OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO oOOOO OOOO. OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" .OOOOOO OOOOOo OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO OOOOOOO. OOOO oOOOO OOOO .OOOO OOOO OOOOOOOOo OOOO OOOO" OOOO oOOOO OOOO OOOO "OOOO. OOOO OOOOo .OOOO' OOOO .OOOO" OOOO OOOO OOOOoOOOO "OOOO. oOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO..OOOO OOOO "OOOOOOO OOOOoOOOO" OOOO .OOOO"""OOOOOOOO OOOO OOOOOO "OOOOOOO' OOOO oOOOO ""OOOO OOOO "OOOO OOOOOO |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | There Ain't No Justice | | | | #122 | | | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| - Metamorph - Chapter 05 by Arifel V It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe and profitable, and dull. Joseph Conrad we didn't converse at all on the return journey, until we approached the point where we'd seen the neutrino-sources. `do you want to drop out of warp and check them out?' Lydya asked. I thought for a moment, then replied, `no. firstly, we have no idea how powerful they are. secondly, if they examine us and think we're typical humans - despite what they've observed so far - they'll know we've gone way beyond the bounds of their Edicts. if they can't damage us, they'll certainly do some damage to the rest of humanity. thirdly...' i paused. `thirdly, i want to have some goddamn fun before i have to start thinking about overthrowing an evil galactic empire. i want to go back to earth. i want to lie in the sun on a tropical beach. i want to make a shitload of money and give it all away to some charity. i want to freak out some straights.' `well, i can't argue with that. hey, over there - ' she pointed. an asteroid, roughly banana-shaped, about three kilometres across its narrowest axis. i grinned; it would make a good test subject for my mining machines. i dropped out of warp and jetted closer. it rotated slowly, distant sunlight creeping across jagged edges. this was, to me, a familiar pattern; when confronted with a painful truth or a nasty situation, i'd occupy my mind with something else. i'd built a prototype sculptor, tangled in my hair like a flea; i shook it loose and activated it with a brief nanogravitic pulse. it hung in space before me, turning slowly, legs wiggling like a new-born butterfly. as soon as its head found the asteroid, a blue spark appeared at the tip of one leg and it vanished. my mass-sense tracked it zipping towards the asteroid; enhanced vision saw it approach, turn over and hit, travelling at about three meters per second. as soon as it touched down, it sank into the asteroid and was gone. together, we'd refined the design until the replication time was now ninety-five minutes. they'd have to chew away about one-third of the mass before it could be made cubical, say, ten thousand million tonnes. with each sculptor weighing exactly 0.08 of a gram, that would take one hundred and twenty-five thousand million million of them, and because of their low mass, it would be just over ninety hours before they'd multiplied enough to consume that much mass. i didn't want to wait around here that long, but Lydya wanted to see them working, so we hung in space for almost four days, watching the jagged creases smooth out, watching the elongated horns of the asteroid slowly erode. we received chatty telemetry from the neural net once it was up; at one point, when it started requesting additional information, i thought we'd gone and created a new intelligent, gestalt lifeform. we sent it some software updates, and after that it restricted its thoughts to sculpting. it was almost ninety-one hours before the final shape emerged; up to the point where the sculptors swarmed, it appeared to be a fuzzy, dark grey cube. then we received a final signal from the net, and the swarm of sculptors lifted away from the surface. before, where there'd been a boring grey asteroid, there was now a glittering cube, intricate designs etched into the sides in copper. one day, an astronomer with a good telescope and a knowledge of the films of Clive Barker was going to get one hell of a shock. the sculptors clustered together into a single, cloudy lump, like a piece of cotton wool in a glass of water, and turned. we felt gravitic pulses as it searched for a new target; it found one almost immediately. pale blue fire flickered along one side of the cloud, and it slowly drifted away. we followed it until we saw its target, a potato-like lump nine kilometres across. my back-brain came back with the figures: shape would require consumption of six point two percent of the total mass of which was approximately six hundred and thirty-five million million grams, which could be eaten away in a matter of minutes by the huge number of sculptors currently active. when their number reached three hundred thousand million million, they would divide into two groups. i suddenly had a vision of the solar system in a year's time, with hundreds of clouds of sculptors flying back and forth, searching for asteroids to convert into cubes. my final update to their software ordered the swarm to divide into two groups; ten percent of them would stay on, scouting the asteroid belt for potential cubes. the other ninety percent would plot a course for earth and, on the way, build themselves into a kind of silicon foam-bubble material, each sculptor taking apart its neighbour and packing it into the shape of an anvil the size of a bus. we followed the swarm until the first anvil formed. it looked evil, menacing, and very heavy; it was about eighty-five percent vacuum and would sink through the atmosphere slowly, settling wherever it fell like a house made of polystyrene foam. if it fell on the ocean, it would float. together, we watched the anvil drift towards the point where earth would be when it got there. then, without warning, i powered up the half-field drive and sent, `come on, let's go home. there are other things i want to do.' `do you think i've lost too much of my humanity?' i asked, rotating slowly within the field-bubble along the axis of our path, eyes closed. `what do you mean?' Lydya sent back. `well, i used to be obsessed by either food, or sex. and it seems that i don't have any interest in either, at the moment.' `i was like that, just after my Change.' she paused, reminiscing. `oh, yeah. i did some weird shit when i Changed. you get over it soon enough.' another pause. `would you like to come to dinner with me when we get back?' i smiled. `i'd be delighted.' she'd darted off somewhere once we'd entered earth's atmosphere. i dropped into the garage where my car was stored and drove it to the nearby beach. it felt strange, driving a car; i was uncomfortably aware of how dead, how unresponsive it was. i began making plans for giving her a degree of sentience, a nervous system. yeah. when i was finished with her, she'd be able to drive herself. as i looked for a place to park, i thought, why stop there? mass- conversion power-system, so she'd run on fresh air... hype the engine up, rework the suspension... the tyres'd have to be replaced completely. a reproductive system? why not. it'd have to be parthenogenetic, at least, at first... i got out of the car, walked down onto the beach. it was late at night; no-one else here. the scent of wind over afternoon-scorched sand was a familiar one, as if no time at all had passed since i'd walked along this beach at night, out of my mind on vodka and angst. i walked into the shallow water; it soaked into my jeans, and the combination of recent extreme cold and vacuum on Nereid, and the salt water did something to them; they began falling apart, the threads breaking into segments about a centimetre long. i waded out until the water rose up to my chest, the tatters of my clothing floating away with the waves. i analysed the water, and found that there were, after all, minute traces of gold in it. previously i'd believed that that had been some kind of urban myth. i knelt down, submerging, a six-inch slash opening up in my chest, lined with cilii. i swam forward, sucking water in through the vent, filtering it and expelling it from a hole in my lower back. there were some interesting pollutants, but all i was interested in for the moment was the gold. i reached down and scooped up some sand; it had more gold in it than the water did, so i swam down to the bottom and started gulping it down, moving about like a vacuum cleaner, slowly accumulating enough gold to pay for dinner at the restaurant. as i swam back towards the shore, i formed it into a little ingot, about the size of two matchboxes, and stamped a five-pointed star into the top. there was a small group of teenagers on the beach, so i hid my genitalia and made my lower half resemble denim before emerging from the water, the ingot hidden inside me. they gave me some strange looks, and as i climbed into the car, i realised i still had a huge gash in my chest. i smiled and set my body to developing a loose skin made of finely woven black cotton, silk, denim and leather. by the time i got to the restaurant i was decently dressed, the gold ingot sitting in my back pocket. i parked the car, got out and sat on the bonnet, mulling over a plan to convert nitrogen into gold using low-energy sub-atomic manipulation. the answer suddenly presented itself, as answers so often do, and within minutes a replica of a two-dollar coin formed on the palm of my hand, perfect in very detail except for the fact that instead of a copper-gold-nickel amalgam, it was pure gold. i was sure that the waiters wouldn't mind. i just hoped that they'd notice, and not put the coins into general circulation. i kept producing coins until i had seventy dollars' worth; i was working on coin number thirty-six when Lydya dropped out of the sky, wearing a sheer black dress with a gauzy train, her long black hair braided over one shoulder. i slid off the bonnet and offered her my arm; together, we entered the foyer of the restaurant. the food was just as good as the last time i'd been here; i refrained from fully examining it with my Metamorph senses. i wanted to enjoy it simply, as a human would, as i would have a month ago. after about forty minutes, however, i was growing bored. while carefully placing small squares of charcoal-grilled steak into my mouth, i played about with the external layers of skin, changing their colour and texture. ignoring the stares of the other diners, i settled on a pitted metallic grey, as if i were a statue cast out of lead. not to be outdone, Lydya changed her surface appearance to that of green marble, diagonally veined with dark red streaks. i grinned, and altered my frame, slowly stretching until my head almost touched the ceiling, skeletally thin. the other diners would stare for a few minutes then, apparently, decide that we were part of some elaborate video prank. i resumed my original shape but kept the metal surface texture. `this is...' i began. `yes?' she said, briefly turning into translucent jade, vague outlines of her internal organs (i hadn't known that she still used them) visible through her skull. `it makes me want to do something that will make them sit up and look. something that they won't be able to explain away as a stunt, or a special effect, or a hologram.' i thought for a few moments. `i have this strange urge to lie in the sun on the beach of an island in the pacific, somewhere. i'd like to be able to buy it.' my head was swimming with plans, things i wanted to do. i smiled at her. `i think i've regained my inspiration.' a week later; Lydya had gone off to visit some guy named Boyd in America. i'd converted enough nitrogen into gold to be able to purchase a house and fill it with very expensive furniture. i'd decided to make a film. i hadn't decided whether or not i'd use human actors; it would have been easy to simply visualise the whole thing inside my head and project it into the lens of a film camera, but that was too far removed from the process of building sets, costumes and lighting. i sat in a huge, ornate armchair, one leg up on the arm, staring into the open fire, details whirring around inside my mind; plans for nanomachines to build the sets, to generate the null-gravity field (it was set in space), to form into three remote-controlled shells, meat-puppets which would be the primary actors. when finished, it had no overt dialogue; a sound-track consisting of twenty minutes of soft, jangling music along the lines of the Cocteau Twins, followed by half an hour of slightly harder-sounding semi-industrial sounds. the whole thing had a vaguely dark aspect. i had no idea how to go about distributing it other than inviting some of my old human friends around to my new house, to view it. one or two of them wondered where i'd been for the past few months, but they weren't really interested in my answer. i aimed the projector at a large blank wall in a room filled with couches and chairs, turned down the lights and started the film. the titles come up in bright, burning red on a black background: `Each Sleek Dominion' (the title didn't mean anything; i'd selected the words at random, and they seemed just as appropriate as any other). opening shot, a starship (the standard, ornate, over-detailed flashing-light-dotted kind ordinarily associated with late-twentieth-century SF films) flies towards a gas-giant in a binary star system. the ship assumes an orbit around the gas giant. many beautiful shots of the ship against the star-field. inside, a young woman dressed in a glittering black latex uniform floats before a two-dimensional holographic screen on which are images detailing her upcoming mission; a rendezvous with an alien ship. her pale face seems small and delicate due to the shock of black hair that floats around her head like a lion's mane. her hand drifts out and a finger intersects the plane of the screen; the images freeze. the sleeves of her uniform come down into finger- stalls over her thumb and pinky. she floats closer; we see a look of concern plain on her face as she examines the images (we are too close to the screen to see more than a dozen or so translucent grey-green scan-lines). she waves her hand through the screen and it vanishes. arms folded, eyes closed, she floats backward through the gloomy control-room, lit from below by instrumentation, flickering lights. her breasts move strangely beneath her uniform in zero-g. her second-in-command - a young woman wearing a similar uniform, her crimson hair cut short, four pale-white animal claws on a leather thong around her neck - floats in through a circular hatchway set in the wall, folds herself into a ball, tumbles, straightens out and shoots towards her captain. they embrace, kiss and there follows a slowly paced yet torrid lesbian scene, during which they strip off their uniforms, generally nibble and lick each other, ending up in a position where each is grasping the other's thigh and grinding their hips back and forth. cut to: outside, where a gigantic grey-green craft shaped like a conch-shell spirals through space towards the human starship. it halts a short distance away (this is where the industrial music takes over). cut to the inside of this ship, which is uncomfortably Gigeresque; a huge hallway which curves around and out of view, lit by harshly bright white spheres, filmed on an angle. (all of these scenes were actually done on earth; i'd bought an old gymnasium, knocked out the first and second floor and set up a series of gravity filters in the football-field sized space. i'd had to make the place airtight because whenever the zero-g effects were on, the air tried to rush out of the roof.) the young woman, naked, floats through the spiral. a hessian bag is tethered to one foot, and it jerks along behind her. she explores the hallway until she reaches the point where the gap is around twice her height; she then turns back and follows the spiral outwards again. she is met by some kind of alien, resembling three rubber balls joined together inside a stocking, bright yellow slick- looking surfaces. the spherical sections deform, shudderingly, as if they were balloons full of jelly. the leading sphere (with four double-jointed but otherwise disturbingly human-looking arms arranged around the side) comes to a blunt-nosed point, like a teardrop. the alien and the girl float about two metres apart, each cautiously regarding the other. the girl opens the hessian sack and produces a cat-o'-nine tails, which she lashes back and forth confidently. the alien cowers, the two outer spheres contracting towards the centre one, the arms partially retracting into the front sphere. the girl gently brushes the whip across the alien's snout and says something reassuring; (no subtitles... i was originally aiming for a dream-like mood; i got away from this as what passed for a plot developed, but occasional touches remained) the alien appears to relax and the arms emerge. somehow, they move closer together; the alien grasps her legs with two arms and the snout elongates and grows narrower at the end. she spreads her legs and sinks down on the end of the snout, shuddering. as they thrust against each other alternate segments of the walls begin to glow in a sequence, light pulsing towards the centre of the conch. as she approaches orgasm, the lights pulse faster... cut to: outside; the alien ship is glowing, the pulses spiralling inwards faster and faster; the whole ship glows bright blue-white, there is a dazzling flash (a few frames of pure white) and the ship is gone. close-up of a slowly turning bubble, a wobbling gelatinous balloon, the captain visible through the transparent sides against the starry backdrop. ú ùþ ú ú þù ú ÛÛÛÛÛÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜ ú ù ú ú ù ú ÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜÛÛÛÛÛ ±±±±ÛÛÛßÛ²ÝÛÝÛÛÝþ Üú úÜ þÝÛÛÝÛݲÛßÛÛÛ±±±± ±±±±²²²²²ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜþúÝ ù ù ÝúþÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ²²²²²±±±± ±±²²²²ÛÛßßÛßÝÛÛÛÛÛÝÜúþ þúÜÝÛÛÛÛÛÝßÛßßÛÛ²²²²±± ²²²²²Ûß þúßÞþßþþÜùþ þùÜþþßþÞßúþ ßÛ²²²²² ²²²²Ûß ú ù ù ú ßÛ²²²² ²²²ÛÝ ÝÛ²²² ²²²ÛÜ ÜÛ²²² ±²²²ÛÝ ÝÛ²²²± ±±²²²ÛÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÛ²²²±± ±±±²²²²²²ÛÜ Phoenix Modernz Systems: 908/830-TANJ ÜÛ²²²²²²±±± ÛÛ±±±±±±²²²Û VapourWare BBS: 61/3-429-8510 Û²²²±±±±±±ÛÛ ÛÛ±±±±±±²²²Û underworld_1995.com 514/683-1894 Û²²²±±±±±±ÛÛ ±±±²²²²²²ÛÜ RipCo ][: 312/528-5020 ÜÛ²²²²²²±±± ±±²²²ÛÜÜÜ etext.archive.umich.org ÜÜÜÛ²²²±± ±²²²ÛÝ ÝÛ²²²± ²²²ÛÜ ÜÛ²²² ²²²ÛÝ ÕÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ͸ ÝÛ²²² ²²²²Ûß ú ù ³ TANJ Mailing Address ³ ù ú ßÛ²²²² ²²²²²Ûß þúßÞþßþþÜùþ ³ PO Box 174 ³ þùÜþþßþÞßúþ ßÛ²²²²² ±±²²²²ÛÛßßÛßÝÛÛÛÛÛÝÜúþ ³ Seaside Hts, NJ ³ þúÜÝÛÛÛÛÛÝßÛßßÛÛ²²²²±± ±±±±²²²²²ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜþúÝ ù ³ 08751 ³ ù ÝúþÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ²²²²²±±±± ±±±±ÛÛÛßÛ²ÝÛÝÛÛÝþ Üú ÔÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ; úÜ þÝÛÛÝÛݲÛßÛÛÛ±±±± ÛÛÛÛÛÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜ ú ù ú tanj@pms.metronj.org ú ù ú ÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜÛÛÛÛÛ TANJ Distribution List: Send mail to talmeta@cybercomm.net to be added to the TANJ-DL!