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some sleep hard. some sleep weird. then there's finn.

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Mohammed Ehsai — Untitled  (oil on canvas, 1996)

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Faramarz Pilaram (1937-1982) — Circle of Light  (oil on canvas, 1969)

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786—intending to start putting maps up and jump start the tumblr, i find i am without maps of any kind on this computer. buck rogers and the old solar system is a fine beginning, though.

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so hey i guess i am going to use tumblr again—doesn't appear to be going anywhere unlike some platforms that shall remain nameless

Robert McCall

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Notebook scans I: spaceships & spacestations

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Outline for Interstellar Game: a bit weird fiction, a bit Traveller, a bit harder scifi than that

Galaxies and Future Histories Angels, Apes, and Azathoth Robots, Moreauvians, Mind-Children

Epochs and Aeons A Natural Galaxy A Sophontic Galaxy A Weird Galaxy One Good System The Belter Life Planetessimals --mine, spin, sculpt Moons and the Urge to Dig Dome Worlds Cavern Worlds Stations Lagrange points and other hangouts Jovian skies Starlane stations Deep space stations Slower Than Light Robots Again Generation Ships Sleepers Exotic Motors In Slow Waves Fleets and Travellers Faster Than Light Starlanes Wormholes Hyperdrives Fleets and Travellers The Natural Galaxy Rogue Planets Red stars and Jovians Tidal lock --Life on the Edge Sun-like stars, Earth- and Squhlonch-like worlds Exotic ecologies Domesticated planets Making rocks livable in centuries to epochs Giants and exotics White dwarves, neutron stars, singularities The Sophontic Galaxy Ancients, Precursors, and Moreauvians What You Might Call Complex History Empires, Federations, Consentiencies Invasions and Clientage Miscegenation & Engineering Sometimes it All Goes Pear-Shaped Group Minds Think Alike Upload All Information and Pod into Cosmos Sometimes it Just Goes to Shit Now That's a War Did We Mention Invasions and Clientage Call This a Depression, Wait'll the Sun Goes Out Cultural Collapse Worlds Beyond Number Homeworlds Ancient Planets Colonies Untenanted Planets Relics of a Bygone Era That's a Pretty Big One Still Flies, Too But is it Art? The Weird Galaxy Azathoth and Nyarlathotep The Old Ones, Various Oldnesses The Stars Whisper Cruelly Monstrous Races Come in All Sizes

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A shiny gold coin shall be yours IF you can identify the disturbing artist whose works I based these descriptions on! Seriously, I can't remember his name. It was years ago and a bad late night on the web. Freaky stuff appropriate for your Mythos-triumphant futures. I shall try to find the artist, but really, looking at this, there are any number of options for statting them out for an RPG: horror, weird-side dungeon fantasy, some mythogical game with symbolic and moral attributes, virtues and curses...

CRANIAL COMMANDO A large, broad, headless engine body, rather in the shape of a fat crab shell, sits atop a pair of fat machined legs, each foot with three broad toes. Four long arms extend from the rounded corners of the fuselage, each like a human arm, ending in a delicate three-fingered hand protected by a massive gauntlet. Harnesses across the top and back hold a variety of range and close weapons; two or three of its hands hold one at any time.

The body remaining to the originally human pilot is centered roughly in the abdomen; a thin skull surrounds a swollen brain, other organs mixed promiscuously with machine-organs. It is cradled in a thick, crystal-clear sphere etched with fine letters and symbols. No visible sense organs.

PELAGISTRIER A modified whale. Its skull has been greatly elongated and fused with silvery crystalline material into a hard hull. The back of the skull-cab swings up, hinged with muscle and metal; the lower edge of the hatch is ragged like teeth in a jaw. A comfortable, white, leathern couch is visible in the coach of the skull; slowly writhing black stumps are at hand for a head, hands, and lower orifices. The whale's eye-sockets are likewise enlarged and bristle with sensory spines and lenses; coils reach into the mouth from asymmetrical pods alongside the beast's underbelly, where two cybernetic paws are currently at rest, streamlined against the body. The massive fins and flukes are ridged with the same crystalline-metallic substance as the cockpit.

HEREROGENOUS FIEND A roughly human form, flesh not so much stitched together as exuded from a pump and cleverly spun together. A massive left arm, leathery flesh spread across a leaden armature and now clutching a vast spiked club; two smaller limbs on the left are balanced by five on the right, the largest of which is outlined in a blur as tendrils move back and forth. The smaller arm-limbs mostly do not end in hands but in spines or cudgels to be swung on fine but sturdy cable. The thing's torso has parts of at least nine jawbones, human and animal, visible, and eyes of all sizes here and there across its surface. On the right shoulder is a child-sized form with three stubby, independent arms weakly struggling; one limb reaches up to scratch at it now and then, and it may pop off.

PRECIOUS CONTRIVANCE FOR GUESTS' DIVERTMENT A porcelain construction in the shape of an elegant, slim woman, hands, body, and head in pleasing proportion, joints clever articulations of the ceramic exterior over dully shining bronze ball joints. It plays twelve games of skill and chance, sings with a piping sound, can accompany itself on stringed and percussive instruments, and serves tea. It is dressed in courtly silk garments that intermingle with the six tubes coiling like thick braids of hair from the head, wrapped in a large and intricate knot, then under the back of the frock and out into a trunk kept hidden from view. The trunk put-puts steadily as fluids are pumped in and out of the automaton. The head, from nose up, is concealed in folds of an intricate bejeweled turban which, should it somehow come undone, reveals a pair of lidless, mad, staring human eyes set in the ceramic skull. Mistress Hortense Bejezebaelia Montessori, Margravine of Auckland and Para-duchess of the 18th Precinct. Mistress Hortense is a tall and stately creature garbed in a vast and heavy frock, much frilled and laced and beaded. Her hands always move over the stove-belly-like contraption in her midriff, which her frock parts around. Many small dials, switches and knobs fill two arcs like commas on her sides, and from time to time she adjusts these without looking at them. There is a port on the swelling large enough to admit perhaps a cat.

THE PALANQUIN OF OBLOQUY Four bearers garbed in vast, flowing, layered robes grasp the highly wrought support bars at the base of an irregular dodecahedral object, each panel shimmering with images of the mighty victories and conquests of the kings of the land. The Palanquins are the honored conveyances of high level traitors and elaborate suicides from among the pathocracy; an annual lottery allows one lucky commoner to be sealed in the Palanquin and be borne about the streets for ages to come. The bearers are masked in gleaming black and grey globular helmets attached by hoses and cables to the underside of the Palanquin. They never rest, nor sit, nor cease their stately procession, but will slow upon request, the better to observe the decorative sides of the Palanquin.

HONORED SCRIBES The Scribe sits lotus style on a small platform, a lap-desk anchored to its atrophied toes and pens, ink and styluses rakishly set out to the sides. When not writing, the scribes' arms rest on contraptions jutting wide out from the walking-platform, its hands held in cunning mudras. The head has wide and staring eyes, all black, no nose or mouth. Its pearly skin smells of sweet oil and lilac, and it wears finely woven black and red mesh. The walking-platform is draped in a kilt-like garment patterned after an insect's carapace. A pair of strong, hairless red legs shoed in elaborate sandals jut out from the kilt and trace mincing steps over the floor of the palaces and salons home to the Scribes.

SPRIGHTLY SOLDAT Four long, thin, deer-like legs are the base of this entity, whose torso can seat a human-shaped figure; a fine uniform in bright parade-ground colors largely conceals the tumorous bulges where two bodies were molded together to form this steed; four clutching hands reach out from the front and back to hold travel-goods, and the heads have also been fused and relocated into a torpedo-like arrangement on the undercarriage; the lipless mouth has large, square teeth.

NIGHTWIGHT A whippy, ectoplasmic creature with a variable number of limbs and extrusions, more human shaped than not, with a headish protuberance whose color moves from the indifferent whitish-grey of the main body mass into inky blackness arranged around a radial, irising mouth, chisel-edged, before fading into invisibility. At a distance of half a meter or so away from the head and torso, orange electrical bolts sluggishly trace the surfaces of invisible nested spheres, and figures reminiscent of a star chart, or perhaps musical notation, appear momentarily along these ghostly orbits. The night-wight can move independently but prefers to spend most of its time waving circularly over the suited remains of a ship's crew or other places where humans and machines have catastrophically breached the mind-sea.

AERONAUTIC SENTRY CUR A dog it once was, for the doggy scent hangs closely about it, and beneath the steel and ceramic of the strangely articulated helmet, a predatory canine head is still to be perceived. The jaw has been altered to swing open in two fanged limbs. The head is on a thick but sinewy neck, the chest teardrop-shaped. Four large doggy paws are symmetrically aligned like the tail fins of a rocket, legs spread so it can stand on all four or on any adjacent pair. The paws have a fat but serviceable thumb. The tail is not cropped but elongated and prehensile. Where the sternum was, at birth or in the bodies of its ancestors, there is a ceramic circular lid, hinged on the bottom edge. It opens to extend a fuel intake proboscis that can expel corrosives, terror-drugs, and other liquids. The Sentry Cur is at home in gravity and free-fall both.

FUNEREAL JUGGERNAUT A giant creature, fifteen or so meters tall, neither like a tortoise nor pachyderm but partaking of the brutish qualities of both, with six thick, apelike legs ending in massive horny paws. A harness round the torso and waist support an intricately decorated cylinder, like a section of tower, that remains level as the beast moves forward. Rubbish birds flock to whatever is on the top. It plods along, jingling with bells, chimes, gongs, wind-whistles and other noisemakers. Its head is more maw than else, with eight long tusks scrimshawed and bound with gold, and a humming machine set in the center of the maw. No eyes are to be seen, but four independently moving tubular ears may overlap in general function. Heavy, putrid incense fumes from portals around the tower, and a pair of tiny human figures, hardly bigger than children, sit attentively in harnesses at its sides. Their head and arms are unseen and beneath elaborate ceremonial robes, a range weapon pivots atop each head, tracking any movement nearby.

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Khilafat al-Hijra al-Sarmadiyya -- how Ladino speaking wizard paladins ended up beyond Samarqand

I once limned a chivalrous or at least armigerous order paladins trained in wizardly arts, the better to battle otherworldly menace; inspired by David Eddings Pandion Knights of his Elenium trilogy*, and charged with the exhileration surrounding the earliest GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; I seem to recall I imagined these fellows as Ladino-speaking Iberian Muslims now living on the other side of a central Asian gateway to a magical world. This world had been discovered & colonized by many peoples with motivation to flee the Iranian and Silk Road part of the Old Oikumene, id est:

Buddhist adventurer-ascetics and princes looking for new lands to defend the Dharma;

Zoroastrian refugees from Islam;

Manichaean refugees from everybody, as well as true Elect in touch with the purer air of an unpeopled world;

Medean Magi, disenchanted with the whole Achaemenid fiasco prior to their putting on the role of priestly caste;

any number of Mesopotamian magicians and star-cultists in search of stars not yet depleted by ritual, nor their intelligences and spirits rendedered sullen;

Greeks of all stripes, gnostic Syrians, Hermetic & Egyptian Judaeans, Judaizing & Gnosticizing Christians, radical Hedonists & Stoics;

Judaean mercenaries and engineers, Judaean thaumaturges;

and surely some of the Terrestrial dragons, manticores, harpies, giants, titans, etc., made their way to a world of more sustaining magic and fewer bloody humans.

Part of my interest was in seeding a fantasy world with real religions and magical traditions and not dealing with orthodox Christianity. But…how did Ladino speakers make it through the Gate beyond Samarqand, Samarkándê?

The Khilâfa al-Hijra al-Saramdiyya (the Succession of the Semptiternal Migration). Descended from partisans of an Umayyad lesser prince --some grandson or grand nephew of Saqr Quraysh, that Falcon Abd al-Rahman I who fled Abbassid knives to the end of the world. Said prince grew up with a head full of dashing violence and intrigues prosecuted amidst rose gardens. He tried to strike out on his own deep in the northern forests of the Peninsula, but his recruitment of chivalrous companions turned into a palace rebellion, for the Caliph, God's Shadow on Earth, took a dim view of splitting off without his decree. The prince kept his neck a few months through the skills of his chance-won allies: Jewish thaumaturges and questionably monotheist Hermetists, who found young Zayd's head full of just the right nonsense to finance their magics. They had long made common cause against the unwashed Franks' aggressive Order of Hermes (a typical piece of Rumi cant; those wizards have no truck with Egyptian or Roman Hermes, and fight only for their own love of fire and earthquakes, and that they might maim the bodies of fallen Magi, the magical power in their blood, heart, eyes, or as much as the ghouls can drag away!).

The Wise of Iberia knew of ancient reserves of power in sites in northern valleys, in caves and shrines and cyclopean carvings upon mountain faces. A prince in search of a new kingdom would not scruple at one defended merely by winter snows and the rumor of ghosts? Saracens don't even believe in ghosts! But the Order of Hermes beat the Wise to the vis-rich sites of Taraconensis, and took their fight all the way to Qurtuba. Zayd was killed; his fate at the hands of the Franks is a story for another time. The rebel's three sons, now tempered hard and sharp by two years of attrocity and sorcerous battle, could expect no quarter from the Franks nor pardon from the Commander of the Faithful. In counsel with the most powerful and otherwordly survivors of the Wise of Ibera, the Three Princes lead the escape of their companions and retainers, all family and children, aged relatives and as many children orphaned by Zayd's folly.

How, then, did at last they arrive beyond ancient Samarqand? Magic, dear sister; magic, courage, cunning, shipwreck, pursuit by Frank, pursuit by Greek assassin… the escape seemed without hope of final refuge from the malice of their enemies and the envy of wicked beings who scented the aroma of wizardry within the stench of desperation and exhaustion. The Hijrat al-Khilafa lasted a generation, then two; and with the third generation, the alloy of Qurayshi valor and Iberian wizardry gave strength to a life of flight with no earthly ally. The piety and fervor of the partisans grew with their cunning and secrecy, and they witness for themselves that God is with the migrant who flees not for wordly aims but for the sake of God alone. Martial virtue, magical art, and the true patience of the faithful: these clothed the backs of the Succession of the Perennial Migration as they won the knowledge of the Gate beyond Samarqand, and this combination has given strength to the best of the Succession in its new world. Wa-llahu a`lam -- God knows better...

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Hlutrgú religion: remembrancing the instances and modalities of torment

Hlutrgú: one of the "inimical races" of Tékumel, a species whose culture, cognitive processes, perhaps their very physiology cries out for human death, torment, and extinction. The estemed author, M.A.R.Barker,رحمه اللــه , believed in alien unknowableness, but also wrote that he didn't care to know what the inimical races thought. On blueroom posts and elsewhere, the Professor articulated a view that even humans from cultural extremes are incapable of mutual understanding, of having a clue what this being is about. Yr hmbl Satrap is of a different mind, in terms of human scholars (of our world, perhaps, or the Empire of Man that terraformed Tékumel real, real, hard) coming to observational and theoretical conclusions; and mutatis mutandis for the Hlutrgú. Thus the Satrap writes for the many alternate Tékumels across the planes. More on the immane skullfaced frogs remains to be prised from notebooks, along with Shen, Serudla, and the seemingly related reptilian species.

Religion: Hlutrgú perform rituals employing large portions of any concerned village, war band, or the entire region. Most rituals occur not in the villages but in the swamp, shoreline, at sea, or in human territories, corresponding with the Hlutrgú narrative of permanent exile in a world inimical to them. Ritual observances do not occur in their places of safety, but outside the bounds of comfort, within the domain of war and enmity. Some of the asexual leaders of the batrachioids function as priests; the sexless ones lead in part because they are not tempted by sexual demons or those spirits that induce sire and dame to maim, kill, or devour their young. The sexless are identified with the Hlutrgú as a whole and can direct the evil power of the spirits against prey and foes, as well as ritual attacks on the universe as a whole. While the sexless act as priests, all Hlutrgú hear and feel and see the spirit world all around them. The populace acts as a whole, the better to exploit one set of spirits by furthering the goals of the Race, and to leave no individual alone to become individually possessed, obeying the spirit's orders, which may well suit the desires of the lone possessee, but seldom helps the populace. The capering and hideous music of Hlutrgú ceremonial has the pleasure of a vice. The unceasing recitation of the Race's memories, grudges, lore & exhortations to vengeance takes on powerful insistence in these phases. Dance movements and ritual gestures heighten the sense of identification with their wronged ancestors, with the cultural heroes of legendary cruelty and power, and with the spirits or ancestors active in the ritual. The complex masks of gold, bone, and green chem wood signify a specific ancestor, demon, or other spirit.

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Memorandum:

Candidates wishing to be taken seriously at this firm will not neglect to sign all legal documents and financial instruments in blood. Blood of the incorrect origin and dweomer has unpleasant consequences vis-à-vis incompatible documents, and candidates will sign in unauthorized fluids at their peril.

Beyond performing legally and sidereally binding signatures, best practice for elevation is scrupulous attention to the written word. This firm has standards for all operational documents compiled from two hundred years' experience with the necessary and contingent factors in the success of our operations. The manual of standards details the formatting, mnemonic sequencing, duplication, distribution, retention, conditions and methods of disposal of all written materials in any media. Verba volant, scripta manent.

Candidates may become intimate with some of the knottier nested contingencies in the standard by reformatting their C.V. prior to submission to the directing body. In compliance to commands from beyond the wall of sleep, we no longer call these documents 'resumes' or 'vitae,' but rather 'concordations.' They must be six pages, circular-spaced, with the approopriate sectional diacritics.

Concordations exceeding six pages are, by definition, no longer concordations. Any candidate, parner, or post-morlock who so far forgets themselves as to wantonly inflict category errors may be found in violation of causality by a Post-Morlock Resources officer.

First offenders must take a refresher course on the learning slab.

Second offenders are eligible for translation to departments in cosmoi tangent to our own, where different topologies may apply. This is not a demotion but a chance to learn about topology from the inside out. Undergoing translation also provides first-hand experience with this firm's contractual partners and the many intermediating agents that all our operations depend on. Keeping our partners and their agents happy is in the best interests of all concerned.

Third offenders will to have always been going to be degraded from the status of "being" to that of "text", reformatted to meet concordation topology, if possible; the resulting concordation will be filed at this facility for no fewer than five years and no more than 13, after which the concordation will go its eternal rest with all our other old documents in the caverns under Lexington, Kentucky.

(Third violators whose topologies cannot be rendered in concordation format in fewer than 7.5 hours will be deleted before any overtime hours accrue. At that point the supervising manager will mark the violator's dosier as MISFORMATTED and retroactively subtract the processing costs from all past earnings.

The dearly deleted will be honored with twenty-one overwritings of random digits onto the disc blocks previously holding the file. That's this firm's Personal Privacy Protection Promise.)

Two Grey Men sit in the partners' club, the penthouse suite of the offices at ground level. The sun has set, the air of the upper half of the club shell-pink with indirect sunlight trapped in evenly diffused smoke. The hues of daylight seep away by the minute, and every surface and shadow grows massive with indigo twilight effulgence. The Day is that part of the cosmos nuzzled close around a star: The immensity of the world of day is invisible on the scale of the Night, and so at night the old world comes into its own.

"Not going to lie to you, Tillinghast, seeing their faces when they realize they shouldn't have started with their own damn blood, three, four, one time seven new junior execs, year after year! Oh... mercy."

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COSMOSITY ZETA REDACTULI .'. Dept . DRAGOMANRY \ KRITIK .'. ARXIVE Cent \ SYNTACTIC MONAD .'. TARJAMAAT.lang:Ualdani>Yakku.koine modulo 3rd.Uranic

[ Dept. of Dragomanry [ Reptiles' Required Reading - [R.W.P.Hwnerkamp]]]

+++ ATTN DOCENTS et al., mnemonic sequencing begins here:

Call the Amir the Cap'n: Zwawa Touareginald, comptroller of the blood of the house of Kha. Even though amir is the word in the primeval Clareloquence language for COMMANDER, one who commands; officer, administrator, & sooner or latter PRINCE sovereign ruler and supreme executive who does not need the noise of wearing "king." Very like Latin dux 'war leader, theatre commander in chief' -> duke, which was also very like a king, but not so in one's face. Military rank, position -> monarchical dictatorship, political and military power a type of inheritable property. The Cap'n is our amir, and never you mind that a commander with us is the Amir of smaller ships and less important missions!

Cap'n Zwawa held a book of the local style at arm's length, reading aloud in a hollow archaic chaunt. "...that polity, and the worlds of the star system of that polity, did however achieve a record, a wonder never recorded across the Terhumene diaspora: seven centuries, seven it was, seven were the centuries of respite before... COLLAPSE." The Amir vibrated the syllables of the baleful word like a sorceror invoking a fiend. "...And the record they did achieve was the... COLLAPSE... of their polity, and all the worlds of the star system of that polity, together with its peoples, and all their treasures, knowledges, and wisdom... COLLAPSED... together." He pivoted hips, torso and head to face the Dragoman directly again, and parenthesized, "A very shocking state of affairs, if true, but our Jaded chronicler is quite immune from shock -- shakes a doleful magisterial head and edifies us with an aphorism and a joke. Classical quotations, totally different style of orthography, or two styles? weird long word forms... you may take an full watch hermeneuticking each of 'em, Dragoman, and don't you pop in on me every twelve minutes with updates and ideas for active measures, hear me, Arxivist?" The Amir's smile flashed from the shadow of the azure hood and mantle of Burj Kha, letting the Dragoman know two or three capers each watch he would forgive, as being cunning strokes beyond the minds of mensch or machinic to sit on until change of watch.

"Certainly, Cap'n, quotations -- two quotations -- full watch per, and my clerks and droids to deal with the rest. Any departure from the narrative form is passing rare in the Chronicle, passing strange. A joke, my Amir? The Chronicler, and joking, is it now. It was not reduced to jokes and epigrams when that Flower of Parting xenodrome breached and killed a round two billion people inside a month, I believe. And yet, you know, the public speech of the Highest Jade oligarchs, the diplomats' conversation at table and the antiquarian one-upmanship that passes for parliamentary process, to say nothing of the manner of dialog in popular entertainment: sentimental declarations in the parlor, racy folk songs on the flight deck of the yacht--"

"I can well see it: the plucky comscan techs are both secretly oligarch brats slumming it to snub their families, and they make innuendo as they stick code cylinders into holes on their terminals."

"Just so. An aphorism, and a joke. I shall sit, as in respect for edification, and as precaution against the injuries of untimely hillarity."

"So," Cap'n Zwawa discarded the archaic singsong and went on,"'Never does a world Collapse, without it murders another.' Fair enough; nigh universally acknowledged, I believe. Going on: 'A witticism: The owner of a palace, its architect, and the chief builder watched the inspector of new construction. As the inspector climbed ladders and tapped walls, those inspected grew vexed with the prolongation of palpating and measuring.

"The architect knew the crack would appear because of discreet negotiations with the builder and with the mongers of metal and stucco, but had made piecemeal reinforcements as a salve to scruple.

"The chief builder had seen the crack, and ordered it concealed with paint, lest the architect discover the results of even more discreet negotiations.

"The owner of the palace did not have the means to finish paying the architect and builder, and had bribed the masons to discourage any gauchery on the part of their bosses, but meant to be taking the waters abroad when the next dispersal came due.

"The inspector despised the owner as a vain and showy arriviste, a rogue on the make ignorant of the douceur customary to an inspector of new buildings, without which there would be no vails for the masons. The inspector wondered if this would be a quick arriviste or a stupid one, and jabbed a probe into the crack.

"The crack opened instantly, down to the floor and up to the roof, and as the roof and the walls fell all about them, the architect cried out, "You fool! You've killed us all!"

[[ work in progress specifically to resume here, where I commenced writing. ]]

had nor wit nor stonesand the respite followed upon rockfall upon that planet, until the polity upon that to Collapse." Flimshaw! Poh! Okay, first, it wasn't a Collapse. It was bad, but not Collapse-bad, and second, this not-great-but-not-Collapse took seven hundred-odd of Highest Jade's long, long, tiresomely long orbits making for seven -- epocha, let's call them. I challenge you to tell me how much that is in real money without looking it up. I dare say a Jade century is exactly how long indifferent clever barbarians like Perpetual Secretary Shehnaz or I need to calculate it.

You & the Perpetual Secretary, maybe! What are the numbers? Yes, what ARE the numbers? Quick! Dragoman Ypse!

What, I'm right here. Uh, Captain.

Ypse bach, Ypseji, Terhumeneutics & Tactical Pragmatics specialist Ypse, Qorbin love...

No, Captain, we have no information on their calendrics, the charts they give us take no notice of the units of time such poor slobs as their trading partners and neighbors right here in the Lace use, their texts and discourse in general largely avoids quantifying time, names of days, months, or whatever their Short Great Year, Long Great Year, and Great Jade Years are, other than when certain spectacles and athletic events happen, and degrees of exaggeration when a shipment is late. How late? Shipping contracts specify due date, delivery time, variables, you would say. You would say that, Captain, you and Shehnaz-sama, but in the actual very fact, Highest Jade contracts do not specify time, they only penalize tardiness.

"The shippers and clients can both work out transit times. They understand their business, we're all in the where's-that-planet-now game, I believe. Just so, Captain bach, and as a pilot, or a former pilot, I should say, Captain, as an experienced observer of pilots and other personnel who do things like push buttons and read samples of Highest Jade legal documents in the Yakku language which is no biggie, written not in the Old Yakku figure, not in the Late Old, but in Early Late Old Yakku orthography..."

"I need one for my gre-gre-gre-grandam. This is just how she taught me to draw spiders and creepy crawlies, modulo if she'd taught me to draw very, very ill or intoxicated spiders. She's a cartoonist, you know, & shall laugh at all these sickly, stoned spiders cramming together in rows; with the blessing, and I don't fly us into a star."

"Take any of these. No, take this one: not only will she have her close-packed rack of bad trip bugs, she'll have all these fancy seals and painstakingly fancy signatures, because why? Because it is an historical document, and these people clutching their pens too hard and scattering these ink blots were historical too.

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INTO THE ABSTRUNGULARITY

YOU ARE NOW LIVE ON THE SNWY & GOLDY SHOW: SNWY & GOLDY STRIVE FOR THE NADIR OF ABSTRUSITY ITSELF: THE ABSTRUNGULARITY.

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So I have this recurring dream. I'm standing somewhere looking at the sky, it's sunset, and I'm with my older brother Ronny, only, like, I guess Doctor Daleth got his DNA too, in this dream I mean, 'cause he's got four long arms with a huge hook on each, they bend like a bug, and he's got these extra horns and optic implants, ugh, I mean, do you ever get the feeling Doc is kind of... Weird... About how he fixes us up? All the claws and carbon fibre synth muscle and echolocation mods, oh, and what about Sarah? Why's her head on Marisol now? They don't even like each other.

Anyway, I'm pointing at the asteroid, trying to get Ronny to see it, but he's looking in the wrong direction, and he's trying to shade his eyes and complaining his hands’re just no good for shading his eyes, and I'm like, Dude! Ronny! Just look where I'm pointing! And he keeps looking the wrong way, and sometimes? He even starts to claw at his face! Wow, did Ronny ever used to get mad about stuff.  Wait, we never used to be able to shade our eyes with the little rippers. Or pick stuff up, or do data entry, so how can I be pointing at the asteroid? And why can't Ronny see it? Dreams are weird.

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Ohcrapohcrap I totally didn't mean to actually drop it, boss, I mean Doctor Daleth, sir, I mean gosh I am so, so sorry, you can fix it, right? Sir? Sir! Are you vomiting out of anger, or, like, radiation sickness? Puke once for anger and twice for... dude, if my armor protects me, how'm I ever gonna get superpowers? Doc? Doc? ... Yeah, this is unit 317, I need a hot rad cleaning crew at the gorge, a body bag, and everybody's got the night off!

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Nice helium 3 reactor prototype you got here, Doc... Pretty careless of you to leave it lying around, I gotta say. Not when just any uplifted bionic theropod who hasn't gotten those GED materials you promised could just waltz off with it and wind up, oh, here at the gorge? Pret-ty careless of you, Doc...

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I start every day with voice exercises. Well, I mean it's that, I mean, no cyberdinosaur's ever won "America's Kidz Got Singing," you know why? Roaring is not enough! I've got SOUL, man, and -- anyway, it's more like an affirmation. Yeah! Or a cry of triumph!  I go "AAAAAAAASTEROID! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA- STEROIIIIIIIIIIIIDDDDD! HEYYYYY, AAAASTEROID? YOU! MISSED ONE! AHAHHAHAHA!