Jill ran a 5K yesterday, and she’s made two trips to Sparkle Skirts this weekend. So while she’s been running around, I’ve been catching up on my to-do list … which included a bunch of things I’ve been meaning to watch.

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WatchingRead More »

 

I’ve been trying to learn a few new things lately.

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CreativityRead More »

Hello, Amalgamated Fluorodynamics, security desk, Noel speaking!

Oh, hi, Ralph. Hey, I wanted to thank you for your Christmas card, that was really nice of ya! … no, Ralph, I’m kidding, I know you didn’t send me a Christmas card this year. Nobody did. Don’t worry about it, really, I’m okay with it, I’m used to it. I’m chief of security. I make people’s lives difficult by telling them to change their passwords and lock their lab doors. If they liked me it means I’m not doing my job right. If I wanted to be popular I wouldn’t be in this business. Still, might be nice, right?

Slow down, Ralph, you’re yammering too quick, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. What got broken into? No, that can’t be, I’d know about it. My console would be lit up like a Christmas tree. Nobody can disable the alarms ‘cept the CEO.

Uh-huh. He did, did he? What’d he take?

Now, Ralph, you know I can’t tell you anything about the top-secret stuff that goes on in there. I don’t even know a whole lot about it myself, just what I hear during lunch break. They came up with something that can move you freely through any dimension, and I learned back in high school that time’s the fourth dimension – yeah, I did a book report on Stephen Hawking once – so I hear they can hop back a couple of minutes just as easy as strolling across a room, and they can go through walls as simple as stepping around a flagpole. Crazy, right? But the secretary tells me they can’t find a decent practical application for it that wouldn’t give Homeland Security a wedgie. So the official word is that I don’t have any idea what goes on in that lab. And neither do you, y’hear?

So he took that. Man, I’m glad I didn’t schedule any Christmas vacation. Anything else?

Huh. But there’s really not a whole lot special about the 3D printer. It’s just an off-the-shelf model from China. It even came with a whole bunch of schematics for stuff that gets shipped out of Shanghai, mostly toys and personal hygiene products. Me and the guys played with it some and now we’ll never need to buy another toothbrush so long as we live. But the printer ain’t any good without the raw materials to go into it, and do you know how heavy that stuff is? How’s he gonna lug it around?

Oh, that too, I see. Yeah, they call it a “massless gravity-nullifier”. See, gravity is like a bowling ball on a rubber surface – the mass of the ball bends the surface and anything close to it gets drawn in, see … sorry, Hawking’s book again, but basically they found a way to make that not happen, so if you hold up a pencil and let go it just stays here. Strangest thing in the world. Yeah, somebody was showing it off in the cafeteria. I would have written him up for it ‘cept it was just too cool.

That all, Ralph? All right. One 3D printer, one time-and-space-shifting doodad, and one antigravity thingamabob. What’s he going to do, become a revolutionary toothbrush distributor? And even if he can make all of it float, that’s still an awful lot to move around. Is he planning on pushing it from house to house?

By the way, Ralph, I hope you’re going to the Christmas party this year. The invite says they’re bringing in live reindeer from Norway or Canada or someplace so they can put venison on the menu. Really fresh, if you know what I mean, as long as the activists don’t hear about it. Maybe I’ll see you there. No, I promise you, Ralph, no hard feelings about the Christmas card thing.

Ralph. Calm down. Yes, I am listening to you. Here at Amalgamated Fluorodynamics, we take the security of our research and development work extremely seriously. The CEO is the only guy who could have taken anything out of that lab, but we thought of that too, we have a contingency plan for everything. Remember what I said about moving stuff through dimensions? Every one of our prototypes is tagged and I’m the only guy with the button that will pull all of the stolen goods right back here to my office. I’m pushing the recall button right now, Ralph. See, worked like a charm. I’ve got all of it right here in front of my desk and the authorities have been informed as to where they can pick him up. All in a Christmas Eve’s work, Ralph…

Hey Ralph, look, I’m going to have to call you back. I think I’m gonna take the evening off after all.

Once upon a time

“No.”

there was

“No!”

In a world

“Really? Do you even believe yourself?” She rolled her eyes at me.

I was back at my usual table beside the lake. It was mid-morning, the sun was bright, the breeze was cool. There were a few ducks on the lake. It’s good for a story to have ducks on a lake, I noted to myself; it establishes the setting as peaceful, tranquil…

My partner for a late breakfast was anything but tranquil. Today she was in the form of a tall, lanky teenager, with short-cropped red hair that looked like she cut it herself, a loose-fitting tee shirt with the name of a band too new for me to have heard of, and a bored expression. And chains, so many chains. “You’re not getting this whole story thing, are you?” she asked me rhetorically.

“Why,” I tried to find the words, “young lady, why are you here today? My usual inner critic is an old Italian guy who smokes a cigar.”

She scoffed. “First off, calling me ‘young’ says more about you than it does about me. Second off, cigars, really? There you go with stereotypes again.” She slumped back in her chair, crumpled an empty egg mcmuffin wrapper on the table so the wind wouldn’t take it. “At least tell me what you have so far.”

I picked up my tablet computer to read my notes, and pushed a glossy photograph across the table for her to see. “The picture I was given to write about this time is of a sandy knoll at night under the stars. Looks like it’s along the side of an empty highway through the desert. So there’s this fellow, see, I figure a car pulls over just long enough to kick him out. The driver’s a woman, a spurned girlfriend who mocks him, ‘you’re the master of space and time! you want your space, you want your time, here you go!’ and she drives away. He wanders out into the desert. ‘I am the master of space and time!’ he says. Thunder booms in the distance. The ghost of a female warrior appears, holding an immense warhammer. He recounts his triumphs … but they’re all from video games, see? The mayor of the town in Animal Crossing. The ruler of a country in Civilization. The head of the space exploration program in Kerbal. He rolled up planets in Katamari. He saved the galaxy in Mass Effect. And with each triumph he recounts, with each achievement he’s earned, the ghost grows and grows until she towers above him, until she can practically reach the stars herself. Finally he realizes she’s the manifestation of all the legends he’s won for himself … through games, at least; she represents everything into which he’s poured his life. The only thing left with which he can feed her magnificence is himself. And so he throws his arms wide, and she lifts that great hammer and crashes it down onto him, and the earth shakes, and when the echoes die out both of them have disappeared. He had poured his entire being into these legends he had created, but the legends were nothing beyond himself.”

I locked eyes with her across the table. Silence hung in the air for a few moments until she broke it. “So there’s that. And then what happens because of it?”

“Er,” I looked away. “Well … the woman who we saw earlier driving the car, she wakes up. Turns out this was all a dream – her own dream. Maybe she’s mad at this guy for spending more time with video games than with her. Or! Or maybe it was just a nightmare and she’s been working too hard and she slips out of bed, leaving him asleep, and she goes and logs on to work email and tries to get an early start on the day even though it’s four in the morning, but then he brings her some hot tea and a nice backrub and tells her she shouldn’t work so hard. Or … maybe she’s never met him, he’s her blind date for the evening, and when she finally meets him she understands him immediately and she kisses him before they even say … before they even say a word … you’re not buying any of this, are you?”

“If you don’t believe in the stuff you write, why do you write it?” she challenged.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I like the process of filling out a story, but I hate coming up with the story in the first place. Like, say I were a chef. I’d be the kind of chef who enjoys skillfully making dishes from recipes that are time-honored, tested and true, but I’d hate coming up with my own new recipes, because it’s all been done before and if it were good it would have become time-honored by now, which means that the only ideas I could have that are new would be – by definition – weird or bad.”

I took another bite of my breakfast croissant. It was burned on the bottom, but I didn’t feel like making an issue of it with the bakery. My critic studied me thoughtfully, until she asked, “Where’d you get the picture?”

“It was, ah, delivered to me this morning.”

“Today’s Sunday,” she pointed out. “Nobody delivers on Sunday.”

I shook my head. “Someone brought it to me. A friend.” I held up my hand to quell further questions down that route.

“A moment ago you said ‘weird or bad,'” she continued. “As if, if you didn’t want bad, weird is always an option. And everything that’s comfortable today once started out as weird, right?”

I asked her, “So you’re saying that the stuff I gave you has potential?”

“No.” She sighed. “Story requires plot. This happened, THEREFORE that happened. That happened BECAUSE this happened. What you’re giving me isn’t plot, it’s events. Like those old Native American folk tales where anthropomorphic animals mess with peoples’ lives. Panther kidnaps hunter’s wife; hunter gets Wolf’s help retrieving her. Event, event. Things happen, but no reasons are given. Why does Panther kidnap? What does Wolf help? Just like that, you’re missing the foreshadowing, the consequences, the ‘why.’ No interest. No life. You have the ingredients, but anybody can get ingredients. You haven’t put them together in any meaningful way.”

I opened my mouth to disagree. I changed my mind. “You have a point.”

“And, by the way, that bit about the woman kissing the fellow at first sight? Completely sexist.”

“Sorry. I was trying for ‘romantic.'”

“Do you even hear yourself?” she growled. “Remember that Yoda thing about doing, not trying. Decide on your message, believe in it, and then make sure that every word you put down carries it there. Now,” she said, pushing her chair back and standing, “you won’t see me again for a while, because your other guy’s coming back from vacation.”

“Well, I appreciate the feedback, miss … sorry, but I forgot to ask your name?”

“Faith.”

“It’s blue out here,” Professor Blatt sighed. She pulled her coat and hood more tightly around herself against the cold. “Everything’s blue.”

Her radio crackled. “No, the snow’s white. And technically the ice has no color, it’s translucent.”

“Don’t contradict me, Asahi,” Blatt snapped at the second-year grad student. “Give me red, give me yellow, give me anything but blue. There’s nothing out here but snow and sky and more snow. The mining equipment is getting close to its maximum depth and all we’ve discovered is more ice. You still so sure of your coordinates?”

There was a pause. “I’m sure,” came Asahi’s quiet reply. “And now you usually say something like ‘this had better be worth it,’ and then I remind you that it is. We’re digging through snow that’s an ice age thick. It’s going to take time to find anything down there. But I’m sure that this is the right place and I’m absolutely certain that by the end of the day we’re going to make a discovery that will tell us a lot about the ancient people who were here before us.” The voice paused again. “By the end of the week, at least.”

That didn’t help Blatt’s mood any. “How did you talk me into leaving the basement lab for this? I’m not fond of being out in bright light.”

“You know the nighttime temperatures can be lethal. And you’ll want to be here, anyway, in case we make any discoveries. I meant ‘when,’ not ‘in case,'” Asahi amended.

The professor spotted some commotion from the workers around one of the rigs. “Stand by, Asahi,” she radioed. She half-crawled across the ice, leaning into the wind, until she found the expedition’s anthropologist, wearing a nametag that read ‘Palm.’ “Tell me what’s up.”

“What’s up is a relic!” replied Palm, gesturing breathlessly. “I believe the drills have finally reached what was once ground level, and we’ve recovered … this!” As she spoke, a crane gingerly pulled a living-room-sized block of ice from the nearest excavation tunnel, lowered it to within a few feet of the ground, then dropped it the rest of the way. The thud knocked Blatt onto her back, but as she rose and shook snow from her coat, she saw the vague outline of something large and yellow inside the block. She approached it slowly, trying to make out its contents until Palm interrupted her: “You’ll want to come around this side, it’s easier.” Sure enough, the other side of the block of ice revealed that the drill had sliced this artifact cleanly in half. Already, the engineers were dragging warm-air blowers over to this side to begin the thawing process.

Blatt found her voice. “What IS it?”

“I believe,” Palm said excitedly, “it was called a ‘taxicab.'”

“And that?” asked Blatt, pointing to a smaller piece that had broken off the block.

Palm crouched over it and studied it intently. Then she stood and took a half-step backwards in surprise. “Man!” The commotion around her ceased immediately, all attention on her and her discovery. “Well, the top half of a man. We really need to be more careful with our drill bits. But I am familiar with the style in which this one is dressed, and if my hunch is correct…” She turned the frozen remains face-down and pulled at the fabric behind its neck. “‘Men’s Wearhouse’, if I’m reading it correctly. You know what this means, don’t you?” she asked the professor.

“It means that men were still alive during the last ice age,” Blatt answered her, as the significance of this sunk in. “There must be millions of them trapped down there, frozen solid. I thought they had died out thousands of years earlier. This is going to turn science and history on their heads.”

Palm had already left the corpse and was pulling something else from the ice. “Bonus!” she exclaimed. “This is what was called a ‘briefcase’. This particular one is made of genuine crocodile leather, which should make it water-resistant, and that means there wouldn’t be any water damage to…” She cracked the briefcase open like an egg. “This!” Nestled within the briefcase, between manila folders and a well-preserved fast food lunch, was a small black smartphone, still intact. She attached a clip that snapped readily into the data port on the phone’s edge, powered it up, and defeated its encryption. “I had hoped that would work!” she said giddily. “We only had an incomplete set of specifications to work from. But now we should be able to access all of the data it holds. Cached information, news, personal messages—”

“Give it here,” Blatt demanded, and Palm complied. Blatt examined the device from every angle. “This symbol on the back has religious significance,” she said in a hushed tone. “It appears in references to temples where people would gather and sacrifice their wages.” She turned the device so that she could see rows of icons on its glowing face. “How do I view the data stored in this?”

“Just tap the glass.”

Blatt tapped gently on the glass. Nothing happened. Then she tried slightly more firmly, but still nothing happened. She handed it back to Palm for a try. Palm tapped at it, shrugged at her.

Blatt sighed unhappily through her mandibles. “We’ve come all this way…” She pulled her hood back from her face, let it slide off to expose her head-carapace to the frigid air for just a few moments so that she could unfurl her antennae. “The temperature will drop soon. Let’s call it a day. We’ve discovered the ruins of Boston, we’ve found evidence that man survived longer into the Information Age than previously thought, and we’ve even recovered a relic from that period.” She tapped again at it with her claw; still it did not respond. “Once we learn how to access the data in this device, we could very well understand a key chapter in cockroach evolution.”