Rings and Things

There were bright oval rings in the night sky and hysteria on the air-waves. Bernard Arden McKenzie had turned his radio off hours ago, preferring listen to Marion Call, some old Filk, science fiction folk music, or  the man in black, Johnny Cash, and finally he had dug up the entire audio version of 'Team of Rivals'. Listening to how the Illinois lawyer, born in Kentucky and plagued with misfortune and misadventure, had put together his ship of state, was all somehow soothing.

He had taken the long way home. It seemed somehow like he had been driving away, for years, and now that he had decided to come home that he'd driven down long, ancient valleys, into midnight hollows, past Indian ghosts of that first great American apocalypse which had made room for the pilgrims and others, had left a garden tended by one hundred million dead souls...

Bernard shook himself. "Morbid, much?" He said to himself, glancing in the rear-view mirror and catching a glimpse of his own ice-cold pale blue eyes, the brown and grey hair, the deep lines, worry and laughter. He chuckled. He had always been able to make fun of himself, which was good, considering most of his work.

He turned into his sister-in-laws' lane just as the night as giving way to day; daybreak. The last morning of the old world? He wondered, not joking, and not morbidly. He was anticipating something wonderful, come what may.

There was his brother's old car, and his nieces' graduation present, his old jeep. There was a big dark green rental SUV and a contractors' truck, plumbing and HVAC, Jack Knight's 'Sir Fix-A-Lot'. Bernard had a chuckle at that too, and paused, looking through the back of it. Plenty of kultch, but no junk; a place for everything and everything in it's place... He nodded with approval and turned to walk up to the door, which was just opening.

"Uncle Bernie!"

Bernard watched his niece come out of the house, running to him, and he felt unaccustomed emotion; a fierce pride, in his brother and his family. The kidlet had turned out alright... She hit him like a linebacker and he let out an 'oomph'. He braced for the bear-hug, for she was a hugger who put all of her strength into it. She'd done that at her Dad's funeral and almost bought him to his knees.

"Uncle Bernie," she whispered in his ear, and he felt her damp cheeks brush his neck.

"Why so sad, Beautiful? Busy Bee? Been breaking hearts?"

"You're horrible!" She said, laughing.

"You know I am; and you're Beatrice."

Her mom was on the porch now, with two men, one of whom Bernard knew well, and he sighed. The other was a young man with eyes only for his niece.

"Oh-ho, you have been taking hearts!"

"Horrible..."

"If I'd known so many people would land on my front step this morning, I'd have gone to the supermarket," Stella Mckenzie commented wryly. She indicated Special Agent Bruce Granger, of the FBI. "This is one of yours, I take it?"

"He's looking for me, is what he is, aren't you Bruce?" Bernard said, turning to Granger.

"I'm sorry as hell, Bear, but you really weren't that hard to find. I talked my boss into sending me, y'know..."

The young man said nothing, just stood clear. Granger and Bernard both noted how he moved and Granger stepped off of the porch, putting a few more yards between them, and moving a few yards closer to his charge.

"Would truly be a shame if things were to get any more complicated than they are, Bear," Granger said. Not a threat, exactly. Just voicing an opinion, or at least that was the way Bear chose to take it.

"I understand, but... can I at least have a little while?"

Granger blinked, and then he nodded. "Sure thing..." he said slowly. Both men turned to Stella, who saw that everyone was now looking to her.

"Well... breakfast, anyone?"

***

Mother and daughter, and boyfriend, headed into the kitchen, but not before Beatrice introduced Axel Knight. Bernard looked pointedly at the truck. "Who's Jack?"

"I work for my older brother, who owns the business. I've been working for him since high school."

Beatrice rolled her eyes. "Uncle Bernie..."

Bernard waggled his hand like a stage magician. "Look, no shotgun. Not pulling the male relative thing, sweetness. Not at all..." and he smiled at Axel, showing all of his teeth.


Axel coolly offered his hand to shake; firm, direct, and no bull-shit. "Beatrice thinks the world of you, sir."

"'Sir'?" Bernard winked at Beatrice. "You got a little something on your nose there, son."

Axel shrugged, a slight grin on his face. Bernard nodded to himself. The boy- man, the man just might do.

Granger brought in a little bag of oranges from the government issue sedan, and conceded to eating a few pieces of bacon, but otherwise acted like a man condemned to a death sentence by his doctor, sadlywatching them consume a magnificent country meal, home-fries and sausage links, a mountain of steaming scrambled eggs, pancakes piled high- Axel and Beatrice took over from Stella halfway through and she sat down with a sigh. "Such good appetites, except for you, Mr. Granger."

Granger shrugged.

"Go ahead and eat, man! It may be the last good feed you'll get for a while..." Bernard shut up as Granger leaned forward and he also saw that the Fed was not the only one looking at him expectantly.


"Would you care to elaborate?" The FBI agent asked with a grin.

"Yes, Uncle bernie, I know you know all about what's going on!" Beatrice was nodding vigorously. Bernard though about idols with feet of clay.

"I'd say that there is a need to know, but you wouldn't want me to disclose national secrets, would you, Special Agent Ganger?"

Granger shrgged again. "I've got NDA's in the car for them to sign, and a scary lecture prepped..." he looked Bernard pointedly in the eye. "And, yes, I think it's high time you briefed me on what I need to know to do my job."

***

Write about puppies and kittens...

I want to create gardens in space... habitats up there. Roll up a strip of the planet, a few tonnes of stuff/m^2.

For the truly massive abduction scenario, I assumed 10 tonnes/m^2, millions of tonnes strip-mined from the Earth's surface replaced by millions of tonnes of asteroid water... make it rain! 8-P

Final Rotoavator Ring design is 1/3 the circumference of the Earth, there are pi^3 or 31 of them, the strip is 1/3 divided by pi^12 or 14 1/2 meter, 47 feet wide, which rolls up into a cylinder just under 14 km wide and 14 km across (strip times pi^6, about 1K).

The Rings ease into position, dumping momentum simply by dumping or grabbing mass. The ring drifts back out by letting go of mass, water and structural cable. The 10 tonnes/m^2 is released at the top of the ride and goes into interplanetary space at just under 6 km/s. The strip is roofed over with a simple tall A-frame, all as part of the grabbing maneuver. Now that serves as a simple free-floating habitat, a long volume which is in free-fall, falling away from the planet. The next step, not the final step, is to roll this up into a cylinder. That is just a matter of shortening the edges of the strip, so that it starts to curl. Two edges slide past each other and 'zip' together, lapping itself every 45 km or so. Either a squat cylinder, or a long one about 10 times as long as it is wide, 4.5 by 45 km (1/3CotE/pi^7 by 1/3CotE/pi^5).

(much later 8-)

The sky opened up, with thousands of filaments coming down to Earth at great speed, spearing the ground inches apart. Bernard saw his niece and her beau running towards himself and the house, shouting as they came on. The filaments parted around Beatrice, fluffed out somehow, and wrapped her in a shroud. A curtain of filaments fell between them and Axel struggled through it to get to her. That was all the more he saw before the sky fell upon him.

But he could hear, muffled like a snowfall, the panicked yapping of the neighbors' dog, a horse whinnying in fear, Granger softly cursing and speaking with Stella inside the house. His obscured vision seemed to clear and Bernard had the distinct impression that the filaments themselves were emitting light like some sort of cloth display. He saw the filaments wrenching the two young lovers apart very clearly, as if he was only few feet away instead of across the yard, some forty feet from them. And then their fingers touched, brushed against each other and Axel lunged, grabbing her hand. The filaments seemed alive, self-aware, sentient or perhaps sapient, that is to say 'wise', and they ceased attempting to pull the two apart.

There was a groaning and the house behind Bernard lurched, pulled up into the sky, and then he went along with it, pulled softly but inexorably to the 'ground' by his own weight, now more than doubled, and Bernard would have nodded, if he could have.

"We're on our way..."

Things were quiet for a little while, perhaps a full minute, except for the yapping dog and a distant, whistling wind, and then Bernard heard a grunting coming his way from the house. "Granger, you damned fool," Bernard shouted as best he could, and the effort winded him. Finally he added, "Stay where you are!"

"I love you too, man," Granger said, adding, "But I'll manage, somehow. It seems to be getting easier. To move, I mean."

Bernard thought about that and then tried to lift his hand. It seemed almost as if- "They don't want the dumb animals to hurt themselves, so maybe they're assisting, like a soft exoskeleton?"

"Speak for yourself; I'm no dumb animal. I got me a degree from Shipp and everything..." Granger stopped to take a break. "Whew, this is too much like work!"

"Uncle Bernie!"

Bernard stared as Beatrice and Axel came crawling towards them at triple-time, the filaments not just parting but pulling them along until they were lying on the grass at the front porch.

"Alright, everybody just calm down... Stella?"

"I'll be with you shortly... the 'magic fingers' seem to be sending me out there to you," Stella said matter-a-factly, merely raising her voice a little, and presently she came into view.

"Anybody hurt?"

"I fell down on my ass..."

"I sympathize greatly with your ass, Granger, because it has to put up with you just like I do," Bernard said between clenched teeth. "I meant, no broken bones, anyone?"

It seemed that they all were in remarkably good shape and spirits, considering the mass abduction and all... The wind beyond the filament curtain had died away, and when Bernard looked over towards the edge of the lawn, about where Axel had been standing, it seemed like the land just stopped. Which it had. Beyond, falling away, was the edge of the Earth, the sky a pale band and black above that, the edge of space. They were already soaring up above it all, turning on the inside of a wheel which was pulling them to the outside with maybe a gee and a half of force, all the while the Earth's gravity was still dragging them back down a 'hill' that was growing steeper as the minutes passed. Bernard found that something, the filaments probably, was holding them in place as the hill went to thirty or forty degrees and then seemed to get less and less steep, all while the force pulling them to the 'ground' fell steadily away, and the bowl of the Earth changed into an enormous ball that grew ever smaller.

"Wow," Axel breathed.

"I agree," Bernard said. "Wow."

Then the bottom seemed to fall out from under them and they were free-falling into the sky. Bernard saw that his niece was looking at him and smiling.

"'Second star from the right, and straight on till morning!'"

"Love you, kidlet."

"Love you more, Uncle Bernie."

"Love you most."

***

Bernard felt a sideways tug, a very slight acceleration that went on for several tens of seconds and then died away. Where the filament curtain-wall that hemmed in their long and narrow world came together far above them that line brightened until it was sunlight strong. The starry black to either side turned. The Earth lay beyond them, almost beyond view, obscured as it was by the rest of the strip of the Earth's surface with which they'd been carried aloft. The crescent moon lay off to the side and ahead of them. It rose and set about once a minute and a very mild force now tugged him ever so gently to the grass again.

"I feel so light," Beatrice said to Axel, and then sprang up and up, shrieking and laughing, easily clearing the roof of house where she had been born and raised, and drifting back down lazily, light as a feather, like a leaf on the wind... She landed softly by the chimney and waved down at them.

"Come on up here," she called down to them. "The view is pretty-"

There was a bright, actinic flash and the filament curtain went dark off to one side, back behind them where the Earth lay; that way had been more or less South and so Bernard thought of it as 'South'. The dark patch in the sky moved as the strip habitat turned so slowly on its long, long axis; protecting precious cargo, stolen treasure, Bernard thought.

Beatrice came back down, clambering along by her finger-tips as the force pulling her down was not fast enough for her need to be with them.

"Was that what I think it was?" Stella asked in the general silence. Bernard only then realized that the hoarsely yapping neighbor-dog had shut up.

"If you think it was a nuke, then yes, it was," Bernard whispered. Granger futilely cursed the general stupidity of mankind. Thinking how a lot of people had probably just died, Bernard could not disagree.

"Who was it? Where was it?" Bea's voice had an edge to it which hurt Bernard's heart.

"It kind of looked like we were over Europe, maybe the Middle East," Granger said. "The French? Israel? Russia? Maybe it was Uncle Sugar," he added gruffly. Bernard reached around, grabbed his friend's shoulder and squeezed. Then Stella and her daughter caught him between the two of them and pulled Bernard and Axel into a group hug. Granger protested feebly and wiped surreptitiously at his eyes. He looked out at the lawn and saw the neighbor-dog looking looking hopefully.

"Oh great, we've been adopted..."

***

A place too far from here; a place too strange for human hearts...
There is, even yet, an alien compassion for us poor humans.
Perhaps they see something of themselves in us?
Do they hope for us, are they waxing nostalgic,
Perhaps, for a second childhood by proxy?
Or do we stand ready to redeem them in some way,
So like they were and fated to do them one better?

(even later on 8-)

"'I'm smiling because I'- I can't see the rest of his tee-shirt to read it all," Beatrice was saying to her mother. The little boy in the red tee was looking about tiredly, lost. There were dried tears on his cheeks. He looked to be about five.

"Honey, leave it be, things are- Beatrice!"

Bernard watched, bemused, as his niece marched right over. Axel fell in step with her, and their hands met, fingers interwove... He filed that sight away for some dark moment, some future need. There was bound to be something else, what with the mass abduction, the alien war between parties unknown, plenty of potential, always. He took the good with the bad, and knew to appreciate ever erg of good that came his way.

"What were you thinking?!"

"Hmm?" Bernard said helpfully.

"Why didn't you try to stop her?" Her mother wailed. The dismantling, piece by piece, of her home had been too much for Stella. Bernard pulled her over and hugged her.

"Stop her? Stop our goodwill ambassador to the worlds? Perish the thought. I might as well hold back the tide, or command the bee to not seek out the flower, the flower to grow, the sun to shine, the rain to fall; in fact, she is a force of nature. Human nature, and a force for goodness and light."

The little boy was smiling. Beatrice had knelt down and was wiping his face with a wet cloth. Axel stood by, taking a sip of water from their makeshift canteen, a one gallon plastic tea-jug. He slung it over his shoulder, adjusting the cloth sash Stella had come up with and considered the young woman and the child, a slight smile on his face growing. He nodded to himself. When Bea picked the boy up, he made horsy whinnies and the laughing child was transferred to Axel's shoulders. They galloped back over, Beatrice hurrying to catch up with them.

"I see we've picked up another stray," Granger commented quietly, for Bernard's ears alone.

"It seems like we have..." Bernard said, turning to his friend. "Are you going to tell her 'No'?"

Granger snorted and dug through his backpack, found an apple from the abandoned house they had raided. "Not gonna happen. Here, pass this along."

"Not brave enough to give it to her, yourself?" The two men laughed. Bernard reflected that they were an upbeat little band.

"In this little army, she ranks me."

'I'm smiling because I know I'm saved', the tee-shirt read. Bernard felt the pit of his stomach drop away, considering all the ways you could take that. It had been a bad couple of days, back on the third rock from the sun, back in the solar system.

TMAS

Tell me a story...

"What kind of a story?" Bear asked. The petite woman with the heart of a lioness was leaning back against his chest. They were taking a break for lunch, treed temporarily by 'Mort and Morticia' on the roof of a McMansion, but just for today the small herd of a dozen walking dead was somebody else's problem. Stan and Daria had presented him with a 'vacation slip', entitling him to twenty-four hours without worry, as a birthday present. Bear, or 'Dillon Miles', according to his birth certificate, trusted in those two, and so did his 'traveling circus'; no one at all had broken their vowed '24 w/o worry'; at least so far.

"I don't know... a tale which tells the teller?" April Zahn looked over her shoulder at him, smiling impishly, and Bear kissed her on her nose.

I would give you all of me, Bear thought, but I can't. So let me give you some small part of me which is ours... "I used to run a bowling alley, for my uncle. Kept things running, kept the peace..."

"Shocking! And here we thought you ran a landscaping company," April murmured, referring indirectly to his signature weapon against zombies, a pruning hook.

"I did help out my brother-in-law with his business, when he was swamped in the late spring and early summer, until my nieces and nephews could chase a push-mower..."

They both were reminded of folks who were not there. The hurts were not too fresh now, ached numbly and without the urgency of months ago.

"How many?"

"Seven-"

"Seven!?"

"He and my sister were happy, but very tired..."

"I should think so!" She frowned. "Why so many?"

"He'd been an only child, and she, she always liked children. Had a gift for nurturing them, and for herding cats, of course." After a moment he added, "After a few years of marriage and no kids, just lots of doctors, they didn't think that they could get pregnant, so they adopted, and then, five and counting, she had the twins. They were so surprised, and so pleased."

"Pleased?"

"They were strange people. They didn't believe in accidents or failure; they believed in blessings." He sighed.  "Daria's sort of people, sons and daughters of Mary, if you get that reference, where Stan is a son of Martha... you do know the 'Sons of Martha', right?" April nodded.

"They know they are saved, and believe in providence... but also in being prepared, being open to the possibilities," she said. "Trust, obey; 'fear God and dread naught', which I've always found to be a curious thing- Fear God?"

"A bit of double-think which was why I loved them but never understood them." Bear stared off into the distance. "I wish that I could have saved them."

April reached around and took his face in her hands, turned it gently so that they were looking into each other's eyes.

"They save you, they keep you alive. Good memories."

PB&J

Something for my poor, sadly neglected blog-

The three youths, late teens to early twenties, sat down at the table next to the fat man with his laptop. They weren't there so much to eat as to socialize, or whatever passed for that, with them. The man, likewise, was much more interested in social media, and ignored them as best he could. But after the sixth 'beyotch' or the seventh 'nixx', he looked over at the white kid acting all 'hood' for the benefit and with the approval of his two black friends.

"Whatchu staring at, beyotch? Ima gonna mess you up!"

The man held his gaze for a few seconds and then turned back to his PC. From time to time he looked up again as the loudmouth dropped another bit of noise pollution.

"Nixx keeps looking at me... whatza mattah wi' him?"

The fat man looked up again and just smiled. The youths finished and took off with a final round of verbal abuse, and the man nodded to himself and powered down his laptop, putting it away.

Outside, he walked across the dark parking lot, past the gazebo where the three youths were arguing in front of a sign which read, 'No Loitering!' The man turned away from them, and in the early evening darkness he smiled, but the youths could not see this. He crossed the little shopping center to a lonely car next to the closed supermarket; perhaps one of the reasons these youths were so bored and abusive was that the town closed up early, out here in the middle of no and where, the man mused. He made a show of getting his keys out, dropped them in a convenient nearby sewer, pretended to panic and waddled around the corner, fleeing.

Predictably, the predators had to give chase, laughing.

They ran around the corner of the supermarket, and seconds later there were multiple screams, which terminated abruptly.

***

"Do you know what I like about these little hunting trips to Dirt?"

The white kid opened his eyes. It was hard to see anything in the bright glow, every surface lit up with a soft green light, like being under the forest canopy on a summer afternoon, only brighter. He recoiled in horror at the fat man, opened up like a meat-suit, with something purple and slick coiled inside. Then he realized that there was no blood, and the thing inside was speaking to him. It was also eating peanut butter straight out of a jar, with its tentacles.

"The challenge. Your species is really rather cunning, for omnivores, and your governments really so reasonable, when confronted with unpleasant facts. Of course, with you three, not so much, not so cunning nor challenging. So stupid, I really would be doing your species a favor..." The purple slug-thing twirled its eyestalks at him and trilled. The body-suits' head sighed dramatically. "But that would be illegal; I've filled all my tickets for this hunting trip, and your government wants too much for the next tier. You, my young and stupid friend, are not worth my money, but it was amusing, and I do hope exciting, for you as well?"

The three youths remembered mocking laughter, and woke up, stripped but not naked. They wore a layer of peanut butter instead.

(I apologize for nerfing the language, which offends me and might get me into trouble with Big Bro 8-)

Characters for 'Into the Blood Wood'

I reread these characters for a game I never ran at Relaxicon 2010 and decided to post it here-

Horse

To recover and bury the bones of lost friends- You could not go, before. The farm needed tending, and your parents needed you. The fence needed repair, and the south-pasture, ditching. But your Pa passed a few years back, and your Ma, just yesterday; and all you could think about, through the service, was how the friends of your youth went south, without you, and never came back… You are Horse

Horse is not an adventurer; he has no wish to go to strange lands, meet strange people, kill them and loot their bodies. He is like the farmers, in The Magnificent Seven or The Seven Samurai, or any of a hundred remakes of those two great movies. He isn't married, except to the land, his families' farm. He did, once, consider going adventuring, with his friends, and he only regrets not going with them, not the not going. He is a widower and has no living family, now that his Ma has passed; he is free to go, and come back, if he can...

Horse is a strapping big plowman, who likes a pipe, a good riddle, and a pint of bitters by the fire, of an evening. He is quiet and holds his counsel, but he is a deep thinker, slowly turning over a problem, like a field to be plowed.

Give me a clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and three hours march to dinner- and then to thinking. -William Hazlit

His favorite passage from the Lives of the Servants of the Goddess, is based on this bit from the bible-

'…the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.' Psalms 65:12-13

***

[Villagers tell Chris they collected everything of value in their village to hire gunmen]
Chris Adams (moved): I have been offered a lot for my work, but never everything.

***

You've got to have Faith!

In service to your Goddess- Called to serve, to witness for your faith and win the day for Good, your path has led you here, to these companions, on this quest. You are Gods-touched, ever since a fever, as a child, left you prone to visions and opened you to the possibilities… You are Faith

Faith is red-haired and green eyed, a daughter of the land, of the Goddess. She is a paladin, with the scars and healed bones of the hard service she loves so dearly; still young, but beginning to get old. She is based on the female paladin, Paksennarion, the Sheepfarmers' Daughter, from the excellent fantasy series by Elizabeth Moon, the books gathered together in The Deed of Paksennarion. TDoP is my favorite serious fantasy series (The Discworld books are silly, and full of insight into the human condition; I love them just as dearly, but in a different way…). Faith is also based, a little, on Faith from Buffy (just a little), and a female bodyguard, Balsa, from the wonderful anime, Moribito, which revisits, for me, the question of whether the good of the one outweighs the good of the many; do you save the boy, or the kingdom? If you are a hero, you turn yourself inside out, and spill blood, to do both!

'…the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.' Psalms 65:12-13

The local church is a fertility cult; the words to the marriage service are- 'Go, now, lie together, and bring forth children, of the land…"

I want to shine on you, and always, like the dazzling sun,
I will defend you, from all the darkness,
This is the truth from my heart.

-Shine, opening song from Moribito-

Chico: But who made us the way we are, huh? Men with guns. Men like Calvera, and men like you... and now me.

Calvera: If God didn't want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep!
(Faith is the shepherdess (Shepherd Book), not with a crook or sling to guard her flock, but the blessing of the Goddess, and cold steel! (@Lee- 'Onward Brinnian Soldiers!' 8-))

Hilario: Even if we had the guns, we know how to plant and grow, we don't know how to kill.
Old Man: Then learn, or die!

Snake

To redeem cowardice- You ran, and left your comrades to die, years ago; you came home to the silence of the village, and crawled into a bottle. Now you can lead a team into the Blood Wood, and make right what once went so horribly wrong… You are Snake

When he came out of the Blood Wood, he knew that he would be hanged, if caught, and sure enough, he was. But the Old King was a clever man, and ruthless. He pardoned Snake and, far from being made an outlaw, he placed the King's Peace on him… strange mercy, indeed. Snake is wiry, tough. Skinny from years of alcoholism, consumption and bad diet. But the fire still burns, and he's still supernaturally quick. He is going to the Blood Wood, to die.

Hilario: The feeling I felt in my chest this morning, when I saw Calvera run away from us, that's a feeling worth dying for. Have you ever felt something like that?
Vin: Not for a long, long time. I envy you.

Lee: Yes. The final supreme idiocy. Coming here to hide. The deserter hiding out in the middle of a battlefield.

Blackstaff

To do your duty to the Crown- The Old King decreed the quarantine, and for all of your adult life, you've kept it. But this morning the Queen fell under the 'evil shadow', and the King gave you leave to gather a team of malcontents and heroes, to make one more attempt on the Blood Wood. You are the Kings' Man, and will do his will, whatever it takes. You are Blackstaff

Blackstaff is a burnt-out old veteran, with nothing left but his duty, and his secret love for the Queen (or King!). He will do whatever it takes. A Royal Bastard? Hard to be sure, but that was one rumor. That would make him half-brother to the King. He had a young wife, once, but she ran off with a bard. Blackstaff doesn't like bards.

Vin: We deal in lead, friend.

Harry Luck: [Dying words] Well, I'll be damned.
Chris Adams: Maybe you won't be.

Romeo

To save a lover from herself- 'The Sorrows', a wasting sickness of the heart and mind, which leaves its victims listless and unresponsive, has taken your true love, and you know that the cure lies in the Blood Wood, in the Pool of Sorrows; it has to! You are Romeo

Romeo is young and quick to anger. Good with a blade, too, but always running off to get into trouble and needing rescue.

"Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind." -The Princess Bride

Hilario: Very young, and very proud.
Chris: Well, the graveyards are full of boys who were very young, and very proud.

Doc

To find the cure for 'The Sorrows'- You are a great healer, but even you are no match for the wasting disease. Now your daughter is cursed with TS, and the only thing you can think to do is to cross the quarantine line, a hanging offense, into the Blood Wood, and find some answers… You are Doc

Doc is more thoughtful, but no less determined. He has a few tricks up his sleeves, as a loremaster and a herbalist; this is the young healer from Moribito, Balsa's 'Wife', but quite a bit older.

"As you wish!" -The Princess Bride

Village Boy 2: We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.
O'Reilly: Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.

Very General Outline/Timeline for the Relaxicon (or any single-shot) Games-
1st Hour- What happens first and/or my goals as GM
2nd Hour- Rising Tension; how can I mess with my players?
3rd Hour- Big Fight/Obstacle to overcome, or otherwise resolve...
Cleanup; bring it on home!

Thoughts on 2112

I ran Microscope with two other people for the first time on Friday and I loved it... but of course I immediately wanted to fiddle with it! I recognized in it some writer's tools which I've never used; writing facts, characters and scenes in index cards, among other things. We've done similar things in previous campaigns when we do a world-building session.

I'd like to world-build the future. 100 years to be precise. 2112 is a palindrome, reading the same forwards or backwards. What do you think?

To paraphrase Pratchett, people want tomorrow to be like yesterday, only better. Warmer, better fed, nicer job. People want to scare us, it goes without saying, want us to do things and possibly for all the best reasons, as in that one cartoon, 'What if we make a better world, for no good reason?' Climate change within our lifetimes is fact, though, whether it is caused by human action or something else. Anecdotal evidence for human culpability lies in the fact that we had a dip in energy use after the recession hit, followed by colder winters, and yet now that the world economy is on a rebound and demand is back up, we've had the mildest winter which I can remember. Cold winter in Europe? There is some evidence that the Gulf Stream is failing...

I'm not worried, over the long term, but I wonder what disaster will do to the psyche of a world becoming ever more tightly knit together. Cynicism is weak tea, to paraphrase Churchill and my favorite Captain. It definitely isn't much of a way of life.

So, what happens if it all goes to shit in a big way? The global economy has no 'give' to it, and a pandemic would kill more people indirectly than ever might die of plague. Other threats which tantalize and titillate readers and audiences could do the same, and over the long term, something will bring it all down.

Then what?

Lots of people die. Billions. And then a few billion people pick up the pieces, go on having babies (or not; babies are a bad return on investment... 8-), and the world keeps on turning, reduced to some fraction of the nonsense we now take for granted.

What would a post-global world look like?

Suddenly the Global Village Construction Set (http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs.php) makes a lot more sense, and I really do hope they succeed in pulling it off. They are more of a lifestyle choice, maybe even a 22nd Century version of the Amish and Mennonites. Opting out of the global rat-race, downsizing, reducing, unplugging and possibly surviving. Necessarily these folks would set up away from major cities, even possibly in the remains of 20th century rust-belt cities like Detroit... wouldn't that be a kick in the ass?

The other thing which they are figuring out is key, if we are ever going to colonize other worlds; figuring out how to down-shift into a viable industrial and information society. I kid you not, their children are Martians!

Relaxicon 2012

I'm suffering the usual post-con depression, I guess, because I'm feeling just a little blah this morning.

I ran Microscope on Friday night for myself and two other players, and while we may not have run it correctly, we did have fun with a vaguely Traveller-esque future history.

I had a good breakfast at the 896 Diner across the street from HoJo's, then I went and gave blood on Saturday morning. I didn't do much in the early afternoon, but I did look at a hard SF board-game Jon Nicholas had brought with him while he was playing in John Corradin's Legendary Heroes game, a mish-mash of Xena, Friar Tuck and others; they were facing of with some Star Wars storm troopers when I looked in on it all. Then I was tired and took a nap.

For the late afternoon block I played in Neal's Dresden Files Game, Acts of Evil. It was pretty intense. A wizard  had gotten away with using black magic and was trying to get rid of his magic to save himself. It actually worked, but it wouldn't have if the players hadn't started acting unilaterally... one of the few occasions where group discord and confusion worked in favor of the plot!

No Styx this year. I got a pizza and beer and was down in the common rooms for a while but went to bed early. I would have come back down, but the room key got changed, I tried to get it reset, no-joy, and had to be let back into my room. So I had a few more beers and called it a night w/o doing the singalong 8-(

I got checked out, went and got some stuff from the Walgreens down the road and came back for my Black Lagoon Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lagoon), Roanapur Midnight Special. That went fairly well with two signed up players, our Benny and Dutch, the boss, plus two more (swept up and press-ganged 8-) to play our Revy and Rock, so that I had all four main Characters.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B38sUusc114SbDJWeTl4Y3lSVkdNWURkUE9PZFBpdw/edit

The crew got pulled into a job through an old friend, survived an ambush by men working for Ling, a competitor of Black Lagoon Company, and got hired to rescue the client's daughter. The Client insisted on being part of the action and was needed to infiltrate anyway, with our heroes using one surviving ambush-er to help them. Rock, the Japanese salary-man, pretended to be one of the dead ambush-ers and the Client and his future son-in-law were loosely tied up for show (armed).

The subterfuge went well, until Ling, talked about 'paying off' the son-in-law. Dutch and Revy were in the back of the van for the infiltration and separated by a partition form the client and son-in-law, and couldn't intervene in the struggle and gunshot which everybody could hear coming from the middle of the van. Then things got quiet in the van while things got messy outside.

Predictably, Two-Gun Revy cleared the bad-guys and capped Ling. Dutch was not very happy about this, and had gotten shot in the battle, but things all shook out in the end. The Client had knifed his traitorous not-future-son-in-law and upped the pay for rescuing his daughter, who had been sold and would be exchanged off-shore. So we ended up with a marine battle, or actually a distraction while Revy and Rock scuba-ed over to Ling's boat, killed most of the crew and got the girl.

Fun for me, and fun for the players to play pirates, lighter shades of gray in a pretty dark world like the city of Roanapur.

A Little Future-gazing

You wake up one day on permanent vacation. There are only so many jobs in the economy now that robotics take care of most routine tasks, from elder-care to organic farming. There are only many service industry jobs, too. You spend much of your time online, playing games, but you decide today to play tourist and see the real world with your own, mark one, eyeballs.

You live comfortably enough, a free one-room apartment with free food and utilities, including bandwidth. It's rationed, of course. If you want more than your stipend, you'll have to find a job to pay for it... but there is no real push or pull to do so. Most people dream by what used to be called TV, before it became interactive and immersive. The food isn't bad, but it's uninspired. Most families, or groups of neighbors, have an amateur cook or chef who dabbles in turning the raw ingredients into something tastier, but today you don't bother.

You plan on traveling, so you treat yourself to an old-fashioned breakfast, sausage, scrambled eggs,  toast and orange juice. The sausage meat is tissue cultured pork, as are the eggs, but the juice and the bread came ultimately from local indoor hydroponic farms, either greenhouses tended by robots under the supervision of a 'farmer', or underground tunnels lit indirectly by the sun, or wind, wave, even nuclear (All that radioactive waste left over from last century is getting 'burned' up in comparatively much safer nuclear cans (after all, it will be gone, then, and not left lying around in corroding steel canisters!) with few moving parts, and mostly do it someplace far away, just like the solar power is mostly collected in the middle of a desert).

After breakfast you throw the dishes in the dishwasher, which these days cleans them and puts them away. You could have left them lying around for the apartment robotics to see to, but tidy habits die hard and make you something of a nonconformist. The place leaves your stuff alone or puts it where you designate it belongs if you just leave it, but otherwise keeps the apartment clean and safe. The place is a little sad because you have to keep things to code. It'd be different if you owned it, or won the lottery and could move someplace, own real estate...

Out the door and down the hall you take the elevator. None of these free apartments is in a small building, so you drop down twenty stories to the street, which moves. Slidewalks always used to be the stuff of science fiction, but with smart materials somebody got the idea to work. Surfaces slide over each other now if you want them to, and you step onto the moving surface and walk out to the faster band in the center. The slidewalk can slide you as well; a few kids come gliding past, skating along. The active surface helps pedestrians keep their footing by variable acceleration, so you don't stand with one foot in a faster lane and have that foot drift out from under you, or cause you to turn slowly in circles, although you can, if you want to. Since you do, you say "spin" and the slide walk responds by spinning your patch and moving it around in traffic.

It's a good, sunny day, no smog to see or smell. No large powered vehicles in sight, either. Goods get delivered to your house of business underground in a system of tunnels. People move around by foot or slidewalk, and go long distances with a faster, underground or elevated version of the same. They call it 'The Tube' because it is a version of the slidewalk which wraps up and over, and speeds you rapidly along.

You're coming up on the tube now. You slide around the spot where the tube comes out of the ground, opens up and flattens out, what seems like a big curved wall under a sun-catcher canopy, weave around people getting off the thing and into the acceleration zone. A hump of the slidewalk has bunched up and now stretches and speeds up from the crawling pace designed for universal access to over fifty miles per hour down into a well lit tunnel. Behind you an old man says "bench" and the slidewalk obliges by moving wall and floor around to gather enough layers in one place to form a curved bench that slides along smoothly behind you. He adds a destination and settles down to take a nap. The bench will make all the connections for him while he dreams of the good old days.

Your plans are for a long-distance journey, and for that you need an even faster version of the tube, stacked up on this one. Where this is fifty times faster than crawling, the 'intercity tube' is ten times faster than that. You walk up a slight hill of bunched up slidewalk to get on it and the tube diameter is a bit smaller, but the principle is just the same. Away you go, and you take a page from the old man's book as you settle down for the hours-long ride cross continent.

TBC

I figured out how ASMNT (aluminosilicate molecular nanotechnology) works in the mine-seed application (This is an idea I had for exploiting methane clathrates, 'fire-ice', the biggest form of hydrocarbon we don't currently use. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, so better to burn it into CO2 and water than to let it get into atmo...). The wallsof the mine-seed are grown from the inside-out and the outside-in, as needed, and then we cut, paste and slide. I estimate a complex, 10^9 atom individual element, 100 atoms wide, about 10 nanometers (10^-8 meter), and 10^5 atoms deep, or 10^-5 m. It would take 10^9*10^-6 seconds or 1,000 seconds per element, provided that all the feedstock and fuel is there. If the mine-seed is a 10 meter cylinder with one meter hemisphere end-caps, which is 10*1*pi + 1^2*pi, or 11*pi m^2, ~11*22/7 m^2 is 242/7 is 34 4/7 m^2. Say this is 4.2 g/cc or 4,200 kg/m^3 and walls 10^-5 thick, so the mass of the mine-seed is 242/7 * 4200 * 1/10^5 is 242*600/10^5 is (1200 + 240 + 12)/1000 is 1452/1000 is 1.452 kg, about 3 pounds. It's a little over 8 tonnes of water... if we give it ballast in the form of some silicate feedstock and pump some air or O2 under pressure, which I want some anyway, for powering the mine-seed.

The mine-seed 'lands' on the seabed, and moves around seeking a methane-clathrate deposit. When it is in the right place, it grows 'roots' into the fire-ice, to harvest the methane for transport and use. The root walls can grab O2 from sea water, CH4 from the ore-body, silicates from the seabed, create more membranes for doing those things and for creating more membrane (not a universal assembler, but a programmable loom or molecular mill, fuel cells, pumps and ducted fans, solenoids and servos, circuitry, all of the things we need to build submersible tankers and freighter for transport and further resource exploration. Or the thing just spreads out under the seabed, growing a pipeline to the land, wherever we need the stuff to go...

I think we need a hundred tonnes of this stuff to go into production; development at one man-hour per atom, a billion atoms times 100 different mills, 10^11 hours divided by 10 years at 2,000 hours per, 2*10^4, so we need 5 million people working for 10 years. If the average worker is costing the effort $100,000 per year for 10 years, or $10^6, which is $5*10^12. Argh! Wages plus stuff, another order of magnitude more... call it a factor of 5, $2.5*10^13. It gives us a mature ASMNT, or the first step to one, a toddler step, as opposed to a baby step.

***

Also thinking how an ASMNT slidewalk would take advantage of silicate materials' natural tendency to form sheets. The moving sheets are tens of millions of atoms thick (10^7*10^-10 m is 10^-3 m) and bunch up at embarkation and disembarkation zones. The edges of the high-speed section roll up, actually sliding apart and then back together again. The system has a slight bow and is permeable, draining water and sifting light dirt below the moving surface. It bunches up, going from a millimeter to five centimeters, and 25 meters per second to 1/2, or 1.8 kilometers per hour, about 1 mph, crawling speed, and up to 90 klicks, over 50 mph. Slow for I-95, but pretty good for a pedestrian. At these speeds, the slidewalk really needs to be enclosed. The 5 meter bowed bed becomes a 10 meter enclosed tunnel. Perhaps the slidewalk is a millimeter thick and goes to 30 cm, about  foot thick, in the slow zone. It rolls over a surface, in turn, which accelerates or decelerates the sheets and swaps out damaged sections as needed. The 10 m tunnel could narrow and accelerate, to 2 m and ~280 mph!

An ASMNT loom could make a new section every 10^5 seconds, a little over a day. Incidentally, the loom or molecular mill could travel inside the 10 million atom thick slidewalk segment as cargo... if the segments carry double-sided molecular mills with feedstock and fuel in the sandwich, they could be offloaded, formed up into pairs and accrete new slidewalk segment anywhere they can be resupplied.

The segments or scales are 1 mm thick and could easily be cubes, but let's make them 2.5 mm by 4 mm, or 1/100 of a cc. They are fairly flexible and can form tubes one cm in diameter. Ten layers would be 3 cm, just over an inch or a fingers' thickness. For manipulation of goods and cargo, we could easily form this stuff into arms and hands. Little three-fingered hands (2 fingers and a thumb) would be 7 cm tubes, short or long arms a little thicker, limbs to be built up into little tube-figures. Six to eight inches thick and maybe one or two feet tall with bland, smiling faces like something out of a manga or anime, they can be summoned from out of the slidewalk by the user, just as the slidewalk building blocks can be formed into chairs, benches, beds or desks and tables as needed. The Tube, tube-men and building blocks have a density of about 4.2 g/cc, but with lots of voids and space between layers to allow for 'softness' or at least 'give', it averages less, call it 2.8. So a 30 cm 'tubie' is more or less a flattened 15 cm tube 30 cm tall. What with the rounded edges and flattening, it is a little over half of 30 by 15^2, say 30*15*8 cc or 3600 cc, or ~10 kg, about 22 pounds. A small dog or fat cat.

Imagine wearing this stuff as powered armor!

Woops, what about speed? The classic loom is operating at 50 megahertz, 5*10^7 times a second, across 10^-8 m, or 1/2 m/s^2, per layer. That's good enough for the slidewalk, which can afford to accelerate people at those speeds, or slower. If we want more, we need only stack up moving layers; ten, or 1 cm is 5 m/s^2, and 2 cm is 10 m/s^2, about one G. We'd need to make exoskeletal battle armor out of faster stuff, but a 'tire' 3 cm thick would have 15 m/s^2 of acceleration. Build a sweet little roadster, even an off-road monster with fat wheels of slidewalk-stuff with a as many wheels as you need, or as few. A unicycle you ride inside of, maybe with outriders, an egg with two fat tank-like treads or half an ellipsoid with dozens of gimballed 7 cm tires, where you lie prone as in a high-speed motorcycle, but a quarter meter off the ground.

With enough energy and materials, I imagine the system could reproduce itself every 10^5 seconds. A week is about 6*10^5 seconds and a year is about 50 times as long, 3*10^7 seconds. Nothing is as simple as that, but change will be faster than we can react as a society, leading to the usual economic, social and general misery in the near-term, opportunity and prosperity in the long-term. If full employment in the ASMNT Project occupied 5 million people for 10 years, then it is a major sector of the national economy. I'd expect it to branch out into energy, manufacturing, transportation, etc. until it is the economy; $2.5 Trillion a year is ~17% of the US economy at present, and the US consumes a quarter of the world's stuff. It wouldn't double every year, although it could. Just to keep things comprehensible, if the ASMNT sector grows at 20% (just a bit faster than China 8-), and employs 10% more people a year, then in 10 years it will be equal to the entire US Economy and employ about 13 million people. Eight years later it will be bigger than the current world economy and employ some 28 million people.

I set this up to start 15 years from now and in 2050 the ASMNT 'Sector' is 11 times as big as the current US GDP, and employs 45 million people. It basically is the economy now; even with strong growth in the regular economy, I expect ASMNT should be more than half of it. In over twenty years it will have replaced most regular manufacturing, resource extraction, transportation, and energy production. It won't replace agriculture, probably, but it will change how farming happens. Robotics would make 'free range' and organic foods cheap. Indoor hydroponic farming would make food production local again.

By 2060, ASMNT produces over a million billion dollars worth of stuff and employees 116 million people, fourteen times as big as I guesstimate the US economy to be in early half a century of slow growth, and occupying the time and energy of over one percent of the world population. Deflation is a given, as more goods chase only so many dollars, plus people won't really need for much. With that kind of wealth, even a corporate state would find it cheaper to buy off dissent with free stuff, especially in a dystopia where corporate-funded welfare provided drugged food, slanted media, etc. I doubt it would be so monolithic, and I hope we could manage 'much more plenty' better than we have managed a little prosperity so far!