio. Won't that be embarrassing!?
I'm not sure about the diary part. It reads very much like a story where the author took her sweet time to write it, real diaries tend to be a lot less structured and less well written.
Not that I'd ask you to write worse, but ... I don't know, this feels too professional for a tattered, taped up notebook.
1872175
I loved Zombieland!
Your point is well taken about the diary - if I were to do such a thing with maximum verisimilitude, it would feel real, but it would suck to read.
So, I do not disagree with you at all. But... the only crime is being boring. Hopefully, even if 'Me!'s diary sounds wrong, it isn't that, at least. Literary liberties must be taken, right?
Still, the above example - I wonder how long anyone would read crap like that! Hee!
1873519
It can be done well, Chatoyance. There's room for a lot of dramatic tension in that format, especially since in a diary, more words correlates with greater emotional impact.
Edit: Actually... I may even see about trying my hand at that format some time if I come up with a story to tell.
1873519 1872175 There is some truth in art, though. I've read a lot of old correspondence and journals, and a lot of such material is really well composed. There's a few conditions that must be met for an individual in history to produce such a theatrically useful primary source.
The key ingredients are: an informed or educated author. Some of that is pure monkey-see monkey-do. If you see a lot of well-composed documents, you're going to try to imitate them when you put pen to ink. The effect is doubled when you have proctors drilling you with instruction at a young age as to how to compose yourself. Now, you might be thinking, "Dark Butt, you're full of bull#!$; everyone has at standard a high school education but look at what they write today, you stupid pedantic weirdo." My counterpoint would be twofold: we do produce really detailed diaries, letters, and such. The medium is frequently different, but look at a lot of blogs. Look at Chatoyance's right here on FimFiction, it's quite useful if it would end up as a historical document. My second counterpoint is that modern education systems don't instruct writing composition like they used to. Me, I got the five-part essay drilled through my skull, and that doesn't help me write, say, a personal experience essay, or a project log. It has shaped my approach in writing, though. For instance, look at this comment, then at the five part essay. The structure is similar, and I doubt that's a coincidence.
Next, I notice that a lot of authors thought believed that the work itself would be read by others, and they wanted to be understood by that probable audience. Back in the Civil War days, letters were commonly read by people other than the recipient. Maybe not right away, but the ideas of privacy were a bit different then. At the very least, your children, or their children, or somebody else are likely to read them if they are kept -- and they most frequently were, which was another cultural difference from modern times. In the case of a project log, such as the sort that's the precipitant of this whole debacle of a comment, the author had better write it well and with purpose. Their work is important, and they might get killed, moved to a different part of the project, or who knows what. Now, there's no real-world examples of familiar concepts that extend from -- oh wait a tick I just thought of something. Also, any computer science wizards in da house might just have a personal experience or two about leaving proper code properly commented. If you've ever cringed at seeing a thoughtless compatriot's hundred line-long method() without a single // within, then you know what I'm talking about. What I'm getting at is that there's a professional as well as personal aspect to this. In the case of Doctor P(cough)n, I imagine she experiences both as she would write such a journal.
Finally, we just have to find the damn things. What? Sometimes that's hard. It's not like in Skyrim where they're always located somewhere convenient. Oh no. No, they're heaped in a disordered pile of notes, or amongst a combustible shelves of moulding books. In the case of Leonardo da Vinci, the only reason we really know so much about him is that his friends compiled, copied and distributed his notes after his death. If not for that, well, he would have been known to us as a minor fresco painter, particularly one that worked slowly. Leonardo da Nobody. Could have happened, genius or not. Look at all the others that it happened to. Oh, wait, you can't, because they didn't leave any evidence for us to find, or we can't find them. Biblical archaeologists and scholars like them are used to big, shocking documents that show up in weird places, like the Dead Sea Scrolls for example. (You there! With the eyes! Stop that rolling this instant!)
So, understanding all of that, no, I think that the journal itself doesn't break the verisimilitude of the story, or at least not as to how you're going about illustrating it. That's not to say that any journal or travelogue is instantly audience-believable (I believe I mentioned Skyrim?), but what you've got here is completely fine. I'm not saying Shutaro is just wuh-rong: I haven't really addressed the time issue, but as a reader I buy it with little fuss.
But, you know, you can't hack paper. To these people, writing on it would be rather clever cryptography, sad as that is. (...THAT'S what I find dark and depressing?)
1874676
Well said.
Plus there's a bit of anthropic selection going on - There were something like 400 scientists, and I think a 1/400 chance of one of them writing a diary like this is lowballing it.
"Me"'s already demonstrated "earlier" that she cares about what the world thinks of her actions and involvement here, and a love of old written treasures, so it doesn't seem out of character that she would be (one of) the ones to do it, either.
The ponies have technology of the ponies is 19th century.
A score of teams with a score of members each. ¿Why does dozen get all of the attention? ¡Score needs love too!
Should be 'a' not 'an'.
"I don't belong on a project like this. I don't know enough. I barely even have a doctorate - honestly I faked and scammed my way through most of it."
I'm not up to that level yet, but I know the feeling well.
"28.8558,-142.414221 -the precise location of the beginning of the end of the world."
[pulls up Google Earth to have a look]
"Apparently their level of advancement is around the 14th or 15th century."
Ah, so no pony railways in this universe? That's a bit disappointing.
"that is truly a thing, really? Since when?"
…Interesting question, actually. I know it exists ("a science in search of a subject") but not when it arose.
[wikis]
Okay, it looks like Wikipedia, at least, uses "astrobiology" for what I'm used to thinking of as xenobiology and "xenobiology" as a subfield of synthetic biology. Which is apparently a thing! Neat. Not what I'm looking for at the moment, though, so over to the astrobiology page (I do wonder which sort of xenobiologist Baasch is, the conversational-in-my-experience sort or the official-according-to-Wikipedia sort, but that will probably be answered soon anyway)…
"Another term used in the past is xenobiology, ("biology of the foreigners") a word used in 1954 by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his work The Star Beast."
Well, there's one question answered.
Hm. I'm not seeing a time of origin (which makes sense, given the somewhat nebulous nature of the subject). Ah well.
"Man, I feel sorry for that poor jerk suggesting moon colonies."
Hey, better than saving no one and nothing if the other plans don't work out. Of course, it's a bit late to try and get colonies up and running now.
Dr. Pastern's (because this is her, of course) books remind me of these old copies of the Winnie the Pooh books (the original two) my family has. They're 1950s printings, IIRC.
"My group is Group 12, of 20 such teams."
And I note that the laboratory was identified on the cover not as "12" but as "012". Expansion space in case the first twenty weren't cracking the problem fast enough?
"I have no idea where they got those"
Antartica, perhaps. Or someone's tree museum.
…I just kind of love this. A existential threat to not just humanity, not just life on Earth, but the actual physical mass of the planet, and what's one of the first things the scientists do? Poke it with a stick to see what happens. :D
Ooh, neat description of the Barrier and the view of the other side.
"It was old, and dead, and dry"
Sounds like maybe a tree museum, then.
Ah, so the entire story (save the introduction and, presumably, the conclusion) won't be inside the frame.
Response to Dr. Pastern's message on the back cover:
I know you did some horrible things. If you wanted to do no direct harm, though, you should have gone with the space colony plan and pored everything into that… and even then, there'd be violence from all the people who weren't getting saved. Maybe you could have simulated things so completely that human tests were merely a formality. But with your strict deadline and how little you understand what you're working with… I doubt it. You horribly killed a few people so that billions of other people could live, the vast majority of them also much better off than they were before. Was it an ideal option? No. But it was the best available. If you had not conducted those tests, you would either be forcing someone else to do it instead or killing far more people through inaction.
Your shrunken text near the end seems to have broken, I can clearly see the tags and the text is normal sized.
I'm sorry.
Oh Celestia, forgive me.
I'm so sorry.
I'm just so sorry.
6136142
Thank you for catching that. Some time back, Fimfiction altered the way it handled text and because I do so much with typography and text arrangement the change caused me endless trouble. I guess it still is doing so, today. It is so hard to catch every little thing - so I am grateful for your assistance.
FIXED!
Is ther such a thing as a Rucker Gate?
8425126
The Rucker Gate comes from Rudy Rucker, a scientist, mathematician, science fiction author, and author of educational science books. Specifically, the term derives from 'The Fourth Dimension', a non-fiction science book concerning itself with the mathematics and nature of higher physical dimensions. I quite recommend it - it is fun, easy, and filled with deep insight.
Rucker goes to some length to describe how a proper wormhole, or gate, between two different spaces would actually look. He starts with 'Flatland' (By Edwin Abbott Abbott) and illustrates what a hyperdimensional gateway would look like within a two-dimensional plane. Basically, like a place where another region of the plane (or another plane altogether) could be seen from every angle, all the way around. He then extrapolates that to three dimensions - a sphere, much like a mirror ball, only the reflection in the ball is not what is around one, but instead reflects an entirely different place (even an entirely different universe). He calls this a 'Rucker Gate' because - as far as he knows - he is the first scientist to properly and accurately attempt to visually describe the thing. I have used the name since.
Oh - you can read Flatland for free right here. It is a must for anyone interested in alternate universes and other dimensions. Or... here is the trailer for the movie version!
...Roselyn? Is that you?