Blackmount Chronicle: More Than One Free Lunch
Waiting by the window sill of his tidy fifty-first floor laboratory, Bridheault Rheims entertained the momentary doubt of a sane man expecting an insane thing to occur. Certainly it would put him in closer keeping with a number of his jealous contemporaries, were he too to decide that his genius was not without the customary streak of madness that often travels with it. No, whether or not his sources were real or figments of a tortured intellect, the science was genuine. Every avenue down which he had been steered in the course of this probably fictitious collaboration had led to breakthroughs, testable, repeatable, verified by independent agencies both within and outside the mainstream scientific community. Tonight though, tonight was the night he had been promised a means to apply what had been up until this point simply monumentally advanced theoretical physics. So by the window, as had become his habit on nights when the moons rose in a line, he sat, and waited for his little green men to come.
It seemed to corroborate the theory that these collaborations were works of mad hallucination, not true experiences, that no matter how long he waited, no matter what time the waiting began, the visitors would invariably arrive just as he began to doze off. It had been a night not unlike this one, working late, assistants all long since retired for the evening, dozing in his chair by the window that his first psychotic break (or meeting with the little ones) had taken place. They claimed to have climbed in his window the first time, though he was sure he'd left it closed. Their little green bodies wrapped in togas of purple silk had looked like dolls to him, only half the height of his forearm, though with similar proportions to himself.
On their second meeting, there had been three of them present, not only the two that had presented themselves initially. When he had become curious and asked them how many more of their kind there were, they had laughed and told him Trillions! Preposterous! In the whole world, there were only eight billion people. That was when he first began to suspect that he was, as the technicians had begun to whisper about him, going completely mad. 'Developing a dissociative relationship to the parts of the subconscious from which his inspiration stemmed,' was how the Foundation report had charitably attributed assertions in his research to secret collaborators that nobody else could see because they only came out when nobody but he was looking. He had even attempted to set a trap once. Not a harmful trap, simply the orchestration of a scheduling mix-up that led three janitors to be assigned to his lab on the evening that the sixteenth meeting was set to occur. It was a full three tri-lunar cycles before his imaginary friends reappeared. They had been understanding as to his mistake - having instructed him not to discuss them with his peers, or allow their meetings to go observed.
After the initial phases of establishing trust in one another, hallucinator and hallucinee alike, the real work had begun. Twice a month, he would arrange to work late, fall asleep by his open window, and meet with the experts. They had been reticent to share their names, at first, to avoid as they put it 'cultural contamination.' At first he had thought they were simply being shy, but as time passed it occurred to him that these tiny beings had a genuine concern that any aspects of their way of life should slip past the veil of professional collaboration they maintained. It was important, they had said, to allow species to develop independently without undue fraternization. And yet they were here, and speaking to him. Why? Was a question that his profession was built on answering, yet his odd little visitors offered so much more tantalizing questions to ponder than the small inconsistencies in the premise of their presence, that despite his professional ethic to question every aspect of the natural world and from it wring ever greater truth, he made what he was quietly sure his memoir would describe as a despicably mercenary decision to ignore it and press on.
It had been some years since his last world-changing invention; a theorem reconciling the wave and particulate properties of light that someone in the Tryblifixtan had applied to the creation and cheap mass manufacture of television screens the size of your bathtub. Somehow, miraculously, it had been the scientist, not the entrepreneur, who had been hailed as the Great Inventor of the hour. Before that it had been a way to preserve food indefinitely by means of suspension of subatomic movement within the meal. Nearly every kitchen in the developed world now possessed at least one such platform on the counter, some with quite kitschy designs, for the suspension and reactivation of food. Needless to say, after such a drought in his invention of labor-saving devices he was keen - perhaps to the exclusion of common sense and the first hints of hallucinatory madness - to do so again.
At two-past the Greenmoon's apogee, Bridheault was dozing off, the pen threatening to escape from his slack fingers and permit itself a short love-affair with gravity. Somewhere between the moment the pen left his hand and the time its fling had ended, badly as most such falls do, gravity being such an inconsiderate lover, the windowsill gained contents. No little green man stood on its surface, but a folded silken cloth, manufactured of the same microscopic fibers as the green mens' clothes - so fine that Bridheault had twice before been forced to comment on how advanced their people must be, not only to remain so thoroughly undetected by his people until choosing to reveal themselves to him, but in the purely amazing details in their clothing and ornamentation. Surely it must take lasers or nano-scale engineering to create even the simplest of their garments in such fine microscopic detail. The sound of the pen clattering to the floor having wakened him, Bridheault's attention snapped immediately to the window, where a cloth no bigger than a napkin, lay ruffling in the night breeze. Treating it with a care he might reserve for handling a fragile insect for study, he gently lifted open the folded cloth. It was written in broad curves and he could see footprints amid the lettering from the writers' journeys between the lines. So considerate of his hallucinations, he decided, not only to leave a note that he had missed them, but to leave it in a size that he could read without auxiliary lenses.
Rather than "sorry you slept through our visit, here are they keys to a better understanding of the universe" the note was predictive. "Tonight at coordinates 3674775 by 3199424 you will find the means by which to send matter between points in space instantaneously. Please collect it before it is found by others less knowledgeable than yourself." TELEPORTATION! Bridheault Rheims gasped aloud, pulling on his coat hurriedly as he punched up the coordinates on his terminal. NOT FAR! His land rover sped through the cool air in the wee hours of the morning. Sunrise would see him back at his laboratory, haggard but possessed of the means to put into application all of the theory that choked his wipe-off boards and filled his brain with dancing numbers of cohabiting values for Place and Time, mismatching but simultaneously true. THIS is what it was all for! To Literally trans-locate objects would appear as magic even in a world that had not since primitive times harbored any such superstition.
His ancestors had turned their eyes to science and never looked back. Now the instructions of projecting convoluted symbolic patterns of laser light on properly refractive materials made sense - creating three-dimensional refracted coordinates to express complex and contradictory truths. He had heard it all - Written about it all - but now, standing in what appeared a meteorite crater in the middle of the desert and holding in his hand a lump of luminous purple crystal, a sample of the promised material, he had never really believed it was anything but mathematics. That such a material could exist, and now that he had it in his hand, be synthesized and replicated and produced to the specifications provided by his imaginary collaborators, brought his destiny into sharp focus.
The humble man within him crumbled and he swelled with a pride thus far unfelt by the scientist and inventor. His name would be remembered forever, on this world and any others that this technology might grant his kind access to! Within weeks he had synthesized enough of the material to create a prototype pad for his office, and another, brought online geographically opposite his own on the other side of the world. After the first successful teleportation - a broken pen being the first object at hand that would not be missed in the event of catastrophic failure, it would take only a year before the government had purchased his research and set up worldwide network of teleportation stations, with talk of civilian home-based transit pads to be rolled out in the coming months.
Bridheault Rheims never saw his little green men again, but they scried on him frequently from their campsite on the Green Moon above, the only one of the planet's three satelites to sustain a breathable atmosphere. Their prayers to the Great Eye told him that what no force of arms could accomplish, even decades and no doubt billions of lives it would have required to claim the planet and exterminate its population of technologically formidable Giants, they of Clan Starmover had done with three mages in less than two years' time. The Starmover clan would be generously rewarded for spreading the means of invasion across an entire world with no loss of Horde life, their answered prayers assured them when they were issued their reassignment orders. The Eye would now see to the extermination of the locals and the re purposing of this world at His Exalted leisure.
And when The Eye was alone in the darkness between worlds, watching the now-interplanarily-conductive planet, brimming with the spark of 8 billion lives, spin on about its futile orbit, He paused to marvel at the elegance of the thing, and Marked the world for his Censured masters. He departed quickly by his own means. Tal'aen knew what came next, when the hungry Censured noticed his mark that a world was safe and ready, and had no stomach to watch it for himself. Not after so many before it.
It seemed to corroborate the theory that these collaborations were works of mad hallucination, not true experiences, that no matter how long he waited, no matter what time the waiting began, the visitors would invariably arrive just as he began to doze off. It had been a night not unlike this one, working late, assistants all long since retired for the evening, dozing in his chair by the window that his first psychotic break (or meeting with the little ones) had taken place. They claimed to have climbed in his window the first time, though he was sure he'd left it closed. Their little green bodies wrapped in togas of purple silk had looked like dolls to him, only half the height of his forearm, though with similar proportions to himself.
On their second meeting, there had been three of them present, not only the two that had presented themselves initially. When he had become curious and asked them how many more of their kind there were, they had laughed and told him Trillions! Preposterous! In the whole world, there were only eight billion people. That was when he first began to suspect that he was, as the technicians had begun to whisper about him, going completely mad. 'Developing a dissociative relationship to the parts of the subconscious from which his inspiration stemmed,' was how the Foundation report had charitably attributed assertions in his research to secret collaborators that nobody else could see because they only came out when nobody but he was looking. He had even attempted to set a trap once. Not a harmful trap, simply the orchestration of a scheduling mix-up that led three janitors to be assigned to his lab on the evening that the sixteenth meeting was set to occur. It was a full three tri-lunar cycles before his imaginary friends reappeared. They had been understanding as to his mistake - having instructed him not to discuss them with his peers, or allow their meetings to go observed.
After the initial phases of establishing trust in one another, hallucinator and hallucinee alike, the real work had begun. Twice a month, he would arrange to work late, fall asleep by his open window, and meet with the experts. They had been reticent to share their names, at first, to avoid as they put it 'cultural contamination.' At first he had thought they were simply being shy, but as time passed it occurred to him that these tiny beings had a genuine concern that any aspects of their way of life should slip past the veil of professional collaboration they maintained. It was important, they had said, to allow species to develop independently without undue fraternization. And yet they were here, and speaking to him. Why? Was a question that his profession was built on answering, yet his odd little visitors offered so much more tantalizing questions to ponder than the small inconsistencies in the premise of their presence, that despite his professional ethic to question every aspect of the natural world and from it wring ever greater truth, he made what he was quietly sure his memoir would describe as a despicably mercenary decision to ignore it and press on.
It had been some years since his last world-changing invention; a theorem reconciling the wave and particulate properties of light that someone in the Tryblifixtan had applied to the creation and cheap mass manufacture of television screens the size of your bathtub. Somehow, miraculously, it had been the scientist, not the entrepreneur, who had been hailed as the Great Inventor of the hour. Before that it had been a way to preserve food indefinitely by means of suspension of subatomic movement within the meal. Nearly every kitchen in the developed world now possessed at least one such platform on the counter, some with quite kitschy designs, for the suspension and reactivation of food. Needless to say, after such a drought in his invention of labor-saving devices he was keen - perhaps to the exclusion of common sense and the first hints of hallucinatory madness - to do so again.
At two-past the Greenmoon's apogee, Bridheault was dozing off, the pen threatening to escape from his slack fingers and permit itself a short love-affair with gravity. Somewhere between the moment the pen left his hand and the time its fling had ended, badly as most such falls do, gravity being such an inconsiderate lover, the windowsill gained contents. No little green man stood on its surface, but a folded silken cloth, manufactured of the same microscopic fibers as the green mens' clothes - so fine that Bridheault had twice before been forced to comment on how advanced their people must be, not only to remain so thoroughly undetected by his people until choosing to reveal themselves to him, but in the purely amazing details in their clothing and ornamentation. Surely it must take lasers or nano-scale engineering to create even the simplest of their garments in such fine microscopic detail. The sound of the pen clattering to the floor having wakened him, Bridheault's attention snapped immediately to the window, where a cloth no bigger than a napkin, lay ruffling in the night breeze. Treating it with a care he might reserve for handling a fragile insect for study, he gently lifted open the folded cloth. It was written in broad curves and he could see footprints amid the lettering from the writers' journeys between the lines. So considerate of his hallucinations, he decided, not only to leave a note that he had missed them, but to leave it in a size that he could read without auxiliary lenses.
Rather than "sorry you slept through our visit, here are they keys to a better understanding of the universe" the note was predictive. "Tonight at coordinates 3674775 by 3199424 you will find the means by which to send matter between points in space instantaneously. Please collect it before it is found by others less knowledgeable than yourself." TELEPORTATION! Bridheault Rheims gasped aloud, pulling on his coat hurriedly as he punched up the coordinates on his terminal. NOT FAR! His land rover sped through the cool air in the wee hours of the morning. Sunrise would see him back at his laboratory, haggard but possessed of the means to put into application all of the theory that choked his wipe-off boards and filled his brain with dancing numbers of cohabiting values for Place and Time, mismatching but simultaneously true. THIS is what it was all for! To Literally trans-locate objects would appear as magic even in a world that had not since primitive times harbored any such superstition.
His ancestors had turned their eyes to science and never looked back. Now the instructions of projecting convoluted symbolic patterns of laser light on properly refractive materials made sense - creating three-dimensional refracted coordinates to express complex and contradictory truths. He had heard it all - Written about it all - but now, standing in what appeared a meteorite crater in the middle of the desert and holding in his hand a lump of luminous purple crystal, a sample of the promised material, he had never really believed it was anything but mathematics. That such a material could exist, and now that he had it in his hand, be synthesized and replicated and produced to the specifications provided by his imaginary collaborators, brought his destiny into sharp focus.
The humble man within him crumbled and he swelled with a pride thus far unfelt by the scientist and inventor. His name would be remembered forever, on this world and any others that this technology might grant his kind access to! Within weeks he had synthesized enough of the material to create a prototype pad for his office, and another, brought online geographically opposite his own on the other side of the world. After the first successful teleportation - a broken pen being the first object at hand that would not be missed in the event of catastrophic failure, it would take only a year before the government had purchased his research and set up worldwide network of teleportation stations, with talk of civilian home-based transit pads to be rolled out in the coming months.
Bridheault Rheims never saw his little green men again, but they scried on him frequently from their campsite on the Green Moon above, the only one of the planet's three satelites to sustain a breathable atmosphere. Their prayers to the Great Eye told him that what no force of arms could accomplish, even decades and no doubt billions of lives it would have required to claim the planet and exterminate its population of technologically formidable Giants, they of Clan Starmover had done with three mages in less than two years' time. The Starmover clan would be generously rewarded for spreading the means of invasion across an entire world with no loss of Horde life, their answered prayers assured them when they were issued their reassignment orders. The Eye would now see to the extermination of the locals and the re purposing of this world at His Exalted leisure.
And when The Eye was alone in the darkness between worlds, watching the now-interplanarily-conductive planet, brimming with the spark of 8 billion lives, spin on about its futile orbit, He paused to marvel at the elegance of the thing, and Marked the world for his Censured masters. He departed quickly by his own means. Tal'aen knew what came next, when the hungry Censured noticed his mark that a world was safe and ready, and had no stomach to watch it for himself. Not after so many before it.