Wednesday, November 26, 2008

66 - The band at the edge of time

Official t-shirts and posters were on sale in the lobby and board mixes could be had by the chrononauts arriving anytime between last Thursday and next Friday.

The MC advised everyone to be careful and as dirigible time machines mixed co-ordinates with less conventional moebius runners and tempus fugitrons the band let go with their opening chaos of lights and sound and, with suitable chrono-modulation, music, smpte coded into strobe flashes which had the time vehicles in all their mad inventor's configurations dancing in and out of the vortex of sidereal tenporality so that a distant observer would only have been aware of a single brilliant explosion of noise and light that lasted for less than the time it would take to measure it or register at all.

And the music kept pushing back further into the past, naturally, to make space, since the entire performance was happening that way anyhow.

To the participants, the concert lasted for years, decades, without an apparent break, as the band phased into the next stack of time whenever it pleased them, the audience themselves popped in and out as it suited their individual plans, all synched up relative to each other only instants away from paradox by the all-consuming all-powerful smpte code. Archaic but a universal standard, difficult to replace.

When the concert truly ended, it was because the band had died. Of course, only relatively speaking, for the chrononauts, and the band itself, continued to visit the singularity and watch the show, again and again and again, ever with more participants, until time technology had spanned the universe itself, and everyone who had ever existed with access to time tech was a participant.

It was colossal, universal, immense, populous, gargantuan. So large and massive a pulse in the linear timestream that its moment of totality eventually eclipsed the frame of the concert entirely and with an explosion of coherence, It slipped to the beginning of the history of history.

What began with a heartbeat, ended with the birth of time itself.

But somebody forgot to turn off the amplifiers, and if you tune a radio to the right channel, you can still hear the hiss of abandoned devices of great architecture and unimaginable power.

They wait for the band to return.

T-shirts are still available in the lobby, but unfortunately, the board mix is absolutely, irrevocably, out of stock.

But those T-shirts are wicked, get 'em 'fore their gone, and hurry.

It's later than you think.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

New Model Army

67 - Big surprise for Alice

Left to her own devices for the weekend, Alice, a professional executive for a major manufacturing firm, decided to indulge in a long held secret hobby: she would write another novel. Something she had done since grade school.

She was precocious.

Saturday morning, fresh from a breakfast of toast, coffee, orange juice and eggs, she sat down in front of her computer and cracked her knuckles at the naked page. Writing was as effortless as driving a car in a television commercial for her. She didn't just dive in, she drove in.

She never cracked her knuckles in public because her mother had told her years ago that nice girls don't do that.

She knew this to be a pile of horse droppings but out of respect she continued to obey, it didn't cost her anything.

This is good advice: concessions that cost nothing are better than free.

She had a natural talent for prose, the words were already lined up long before her fingers touched the keyboard, waiting in line in her head like patient dancers in the wings.

One by one, they left her head via her fingers and she had soon darkened hundreds of pristine pages.

Sunday afternoon, with a fresh ream of paper, she printed out a 308 page novel about a woman who makes a shocking discovery.

Then she went to her special closet where she kept all her manuscripts.

She was killed by an avalanche of unsubmitted novels.

Discovered along with her body, each one would ultimately be a best seller.

Monday, November 10, 2008

68 - Feats of Cunning and Daring-Do

It was a devilish plan, full of conceit and bad intentions. There would be mayhem and deviltry and feats of cunning and daring-do. The most conceited of all was our leader, a vain man, rotten in every gummed crack. Also, he was the most eloquent, even inspired, orator I had ever heard.

Foolishness was rife on the eve of the dauntless unblinking moonrise, staring baleful and reeking of antique madness.

Made of cheese? My goodness, what else?

Buckles were thoroughly swashed, flagons of ale quaffed, bodices burst with extravagant abandon, Chandelliers were swung upon, duels were flourished on mysterious staircases to nowhere.

The hapless guards? Comic relief.

A kaleidescope of sweaty hairy roaring humanity sloshing against a tide of naked thighs.

All gone.

The First University of the Built Environment was Göbekli tepe

"Only good is good, it is easy to be a Buddha when you are a prince. Don't follow me, if you find Buddha, kill Buddha, by which I m...