Imperial starship, stop the flow of time! -- Christopher Plumber, Starcrash
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Author: Ross

Fiction: Domo Arigato 1

Dipping once again into the pile of “Stories I meant to write decades ago,” this is actually an idea I had way back in the ’80s, but it took several decades for the key element of the climax to come to me. Now, the material is maybe a little dark given how young I was at the time, but keep in mind that I had just come off of Captain Power. Also, the original idea was a jukebox musical, but that doesn’t translate well to prose.

Rick set Lauren down on the couch and checked her eyes. They’d already turned gray. Fine silver lines had started to trace paths along her temples. “Who is she?” Daryl asked.

“A friend,” Rick said, “But not for long if we don’t do something.” He found one of the two android weapons on the table where he’d left it earlier, took out the power rod. “This is how they did it. They call it a sillicizer. It changes organic matter into…” He trailed off.

Everyone else just watched in confusion as Rick crossed to the time machine and opened a panel on STEVE’s housing. He placed the silvery rod into a test tube mounted to the inside of the panel and closed it. “STEVE,” he said. “Use your sample analyzer to invert the molecular structure and create a reversal agent,” he ordered.

STEVE looked up at him with no expression from the rounded screen. “An-na-na-na-lyzing,” the computer stammered. “Scan process will ta-ta-ta-take one-one hundred trillion cycles. All cir-cir-circuits busy.”

“She’s getting cold,” Daryl said, checking Lauren’s pulse. “Do we have that kind of time?”

“No chance,” Rick said. “I have to go back. They must have an antidote.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Casey said.

“She saved my life. I have to do something. Besides, we can’t just leave her here. If she changes, she could–” His eyes moved around the room, landing on the bin of parts. “I have an idea. STEVE, prime the time machine.”

“Un-un-un- Error. Circuits are busy. Do you w-w-wish to cancel the current job?”

Rick looked flustered for a moment. “Oh. Okay. Right,” he said. He walked around to behind STEVE, opened a different panel, and started rapidly hammering on a keyboard inside.

“What is it?” Casey asked.

Rick kept typing. STEVE’s image vanished for a second then reappeared. “Circuits r-r-ready. Starting time machine warm-up.”

“The professor was a genius,” Rick said. “STEVE is amazing, even by today’s standards. But he’s still an ’80s computer. Single threaded, single tasking. He can only do one thing at a time. But when I rebuilt him I used a modern CPU to run his program in a virtual machine. So I can add a simple task scheduler to run multiple jobs in parallel. It’s a little bit of a kludge, since STEVE’s program doesn’t have any access to the task scheduler, but it should work for now.”

STEVE’s eyes followed Rick closely as he returned to the parts bin and began quickly plugging pieces together. A coil of wire. A large bar magnet. A wah-wah pedal. “What are you doing?” Casey asked.

“I’m going to threaten them,” Rick said. “I’m going to march right into the robot headquarters and make them give me the antidote.”

“I thought you said they took over the whole world,” Daryl said. “You can’t just take them on.”

“Not a lot of choice,” Rick said. He stepped close to Daryl and looked down at Lauren. “I’ve got something they need. Something they’ve waited a long time to get their robot pincer hands on. Hopefully I can make a deal.”

“T-T-Time machine ready,” STEVE chimed.

Casey shook her head. “Don’t do this. It’s too dangerous.”

Rick kissed her cheek. “I have to do this.” She frowned, but looked over to Lauren on the couch and gave a grudging nod.

She slipped off her ring and placed it in the socket on the time machine. Rick did the same. As the time machine started to light up with purple energy, Casey returned her ring to her finger. Rick instead slid his into a clip on the device he’d built and pressed down the pedal. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “If that’s not enough time…” A quick glance at Lauren confirmed that she was changing rapidly.

Casey struggled to find a response. “Stay safe,” was all she could choke out before a violet ribbon stretched out from the emitter on the time machine to Rick’s ring, whisking him twenty years into the future.

Fiction: SPACOM 3

Colonel St. George rubbed his temples and sighed. “Let’s try this again. Two days ago, you interrupt my lunch to tell me things you shouldn’t have any way of knowing. Then, this morning, you somehow manage to break into one of the best-protected installations on the planet. And you’re telling me that you knew how to do that because of a television show. Have I got that right?”

Zeke laid his head on the table in frustration. He hadn’t expected this to be easy, but plowing on through blind faith wasn’t getting him anywhere. “I get that it sounds dumb,” he said. “But come on. Didn’t this already happen to you guys once?”

St. George shot a glance to Doctor Waller. “Any idea what he’s talking about?” Waller’s shoulders twitched in confusion.

Zeke sat up, processing. “That hasn’t happened yet, has it? Okay. That helps.”

“Now you’re saying you’re from the future?” Waller asked. He’d been playing the “good cop” role so far, but he sounded frustrated. Which was fair, given how long they’d been at this.

“No, definitely not the future,” Zeke said. “I told you. I’m from a parallel universe. Or whatever. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. Well, I mean, I am, I guess. But not that kind of scientist. The normal kind who doesn’t study wormholes and aliens and parallel universes.”

Waller nodded and sighed. “And in your universe,” he said, almost, but not quite completely suppressing a skeptical tone, “We’re a TV show.”

“That’s creative,” St. George said.

“Ted, you have to admit, some of the things we’ve been through make a lot more sense as ratings stunts,” Waller said. “Like the time-”

St. George silenced him with a glare. “Not in front of the suspected alien agent.”

“See, this is what I mean,” Zeke said. “If I knew exactly where we were in your storyline, I could prove at least some of what I’m saying by predicting the future. But you won’t tell me anything. Do you still have the Klepton truth machine? You could plug me into that and it would tell you that I’m telling the truth.”

Waller shook his head with what looked like genuine sympathy. “There are some forms of mind control that give it false readings. Maybe you really do believe what you’re saying, but you’ve been brainwashed. Or, if you’re telling the truth, how can we know it will even work on someone from your universe? From your perspective, this is all fiction, isn’t it?”

“Again with revealing sensitive information to the weirdo,” St. George said, exasperated.

“Maybe at first, I guess,” Zeke said. “But I’ve been living in a teen drama for two years now. I am totally over any sort of prejudice toward the ontological nature of someone’s plane of existence. You should hear who we elected president.”

“Let’s pretend I’m humoring you,” St. George said. “How did you get here?”

“Car crash,” Zeke said. “Two years ago, I was driving up 40 in a bad storm, and I lost control and went into the guardrail, and when I woke up, I was in a hospital in a small town in Rhode Island surrounded by a cast of quirky, attractive, quick-witted characters that I recognized from the hit basic cable teen drama Sparrow’s Folly. I spent two years trying to figure out a way to get home. I tried interfering. I tried not interfering. I tried just driving back to my own house, and I do not want to talk about how that went. Then, six weeks ago, I tried going skiing. And the ski lift broke and I very nearly died, and now I’m here. Well, a few other places first, but here eventually. I’m simplifying. Fortunately, that whole incident where everyone in Columbus lost three hours was still in the papers, or else I’d never have figured out where we were.”

“And this doesn’t seem a little hard to believe to you?” Waller asked.

“Well sure,” Zeke said. “I realize that the most rational explanation is that none of you are real and this is all a coma dream. But that’s not an actionable hypothesis even if true; I can’t just will myself out of a traumatic brain injury, can I?

“So, assuming this is a real world and I am really doing the things I think I am, I wandered around town until I found that diner where you guys hang out, and when you blew me off, I wandered out into the woods and found the ventilation shaft you used when you needed to sneak the Jindro out of the base. And I was expecting you to catch me right away, but I was hoping I’d be able to dazzle you with my inside knowledge.”

“This was a bad plan,” St. George said, wryly.

“That’s fair,” Zeke said, depressed. “But you must know I’m human by now. You get those Precursor bio-scanners in season three. Can that detect that I’m from a parallel universe? I can’t remember if it ever came up.”

“There is something unusual in your scan,” Waller conceded. “But we don’t know what it means. We’d need to compare it to something that we could confirm was from a different universe.”

Zeke had an idea. “Ooh, what about a portal token? SPACOM 5 could send you one of those.”

St. George and Waller exchanged a long look, silently arguing something. St. George conceded. “SPACOM 5 was lost, presumed KIA. I’m not even going to ask how you know about them.”

Zeke lit up. “You don’t know!” he almost shouted. “That’s it. That’s the thing. I can help you. I need a piece of paper. I hope I remember this.”

Another silent conversation, and Waller slid his notepad across the table. Zeke started writing furiously. “SPACOM 5 is alive. Well, mostly. They’ve probably lost a couple people by now. They got out before the supernova. The Precursor device was a portal into luminous space.”

“Luminous space?” Waller asked.

Zeke kept writing. “It’s a parallel universe. But the usual kind, not a TV show universe. They call it that because the vacuum energy is different so empty space glows and the stars are black. And yes, I know that doesn’t make sense. There’s a running gag where any time someone tries to explain it, they get cut off. Here.”

He pushed the notepad back. Waller studied it. “This is the language of the Precursors,” he said. He pointed to the first line. “This is their name for Earth.”

Zeke nodded, excitedly. “And the second one is the dinosaur planet where you found the weather machine. I think that should be enough for you and Lieutenant French to work out the math. They’re not just names. They’re coordinates. The names tell you where the planet is.”

St. George gave Waller an expectant look. He nodded. “That’s possible. We have some fragments of other Precursor planet names. Samia should be able to work out an algorithm to translate.”

“I want to make a deal,” Zeke said.

“A deal for what?” St. George asked. “And what does this have to do with SPACOM 5?”

He pointed at the third line. “That’s the name of a Precursor outpost. That’s where you find the second portal. The one that lets you contact SPACOM 5. I am just giving that to you, no strings attached. Save you a couple of months, maybe save some lives. You scan a portal token, figure out how to tell if someone is from a parallel universe. Hopefully you start trusting me.”

“What about the deal,” Waller asked.

“I want your help. I want to go home. Or back to Sparrow’s Folly. Or ideally, back and forth to either one whenever I want. Occasional vacations to that kid’s show where everything’s made of candy.”

“Why?” Waller said. Simultaneously, St. George said, “I love that show.”

“Because I know another name. The big one. The Precursor home planet. Look, you guys give all the planets serial numbers and that’s great for you, but I can’t remember a single one of them, so I can’t help you with which ones are good and which ones are bad. But I can remember the ones with names. I can skip you all the way to the end of the series without you spending years wandering around hyperspace looking for clues and accidentally waking up Cthulhu or Space Godzilla. At least one of those happens. Depends on how literal you’re being.”

A Programmer’s Problem Solver

Many years ago, a colleague and I likened programming in C to programming by shoving your hands into a big box of broken glass. All the pieces are there, and you have complete access to them, but they are sharp and pointy and you are on your own; good luck.

So here is a very general programmer’s problem solver:

 

You have a problem. You want to solve it. So…

In C: You solve the problem. Of course, first you’ll have to hand-craft all of your tools, from scratch.

In Assembly: You solve the problem. Of course, first you’ll have to hand-craft the abstract concept of problem-solving, from scratch.

In C++: You think you’ve solved the problem, but in the back of your mind, you’re never really sure if what you solved was the actual problem, or a copy of the problem, and you really just moved the original problem somewhere else.

In Perl: Now you have two problems.

In Java: Now you have a problem factory.

In PHP: Now your problem has a SQL injection vulnerability.

In Javascript: You solve the problem, but the solution only works in Firefox and Edge. Also, Google deprecated a key API so your solution is going to stop working in April 2023.

In Python (according to Python fans): You just “import solution”, it’s easy!

In Python (according to everyone else): You try to “import solution”, but it turns out that “solution” requires Python 3.9 but “problem” has dependencies that haven’t been updated since 2014. Someone tells you that you should really be using a docker container for this.

In Swift: Ha ha just kidding. You can’t solve problems in Swift.

Fiction: Unbent

I was surprised to find I had another piece of this in my head. It’s… Still not great, I think. But I’m trying a new thing where I go ahead and write things instead of agonizing over them in my head for thirty years. So here.

Wind.
One branch bends.
Unbroken.
Another breaks.
Falls.
But remains
Itself.

Dorothy crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. Then she took it out again and carefully flattened it. She sighed.

“Knock-knock.”

She looked around, surprised. “Gabe?” she said to the empty room.

He stepped through the closed door. “How did-” she tried. “What did-” she tried again. Every question she wanted to ask felt stupid in light of the material reality of him. Or unreality, as the case may be.

“How did it go?” he asked. “The audition. That was yesterday, right?”

She wasn’t done with trying to interrogate him, but she let him distract her anyway. “Understudy,” she said. “Just as much work but less scary. They cast Anna, though. Rebecca Gibbs. I guess it turns out she always wanted to be an actress? She’s not ant good at it, but she’s popular.”

“Congratulations, I think,” he said. He seemed slightly distracted, looking around her room with a curiosity Dorothy couldn’t quite parse. He walked over to the window and looked out. “Nice view,” he said. “I like the tree.”

“Why did you knock?” she asked.

He looked down at her desk. “I thought it might make you uncomfortable if I just bamfed into existence in your bedroom,” he said.

She blanched at the thought. “So you can just do that, show up here whenever you want? What if I was naked?”

He blushed impressively. “I wouldn’t. We have… There’s procedures. Your privacy and autonomy are completely protected. Mostly. As much as we can. It’s complicated. And mysterious. Sorry. Did you write this?”

He was looking at the poem. Suddenly self-conscious, she reached through him to snatch it off the table, crumpled it again, and threw it in the can. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I came to check on you. Make sure everything worked out okay. I know I got you in some hot water the other day. That was careless of me.”

She looked away. “Anna still thinks I’m weird, but I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. And then there’s her friends.”

“Oh?” Gabe asked with a tone of surprise that wasn’t entirely convincing.

Dorothy rolled her eyes. “Don’t play dumb. Someone brought a six-pack. And they got caught. It would’ve been pretty bad for me and Anna if we’d been there. You knew.” It wasn’t a question.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Nothing’s set in stone, but some things have more wiggle-room than others.”

“How?” she asked. “And why me? What’s it to you?”

“It’s…” he struggled.

“Complicated?”

He sighed and started pacing. “Thing is, most people’s lives just sort of work themselves out. There’s nature and nurture and genetics and free will and externalities and internalities and a million little nudges and mostly it all just balances out and people sort of tumble into the space the world has made for them, and that’s fine. It’s like… Skiing.”

“Skiing?” Dorothy asked, lost.

“When you’re halfway down the mountain, maybe technically you could change your mind and go somewhere other than the bottom, but it would be a lot of work, and you’d probably fail, and besides, the bottom was where you meant to go in the first place.”

This did not help Dorothy make sense of what he was saying.

“But anyway. There’s a flow and most people just go with it. But some people more sort of… Don’t. They’re slippery. It’s like skiing and… Actually that metaphor doesn’t go anywhere. The point is that you’re different. You’re… Slippery.”

“Why?”

Gabe shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s complicated. And this time I mean that it’s so complicated that I don’t understand it either. Some times those million little nudges line up just so, and instead of you falling into the space the world left for you, the world falls into the space you left for it.”

She shook her head. “What is this, some kind of Campbell thing? I’m the chosen one and I have a great destiny to fulfill?”

He raised his hands defensively. “No, nothing like that. Kinda the opposite. You don’t have a destiny. You’re a free agent. That’s why I’m here. When a person could do anything, there’s some incentive to make sure they do the right thing.”

“What does that mean?” Dorothy asked. “What kind of incentive? What’s the right thing, and why does anyone care about me? I’m nobody.”

Gabe took a quick, sharp breath. “You’re not nobody. You could do so much. You could change the world. So…” he looked around uncomfortably. “Do a good job at it, maybe?”

“How?”

He smiled. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re a good person. You just need the occasional nudge to make sure you don’t forget that.”

The smart speaker chimed out a dinner bell. “This isn’t the end of this conversation,” Dorothy said.

“I didn’t imagine it would be,” Gabe said with a smile. “Have fun. Live your life. Learn your lines. You’ve got this. And if you don’t, I’ve got your back. In a vague and mysterious sort of way.”

He stuck one hand in his pocket and gave her a jaunty wave with the other one, then popped out of existence. Dorothy waved her hand through the space he’d occupied. This was going to take a lot of getting used to. With a deep sigh, she headed downstairs to dinner.

Ten seconds after the door closed behind her, Gabe winked back into existence. With a guilty glance over his shoulder, he stepped to the wastepaper basket, reached down, and very carefully picked up the crumpled poem.

Fiction: The Saints and the Poets

This is a piece of a plot bunny that has been bouncing around my head for about thirty years and I am finally willing to commit a bit of to written form. You’d think it would be less clunky after all those years, but I guess if I could make it flow quite right, I would’ve written it down a lot sooner. It’s mostly inspired by High Concept Sit-Coms, so I tried to keep it shallow and, despite tremendous mental pressure, avoid profanity.

“Will you please trust me on this? Don’t go. It’s a bad idea.”

“Why would I trust you?” Dorothy asked. “I’ve known you for all of ten minutes. She’s family. Technically.”

“Yeah, but which of us seems more inherently trustworthy?” Gabe flashed an exaggerated smile.

“Well what do you have against it? We’re just going out to have some fun. You’re acting like they’re plotting some kind of heist. Do you-” she shook her head. “Do you know something?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Gabe said. “But I would really like it if you trusted me. Trust is important, don’t you think?”

“But this is weird. You know that, right? That what you’re asking is weird? I’m being asked to hang out with, ahem, The Cool Kids, and you, who I don’t know from Adam, is telling me assassinate my social life for mysterious undisclosed reasons and–” Dorothy felt the sudden weight of unwanted attention and looked around. “Why are people looking at me?”

Gabe glanced around, nonplussed. “Oh,” he said. “You didn’t realize. Sorry. I thought you did. They think you’re talking to yourself.”

“What?”

“Yeah, they can’t see me.”

She set her water bottle down. “What are you talking about?”

A guilty expression spread across Gabe’s face. “Okay. This isn’t going well. I can’t actually explain, but I can show you.” He paused and held up his hands in a warding gesture. “You should brace yourself so you don’t overreact.”

He held out his hand in front of him, then slowly moved it toward where she’d set her bottle on the table. He extended one finger toward it as if to push it over. Then, in a slow, smooth motion, passed his finger straight through the bottle.

Whatever bracing Dorothy had done wasn’t sufficient. She let out a little yelp, drawing even more unwanted attention before she could stifle herself. Through clenched teeth, she whispered, “You’re a ghost?”

“I’m not a ghost.”

“Then I’m crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. I can prove that. Maybe. But, um…” he nodded over her shoulder.

Anna. Dorothy hadn’t thought there was still a “worse” things could get. “Oh. Um. Hi?” she tried.

“I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt,” Anna said. “But ‘my step-sister is a schizo,’ isn’t a good look for me.”

With a sour expression, Gabe said, “Ooh. Ableist much?” He stood up and walked over to Anna. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re really hot. But that’s not a good look.”

“I.. Uh…” Dorothy struggled.

“Drama club,” Gabe said.

“Drama club,” Dorothy repeated, surprised.

“Drama club?” Anna parroted.

Gabe walked through Anna and another table of students and pointed at a poster on the wall, too far away for Dorothy to read. “Audition,” he called out. “Thursday.”

Having no other choice, Dorothy decided to run with it. “Drama club,” she said again. “There’s an audition Thursday. I… I thought I’d try out. I was practicing.”

Anna’s eyes narrowed, suspiciously. “You? Drama club? Isn’t that a little ESFP for you?”

“I’m… Broadening my horizons.”

“What’s it for? The audition?”

“Our Town,” Gabe shouted. “Be right back.”

Dorothy glanced over just in time to see him futz with something in his hand, then he simply vanished. Anna looked her up and down, lingering on her pinafore. “Okay, fine, I find that broadly plausible. Show me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Show me what you were practicing.”

“Why?”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Just do it. Let me see how big of a fool you’re going to make out of yourself, so I can decide whether or not to disown you.”

“Um…” Dorothy stammered.

Just then, Gabe reappeared behind Anna, walked through her, and held up a script. “Eyes here,” he said. “Forget everyone else, just look at the script, don’t think about the extent to which your entire social existence is in existential peril.”

It was more than she could process, so she did as she was told. “​I can’t,” she read. “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened them. “So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look…”

A hush fell around her as she recited Emily’s goodbyes to Grover’s Corners, but Dorothy stayed focused on the paper in front of her and didn’t notice. Even Anna seemed hypnotized by her delivery, though Dorothy couldn’t see it with Gabe between them. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it-every, every minute?” she finished.

“No,” Gabe said, filling in the corresponding part, “The saints and poets maybe. They do, some.”

“I’m ready to go back.”

When Gabe lowered the script page, Dorothy finally noticed that every eye in the cafeteria seemed to be on her. She blushed and reflexively brought her hand up to her face. “What?”

“Wow,” Anna mumbled. She struggled for a second and had to physically shake herself to recompose. With exaggerated nonchalance, she said, “Yeah, that’s passable I guess. I, uh. Tell you what, I’ll go with you. It’ll look good for college, right? Wait. Thursday? Crap. Never mind. I’ll take care of it. I got to go find Jimmy.” She turned and stalked away.

The rest of the room slowly returned to normal business and Dorothy turned back to the lunch table and sat back down, befuddled by what had just happened. “What was that?” she whispered through clenched teeth.

“They liked it. You impressed them. You really don’t appreciate how gifted you are,” Gabe said. “You’ve got a power in your words. Someday, they’ll be your own words, but Thornton Wilder will do for a start.”

Dorothy pieced it together. “Thursday,” she whispered. “You committed me to something Thursday. Anna too. So we can’t-”

“There,” Gabe said, smugly. “See? No social assassination required. I got your back.”

“What are you?”

He cringed. “Really can’t explain. If it helps, just think of me as your guardian angel.”