there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.

the masses of human beings in the middle of the city.

a two-dimensional film of people, millions of people.

crammed, moving slowly, in waves.

and yet, from above we can see.

perched.

sat.

and then the one in a million. two of them actually.

they approach through the film. a region forms around them.

they pass

they stop.

their wakes continue and interact until they disperse into the noise of the film.

they approach each other again, directly this time.

I call to my neighbor to move in for a closer look at this. My closest neighbor at this time is Bill. He's seen a few one-in-a-millions together before. He'll like to watch this.

....

the sea of people and things around me do not annoy or trouble me. not any more than the sea did and does to the captain.

the pleasant lights, the shining lights, the gentle sounds and the serious sounds.

there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.

a key feature of all modern eye gear of the past 40 some odd years is of course the filter. Filtering layers and overlays is common. Most people these days like to keep a constant ad stream running. I filter almost everything out. Including other people.

to me, it is a dark, or light or grey world.

I run algorithms on the vision detection system to overlay colorful patterns which represent the properties of the crowd. There is endless information in these millions of us, wandering around this city desert.

I must have mouthed the words, "city desert" as a brief, subtle search notification showed an image of the event 'burning man', which was begun some many decades ago.

but my 'city desert', with the sea of millions at its heart lived atop a concrete-coral in the bay of San Francisco.

there are a few of these deserts around the planet. the San Francisco one is quite popular, and although more expensive in the goods being sold around, is so much safer than any of the rest.

Oh, don't get me wrong. this place has its fair share of the bad stuff. It's just statistics. But statistically speaking, you have 10 times less chance of being stabbed here, and that's a fact.

for me, I have a 10,000,000,000 less chance, which is way better than the 10,000 times less chance I would have in the Atlantic homestead market. you don't want to go there.

what I do is that I use a special blend of stimulants in conjunction with my transcranial direct stimulation, ekg oscillation inducer to speed my mental functions by a factor of around 200. So everything moves about 200 times slower for me.

The longest I've done this for is 24 days. And that is up until now. And this is the first time I've done it.

But understand, that is 24 days real time. for me it has been an experience of 480 days.

at any rate, back to the task at hand: going through the market looking for a couple rare elements. treating the crowd as a non-newtonian fluid. and then I saw another one like me!

moving through the fluid. and that person also saw me.

we both stopped and the sea of people washed by us.

to my eyes, all was a pitch black except for the hard glowing white outline of that one person. Some effects to my peripheral vision represented collisions in the crowd, but I allowed them to happen and ignored them.

we began at the same time, by coincidence or virtue of the state of the system of people in which we were embedded, to move towards one another. It would take 10 seconds real time, which would be over 33 minutes to us, and so I initiated a friendly hello via chat.

...

Bill landed next to me. "Hey ty. I can totally hear their microwaves!"

I cast Bill a skeptical glance, "You can't interpret their radios, Bill. You know that."

"Shh!" Bill tilted his head and then spoke, "yes, they said hello, did some crazy sounding stuff, which I think is some kind of detailed exchange of information (only these one-in-a-millions do these things so I'm very excited about this) and talked about the film of people around them."

"How do you know these things Bill?"

"I have this audio headset with a coil and genetic antenna. I can't decode the data streams, of course, because they are crazy encrypted. But I can see and head the pauses and interactions of the data exchange and thus guess at the protocols or what they are doing. This works for lots of AI systems, it's how I get all those free hot dogs."

I widened my eyes and jumped a bit back, "so That's how you get all those free hot dogs! You are so crafty Bill. Crafty crafty crafty."

...

information exchange could happen at 2000 times normal speed, once a data link was established. and so in the 10 seconds as we approached one another, we began what would be a friendly and enjoyable 5 and 1/2 hour conversation.

We Found the Wake

We never got a truly clear glimpse of the thing. I mean, we never did get more than 100 pixels.

It's waaay out there man. Like 9 billion light years, back in some hot, blue-white galaxy, but it's out there. Or more precisely, it WAS out there 9 bil's ago.

We can't tell if it's still here.

What we can tell it that it is huge, nearly the size of earth's moon. It is yellow and red with a grey line along the middle of its elongated main section. It changes shape slightly, appearing to be able to bend.

It may emit light, or that may be the way in which it takes its colors, we are not certain because we have not captured a picture of it in space or on a non-starlit (sunlit) side of a planet on which it is located.

We assume it is a single entity, because we do not see two of this object at any one time.

But we can see its fast. Too fast.

If we calculate the time it took between these events when the object disappears then reappears on another planet, then we see that it must have gone faster than light.

Here the conversation gets very deep.

I and my collegue ignore the conversation. We aren't hypothesizing about these obeservations any longer. We think we have discovered the wake which the object leaves in space between planet-hopping, and now we are about to test our theory.

Antediluvian Initialization

"This is the room of enchantment and understanding. This is the magic book, 'Abracadabra', and lain out around it are the implements for the book, including the passive user's daemon, an eksee of the order main."

The introductor was so lost in his enjoyment of displaying this room to the renewed wizard that he failed to notice the wizard causually opening the magic book, 'Abracadabra'. This book was not intended to be read or understood by humans and most other non-daemons.

This is not to say that the book couldn't be read by a human or what not, although it would be a rather painful affair. Abracadabra, however, was a hazardous book to handle, for when opened for reading there is a reader-initialization ritual, which cannot be avoided easily. This is what the introductor noticed has just occured to the wizard.

The introductor's face lost some of its lift, "Oh wizard! Don't go opening books, even you old selfs'! You know what kind of wizard you were/are." There was a thoughful moment during which the introdctor drew in and exhaled deeply, slowly and audibly.

With a few blinks the wizard shut the squat, thick book and sat it back down. "hmm...", the wizard said quizzically.

The introductor gave a half, half-smile, "How was the reader-initialization ritual?"

A good-natured chuckle, perhpas a bit muted, rang from the new-wizard, "It's just as I remembered, but obvoiusly forgot. You might guess, I made the mistake of opening that book so many times when I was writing and building this room. I would open the book, and BOOM! I'm stuck in this ritual where I am prepared to read the volumes of redundant data and amounts, and I'm all like, 'dude, I already know the deal, I just want to...', and then I get mad at myself because I wrote this book like this...I guess it is sloppy?...or just simple?...what would be the word for an old, almost ancient, basic kind of builing?"

The introductor took around 100 chrono cycles (0.5 seconds) to answer, "antediluvian is the right word, although you may prefer archaic, wich is accurate but feels less correct".

The wizard raised his eyebrows and smiled. "I certainly do enjoy being back in the castle. At any rate, back to the point - the ritual feels like 60 minutes every second. It's a virtual, enchanted experience in which you feel like you are being tutored by a great teacher. you are sat is a sunbathed classroom with fresh air streaming from outside. Also it is your final class of the day and it is always a half-day or less...Also, you are stuck there for 60 minutes no matter what."

The wizard ended the explanation with a cheerful expression, which was somewhat altered as his brow furrowed in thought, while the rest of his face reamained frozen in cheerful recollection.

"Isn't it just so funny how no matter what, the most joyful and happy experiences can be tainted by context?"

The introductor shivered. He smiled understandingly, yet he did not like hearing the deep philosophical insights of humans. How they could dive into those pitch black, unwarmed depths. It frightened him greatly. It must have something to do with the human mortality...but then again, here was the wizard again. mortal again. but here again...The introductor moved to the next section in the script, perhaps a bit abrubtly.

"And this next room is the colluseum, right down this hallway."

The wizard blinked rapidly and turned towards the brightly lit path, "oh my gosh, I actually made that! Excellent. Let us then proceed!"

Exiting the room, the introductor turned, quietly shut the doors and gently touched the door handle, "We daemons, as basically I am one, may fear those places, but from those dark depths, the humans return with elightenment and insight."

He turned and proceeded. The torches in the hallway went out two-by-two behind the introductor as he followed near to the wizard.