Friday 17 December 2010
Thursday 16 December 2010
Appendectomy
Irritating little suffixes appended to statements to convert them into questions are irritating, no? Yes?
As always, click if you aren't eagle-eyed like me.
As always, click if you aren't eagle-eyed like me.
Tuesday 2 November 2010
Girls
This one feels a lot like an xkcd strip, so there might just be one which looks just like this. My apologies for any unintended rehashing, but I simply had to put this one down on paper. (More lunchtime musings btw.)
Thursday 28 October 2010
Friday 15 October 2010
Tuesday 12 October 2010
Monday 4 October 2010
Friday 1 October 2010
Thoughtomaton
Workplace lunchbreak musings.
EDIT: Again, since the flowchart is apparently difficult to follow without context, here's half an introduction. Start at the box which says 'THE PROBLEM' in big, underlined capital letters. This flowchart captures all the states your fickle mind passes through on the way (maybe not, depending on your vocation) to a solution.
EDIT: Again, since the flowchart is apparently difficult to follow without context, here's half an introduction. Start at the box which says 'THE PROBLEM' in big, underlined capital letters. This flowchart captures all the states your fickle mind passes through on the way (maybe not, depending on your vocation) to a solution.
Wednesday 1 September 2010
Tuesday 31 August 2010
Sleep Ego
This one's dedicated to the two progenitors of humanity's future evolution: Binit Ranjan Mishra and Soumyadeep Ghosh.
Sunday 22 August 2010
Chain Writing 1: The Race
During one of my mental wordplay sessions, this idea popped up into my head fully formed. Have fun!
Thousands of flag waving supporters in their collective Sunday best person is going to win. That’s the way racing always works out for him this time at least. It was sad to see his injury last place finishers don’t even get bragging rights this time as they get relegated. There, the contestants have just stepped on to the track them this time, with the numerous cameras both street-side and in the cockpit. The rows of starting lamps light up one by one and they are off the track goes our first victim. A smooth start has propelled the fan favourite to the front approaching, leaving the fans wondering if rain will play spoilsport yet again. Wait, there’s action halfway down the grid of blinking red lights announces the collision and the impending arrival of the safety monitor. A set of boring laps ensues with the monotony only broken below, having jumped the three story high fence to get a piece of the action. Meanwhile, on the track the safety monitor has been removed, and the race is on to him now with the huge lead eaten away by the safety delays. The rest of the field spaces out quickly enough time to catch him up? The fan favourite, the contestant in the bright red has to hang on for three time champion in the iridescent blue breathing down his neck. Another lap is gobbled up and nothing has changed it seems to be inching closer and closer to a tight victory. Surely this race has no more aces the S-curve with a blindingly perfect line, and moves a little bit closer to the leader. It’s the last lap now or never for an overtaking move. He cuts onto the outside, hits the throttle his chances of a victory with that disastrous move. The man everyone loves to love, the man who rose from the ashes of a crippling injury is almost sprays the cameraman with an exuberant wave of the champagne bottle.
Saturday 21 August 2010
Friday 20 August 2010
The Pits
Have you ever wondered what a butterfly feels like moments before it’s born? The unique feeling of suffocation that’s a debilitating concoction of impotence, and frustration at that state of impotence. It’s almost claustrophobic, but without the accompanying dread. The butterfly-to-be is perfectly aware that the process is in motion, and that nothing it does, or feels, is going to change that fact. Yet, that special agony of being trapped in a limbo state, a black box with no pinhole, remains.
Have you ever wondered how it would feel like to be at the heart of a nuke moments before it goes off? Perhaps you would feel the choking pressure of the tremendous amounts of energy compressed into the tiniest of spaces. Perhaps you would begin to ‘see’ the mad dance of the Universe’s most miniscule inhabitants - the way you normally see birds, skyscrapers and well dressed women- and their frenzy, their sheer undiluted restlessness hidden away in a facade of stillness. Maybe, what you would feel won’t all be awe. You might feel helpless at the stark inevitability of it all. Or perhaps, in the final moments, the last remnants of your optimism would rally, and you would hope that Sanity hits the off switch real quick.
Do you even know what a fragile state of being is? Have you ever put yourself in the place of, say, a soap bubble? No, don’t stop at the spherical shape. Wear the soapy film of the bubble like a second skin. Experience the delicate balance of forces that keeps the body from dissolving into nothingness. Forces that, at face value, are completely mismatched: it’s only your inherent elasticity, a love for your own skin if you will, that keeps at bay the powerful and insidious forces that the outer realm teems with. Appreciate this fact, and you might just begin to see the meaning of a fragile state of being.
Did you get all that? Now you might, you just might, get a faint inkling of how I feel when I’m listening to metal sitting in an overpopulated cab with five other people.
Wednesday 18 August 2010
The Word
This one's a tribute to an incredibly powerful weapon: one that confers on its wielder an almost supernatural ability of argument, and one that makes conversation itself redundant.
Tuesday 17 August 2010
Vows
I've picked these up off the top of my head. Fellow geekoids, please feel free to append to the list: we're talking about a very sacred institution after all.
PS: As always, click to zoom.
Friday 13 August 2010
Thursday 12 August 2010
A Day In My Life
To me, most days are the same. I wake up when everyone else is snoring away in bed, and I’m already at work by the time sleepy hands start reaching for the snooze button. It wouldn’t be all that hard to rebel. In fact it would be really easy. But, philosophically speaking, what purpose would that serve beyond a momentary satiation of the ego? I believe that everyone has a part to play in keeping the giant clock that’s our world ticking, and that petty bouts of jealousy have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Besides, if I were to be honest with myself, I’d be compelled to admit that I rather enjoy it. There is a certain charm to a workplace without workers. It’s the only time of the day when I can safely pretend that the world is indeed my oyster. Sigh. Perhaps it’s only a big-fish-in-a-small-pond kind of feeling of security, but no less pleasant for that. Once I had plenty of ambition. I would be wealthy and successful. I would be kind and magnanimous, yet respected by all. I would rule a kingdom of lesser people. I would be the big fish in the big pond. Now all that’s left is a weary body full of aching bones, that begs me, every single minute, to stop. To end a lifetime of thankless service, to let go once and for all. No, sir! I’m far from done. I might be old and tired, but compared to the pesky little rats who claim lordship over me, I have boundless energy!
Speaking of little pests, there comes my supervisor. Such a little creature, yet so powerful! Everything he touches turns to gold, it seems. I’m speaking from his point of view of course. Any viewpoint that claims neutrality would be forced to scratch away the veneer of glitter, and discover the murkiness beneath; the base substance made of the sweat and toil of uncountable others like me. Oh yes, I’ve heard stories. This man, no I won’t call him little again– physical stature doesn’t count for much where I work, squeezes every last minute of work out of these good people and dumps them, unceremoniously. The more I see of the machinations of this world, the very same machinations I’ve sworn to respect, the more obscure they appear to me.
What is clear to me is that I’m no different from all my predecessors. The same fate awaits me: a future that ends with me lying broken, useless, and forgotten, except for a shiny badge on his chest. You might ask me why I don’t heed the call of my body. Give up on my own terms. You don’t really understand me then. Giving in to weakness is just... abhorrent. Can the seconds hand on a clock stop moving simply because it’s tired? At the risk of overcooking the metaphor, the only acceptable way for the seconds hand to stop working would require the clock to get replaced.
There. I’ve gone off on one of my wild thought trips again. Don’t get me wrong. While I’m a bit too talkative for my own good, it’ll take a lot more than resentment to break the rules. I’d never turn on my supervisor. I can’t say the same about my some of my fellow workers though. Every society has them. The reachers, the dreamers, the gaily coloured pretenders. Like the brightest stars, they live short and dazzling lives, almost always beyond their true means. But unlike the stars, it’s the little ones that suffer the affliction. Every day I have to put up with their nippy little pranks and sharp tongues. I’m of course easy prey, with a lumbering body and a generally saintly disposition, but at least I have the consolation that I’ll outlive three generations of them. Their masters are just like them, addicted to the razzmatazz, and consequently infinitely more cruel and demanding than mine. Having said all that, my mask of saintliness does slip sometimes. And my, how they scatter, fleeing my rage like flies from a fire.
It’s my lunch break now. Actually it’s my supervisor that has the lunch, I just get the break bit. Watching the fussy little man eat, I can’t help but notice the hangers-on. Noisy hordes of people like him that are just about everywhere. Even now, they swarm every place I can see, which again makes me wonder: how can there be more supervisors than the supervised? Ha, I guess I just don’t know everything. Technically I report to only one supervisor, but these pathetic midgets, all of them behave like they own me. I don’t know if they simply do enough boot-licking to curry favours with my boss, or if they really do own me, in some sense, as common property. They expect me to do the simplest things for them, and they expect me to do that all the time. Sometimes I wonder if I’m carrying them up their career paths myself. Sigh. Rules, rules.
Fatigue is like your ego. You never get used to it, and it affects everything you do. Well, it’s been my companion for several hours now. Sunset’s come and gone, the moon’s shining radiantly high in the sky, the drone of the buzzards only gets louder with the switching on of their artificial lights, but my work goes on. Mine’s no nine-to-five job after all. It’s tough being a bus.
Wednesday 11 August 2010
Monday 9 August 2010
Sunday 8 August 2010
Metaphors and Time
My very first comic mash-up, and thank you, Superlame!
PS: I suspect you won't be able to read the speech bubbles. Just click on the image to see the expanded version.
Wednesday 3 February 2010
Beyond the Unknown
I did have some solid science fiction speculation behind this one, but it seems to have got lost in the mysticism. And I'm trying to do something I've dodged in the past: portray the protagonist as an emotional entity, and not just someone who unravels a beautiful new world. Caustic criticism is welcome.
It was an important day for the planet, a fact that most of its inhabitants were blissfully unaware of. Amidst the tiny subset who occupied the sprawling mission control centre room however, the sensation was almost heady. There was a palpable, yet indefinable something that hung in the air; a powerful emotion that, to the biased eyes of Ack, seemed to be a mixture of too much euphoria and too little anxiety. Perhaps the secrecy associated with the operation gave these men and women a feeling of shared megalomania; a form of lunacy most dangerous, as its only symptom was a heightened sense of rationality. Perhaps this primal emotion was yet another manifestation of that blasted agon. After all the time and effort the Organization had spent in trying to weed it out, it was still around. He felt the beginnings of an uncontrollable rage. It would soon spread all over his body like a tidal wave, and he would end up doing stupid. He tried to call upon his extensive scientific training to fight it, perhaps with the naïve hope that the anger would simply be cast off as something wasteful. The same logic and the same rationality he had always prided himself on seemed to fuel the rage. Falsehoods! That was all that his logical arguments were. They were all lies! He turned to face the smartly dressed woman seated in front of him.
It was the Age of Space. But this was no space faring generation Carl Sagan would have envisioned. Where was the death knell for religious superstition? Where was the drug that would open minds and heal the world? This was supposed to be the time when the foremost sentient beings of the planet would finally accept the responsibility that status entailed. This was supposed to be the time when humility would rise up and smite down petty parochialism. If there was a plot to this tale, it was one the characters did not understand. The sentients were to finally take the first steps into planetary adulthood. Where had it all gone wrong? More and more people began to ally themselves with the idea of sentient pride. This notion became so widespread that it got a name of its own, a name that carried no traces of its negative origins. Agon. Perhaps this agon was created in anticipation of a first contact. Perhaps it had always been there, subliminal, waiting for the right stimulus. New religions drew on the sentient race’s rightful claim to the vast riches the Universe possessed. Governments launched multitudes of spacecraft into the sky, ostensibly with scientific motives. The truth, and retrospection never lies, was that they waited for War. There were hostiles out there. They only had to seek them out with the right tools.
To the world she was an ordinary space trader. A filthy rich and politically well-connected one, but still she was just another person who had made a fortune off extraplanetary minerals. The media adored her; not only did she possess a delectable holier-than-thou religious persona, but was good looking to boot. She was closer to middle age than youth in reality, but this only seemed to add to her aura, not take away from it. She was perfect, and she was the head of the Organization. The cloudhead-in-chief if you will.
“I know why you requested for this meeting, Doctor. And you know perfectly well that we cannot act on mere hunches. Sorry.” Anyone else would have come across as harsh with that sentence, but not her. Certainly not her. The ease with which she controlled others, her calm, her beauty, everything about her, despite himself he felt the stirrings of an old infatuation. He fought it back. He had waited weeks for this meeting, and he would have his say.
“Well, I cannot emphasize the graveness of the danger we might be exposing ourselves to. The tablet… “
She cut him off. “The tablet speaks of a mythical tale that you established was simply a cover for the complex mathematical data it hid within. They did not want to appear anachronistic in any way, and what better way to do so than cook up a tale of world destruction? The wrath of the Gods is all-powerful and we must atone for our sins.” She smiled sweetly, and the whole effect was to reduce his Ack’s misgivings to adolescent fatalism. But she was so tolerant, wasn’t she? She would forgive him for his indiscretion.
Ack was not done yet. “I agree, madam. But why? The question here is why? Why would they go to such lengths to hide the data? The levels of indirection in the mathematical data were so complex and in such abundance that you are forced to ask the question – What if there is meaning to the story?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor. I cannot help you here. I understand your concerns, but you, of all people, should understand the magnitude of the task we have set ourselves. We cannot fail. We simply cannot.” A slight change in intonation told him that the meeting was at an end. The virulent rage that had been gradually building up in him lately set off on its usual process of delicate seduction. He hid his trembling hands under the polished desk in front of him. He had more to say, plenty more, but he would have to go.
They were believed to be just another group of religious nuts. A drop in the dirty ocean, a face in the noisy rabble, they were mostly ignored by the establishment. At the time when pride in one’s species was at its zenith, these people rejected the agon. They claimed that sentience was the only true law of the Universe, and that it was everywhere. Why do we not see it then? To this they had an easy answer: other sentient races cannot be seen because they lie outside our ‘natural’ laws. If only we look hard enough and long enough, we will eventually find an anomaly. With this hope they turned to the stars. For many, many years they waited and watched. What they sought was not the bustling alien metropolis of the astronomers; instead they looked for the signature of a massive sentience, a slow, brooding power that worked at galactic time scales on the fabric of the cosmos itself. They came to be known as the cloudheads.
Ack walked into the mission control centre. He noticed that he had drawn the attention of a couple of his physicist acquaintances, and waved cheerily back. Once again his conformism disgusted him. Why should he try so hard to keep others happy? Let them see the veil of hopelessness that surrounded him. Let them see him for what he really was. If he was right, what did it matter now? Before his rebellious thoughts could come to any kind of fruition, he found himself distracted by one of the monitors. It showed a feed from the probe’s left panel camera. Twenty three light years away, in the heart of the predicted ‘anomaly’, space looked like anywhere else. Black. Featureless. The huge timer board that hung from the ceiling of the control centre informed him that the probe was in position and would discharge its payload in a little over an hour. A new emotion swept over him. Determination, and a sense of purpose he thought had been irretrievably lost. He would study the tablet one last time.
The evidence came not from the stars, but from the soil of their own planet. It was a piece of clay, a tablet which told the story of a long dead race. It should have been nothing more than a run of the mill archaeological relic, but for a series of incredible coincidences. First was the takeover. The Organization (this was what they had begun to call themselves) had its usual share of wealthy benefactors, like any other cult. One of them was a beautiful young space trader who went by the colloquial tag of Tel. One of Tel’s numerous archaeological consortia had found the tablet, and after exhaustive study concluded that it was nothing more than what it seemed. By way of giving him something to do, Tel handed over the tablet to a young cryptographer at the Organization for analysis. This young man was yet another in the growing group of intellectuals who had been seduced by the cloudheads’ metaphysics. Ack was what his friends called him, and he was one who took his work seriously. He immediately realized, with the mathematician’s eye for patterns, that the system of grooves that covered the tablet were not random. After painstaking work, he uncovered something akin to a scientist’s report. It spoke of a weakness in the ‘vortex’ of existential flux, a weakness that could be broken through with the right amount of energy. The cloudheads had finally found their laboratory, and nothing would stop them from conducting the experiment. They would launch a space probe to the ‘anomaly’ and use it to rip a hole in spacetime. Oh, yes, that would send the other sentients a message.
He studied the tablet in his chambers. Every ridge on the otherwise smooth surface, every scratched alphabet in the story, he knew by heart. He also knew that there were parts of the hidden cipher that had been decoded but not understood. They held the key to his puzzle. Increased sounds of frenzy from the control room tickled his eardrums. It must be nearly time. He began to despair, and wondered whether he should go back to the control centre and just watch the detonation. Then it happened. The only orgasm that the thinking mind can experience: a surge of pure pleasure that accompanies an almost Platonic transfer of new ideas to the scientific theoretician’s saturated brain. He suddenly knew what the story meant. A cold chill washed over him. The Guardians were real. He had to tell the others. He had to, there was no time. They were going to come for them. But, even in the moment of his greatest triumph, he could not totally ignore sensory percepts. The mission control centre had gone completely quiet.
The story the tablet told was not something knew. It spoke of excesses; it spoke of punishment and it spoke of redemption. They had overreached; they had delved into the books of the Gods, they had learnt too much and now they had to atone for it. The Guardians would come and destroy them all for their impertinence. The story, especially after the mathematical secrets on the tablet were unravelled, seemed particularly allegorical. It was ignored. The cloudheads did not quite know what would happen if the ‘anomaly’ was torn apart, but they knew that it would expose the Universe of a higher sentience. Perhaps it would show a Universe in which stars, galaxies, or even groups of galaxies would be the tiniest of its constituents, or perhaps it would reveal an infinity of Universes enclosed within those miniscule entities called quarks. The cloudheads went underground. This was a long term project and needed the utmost secrecy. They certainly had the financial backing; they just needed the right technology. Oh, yes, they were going to send a message, and not just to other sentient races.
Something unexpected had happened. The screens still showed the same dull black swathe of nothingness, but this was not any feed from outer space. The feed was lost to the mission control, on all cameras. The result of the detonation was unknown. What if the probe itself had been destroyed? No one spoke. Perhaps they were all hoping for something to happen that would convince them that years of work had not just been lost in a heartbeat. Ack barely held in check a strange new feeling that threatened to overwhelm him: it was mostly euphoria with a tinge of anxiety. Something was going to happen, and he would be damned if it would happen to all of them. They did not deserve any of it. There was no malice in that thought. It was too late for that. He made his way back to his chambers, just as his brain convulsed in the throes of another magnificent vision.
Plato, and the ancient Greeks would have loved to see what he could see. The Universe was... Ideal. They were everywhere, and everything existed because of them. They were breathtakingly beautiful and immeasurably perfect. Maybe you could call them a source of boundless light, but putting words to his vision would be sullying its infinite purity. It was such a noble thing, he could hardly bear to look at it, but it was everywhere. They were here to take him. How could he ever have thought they meant harm? He understood their purpose. They had to maintain the equilibrium between the levels. Was there somebody who controlled them? Was there a sentience that stitched together the laws of sentience itself? Oh, how perfect they were! He suddenly felt forgiveness. He pleaded with the illuminated nothingness around him. Don’t take the others. Just don’t give them what they want, that should keep the barriers in place. It was always about him. He was the anomaly and he would fix it.
It was an important day for the planet, a fact that most of its inhabitants were blissfully unaware of. Amidst the tiny subset who occupied the sprawling mission control centre room however, the sensation was almost heady. There was a palpable, yet indefinable something that hung in the air; a powerful emotion that, to the biased eyes of Ack, seemed to be a mixture of too much euphoria and too little anxiety. Perhaps the secrecy associated with the operation gave these men and women a feeling of shared megalomania; a form of lunacy most dangerous, as its only symptom was a heightened sense of rationality. Perhaps this primal emotion was yet another manifestation of that blasted agon. After all the time and effort the Organization had spent in trying to weed it out, it was still around. He felt the beginnings of an uncontrollable rage. It would soon spread all over his body like a tidal wave, and he would end up doing stupid. He tried to call upon his extensive scientific training to fight it, perhaps with the naïve hope that the anger would simply be cast off as something wasteful. The same logic and the same rationality he had always prided himself on seemed to fuel the rage. Falsehoods! That was all that his logical arguments were. They were all lies! He turned to face the smartly dressed woman seated in front of him.
It was the Age of Space. But this was no space faring generation Carl Sagan would have envisioned. Where was the death knell for religious superstition? Where was the drug that would open minds and heal the world? This was supposed to be the time when the foremost sentient beings of the planet would finally accept the responsibility that status entailed. This was supposed to be the time when humility would rise up and smite down petty parochialism. If there was a plot to this tale, it was one the characters did not understand. The sentients were to finally take the first steps into planetary adulthood. Where had it all gone wrong? More and more people began to ally themselves with the idea of sentient pride. This notion became so widespread that it got a name of its own, a name that carried no traces of its negative origins. Agon. Perhaps this agon was created in anticipation of a first contact. Perhaps it had always been there, subliminal, waiting for the right stimulus. New religions drew on the sentient race’s rightful claim to the vast riches the Universe possessed. Governments launched multitudes of spacecraft into the sky, ostensibly with scientific motives. The truth, and retrospection never lies, was that they waited for War. There were hostiles out there. They only had to seek them out with the right tools.
To the world she was an ordinary space trader. A filthy rich and politically well-connected one, but still she was just another person who had made a fortune off extraplanetary minerals. The media adored her; not only did she possess a delectable holier-than-thou religious persona, but was good looking to boot. She was closer to middle age than youth in reality, but this only seemed to add to her aura, not take away from it. She was perfect, and she was the head of the Organization. The cloudhead-in-chief if you will.
“I know why you requested for this meeting, Doctor. And you know perfectly well that we cannot act on mere hunches. Sorry.” Anyone else would have come across as harsh with that sentence, but not her. Certainly not her. The ease with which she controlled others, her calm, her beauty, everything about her, despite himself he felt the stirrings of an old infatuation. He fought it back. He had waited weeks for this meeting, and he would have his say.
“Well, I cannot emphasize the graveness of the danger we might be exposing ourselves to. The tablet… “
She cut him off. “The tablet speaks of a mythical tale that you established was simply a cover for the complex mathematical data it hid within. They did not want to appear anachronistic in any way, and what better way to do so than cook up a tale of world destruction? The wrath of the Gods is all-powerful and we must atone for our sins.” She smiled sweetly, and the whole effect was to reduce his Ack’s misgivings to adolescent fatalism. But she was so tolerant, wasn’t she? She would forgive him for his indiscretion.
Ack was not done yet. “I agree, madam. But why? The question here is why? Why would they go to such lengths to hide the data? The levels of indirection in the mathematical data were so complex and in such abundance that you are forced to ask the question – What if there is meaning to the story?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor. I cannot help you here. I understand your concerns, but you, of all people, should understand the magnitude of the task we have set ourselves. We cannot fail. We simply cannot.” A slight change in intonation told him that the meeting was at an end. The virulent rage that had been gradually building up in him lately set off on its usual process of delicate seduction. He hid his trembling hands under the polished desk in front of him. He had more to say, plenty more, but he would have to go.
They were believed to be just another group of religious nuts. A drop in the dirty ocean, a face in the noisy rabble, they were mostly ignored by the establishment. At the time when pride in one’s species was at its zenith, these people rejected the agon. They claimed that sentience was the only true law of the Universe, and that it was everywhere. Why do we not see it then? To this they had an easy answer: other sentient races cannot be seen because they lie outside our ‘natural’ laws. If only we look hard enough and long enough, we will eventually find an anomaly. With this hope they turned to the stars. For many, many years they waited and watched. What they sought was not the bustling alien metropolis of the astronomers; instead they looked for the signature of a massive sentience, a slow, brooding power that worked at galactic time scales on the fabric of the cosmos itself. They came to be known as the cloudheads.
Ack walked into the mission control centre. He noticed that he had drawn the attention of a couple of his physicist acquaintances, and waved cheerily back. Once again his conformism disgusted him. Why should he try so hard to keep others happy? Let them see the veil of hopelessness that surrounded him. Let them see him for what he really was. If he was right, what did it matter now? Before his rebellious thoughts could come to any kind of fruition, he found himself distracted by one of the monitors. It showed a feed from the probe’s left panel camera. Twenty three light years away, in the heart of the predicted ‘anomaly’, space looked like anywhere else. Black. Featureless. The huge timer board that hung from the ceiling of the control centre informed him that the probe was in position and would discharge its payload in a little over an hour. A new emotion swept over him. Determination, and a sense of purpose he thought had been irretrievably lost. He would study the tablet one last time.
The evidence came not from the stars, but from the soil of their own planet. It was a piece of clay, a tablet which told the story of a long dead race. It should have been nothing more than a run of the mill archaeological relic, but for a series of incredible coincidences. First was the takeover. The Organization (this was what they had begun to call themselves) had its usual share of wealthy benefactors, like any other cult. One of them was a beautiful young space trader who went by the colloquial tag of Tel. One of Tel’s numerous archaeological consortia had found the tablet, and after exhaustive study concluded that it was nothing more than what it seemed. By way of giving him something to do, Tel handed over the tablet to a young cryptographer at the Organization for analysis. This young man was yet another in the growing group of intellectuals who had been seduced by the cloudheads’ metaphysics. Ack was what his friends called him, and he was one who took his work seriously. He immediately realized, with the mathematician’s eye for patterns, that the system of grooves that covered the tablet were not random. After painstaking work, he uncovered something akin to a scientist’s report. It spoke of a weakness in the ‘vortex’ of existential flux, a weakness that could be broken through with the right amount of energy. The cloudheads had finally found their laboratory, and nothing would stop them from conducting the experiment. They would launch a space probe to the ‘anomaly’ and use it to rip a hole in spacetime. Oh, yes, that would send the other sentients a message.
He studied the tablet in his chambers. Every ridge on the otherwise smooth surface, every scratched alphabet in the story, he knew by heart. He also knew that there were parts of the hidden cipher that had been decoded but not understood. They held the key to his puzzle. Increased sounds of frenzy from the control room tickled his eardrums. It must be nearly time. He began to despair, and wondered whether he should go back to the control centre and just watch the detonation. Then it happened. The only orgasm that the thinking mind can experience: a surge of pure pleasure that accompanies an almost Platonic transfer of new ideas to the scientific theoretician’s saturated brain. He suddenly knew what the story meant. A cold chill washed over him. The Guardians were real. He had to tell the others. He had to, there was no time. They were going to come for them. But, even in the moment of his greatest triumph, he could not totally ignore sensory percepts. The mission control centre had gone completely quiet.
The story the tablet told was not something knew. It spoke of excesses; it spoke of punishment and it spoke of redemption. They had overreached; they had delved into the books of the Gods, they had learnt too much and now they had to atone for it. The Guardians would come and destroy them all for their impertinence. The story, especially after the mathematical secrets on the tablet were unravelled, seemed particularly allegorical. It was ignored. The cloudheads did not quite know what would happen if the ‘anomaly’ was torn apart, but they knew that it would expose the Universe of a higher sentience. Perhaps it would show a Universe in which stars, galaxies, or even groups of galaxies would be the tiniest of its constituents, or perhaps it would reveal an infinity of Universes enclosed within those miniscule entities called quarks. The cloudheads went underground. This was a long term project and needed the utmost secrecy. They certainly had the financial backing; they just needed the right technology. Oh, yes, they were going to send a message, and not just to other sentient races.
Something unexpected had happened. The screens still showed the same dull black swathe of nothingness, but this was not any feed from outer space. The feed was lost to the mission control, on all cameras. The result of the detonation was unknown. What if the probe itself had been destroyed? No one spoke. Perhaps they were all hoping for something to happen that would convince them that years of work had not just been lost in a heartbeat. Ack barely held in check a strange new feeling that threatened to overwhelm him: it was mostly euphoria with a tinge of anxiety. Something was going to happen, and he would be damned if it would happen to all of them. They did not deserve any of it. There was no malice in that thought. It was too late for that. He made his way back to his chambers, just as his brain convulsed in the throes of another magnificent vision.
Plato, and the ancient Greeks would have loved to see what he could see. The Universe was... Ideal. They were everywhere, and everything existed because of them. They were breathtakingly beautiful and immeasurably perfect. Maybe you could call them a source of boundless light, but putting words to his vision would be sullying its infinite purity. It was such a noble thing, he could hardly bear to look at it, but it was everywhere. They were here to take him. How could he ever have thought they meant harm? He understood their purpose. They had to maintain the equilibrium between the levels. Was there somebody who controlled them? Was there a sentience that stitched together the laws of sentience itself? Oh, how perfect they were! He suddenly felt forgiveness. He pleaded with the illuminated nothingness around him. Don’t take the others. Just don’t give them what they want, that should keep the barriers in place. It was always about him. He was the anomaly and he would fix it.
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