Archive for May, 2010
The Day Without a Story
Friday, May 7th, 2010
It was the day without a story. At least, if we were reading the dials and blinking lights correctly.
The fictiometer sat in the middle of Professor Woodfern’s desk, whirring and clanking.
“According to this,” he said, nose grazing the pages of the operation’s manual as he read, “we’re in a state of storylessness. It has no beginning and no end.” He looked up, and got that voice he had when he dictated articles on critical theory, “An atemporal state of irremediable middleness. A paramodern and yet curiously prelapsarian condition attended by the utter suspension of causality.”
“Meaning?” I said. The machine was beginning to overheat, so I hoisted the nearest window open a couple inches.
“Events happen, and other events follow, but nothing causes anything else. It’s all isolated, as if the laws of profluence had been suspended.” There was a quiver in his voice as he looked out the window, where the shadow of the clock tower didn’t fall on the roses.
An airplane droned overhead.
My scalp tingled.
In the next office, someone sang a tune without words, only to be interrupted by their own laughter.
I picked up the operation’s manual, and clonked the side of the fictiometer with it the way you’d bang the side of a malfunctioning TV.
The readings didn’t change.
“So it’s true,” I said.
And then, other things happened.
Maybe why he didn’t want to be involved
Thursday, May 6th, 2010
Yeah, D’miss and I, we own exoarcheology. We translated a newly discovered example of Precursor writing, which we found etched onto a billion-year-old polished stone standing upright at the geographic center of a rubble-strewn plain. Mauger the rubble, the place was flat as a pancake. Must have been an important spot. Now? Sole remaining trace of life on a long-dead world. The stone, with its inscription, the only fabricated object within lightyears. The Precursors were the oldest interstellar civilization; their ruins range in age from 1.8 to 0.9 gigayears. The few known examples of their writing had been enough for Odaro to crack the code – to translate. Yeah, that Odaro. Not just a writer and singer. I know; his translations haven’t been published yet. Heard rumors at the last Interstellar Archeological Congress. We tried to contact him after IAC, but he blew us off. At first he said he’d try to squeeze us in, but then he said he was too busy, when he’d merely glanced at a photo of the stone. After that, even his autoclerk wouldn’t respond to messages. So we fixed his ass. The AI Klondyke hacked his linguistic database. With its help we tackled the new inscription ourselves. The translation was surprisingly easy to come up with, though we’re not sure what to make of it. Here’s what we’ve got so far.
Some flowers have color, others do too,
food additives have flavor, and I love you.
So the oldest known poem is … doggerel, of an all-too-familiar sort.
end