(no subject)
As part of my employment as a field worker in the interstellar colonization commission’s urban reclamation program of 2770, part of my job was to accompany researchers on their xenoarcheological expeditions subsequent to the recognition of some trace or stain left by the activity of sentient or organized life forms in times past.
Some planets that were candidates for colonization, don’t ask me which, had a particularly conspicuous number of species on their surfaces at some point. They left behind their skeletons, brilliantly crafted edifices, what appeared to be ritual baths incorporated into secular-functional facilities and a vast literature that we quickly digitized, vaporized and translated into Space-Hindi. In fact, we vaporized every remnant of their doings (by 2774 we pretty much had this down to an art form in the most genuine sense a spaceman can say the word “art form”; we had our celebrities, our critics, our experts in the history of mass-vaporization, and all of the other peripheral derivative destinies that eventually spring up around the edges of consequence).
Traditionally, the real technique involved in vaporization resides in the vapor-artist’s ability to minimize the vaporize: digitize ratio (vapodigiratio). Ideally, a skilled vaporizer should convert an extinct civilization’s leftover information into a convenient, accessible format while reducing it to a fine powder with potential as a material in the agricultural (makes a good base for fertilizer), construction (makes a suitable agent of coherence in bricks) and dust (makes an excellent dust) industries in as close to a simultaneous fashion as possible. When two vaporizers are of comparable merit, having equivalent vapodigiratios, then the only unit by which to judge his or her or hersh potency is by gauging the aesthetic prowess of the individual’s vapor processing.
Our vaporizer was one by the name of Jalendu Napatkar. Upon attaining a vapodigiratio of 1.3 while under the instruction of one of the last great Germans, Rajesh Adolf Gruggenzammer II , he promptly secluded himself in the past. When the past grew a little older, he emerged somewhat eccentric, but through-and-through one of the most original and generative minds operating a vaporizing machine at the time. Observing this remarkable one at the controls of those great machines, one got the sense that they were a special witness beside God Itself in the laboratory of genesis, taking part in the divine synthesis of mortality and time. In fact, I read elsewhere that sometime in the 90’s after humanity had reestablished contact with the almighty, and after the almighty revamped Its writing career, that if It had to identify one class of mortals that were essentially more akin to Its image (an image in the image of God more categorically God-like than the other images) that it would have to be “those ever-persistent, ever-perfecting, world-melting vaporizers; true peers , my “dust to dust” brothers”.
Napatkar was capable of replicating all sorts of naturally occurring structures in the great swarm of dust as it was gradually captured in mobile vacuum-containers propelled by inherited levitation technology. A tornado? You’ve never seen a tornado? That’s fine, that’s OK; just wait for zero pre-vape and Mr. Napatkar will command his vacuums to create the most authentic tornado humanly possible. What’s that you say? You’ve never laid eyes upon a portrait of Ultra-Commander #1 of the Confederated SolArm? But they’re everywhere! No matter- just ask Jalendu to articulate his features for you in the ensuing vapor cloud so that in the event you see him approaching down a corridor you will pick him out even before his own wife does (owing to the crispness and clarity in which our crew’s exemplary vaporizer expresses this specimen of historical consequence).
My own job detail was pre-vaporization excavation. This was a petty job that the commission gave to those of us competent enough to perform menial tasks after we were extracted from the Terran metropolis. As we all know, any of the real excavation that goes on is in a digital representation of the space captured by our vaporizer, so we didn’t embrace our work with the earnestness that was expected being that we were so graciously afforded an occupation, and so on a so forth. Nonetheless I enjoyed this job since it gave me time to get lost in thought dragging my toes through the hallways of unthinkably dead creatures that lived unthinkable lives many times more sophisticated and nuanced than my own. Some of the better conceptions of my younger years were had in those abandoned vaults, kicking about debris, fingering piles of alien miscellany with voyeuristic glee. What was strange about those expeditions was that no one ever found anything remotely valuable or worth salvaging in its physical form. If the xenofacts were not in a state of disrepair, they were too esoterrically non-human to serve any functional role in our lifestyles. At least if we allowed our digitzers to read the broken shapes of the objects there was some hope of restoring them to their virtual former wholeness, like growing back one’s head from a tooth. Through this procedure, we had been able to recover and exploit ancient extinct achievements, but it was invariably mediated through digitized reconstructions.
Some planets that were candidates for colonization, don’t ask me which, had a particularly conspicuous number of species on their surfaces at some point. They left behind their skeletons, brilliantly crafted edifices, what appeared to be ritual baths incorporated into secular-functional facilities and a vast literature that we quickly digitized, vaporized and translated into Space-Hindi. In fact, we vaporized every remnant of their doings (by 2774 we pretty much had this down to an art form in the most genuine sense a spaceman can say the word “art form”; we had our celebrities, our critics, our experts in the history of mass-vaporization, and all of the other peripheral derivative destinies that eventually spring up around the edges of consequence).
Traditionally, the real technique involved in vaporization resides in the vapor-artist’s ability to minimize the vaporize: digitize ratio (vapodigiratio). Ideally, a skilled vaporizer should convert an extinct civilization’s leftover information into a convenient, accessible format while reducing it to a fine powder with potential as a material in the agricultural (makes a good base for fertilizer), construction (makes a suitable agent of coherence in bricks) and dust (makes an excellent dust) industries in as close to a simultaneous fashion as possible. When two vaporizers are of comparable merit, having equivalent vapodigiratios, then the only unit by which to judge his or her or hersh potency is by gauging the aesthetic prowess of the individual’s vapor processing.
Our vaporizer was one by the name of Jalendu Napatkar. Upon attaining a vapodigiratio of 1.3 while under the instruction of one of the last great Germans, Rajesh Adolf Gruggenzammer II , he promptly secluded himself in the past. When the past grew a little older, he emerged somewhat eccentric, but through-and-through one of the most original and generative minds operating a vaporizing machine at the time. Observing this remarkable one at the controls of those great machines, one got the sense that they were a special witness beside God Itself in the laboratory of genesis, taking part in the divine synthesis of mortality and time. In fact, I read elsewhere that sometime in the 90’s after humanity had reestablished contact with the almighty, and after the almighty revamped Its writing career, that if It had to identify one class of mortals that were essentially more akin to Its image (an image in the image of God more categorically God-like than the other images) that it would have to be “those ever-persistent, ever-perfecting, world-melting vaporizers; true peers , my “dust to dust” brothers”.
Napatkar was capable of replicating all sorts of naturally occurring structures in the great swarm of dust as it was gradually captured in mobile vacuum-containers propelled by inherited levitation technology. A tornado? You’ve never seen a tornado? That’s fine, that’s OK; just wait for zero pre-vape and Mr. Napatkar will command his vacuums to create the most authentic tornado humanly possible. What’s that you say? You’ve never laid eyes upon a portrait of Ultra-Commander #1 of the Confederated SolArm? But they’re everywhere! No matter- just ask Jalendu to articulate his features for you in the ensuing vapor cloud so that in the event you see him approaching down a corridor you will pick him out even before his own wife does (owing to the crispness and clarity in which our crew’s exemplary vaporizer expresses this specimen of historical consequence).
My own job detail was pre-vaporization excavation. This was a petty job that the commission gave to those of us competent enough to perform menial tasks after we were extracted from the Terran metropolis. As we all know, any of the real excavation that goes on is in a digital representation of the space captured by our vaporizer, so we didn’t embrace our work with the earnestness that was expected being that we were so graciously afforded an occupation, and so on a so forth. Nonetheless I enjoyed this job since it gave me time to get lost in thought dragging my toes through the hallways of unthinkably dead creatures that lived unthinkable lives many times more sophisticated and nuanced than my own. Some of the better conceptions of my younger years were had in those abandoned vaults, kicking about debris, fingering piles of alien miscellany with voyeuristic glee. What was strange about those expeditions was that no one ever found anything remotely valuable or worth salvaging in its physical form. If the xenofacts were not in a state of disrepair, they were too esoterrically non-human to serve any functional role in our lifestyles. At least if we allowed our digitzers to read the broken shapes of the objects there was some hope of restoring them to their virtual former wholeness, like growing back one’s head from a tooth. Through this procedure, we had been able to recover and exploit ancient extinct achievements, but it was invariably mediated through digitized reconstructions.