From: gujn@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Jeremy Nelson) Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [Z] Travails. Date: 13 Sep 1992 22:46:00 +0800 Message-ID: <18vk78INNjrd@uniwa.uwa.edu.au> ADMIN: This is a lead up for Zia's death watch... sort off. When Zia last appeared she was close to death then funny things happened and well,.. it got postponed. This is what happened, and is happening... And when Sage, and Raelf and Kadrys are free (All of whom are busy, RL or Inn) this gets wrapped up. Meanwhile. Kotetsu arched her back carefully and listened to the gentle cracking sounds of her stiff back. Around her the office was silent except for the eternal hum of the air conditioning and everlasting drone of the wind outside. In front of her the screen dimmed at her mental command... she didn't use it anyway, but people would disturb her, even this late at night, if they didn't have some form of indication she was working. Besides which, she quite enjoyed generating abstract patterns and then seriously exaplaining how it represented the Companies group earnings through sale of canteen equipment to subsidiary corporations. Of course sometimes it was true. Very gently she disengaged herself from the computer. The metal strip of contacts which ran down her back were tough, but it served to be careful, they where her income and lifeline. That done she lifted herself across to her wheelchair and steered it over to a window. Outside a small protion of the mining operation could be seen. Even at this late hour, automated machinery still worked to clear the mine face. Above the huge trucks and equipmentshe could see the occasional sign of the energy beams lancing down through the atmosphere. Not safe, or even terrible viable on heavily populated planets, but here on this barren planet they were an economical way to run heavy equipment. Kotetsu remebered reading somewhere that they were banned on life bearing planets because many of the gliding avian populations tried to use the heat beams as thermals and were instantly vapourized... Kotetsu smiled in the dark and stretched again. Not much more work and she would be finished with this mine site, and this was the last stop before summarising and final presentation. Briefly she wondered what her next job would be... hopefully something in space. She had heard on the grapevine that Xerox Space was due for an overhaul. After this job she figured that she might be able to push for that... --- Later that night as she slept she dreamt... Below her spreads a vast map of interconnecting lines and symbols, bright and glowing like a movie scene but something else, something sinister is behind it. She knows that it has trapped her, and to escape she must understand it but the complexity... it stretches to infinity, glowing lines, triangles and circles... How can she understand this? Even as she thinks this she notices a pattern, there and there, repeated, wait, repeated all the way to infinity! And here, a generalized pattern which, in a digital network would be a simple gate, but in this context it is... In ever increasing circles she remembers how she understands, how simple, how elegant, how to answer the question... --- With a start she awakes and looks around in panic. She hasn't dreamt like that in so long, why now? In the dark, still groggy from her dreams, in a confused fog the air seems to be thick and the darkness a smothering pillow. Fright and confusion, panting and hot the blankets weigh her down and with no legs she can't kick them off as the water closes over her head, and weights pull her down and she can't swim Oh God! she can't swim Why did she go in the water if she can't swim? in this hot stinking water that gathers round her head and into her lugs as she drowns in the smothering dark. Red light flashes and reality comes back. Kotetsu sits up in the dark as the red lights on the door lock flash. Her head is still groggy but now she is awake. The air IS thick, the air conditioning is not working properly and she is not nrreathing enough oxygen... she slides to the side of her bed and lowers herself to the floor breathing off the colder but only slightly fresher air at floor level. Quickly she pulls herslef to the door and punches the controls, but no response. Already the walls seem to be closing in and her throat choking the dark pushing down her neck... she reaches for the lights but they do not repsond to her increasingly desperate attempts to turn them on. 'Be rational Koti, be rational.', the sound helps she realizes, it makes her realize she is awake. Kotetsu laughs and the darkness retreats to fantasy. Thinking quickly, almost desperately relieved to be awake, finally, she pushes at the door... but it will not budge. Regulations for all hostile atmospeheres require sleeping quarters to have fail safe doors which will preserve the internal atmoshpere... Hmm, has the complex been breached? No surely not, no sounds woke her, no alarms... then what has happened? Deliberate? Murder? Perhaps. No doubt many have something to fear when she compiles her final report to the company. It is hard to hide from a Computer Investigation, and most especially by someone like her... a computer jockey of the new age. Someone who can interface so closely with computers that using supercomputers to do an audit is only logical... shuffling data as natural as catching a ball. It doesn't matter how fast your computer, how good it's connections, but if the user can't tell it what to do then it is useless. So a connection like hers is only logical. But so difficult! Why only ten, maybe twelve people of all the billions... And in the darkness she has slumped forward. With little oxygen to support her she is half awake, half asleep... Outside the airconditioning hums and the wind drones on. -- Jem. Jeremy Nelson. gujn@uniwa.uwa.edu.au :\ => :) I fear two things: That I am not one of the most interesting people in the world... and that I am.