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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

📓📕📘📙 Prologue 📓📔📗📘

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

These posts will be the updated versions from my DeviantArt account, and since Tumblr may not display all the text correctly (it destroys anything I had in italics or underlined) I would still recommend reading everything there, on DeviantArt. They will also include internal links that navigate between the chapters on DeviantArt and will take the reader off Tumblr if clicked.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Okay, so that’s why I installed those internal links in each one… so that if anyone gets to a random section by way of a search engine and would like to read the story from the beginning, they can.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

There is a new species of virus on the internet that likes to eat ancient Tumblr posts and barf them back up infested with adware - spyware - malware etc. The virus goes by names like TumGIR, TumBIG, TumPIK, or Tum(anything else but ‘blr’). The caps were added by me for emphasis so that maybe you can double check in case you’re not looking at an actual Tumblr post right now but one of these so-called “mirror” sites.

If you’re looking at this text through one of the counterfeit Tumblrs that I mentioned, then no link you click (assuming it even copies it with my links intact) will take you out; it will redirect you and show you all of the spam ads it wants to. So read carefully what url is showing on your browser right now.

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

📓📕📘📙 Prologue 📓📔📗📘

↩️return to previous section (the preface)

Never trust a time traveler who doesn’t wear a watch.

“I found this in the patient’s room, Ms. Ranganathan,” her eager young personal assistant said. “At first I thought it was from a fortune cookie, but it’s in ink, done by someone who can print very neatly.”

“Thank you so much Petra. You did what our ‘sweep team’ failed to do properly.” She took the tiny strip of paper, knowing exactly who the aphorism’s author was referring to, and silently disagreed. Just a few days ago and thirty-thousand years in the future, she’d had the pleasure of hearing him perform his signature song live – while not wearing a watch. His trustworthiness wasn’t a problem. The person who wrote this “fortune” however, was a narcissistic sociopath who was going to get three helicopter-loads of people killed in about a dozen years.

She continued staring into the thing her European employees called a tablet. That was good, she thought, that it blended in with their technology and didn’t look too futuristic. The young woman whom she could just see in the corner of her eye, was in fact chronologically a year older than she. It was also good to see she’d put on neoprene gloves first before picking up some random scrap from a patient’s restroom floor, even though she knew this patient hadn’t been physically ill at all. She glanced at her own watch, one of only two on the entire planet that was currently working, and thought: twenty minutes... that should be more than enough.

Her assistant needed to be less formal, especially in public. Not for social or interpersonal reasons but because it looked attention-drawing weird for Petra to be speaking that way to someone of her apparent age. It had taken about a week to get her to “duzen” as the Germans call it. That part didn’t matter in English, and since this patient had escaped from an American hospital... It wasn’t a big deal at the moment. Furthermore, with time frozen, no one could see or hear them; they could speak however they wanted.

So she held off on another don’t-be-so-formal-in-public talk. The young German had never seen Marcy and Peppermint Patty from Peanuts either, so that analogy hadn’t helped. “Hey, since your tablet should be charged enough by now, go ahead and read me some more of your redacted report for the human workers, please.”

“Yes ma’am!” She whipped the thing out like a spaghetti-western gunslinger and got the page right open:

“A prior group of humans at some unspecified time have found the object. It is not exactly a sphere, but as Alex later described it, The Thing oscillates between a prolate spheroid and an oblate spheroid form. After the original humans found it, it accelerates into space to make its escape.”

She paused to clean a smudge off her screen and casually see if her suddenly-very-quiet boss was still even in the room. She was. Just evidently scanning a corner with a gadget that looked like an old-fashioned label maker.

“It lands on Venus and burrows under the surface slightly – at a place called Lakshmi Planum. This is supposed to be the automated spheroid’s way of returning to its alien caretakers or owners. It’s basically a tool for aliens on a camping trip. Alex later describes them as 12-dimensional beings. We aren’t sure if he’s joking or not. He’s a mathematician.”

She stopped to see why her boss had laughed. “It’s okay Petra, you quoted me exactly. But we’ll edit that part from the final version. Please continue.”

In truth she had known that mathematician since they were kids at school together over a hundred-twenty years in the future. That would be too much info for her assistant from this era of Earth’s past to handle right now. So she got her to keep reading the dumbed-down version while they could still take advantage of time being frozen and the nano robots were still erasing all evidence of the patient’s DNA; enough that the simple CSI types from this time would never be able to find anything.

Back to The Spheroid’s strategy:

Sort of like “if we get separated, meet back here.”

The Spheroid has rudimentary AI capabilities and the ability to monitor or access information networks. It concludes that Venus is a safe place to wait, since humans in the eventual future where it was-will-be found by the miners, will apparently at least partially terraform Mars. But they will do nothing whatsoever with Venus. They decide that it’s just too complicated due to the atmosphere.

The thing knows this from reading the ship’s logs and library files on the human-crewed spacecraft that picked it up. It will simply wait for the appropriate amount of time until right after it was originally found by the mining expedition and gravitationally slingshotted around a naked singularity. Then it will return to its original spatial coordinates and reunite with its owners, etc.

The important details left out in the “et cetera” portion of this account would fill the woman’s device. But several of the higher-ups were adamant that this was all they were cleared for.

She continued:

It does not, however, have the ability to refuse service to anyone else who may find it along the way – Think of an unlocked phone. And someone did find it.

At the end of its last encounter with humans, the six metallurgical researchers on the asteroid outpost who agreed to forget about the alien artifact because they believed it was too much power for any human beings to be trusted with – not only themselves, but any humans at all – made a mistake.

In erasing their memories, one or more of them accidentally erased something they shouldn’t have… A seemingly unimportant memory that would have led its owner to action… That would’ve established space exploration policy, eventually leading to Mars terraforming endeavors in the following century.

Instead? Humans in this alternate future have decided to terraform Venus after all. A few years later they did still terraform Mars as well.

The woman paused briefly to get ahold of herself. She knew the basics: time travel is real, the boss is from the future, the people she works for are the “good guys,” and naturally technology in the future is going to be more advanced. But the numbers which were forthcoming as she read had truly terrifying implications. Had humans become more advanced in this future as well? Enough so that they could be trusted with this kind of… well, firepower?

“It takes about one megaton pushing on every twenty-five square kilometers of atmosphere.” She went on reading.

“So 32,768 one-thousand megaton thermonuclear devices – shaped nuclear charges – are detonated simultaneously and at uniform height over equidistant points above the atmosphere of Venus, causing the atmosphere to undergo implosion-ablation and be largely blasted off into space where it gets harmlessly dragged in by the Sun’s gravity and becomes a zeptoscopically small amount of additional nuclear fuel for our star.”

Future-Alex’s calculations in high school in another century would show it had to be more firepower than that, and that the future-government was probably lying, but again not relevant to humans of 2006.

Thus with the planetary atmosphere of Venus pretty much removed, the humans eagerly began their sub-Cytherean terraforming operations.

Impact on the spheroid’s plans:

Venus was a place where it thought it could wait quietly for a millennium or so, without being disturbed, until its original owners came for it. Now, with all the humans poking around, the thing found it necessary to relocate. First to the far western edge of Ishtar Terra, and then off-planet. As far as it knows, Mars is still being colonized. It chooses for its hiding place, a subterranean cavern beneath a giant sinkhole in an abandoned part of Kentucky...

That was about as far as her assistant’s report would need to go for now, but of course it triggered some of Praji’s memories of her “home time” that she’d recently been forced to leave. That part of the story would need to continue in her mind vlog, privately. Prajina noticed the files in her mindwire beckoning to her but couldn’t look of course; the world would only be frozen for another thirteen minutes now.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 1. five chapters, ending with chapter 5

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 1. five chapters, ending with chapter 5

↩️return to previous section (the prologue)

(Use the above link to refer back to the previous section. Also use this link if you arrived here from a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning.)

Prajina

DiaryWorld™️ entry for August 9, 2137

Why are there retro trends?

Maybe it’s all in the way the stories are told. Most people don’t really go around thinking very much about past eras and what it would have been like to live in them. And if they really thought it through, they would likely find multiple reasons why that particular time would have sucked for those experiencing it. But if you can romanticize it right – in literature, stage, screen, 3V, and Sensoarim™️? Even if it was way before their time, someone will pine for it.

This was a little beyond simply pining for it; Alex had actually chosen to go back in time to live with the people of that era! And how had that even been possible? Wasn’t it supposed to create paradoxes by changing history in the past and all?? Never mind, it’s hurting my brain.

Cyrano de Bergerac, who wrote some of the earliest identifiable science fiction, had lived in the 1640’s plus or minus twenty years. But Edmond Rostand wrote about him in his eponymous story in 1897, 0.25 millennia later – after the initial action of the play.

In the play he includes a cameo by d'Artagnan, who lived at the same time but achieved musketeer fame in the popular imagination due to Alexandre Dumas in the 1840’s. So, about 200 years after the middle of his life.

All through the renaissance, European scholars yearned for this, that, or the other golden age; the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome... you can see it in their poetry, theater, opera, literature.

In the USA in the early 1970’s people became enamored with the 50’s for awhile. Then twenty years later there were 70s and 80s retro trends at parties & clubs and on university campuses. The things always seemed to fizzle out after a couple of seasons. In Alex’s chosen time, that ‘70s show was a notable exception. And on that note, the time at which the aliens want me to contact Alex? The late teens of the early 21st century? I wonder if any people reminisce about Friends, Seinfeld, and haphazardly organized websites like geocities... Movies and “TV shows” back then helped the momentum of a retro trend...

So it’s probably not surprising that in the year 2136 famed avant-garde director Capaccio Valpolicella’s virtual film “Ravenhorn!” later spun off on Sensoarim™️ and as a 3V show, spawned a new 1990’s retro trend – about 140 years after the original time – complete with some of the same designer drugs of the era.

A few truly new drugs had debuted in the last century; one of them did things a 90’s rave DJ never imagined.

Amongst the class of ‘37, no graduating senior / inbound college freshperson would touch them-

picture the dork a hundred years earlier who still smoked tobacco cigarettes after President Black finally got weed to be one hundred percent legal everywhere – I still can’t believe my great grandma voted for him, twice. In his second term they say he wrecked the economy pretty bad... but nothing we couldn’t recover from later under the Smith administration. Still… It would be priceless to go back (or ahead?) in time and see the part where he moons congress! But I digress...

So the newer drugs were unhip. Uncool. That was the shit your parents did back when they were protesting the war, marching on Wall Street, Martha’s Vineyard, etc. Suddenly it was trendy to do hits of nitrous oxide from balloons again, or maybe just from a mask straight off the tank… ecstasy, 4-methylaminorex, and Oh Yes.… The Spirit Molecule – DMT – the one from ayahuasca … whatever.. the one that’s supposed to make you see Angels/Faeries… shit your great great grandparents did was hip once again.

The whole idea of an outdoor rave, with generators, in a rural field in Kentucky was delightful to young people everywhere in the late 2130s. No one exchanged an egg… You didn’t want it to be so secret that nobody showed up, but there was some tomfoolery in place to kinda make sure that a lot of the coolest people would know about it.

They came from pretty far off. IU students brought the best drugs… but there were some from as far away as Ann Arbor, the principal DJ from Greenbelt, and our little group from Missouri.

(I must elaborate: i have access to Alex’s DiaryWorld™️ page, but it’s legit – he gave me the password / login credentials when he was suicidal once so I could read everything he was going through. He got better; never went through with it, obviously.)

Alex

As recalled through Prajina’s DiaryWorld

Alex was pleased that Prajina had invited him / filled him in on the rave’s exact time and everything... basically letting him know it was going on. He did not need her to tell him the location though. That was his suggestion – a place he knew about from his youth. It was at an odd crux of positions. Abandoned or poorly maintained properties all around; some of it used for illegal dumping of just about everything; much of it owned by his family.

Alexei Sohibnazarov, of the Lexington Sohibnazarovs, knew it would make him sound way nerdy if he told people at the rave that this was “his spot,” and that he had brought it to the attention of the rave organizers. It was just awesome that he knew exactly how to find a place that only the coolest kids online could learn about…

He’d made the mistake, mid-senior year, of pointing out the anachronistic errors in the dialogue of Valpolicella’s “Ravenhorn!” The terms “awesome,” and “cool,” or “bitchin,” were all from earlier than the 1990’s, but still late 20th centu........

Whatever, spaz! He realized too late that kids just wanted to imitate the speech of Dagmara & Javier from that 3V show.

Yeah, just the fact that he was showing up would mark him as a cool dude. Because how else would he know about this rave, right? As long as he could refrain from speaking, he might fit in… Rather like that scene in the old 20th century movie The Night Before, where the other girl tells his date: the whole point of this bet was that the loser had to be seen with a geek. It’s not fair, you can’t take him to some part of town where they don’t know what a geek he is!

That’s what this was for Alex: a part of “town” where they didn’t know what a geek he was.

He had given up on Prajina, pretty much. When she had said Padmanabhan was doing the lighting and light show… Alex asked, innocently he thought, “post doc Padmanabhan, or young Padmanabhan?” Her response of “young Padmanabhan” had been more emotional than she realized at the time. In truth, she had just been in a happy mood when she gave him an answer to his question… Not “all starry-eyed” as his private DiaryWorld entry had suggested. If only there were some way to track him down in 2017 and talk to him about it. She truly did not feel that way about Padmanabhan. Not only that, she was pretty sure young P was gay. Alex was a bit weird, and she didn’t know if she felt that way about him either... but more likely him than Padmanabhan. But now? He’d be 25 or more years older, since the aliens had sent him back to around 1992 and her to 2017. What the hell?

Fast forward

Alex (for real)

Later that night- the song was: Solar Power by N-Trance or maybe it was called N-Trance by Solar Power

Alex couldn’t be sure…

He had seen the fairy folk at last; it wasn’t just DMT – it had to be administered with other ingredients. That’s why the tea was the best way. Other ravistas just wanted the pill form; big mistake, thought Alex, the high won’t last as long and you won’t see the Fae. Alex, a true Chronopolitan, insisted on historical accuracy and wanted to do it as Jennifer Aniston had in that hippie commune movie with Paul Rudd. So he had done his spirit molly with the chatsubo crowd... And of course a vomit bowl nearby! (A small detail they’d omitted from the early 21st century film. A vomiting scene with her would have been a bit distracting.)

He later mixed up batches of chocolate drink though, and accidentally switched yoo hoo bottles with some girl in a pot-leaf prom dress. A Talamantez knockoff that was a few decades late for a 90s rave, but still rave wear, so okay. Had it been an authentic Talamantez, it could have gone for at least a couple of million at an auction house. All right… Remember Alex, no talking to show off your trivial pursuit knowledge. You think you’re conveying some kind of super important information… What you’re really saying is “I’m Cliff Clavin from Cheers. Don’t talk to me. And be sure to warn your friends about me as well.”

The molecules in her bottle? Put bluntly, it was a modern mimic of some old-fashioned shit: PCP. It made his brain “pulse,” as he would later describe it in his DiaryWorld entry. The pulsations, combined with his idiot-savantish propensity for math, was causing him to “see” algebraic topology in a way he had never visualized it before. This gave Alex a pattern of brain waves that was uniquely different from all other humans in the world on that particular night.

If an extraterrestrial intelligence had happened to be cruising by Earth and decided to scan brain waves of humans, it would find them fairly similar – just minor variations. But even the variations were predictable. Except for Alex. On that night. When it got to him it would’ve noticed a pattern of brain waves that resembled those of aliens from a moon of a gas giant orbiting the star Alpha Aquilae. An alien vacationing on Earth perhaps? Or here on some business? As fate would have it, or the never-created Greek god Statisticles, there actually was an extraterrestrial intelligence nearby that could scan brain waves remotely. Alex, however, was not what woke it from the sinkhole… It was the music that woke it. N-Trance, a bit over a minute and twenty seconds into this DJ’s version of it.

The Alien Sphere

OK, as Alex would insist on describing it:

Object that oscillates between prolate spheroid and oblate spheroid form.

As the sound waves resonated around the woods they created an interesting beat frequency. Interesting to DJs and sound technicians perhaps, and definitely to the alien spheroid. The spheroid had access to the alien ship’s mechanical logs and knew one of the contraterrene generators had been grounded near the Rosette Nebula. The plan was to temporarily repair the mounts with a borosilicate-aluminosilicate appliqué done by nano robots. It was nothing but boring internal chatter amongst the ship’s computers. One of the AI‘s that resided in the SIMC database had chosen to do a calculation – just for the ࿔¡ᢈᰊᡜ of it – to simulate what vibrations (and of course sounds, for those passengers still using atmosphere-breathing bodies) the field-repaired generator would make. No part of the ship was supposed to produce any mechanical vibrations at all. Or sounds.

It would be an undetectable sound to anyone but a Makcir; and there were no Makcirs on the ship, this time out, who might complain of a noise. But Ambraluxia, what that particular AI chose to call itself, had been right to do the calculations, just for thoroughness. Copies were made available of all the data for all the other computers, including the less-than-full AIs like the one on the spheroid. The spheroid had been detached and lost from the ship before the repairs were completed, so it’s computer never got to hear the actual sounds in order to tell if Ambraluxia’s calculations & simulation had been correct. “She,” as the AI preferred to be referenced, had a good reputation for this kind of math, and was thought to have a greater than 99% accuracy in simulation.

So when N-Trance started reverberating in the woods the spheroid was greater than 99% sure that it’s mothership had returned. Several centuries early, in fact.

If the spheroid’s rudimentary AI could have, it would have “felt loved” at the thoughtful gesture; not that it’s owners had bothered to track it’s time travel activities. That was predictable. But that they had elected to expend the energy to come back in time for it, would have seemed quite touching.

As it awoke, it begin scanning for other components of the ship. None detected. False alarm? Or they just changed the codes… more likely, because who knows how many centuries or millennia they had waited before coming back in time to retrieve it.

So the next set of scans was for lifeforms. Many humans – unusual for this remote place and odd that they would choose to risk appearing in front of so many of the Earth creatures – but the “alien” masters know what they’re doing, no doubt. And after exhaustive scanning of the crowd (which presented an added challenge because they seemed unwilling to remain still whilst the music was playing) it found one “alien,” as in a citizen from a known, member-world. Finally!

Although, it seemed to be a child. Confusing. Alex’s new pulsating alien-esque brain waves registered as an older toddler; definitely under 500 Earth years old. Now the spheroid was concerned that the child had been left alone. What had gone wrong? It was hungry, the spheroid could tell.

Alex

Alex had the munchies big time. Everyone who had brought food whom he’d met earlier was currently out of sight. He was really enjoying young Padmanabhan‘s light show; a bunch of colored spherical holograms hovering over rural backwoods Kentucky to the tune of that breakbeat from “this is techno” volume something-or-other. One of the fringe ones caught his attention. It varied colors just like the others; about the same size and shape… But something was out of place about it.

It occurred to Alex that all the spheres but that one had been arranging and rearranging themselves to fit into a point group like D6h, C8v, etc. This one broke the symmetry. Now it’s a C1, overall. Deliberate? Or more likely a glitch in Padmanabhan’s program. It also seem to be centered above “hell-hole.”

The sinkhole that swallowed up a small neighborhood in 2048 and killed dozens of people, that he had been warned about all through his childhood, never really interested him as much as others. Always a source of dares and adventures for the local kids, sure. But not him, really. Until he read “The Lovely Bones“ and had seen the movie. Then he wondered if maybe it contained a chained-up refrigerator with a body in it. That’s spooked him a bit, but also drew him to it as a teenager.

It was prolifically used as an illegal dumping ground throughout Alex’s parents’ lives; then that had stopped about the time the government parked a geostationary camera over it. Which was also about the time Alex was born. He read the news article and thought it was odd that the feds got involved in a state enforcement matter. The sphere over hell-hole suddenly seemed more realistic than the rest of the holos. Almost corporeal; alive? And then it was not his imagination, he saw it blink out of sequence with the others.

And it distorted between prolate and oblate; cycling according to some kind of relation that Alex later called an “elliptical harmonic” in the tech section of his DiaryWorld. It was a pattern which he’d never seen before. It couldn’t be young Padmanabhan! The harmonic function began to entrance him somehow.

This dude was way in to pharmaceutical chemistry and molecular biology – not sure exactly what his major was – but definitely not part of that math crowd. Illogical as it was, he felt like this spheroid was beckoning to him somehow. He started staggering over in its direction, thinking: “maybe it’s a flying saucer or something and it could drop me off at Taqueria Ritmo!” Right – and get them to open up? Everything in all the nearest hick suburbs was closed at 4 AM. Still, he hobbled over to it, fascinated by the oscillations.

The Captain, or ℏ♄

The P.S.L. Fomalhaut had beamed Prajina aboard that night at just about exactly the same minute Alex was sent back in time, as if they’d been watching her ride into the parking lot. Despite her frantic pace, driven by the knowledge she’d extracted from between the lines of Alex’s blog which she was pretty sure had meant that he actually liked her in That Way... she missed him and some other bizarre sights that accompanied him by just a few beats of a great elephant’s heart. What she got instead was The Captain.

The Captain, acting as a representative of the Laniakea Supercluster Amphictiony of galaxies had initially chosen to appear with the head of an elephant. This decision was based on some positive images she took from the young human’s childhood memories. The Captain also arranged for a choir of humanoid looking holograms with extra, for human beings, arms and bluish skin to sing:

“Om Gan Ganapataye Namo Namah

Shree Siddhi Vinayak Namo Namah

Ashtavinayak Namo Namah

Ganapati Bappa Moraya”

It seemed to stress the human girl, even though it accurately reproduced an educational documentary on mythology, and certain altar scenes that she had enjoyed as a child. She double checked the words and pronunciations on the information network provided by the humans and it seemed to be correct; perhaps there were some kind of inflected tones or other speech nuances that her simulation was failing to reproduce. Never mind the speech intricacies she thought… perhaps she’d misread the young human woman’s mind?

So next, the captain tried appearing as a larger than life humanoid woman with a double digit number of arms, bluish black skin, a blood red tongue sticking out, a necklace made of skulls, etc. Not only did this not calm the young female, she now seemed to be starting a major freakout. Clearly, her first contact with a human wasn’t going well.

To be fair though, contact with this species was severely limited. 75,000 🜨Yrs ago, give or take, they had been an endangered species when an Indonesian supervolcano had erupted. An environmental group had intervened to transport some humans around and collect them into clusters so that the species could have a chance to be re-populated. One of the captain’s great-grand beings had been a part of that rescue group. Although a bit of a prankster, it had not been her intent to dig up stone tools and move a few other things in order to mess with the later automated government archeological surveys. She just genuinely liked collecting souvenirs from far away places to use in her art projects back home. She was from the alien equivalent of a hippie generation, and she had initially opposed ૯ಾ⟂ಌ‘s (captain’s given name unpronounceable with human vocal cords) intent to join the temporal constabulary – to be a “time cop” she said, was the worst kind of elerdprenda – roughly the equivalent of a hippie calling a cop “pig.”

Now, coincidentally ℏ♄, as (name unpronounceable) was affectionately called by her fellow officers at the academy, was leading a cleanup operation to correct one of the worst environmental disasters that this galaxy had seen in the last 2.2 million 🜨Years – a disaster that even had ramifications in other dimensions and many parallel universes and was really starting to piss off the powers that were to be. The disaster still wasn’t going to happen for another 120,000 earth years, and so was considered top priority. Since the events that triggered it were set into motion when the human “mathematical genius“ Alexei Sohibnazarov – a descendent of the very humans that Nana Weed had rescued from the aftermath of the caldera system – was accidentally sent back in time approximately 145 years by a piece of lost camping equipment, i.e. since time-tinkering was involved… The matter was firmly under ℏ♄’s jurisdiction.

Jurisdiction may be clear, but back to that matter of how to communicate with the human mind of Prajina in 2137? ℏ♄ was having no more luck understanding her thoughts than the piece of camping equipment had had with Alex. She remembered seeing axion feed billings for the thing they called “the spheroid” when she was a child. The playlets were the alien equivalent of a 70s Ronco commercial before Christmas. The thought conjured up happy memories of her home, but she had regarded the gadget as silly. “Why waste thaumasia on something like that,” she had thought aloud to the axionevision in her room, “when I could just make my own with stuff from ɚϗꏃð ?” ...the alien equivalent of a Radio Shack.

Then there was the problem of free will – the human math child, Alex, had wanted to remain in the 1990s, Gregorian calendar, Holocene epoch. So just prevent/event was not an acceptable strategy. Otherwise, this would’ve been as routine as a human cop in the 20th century writing a parking ticket. But Alex it seemed, was quite enamored of that time. It would be possible to let him stay as he wished, but he must not be allowed to prevent the human Jack Black from being reelected as president of the United States for his second term in the 2040s. That was where Prajina came in.

There was no other knowledge of the humans except for some automated gathering in 1908 in their current calendar. Some dipshit tourist from another dimension had accidentally materialized, and crash-landed near Vanavara, Siberia. It was at a place called Tunguska. The traveler reported it immediately and a drone was dispatched to clean up and leave evidence of natural phenomena. The locals over the next few decades concluded that it must’ve been a comet or meteoroid impact. The drone had equipment for an axion-synaptic scramble pulse, to erase memories if necessary. But the place was so remote that nobody saw anything. The geographically-distant nearest citizens who might have, were only interested in a biochemistry experiment that they were conducting. With themselves as test subjects, they seemed to be analyzing the effects of a beverage that they made with a starchy fermentable plant material. So no new data on the humans there; just that they were starting to get interested in science – such as chemistry. As well as thermodynamics, and electromagnetism – based on analysis of their other activities at the time. Although they were communicating with it by then, the primitive radio of the era also failed to help researchers glean anything useful about the humans.

Evidently the biochemistry project was a long-term study spanning centuries, ℏ♄ noted, as it was still being conducted on a large-scale in that part of the world. She briefly scanned a file that humans used to show other humans how to do it cheaply with potatoes. She was pleased to see the humans cooperating and taking such a dedicated attitude towards science. But socioculturally it didn’t tell her anything about how to communicate with one of them. She finally settled on human form, male, central Asian, speaking Hindi and Tamil as Prajina’s mother and father had in the home... but fluent in English, as they had been fourth and fifth generation Americans, respectively. It calmed her a little more than Jai Kali Maa had. Although the Earth woman politely passed when ℏ♄ offered her some of the potato-based biochemistry-experiment beverage that the ship’s automated chemical synthesis lab had whipped up for her upon command, she was at least willing to talk now.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 2. four chapters, ending with chapter 9

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 2. four chapters, ending with chapter 9

↩️return to previous section, section 1

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Alex

When Alex had “boarded” the spheroid - as he perceived it, his stomach was already grumbling. But the math it showed him was just too damned interesting! It, once again, made no logical sense, but the surround-sound chair it invited him to sit in actually made him feel smarter. His comprehension was off the scale considering how hungry and stoned he was. Then he realized that he had waited way too long to eat, as he saw things that couldn’t possibly be happening unless he was very wrong about the laws of physics! It was exacerbating his hallucinogenic trip…

Yes, the spheroid was a type of craft that could and did transport him to a nearby Mexican restaurant. And yes, it had been closed as he’d predicted. It wasn’t a Taqueria Ritmo, but a local chain that started out as Chinese and then expanded their menu a few years back to include burritos, chalupa‘s, tacos… basically a half-hearted attempt to compete with Taqueria Ritmo. They had this idiotic taco-dude mascot, leftover from some promo when he was in the fifth grade, which had become a permanent fixture by high school when he’d worked catty-corner across the street at The Oakey-Dokey. It was a statue mounted outside; basically a larger than life, four meter tall taco that seemed to be sprouting humanoid limbs and effecting other human features.

In the absence of any employees for almost two more hours, Alex sort of imagined it coming to life and ripping open the roof of Wokkon The Wild Side, so he could get some food. Then, thanks to the superior high-quality psychedelic shit he was on, it actually did come to life! And ripped off the roof, proceeded to get exactly the food he wanted out of the deep freeze, and zapped it hot. Almost like it had read his mind.

Young Padmanabhan

The cops found nothing on him. The breathalyzer was negative. He offered them blood, knowing he would be able to pass that test too. They obliged him with some kind of old-fashioned prick test. They simply could not seem to believe that any college student his age at a rave could possibly not be using any drugs of any kind, regardless of whatever philosophical thought system he claimed to be an adherent of. Padmanabhan simply could not believe that the local law-enforcement here was still using this ancient device they called a “polygraph.”

They had mistaken his comment for a smart-assed attitude and were now searching his computers and all other devices for messages involving Prajina and Alex (the two members of his party who were currently missing) and were suggesting that they had been involved in some petty crime and hacking scheme. Vandalism, petty theft, plus practical joking. He had an honest gut reaction to the request for him to take / suggestion that he take a polygraph test. “There is no such thing as a polygraph,” he stated flatly and matter-of-factly.

They insisted there was: an elaborate machine which they were evidently very proud of; he admitted that, of course, the machine existed. But then so did decks of tarot cards and crystal balls. They mistook this as a criticism of their equipment quality; the big-city boy mocking the bucolic country backwoods cops, perhaps?

Quite simply, the only way a polygraph or so-called “lie detector” could possibly work on people, was for it to be used on people who believe it works – and no one seriously believed that anymore, did they? It was pure fiction, and that’s why no one had made an effort to have it admitted as evidence in two centuries now! Even its original inventor had insisted it should not be used for this purpose. “Bogus pipeline” much?

They wanted to know if one of his friends had been dressed in a “taco outfit” earlier! Seriously, a taco outfit? He honestly did not recall seeing anyone like that. Just for grins he went ahead and consented to the moronic polygraph thing, because he felt like fucking with them now. The machine showed that he was lying about his real name on his federal ID chip, was in fact named Doe B. Gillis, believed they were in Kathmandu during the interview, didn’t know anything about the alleged crimes of vandalism against Wokkon The Wild Side or hacking of the local police camera network, and… That he firmly believed his friends Prajina and Alex had been abducted by aliens from Aldebaran. They concluded that he was a nutcase and let him go.

This last conjecture was absurd of course, since the spheroid thing was a piece of equipment which couldn’t really be counted as an “alien,” and ℏ♄ and her crew weren’t even from this galaxy.

All the way back to Columbia, he neglected to pat himself on the back for screwing with the polygraph by exercising his kundalini-esque control over his stress levels; he was genuinely a bit worried about his two missing friends.

Although it was not totally unforeseen that they might wander off and “disappear” together: both of them had multiple offers from other universities, some of which overlapped, and he was pretty sure they had the hots for each other. He hoped his light show had made the evening a tiny bit more romantic for people, including them. He relaxed on the way home and thought-texted his boyfriend Eric, who had been unable to make it to the rave. It would’ve been a fine occasion for coming out to their circle of friends. Yes, friends, at least. Eric‘s family still had a bigoted attitude that Padmanabhan was sure had perished during RuPaul‘s time –the late 20th / early 21st century drag queen, not the supreme court justice from 2098.

The thing about the police video hacking still perturbed him a little. He knew exactly why they were alarmed, and was already a step ahead. If someone had hacked them the way they were worried they’d been hacked, this could very well become a federal case soon. It wasn’t supposed to be possible, but if some super genius hacker from the rave had figured out a way around the Cryptomancer™️, perhaps it was good that the investigators regarded him as a harmless brain case with no useful information to contribute. But how are P&A involved? Not as the hackers themselves, but did they know the hackers? That made him somewhat concerned for their safety.

Keith

He couldn’t understand why his sister called it “must see TV.” Part of it admittedly may have had to do with his formal diagnosis of attention deficit disorder. He truly could not sit still for a half-hour show, let alone that one hour er, which his sister always adored because she had a crush on some tv doctor but would never admit it.

Keith failed to understand how not wanting to sit on your ass for half an hour was a “disorder.” How about “you snooze, you lose disorder!?” Be a couch potato or skate Berkeley with his buds? No brainer!

Somewhere on Virginia Street not far from the Cal campus, on the roof of a co-op house, some dudes who had taken physics classes with his professor-mom had the biggest bong he had ever seen. The view from up there looked out over the bay and you could see the Golden Gate in the distance – not fogged in at the moment – so Keith tried to pretend to be interested in the bridge he had seen all his life; his girlfriend wasn’t there yet but some of the other couples were making out; he felt a little weird like a seventh or ninth wheel or something; he couldn’t really keep track of everyone’s comings and goings without staring, which would’ve made him feel creepier. She’d be there soon. This was life. Why watch a show called friends when you could actually hang out with friends? Or a show about nothing when it was more fun to do nothing with the right people.

Nothing turned into something called auyahausca. Who’d ever heard of getting high on tea? These Berkeley people! And oh yeah, Keith saw the angels that afternoon! They ended up in San Francisco, at a rave, of course.

Voodoo People... by The Prodigy. That should be perfect for this trip, he thought. But only on cassette. He didn’t see how the others could cope with the distraction of skipping cd players while on skateboards! This was Gonk’s personal remix. But the Gonk himself assured him by long distance from Santa Monica that tonight’s DJ, Hillbard, would have an even better version of that track.

He found an older truck to grab onto that accelerated up to just the right speed. It did have a good bumper for skitching – not molded plastic like newer cars. But with a pickup truck just reaching into the bed or grabbing the tailgate was fine. Yeah it was a Chevy like Farrah Fawcett or Jean Coulter the stunt double had grabbed onto, and he knew there’d be some kidding about it later maybe... if any of these other stoners could remember. Probably. You can’t be too stoned if you’re gonna try and skate like this.

He saw that Lucycat and `Diva had snagged themselves a decent truck also. Tammy, Jason, and that douchebag from Oakland whose name he couldn’t remember, had the fastest truck. Batgirl, Reyna, and Perez were having some trouble with people who didn’t want to play along and Jared and Aurelio managed to get a truly clueless driver who seemed baffled by what was going on and wanted to pull over and stop completely.

As far as Keith knew, there was still no specific law against skitching on a skateboard in California; for the skater anyway. If they could prove that a driver knew and let someone do it, then maybe for the driver. That’s why you used “plausible deniability” and pretending not to notice. Don’t be a dick and completely stop. The rest of their group of about twenty or so did ok with their chosen vehicles.

Everyone picked up some major speed, at last. So did Keith’s heart rate.

Tammy. From Idaho. Or Iowa. No one could ever remember. People always get it confused. She doesn’t care. Hated it there. Parents got her a Nash long ago. It’s now out in a backyard delaminating somewhere. Keith laughed out loud at the distant memory but couldn’t be heard by anyone over the roaring of the road noise now. He said he had one from his childhood doing the same thing. She knew enough to not try and skate on a Nash when she got here back in middle school.

The other thing that she brought with her from I-daho/owa was weed. She’d ripped off her asshole “stepfather” or just mom’s abusive boyfriend or whatever from the toolbox mounted on the back of his truck which he chose to padlock with some low grade TG&Y hardware. It was Columbian or Acapulco gold. Keith couldn’t recall. But she’d stored it right and it was still premium. He felt bad for almost a split second for the dude until Tammy told people what he’d done. It was the first time Keith had ever heard the term “trailer-trash.”

She was smart to just sell the whole stash to some older kids who owned the block; not be tryin’ to start up as a dealer herself. Maybe she lost money on the exchange. It was still more than enough to make it a Powell-Peralta Christmas. After that she started hanging out with the Wiccan contingent: Lucy, Amber, Melissa, Cecilia, etc.

She never had been into him like he’d hoped she would be back in the eighth grade. Now she was with Trent and Keith & Lucycat had been a thing since senior year started. So it was awkward that he was staring right up her ass for the past couple of minutes and couldn’t see his own girlfriend. She and the two dudes had gotten an enormous Dodge Ram or maybe GMC? It was a work truck that someone really used for work, and a bit too dirty in the twilight to read the tailgate around three people skitching. The guys were on the back corners and had a normal tailgate grip like he did. She was in the middle and had bent forward ever-so-slightly. Something about the draft was blowing up her skirt like someone was taking a leaf blower to it.

It was okay ‘cause it was either a skort or she had on some long sweat shorts under the skirt. But it was close enough to be confused for flesh-colored in this weird lighting; an exact match to her complexion every time they passed a street light. He wondered if any drivers thought they were actually seeing what it only looked like. And would they have any accidents? Oh well, always a good idea to watch out for erratic driving anyway. Overall the whole situation made him uncomfortable. He wanted to be good to Lucy.

Keith and several others carried spare bones in their backpacks; not only for themselves but for anyone in the group who ended up needing them. They were a long way from home this time. Everyone here, he was thinking, has gotten to at least 40 mph before. There were plenty of slower-moving vehicles that night for those without death wishes. So he estimated about twenty percent burn-up going across bridge. Plenty of spare wheels to make it back. But “back” would consist of a variety of different trips for them over the weekend. No hauling ass at insane speed and burning up polyurethane.

A brief distraction for stunts at the gate arms, then a stop at Treasure Island / Yerba Buena tunnel to enjoy Gonk’s Northern Lights. After that, no more fast skitching, because a mild – in Keith’s opinion – fog slowed traffic down a little. So then it was just them taking their leisurely time to get across the western section.

They arrived at the downtown parking garage just as his tape auto-reversed a second time and restarted Prodigy... And just as the DJ, Hillbard Ravenhorn, was starting his much-hyped remix of the same tune. They mashed up nicely before Keith took off his headphones. The dude was supposedly one of “Us.” As in Lucy & Batgirl us’s... a Wiccan. And that was actually his craft name. The fact that it contained the word “Rave” in it probably gave everyone the impression that he made it up for his DJ-ing gigs.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Some people might have thought they were bodypainted ravers, camouflaged to blend in with the colorful Basquiat-like graffiti on the concrete walls inside the parking garage. There was a lot of hippie-style bodypainting going on, of course.

Others who caught them at a non-camouflaged moment may have thought they, themselves, were hallucinating because they were stoned on some new-n-improved shit... which many of them were.

Whatever the people imagined they were seeing, the things weren’t nearly as good as they thought they were at hiding themselves. Two young women Keith recognized from Cal campus, hanging out in the hall back when they were waiting to see his mom during office hours, were laughing hysterically and pointing at the things between hits from their balloons. Tammy giggled also, but noting the balloon ladies and not the weirdly camouflaged wall things: “hey, they’re sucking in helium,” she said smiling gleefully – trying to point with an unobtrusive thumb, “to make their voices sound funny.”

He saw Trent almost lose it. The guy played it off well, cupping his hands into a megaphone around his mouth and pretending to cheer Hillbard Ravenhorn on as he faded Voodoo People into ISH Revenge. Dated, Keith thought; like kinda so three-or-four-years-ago plus they were already using the opening stereo acrobatics on radio commercials for a night club. But several ravistas nearby joined Trent in howling their approval out to DJ Ravenhorn. Tammy never guessed he’d been about to burst out laughing at her. Sometimes the Idahoowa still showed through in her.

But she’s with him now and he just spotted Lucy in a pot-leaf outfit that Castadiva had made for her; he wondered, where in the hell had they gone to change? So it would be up to Trent to explain to Tammy what they really had in those balloons.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

To his dying day, he could never reproduce the exact same drug combo as on that night. It was during a trance track called The Magnet, by the Holy Ghost Inc. that he was convinced he could not only see the sound waves in the air above his head, but could reach up and touch them and squish them around in his hands. Later when most of the high had worn off, he demonstrated his fearless skating abilities in a way that almost got him killed. Like Berkeley across the bay, San Francisco had a few hills of its own. Ha ha – they were all pretty familiar with Berkeley – but San Francisco, not so much. The others in his group, not willing to attempt this maneuver in the same spectacular fashion, lagged behind.

You snooze, you lose! But he only arrived at the park about three minutes ahead of them. Alone. The place was vacant on a Thursday night. Okay maybe Friday morning now; their unexpected three-day weekend, due to mold in their high school, was off to a wild start all right. This couldn’t still be caused by must see TV, he thought. Could it? The others, being basically as stoned as he was earlier, were in no shape to find him. Bummer, because he really wanted to eat, like he could devour an entire Mega Turbo Burrito plate from Rosie’s Cantina! (They could become vegetarIan if you left off the sour cream.) That’s when the rustling back in the trees and shrubs got his attention.

Okay, so most of the high has not worn off, he mused, laughing to himself happily! There was a giant, living taco approaching him. Not like a mascot in a costume or anything, but as if a taco had actually come to life. It had food with it! Cool!

This became the subject of much amusement over the next few weeks, especially around the times during which Keith had tried to again conjure the taco for everyone else to see it. He was unsuccessful of course, but did conjure it again for himself. Mentioning that part wouldn’t have helped much. He already was dealing with Lucy, Andy, and Jared’s reactions. His girlfriend and two best buds simultaneously admired him for having been the most stoned of anyone they’d ever heard of and ridiculed him for believing his hallucination had been real. Keith’s being stalked by a giant taco, they laughed, literally rolling on the floor! Lucycat actually laughed so hard she farted. The other guys were too drunk to notice but Keith thought it was cute.

Stalko-Taco, they called it. It became the running inside joke among the stoner and skater community in his part of Berkeley… “Hey, if you get as fucked up as Keith was that night, you’ll be able to see Stalko-Taco.”

Alright, but then where had he gotten the food? He pointed out that his three minute lead had not been nearly enough time to stop by a restaurant and get food. As luck would have it, Keith did remember and was able to produce a close enough combination of drugs for conjuring Stalko-Taco... in front of other people.. A few weeks later and just before New Year’s Eve 1996.

Brenda

The creepypasta website scared the fuck out of Brenda Gironés-Bernal when she was 12. At 16 it was passé; the stuff which those poseur emo goth kids at her school liked. She had no respect for them after the shit they pulled during the election – vandalizing only the blue-sign yards revealed their true colors. To be fair, it was still an interesting forum to watch as a source of creative energy from the writers there; sadly she just hadn’t had the time lately.

She had read all the popular ones – Slenderman before those misguided girls tried to really kill someone as a sacrifice or whatever they’d been doing… Jeff The Killer of course – uninteresting to her as fiction goes – but he was cute. So...

That caused her to be more likely to watch actual dudes on YouTube, and several females as well, doing him as a cosplay subject.

She thought the Russian sleep-deprivation experiment was giga-scarier, even to this day. The one who sculpted stuff out of shit and Stalko-Taco were just plain ridiculous. Silly and maybe at most just mildly entertaining.

Candle Cove kind of gave her a chill but she wasn’t quite sure why it... her mind stalled as she tried to hold onto a thought that seemed to want to escape.

“Oh, wait! That’s it. Along the same lines as Candle Cove, there was something weird. About Stalko-Taco.”

She went on to spend a large part of the evening digging. Already sitting on the floor in the middle of her room, Brenda was now surrounded by a sea of paper. She went to the Internet first like any normal teen, then later resorted to digging through old papers, half-assed attempts to start diaries that she never kept up with, notes from classes, etc.

Precisely what it was that was weird about Stalko-Taco dawned on her at last: when she scanned through the list of creepypasta stories & characters on the file that she’d downloaded about five years ago, it hadn’t been there. Maybe she missed it? No. A second scroll-through confirmed it wasn’t on her list. Was this list from before Stalko-Taco? No way – the taco story was older than Jeff and Slendy. Unless she was majorly wrong about the timeline in her head.

So back to google then. That’ll settle it.

Nope. It settled nothing. The internet had nothing at all on Stalko-Taco. Which led her back to the digging through papers.

Eventually she fell asleep in her clothes in her room.

In the morning after she washed up, changed, and had gone back to bed for some more proper sleep, she told herself to knock off the creepypasta shit; no more than an hour was all she could allow herself. There were just too many other things she needed to be dealing with, especially now that she was out from under her curse!

Then instead of birds outside her window on a Saturday morning, she heard what sounded like Poppy & Grimes again blaring from a car stereo out there. She didn’t make it to the window in time to spot the vehicle and see if it was the one from yesterday.

She went over it again in her head. What was equally curious about that afternoon was what got her thinking about the creepypasta phenomenon to begin with.

It wasn’t a required chore or anything but the little birdbath in their front yard was full of dead leaves which she noticed when she arrived home from school. Maybe birds would have no problem “bathing” in a concrete bowl filled with slimy rotten leaves and water as opposed to just clear clean water? But hosing it out would only take a minute and she liked the little ones out there chirping and playing around in the morning outside her window that overlooked the front yard and her street.

After that she’d go in to clean up and get her very late lunch out of the microwave since, as was her established custom, she had refused to eat lunch at any school since the seventh grade. Over the noise of the water blasting everything clean, the beat had approached. She’d expected it to be someone she recognized, or if not, at least someone who looked kinda close to her own age. Instead the driver and passenger together gave off a sort of middle-aged women vibe. The “do I know them?” question became “do I know their kids?”

They had a familiar feel about them but she couldn’t exactly place them. She wrote it off as nothing once she was done with the hose and they’d disappeared, turning out onto the major connecting street. Going inside to her food, she felt happy for them and hoped she was still enjoying life and jamming out with her friends in her roughly mid-thirties or so. On that note, it hit her: who the passenger reminded her of, at least.

She could visibly track the wave of goosebumps appearing on her forearms as she realized: “you see her whenever you look in the mirror, Brenda!”

It was herself from the future. “What the fuck? Why am I thinking this?” She wondered out loud with the house to herself at the moment. Brenda was in her own opinion, a typical looking Hispanic female. Or Latina. Whatever. Like a lot of girls in this town. The woman was possibly twice her age, dark brunette, with possibly olive-to-tan-complected skin. There were a lot of ways Brenda might age over the next twenty years or so. Some of them might resemble the woman in the Poppy & Grimes car stereo vehicle.

There were also lots of possibilities for how the passenger might have looked as a teenager and some might also resemble Brenda now. The driver could have possibly passed for her friend Ava in the future. But there was nothing conclusive about all this. Why, Brenda wondered, did she suddenly feel like she had an age progression app installed in her head and that she could be so certain?

Even if she was to download an app that would do the age progression thing, she hadn’t gotten a close enough look at her presumably future self to be able to confirm whatever the app may show. So whether those apps worked or not, it wasn’t like she could look at the woman and say “Yes! That’s her. Or rather, me… us?” or prove herself wrong and say “no way, not even close.”

The other kind of software which she knew existed – the one that would age regress an adult person and estimate what they looked like as a teenager – would be even more useless. To use something like that she would not only need to find the woman again, but get close enough to get a decent photo. And that’s just gonna look perfectly sane, right? Running up and snapping a picture of some stranger in a car without her permission!

It was simply a “gut feeling” as her mom often famously described these things. So unless there’d been some advances in science that Brenda didn’t know about, like time-travel had become a reality... and she cut herself off mentally. Thinking, note to self: watch some news once in awhile in between Snapchat marathon sessions. Seriously, there could be a war breaking out some days and she wouldn’t have known about it until someone posted something on Instagram maybe.

Then it struck her how much these goosebumps could be useful! Whether the time traveler thing or herself from the future checking up on her was true or not, this could potentially be the end of her six-week long writer’s block dilemma! While a new creepypasta wasn’t exactly what she’d been thinking of, it could certainly work. She abandoned the microwave with the door open and raced to get her current brainstorming composition book and a pen as well as her old 5S. No longer in service with a working SIM card, it still had the voice recording feature. Moreover, it’s microphone was in better condition than the one on her current actual phone.

Talking and writing alternately in stream-of-consciousness-brainstorming-mode? Yes, it might’ve looked and sounded insane to anyone watching. That was a minor reason out of many more important ones for why Brenda didn’t write around anyone or show them her work until it was done. But there had been times for real when she’d forgotten ideas while trying to write by hand. Not that she couldn’t scribble fast... but her thoughts simply blazed through her mind like that flash paper her father had used when he was a lounge magician.

She had her dad’s father, grandpa Enrique to thank for the “tape recorder” idea. He’d given her his old Greg Brady-style tape recorder when she was 10 to record her singing. While she never went on to do anything as beautiful as Clowns Never Laughed Before, it gave her the idea to start recording everything important. And since four-track reel-to-reel tape wasn’t that commonplace as a storage medium anymore, it went on to be on dad’s old blackberry, a digital audio recorder, and finally her iPhone that she wasn’t allowed to have until she had turned 15. Then mom’s plan got her the hardware “upgrade” if you could call it that. The point being that she could always babble at least as fast as she could think. It was a safety net that allowed her to get absolutely every important thought during a writing binge down in some permanent form.

Lunch for that afternoon had to be reheated again. But she was ecstatic that the writer’s block curse had been lifted. It did lead her to some technical research, even though creepypastas were open source, to make sure she wasn’t pilfering too many ideas from established stories. And that in turn led her to waking up at 4:15 in the morning, still dressed in her clothes from the previous day, but in a bed full of papers like that kid from Real Genius.

Looking through steam from late Saturday morning coffee, the booming car long gone, birdies perched on and occasionally drinking from the birdbath outside while not literally bathing, she enjoyed their company and thought about directions to take her new “creepypasta-ish” story.

And kept getting interrupted! Thoughts of another creepypasta were creeping into her mind. “Why on Earth does my insomniac bipolar wacky mind think that story is so important?”

Reluctantly, she let herself think about it. Only. No googling and no papers. What exactly was bothering her about it? She not only wondered but forced herself to state it in a sentence. To be spoken aloud. One of her digital recording devices was still going of course.

It came to her. The words sprang from her. The problem wasn’t just that it had been removed. Another major story had been deleted, that she knew of, due to a DMCA claim. But guess what? You could still google it. Results still showed up from where people were talking about it. Long after the DMCA and plagiarism allegations. For Stalko-Taco, there was nothing. Not even a blog entry from someone who perhaps didn’t like it and was going on about how much they thought it sucked.

Either some series of events, like that DMCA stuff had resulted in a really big scandal where they’d literally gone through and obliterated everything about it, or she had hallucinated a creepypasta that never existed! Not possible, she knew. But not because she was immune to hallucinating. It was because she just remembered a boy!

Not one she was ever attracted to, but an old friend from early middle school. He was an artist who drew every creepypasta character on his Wacom. And, he put them all on his DeviantArt. Not just his faves but even the ones he didn’t like so much, just for the challenge of it. He’d even imagined several “artist’s conceptions” of what some characters would look like for cases where there were only text descriptions available. Once again, something he did purely for the challenge; though in Stalko-Taco’s case, she knew he really did like that one.

When she called him, his extremely busy mom – Nancy – hurriedly explained that he was out for the weekend. It was some UIL type of thing, like for mathletes but also for science. And just her luck, they didn’t allow smartphones or devices into the testing areas. But she remembered Brenda and it hadn’t been more than a few months since they’d spoken. Nancy said she’d tell him to call her back.

Would that be tonight? Did they have some celebratory antics planned back at their hotel? Or on the bus on the way home Sunday afternoon or evening? It was fine though; now that she’d resolved to contact him, she knew the matter would be answered. Heck, he’d probably even email her the original text of the story.

With this set into motion, the missing creepypasta issue quit nagging her so much and she finally got down to the business of working on some more of her own story over the rest of the weekend.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 3. four chapters, ending with chapter 13

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 3. four chapters, ending with chapter 13

↩️return to previous section, section 2

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

ℏ♄

Prajina eventually learned that the captain’s nickname, ℏ♄, was pronounceable with human vocal cords. But only certain humans had bothered to master this kind of “speech.” It was in fact, colloquially known as Mongolian throat-singing. It seemed it could be accurately reproduced by a master of this kind of singing who repeated one particular word, twice in a row, with a slight difference in pitch. So far Prajina’s new education from the device she said looked like an ancient “tanning bed” did not include any training in Mongolian throat-singing, or any Mongolian at all. The rest of the languages were to be covered in tomorrow’s session.

Her nickname could also be approximated by listening to the sound that the blue orbs called The Old Ones made when hovering in the Rock Hudson tv-movie version of Ray Bradbury‘s “The Martian Chronicles.” If you listened to the repetitious sound they make and let it repeat for two cycles but vary the pitch slightly from one to the next, it sort of sounds like it. The aliens on the Fomalhaut would still detect that you were speaking with a human accent either way, but they would understand who you were talking about: The Captain. Besides languages, all of the books were included as part of Prajina’s brain programming.

For the time being, due to physiological reasons, it was pointless to try and teach her too much more “alien speech” – or The Intergalacta as it was called – sort of an alien Esperanto. The term “alien” no longer made sense to use either. Notwithstanding semantics, most of the captain’s “native” speech, as Prajina thought of it, sounded like the synthesizers, eight minutes and forty-nine seconds into something called the “Rage Mix” by the 21st-century human called DJ BL3ND that she had in her public head cloud. The crew all regarded this as a catchy tune and had been going around seriously singing it, unable to get it unstuck from their heads.

As soon as they realized that DJ BL3ND was not actually a Ხᢈɧᯌ from the Epsilon Camelopardalis system, but in fact a human in a mask, they also learned that it was not the sound of his singing, but a combination of sound effects applied with a synthesizer program. They quit trying to hear meaning in the “words” and just enjoyed it the way a non-Italian speaker might enjoy a beautiful aria from an Italian opera without understanding the words. Their captain was getting tired of it already and was looking forward to relaxing with “Exit Planet Dust” by The Chemical Brothers back in her quarters when her regular shift time ended.

As the ship’s captain she had a certain autonomy that other public servants rarely experienced. It was well within the scope of her job to deputize other sentient beings as needed when it helped with a case.

And considering the magnitude of this case, it could be justified. But seriously? No one else from the member worlds of The Amphictiony would pull a stunt like deputizing a human; they were still just infants as a species and needed more time to develop. But the Captain of the P.S.L. Fomalhaut’s decision would not be challenged… not ordinarily, and certainly not in this instance. They never could convey the meaning of the letters PSL to Prajina. After attempting to translate, the words were still lacking. So the abbreviation followed by the name the humans had given to that star for which the ship had been named, would suffice. It was necessary to explain to Prajina that she was on a skewed-Minkowski-space-time-inter-dimensional craft, so they might as well give it a name.

What puzzled the captain also – but she understood that most beings, including her own species, went through a phase like this somewhere in their distant evolutionary past – was that humans used so little of their brain capacity. Like having a decent amount of books available in their libraries, and yet few, if any of them, having ever read them all. Why has every human not read every book ever written? At least the ones by humans?

And if you’re going to have over a couple of hundred major languages? Okay, that’s cute, she thought. But then why don’t all humans speak them all? She knew from Prajina’s thoughts that she resembled the bluish female, presumably, supervisory alien from the first Lilo and Stitch movie. Interesting, all around. That humans had already begun to think of such things.

Personally, ℏ♄ didn’t see the resemblance, and thought the cartoon reminded her more of her crazy Aunt ࠄo࠳ ୌѪ ృ, but some of the crew did find it amusing. So yes, they had already begun to think of things; theories that might have postulated the existence of ℏ♄ and her crew. And yet they couldn’t be bothered to read every book ever written, learn every language, take all college courses in all subjects... you know, simple things like that.

Moreover, once Prajina had realized they were “aliens,” she had not only wanted to see the captain’s true form, but had finally calmed down. That she was not more comfortable with her own “tribal god images,” suggested that maybe the contact manual needed updating. Well, the so-called “tanning bed” was now ready for Prajina’s session tomorrow, and ℏ♄ went back to her quarters and put on Loops of Fury instead.

“Young” Padmanabhan

Obviously we’re not talking about “Padmanabhan the postdoc...” who was too busy writing a grant proposal to be at the rave or involved in any of this. He got his grant, published, and repeated. He eventually became a principal investigator, a tenured professor, and lived happily ever after without ever knowing anything about Stalko-Taco or the shenanigans surrounding it. So it is no longer necessary to specify that we are talking about “young” Padmanabhan.

“You could see it in the Incredibles, and in the Gatorade soccer commercial. Also, the pharmaceuticals companies already had a lot of money to expend even back then,” he looked out into his audience to see if they were paying attention.

“But the matrix was all real actors,” Siouxsie said, raising her hand but then talking without waiting to be called, “so what does the intro scene have to do with hyper-animation?” While the book they were presently discussing wasn’t The Matrix, it made enough references to the film that it generated some interesting side discussions.

Padmanabhan could see the files in her head cloud, as permissions had been granted for him to overlap their public, academic areas with his own head cloud and he could see that she’d purchased the CliffsNotes. It still contained the ancient admonition at the beginning urging students not to use the CliffsNotes instead of reading the book. Well, technically, no problem there. Siouxsie was the type who read neither.

How he’d gotten wrangled into tutoring English and American Literature students was boring and simple: he was in a hurry to get his citizenship. Then he could get his car and move around the country relatively unobserved. Alex and Prajina didn’t need to worry about such things; theirs was bought for them – a mere $3 billion each.

It had not kept up with the rate of inflation since the ‘70s. Anyway, P & A were both from prominent, wealthy, old money American families. Alex from the Lexington Sohibnazarov’s, And Prajina from the Seattle Ranganathans. So clearly their parents could afford to buy their citizenships. Padmanabhan was not from the one percent, or even the ten percent, and had decided to go the volunteer route; he was going to be teaching in public schools after he graduated, delay grad school for two years, and that way at least enter grad school as a citizen. Now he was in a hurry though. He needed access to things that citizens could get – without the government scrutiny that would be applied to non-citizens.

The fact that this tutoring counted, was repugnant to him. These were kids whose parents were anywhere from deci-billionaires up to a few of centi-billionaires, who were supposed to go to university because that was what was expected of them. Only trouble was, they weren’t very bright. How could this be counted as public service and quadruple the speed at which he achieved citizenship? One semester. Slightly less than half a year, would replace two years of teaching actual underprivileged kids in high school algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. Someone had set it up. “The fix was in” as they said. Not fixed by him, though. He’d simply answered the add which his boyfriend had brought to his attention on his head monitor – by telling him okay, and to go ahead and “click” on it.

Back to the lecture. A dirty old couch. It had to do with such diverse subjects as entropy, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, etc. Not likely anything these spoon-fed whiners would deign to read about.

The proverbial “dirty old couch” was a benchmark holy grail of sorts, around the turn of the 20th to 21st centuries. To be able to simulate one, meant that you had a computer-generated image so accurate that humans could not tell they were looking at a computer-generated image, and might in fact believe they were seeing an actual photograph of someone’s apartment for instance.

If in the universe of the matrix, they had succeeded in producing an entire computer-generated world that humans believed was in fact reality… Then the dirty old couch goal had presumably been reached long ago. So they didn’t literally go for a couch, sofa, etc. Instead it was a pair of chairs. But they did make sure to have them be both dirty and old. The scene where Morpheus meets Neo to start explaining to him what the matrix really is, takes place on a pair of dirty old chairs. It’s symbolic. Duh. CliffsNotes to the rescue. How lazy do you really have to be to need someone to read them to you? That was essentially what Padmanabhan was doing if he stuck to the lesson plan.

The book they were “reading” however had tie-ins to what he was actually trying to investigate, as it related to P&A’s disappearance. A curious little synchronicity… and helpful one. It gave him a plausible excuse to have billionaire teenagers (citizens) go poking around in Cryptomancer™️ related matters. It was too risky to do it himself, since those local cops back in Kentucky had most likely forwarded everything they had to the feds. He shouldn’t even be a “blip” on their “radar” right now, as his Grandpa Kaushik used to say. But he might become a rather large, obvious blob on the radar screen if he were known to be sniffing around into Cryptomancer security matters.

As he understood it, the company called Cryptomancer™️ had developed a technology that made it possible to use video as evidence in courts of law once again. In fact, there were many uses for video, once verified to be actual video, such as news, official educational documentaries, etc.

His great-grandfather, as a legal aid attorney, had been alive and practicing during the entire but brief time period in which videos were inadmissible. He had shown young “‘Rajan,” as Padmanabhan was affectionately known, a “video” of someone named OJ stabbing and killing a man and woman. Then a “vid” of the same man and woman, in the exact same surrounding scenery, being stabbed and killed by a former U.S. president, then a fictional character in a hockey mask took a turn at stabbing them. Although the two people depicted were actual murder victims who suffered a horrific death at the hands of someone, none of the so-called videos were real.

The point being, that at some time in the twenty-first century, video simulation technology had become so advanced that it was impossible to tell the difference between “cartoons” and reality. It immediately meant that you could make entire movies that contained no human actors. You could make your own “virtual movies” à la Capaccio, on your desktop – starring no one who was ever actually born.

If for some reason you ever thought that Rita Hayworth would’ve given a better performance as Princess Leia in Star Wars? You could go through and replace her in every scene. Or have yourself as Princess Leia. Or your best friend as Han Solo. Replace any actors in any movie ever made before 2036, due to loosened copyright restrictions, with any other actors from any time period... or non-actors, or non-people/simulated people. And it would all look perfectly realistic. Someone who had never seen the first Star Wars movie from 1977, would never know it didn’t originally star You as Luke, Frank Sinatra as Obi-Wan, etc.

The downside to it of course was that you could now frame anyone, for any crime. From robbing a liquor store to assassinating a president. Videotaped evidence, once considered incontrovertible, indisputable evidence in court, was immediately useless. There was simply no way of proving it really happened and that it wasn’t a simulation.

And closed circuit surveillance systems? Completely hackable. It was a variation of the old vacant room scene… Only now you could have a virtual security guard walk into your virtual room and “wave” at the camera. It could be a guard whom everyone recognizes at a company, even her/his best friend would recognize them as an employee; meanwhile, moving crews could be making off with truckloads of merchandise, terrorists infiltrating a government installation, whatever. For about three years, it was a real problem. Then came cryptomancer to the rescue.

Prajina

The tanning bed was of course nothing of the sort. It was a learning technology, essentially. But depending upon how one analyzed it, it might also appear to be a device for performing brain surgery.

The captain’s sweeping generalizations had led to a situation wherein some brain damage had inadvertently been inflicted upon Prajina. It was easily repaired with biocompatible nano robots. Not only were the required repairs effected, her neurophysiology was bolstered in such a way as to prevent further damage when educating her.

So according to ℏ♄’s directive, Prajina had now “read” every book ever written, spoke every human language fluently, and had taken and mastered all college courses and laboratories offered to all students on Earth. On the third day, she started to absorb some basic knowledge from the “alien” equivalent of books.

Prajina thought briefly about how her ancestors used to employ a thing called an IQ test. Presumably it was only to detect learning disabilities in its beginning. Then later a recreational use for it evolved as it became a fun way for people who thought they were smart to compare brain pans. Since she was now someone who had read – and memorized – every book ever written, and since Alfred Binet was among those authors, she couldn’t help musing about it. She concluded it would be complete nonsense to try and compute such a value for herself, obviously.

How do you estimate mental age? You’ll need that numerator before you can do the calculation. Even an extrapolation of a mental age would be absurd. At what mental age is someone supposed to have read every book ever written, taken and aced every chemistry & physics lab, be fluent in hundreds of languages and instantly be able to translate betwixt any of them? Arbitrary indices aside, she was now regarded by the “aliens” as the smartest human being alive. Her intelligence was roughly on par with what ℏ♄’s was in “kindergarten.” Her mission was explained to her; she had already accepted it and been deputized before any of the brain tinkering had ensued. But the specifics of how she was to carry out her mission, ended up being considerably more complicated than merely comprehending and accepting the assignment.

Brenda

Though she promised herself she wouldn’t do this, Monday evening after school again found Brenda pouring through papers… frustrated. She finally took that break she’d been promising herself. That’s when it occurred to her that her weekend call to someone who she knew could send her copies of all the files she was looking for, had yet to be returned.

It wasn’t like they’d gone so long without talking that they were practically strangers; two-to-three months, tops. And that was for people living in different cities who were both swamped with schoolwork. They were still close enough friends, she thought, that it shouldn’t feel like she was bothering him. “Even if I am? Fuck it! If I am bothering him it’s only temporary; once he hears what it’s about, he’ll be too intrigued to not want to talk,” she said under her breath, her thumb poised over the phone screen, ready to scroll through recents and call him again already.

She thought about how to summarize it to him in case he wondered why the sudden interest in Stalko-Taco...

That particular story had been removed. Okay, she reasoned. It’s their website I guess, they can do what they want. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t just on the creepypasta official website. There was fanfiction. It was open source. There were other blogs that talked about creepypasta stories. People – including him – did original drawings on DeviantArt, Tumblr memes, YouTube videos; they did cosplay in real life, made videos of it, and put it on YouTube. And Instagram. Sure, Stalko-Taco had never been as popular as JTK and Slenderman; If Brenda had to estimate she’d have said he (it?) was about on the level of Ticci Toby in terms of popularity. But there was nothing.

As if the internet had been wiped clean of it. Impossible, she knew, even though not a techie person. But not only that, it was as if people’s memories had been erased; people she talked to online over the weekend who were big enough fans of all creepypastas in general that they should have known about the taco, didn’t. Erasing people’s memories? Also an impossibility, she was pretty sure. Collective amnesia? Collective and ultra selective.

But she knew something super weird was happening when Wheeler didn’t remember!

She finally got ahold of him. No problems. He’d just been wrapping up a major project that afternoon and was about to call her, he reassured Brenda.

Her nerdy friend from Gus Grissom middle school had thought about actually going as Stalko-Taco for Halloween one year, when they were about 11, but then changed his mind and went as Ben Drowned. The last she’d heard – and it had been awhile – he was into Babadook cosplay on whatever free time he had. He’d rejected the idea, partly based on her recommendation; but he also agreed that too many people would think he was supposed to be the mascot for that baseball(?) team nearby in another town sponsored by some restaurant.

Though she knew nothing of sports, she was pretty sure they weren’t as well known as, say the New York Yankees. Not major-league, if that was the right term? So outside of their state, maybe in Berkeley and San Francisco where the story was set, people might not connect it with a minor-league baseball mascot. But in Austin where they lived? No way. Everyone would be saying it’s the mascot. Wheeler never forgot anything. He was a fucking genius and had gone to some high-tech specialty high school at FDR while Brenda’s parents moved her seventy-five miles south, to San Antonio.

Everything was cool about the couple of months of no speaking. They still kept in touch at least on a touch-base kind of level. But this time he acted like she was insane. Only he wasn’t acting though.

“Have you been trying to smoke bananas again? Did you get out your grandpa’s Anarchist’s Cookbook? I know you’d never try the toad thing because you’re vegan like us, or at least vegetarian, right? But did you –”

“Alright, knock it off,” she said finally able to talk amidst her laughter, “it was banana peels, and no, I’ll never do that again. All it did was give me a headache from hell. And you’re right about the toad thing: absolutely no way. And it wasn’t my grandpa’s book, it was my dad’s.” The realization overtook her: He truly had absolutely no recollection of Stalko-Taco.

Seriously? She went over it again with him: it was a Creepypasta story called Stalko-Taco. A giant living taco appears to the most stoned person it can find who is still technically conscious on any given night, who also happens to have the munchies, and then feeds the hungry stoned person.

“How is that scary?” Wheeler had asked. Well, that part wasn’t, she agreed. Though it was creepy that a twelve-foot tall taco was actually alive, right? But it did get scary when anyone acted violently towards the stoner, somehow acting as a protector – her memory wasn’t clear. That’s why she needed to find a copy of the old stories online somewhere even if the original website owners had chosen to delete them. Needless to say Mister “I’ve never heard of anything like that” did not have any copies of files to send her.

Why else was it scary? She thought to herself as Wheeler went on about the numerous other old times he could remember perfectly well.

It may have had something to do with the “men in black” type characters in the story who showed up afterwards to erase people‘s memories and cleanup evid......

Whoa! Major mindfuck! It dawned on her that maybe Stalko-Taco wasn’t a creepypasta story at all. What if it was absolutely Real, including the MIB sort of characters who showed up to do cleanup & memory erasure? And what if that was exactly what had happened!? Except they’d somehow forgotten to erase Brenda’s mind! Alright, that’s probably crazy, but that idea in and of itself would make a cool creepypasta; and although she was still very much an aspiring future creative writing major, Brenda felt like that might be straining her creative limits at the moment. Maybe some other time. But a good idea for capturing in the paisley mushroom-patterned brainstorming composition book which she was currently carrying everywhere in case she needed to jot ideas down, that was right there at arm’s reach.

Wheeler was out when she called back the next day, that time honestly just to talk and not so much to pump him for information. So she called Renaldo, the other math and science nerd whom she knew – from her high school. He wasn’t also an artist like Wheeler, but that wasn’t necessary.

True, he didn’t know creepypastas and wasn’t into any of this. But he could answer questions about tech stuff. Like could someone wipe all evidence of something from the internet? Maybe, he said, something called the NSA could do it; whatever that stood for. At 17 there was a lot of stuff she hadn’t heard of yet. But yes, it was some kind of super secret electronic spy agency and supposedly the single largest purchaser of computer hardware on the planet. If they could do something like that, along with bots to search for any sites mirroring it and possibly post-patriot act seizure and strong arm tactics to make the owners of the servers cooperate... their conversation droned on like this as Brenda sipped her coffee to stay awake and listen to him.

...and even if someone used a scrubber, they might still find traces of it with a SQUID. “OK,”

she stopped him. “Scrubber, I can sort of guess at the meaning of, in this context, but squid?”

“Superconducting quantum interference detector,” he elaborated.

All right, a gadget of some kind then, as she now understood it. He continued lecturing. Basically, yes, he’d tried to explain. But not something a typical high school kid would have access to. Not even a typical police department would have access to it. For major crime, the local PD would be able to make a request from the FBI. Some university or corporate R&D facilities might be able to pull it off, but in order to be admissible as evidence, the authorities would most likely want to keep it all within law-enforcement.

He went on detailing how to use a so-called low tech “book code” to supposedly thwart the electronic spooks. After what seemed like an eternity later, he changed gears a bit. “It’s not going to be relevant though, for what you’re talking about, Brenda.”

She wondered why, perking up. He continued: “a bunch of kids searching for evidence of an open-source cartoon –” what Renaldo understood creepypasta to be, so far – “aren’t going to find it if The Powers That Be at the highest level really wanted it wiped.” He continued on for another 15 minutes with tech-splanations.

But why would “they” really want that, she pondered, thinking about her earlier revelation that maybe this was reality and was never supposed to have been a creepypasta story. Renaldo pointed out to her the ridiculousness of this idea at the outset: “Why would The Government build a giant robotic taco in the first place??”

He was automatically presuming it had to be the government. Brenda hadn’t really thought it through enough yet to assign blame to anyone.

“Let alone,” he continued, “allow it to be seen, enough times to become an urban legend in the 90s, allow details of it to be published in story form on the Internet, let it be viewed by as many as 8 million viewers...”

An estimate she knew he’d made from official CP website stats that they displayed on their page, which she also recalled seeing. The number bothered her as well. Because if you are going to “erase” the memories of that many people, you’d need an army of goons to go track them down and do all that... and then how do you keep that many mouths shut? Have a smaller super-elite goon-squad that erases the erasers?

Renaldo hadn’t hit upon the concept of memory erasure at all, as was apparent from his ongoing analysis: “...and then expend all that energy just to erase Internet-only evidence of it? What about all the people who read it and remembered enough, or just copied files to their local drives or clouds. Or people who, like your friend Wheeler, might’ve actually done cosplay as this taco?”

That’s when Brenda asked him the next phase of her question: can people‘s memories be erased?

It was too late. Renaldo’s mom was hollering at him to get off the phone since it was a school night, and Brenda told him it’s okay; they both had school in the morning. He agreed they’d pick it up here, later.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 4. five chapters, ending with chapter 18

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 4. five chapters, ending with chapter 18

↩️return to previous section, section 3

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

The Spheroid / Ambraluxia

The AI, a registered sentient being and citizen of the amphictiony, had chosen to absorb the sub AI spheroid’s research progress and all its experiences before it was decommissioned. It was determined to essentially be a comedy of errors and not the fault of the manufacturer or anyone aboard the spheroid’s mothership. Still, it had made all the right decisions according to regulations, but produced a colossal cluster-᎘x࿔ᢈᡜ …she recorded in her equivalent of an online blog that was publicly accessible to all other member-species. So the company issued a voluntary recall. Ambraluxia now instantly comprehended the spheroid’s actions: she saw that its first priority had truly been the welfare of the “child,” even if it meant neglecting to follow certain environmental regulations.

The computer had assumed, by brain activity only, that Alex was an Altairean toddler. The fact that its parents had changed it into a human body while on Earth was not at all surprising for Altaireans. It was their absence that was cause for concern.

When it asked Alex where his parents were, he only knew the location of two of them, and he gave their coordinates in terms the computer couldn’t decipher. When asked about his Ardhanari parent, Alex’s answer was incomprehensible... curious, since at this age the Ardhanari parent would be handling most of the nanny-type responsibilities and spending the most time with the child, according to the customs of Altairean society.

What the spheroid’s computer had failed to grasp, was that Alex was saying he only had two parents. Humans would have two, Altaireans would have three. An actual sentient being would have reasoned that Alex was an inordinately intelligent human with some abnormal imbalances of neurotransmitters, receptor antagonists, and receptor site blockers – and then backed off. Not getting involved and caring for the “lost child,” feeding it, entertaining it with toys, and sending it back in time to wait for who it felt was its family.

Ambraluxia did think it was adorable how Alex played with the math games. He had been in the chair for about an hour before his appetite took over, but he enjoyed the educational toy in precisely the way that an Altairean child of his perceived age would have been predicted to. Then he had wanted Earth food, and wanted to play with the giant food-advertising character outside and see it come to life. The spheroid had naturally obliged him and then, it even sent his toy back in time with him, to New Year’s Eve of 1991.

Brenda

Could memories be erased? She’d researched, or at least googled, different types of amnesia. Retrograde and anterograde amnesias, Korsakoff's syndrome, or Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, other neurological conditions, etc. It all made perfect sense how one person could forget things. But it was beyond absurd to think that it could be orchestrated so as to make a large population – in the millions – all forget about the same thing.

Wheeler not only couldn’t remember, but later that week he could not produce pictures of himself from when his mom had tried to make him the outfit for cosplay. Brenda had had him on FaceTime, looking at the strangely oversized cork board in his room, pretty much as she remembered it. The thing had pictures from the past half-decade-plus, gathering dust and pictures layered up in some cases on top of older ones. There had at one time been old-fashioned Polaroids of the attempted Stalko-Taco outfit which he pinned up in his room. Those were now missing, and predictably, he had no recollection of them.

And this next part totally blew her mind during the FaceTime call: She located the actual vacant spots where she was sure they had once been, guiding him to exactly where she wanted him to position the phone’s camera. When she asked him why those spots were vacant, his answer was bizarre!

After babbling for a few seconds in a way she couldn’t understand, he got some words together. But they suddenly sounded like the speech of a person who’d just been abruptly awakened and asked a question while they were still half asleep. He was wide awake, but the words that came staggering out were: “Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.”

“Dude!” she managed to choke out a response, trying not to laugh and cause the cranberry-grape juice she’d been sipping the moment before to come spewing out of her nose, “you just quoted Andy Warhol!” She paused just briefly to swallow and catch her breath. “I thought during your, uh, critical diatribe last year that you made it clear you, um, didn’t like him? To put it mildly.”

“Not exactly. What I said was,” Wheeler intoned with a now news-anchor-perfect masculine voice that he could’ve made money with doing voiceovers for ads, “that I thought he was way overrated and that I could name at least ten other artists of the twentieth century who made more artistically significant contributions, and then I proceeded to do just that... along with detailed reasoning for why I thought so in each case. But I don’t exactly dislike him. I simply –”

He paused again and she was worried that maybe the expression he saw on her face was one of “Oh no! He’s going to repeat the whole gawdawful long lecture again!” So Brenda in that split second tried to look pleasant and slightly raised her brows as if to appear quite interested in what his next words would be. But her look wasn’t what had caused him to cut himself off.

“Wait,” he ventured in a less lecture-y tone, “did you say I quoted him? I don’t even know any quotes from him because I’ve never really studied him in that much depth. Oh hold on, the one about the greatest art... great art versus good art,”

“Good artists borrow. Great artists steal?” Brenda offered sweetly.

“That’s it! That’s the only quote I know from him. But I didn’t quote him. At least not that I’m aware of,” Wheeler said with utter sincerity.

“Nah. First of all that was Steve Jobs, not Warhol,” she tried to correct helpfully.

“No shit? I always thought it was an artist.”

“Steve Jobs said it a lot and liked to blame it on an artist. It doesn’t matter which one because it was none of them. But no, it actually goes back to San Francisco in the 60s when – Nancy! And Entropy!” Brenda said gleefully, and then rápidamente to Wheeler: “I’ll tell you later about Haight-Ashbury.”

His mom hadn’t barged in or anything; the door to his room had been open and Wheeler was walking in and out multiple times as he went to different spots looking for the old pictures.

After exchanging happy greetings with Nancy, she scribbled a word furiously, without looking, in her paisley-shroom-brain-book, determined not to forget: hypnosis!!!! A bit more shorthand followed but Brenda didn’t want it to be obvious and appear to be ignoring her, or preoccupied, or whatever.

She asked Brenda “Haight-Ashbury? You two couldn’t have been talkin’ about me – I’m old but not quite that old.” Wheeler’s mom, a self-described “aging hippie” insisted that no one should ever call her Mrs. Wheeler even though she was still happily married to his dad. All the other kids they knew in Austin were asked to address her by her first name; not especially rare for their part of the city.

Brenda honestly didn’t want to be rude, and smiled genuinely at Entropy, their odd little chihuahua-yorkie-dachshund mix whom they’d rescued when they found him as a stray near SoCo.

She got her chance to scribble more, which she could easily do without looking at the paper. Exactly two more words. Altogether it was enough to keep her aware of the situation and the idea. She thought initially that Wheeler had been trying to come off as goofy, to mock the way Warhol was in most of his interviews. It wasn’t quite how he used to sound. But she realized he truly hadn’t studied the guy that closely.

When pressed about where the things had gone which should have been there, he’d given some kind of almost pre-programmed sounding, canned response. It was also as if he’d momentarily gone into some quasi-trancelike state. That, and the memory anomaly were starting to scare her. As in “oh shit, I may actually be right” sort of scary.

She talked a bit more with Nancy, watched as she picked up Entropy’s paw and had him waving at the camera, and thought about the dozen or so older experiences they’d been rehashing in their conversations. She’d had to table the discussion, understandably. How would you go about saying to Nancy: “Hey, by the way, it looks like someone is messing with your son’s mind and putting him in a hypnotic trance... and oh yeah, they’re breaking into his room and stealing stuff.”

Wheeler wasn’t just alright with his last name, he wanted to be called by it exclusively. Enough boys at school and some male teachers did that anyway, and the rest were mostly convinced to go along with it. Come to think of it she couldn’t even recall his first name; beginning of the sixth grade possibly, some teacher in the class they had together may have called roll using it. It was so common, she remembered the woman approving of the decision because three other boys in that same class also had the name. She’d resorted to calling them something like “Name K.” or “Name R.” etc. So using “Wheeler” simplified things by avoiding a fourth one.

Brenda realized she’d been lost in thought and hadn’t heard the last couple of things Nancy had said. She tried the old “I’m sorry you cut out just now” trick, and asked her what was it she said after the part about Entropy eating the pillow while they were gone. “Entropy... you were a bad boy,” she said in her silly pet voice while tapping his nose as he wagged excitedly.

Well, it was understandably difficult to focus, considering the level of weirdness that might be going on with Wheeler’s memories. Brenda was almost finished reading The Cool War by Frederik Pohl, and was suddenly struck by the memory of how they wanted Hake, when his general orders were read to him, to only respond to each one with: “I understand and will comply.” Maybe that trance state was what they were going for. And perhaps that character’s tendency to ramble, ask questions, and at first just forgetting to respond as ordered, explained why he was never fully hypnotized – even though another character made a point to say that he was acting like he was.

Listening to Nancy would have been a pleasant diversion from this if Brenda could’ve gotten her head all the way in the game, so to speak. A bit too young to have been part of the original movement in the 60s, Nancy had managed to not only find but become a resident of a genuine hippie commune when she was 19. And this happened at a historic point that was practically the nadir of popularity for all things hippie in America: 1986. As far as the “aging” adjective she chose to put in front of it? If she was doing it, she was doing it in a very Cher kinda way!

Thirty years of “intelligent and informed vegan eating” according to Nancy, plus seaweed extract, plus a tendency to “shun the Sun” directly on her skin for more than a couple of minutes here and there, may have contributed… she liked carrying and using a parasol. It also gave her ample chances to wear her beloved collection of floppy hats. She also wasn’t a heavy drinker, preferred her weed eaten rather than smoked – and moreover, she practically went into some sort of toxic episode and had to leave the room if anyone ever smoked a regular cigarette.

Whatever she was doing was definitely putting the brakes on the whole aging process. When she was 43, other kids used to think Wheeler was being dropped off at school by his older sisters. Plural of course, and not his mom and sister.

Then a dark thought intruded: Marky Mark. Not the ‘90s singer or rapper-turned-actor himself, but a movie of his that was hitting cable tv at exactly the time she was just thinking of in their childhood. Brenda and Rosa couldn’t understand why their parents wanted to always refer to him that way when the actor clearly had a different name. Then YouTube appeared when they were in elementary school and they immediately understood.

The movie was a bit later; too scary for her, they said. Not until she was older... but what was it called? She thought she might have to goog– Never mind! She got it. The Happening. By the time she was “old enough” Brenda had already seen way scarier shit, in her opinion: the Chucky movies and the Pinhead movies for example. The Marky Mark one had mainly caught her attention because she’d always been a Zooey fan… ever since Elf.

But this formed the basis of a new idea: As an alternative to someone physically invading Wheeler’s room, what if some kind of mysterious signal or combination of chemicals went out all over the world?

Instead of a suicide command, like in The Happening, that made them jump off buildings or throw themselves under heavy duty lawnmowers, maybe it’s simply telling them “take everything you have that’s related to Stalko-Taco, including not just files but pictures and memorabilia, and destroy it all.”

Okay, she thought, “if I kept a top ten list of silliest ideas I’ve ever had, I’d need to take every one of them down a notch and bump one completely off the list, because this would be my new number one entry!” Worth scribbling down a note in paisley-shroom-brain?

She did, as she changed the subject with Nancy and changed position in her chair to get more comfortable. Just three words would do. And she hadn’t made it obvious.

The new subject had just been a “covering-all-bases” line of subtle questioning, and for some reason hadn’t prepared her to expect more weirdness for an answer. Nevertheless it caught her off guard: his mom couldn’t remember having attempted to make the outfit for him either! Fortunately Wheeler had to go and needed his phone to take with him, so it stopped Brenda from visibly commencing a freak out, or at least looking stressed out, on FaceTime. Wheeler and his mom exchanged their goodbyes with her and agreed they’d talk again soon.

What the fuck!? Did the “forget about Stalko-Taco” signal apply to Nancy too? But then why not Brenda? She had been physically there for part of the project. The yellow-ish taco shell color had been a little off. Wheeler’s older sister Sherri had walked through the room and said, during try-ons and pinnings, that he looked like the wrapper from an overnight jumbo pad. It was at a time just before Brenda became “aware” and was not yet requiring any products, and it wasn’t a brand that her own mom or sister used. So since she didn’t get it right away either, fortunately, it ended up being Sherri who had to elaborate.

After explaining to Wheeler what it was, he didn’t say “ew!” or “gross!” or anything but he did seem less than enthusiastic about wearing it. Anyway the idea got back-burnered for awhile when his mom ran out of some kind of elastic material and shortly afterwards he started to think about the mascot resemblance. Her point being though, that he remembered the conversation, the outfit, his sister’s bad joke, and other associated events for months afterwards… Not anymore he didn’t! And neither did his mom, the seamstress, apparently.

A little later she told Renaldo about her hypothetical mass memory erasure. Like the flashy-thing, in Men in Black she said, while leaving out The Happening kind of scenario.

“You mean the neuralizer that that guy was using, um, Jaden Smith‘s father?” He seemed to strain to remember. That was typical Renaldo: knowing the correct technical name of the flashy-thing, but not able to recall one of the most well-known actors of our time by name. He was very focused on tech. Well, good, Brenda thought, that’s what she needed right now.

“Is a neuralizer really technologically possible? I feel like it probably shouldn’t be, but I’m not sure…” she asked tentatively.

“For humans,” he asked, “or for aliens?”

That kind of took Brenda by surprise. She hadn’t thought of an alien angle on Stalko-Taco. He explained the Drake equation in detail and why it was statistically almost certain that there were extraterrestrial civilizations if one expanded the search to an intergalactic scale.

Her mnemonic from school paired things up just so she could recall the order of the sizes correctly: cities, states, nation, the world... are as planets, stars, galaxies, the universe.

So his use of the word intergalactic meant travels to the farthest reaches of the universe? It reminded her of the song by the Beastie Boys that her father had been dancing to in a silly vhs video of himself from the 90s that she and her sister used to laugh hysterically at. This triggered another spark of memory and she made a note to herself with her last mechanical pencil that still had graphite, not wanting to get up and rummage around on her desk during her FaceTime with Renaldo: look in garage for doll house box full of middle school papers. She double underlined the words enthusiastically.

Renaldo went on to expand on the book code, using microwaves for surveillance (the photons from the region of the electromagnetic spectrum known as microwaves – not microwave ovens as that one government imbecile had misinterpreted the word earlier that year), and why playing loud continuous music with speakers against your windows was a good way to mess with listening devices that could be pointed at your house or office from a long distance away. She felt like she should be going for Sarah Conner-mode after the first movie and picking up whatever knowledge and skills she could learn from these dudes. She listened as intently as possible whilst sipping her third coffee, but her mind kept drifting to that dollhouse box.

Alex

The Z. C. Ploughman’s Trophy was supposed to be the mathematical analog of a Nobel Prize. Or so they said. Alex did grapple with the moral – or was it ethical(?) – dilemma of whether or not he deserved it. It was a prize for human mathematicians, right? Although no rules specifically stated this.

He had already been a fairly bright young amateur mathematician in his time, and had access to branches of math that hadn’t been invented yet in 1991. These things alone would’ve allowed him – starting in 1992 – to phone in his performance as an undergrad, to breeze through grad school, to be a fountain of brilliant publications; tenured professorship would only be a matter of time.

But the Ploughman’s Prize? That was alien technology. Whatever that chair was that they had put him in aboard the alien spacecraft way back in – or rather way ahead in – the year 2137? It had sorted out his thoughts. Not just mathematically, but logically in all areas. It made him, in his opinion, the world’s smartest human…

He hadn’t met Prajina lately.

Not in almost 27 years by his reckoning. It was 2018 in the local calendar and he had done well for himself in his chosen time and profession. Prajina was more of an abstract concept now, like a fictional character he once read about. One who he knew would live happily ever after with young Padmanabhan long after Alex was dead. He would be chronologically 100 years old in 2073, though he would be born in 2119. Since no radical advances in human life-extension beyond the age of 130, were going to be forthcoming, he could easily expect to have lived out his natural life before they were ever born.

What Alex failed to realize was that “the aliens” had in fact been an automated device. That a moronic, by alien standards, computer moiety had misread him to be a child from Altair. It had placed him, for about an hour, in a device that was the alien equivalent of a leap pad for toddlers. And yes, until Prajina’s arrival last year, it had made him the world’s smartest human. Well, one of them anyway. If Alex had accepted the philosophical premise of IQ theory, he might’ve been amused to know that his was on par with the extrapolated IQs of Stephen Hawking or Leonardo da Vinci.

What he was also unaware of was that the spheroid’s computer had elected to repair and upgrade his human body. It sent in nano robots to make repairs to his telomeres… and performed a few other simple tricks. In the spheroid-computer’s analysis, the human body that his parents had dressed him in was a temporary job. Since the spheroid wasn’t sure how long the child would need to wait, it extended the life of the child to effectively 5000 Earth years. The body would grow to an apparent age of around 55. Alex would be a distinguished looking scholar, but would continue to live for a few millennia if necessary.

Had the sphere’s computer been equipped with a more thoughtful intelligence, it might have pondered why all humans didn’t repair their bodies in this elementary way. The repairs to Prajina had been more extensive than an infomercial gadget’s computer could fathom. There was every reason to think she would still be around to see this environmental disaster averted in 120,000 Earth years.

Cufflinks had been a gift from the department, to wear to the banquet. He was regarded as an all-around good guy, in an environment that could get a bit competitive; he was the go to guy – the sounding board to bounce ideas off of. Colleagues who hit a rough spot on some proof they were working on could come by after office hours with a bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee sipping whiskey… And do just that. Bounce ideas off him through the night. His suggestions had a way of saving the day.

Obviously any person who says they think better drunk than sober is a fool. But this wasn’t always just about logical thought; it was creative energy as well. People would wake up in the morning and suddenly find that they had scribbled down some brilliant gems of wisdom that seemed to solve all their problems. Alex of course, being from the future, knew all of their work. He knew what they were going to publish and when.

His head cloud was invariably neat and organized. And like clockwork, as was his eccentric habit, he had physically backed up everything all the way up to the Friday morning before the rave at hell-hole. Optical chips, each the size of a starburst fruit chew, with many terabytes each of data storage capacity… contained all the mathematical journals that his parents had bought him subscriptions to. Which meant all the journals. Even though money didn’t exactly mean as much in his century, there were still some advantages to being a baby billionaire.

So he knew precisely what everyone was supposed to publish, and when they would publish it. The cufflinks reminded him of the prolate spheroid form of the “odd sphere” in the rave’s light show. The aliens aboard that craft had been surprisingly flippant about the prospect of him “changing history,” but as he understood it, this had to do with their ability to comfortably navigate betwixt parallel universes. He was simply adding another universe to the “multiverse,” as Heinlein would have phrased it.

That night at the banquet he caught a glimpse of a girl who he was sure had to be an ancestor of Prajina.

Amidst the mandatory hobnobbing and mingling, he made futile attempts to move closer to her and hopefully strike up a conversation to ask her if her last name, by any chance, was Ranganathan.

ℏ♄

It was the human empire called the United States of America that seemed to be calling the shots on policy decisions relating to Earth’s exploration of space. One of their presidents, the one called Jack Black, did not seem to be directly involved at first glance. But at some point during his second term, a new cabinet appointee and two government agency heads were recommended to him. He wisely signed off on these suggestions and the synergy of these three women – correction, one was something called an intersex person and preferred to avoid using the gender binary paradigm – ℏ♄ made a mental note to acquire more information from agent Ranganathan about her society – had initiated a sequence of events that made Earth a truly spacefaring civilization within less than one of their centuries.

This needed to happen during his second term. That is, the term where he “Mooned Congress” as Prajina described it. Although his mooning of the congress of this group of humans was one of the things he would be best remembered for, his actions during that particular legislative versus executive branch conflict were completely irrelevant to Earth’s future space exploration activities.

ℏ♄ was still at a loss to understand the nuances of human behavior and politics. She had seen the videos of the event from C-SPAN as well as some of the emotional news commentaries and interviews afterwards… And still understood nothing of it. But to move so many people to such enthusiastic and emotional responses on both sides, with such a simple and no doubt well-timed gesture… He must truly have been a master of communications. The humans obviously had chosen their leader wisely.

Eventually, when the mission was completed, she would ask her deputy agent Ranganathan to explain the significance of this “mooning gesture.“ What, in particular, did it have to do with any moon? The Earth’s Moon? One of the tiny ones orbiting Mars? Not one of the Jovian Moons which they’d only recently begun to inhabit in her time, right? She had been repeatedly assured that this had no impact whatsoever on space exploration policy. For now Agent Ranganathan regarded ℏ♄ as an all-knowing infinitely wise being. That would be a good state of mind to keep her in throughout the rest of this mission.

When humans of the future were interested in extracting energy from stars by way of Dyson spheres, they had been tinkering with a neutron star. Humans 120,000 ᪠Yrs in the alternate future had mastered the ability to move stars around from one location to another. Very well done to have advanced so far so quickly, she thought. ℏ♄ tried to dredge up the name from her childhood history class, of the particular member of her own species; the engineer of her distant ancestors who’d done the same thing 180 million ᪠Yrs earlier.

Reviewing the report on their alternate future neutron star fiddling, she saw how they had accidentally fed the thing too much mass too quickly, forming a supermassive black hole that became a second galactic nucleus for their “Milky Way” galaxy. ℏ♄ smiled and shook her head slightly, thinking out loud “rookie mistake!”

Keith

For the occasion on which he finally conjured it – in front of people – Keith was employing a combination of drugs, rituals from Wicca books, geography, breakbeat techno and trance music… anything that he could think of to help reproduce the same conditions as that first night. It was mainly the drugs that did it.

Of course they had staked out the same park again. The Moon was in the same phase again, and the time and lighting were identical. At that moment when the taco actually appeared for others as well as himself, it was as if he could hear a choir in his head loudly singing Ode To Joy similar to the scene from Die Hard where Alan Rickman is marveling that the safe is finally open. The rest of his party was in shock when the thing actually appeared. Finally, he thought: they can understand why I was so excited and babbling about this! Wild! It even smelled like a taco.

It was Keith’s fourth time seeing Stalko-Taco, but the amazement had not worn off at all, and at last having it appear for his friends was thrilling. Not just because they now wouldn’t think he was crazy; he cared nothing about that. But because now he could begin to have some serious intellectual discussions about just what in the hell this might mean. He wondered like every time: how is this even possible? Well, it was time for some entertainment; the taco danced for him on the previous occasion – like a little riverdance move. It was just like it could read his thoughts.

He wasn’t thinking about disco dancing on this particular night. Perhaps the thing could pick up on other people’s thoughts as well. His friend Jared might have been having these images in his head. But it was definitely setting up something with strobe lights and a blue colored light. Then he saw some flashes of a red light in the trees above and realized… cops!

It wasn’t the taco preparing a light show for his/her/its(?) next dance number. The cops had pulled up at a leisurely pace, taking this group of stoners completely by surprise. There would be no point in trying to tell them about Stalko-Taco. As far as the police were concerned it was just a bunch of teenagers hanging out stoned in a park on a Friday night. Well, after midnight, so technically Saturday morning. Still before dawn though.

Stalko-Taco wouldn’t have cooperated anyway. It responded before the first car was even in full view, by getting onto its… knees he guessed? And then crouching into a yoga position and morphing into a boulder. The boulder looked like part of the scenery and seemed to belong there.

Had it always been there? Keith had been coming to this park since he was 12 and couldn’t be sure. Would everyone else believe it now? Or would they decide that it was a “consensual hallucination” they were all agreeing to have? Anyway, time to deal with the local fuzz.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 5. eight chapters ending with chapter 26

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 5. eight chapters ending with chapter 26

↩️return to previous section, section 4

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Brenda

“You don’t get to meet him, ever.”

Brenda could tell her new friend was a drama queen and maybe had traces of histrionic personality. So, real meaning: he’s a dude; he’s young; if he’s in the mood to talk to a girl irl instead of just online, I will meet him, when and where the two of us choose, and what you just said is completely meaningless. But humoring her right now would cost nothing.

So: “I understand and will comply,” was Brenda’s reply, plus: “it’s too big of a security risk. Furthermore, the less information we know, the less we can spill in an interrogation if we’re ever captured.” This had her friend Madhvi at ease. Brenda at first made the mistake of considering her to be very “Americanized.”

“Agent one” had in fact misunderstood “agent two.” Madhvi had been born here. It was her parents, each of them, who immigrated here with their families from Tamil Nadu and somewhere else in Madras(?) when they were both roughly preschool age. They had met here, while in college. Madhvi was as American as Brenda or Irving… agent 003. For some reason, she had never met any American-born ethnic Indian people in San Antonio. Austin was too distant a memory right now – that was middle school. The ones she knew of were all immigrants, at universities on student visas, or otherwise resident aliens born in India.

Austin was a slightly different social climate, she’d always been told and vaguely remembered but now noticed it, as she was finally back. You could see it in parts of S.A. You could see it at La Sardiña and Mud Hutter‘s and in the SAC area. But in Austin, it was everywhere. And that included seeing it at the Ligustrum Café location on South Congress near her old neighborhood. It was an indescribable energy vibe that she hadn’t really noticed when they left after her twelfth birthday because her life here had been more sheltered than she realized.

Anyway, back to her insight that was based on lengthy discussions with Renaldo. It sounded like a good idea at first: communicating like it was pre-telegraph 1800s. No electronic signals whatsoever. Only snail-mail and only physical meetings. Written documents only. Okay, the three of them had cheated a bit and used their disconnected phones, in airplane mode, to photograph each other’s written documents.

Irving had suggested photocopying them. They agreed that in the future, that would be the procedure. But for the first meeting, it was just too much information to spend a couple of hours driving around and then making copies. The documents would be printed when they returned home, and the original photos wiped.

Luckily, all three of them had shown up to their meeting in possession of their old, deactivated phones as well as their real phones. It seems like everyone has an old one gathering dust somewhere. But in airplane mode and with WiFi off, this couldn’t really be counted as online. Right? But it was electronic. Only now, the plan was to go online. With the help of Madhvi’s genius hacker friend known only as “Cryptomancer.” A great idea, if he wasn’t an NSA agent. Now admittedly, she was being somewhat dramatic.

Supposedly, large files would be sent both encrypted and then steganographically hidden in video files. Each of us liked our own particular kind of anime. The videos would

be some scenes from Made in Abyss, perhaps an interlude with Inuyasha and Kagome, Chunibyo... mixed up with some of the recent Ancient Magus’ Bride, and maybe even some old Ah! My Goddess! So pretty much anything we like, set to music that we selected – in other words AMV. Except before sending them to each other, we would apply a program to them that would imbed the encrypted files into the video file. Anyone observing our activities would merely see some people exchanging their AMV creations. To add to the realism, we would use our existing YouTube channels to upload them, but the YouTube versions wouldn’t have any data hidden in them if someone were to download.

If this oddball Cryptomancer wasn’t some kind of government plant, it would be an excellent alternative to all the pussyfooting around like it was 1839. But in truth that had been Brenda’s idea, inspired by Renaldo, to thwart the electronics spooks by going low tech.

It was those nights that she had first spoken to Wheeler and Renaldo. On the one after Wheeler’s mom couldn’t remember and after an hour of sleep, then another hour of tossing and turning, Brenda remembered Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys and went to the garage! That silly vid of their dad that she and Rosa had thought was such a riot all those years ago: it triggered the memories again and plunged her immediately back into full consciousness sitting up in bed.

Her older sister was home from college. Right. All the way home from UT. Brenda had wondered why she bothered living there in a dorm when she could’ve just saved money and lived at home and commuted... that was when she was still 17 and a high school senior and didn’t get it yet. She’d graduated and actually did get it now. Anyhow, Rosalinda still had laundry going out there in the machine. It reminded her of stuff Renaldo said about using some ideal white-noise-to-pink-noise ratio to hinder maser or laser window attacks. His voice droned on in her head, like an audio Tetris effect.

In a hermetically sealed – or at least plastered with packing tape – dollhouse box that was never unpacked since their last move over four years earlier, were papers: artwork, sketchbooks, some class notes, doodlings… And hopefully the Stalko-Taco writers’ guide!

Weird Shapes

It was Eileen, before the humans had captured her and held her in a psychiatric facility, who had coached them on using ceilings. Since gravity didn’t really have to matter to them, they could hang out while plastered to a ceiling just as easily as they could blend in with wallpaper, paneling, stucco, or whatever else on a wall. It worked superbly if there were no lighting fixtures on the ceiling. Brenda’s parents’ garage had been perfect.

She did not see them at all that night and had no idea they were watching her every move. It wasn’t until later meeting an actual Superhero from the future who could fly, stay under water as long as whales could, and heal wounds like a “Whitelighter” from Charmed... that she was fitted with a type of implanted device that not only allowed her to see their every move, but also make herself invisible to them.

But on this night they were free to observe Brenda as much as they wanted. Not that it mattered too much; they were basically just relieved to learn that things were going exactly the way they were hoping for.

Back to Brenda

It was at a five-day long creative writing “camp” one summer, enough years ago that she still felt a morbid fascination with Creepypastas. A few other kids there also wanted to choose a CP as their topic, so she had to participate in a drawing, and the character whose name she pulled out of the basket was none other than Stalko-Taco.

She was to produce a writer’s guide: set of conditions that open source writers could use when creating Stalko-Taco stories. For example, an old Star Trek writer’s guide would contain basic information: there’s a Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, etc. It would prevent an amateur writer from committing a faux pas such as having a captain violate the prime directive – one who wasn’t Kirk, anyway – or using a cloaking device on a stardate that was before encountering Romulans in Balance of Terror, and so on.

Brenda got about as far as “It was a dark and stormy night.” Maybe not quite that bad. But after one line and five minutes of staring at paper, a boy named Travis offered to switch with her and let her do Zalgo. She and Travis exchanged photocopies of everything they produced by the end of the day. In addition to his most excellent storyline in which he went above and beyond the assignment to give an example of an actual story that might have been written by someone using the cannon restraints of his writer’s guide, for reference, he had just stapled on a printout of the original creepypasta story on Stalko-Taco.

If any of the packet she’d received from Travis was still there, it would prove that Stalko-Taco existed. Not that the real one existed of course, but at least that there was once a creepypasta story by that name, and that she wasn’t just losing her goddamn mind!

Electrified by the moment, she cleared away other papers from her hand and found that she was holding it. Brenda silently gave thanks that there were some old fashioned teachers remaining in the world who still insisted on primarily using paper. If there was an organized covert operation to erase Stalko-Taco from existence, it had just been foiled by a bunch of stuff printed on paper and assembled by a brainy middle school kid.

It was as she remembered. A bit silly; not something that she found to be very entertaining. At this point the most fascinating thing about it was that someone had bothered to attempt erasing it from existence. Oh, and the fact that they had all but succeeded. Three Days of the Condor, anyone? The obscure book getting translated into too many languages… was she the condor here and she stumbled onto a plot? Was this original Stalko-Taco story a book to be used for some kind of book code, as Renaldo had suggested? And as the forgetful Wheeler had pointed out, the story was not even very scary. Stalko-Taco was a gentle giant who didn’t seem capable of hurting anyone.

Lucy

So “Stalko-Taco” was a cop killer! No longer just the hilarious vision that Keith had told everyone about. They were all still in shock I guess. My mind raced with a bunch of thoughts in different directions. One small cul-de-sac it went down was: how am I going to get these wrist ties off? As soon as I thought it, they broke free somehow. The strong plastic ties that cops sometimes used so they didn’t have to carry around a dozen pair of handcuffs each, were nowhere to be found in the vicinity around me.

Did they disappear the same way as the cops? The cops! Yeah, back to that. The far more serious matter than my wrist ties. You lay low for a while when you have warrants. But for a cop killing… and a quadruple cop killing no less? They would never stop. There was no state that wouldn’t extradite back to California. We might have to leave the country, permanently. And no, the ties hadn’t vanished in the same way as the cops, I was now pretty sure, because the melted plastic would’ve burned my wrists. All four cops simultaneously went white hot before they were vaporized/disintegrated, whatever. They had vanished in less than a second.

Weird Shapes

Out at the edge, in the trees amongst the shadows they moved freely. Though they had been working on their concealment a bit more since the parking garage rave, they were still not as well-camouflaged as the predator had been in the movie with Arnold that many humans had enjoyed. If any of the skaters or the cops would have looked over and seen them? They might’ve registered simply as people wearing dark clothing milling about within the bushes. It would’ve led the cops on an exhausting goose chase if they had seen them and decided they wanted to pursue.

It would’ve been about like pursuing a cartoon; they could simply disappear back into their own dimension or some pocket realm as fast as Stalko-Taco could morph back-and-forth between a taco and a boulder. Had they understood the physics of this universe better, they could’ve simply dispatched some drones to observe the event they were so interested in.

These people in the mid 1990s most likely wouldn’t have even understood what a drone was and thought they were weird insects like big dragonflies, or bats or something. So their plan B was just to run away if approached. Under no circumstances did they want to interact with humans in this time. Everything was a delicate balance and up until now it seemed they were forestalled at every turn by the Chronopolitans, including their newest edition whom Marco had nicknamed “Timecop Girl.”

Back to Lucy

Lucycat wondered if they felt any pain. But only wondering in a detached sort of way. After her father plus everything in her own life, she had no love for the police. Of course her dad was a criminal. He had said out loud: “the only good cop is a dead cop.” A hippie from the late 60s, occasional commune-dweller, and participant in an SFSU takeover... in the early 70s he and his merry band had caused all kinds of chaos. They reunited in the 80s to address a witty retort to those shoot pool bumper stickers. Their new bumper stickers read: shoot cops, not people. Then they paid kids in different neighborhoods to run around and stick them on bumpers – of cop cars, naturally. No one ever figured out what happened and traced the prank back to them. Thinking about her deceased father calmed her a bit; he was atypical for a hippie. Most of them had animosity towards the cops for sure, but they didn’t think the cops were war criminals who deserved to die. So she supposed this would’ve been a pretty good day for him and his radical friends.

Batgirl had not done anything to deserve her awful treatment. But awful as it may have been for her, it was probably not serious enough to warrant the deaths of four officers. Their suffering was obviously way out of proportion to Batgirl’s suffering. Still, they had tried to reason. Since her sexual assault and rape by multiple men in one night, the so-called gang rape, the one they called Batgirl had become what you might call a “touch freak.”

She couldn’t stand to be touched by anyone, even casually. The fact that they had her tied up during the rape did not help. So of course she couldn’t tolerate being in handcuffs. The other girls desperately tried to explain this to the one female officer: that she was a rape survivor and that being touched at all, let alone restrained, could freak her out. They blithely chose to ignore this and tried to handle her anyway. Batgirl’s psychological and physiological response to all this was to simply “go limp.” She just completely fainted from the stress. So the bonehead – and soon to be ghost – cops cuffed her hands behind her back anyway and loaded her unconscious body into the back of one of their cars; still thinking perhaps that she was faking?

Lucy couldn’t recall her actual name, but it was okay; she liked being called Batgirl. They were only putting Keith and Batgirl in the backs of cars. That is, the two people in their group who were “holding.” And they were also the ones who got the actual handcuffs. The four pigs only had two patrol cars, so that worked out well for them she guessed. Everything was relatively peaceful until Batgirl sort of regained consciousness.

Then she was batshit crazy girl. Emerging back into reality to find her hands restrained behind her back, in the back of a car, was too much. Screaming! Thrashing! Kicking! At first the taco remained a boulder. It stressed Lucy out because she knew what was happening to the poor girl. Her still stoned and somewhat clueless boyfriend, Keith quietly sat handcuffed in the back of the other car, still looking around to see where the ruckus was coming from. He finally managed to scoot around and look over his left shoulder.

She could see the look of realization sweep over his face, and then the stress too. It was Keith’s stress that triggered the taco. It was indeed reading minds… his. Now that she replayed it in her head it made sense. At his moment of frustration over what Batgirl was going through, the boulder shape-shifted back into Stalko-Taco, recovered from its prostate yoga pose, leaped through the air a distance of about 60 feet like a monster from a Godzilla movie, landed between the two parked cruisers with a thud that reverberated through the ground and through Lucy like the ‘89 quake, then punched in the metal roof on the front passenger side.

Weird Shapes

If anyone from this universe could have understood their psychological make-up, they would have noted the creature-shapes were experiencing something close to awe as they saw the taco leap into action. Their translation of the phrase they used for Stalko-Taco would have been close to “the progenitor of the universe.”

They were badly in need of an interpreter in this universe. About all they had been able to do so far was scare the shit out of normal people or make stoned ones think they were having wild hallucinations. The physics of this universe was so foreign to them that they couldn’t really tell which humans were or were not stoned.

One that was mildly intoxicated that night – the one who currently went by Batgirl – had long been a target of their investigation. It was on this night that they realized she wasn’t really the one they wanted. They needed one of her old craft teachers. A woman who, in Wicca, went by the name Omneris Araxes. She wasn’t present that night (couldn’t skate or dance at raves, among other things) and Batgirl had written her off months ago as untrustworthy, a con-artist, and a cult-leader wannabe. Batgirl wouldn’t have acknowledged her craft name, but when she warned others about her she used it – also using the woman’s real name: Eileen Canales-Villanueva.

The shapes were however, able to read enough in Batgirl’s troubled mind to know how to make contact with Eileen and how to entice her into working for them, willingly and enthusiastically.

Back to Lucy

The sequence took place in a fraction of a second, from thud to punch, with all four of the cops’ backs turned. The thud startled everyone, but I guess some of our group were looking up right before the thud... at the giant leaping taco, no doubt. So many of the cops’ eyes turned to the sky just briefly, as if to scan for thunder or an explosion up there. The first one to figure it out was also evidently the quick-draw artist of the group. He spun around in time to see the roof of the car getting peeled off like a sardine lid.

Would shooting it have done anything? It was either demonic supernatural or some kind of alien technology. We’ll never know it seems, since he got vaporized before he got off a shot or even yelled anything with his suddenly-gaping mouth. The other three instantly moved their gun hands to cover their sidearms and were vaporized as well. Looking back, it was nearly simultaneous; the first one had not finished disappearing yet when the others started glowing. But close enough. I didn’t actually see the taco pick up Batgirl and move her, but at some point she was on her left side, reclined, and slightly in a fetal position – hands unbound, of course. The taco went ahead and ripped open the roof to the patrol car Keith was in and he very rapidly ended up about twenty feet from Batgirl.

While all of this was still sinking in, Stalko Taco scampered back over to its rock position, crouched down, and morphed back into its boulder form. Keith was looking at his hands like I had been; only the indentation marks on his wrists were there to prove they had been bound. Castadiva went over to help Batgirl up and I ran to Keith. Some of the other guys, I noticed were actually applauding Keith and cheering him on. I was pleased to find out that he thought more like I did.

Instead of cheering on the deaths of four cops, his first words to me were about how much trouble we could be in if we were implicated as cop killers or even accomplices. I asked him if he knew anything about a mind link with the taco and if he could tell whether their cars had the new dashboard cameras. He knew what I meant. Rather dramatically for Keith, he placed two fingers over his temple and spoke out loud: “I want these police cars gone… and never to be found again.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Both cars vanished instantly, with the same kind of flash as the cops. The last phrase had ensured that Stalko-Taco transported the cars into an active volcano, on Io. The taco had used its own discretion in dealing with the police.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 6. three chapters, ending with chapter 29

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 6. three chapters, ending with chapter 29

↩️return to previous section, section 5

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Padmanabhan

It had to be fake! Right?

Citizen Padmanabhan had spent every spare moment of his time as a biochemistry major – which was not too much trouble since biochem and most other subjects were incredibly easy for the boy genius – tracking down the information he needed. Not just the original video files, but everything relevant to the technology. That included everything he could learn about cryptomancer.

“So you could believe one of two things,”

he explained to Eric: “either Alex flew into the parking lot at Wokkon The Wild Side on a flying saucer ‪at 4:30‬ in the morning in moonshine county Kentucky, commanded a giant taco to come to life, rip the roof off the restaurant, cause many food items to levitate out of the restaurant and into the saucer… then Alex reboarded the flying saucer, with the recently animated taco and flew away. Then moments later Prajina came riding in on a bicycle that she borrowed from a DJ called Yonderboy, was met by a larger flying saucer, and was beamed aboard – original Star Trek style…”

OR:

“Someone has hacked the invincible Cryptomancer™️ protocol. An equally fantastic notion, but far more down to earth.”

That meant that the hackers had decided to simulate Alex and Prajina. He was once again automatically ruling out the possibility that they were the hackers. But there was additional weirdness. Alex had lost some weight recently and had found it necessary to start wearing a belt with all of his favorite jeans. He had forgotten the belt on this trip when they left Missouri ‪Thursday morning‬, so he was slightly tugging on his pants to pull them up; a new mannerism for him. The video showed him doing this.

Prajina had gotten a new hairstyle just five days earlier – a “bob with bangs” she called it – and decided to wear huge hoop earrings with the look. She was habitually checking them to see if the backings had fallen off. They were bigger, she said, than any earrings she had ever worn before. They knew to include this new mannerism in her video simulation as well.

That was odd. The programming of these kinds of simulations took time. Either someone observed the two before they left on the road trip… Or they observed them on the afternoon when they arrived for the rave, the day before they had disappeared both on video and for real, and then programmed their simulations with incredible speed!

Then Eric interjected something, not too surprising for an old Sierra Clubber like him, that halfway made sense: Venus. The environmentalists had been all up in arms when Eric was in preschool. His biological parents were supposedly among the leading protesters. He remembered it reasonably clearly since it was one of his more vivid memories from before they were arrested and imprisoned (over completely different and unrelated incidents). And before the court placed him in the care of “the hicks,” as he derisively referred to his mom’s cousins.

“Don’t nuke Venus,” the activists warned!

Experts ridiculed their protests.

You are not going to make space more radioactive. It would be like worrying that someone adding a single grain of salt to the Pacific Ocean was going to make the water too salty. And in their defense, after 21+ years, it appeared the experts were mostly right. No solar system-wide environmental catastrophe had befallen us. But Eric analyzed it on a new level: what if extraterrestrial intelligences were watching us? Humans had been putting small amounts of matter into space for about a century and a half, and that included things with radioactive isotopes in the payloads. But it was always either for power generation or for research. That is, until the Cytherean terraforming operation.

What would alien observers think of us then? Sure, Venus was uninhabited. But what if humans one day were to use this technique on a planet where there was already sentient life? “It might look to them like we were the evil empire from Star Wars, using our Death Star,” Eric ventured. “It might cause them to go poking around in our business much more deeply than before.”

Okay, maybe. But his chain of logic was about to snap! How exactly would that increased attention, paid to us as a species, cause them to bring a taco to life for Alex? Rajan brought his eyes back into focus as he disconnected from the head-wire virtual sensorium rig and attempted to look around at “reality” again. He had exceeded the recommended maximum time like always. No problem, though.

Alright, maybe a bit of a problem. It really had a weird effect on him this time: the wallpaper in their not-so-cheap-as-the-last-one apartment seemed to be taking on an almost three dimensional character for just a moment. It was like those visual stunts where they bodypainted people to match some kind of background and if they stood still and you weren’t looking carefully, they might be camouflaged. Except these things didn’t look like people; they were more like rectangular sections of the wall. And they didn’t maintain perfect stillness. It was as though he caught them moving slightly – and shimmering a bit the way the Predator had done in the jungle in the classic movie.

About two blinks took care of it and the after-effect was gone. Rajan did make a mental note chastising himself for not heeding the manufacturer’s warnings... and for pushing himself to go without sleep for way too many hours now. It was definitely time to turn in. Or at least go for a nap.

A nap it was. His ideas woke him. One in particular. Of course it was an absurd idea. But only absurd ideas were going to have a chance of being right in this matter; every “hacker” he had consulted with, especially ones who dealt in this kind of video technology, had been of the opinion that the current Cryptomancer™️ protocol was unhackable. Unless…

Unless it was an “inside job.” If a team of software engineers at the company – and it would have to be several – could construct a back door that was undetectable, it might happen.

Why? He hypothesized: Industrial espionage perhaps? If a “vulnerability” was revealed, then another company, say XYZ Incorporated, could pop up and introduce their version of anti video-fraud software that would be truly invincible. It was very flimsy logic; too easy to poke holes in a plot like that. But if he was right and something like that was going on? Then why hadn’t they made their move yet? The taco animation and Alex & Prajina’s disappearances had occurred a few years ago. If it was good enough to fool law enforcement already, then why not put the rest of their plan into action and start raking in the centibillions?

So Padmanabhan reluctantly went looking for any correlations between the Cytherean terraforming nuke incident and UFO sightings on Earth. What he found gave him new respect for Eric‘s wacky theories. Eric was an artist and fashion designer, and not normally helpful in technical matters. Was there a correlation? Try fifteen minutes apart!

The actual time of detonation had been secret, and the subject of misinformation. They detonated the warheads- - - um, “shaped nuclear charges,” that is - - - days before they were even supposed to be in orbit around Venus. There was concern that a group of hackers working with environmentalists might try to sabotage the orbital mechanics computers, as they had attempted to sabotage ground-based computers before the launches of certain payloads.

When it happened, no one amongst the general public knew that anything special had gone on. They didn’t know to have false UFO sightings because their imaginations were running wild with them. But the only sightings in that fifteen minute lapse, were over the counties of Kentucky that basically formed a ring around where the rave was in 2137!!!

So, 18 years earlier… One of the most colossal endeavors ever undertaken by humans in space kicked off with nearly 32 Giga tonnes of thermonuclear devices going off.

The exact amount was evidently classified. From hacking Alex‘s Diaryworld he saw that mathboy had done a calculation indicating that it had to be higher and explained why, but never had any reason to share that with Padmanabhan whom he barely knew at that time.

Alright, yeah, a big blast either way. Fifteen minutes later a rash of UFO sightings- over 170 of them – centered around that thing Alex and his friends had called hell-hole as kids. Incidentally, the US government placed a geostationary satellite over the area for reasons that, frankly, made no sense at the time. Then Prajina, Padmanabhan, and Alex were all born within the next month, in that order; probably not related to the UFO business and except for Alex, in far away parts of the country. And after 18 years, we have a rave there. That same night, there’s UFO-type activity again.

Or so it would appear. It was too suspicious not to be true. But if it was true it meant that Rajan had spent the last three years of his life becoming an expert on a sub-discipline of cyber security now regarded as mundane amongst professionals in that field, for no particular reason. It would also, if true, mean that his chances of finding A&P just dropped to zero. The only hope of finding them might be for he himself to be abducted by aliens. A frightening thought. Or was it? Alex seemed very at ease in the “video,” if we are now regarding it as an actual video and not a simulation. It wasn’t possible to tell what Prajina’s reaction was; the beaming process, it seemed, was just a bit faster than on Star Trek TOS.

Going over the details of the sinkhole’s formation was about tied for 20th on his list of things to do. But for some reason it beckoned to Rajan.

Alex

Computer hacking skills. Girls only want boyfriends with skills. Was that the exact quote from Napoleon Dynamite? Something close. That was one he hadn’t been able to go see again in theaters when it “first” came out. Alex was not a skilled computer hacker in his time. He felt silly doing this. But in 2018 cybersecurity was bucolic to say the least. Laughable protection measures that he could easily defeat with some apps from his “phone.”

His phone that he had brought back with him from 2137, that is. During his mid-20s, when many of the locals were worried about the nonexistent threat of Y2K, he’d spent a year making electronics his number one hobby and built an interface that would allow him to access the files and apps on his phone that didn’t require nonexistent – here in the past – networks or accessories.

So now, hacking into hotel security video, registration lists, street cameras, and even Uber was a simple as tapping apps on an iPhone XR that he was using as an interface to access the brain of his real phone.

There would be nothing on a phone to physically “tap” or “swipe” of course, in his time. But since medical doctors of the day might notice the implants, he early-on asked the taco to temporarily remove them. Now he tapped and swiped away on ancient touch screen devices just like his great-great-grandparents did.

There would be no trail for even the NSA of this time to follow. He had, as usual, a modulated beam of neutrinos at two points and two underground detectors at two other points. His routed signal originating in Tucson, transformed into an encoded pulsed beam, would pass through the Earth’s core and mantle then come out in Thessaly. The return signal beam would enter the Earth in Surrey and emerge in Buenos Aires. If the devil himself had a neutrino detector, he might be able to eavesdrop on Alex’s signals and then spend the next few millennia trying to decrypt them.

What he found was more shocking than a real meeting with the mythological creature: the Prajina look-alike / potential ancestor, had registered under the name Prajina Opulus. As far as anyone could tell, no one‘s last name was actually “Opulus.” It was an inside joke.

An inside joke from the future! Count Mippipopolous. A relatively minor character from “The Sun Also Rises.” In high school Prajina had both read the book and seen the 1984 movie version that book fans mostly hated – the one with Jane Seymour – before Alex had done either. She commented that his role has been greatly expanded in the movie.

Alex, who hadn’t gotten far in the book at all, didn’t understand when she said his name and thought she said “count Mrs. Opulus.”

To be fair to young Alex, there was marching band practice going on, on the other side of the parking lot outside of their school where they were standing. It was hilarious to her at the time because she used to kid him about slacking off in the non-technical subjects, i.e. not math or math intensive, and he had just assured her again that he wouldn’t fall behind in his reading. The conclusion, as a favorite author of his childhood once phrased it, hit him “like a hammer blow over the solar plexus!” Prajina had come back in time also! It wasn’t an ancestor, it was actually her! But young. She looked just like he remembered from their pre-frosh summer program at university.

Then his heart gave a grinding thud like someone trying to shift gears too quickly. Changing history? That damned silly taco! The one that he had been trying – with limited success – to hide in Berkeley? She was likely sent back to contact him. But why now? Why not be waiting for him at the Cow Palace concert back in ‘91 to stop him from doing whatever it was he wasn’t supposed to do?

His Cerebral Phosphorescence

(Author’s note to readers: this historical account contains details about the way the late 20th century-to-early 21st century NSA operates. Or at least it did. If representatives of that agency found this information and decided to filter it for security purposes, the versions you are about to read may or may not have been edited to omit certain technical details. Since by the time anyone reads this I will have already returned to my own time, universe, and timeline… I can neither confirm nor deny that this is the way the actual NSA in your timeline conducts its business. Nor will they!)

“Job description? You know that’s classified,” he tried to grin, sadistically perhaps, but just didn’t have it in him. He was too much of an all around nice guy. “Officially, neither of our jobs exists. So is it within the scope of my job? It is, if I say it is, Ghost-in-the-Machine,” he winked.

The ghost handed a Zip disk with one-time pad keys to the cryptographer known as “His Cerebral Phosphorescence.” A routine part of the way they communicated in these situations. What was going on in his mind was beyond traffic analysis. This was more esoteric; having to do with correlations. Correlations between unrelated patterns of traffic. Or at least patterns that should have been unrelated.

It would be as if every time a traffic light turned red at a particular intersection in Los Angeles, a group of students were seen coming out of a building at a university in Louisiana on foot. There would be absolutely NO logical reason to think the two phenomena were related. If there seemed to be a correlation, for example let’s say every time the light in LA turned red, at least seven students exited a building 1900 miles away, but no students exited when it was green? You would look for some other mechanism. Something else must be responsible for the foot traffic variations, right? Something with the same timing as the traffic light cycle, like maybe an elevator in the building?

But what if you couldn’t find the mechanism? Then what if you sent a crew to turn off the traffic signal and the foot traffic mysteriously stops also? It’s just suspicious. So maybe you dig deeper? That’s what the ghost was doing.

But this was much more subtle.

Things were connected that were not supposed to be connected.

Patterns of communication – on the surface, completely mundane matters being discussed amongst civilians between New England and Kentucky – were coinciding with power grid drains in Arizona, and being followed by signals in Lárisa, Greece. They were then sent to Lisbon, then immediately followed by power grid fluctuations at Surrey in the UK, followed by communications between Buenos Aires and an island in the Caribbean, followed by digitally encrypted _____________ (agent’s thoughts redacted) _____________ ____________ ______________ be received in the southern United States.

It reminded him of that scene from Sneakers where their silly map was depicting how the supposedly untraceable signal was bouncing all over the world. (And btw, haha, he thought! We eventually traced it anyway, even in that fictionalized film account!) Except this featured an added layer of complexity, probably involving parts of the signal being transmitted in non-electronic form.

If Swifty was right... what would you even call these signals? Neutronic? No. That would mean neutrons were involved and they’d be virtually all stopped within the first few feet of lithosphere. Neutrinoionic? Maybe neutrino-esque? A syntactic detail which he could ponder later. Back to the point:

It was complete uncorrelated nonsense to anyone but the ghost. But it was always the same order. So he knew it must mean something. Still, the ghost was technically the student and His Cerebral Phosphorescence, the master. So like the young padawan learner, he politely brought Obi-Wan his findings first – before declaring what his conclusion was.

Obi Wan smiled more warmly this time and told the padawan to write down his conclusion in one or two sentences on a paper towel but not show it yet. The ghost obliged him using his own pale skinny forearm as an improvised writing surface. Obi Wan’s pronouncement finally came, with head slightly shaking: “someone – likely within our borders – is doing some hacking, and has found a way to make himself truly untraceable, even to us.”

Ominously, he looked at the ghost’s paper towel and saw that his student’s conclusion was essentially the same. The paper towel was torn carefully into tiny pieces and placed into a mason jar marked “Chia head seeds,” which appeared to contain tea or coffee. It reminded him of an old revolutionary war trick.

“If we’re right, these people are using masers or some kind of unidirectional beam to communicate with satellites,” his boss pronounced, looking somehow regal at his makeshift Rubbermaid table-desk inside the secure area. “Analyze what’s in orbit that would be accessible from these places, see when it was launched and by whom, and if the dates work with your intercepted ‘communiques’.”

“What if we’re looking in the wrong direction with satellites, sir? What if it’s going through the earth?” The ghost in the machine was entertaining flights of fancy, but felt he had to try again.

“We would’ve detected seismic waves that powerful, and you checked, right?” Obi Wan paused with a furrowed brow. Ghost nodded and hesitantly said yes.

“You’re not going down the neutrino trail again, are you Swifty?” He had recently re-read The Particle Hunters by Yuval Ne’emen and Yoram Kirsh. The ghost read everything. He of course had memorized all of the Stainless Steel Rat novels as a kid. “Yes sir, I am” was his immediate reply.

The power grid drains could be due to particle accelerators of some type, they agreed. But it would have to be a type of equipment currently unknown to them. Neutrino detectors though huge, could be concealed underground. But it was tilting at windmills, Obi-Wan cautioned. “We’re not working on the X-Files here. Pursue the more conventional options now,” he eruditely intoned.

The entire office was a modified SCIF at Camp Pickett, Virginia. So during secure meetings like this, an old-fashioned knock from outside was about all one might dare attempt. The knock which would naturally need to be for a damned good reason, was discovered to have four good reasons. Technically, five. The first four were naked people; three men and one woman. The fifth item was some emergency radio chatter from secure digital channels of a metropolitan police department in the US.

Four naked people had been apprehended in four different international cities on two continents, all within 30 minutes of each other. All of them, it seemed, claimed to be police officers from San Francisco in the United States and could not explain either their nudity or how they came to be found in the cities. One was babbling something about a giant burrito ripping his police cruiser apart. Just for kicks, the listening post techs had patched into SFPD‘s communications and sure enough, they were all buzzing about four missing officers who were not reporting in and had all gone radio-silent at the same moment. Three male, one female.

While it was not at all strange or impossible for a person to be abducted and transported to another city far away, the fact that it was only 15 minutes from their moment of disappearance to the first report of discovery in a city that involved intercontinental travel, was what experienced intelligence analysts called “weird.” Did they have their own private space shuttles? Or had another tetrad of SFPD officers disappeared earlier? That’s why it was brought to Obi Wan’s attention, just to get his take on it.

It was in fact, weirder than the analysts were ever aware of. The four cities or regions to which the nude cops had been sent were Lárisa, Lisbon, Surrey, and Buenos Aires. The term “traffic analysis” just took on an added new dimension.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 7. seven chapters, ending with chapter 36

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 7. seven chapters, ending with chapter 36

↩️return to previous section, section 6

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Prajina and Alex

As expected, Alex had seen her, become curious, and followed up by digging electronically. A bit more carelessly than he was aware of. His trail was being analyzed by an older man who was thought of by her employers, prior to Prajina’s arrival, as essentially the second most intelligent human on earth. He was now third, if you believed in that kind of stuff. Nevertheless, since we can’t have Inigo Montoya following the Man in Black… club him over the head with a rapier pommel? Ha ha, no. Prajina just simply erased the appropriate files at NSA, DIA, CIA, etc. She could do this remotely from her office in Trieste in fact, using technology so advanced that it made Alex‘s 22nd century neutrino beam shenanigans look like “stone knives and bear skins” as Spock once said.

Prajina had also erased memories, using the old open-up-a-microscopic-wormhole-inside-someone’s-brain-and-perform-surgery-from-somewhere-else-in-the-universe trick that her alien mentors had taught her. The memories of NSA employees in key positions had been removed and false memories substituted for them that would be indistinguishable from reality in their minds.

It was legerdemain at first but had already become dull for her at this point; cleaning up after Alex‘s trail required a lot of this special attention and she’d become used to it already. More importantly, she now needed to have an actual conversation with him. But it had to be of his own free will. If he truly wanted to live in this time, the powers that be would not stop him. Even if it meant he was creating new parallel universes, being awarded that prestigious Ploughman’s prize for his work, introducing advances in mathematics – indeed new branches of mathematics – that shouldn’t have happened yet, and so on.

It came in the form of a FaceTime call. She made the trail easy to find, but not easy enough to be obvious to the information experts of the time. Tentatively, a gentleman scholar on the screen said “Praji?” The nickname she went by in high school and middle school... Because kids quickly learned that by deliberately mispronouncing her name, they could rhyme it with a most prominent part of the female anatomy. Kids had not changed significantly by their century. “Yes Alex, I am pleased to see that you figured out what was going on.”

Alex was very far from having “figured” anything out, apart from the fact that Prajina was here, and how to make contact using the trail of crumbs she’d left for him. He very much wanted to meet her in person, but didn’t know when he’d be able to manage a trip to Trieste. As he attempted to get the words out, and while debating himself about whether or not to mention waking and using the taco to transport himself there, the knock came on his office door. Nobody in their right mind would defy his metaphorical “do not disturb sign,” from students, or other tenured professors, or even administrators up to the chancellor.

Then he noticed the background on Prajina’s phone was no longer resembling any Italian city skyline and looked a lot like the familiar wood paneling and wainscoting in the hallway outside of his office. Of course, he realized that if the same aliens had sent Praji back, she might also be equipped with some kind of “transporter” technology. As he rushed to the door he briefly wondered if she had to use anything as ridiculous as a giant taco to get herself beamed from city to city… Never mind; that would be a discussion for another time.

Their hug lasted longer than he could justify under the friend pretense and he backed off a bit before she felt “him.” All he could think to say was “it’s been so long. I’ve missed you so much.” He tried to choke back the tear, but Praji was already Mona-Lisa-smiling at him and wiping it from below his eye. She revealed that it had only been a few months for her.

He calculated. She arrived in 2017 then. Many hours of conversation later, and after both of them had beamed (without the use of a taco) back to Trieste from Alex‘s office, Alex was feeling self-conscious about their first kiss. Yes, it was wonderful; as sweet as he had dreamed since he was a boy in middle school; his heart danced and the moon came out and sang opera for him. But she was still 19. Physically. He might’ve passed, he thought, for less than 45; maybe late 30s in certain types of lighting. Did it make her feel weird?

Lucy

Nothing whatsoever on the news about missing cops… At all. The lack of corpses, perhaps? She needed to find someone with a police scanner. Buying one at RadioShack would be simple enough. But what if they had videotapes of their transactions? The act itself might be suspicious. There must be an actual person who has one already.

There was.

Castadiva’s “Sleazy Uncle Raul” as she’d jokingly called him in the past. But she finally provided Lucy with some clarification.

Sleezy? Yeah, because he had purportedly molested another family member. But `Diva was never in any danger she reassured them glibly – he preferred males. As `Diva went on, Lucy eventually found out that the family gossip was skewed: he had merely provided refuge for the boy after his family had thrown the dude out at the age of 15 for finding out that he was gay. Gay Uncle Raul thought it was the right thing to do, as opposed to the boy’s own father’s decision to pick up a frying pan with hot oil from the stovetop and throw it at his son and scalding the kid’s forearm during the otherwise passé and predictable “get out of my house” tirade.

Then Raul had had the audacity to report the incident to authorities on the way to the ER with him… resulting in authorities being there to photograph his injuries on arrival and quickly thereafter resulting in child services removing his two younger siblings from the home. Everyone called Raul “vindictive” for this.

So word amongst daddy and other religious-fanatic relatives was that there must be something “sinister” going on under Gay Raul’s roof. The kid was a graduate-school-aged young adult now, had already fathered two male children as a sperm donor for different lesbian-couple friends, was by mutual agreement a part of their lives, and as an appropriate precaution – revenge according to the senile reactionary religious fanatic family grapevine – had made sure his parents never got to meet their only grandsons before they died. Raul and his partner were starting to be able to contribute to each kid’s homeschooling now, since they were a scientist and a mathematician respectively.

It was either set up a visit with Uncle Raul or continue to watch commercials on TV for that one news item that might or might not ever air, whilst suffering through commercials for the next episodes of “Friends, Seinfeld,” and “E.R.” or whatever driveling idiocy was on the other channels.

She was beginning to see what Keith’s criticism was based on. Lucycat already preferred Sid Meier's “Civilization.” She had once played on emperor level and conquered the world by 200 CE. But her score was much higher when she let it go on to the 1600s or so, built wonders and discovered everything up to “future technology number” whatever.

One of the just slightly disappointing things about the game: no explanation of future technologies beyond fusion power. But that was understandable, she guessed.

What level of future technology, she wondered, would a civilization need in order to make a giant taco come to life, read minds, and morph back-and-forth between a rock and a taco? And oh yeah, let’s equip it with the death ray too, just for shits and giggles. Okay, back to the issue: Cool Uncle Raul was the best choice. They would just go visit him as a small group. The three of them: Lucy, Keith, and Castadiva Talamantez.

Castadiva was her real name; her mom had seen Bellini’s Norma back in ‘79 and was in love with the aria – enough to name her newborn baby girl after it a year later. They went to see uncle Raul under the guise of a school project. As if any of them ever took homework that seriously! Castadiva was actually the most levelheaded of the group. Her favorite subject was home ec. Especially the sewing projects, which she rocked – Lucy supposed that when your name is Castadiva, you’re destined to become a fashion designer, or some kind of artist at least!

She knew how to play to her uncle’s idiosyncrasies. Don’t make it a science project, she decided. He’ll see through that and know something’s up. It’s a paper we’re doing for a government class. A group report they’d selected on police accountability. She was the only one who had access to the World Wide Web and the Internet. Keith had pondered with Lucy that they might actually be the same thing; they both made a point to learn more about it later. Apparently there was a big buzz on alt dot something-or-other about whether citizens have the right to listen in on police frequencies, and what if the cops went digital and started encrypting everything they said on the radio. They, of course, we’re taking the freedom of information side. This was sure to get him all riled up appropriately, she said; he was an old hippie at heart still.

It worked. He didn’t trust the government. Duh. Who did? By the grace of God, whom Lucy did believe in even though Raul didn’t, he had a sun-faded dog-eared poster on his wall – one of dozens – that in particular showed all of the 10 Dash codes. The old standard 10-4 plus 10-100 and maybe 10-20 were close enough to common knowledge. But what about officer down? And yes the police department had one for officer unaccounted for/failing to respond, etc.

“What’s the difference between that one and officer down?” Lucy innocently tried to give the impression that she thought the only reason an officer would fail to respond would be if she/he were in mortal danger.

No, he said it could just be equipment failure, or an administrative glitch like a last-minute rescheduling of the shift and someone forgets to log it. But he made it clear that he hadn’t heard that one in many moons. No comment like “oh, funny you should mention that one… just the other night,” and so on. There were numerous “officer downs” in the last several years, but nothing recently, and certainly nothing about four officers disappearing along with two of their cars. They were, however, experimenting with the new encrypted digital signals, though they weren’t standard yet for all communications. Then he wanted to talk about his ham radio, and his shortwave antenna rig that allowed him to clearly pull in broadcasts from Cuba. Keith wasn’t exactly sure what any of this meant, how it mattered, etc.

So the take-home message: the cops weren’t publicizing anything about the case. They certainly weren’t putting up roadblocks or having a nationwide manhunt for some multiple cop killers.

Next problem: surveillance video. Not the kind from dashboard cameras, but elsewhere in the city. Traffic light cameras? She had heard that ATMs now all have cameras. Have they always had them, she wondered? They needed to retrace their route as accurately as possible to see what cameras might be positioned along the way.

Her next suggestion was a bit elementary, but made sense. Change of appearance. No one had a valid ID on them that night, so there was no way the cops called in any names or drivers license numbers. They were all in high school and only three of them could drive. One was suspended, and the other two didn’t bring anything because they were all on skateboards. For their entire lives, the drinking age was too high for any of them to pass except maybe Jared. And he had a fake with a different name. One of the cops had easily spotted the fake I.D. and confiscated it.

So Jared was alerted never to use that name again, just in case they had radioed it in that night before being exterminated. The girls all had fun changing their hair colors and/or styles; some of the guys did too. Their clothes were nondescript anyway.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It turned out to be unnecessary to disguise themselves. No images were captured of any of them, Lucy found out years later from a source she couldn’t even have imagined in ‘96-‘97.

What happened next, before Martin Luther King’s birthday that year, was the best possible news imaginable. Lucy saw the female officer... alive! She was working security at the courthouse when Lucy went to take her mom to a court appearance for a DUI. Lucycat had always had a photographic memory for faces and it had only been a few weeks. She told Castadiva excitedly: That meant they could be off the hook... right?

Lucy and Diva put 2 and e together, applied the change of base formula for logarithms, and performed a few other elementary operations to come to their own unique conclusion. They hadn’t been attacked by a death ray, but rather “beamed” à la Star Trek. Lucy was generally regarded as the genius of the group. She joked, paraphrasing Herman’s Head, “that’s like being the Best-Looking Oak Ridge boy.” Castadiva chimed in with “or the best opera singer in...” She cut herself off, having previously promised Lucy that she’d stop disrespecting the place they were both from. Lightheartedly she made fun of her “hometown” too but it seemed like they both pined for it sometimes. Both girls often said they’d like to trade skill sets, `Diva wanting to be more SAT smart, and Lucy coveting her creative genius. They finally got ahold of Keith on Lucy‘s new cellular phone to tell him the good news. They recognized another one of the “dead cops” several days later; also very much alive.

Ambraluxia

“If one were to try an experiment in time travel,” she thought-questioned the baby “wherein history was completely reset and allowed to proceed forward without making any changes, then how would the new future look?”

The baby answered, “the same as before?” This was an opportunity to educate him. The Councilwoman ၕo ࿔ᠶóᡜ felt confident that an A.I. such as she would be a most excellent babysitter for her son. Ambraluxia had a lifetime of real world adventures in intergalactic space to share with young ᡜℏញ.

She retold her version of the story of “Earth” to the baby. Kids always loved that one. What was the difference between a time machine and a matter rearranger? Nothing, of course. The introduction of the observer into the scene made both of them merely approximations. If you could truly rewind the universe to an earlier configuration, there would be no observer in that universe to witness it because all of the atoms (as well as energy) in the observer would have to be reset to their prior arrangements also. Including those in brain cells. Every scrap of matter and energy must be reset in order for you to have truly reproduced the past.

At best, you’ve reorganized the universe into a very elaborate period-based theme park for an observer whose body and mind did not participate in the rearranging. Only observers outside could see it if it were absolutely identical to a past moment. So why had the professor’s mind not been correctly reproduced like the one of the character in that Sphere film? “Zero point vibrational energy is not the same for all sets of particles every time a universe is rewound?” was the baby’s innocent reply. Essentially correct she noted, smiling... So adorable at this age!

So the humans ended up “terraforming” Venus as well as Mars in this alternate future. The one called Young Padmanabhan (they both laughed about that one word- young! As if any human had ever lived long enough to be considered old by ᡜℏញ’s species) and his husband Eric, had been partially correct. Humans were attracting the attention of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, but not because of the implosion ablation of Venus’ atmosphere with some firecrackers. They didn’t know the rule of territoriality that gave humans unlimited access to all planetary resources in their solar system as long as they were on/in uninhabited places.

Now, starting a second galactic nucleus in such a way that you rip holes in the fabric of the universe allowing matter and energy from multiple dimensions to pour into each other… That’s just downright annoying.

Padmanabhan

“Why wasn’t the land checked thoroughly – they had the technology – before citizens were allowed to move in?” Padmanabhan hadn’t slept in 23 hours and ignored Eric‘s perfectly reasonable question, without meaning to. He was preoccupied with something his subconscious glimpsed in a photo from one of the news articles and was trying to go back over it. It was that feeling like when you dream a thing that shouldn’t be there and then the realization wakes you up. One time he dreamt an entire floor of his parents’ house that didn’t exist. He really didn’t want to be rude. “It was 2048,” he murmured absentmindedly, “you didn’t have to be a citizen to own a house yet.” Eric knowingly answered “oh that’s right,” as if he remembered any history or government from school.

Then it hit him! “Eric! Either I’m dreaming or your alien theory just got slam-dunk-proven! Look at the people in this photo and tell me who or what you see please.” Eric smiled as he ported the monitor output to his head wire, closing his eyes. He looked pleased that he might actually be right about something requiring technical intelligence. “If you were dreaming, wouldn’t I be standing on a pyramid in sort of sun god robes with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at me?” Eric opened one eye to check `Rajan’s reaction. Only a weak smile. They had learned to communicate in old movie code and he woke up with bed-head that morning which both of them agreed resembled the pompadour-esque hairdo sported by Val Kilmer in the movie. Communicating in movie references became part of their inside humor. “OK, I’ll be serious.” He closed both eyes again to concentrate on the monitor.

“Oh there they are! I see what you mean now. What in the world are they wearing though? Blues Brothers? Or that Will Smith/Tommy Lee movie? He’s rockin’ it, but the Annie Hall thing just does not work for her…” His voice trailed off as he realized his husband’s stress level had just jumped again. “Don’t furrow your brow that way babe, it’ll make you look like Ernest Borgnine. I want my Jimi Mistry back!”

“Rolla dear, please, it was Tommy Lee Jones. The other guy was the drummer from some 1980s hair metal band. But tell me just so I know I’m not going insane, who is wearing those suits?”

“Well that remains to be seen, Kent, but we are looking at your two friends, Alex and Priyanka… um, sorry, Prajina. It’s definitely them.” Eric hadn’t connected the dots yet, as his head wire monitor only intercepted the image `Rajan wanted him to see, and not the whole article.

“How old do they look to you Eric?” He tried to remember, and then thought about whether this might be a trick question… Hadn’t the three of them all been born on the same day or something? Maybe it was in the same month. “Um, they’re about the same age as they were when I last saw them three and a half years ago, dear, over eighteen I guess; late teens to early twenties? Or maybe about like I’d expect them to look now. Why?”

Why? Because the picture was of a crowd of onlookers observing rescue workers – it was quite the miracle that no one was killed when the collapse happened – only a few minor injuries. It was at the site of the Kentucky sinkhole 92 years ago! The photo was from 2048. Alex and Prajina had time-traveled back into the last century. Either Alex was a much more prolific boy genius than he let on and had invented a time machine – not likely, as he was not known to be modest about his accomplishments – or aliens really were involved.

Meanwhile Eric had a very strange complaint: looking out their bedroom window into the city at night, on the balcony of a building across the street from them... Rajan hadn’t had any of his mind blogging features sharing things with Eric at the time. But Eric’s complaint out loud sounded like he was reading word for word about the hallucinations that his husband had after disconnecting his MindWire virtual sensorium rig.

He even made the Predator analogy, describing the shadowy things on the neighbor’s balcony. But no way had Eric been connected long enough to be experiencing these kinds of side effects. Rajan wondered if it was possible to sneak a virus in on one of the rom-macro-molecule chips... but even so, how does that have any influence on a person’s mind and optic nerves afterwards, when switched off? It had been too long a day and he just fell asleep. Of course Eric was there to cover him, straighten his head out, get his pillow comfortably under him, and put all his devices on the charging station for the rest of the day.

Brenda

A post office in the mall? She thought to herself to take her mind off it. Hmm, that’s something she hadn’t seen in San Antonio. This “galleria” in Houston was special, historically though. Cryptomancer’s parents had met there on their first date in the 90s when there was still a Bennigan’s overlooking the ice-skating rink. His real name, Bobby, made her think of the cyberpunk character, and like a dork she asked him if his last name was Newmark when they first met. Fortunately, he was just as geeky and responded “I can be, if you’ll be Steppin’ Razor.” Brenda held off on asking him why he had a PO Box in the galleria post office. Wasn’t snail mail kind of un-cyberpunky for him? Her mind couldn’t help drifting back to “it.” The “spot.” If it existed, how big was it?

Dammit, they weren’t supposed to get out of the car. If the restaurant they drove thru to satisfy their munchies hadn’t been spewing out a generously strong free WiFi signal, and if Bobby’s devices hadn’t already recognized the network from having joined it before, he wouldn’t have even gotten the notification (he had some, frankly, paranoid-sounding reasons for not wanting to use LTE when out and about) that led him to wanna go check his box. Perhaps a public restroom and some change she’d grabbed from his car console to get an emergency pad would take care of it? That was roughly the plan. She wasn’t supposed to have needed any.

But this was altogether different; her first time in six months. But also her first time ever for going out afterwards without bathing / freshening up in some way. Plenty of change available in all kinds of little compartments throughout his car, and no complaints from him naturally, as she’d simply mumbled something about “a vending machine.” He didn’t ask. Maybe he was focused on thinking about “them?” A possible strategy for her, to take her mind off it as they walked through the parking garage.

Them. Thirty-three people have made contact before today. That was not including Bobby/ Cryptomancer who was brought in for technical support. What Brenda noticed about all of them, starting back with Madhvi and Irving, was that they had copies of files or printouts about Stalko-Taco even though they weren’t fans. How weird is that? If you were a fan, not only was your memory of him (it?) utterly Destroyed, all documents you may have had to jog your memory of the story, and remind you that it existed, were just mysteriously gone somehow too.

That even applied to old Polaroid photos that Wheeler had had of himself trying to do Stalko-Taco cosplay in the outfit his mom started to make for him. She had chatted with his mom recently again, an otherwise normal woman as far as memory goes, and found that she still remembered nothing about it either. Brenda still hadn’t floated her “Happening” theory to Bobby or anyone else because she was afraid it was just too stupid and she was already a bit self conscious about being one of the few liberal-artsy-girls among this bunch of super brains. They’d most likely, she thought, shoot the idea down with their in-depth understandings of all things technology-related.

Okay, now she oozed. The feeling was unmistakable. They were going in their sweatpants and t-shirts for this. Sweaty workout clothes? Perhaps people would think they’d just been exercising? And of course Houston was hot as hell as usual. Yeah right. And her only sweat just happened to be in that spot! Obviously not blood. Would people think she was sexually aroused and that was her own juice flowing? Maybe they’d simply think she couldn’t hold her pee and had a slight accident that way. Or would they guess that the guy she was walking with had just fucked her a few minutes ago and it was his semen leaking out of her as she walked? Was it even that conspicuous that anyone could possibly notice?

“Seems that only if you didn’t really like Stalko-Taco, but had documentation about him anyway,” Bobby ventured distantly almost as if talking to himself but still momentarily glancing at Brenda, “your documents are intact!?” What had they done, he went on wondering aloud, contacted everyone in the fanbase, then Will Smith flashy-thinged them and confiscated their papers?

Maybe. But then why ignore the people who weren’t fans? Well perhaps they thought there wouldn’t be that many. A non-fan who for some reason still has copies of the story anyway? Unlikely? They were basically right, to a good approximation. Only 33 in the world so far.

Plus whomever we might discover today through this thing Bobby called his low-tech back channel; his PO Box. But first, and at last, a ladies room. He was dead set to proj on to his box, but could tell she really needed to divert over to the restrooms. But did she? What if the spot that she was Sooo sure was visible and the size of a pizza, was in fact the opposite of visible and she’d been worrying about nothing. There was enough of a lull in this weekday crowd flow that they had a moment of total privacy in the hallway outside. She quickly asked him “ok, be honest Newmark, can you see a stain on me if you look at my butt? Or from the front?”

Once he got it, he was sweet about it; no vulgar joking or anything. “Honestly,” he calmly smiled, “if you hadn’t bent over just right and drew my attention to it, I’d never have noticed. I’m positive no one else has either.” But yeah, he now agreed with her that the box could wait another several minutes or as long as necessary. And wanted to know if she’d grabbed enough change because he truly didn’t have a clue how much those things cost. It made her feel better to just deal with it while they were there.

She found herself thanking him for not being grossed out by it or thinking it made her seem slutty – in retrospect, kind of a sad commentary on other boys she’d known so far. And finally, as they reached the public facilities, tried to lighten up by pointing out that since he was the only other person who knew about the secret spot, it could serve as a reminder that he’d “marked her as his territory.” Admittedly she was going for this effect, but just hadn’t thought it would work so well. As the sound of her own flirtatious words still echoed in her ears, she could see him visibly Grow! The grey sweat pants were kinda baggy and his briefs weren’t tight enough to restrain it. Awesome.

She’d thought earlier about getting back to his place and showering and discarding their “workout clothes”, then possibly another romp between the sheets. He was sexually spent until later this evening – at night at least, with a possible afternoon nap, he could be ready to go again. Now she mused that maybe he wouldn’t need the nap after all.

The pad probably wasn’t needed either. But since she had made such a fuss about taking this detour... might as well go ahead and get it. But hurry up, she told herself; she wanted to see what was supposed to be waiting at this box as much as he did, and now with her pants down she saw that the thing was decidedly tiny. The best thing to come out of this was what had popped up in the hallway outside, she thought smiling wryly into the mirror over the sink. After rushing her washed hands under the dryer so she could get back to Bobby and their business, she was surprised to see him shuffling around the corner, slightly out of breath and with some generic store bag in his hand.

Instead of waiting patiently as she had been picturing him, he’d run to a kiosk they passed on the way in. It gave her a slight melting feeling as he handed her the shirt. He kinda fumbled for the words to try and tell her what he was recommending that she do; something almost all girls know about already, and so she nodded and thanked him warmly with a let’s-feel-if-that-bulge-is-still-there hug... as she had tied the sleeves around her waist faster than he could explain the configuration. In truth, she thought, while boys may or may not know about it and might just think it’s a fashion choice, it pretty much screams out to most women. The thing that wasn’t noticeable before had now been transformed into an unmistakable “oops” signal.

But most of us have been there or known a friend who has, so it’s not like anyone would have an attitude over it. It was just too sweet a gesture from him to not oblige him by wearing it as he had envisioned it.

So next stop, the box, to find out how many more “un-erasables” there were in the world (besides the current thirty-three) who could still remember Stalko-Taco.

Weird Shapes

She wasn’t sure what store the display was supposed to be for. It was kind of on the wall between a clothing retailer and a card and gift shop. It seemed rather a waste of money; if you were going to invest in uber-expensive hologram technology then you’d better make sure people know which damned store the ad goes with.

Bobby appeared to be impressed with it also. Being a techno-wizard, it didn’t matter to him so much what the message was – it was just pretty cool to see them showing off their advanced holography.

If they hadn’t both been in such a hurry they might have hung around and gawked like sightseeing tourists.

Meanwhile, if the inter-dimensional travelers had been able to pat each other on their backs... they might have been tempted to in celebration of their mastery of camouflage for once! For the next phase of their operation, in this same human city only a bit later, they wouldn’t need camouflage. It was almost time for the actual confrontation with one of the humans; the one they estimated could likely handle seeing their true form.

Back to Brenda

I could tell my new boyfriend was mad about the eraser situation. At first I mistook it for a general moral indignation, like how dare the government do this to citizens, but realized now that it was more personal for him.

He had never heard of Stalko-Taco. But he liked most creepypastas. Even the ones that weren’t especially his favorites, he had bothered to read and knew them in detail. He could recognize who each character was supposed to be on Madhvi’s DeviantArt. Naturally he had no memory whatsoever of Stalko-Taco. Which meant that he was in the other category. He was quite apart from this group of 33; he had most likely been a fan. Upon reading all of the unique documents that each of us had found, although Bobby had no memory of the stories at all, he laughed at parts; said “cool” at one point.

Yep, he had been a fan. And like millions of others, his memory had been erased. But not only that, his personal files on his computer had been deleted in a way that left no trace. One of the best hackers in the world had been hacked – something heretofore regarded as an impossibility had been perpetrated against him – and he was infuriated, no doubt.

That turned him vicious, as far as I could tell. High-ranking government officials in the administration had sent encrypted compressed steganographically hidden documents to countries they weren’t supposed to have contact with... they hadn’t of course. Not voluntarily. The great Cryptomancer had caused their devices to do it, though. He not only framed them, but the so-called “plaintext” files that he had encrypted, were in fact gibberish as she understood it. Batches of random numbers, he explained, that he’d generated with two different americium-type smoke detectors and two bananas, with two separate geiger counters. The time intervals between decay events from multiple sources being routed out of signals from two different detectors, he said, would be truly random.

At first Brenda didn’t get it. Basically it meant the NSA would be having shit-fits thinking they were unable to decrypt the “messages” when in fact there was no message, and simultaneously wasting both manpower hours and valuable CPU time – hopefully on some of the NSA’s most expensive equipment.

It gave him a warm fuzzy feeling, also, to think that powerful, high-level spooks in the government would be needlessly interrogating other government bureaucratic officials. He admitted that he was “a bit annoyed” by the erasers.

“A bit annoyed?” Brenda thought… She wondered to herself “what would you be like if you were really pissed?”

Among the letters he got were items from someone named Lucycat Beall in Santa Cruz. She claimed to have an original Yves St. Laurent in her closet that had been authenticated and wondered if he’d be interested. She pointed out that it had only been worn by the model on the runway where it was first shown. That was a lower level code that meant she was one of us. But with a modification: if Brenda was interpreting it right, she was saying that she had actually seen the original Stalko-Taco, in “person” as it were.

Did she mean that she had seen the first draft, and remembered it? That she actually knew the author? Was the author? No, it almost sounded like she literally meant that Stalko-Taco was real and not a story and that she had seen the actual taco. Well, once Bobby decrypted the message in her poetry, they’d know more.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

Everything from here👇 and below is not part of the story but a comment section from DeviantArt, which I use to talk about why I gave this and possibly other sections a ‘mature’ rating.

For this section I wasn’t sure if I should indicate that it has “mature content” when the upload questionnaire appears.

As anyone reading has figured out by now, this is a science fiction novel. Primarily. But some of the characters in it are humans. They have sex sometimes. But there’s no sex scene in it – without creating a plot spoiler – it’s just a character acknowledging that she recently f**ked another one and that she’s looking forward to doing it again with him later.

I’m not sure if this qualifies for the mature content rating; it has survived in this form on my old tumblr for almost seven years now… and tumblr these past few years is well known for having hissy-fits over anything even remotely sexual.. and even some things that aren’t. But to avoid any problems I’m designating it as ‘mature.’

If this really causes anyone trouble, they can see the original ancient tumblr here…

vandahlcourte.tumblr.com/post/…

…and will have all the same files (including these newly re- proofread ones from just last month). It would just require a lot more scrolling. But also please note, that as you navigate through the old tumblr files, they eventually will want you to sign in or sign up for a tumblr account if you don’t already have one. Then you’ll also be able to see all my original posts from October 2015 which are fraught with even more spelling and grammar errors😅

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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 8. seven chapters, ending with chapter 43

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 8. seven chapters, ending with chapter 43

↩️return to previous section, section 7

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Keith

They both passed Crêpes A-Go Go a million times over the years. It wasn’t surprising that Keith had never stopped there in his adult life – unless a restaurant specifically claimed to be vegan, he knew to avoid it. Even at the more hip establishments around Berkeley and San Francisco, he would have to haggle and nitpick about every ingredient in every item and it always made him look like the fussy prima donna of whatever group he was with. At least with a vegetarian place they would sort of get him. La Bella Lucia assured him there were vegan-acceptable things on the menu.

Lucycat Beall! Eight years since they had parted company and a dozen since the taco attack in the park. It was surprising she hadn’t eaten there, since she had actually gone to UC Berkeley and was quite more of a social butterfly than he ever was. But vegan, too. So she understood the restaurant dilemma. She convinced him that this would be the best place to meet and greet all the prospective new coven members she had seemed to be accumulating for him in the past several months.

“Not for me, Lucy.” It was important to him to emphasize this, as he and his priestess both had bad experiences with would-be cult leaders in the past.

“That kind of makes me feel uncomfortable, because we don’t want to be thought of as ‘cult leaders’ or as a cult at all.” He said motioning to his priestess, the one formerly known as Batgirl, who was probably the closer thing to a “leader” that the coven had than Keith had ever been. She now went by her regular first name, Amber. Although her craft name was Ambraluxia, which she used when appropriate.

They were both convinced that the taco thing had been magical. Their coven (actually the trad preferred to call its groups ‘crannogs,’ they explained to Lucy) were all of mindset that the magick was real. In theurgy versus thaumaturgy considerations, they were much more on the actual miracle side. This had led to a merry war of words with Cerulean Fire Witch and Count Lord Simon on WitchVox and other forums.

No, the magick was not a metaphor. It wasn’t personal alchemy or internal self-transformation of the self into the higher self. Though that was certainly valid, and a big part of it… Their group consisted of people who really believed the actual “magic” was actually real.

Lucy had long since settled on the extraterrestrial angle. Or the government possibly getting ahold of alien technology and accidentally using it in some project that went haywire. So their opinions were Charmed versus The X-Files. But of course that had nothing to do with why they split up. Both were bi and poly, but Lucy was just a little too careless at a time when four of Keith’s older friends from childhood had tragically been wasting away from AIDS as their bodies finally shut down from the roughly ten to fifteen year battle each. She seemed to be of the outmoded opinion that a guy who wanted to give anal to a woman was a zero risk since he couldn’t possibly also want to receive it from another man as well. Risky proposition! It was one of a hundred minor things about which they differed in opinion.

When the time came for her to pick a grad school from amongst a half dozen that accepted her, and her favorite choice ended up being in Florida, they simply agreed: she would go. And with Keith having no academic or professional reasons to, he wouldn’t.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

An iridescent flash on the wall of a nearby building caught his attention between the parked cars behind her. It almost felt familiar somehow. Then a flash came from a glass pane on an old-style newspaper machine that a woman in an athleisure jogging outfit was struggling with.

So that was probably what the flash was, Keith’s subconscious told him, and not anything you might have seen lurking in the bushes in a park a dozen years ago while stoned; a thing that you were never really consciously aware of in the first place.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Can you believe it Lucy? A black president!”

They’d watched on as Reyna’s new “smart phone” displayed the video from some online video clearinghouse called you tube; or maybe it was one word. He’d heard of it before when that bridge collapsed back east somewhere. But his cell phone was still stupid and not smart like Reyna’s... The vid had some highlights which someone appended together. They looked on as Oprah started to cry and as Beyoncé sang while our president danced with Michelle at his inauguration.

Keith went on telling Lucy: “My aunt Harriet told me when I was six: never let anyone know that I was a Jew in America – since I was non-practicing – until we either had a Jewish president or a black president. During full throttle Reagan era in ‘86, that was her way of saying ‘when hell freezes over.’ Well Aunt Harriet, they’re having snowball fights for the rest of the week down there!” Keith theatrically pulled out the talisman he called “The Seal of the Macrocosm” from his collection inside his T-shirt and let it hang out prominently as the four of them walked into Crêpes A-Go Go.

rIt wasn’t like wearing a Star of David on a necklace would raise any eyebrows in this part of California. Hadar had shown up, Lucy noted, wearing her favorite gold-with-blue-inlay Hamsa talisman around her neck as always; a present given to her on becoming a Bat Mitzvah, from an aunt whom many of her family regarded as a crazy old witch. She had read Kabbalah and Zohar at a time when women really weren’t supposed to, and many other Jews still cared; supposedly she really believed golems were possible, etc.

Hadar did ask her new acquaintance, Keith, in what sense he had come to be “a non-practicing Jew?” i.e. was he lapsed or just not raised religiously? He explained that his mother was a Jew but his father Gentile – so by Law of course that made him a Jew no matter what his father was, believed, or practiced. But that he had been raised by a family of “devout agnostics,” then babysat by a bunch of hippie Hindus – a group of hippies that included some actual people from India –since the age of four. Then he became Wiccan at 15.

Hadar’s deadpan humor took Keith by surprise: “that’s funny,” she said, “you don’t look agnostic.” Two of the others had arrived by then so our little table was half full. It took them different amounts of split seconds to get her. A very dry sense of humor it seemed, just a thin smile to let the others know she was kidding around.

Lucy

That’s why we thought she was also fooling around when she later referred to the place as “CREEPS A-Go Go” instead of Crêpes A-Go Go. We were waiting for the punchline or grin or anything to show how that was supposed to be funny. Then it became apparent that she simply wasn’t all that familiar with the word crêpes as a food item – wanting to describe the things as blintzes – and that auto correct on my phone had actually changed crêpes to creeps.

Hadar simply hadn’t bothered to look at the sign that closely when she rode her bike into the parking lot that matched the correct address I’d texted her… So it ended up being funny after all. In fact it became one of the running jokes of the afternoon there. She even urged Keith to try some of her “creepy pasta primavera” dish that she was pretty sure was vegan-acceptable unless Lisa Simpson analyzed it and found traces of egg or dairy in the sauce.

Keith tried the creepy pasta, pointing out “I’m only a level 4.95 vegan at the moment. I’ve yet to achieve Lisa’s perfected level.” The term “creepy pasta” a few years later became a codeword for part of our clandestine communications with that bi-queer juggalo/hacker in Texas who called himself “Cryptomancer.” It helped that a website evolved around the same time as that lunch date, with the same name and a parallel etymology, so few people ever knew the “original” origin of our term.

Her knowledge of golem lore was impressive, as well as her abilities in Hebrew – spoken and written – plus the numerology associated with the written language. Like Ambraluxia and Keith she could read, write and speak Enochian.

Weird Shapes and Eileen

More gold! She needed more gold. How had she told them that the last time with tarot cards? They still couldn’t talk. They could slither along the surfaces of walls, ceilings, floors, and even irregularly-shaped objects... molding themselves to fit over or around things like the most perfectly tailor-made table cloths. With Eileen’s instructions, painstakingly transmitted to them by tarot and rune symbolism, they’d begun to get better at camouflaging themselves.

The gold. Yes, back to that. The assortment of cards that worked last time was well documented in her notes. In San Francisco of course. And the newest tarot deck plus another oracle deck was waiting for her at the MailDrop Guru location on Sloat. So also across the bay. The plan was forming as she started to walk back in the direction of the parking garage at Cal. She’d use the last little bit of cash to get gas for the van. There was no quicker way, but since she had time-travel now... it shouldn’t matter.

But she thought really hard about how to reassure herself that it would work. It was a rather Bill-and-Ted’s solution but it was simple and direct; not as silly as “remember a trash can.” But instead just a matter of waiting. And thinking. Greet yourself. Wear something very different. Do your hair and makeup different. Pick something that goes with your black bolero so we can wear it.

“And bring me a newspaper, Me!” she murmured – under her breath – just in case someone other than herself came around the corner and might think she was crazy. Or worse... they might not think she was crazy and discover her plan for world domination. “Yes. ME. I’m talking to you. Bring me a newspaper we can use. I like cheating the stock market with time-travel now that I know how day-trading works.”

She noted that her “friends of darkness” had elected to hang behind and watch the Crêpes A-Go Go crowd. Had their future selves already come back in time to tell them what we were doing? Before she even told them? Well, she didn’t necessarily need them tagging along; they’d reappear instantly whenever she summoned them with the Golden Dawn tarot deck...

Unbelievable! Her plan worked! Herself came clip-clopping around the corner in their favorite ankle booties. Yes! The ensemble, makeup, and hair together were all radically different enough from her current mom-making-a-grocery-run-and-other-errands look, that they’d never be mistaken for twins. Plus the boots made her an inch and a half taller than her present shoe choice. If some nosey asshole were to stop and stare, they might come across as sisters, but not identical twins. They certainly would have identical pepper spray containers if anyone that obnoxious got in their way. But no need. They were alone.

“Hi Me!” herself from the most-likely very near future said, handing her a newspaper which she could see had the date blacked out with a broad felt-tip marker. “Don’t actually sell any gold until early next week, like Tuesday. It’s gonna spike again. God bless that second Bush-tard for wrecking the economy so good!”

She laughed slightly, having thought the same thing while those punks – Amber & Keith were entertaining all the new recruits in there talking about the inauguration. “Anything else I should invest in or avoid?” she observed herself hopefully.

“Nah. Nothing major. Farther in the future, we’ll apparently never get to buy tumblr as a publicly traded stock. A future ‘us’ from years later sent a detailed report about investments to jump at and – –

“Really? No tumblr? It looks so promising right now,” she interrupted, wondering if it was rude to interrupt herself.

“Nope. Evidently their management gets overrun by dipshits in the future. Not worth bothering with. But never mind the investment stuff. You’ll get the report Saturday and the paper has what we need to have fun for the rest of the week in day trading. Plus the hobgoblins are gonna cough up that gold we need. Use Schneider, not Ramirez. He’s getting too well known at the pawn and coin places.”

“He’ll want a bigger cut o...”

“Let him. We get more than enough to pay all the P.I.’s we needed for this. Right now I need you to listen,” she told herself, pulling out a prepaid Walmart visa and pushing it towards her self of a few days ago.

Cool, she thought. I remembered that I was going to need gas for the van, and this beats the hell out of Jeff Spicoli-ing through lint-filled pockets of the dirty clothes in the back to get change.

“Don’t hurry to get home right now!” I told myself rather abruptly. “Get some gas. Fill it, in fact. Then get our nails done at that avant-garde place; Stilettos, with the psychedelic pattern like we’ve been wanting!” I emphasized my words by thrusting up my Molly Millions backwards so now-me could see how good they looked on me.

“Ok,” I answered myself a bit confused and then we both blinked as the nails started McFly-ing out of existence.

“Dammit Eileen! Do the remember a trashcan thing like you were with making sure I showed up right now! There’s gonna be three major traffic accidents and the bay bridge is gonna suck worse than usual. If you just kick back and get our nails done you’ll actually make it home sooner and still get to check the box. The detour that the traffic coptards will try to send us on is crazy-long.”

“Any chance that one of those future us’s filled you in on how we get a time fixator, since our dark friends back there on the restaurant walls can’t seem to comprehend the physics of what we’re asking or even understand why it’s a problem?”

“Nope. Bernart is still our best shot. Ugh, I know! I’m still gagging from that sick-sweet meade that the renn-faire junkies love; thank Goddess some girls there like plain ol’ vsop brandy. Now do it!”

I concentrated on my new plans for the rest of the afternoon & early evening and watched as future-me’s psychedelic stilettos reappeared like Marty’s hand after his dad punched Biff.

“Good,” I said to me. “And we’ve got this here. The private detectives have been paid extra extra well to shut the fuck up and not talk to each other, even though some of them know each other professionally and personally. Each one of the new recruits that punk-witch in there is eyeing up will have their own P.I. following them as well as Lucy Beall. The high priestess and priest will still have their usual surveillance.”

“Oh no, not ‘high’ priest & priestess,” I told me in a mocking tone. “That’s too cultish for the fluffy bunny coven.”

“Get going,” I said to me, rolling my eyes.

Back to Keith

We definitely clicked, and we noted the similarities between Stalko-Taco and a golem.

Then Hadar caught me a little off guard with another question: could she write the story of Stalko-Taco on her creative writing blog? To be self-published online, and open source.

It was a complicated question that concerned not only me, Amber, and Lucycat, but several other people who weren’t at the table – not the least of which was Castadiva, whom none of us had seen for many Moons now and whom we were really starting to worry about.

It was universally accepted that none of the four cops were dead. All were visually verified again to be around town, back at work. What had happened was apparently some form of teleportation like the transporter from Star Trek as Lucy pointed out – or “orbing” from Charmed, Batgirl/Ambraluxia noted. But still, abducting a police officer?

Lucy expressed her concerns to me: What’s the statute of limitations on that? One of the four had retired already. Could anyone from the group be implicated still? If so, then project “creepypasta” as Hadar had codenamed it, had to be tabled for a while.

She did tell us about some of her online acquaintances who were working on other stories including a tall, pale, wraith-like creature with no face. That sounded good; perhaps she could think of some other characters in the meantime, for her horror and urban legend blog.

Alex and Prajina

“Really? These stupid suits?” Alex felt ridiculous.

“You don’t want to stick out do you?” she asked, trying not to laugh herself. “This is actually what’s fashionable at the moment. Ever since that Talamantez woman passed on the reins of her fashion empire to her kids. Everyone’s drooling over the Leon de Grance stuff right now, but in a few years Morgana will pass up her brother in the fashion industry stardom.”

“Don’t they realize they’re looking at the Men in Black suits from just over fifty years ago; less than that if you count sequels?” Alex trailed off as he realized she had patched into that alien cyberspace thing that she did with her mind. He quickly learned though, that it didn’t matter. She could multitask with her alien-enhanced brain.

“It’s that old cliché – that good artists borrow and great artist steal. You just proved the hippies’ point, again.”

“Do you believe now, that we’re doing the right thing Praji?”

“I never did not believe; I was just saying that it was going to be difficult for me to pitch the idea to my bosses. Or so I thought. They were most impressed, as was I, with your empathy for these people. You’ve scored points with them for humanity, you know. Those fifty-two people who died in that sinkhole were not in any way connected to you – relatives or friends.” Her supervisors, she went on to explain, were okay with it provided that certain restrictions and conditions were applied.

She wore a stylish data glove and some equally fashionable ÇimLine vr-glasses with the dummy-background light on as she remembered to move her gloved hand once in awhile to look normal and not like she was meditating or just staring off into space. In reality moving no part of herself at all, like any person from her time, Praji continued to “write” in her mind blog but she also continued to compose responses to two different emails from alien time-cops in another galaxy. And since this was all barely enough of a drain on her to even be rightly called “multitasking,” she went on mentally rehashing the sinkhole:

Fifty-two lives that had been lost over half a century before their generation were born, would now be allowed to continue. Some of the youngest victims might even have grandchildren the same age as us. Our time fixators would stop us from being blindsided, but as far as anyone knew in our graduating class, these people would have always existed. Some might have an interesting story to tell about the time grandma was a kid and almost fell into a giant sinkhole… Hell-hole: the one that gobbled up her entire neighborhood, but killed no one. They would exist now instead of being nonexistent – having been born – something that was not possible before with their ancestors dead.

And surprisingly, this little side excursion Alex had proposed won the approval of the Time Police, via ℏ♄. Overall, through time, they and their descendants would accomplish more good than evil – that had been Alex‘s simplified analysis, but basically correct.

The taco had been temporarily deactivated for their journey into the near future. Prajina knew how to do this; Alex could never override the thing’s programming. They would discuss what should become of it when they got back to 2018.

“What I don’t understand,” Alex pondered aloud, “is how your great-great-grandmother‘s involvement in the story of an urban legend could alter a presidential campaign 22 years in her future. What, as my grandfather will one day ask, does that have to do with the Price of Caviar in Krasnoyarsk?”

Then she saw Alex’s attention waver. Looking across the bar & grille place he’d chosen, she still couldn’t find anything meaningful and so she looked back at him with her what’s up expression.

He answered her look with a word: “Beer!”

His Cerebral Phosphorescence

“Swifty” was what they had called him in his youth. He laid his tulips on the casket and went to pay his condolences to the analyst’s widow. It did occurred to him on the way to the funeral – driving in silence, as it seemed disrespectful to let his usual 80s metal playlist go on blasting – that they were burying the last person who would’ve still felt comfortable calling him Swifty. Or any nickname at all. He was older, very deservedly respected now, and yes, still supervised by people younger than he. But quite indispensable as proven by his track record. And none of them would use the name “Swifty” for him, ever.

Not a huge loss, just a philosophical pondering. One of his predecessors who had used it, often, had not bought into his neutrino-beam-through-the-earth theory. Not that he didn’t think it was theoretically possible of course; a beam of them or any number of randomly directed ones could pass through the earth or any other planet with their paths virtually unaltered. The problem lay in generating a bunch of them in sufficient numbers and modulating the source in order to encode information. Would you switch it on and off rapidly? There would be nothing in existence at the time, that he knew of, which could function as a beam chopper. An ultra-strong magnetic field? No. They wouldn’t be susceptible to that, he thought to himself and daydreamed on.

He realized that, lost in thought, he’d almost lost track of the woman he was supposed to be following back to the analyst’s family’s house to deliver his foil-wrapped edible contribution to the post-funerary potluck ritual. Perhaps, he thought, now would be the time to rehearse his “appropriate conversation ideas” that he needed to use to make up for not having any social graces.

It wasn’t a very long drive back to Alexandria from where they buried the guy, near Leesburg – safely under an hour in this good weather. Still, it was boring staring at her Mary Kay bumper stickers the whole way; her car was pink but not a Cadillac. Maybe she or whoever the distributor was had done ok but still hadn’t made it to the top yet; he wasn’t exactly clear on the nuances of their business. And his mind continued to wander. The technology for encoding a message in a neutrino beam had become at least theoretically possible around the time President Obama got rid of “don’t ask don’t tell.”

He wondered as his mind-tangent meandered further, how that would’ve changed his career. His first impulse was to go with one of the military recruiters at his college. Could he conceivably have gotten into SIGINT that way? But this was way before don’t ask don’t tell was even a thing. Back then it was “we WILL ask, and if we don’t like the answer, we’ll kick you out.” And not long before that, a stay at Leavenworth might possibly feature into it. He had run into the recruiter a second time on campus, after their initial meeting, before his appointment to come in and sign some papers.

The problem was that Swifty was wearing his Bronski Beat T-shirt with a pink triangle on it…

“Good God, son! Do you realize that’s the symbol Hitler used on homosexuals in the concentration camps?” The recruiter had surprised him and gotten a good look at the T-shirt first. It was custom made for him by another gay friend who did silk screening, and on the back it said “hit that perfect beat boy.”

So his response to the Hitler comment came stammering out as he was caught off guard, trying to say something about it just being a band that he and his friends had gone and seen in concert.

One thing led to another and eventually the recruiter blew him off. It paved the way for his private sector career. Then, he became too irresistible for the agency to pass up. Like the scene from Good Will Hunting, except he didn’t want to be a bricklayer. Many commented, presumably to try and offer words of encouragement, that his was sort of a modern Alan Turing story, only with less pressure about the gay thing.

Unlike Turing, He got to march in his first pride parade after 6/26/2015. Swifty was well aware that it was more like what Dr. Turing would’ve experienced if he’d not been harassed, or if he’d stayed 100% in the closet. Those that glibly rambled on about the Alan Turing comparison didn’t really stop and think about the level of bullshit that people like him had to endure in those days. That, and the fact that they made him undergo court-ordered chemical castration, and that it likely drove him to his death.

In the early years, a select few had re-nicknamed Swifty the “ghost in the machine,” and then just “ghost.” He seemed to have access to information he couldn’t possibly have. They speculated, with no security breeches detected… that they maybe should have funded the men who stare at goats more enthusiastically? Even die-hard skeptics seriously pondered whether or not he might actually be psychic. And like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he was everywhere and had access to everything, it seemed.

He strained not to laugh out loud that the people who didn’t believe in psychics would rather suddenly have a change of heart and start to believe psychics existed than accept the more frightening prospect: that they are merely so predictable that an intelligent person can forecast their thoughts and actions as good or better than the weather. Things they were sure no one could possibly have known they were thinking were as obvious as his childhood electronics-project pet robots’ next moves had been in the late 70s.

Now there was a new ghost in his machine. One he couldn’t explain. Agents lying or confabulating, but passing polygraph tests with flying colors. Some of them were avid consumers of hard liquor on their free time – so Korsakoff syndrome? But even in alcoholics, it’s rare. Statistically impossible for all of them to have developed KS. It had to be a conspiracy. But orchestrated by whom?

Their lies and absent memories benefited no one. He had put all of his intelligence into analyzing their patterns of lies, omissions, and forgetfulness, and couldn’t trace anything to a high-level mole or double agent or the like... which previously had been his top theories. A normal person would’ve concluded that he was simply being outsmarted, and outmaneuvered. Since Swifty was not even in the vicinity of normal, he refused to believe someone was more intelligent than he.

It wasn’t ego, but just factual analysis. You don’t assume that the people who show up in old Geo Metros like he drove in college, are going to win in a race against a Formula One vehicle. Statistically, his intellect could consistently blow the fucking doors off any government employee, of any government on earth. Mentally there was no comparison. Compared to him, they were whispers to a scream. And with no one left to check him as he pulled up to the widow’s house, he concluded: aliens. It had to be aliens.

ℏ♄

The Wild Mix by DJ BL3ND was really her favorite now, even though the rest of the crew went around singing that part of the Rage Mix that was stuck in everyone’s head. She was rousted from her near sleep by the ship’s alarm as the pleasant melodies lulled her. Brane quake! She heard shouts from the hallway outside. It often happens with cases where large numbers of new parallel universes are created simultaneously. Evidently, Alex’s “humanitarian” mission to save 52 lives had resulted in the creation of over six million new parallel universes – or alternate timelines within the multiverse – as the human author Robert A. Heinlein had called them. She preferred Heinlein’s terminology when communicating with the humans since it didn’t contain an inherent contradiction.

In the “best of all possible worlds” to borrow from the human Voltaire, which is the one the amphictiony tried to always steer civilization towards, the humans’ descendants actually will end up being helpful, productive members of society. ℏ♄ could only travel 180,000 ᪠Yrs into “the” future; 60,000 ᪠Yrs after the neutron star mishap they were trying to prevent. Beyond that was off-limits to her by department orders.

What she could see was promising. The humans and the story of Earth even became popular entertainment. In the future, many beings that she knew of / was going to know of took their names from the characters. She pondered the question of why they allowed structures to be built over sinkholes at all, or why sinkholes were allowed to be created under structures. Oh well, the humans evidently are still learning on their way to becoming a technologically advanced civilization.

There was a new problem on the horizon. A group of beings who benefited from the second galactic nucleus. Although their timeline wasn’t created until the incident, it was created with it’s time axis at a nearly right angle to the amphictiony’s universe’s (our universe’s) time axis. So immediately they already had tens of millions of years to evolve. They were considerably more disorganized than we were, and unfortunately their ethics and morals were reprehensible. They had detected the threat to their universe’s existence and viewed the amphictiony’s actions in trying to stop the neutron star incident from happening as an act of war. They were having very little success getting through into our timeline. But a little success translated to at least some success, and there was now an adversary roaming free in our universe, actually trying to thwart Prajina and Alex.

They had codenamed them ᢈᯒၔ᎘ which some humans from Prajina’s German subsidiary of her company had misunderstood as “dunkel-welters.” The darkworlders? It sounded like some really sappy pulp fiction concept. However when they tried to explain to Prajina that it was just a description of how space, time, matter, and energy interacted for these peculiar entities... they found that the human mind just wasn’t yet capable of experiencing reality this way. So that was the best translation she could understand.

But there was a peaceful solution. It just involved rotating the time axes a little then separating and isolating the timelines. They would then be able to live peaceful but separate existences. What was involved was energy. An amount of it so extreme that it was threatening to strain the economy of our timeline. You know, kind of like that scene from Back to the Future where Marty tells Doc: it’s okay, all we need is a little plutonium. It would be much easier if we could negotiate with them and get them to share some of the energy costs.

The long-term problem was that they just assumed that we had their morals and that we would just shut their entire universe down as part of the cleanup; that they would simply cease to exist. We of course had no intention of doing that. We are civilized, damn it!

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 9. 7 chapters, ending with chapter 50

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 9. 7 chapters, ending with chapter 50

↩️return to previous section, section 8

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Castadiva

The guy at the table sitting across from me may have had something like Parkinson’s disease, from the way he moved uncontrollably. He was unusual. Most people here were either drug addicts or mentally ill. But there was a lot of overlap. I would guess two-thirds drug addicts and the remaining third mentally ill. With a degree of overlap, as I said, some of them being both. But `Diva, you ask, what about all the ones who are just down on their luck? People who went through some kind of crisis financially perhaps. Maybe they are in other cities or at other homeless shelters.

But here at this one that’s just how it is. It wasn’t how I pictured it. Back in ‘08 when w left office and the economy of the whole damn world was in the toilet, they said there were a lot of people like that here. Supposedly the depression, recession or whatever had ended. Not for me. I don’t have a substance-abuse problem – haven’t even done booze or weed recreationally. Not for the last 15 years. So I suppose I’m in the mentally ill category.

Parkinson’s guy here may actually be in a class all by himself. I don’t know if he uses anything. And don’t know if he has a mental illness on top of the neuromuscular thing… He’s not very talkative. But I did pick things up off the floor for him that he occasionally dropped, and helped him open his juice containers. The LGBTQIDAP+* community out there in the courtyard were far more talkative; and receptive to my designs. They had friends in the non-homeless community who did drag. If I could get my designs on some actual performing drag queens it might be incredibly good publicity.

First, I had to get my sewing machine out of Melissa‘s apartment. First? OK maybe a few other things like getting off the street and out of the homeless shelter. Everywhere I turn there’s a dead end. I went outside to get Wi-Fi from my disconnected iPhone 3GS so I could try and track down Gary. He didn’t seem to be active on any social media for the last two months and in his last post he had a bunch of links to things called “creepy pastas.” Or maybe it was one word – I didn’t have time to waste going back to review the text of the links. Knowing him it was either something disgusting or silly. Like maybe a bunch of YouTube dares involving food that you drink from a blender. I read on for clarification.

Okay, Ted The Caver disproved that theory. Some of it was kind of scary but somewhat silly. Then it was as if a zoom lens was fixed on me. Blinking a couple of times in the cold night air to be sure and focus properly and make sure I read the words right; it did say “Stalko-Taco.” I wondered if Manson felt this way when he first heard secret messages in the Beatles? It might be best to hold off on telling my psychiatrist about this for now. But whom to call? Lucy and Keith both worried about security – like if someone talked and it led back to us – the legal ramifications. If the cops died in the story or just got beamed to another city, there could be trouble. I had to read the thing all the way through. Just then the Wi-Fi quit. They were calling for lights out, all of my friends and I had our mats and blankets for the night, and I was low on charge. Tomorrow.

Brenda

Thirty rounds was the most that each of my combat drones could carry. Fortunately Madhvi was well funded. The Ranganathan family had done well in America so far. So there were eight more standing by, each to take the place of the previous one when it ran out of ammo or got shot down. Two-hundred-seventy rounds total, if nothing jammed, to fire at the enemy drone – or drones.

For the past few months every time some stoners had tried to do some antics at the park to “conjure” Stalko-Taco, one or more flying drones had appeared overhead, presumably to take their photos? But afterwards the people ended up with their memories erased. Nothing bad; just waking up in their own beds but with no idea how they got there.

I hadn’t considered a drone possibility before meeting Bobby. In some ways that was more comforting than the flashy-things carried by agents. And definitely not like that Marky Mark movie; I rewatched some clips of it and saw that it was supposed to be a chemical signal transmitted by plants. The government drones could still be broadcasting some kind of signal that conceptually does the same thing; making people do things they otherwise wouldn’t want to. Either way my initial reaction was “comforted” because at least it would mean they weren’t physically breaking into everyone’s houses like I had imagined them doing to Wheeler and his mom. Still a major invasion of privacy and violation of civil rights, obviously.

For the past few weeks before arriving in Oakland, I’d been practicing shooting down drones on a video game that Keith and Bobby’s mutual friend Gonk designed. Only now, the monitor showed actual video input from the homemade gunner drone, and the controls would fly my drone for real. The “gun” was a stripped down semi-automatic rifle with a 30 round clip. Normally reasonably accurate to about 1000 feet I think, they would only need to work at about 40 feet. So the barrels had been sawed off of all the rifles.

With no stocks and shortened barrels, the overall length was perhaps a tad bigger than two of my dad‘s size 13 work boots lined up end to end. Each gun mounted easier on the drone that way. And although the range was short, recoil from the rifles would be almost nonexistent for this small caliber, they said. Range would be less of an issue because they were counting on my skill as a pilot.

The other modification was an old “BMF activator” screwed onto each trigger guard. A high torque electric motor had been installed in place of the handcrank to turn each activator. The rule of thumb was: every complete turn of the crank equals four pulls of the trigger.

So I had nine drones with homemade submachine guns under my control. Minas Morgul was the back of a van with a handicapped placard. I had my computer set up back there and it was just like playing the game from home.

Ronald was one of our guys. Part of the original 75 “Un-Erasables” who somehow was able to remember Stalko-Taco. His wheelchair was safely locked down in the back with me and he was waiting in his drivers seat still, in case he had to drive us away quickly. As the kid from Sixteen Candles once said “I’m breaking like thirty major laws here.”

The decoy coven was all wearing some old surplus silent partner brand T-shirt style body armor under their clothes, with the maximum number of Kevlar panels inserted. Why Castadiva’s Uncle Raul had a crate of these things sitting in his storage facility, along with the activators, was still unclear, but I was getting used to dealing with shady characters since I started finding and contacting The Un-Erasables.

They were only “small caliber,” with sawed-off barrels, from over 100 feet away (from the point of view of any spectators on the ground) Bobby had pointed out. “But what if one of those bullets goes astray?” I protested. “I’ll shoot their eye out kid!” So they also had on Kevlar helmets with a face visors, like riot police. (Thanks again, Uncle Raul.) Their bulky robes with enormous hoods covered this mostly. They were made personally by Castadiva Talamantez and integrated to fit with their body armor. But it still seemed to make their silhouettes look like some kind of aliens. It was good for them that this whole shindig wasn’t playing out in Houston or San Antonio right now or they’d be passing out with heat exhaustion.

If it worked the way Gwyndeloc Coven thought it would, then Gwyndeloc Coven would be unnecessary. (Sorry Amber; Gwyndeloc Crannog.) It was their opinion that The Taco would come to life for Keith. Simply his presence there would be enough to vivify the thing. If this harebrained scheme had even a snowball’s chance in hell of working – in other words if it’s true – then I would love to be there to see a boulder morph into Stalko-Taco. But somehow I got wrangled into piloting the gunner drones. Somehow? It’s because I kicked ass and every combat and shooter game I ever played, and aerial combat games too. Bobby felt like I was the natural choice.

It was kind of prosaic having the actual experience; the simulations were much more challenging because the drones there were armed also, and shot back. These real ones did at least perform some effective evasive maneuvers that were sort of challenging me. Not too much though. The three of them each went down in a cloud of plastic fragments blown to bits in the sky before they fell; only one of the three guns I had originally dispatched had jammed. So a fourth had to be launched.

The decoy coven ran out and Gwyndeloc Coven filed in quickly and started forming a circle around the boulder. Success! I happened to get out of Ronald’s van in time and offered to help him into his chair and use the lift. I’ve been around people in wheelchairs for most of my life and I know how to physically handle the equipment. Ronald was aware of this, though he politely said that’s okay, and got out of the van just as fast as I could. And so we happened upon the scene, not only in time to see it morph, but in time to catch its little dance number: a rendition of part of… Riverdance?? After the initial shock wore off, I burst out laughing uncontrollably.

Were it not for all the hype leading up to this, with full grown adults like Keith, Amber, Lucy, Castadiva, and Jared all backing up the same stories, I might’ve thought I really was losing my mind and distrusted all the younger people who insisted they could see it too. I wanted to stop laughing now… I knew I might draw attention to our group, but I couldn’t stop. It ended up being irrelevant anyway since the entire world went white then came back into focus to reveal an island, which was also possibly a park or nature preserve... in the Puget Sound region maybe? I think. I later confirmed it was Washington State definitely.

It kind of reminded me of that place from The Ring, complete with old lighthouse. The shock of this stopped me from laughing. I realized that I had just been “beamed.”

Padmanabhan

Without experience in spelunking the sinkhole would’ve been awe-inspiring scary, I suppose. Compared to some of the caves we explored in high school this so-called “hell-hole” was a bit of a yawn. An easy rappel down, then the first ledge. Just enough to stand on. Three more ledges down, we found one with a big enough chasm carved out of the wall, and a reasonably flat enough “floor,” that we could have pitched our tent there and slept for the night. All the rocks would’ve made it uncomfortable as hell. I did say reasonably flat. But that’s what the little tanks of space-filling expansion foam were for.

The scariest thing about this hole was all the crap that had been dumped in it over the past 92 years. Well for the first 71 of those anyway; for the most recent 21 years, it wasn’t just illegal, it was impossible. The satellite in isosynchronous orbit above Kentucky would not only take your pictures but follow you, arrange to have other satellites follow you, alert the human authorities… basically track you to the ends of the earth. Literally. They had suddenly become dead serious about enforcing the local no dumping ordinance.

Perhaps not coincidentally, hawklike observations started exactly when The UFO activity had occurred in 2119. So was this the aliens’ underground headquarters? If so, you’d think they would’ve bothered to clean the place up in the last couple of decades. No aliens yet, or any bizarre machinery or things with alien-looking writing.

Eric and the Weird Shapes

Another predator thing in the corner of Eric’s vision distracted him just a bit. But they weren’t rappelling at the moment and had just stopped for a water break. He didn’t interrupt `Rajan about it yet because he seemed busy with his gps-jamming thingy.

Eric assumed that it was something similar to the other night because he had been logged on to Avantgardium too long during the trip. Not that the scenery wasn’t beautiful, but he needed to get caught up on liking, commenting, and sharing other fashion designers’ posts to stay current with them and not be a ghost follower.

Oh well, he thought, the weird-shaped thing was gone. And his husband was still busy with his gadget. Mentioning it could wait until later.

One of the shapes shimmered out to report that it had successfully started the countdown timer on the electromagnetic clamp. It would go off and drop the load as planned… but how this would permanently stop Polo’s friend timecop girl was beyond the creature’s understanding. It would merely need to have some trust in the scheme devised by its superiors.

Back to Padmanabhan and Eric

No, there was nothing with otherworldly hieroglyphics that grabbed Padmanabhan’s attention or his husband’s. Only a canister marked Cl₂C equals O caught Eric‘s eye. Since they were English letters, he thought nothing of it. He neither retreated from it nor approached it. Nor was he concerned when the small avalanche of soil and gravel swept it off the little cliff they had stopped on and sent it bouncing merrily down hell-hole.

Padmanabhan only looked in the direction of the gravel-y noise to make sure Eric was alright. It was about a minute later he and `Rajan both noticed the smell at the same time. Eric commented first: “How odd down here, to smell freshly mowed grass…”

“Up!” Padmanabhan shouted. “This isn’t a drill Rolla! Fast as you can” he said while rigging his motor for him, “and use all emergency batteries for your hoist motor. Damn the charge, we have to get out now if there’s any chance it could be what I think it is.” Eric promptly complied with his more experienced husband’s urgent instructions. But since there was nothing much to do as the motors – each the size of half a landscaping timber, strung in parallel with the ropes – elevated them faster than it was humanly possible to climb, Eric asked “could this have anything to do with the Cleco, or click oh?”

“What the fuck is clico, dear?” Rajan reasoned he might as well ask, just to keep Eric calm.

“Well, it was really CL and a number. I can’t remember which. Then C equals O... or zero,” he strained to remember the canister.

“That’s what I was afraid of! Now I know it is what I think it is. Hold your your breath as much as you can. Pretend you’re swimming and and only conning up for hair as a few, um, air ever sever, several.. stokes.. view of an air...” `Rajan felt himself losing consciousness. The last thing he remembered his husband’s voice saying was “don’t worry, I can’t even smell it anymore.”

That’s the worst. If you smell it and can get into fresh air, you may likely live. When you’ve smelled it so long that your nose becomes dead to it and you can’t smell it anymore… It’s too late, they say, you’re already dead. Who in the hell were “they” and how the fuck would they know? Oh well, they must be right because here’s the first of the angels coming to greet us. She looks like Lakshmi, my Ishta Devata, from back when I still used to practice and do bajans and stuff with my family. So I guess it figures it would be her… I wonder who Eric got? Could Eric have made it?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Graham’s Law of Effusion calculation he was trying to do in his head – probably the last calculation he would ever do – told him no, probably not.

Prajina and Alex

“They brought back simpatico, and mamba?!”

Alex was like a kid in a candy store staring at the beer selections at Lester’s Veggie Burgers in San Antonio in 2048. “It pissed me off that both of those became obsolete. I was happy enough with Bohemia and Indio, I guess; you can always get those in Austin. But I’m definitely starting to like this time a bit more.”

“You did a good thing, by going to bat for those fifty-two people and the unborn souls of their descendants.” Prajina couldn’t help finally vocalizing her opinion. “The ‘aliens’ are impressed with us. With you and your selflessness. Many species, when presented with the option of time travel, are want to set themselves up as kings, emperors… gods even. Your gut reaction was to try and use it to help. Diplomatically, you may have just advanced us by centuries with them; ℏ♄’s recommendation will go along way…”

Alex looked startled, Praji paused to ask what’s up. “That sound you made! It didn’t sound human! Do you speak alien languages too?! Did they modify your vocal cords?” He quit babbling upon realizing that he was.

No, she explained, humans could make those sounds. It was just called Mongolian throat singing, like in Gibson’s Virtual Light, etc.

“The name is actually a nickname; her real name in her native language is

unpronounceable with human vocal cords. The nickname means, roughly: little obsessive compulsive control freak. But in a sweet way. You see, back at the Academy she supposedly organized a gr-”

Now Prajina looked startled, and worried. “Don’t get too attached to this time, Alex. Finish your second beer or malt liquor or whatever that is.”

“I’m almost done with the Mamba, and the Simpatico was just like I remembered from 1992, but what’s wrong Praji? You look like you’ve just seen Jai Kali Maa again.”

His pronunciation was wrong. Correcting Alex would take time; later perhaps. “I just got the equivalent of two simultaneous video calls in my mind from an alien supercomputer / A.I. named Ambraluxia and from an alien who looks like a purple dinosaur from the chest up.” She was wiping her fingers on a bar napkin and now rummaging through her purse for something.

“Well?” Alex had been waiting patiently while she was preoccupied with the settings on her neuralizer.

“Oh,” she said “four drones owned by my great-great-grandmother and piloted by some gamer-girl just shot down three of my surveillance drones over San Francisco in 2018. Also there was a back door in Stalko-Taco’s programming which I didn’t know about, that allowed it to restart without me and it beamed itself out about 100 people to an island near Puget Sound.

And… ”

She took in a deep breath to compose herself: “Padmanabhan and his husband were just killed by phosgene nerve-gas poisoning at hell-hole in 2140.”

Ambraluxia

“It’s true,” she told the young ᡜၕᚖ, “I did take my name from the character in the story about ancient Earth,” she fibbed a bit to the kid, like Earth people used to do with Santa Claus; too much info about her real identity would not profit him. No, she hadn’t exactly taken her name from the story – more like the story had borrowed some things from her. The baby didn’t fully grasp sometimes just how many tens of thousands of years old she was. “You’re a very bright young man, ᡜℏញ. You’re the only one who has ever made the connection.” And regarding that, she was not lying to the kid.

“Will you tell me the story now of how you averted a war with the darkworlders, Tia Bubu?” he asked, all of his eyes open wide and innocent.

“More stories from 100,000 Earth-years ago? I think not. I didn’t do it single-handedly, darling” she modestly replied. “I did my part, but it was a big team effort. And not this year. Finish your partial differential equations and complex variables homework, then brush your ᢈ ၖꏃ and get some sleep. Your mommy wants you to hibernate for about a year, and that story takes roughly five years to tell if I do it right.” Later, she used her android body to kiss the lad good night on his central forehead ridge. He giggled adorably and said it tickled. Of course, like humans with their tooth fairy also, there were some things in a similar vein; things that you told kids that weren’t exactly true.

It turned out she had single-handedly averted a war with the darkworlders, and with another species that was even more dangerous from yet another dimension that the amphictiony hadn’t even considered yet. Through an impossible labyrinth of holding companies, attorneys, and interlocking directorates, she solely controlled the corporation that manufactured the “spheroid.”

It was no accident that she had been on the crew of that ship. It was of course she who saw to it that the piece of camping equipment got “lost” in the first place, thus setting all of this into motion. The creation of the darkworlder’s timeline was necessary in order to avoid contact with another dimension even more hideous. By rotating their time axis parallel to our own we had also rotated the time axis of this hitherto unknown dimension in a way that permanently blocked contact between our universes and avoided interdimensional war.

Although the cost in terms of lives was steep – her own life had been among them – hundreds of trillions of lives were saved. Yes, she would admit her ethics were distinctly utilitarian and fervently debate with you until the ࠄᚗᚣᜅ came home. All of those who discorporated, she pointed out, could easily return in cybernetic form as she had, if they wished.

Easily for all except one, whose case was still puzzling even the wisest thinkers in our universe. Thinkers hadn’t rescued that one. It had required true acts of heroism from her old friend ℏ♄ and – using some Earth slang, for lack of a better term – some “bad-ass bikers” from The Cartwheel Galaxy. While her ethics had come under scrutiny at first, her participation in that specific rescue mission was what had redeemed her in the minds of many of her critics.

Someday... she thought, maybe in another 25,000 Earth years, I might write a tell-all book. After the baby is grown enough to go off to school and live away from home for awhile and I move on from this job.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

With the baby asleep finally, she unwound for the evening with some music. The set started with Eruption followed immediately by You Really Got Me. Ambraluxia believed those two Van Halen songs should always be played together, just like on the original vinyl. She admitted she was old fashioned that way.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 10. 4 chapters, ending with chapter 54

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 10. 4 chapters, ending with chapter 54

↩️return to previous section, section 9

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Brenda

All right, full disclosure, I am not really Brenda. This first part of her story is being relayed to whoever may find this, in the future or past or on some other timeline or in some other parallel universe, by a friend of hers: me.

My name is Renaldo. And Brenda gave me something for safekeeping. This is going to sound super weird. But she gave me something to hold onto for her in case her memory was ever erased.

And by that, I mean the memory in her head; Her brain; her mind. Whatever you want to call it – I’m not talking about one of her devices having it’s memory wiped like a phone or notebook or tablet.

And as weird as it sounds, it actually has happened now. Someone erased her memory as she feared they might.

To be honest I was just kind of psyched that she wanted to talk about all this at first. It was fun. Kind of like a theoretical conversation about different types of science fiction. But I’ve come to realize now that this is all too real. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s scary.

Is Brenda going to be normal again? Healthy? She seems to be doing okay. She just has absolutely no idea that a particular fictional character on the Internet ever existed. And someone can live the rest of their life happily ever after without knowing about some obscure open-source cartoon, right? But then would she want to know that her memory had been erased and try to find out who did it and why?

I didn’t know that that character existed either; not until recently. But that’s simply because I should “get out more” as both my brothers frequently remind me. I tend to not know about fun stuff or trendy things. I found out that it existed because she told me. Now, I am finding myself in the peculiar position of having to tell her something that she not only used to know, but knew well enough that she was able to teach me and other people about it.

All right, enough drama. Time for specifics. As fortune would have it, Brenda decided to confide in me after all about what she called the Marky Mark signal. I went back and found the movie and streamed it on two different nights; I had a research paper due so I couldn’t see it all in one evening. But I watched it as quickly as I could so that I would understand what she was talking about.

And yes, it would make more sense to do it that way: A signal that goes out worldwide and makes people stop what they’re doing and go into some sort of hypnotic state where they immediately grab whatever materials they have on this fictional character that they are not supposed to know about, and destroy the things.

That could include erasing files from local drives and clouds. But also physical hardcopies; printouts of related articles. Handwritten notes. Art that someone drew on their Wacom Intuos. (Hers is wiped clean of it, by the way.)

That actually makes a lot more sense than a neuralyzer / flashy-thing or or the like. As I told Brenda, let’s just crunch the numbers.

While that may work for just a few people, we’re talking about a number in the hundreds of thousands or millions, if the figure I read on the creepy pasta website stats is correct. How many people can one agent flashy thing in a day?

Assuming they have to go driving around visiting each person, would 10 a day be reasonable? That assumes an 8 hour work day, which would be 48 minutes per person. Assuming mostly urban environments, most of that 48 is spent driving, parking, and walking to and from the car... plus a little time for knocking and getting into a private place where no one else could see them use their gadget.

If so, then that agent could erase 300 people’s memories per month. How many months do they have to do this? Let’s say that the agency, government bureau, or whatever they call themselves, doesn’t mind moving at a leisurely pace. So let’s say they allocate 10 months for this project. Working with no vacation for 10 months straight, our agent can erase 3000 people‘s memories.

The website indicated something like 8 million viewers when I checked. Let’s suppose not all of them were fans of Stalko-Taco. You have only perhaps 3 million of them who were either fans or read the story then decided they didn’t like it but remembered it anyway…

How many agents would you need? If we’re sticking with that 10 month figure, then that’s 1000 agents. To personally visit and flashy-thing 3 million people for the purpose of erasing their memories. In ten months. If you wanted to hurry the process up and get done in only a month, you would need 10,000 agents.

Never mind which one it is. If it’s 1000 agents or 10,000 agents, that’s still a lot of government employees out there running around fully aware that there is a memory-erasing technology and that the government has some kind of organized campaign to go out and track down specific citizens and erase their memories. No way in hell does someone not talk when the numbers involved are that large. With anything more than 10 people it would be hard to manage. (And I am fully aware that during this rudimentary calculation I have completely neglected the complications presented by dealing with international fans of the story, i.e. outside the U.S.)

So what else could you do? Have some kind of super elite spy agency within the agency? Maybe 10 hard-core guys who systematically erase the memories of the memory-erasing agents once they’ve done their jobs?

I suppose it’s possible, but it’s just cumbersome. However this is happening, whether by “flashy thing” or “Marky Mark signal,” it almost certainly is occurring using alien technology. I made it clear to Brenda how I preferred to interpret the Drake equation.

So if it’s alien technology either way, and I am the aliens, I would go with a solution that’s less logistically cumbersome. So, Marky Mark it is.

As a safeguard against us being hit by another Marky Mark pulse which would be more thorough than the last one and would wipe Brenda’s memories as well – something the first one had failed to do – Brenda tried to do an end-run around the process.

Another old phone from her sister. Still another old phone that her dad didn’t need anymore. Both with the Sim cards removed in the course of their deactivation. She placed the videos on each of these phones. In the photos, yes, the obvious place. But also, as these phones allow you to do, the videos were embedded into some notes files. It doesn’t let you lock a notes file that contains a video. One that has pictures in it, yes. But not one that contains a video. But she gave it a shot anyway.

It was just another way to possibly foil their plans if they found the phone and just scanned for audio and video. Then yeah, they would erase that. If they looked at notes files – in other words, text files – the paragraphs would contain nothing but articles about fashion, complete with pictures of different outfits. But if you scroll down far enough, in between what’s in and what’s out for this autumn, there would happen to be an occasional video file imbedded.

She gave me one phone and let it slip out that she gave Wheeler the other.

There is more than one way she could show up asking for it back. One possibility would’ve been that Brenda, the normal version of her, comes to me/us and simply asks for the phone back because there’s some reason why she needs it/them.

The other possibility is that she asks for it back... but the person doing the asking isn’t quite the normal Brenda. To ascertain just how “normal” she is, she gave us a series of questions that we are supposed to ask her; somewhat more advanced than a simple password. A series of questions which when answered correctly would reveal that her memory was still intact and had not been tampered with.

I saw a potential problem with this. But telling her what this problem was would not only fail to solve it – it would in fact create a situation wherein she would fail altogether. That is, a situation wherein the whole procedure of making backup videos would automatically become useless. I couldn’t tell her about this. The only way to help her achieve what I know she’s going for is to change her plans without telling her.

I searched for the name in my head. I had to remember. Only one university here, I was fairly certain, had an actual law school. Scanning through their website’s list of faculty would probably trigger my memory. I’d know it when I saw it. Phone all the way dead; I could just wait about 70 seconds and then use it at 1% while plugged into the kitchen outlet. Asking my mom would have been a guaranteed way to find out his name, but she’d be infinitely curious why I wanted to know, and she’d never let up. Then as the white apple popped up, I saw one of my dad’s old coffee cups, from Flagstaff. Lowell Observatory – that was it. Professor Lowell.

Eileen

I trusted a time-traveler who doesn’t wear a watch. If that one mistake could have been avoided I might not be facing life in prison. I wasn’t handcuffed to a hospital bed; they hadn’t made an arrest yet. But it was just a matter of time and I was under guard, I could tell – more than just hospital security. I couldn’t leave. If I tell the whole truth? Then they might arrange for some of the time to be in a nuthouse instead, because they’ll never believe the truth. This isn’t how the future was supposed to be. Because I’ve already time traveled to the future and this wasn’t it.

What happened to My Future – the one I Saw? That little so-called Chronopolitan? That punk troubadour who prefers to live in medieval times? Yeah. And even though he’s from the future and could easily wear a watch, he chooses not to because he’s in love with that era. I want my EMPIRE dammit!

Narcissistic personality disorder! Bull Fucking Shit. I sometimes go days at a time without wearing makeup or looking in mirrors. It’s them! They’re the narcissists. The two doc-tards and the last five nurse-tards. All of them and their mutual admiration society. And all that eurotrash from Stuttgart and Trieste! They probably caused this. That’s it! I’ve made up my mind.

I’m tearing this shit up and flushing the tiny pieces down the toilet, as long as they’re letting me in here unsupervised back in 2006. I can’t have these notes ever be found. Because I’ve decided that it might be easier to escape from a looney bin someday than from prison, I’m going to do something that violates my personal philosophy of success: I’m going to tell the truth. That alone oughta get me locked up on the funny farm. That plus I have knowledge of psychology they don’t know I’ve got; enough to fake several mental illnesses in case the truth doesn’t make me sound crazy enough.

Plus my shysters being paid indirectly through offshore accounts will push for it and bring in expert witnesses to demolish my mental competency standing. More of what’s supposed to be my empire, crumbling because the vultures know there’s untraceable money there.

The Pyxis! I could clearly hear its sounds coming from down the hall now. My nurse-tard is habitually late and has to wait in line for it. She’s too much of a pushover. Let’s others walk all over her. Yes, perfect, just what I need. So I’ve got a half hour at least to tear up these tiny strips and flush them. My last chance because I’m pretty sure unsupervised use of toilets is going to be a rarity for me soon. As well as unsupervised electrical outlets. And towels. And salt packets. And straws.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

C’mon Eileen, I encouraged myself, it’s just like BDSM with Jared. And... ZAP!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Eileen?” The nurse politely asked, even bothering to knock on her already propped-open door, she could hear because she was still semi-conscious but convulsing.

Shouted calls. Urgent instructions. Through it all she heard cries of “get the power shut off!”

Unknown and unseen voices chattered back and forth. “Where did she get wires?”

“It’s brine.”

“What?”

“A slushy paste of salt and water. Inside two lines each of about twenty plastic straws stuck together.”

You would think these losers had seen it all by now. They seemed truly surprised. Another one, on the phone with a doc-tard who was apparently in charge but too important to actually be present in the ward, sounded genuinely panicky: “Holy shit! She made two long tubes by working the straws together end-to-end, filled ‘em with salt water slush and plugged them into the outlet like wires. The wet towel wrapped around her neck may be soaked in salt water too. Yes sir, the current’s been switched off and she’s still breathing.”

It’s a good thing we aren’t further in the future, she thought. Bernart just happened to mention one day at a burger joint in Loma Linda that plastic straws would be outlawed on the entire west coast by the 20s, if not sooner. She’d silently cursed to herself:

“What other kinds of idiocy await in this wrong-future that I got railroaded into?”

The flashlight irritating her eyes was her cue to try and speak. With some difficulty since her “electrocution” stunt had almost worked. Fortunately she was able to attempt several tries since this moron kept flicking the thing back and forth about a dozen times. She fought the overwhelming temptation to shout: Dude! If my fucking pupils haven’t done whatever it is you think they’re supposed to by now, they aren’t gunna! You’re annoying as shit.

Finally her mouth worked well enough.

“Time travelers.”

Moron b repeated it to flashlight moron:

“Did she say time travelers?”

Time to get busy acting Eileen, she thought happily, shifting into high gear but still speaking in a groggy voice: “They already copied me and sent my new body and mind to the future. I don’t need this body anymore. It’s okay, we can go ahead and kill it.”

Brenda, by way of Renaldo again

I ran this whole scenario by my mom’s old friend, Professor Lowell. He was not just a lawyer but a professor of law at a nearby university. I had a voice conversation with him, in person. Totally non-electronic. I couldn’t rig the room and make it a SCIF or suchlike, or even pipe loud music against his office windows.

But one thing that worked in my favor was construction; whatever they were doing in the parking lot outside his building involved at least one jack-hammer going for the majority of the time, against a blanket of constant background noise created by heavy machinery – backhoe loader type vehicles. And at any given moment it seemed like at least one of their backup warning beepers was going; definitely more than half the time from the sound of it.

He apologized for all the racket out there. I told him it was okay. But didn’t elaborate as to why I thought it was okay. It would have made me sound disturbingly paranoid. And on that note, I was taking a calculated risk by assuming that his office wasn’t bugged beforehand. Statistically it was unlikely. Given that the “Taco Erasers,” whoever they were, were primarily targeting people who liked Creepypastas and they in turn seemed to be of an average age of around 18... it was unlikely that Professor Lowell here would even be on their radar.

Might he be involved in some other matter that could have caused someone to bug his office and thus allow my group of hypothetical spooks to patch into the preexisting circuitry and listen? Sure. But also unlikely. Although he was still officially licensed by the state bar association to practice as an attorney – if that’s the right phraseology – he was semi-retired now and primarily focused on teaching and coauthoring some publications with his peers.

Moreover I wasn’t running the scenario by him to ask if it would be legal, but to see if he agreed that it would be logical. And I admit that I also wanted his take on whether it would be ethical.

I mean, I’m basically lying to Brenda. But I’m doing it for her own good. Is that truly possible? Or am I just kidding myself? This guy had taught a course called The Philosophy of Logic, as a visiting assistant professor at another university in town, through their philosophy department. He’d also taught ethics both in his law school capacity and through that other university’s philosophy program.

He vaguely understood that I was writing some kind of literary work in the science fiction genre; a necessary cover story since it wouldn’t likely be possible that I hung out in circles where memory-erasure and mind-control were readily practiced.

To begin with, he assured me that my logic was sound. The two possibilities that I mentioned, one being the normal Brenda, and the other one being the Brenda whose memory had been tampered with, would give identical answers to anything requiring passwords or challenge questions. It would not be possible to tell them apart.

If this hypothetical technology could force people to do things they didn’t want to do, then that would also apply to keys to a desk drawer, passwords for computers or other devices, and answers to challenge questions that I or Wheeler might pose... it would even extend “to pulverizing a block of concrete with a jackhammer,” he said looking out his window somewhat perturbed, if the subject had chosen to encase the evidence in a concrete foundation.

If “they” truly had the ability to make you do anything they wanted for the purpose of destroying whatever evidence you had, then your involuntary cooperation would also extend to revealing all hiding places, passwords, locations of keys, etc. So your character’s actions and answers would be indistinguishable whether she was a victim of their mind manipulation or just genuinely realized that she needed her phone back for some other purpose.

Since she would voluntarily provide them with all the information necessary to look like she was normal Brenda, and not mind-manipulated Brenda, when she came to their door asking for the phone back they could expect her to have all the correct answers.

After that, the professor was good enough to give me quite a bit more of his time to discuss ethics. Personally, I think he’s always been hot for my mom, who is just now coming out of her six-year long social withdrawal since being widowed, and maybe he thinks getting on her kids’ good sides might be helpful.

Later I reassured myself in my nightly journal, that what I was doing was ethical and moral. It was flimsy reasoning, I knew, and what I did was tantamount to seeking absolution from someone I was already sure would give it to me. Ultimately, it will not be time but Brenda herself who will tell; tell me if I did the right thing. So let’s get back to my “confession,” I suppose.

That thing Brenda feared would happen? It would work roughly in this way:

The pulse or signal (which we are no longer calling the Marky Mark signal because we have determined that it is not biochemically based in, and distributed by, plants... but in fact is likely of an electromagnetic nature) goes out into the universe to alter the minds of anyone who the Powers-That-Be determine has a knowledge of Stalko-Taco.

It tells these people: “go track down everything you have on Stalko-Taco. When you find it, destroy it. Then forget everything you know about Stalko-Taco.”

That would also apply to a personal vlog that they created which explains in detail exactly what Stalko-Taco is. Whether it’s on a device on their desk in their rooms, out in a storage bin in their garages, or in a desk drawer at their offices or wherever they work, it won’t matter.

They will go to whatever location necessary in order to get it. That also includes going to see a friend named Renaldo at his house – which for Brenda is quite a bit shorter a distance than most people’s average morning commute. But she’ll also drive the longer distance of almost 70 miles to get to Wheeler’s place in Austin.

If there really is a signal that can make people do this – destroy all evidence – then she’ll also cough up passwords, find keys, act normal or however she’s supposed to in order to get the things back from people...

The professor’s words still echoed through my head: even rent a jackhammer to extract “it” from a slab of cement if you had decided to hide it there.

The only way my character’s plan might work then, he conjectured, would be if she gave “Wheeler” the phone in a one-way transaction – admonishing him to “Never give it back to me for any reason, no matter how much I plead for it.” Instead, if she ends up dead under suspicious circumstances, or in a persistent vegetative state, or just generally acting goofy like her mind has been erased? He is to go Woodward-and-Bernstein and expose the video files to the world! Publicize it to the maximum extent possible.

I gave Professor Lowell the name Wheeler for the “other character” in all these cases, since I couldn’t very well use my own name. It was supposed to be fiction.

So when Brenda called me one afternoon just a few days later and said that she needed to come over for something soon, I already knew what it was going to be about even without her elaborating on the phone. I was fully prepared insofar as the hardware I would need; still not totally prepared in terms of my mindset. The guilt easily managed to taunt me through the holes in the pseudo-absolution process I had tried so hard to build for myself.

Why? Why all this guilt? Well, because I like Brenda, I suppose. And I’m just flat-out lying to her, stealing property from her, and burglarizing the house of a friend of hers... and ostensibly doing it all “for her own good.” How many times in human history has anyone who’s ever done something that they knew was wrong, but “for the right reason...” actually been right?

And when I say I like her, I don’t mean that I like her in that way. Brenda knows I’m gay. I’m fully out. As a popular girl who was walking between a clothing store and a makeup boutique with a group of her popular friends in her new town, she used her social currency to stop some guys from bullying me when I was waiting for my mom at a mall after summer school on my 14th birthday... before high school even started and before I had any idea at all... about what I was.

Now I have my network of people whom I feel safe enough around to wear my “Love is Love” t-shirt, which I also wore for the trip up to Austin to meet Wheeler for the second time. The first time I had on a different pride shirt. All I had needed to do was mention to the guy that Bren might be having some kind of trouble and I had his undivided attention.

Also, I hadn’t wanted to just blurt out the question and ask him: “are you gay?” But Babadook cosplay? Really? For some things you can simply read between the lines.

That, and what 18 year-old cis het-boy from Texas can even name ten prominent artists other than Andy Warhol, let alone give you detailed descriptions of them and their work? Or how many who even knew who Warhol was in the first place? It helped that Wheeler was cute too. I ran one of his Instagram photos through a “celebrity twin” or look-alike app to see who he reminded me of and it gave me some actor from an old Disney show that ended seven years ago. No, it wasn’t anyone I recognized. Well never mind that; We hit it off.

Weird Shapes

The artwork on their wall was different in a hip tech way, he thought. Not exactly a hologram but a diffraction grating sheet over some images perhaps? From their concealed positions and in their two-dimensional forms they heard him compliment Wheeler on it, since he knew by his reputation through Brenda that the dude was an artist.

The Princess of Pentacles, as that particular mass of quarks and leptons had come to be referenced by the ᢈᯒၔ᎘, had selected an excellent hiding place for them this time: a piece of Nancy’s avant-garde trash, as Princess Pentaculum called it.

“Oh, thanks man, but that’s actually one of my mom’s pieces. And yeah, it is some kind of diffraction grating that you’re viewing it through. She keeps changing the underlying images behind it and I’ve lost track, cause I’ve just been way busy lately.”

The shapes were “thrilled,” or whatever the close analog for it in their universe was: they immediately instructed the others to produce many extra batches of quarks and leptons for the Princess – in the form she liked: seventy-nine of the two-ups-and-a-down trios of quarks; enough of the two-down-and-one-up kind of trios to make it stable. Let some of the appropriate leptons tag along. The rules of charge in this strange universe will see to it that the right number automatically distribute themselves. A face centered cubic lattice for these blobs of matter. Let’s say, a thousand units. But no more than about 10²³ of the blobs per unit. Correction, the ᢈᯒၔ᎘ communicated to its assistant, multiply that by 0.950 and that should make them one “troy ounce” each.

Anything bigger than that made it difficult for her to move them on the “pawn shop” circuit... whatever that was supposed to mean. They didn’t really care to know all the nuances of her universe. The Princess was giving them the best results they’d ever seen in this dimension. They were happy with what they were seeing as the two human boys successfully defeated Agent Ranganathan’s best laid plans, backed up by the full strength of the Laniakea Supercluster Amphictiony. So, yes, they definitely wanted to keep The Princess of Pentacles happy.

The one called Renaldo looked on curiously at Nancy’s art. He didn’t have time for a detailed study. It was almost as if she’d placed a video image behind the grating sheet. As expected, it did that hologram-ish thing where you saw a different image as you walked back and forth, looking at slightly different angles. But it was almost too many images for just a hologram. A giant flat screen monitor behind the diffraction grating film might explain it.

Thoughts rang out loudly in his head, which the ᢈᯒၔ᎘ could read but not comprehend. The dude told himself to focus; never mind this art. He needed to learn the layout of the house and identify security measures, since his next visit here might very well be as a burglar.

A few hours later in her extended stay motel room, Eileen got off the bed in a hurry when a bi-location opened up about a meter above the middle of her mattress. It was just like the one the paranormal investigators were studying in Poltergeist. She knew it would be something good, but had to get clear of it to avoid bruising – these things were still utterly clueless about how physics worked in our universe.

Her bare feet were freezing on the simulated hardwood floor, but she looked on gleefully as the torrent poured in from another dimension. Before counting them, she made sure to arrange the tarot cards in a way that thanked them. She no longer had to introduce herself every time with the Princess of Pentacles card; they knew her well enough now. They got the size perfect: 31.103 grams each on her portable balance. And after grouping them into rows and columns, she realized that there were precisely one-thousand of them! Good, she thought, they’re learning to stick with base ten numbers for things, as she’d been trying to teach them.

Next, the tv. On! To the financial channel that always had that stock ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Less than a minute wait to see the precious metals prices. It had spiked a bit in the last week. After her fences and contacts got their cuts, there would still be well over a million dollars left for her! It had been her most profitable day so far that year.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 11. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 56

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 11. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 56

↩️return to previous section, section 10

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Renaldo

The first trip to Austin was to copy everything off the old phone that Brenda had given Wheeler for safekeeping. I told him I would store the offline device that I backed it up to, in a really safe place: a close relative’s safe deposit box in a downtown Austin bank & office building. He agreed it would be a good idea because, as a former Stalko-Taco fan whose memory had been erased before, he considered himself susceptible to their memory tricks and didn’t think he might be the best choice Brenda could pick for something like this.

The second trip was kind of social. At least in a science-geeky sort of way. VAMS, or Variable Age Main Sequence, was the name of the simulation software that came with one of my old astrophysics or cosmology books; on an antique 3.5 inch floppy disk in an envelope attached to the inside of the back cover. The reason he liked being called by only his last name, was a physicist whom he admired named John Archibald Wheeler (no relation) who was a coauthor of a book we both had: Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.

The dude was truly as much of a scientist as he was an artist and thought it was cool that he shared a last name with the guy who invented the concept of the “wormhole.” I mentioned to him that I had a copy of a “solutions manual” for Gravitation, photocopied by some grad students in Russia in the late 80s and brought here and given to my father in grad school in the early 90s. He already had one!

I thought of the Monty Python scene where the French were trying to get rid of those silly English “Kanigits,” but he wasn’t kidding; he really did already have one. What he didn’t have, and what I knew he couldn’t resist, was VAMS. I told him the disk had the source code which he could compile for himself but that it also had an .exe file. The source was useful if he ever needed to debug it (unlikely) or enhance it somehow (more plausible).

He assured me that he had access to a fully functioning dos pc in his dad’s garage workshop – complete with drives for accepting either three-and-a-halfs or five-and-a-quarters. I told him the VAMS disk and the astrophysics monograph with which it came were in a storage facility in north Austin, out towards Tech Ridge, that I was helping that same relative clean out; especially by getting a lot of my old stuff out of his way. I could bring VAMS and the associated book by in a few days if he’d like. He did like, and was looking forward to it at our next meeting.

My “backing up” of the phone Brenda had given him went beyond just copying the relevant files. I got all the photos, vids, text files, apps, and everything down to her wallpaper. I had to jailbreak the thing to get some of it done, for the project that I really wanted to undertake. I also got the model number, serial number, and all of those other tech details from the general/about page. Through subtle questioning I had already confirmed that neither Brenda nor her family had ever bothered to record that information anywhere and didn’t really even know where to find it on the phone.

For our second meeting, I did bring VAMS and other goodies to dazzle him with. I also brought my fully cloned, rigged, counterfeit phone to swap for the one he was holding. I’d even practiced the bit of slight-of-hand that I would need to secretly pull off the swap – tricks I’d learned from Brenda’s stage-magician dad a couple of years earlier.

So yeah, I stole the phone right out of Wheeler’s room.

No slight-of-hand was necessary; his dad evidently considered that garage workshop of his to be some kind of inner sanctum. The rule, Wheeler said, was that guests were not supposed to see where the keys were kept, how many locks there were, exactly how they got opened, etc. Furthermore, the antique computer was already on a cart and Wheeler simply had to roll it into the kitchen. In accordance with his dad’s own rule, he appropriately asked me to simply wait in his room until he came and got me.

I had six unique and redundant, overlapping-spectrum gadgets on my person for detecting optic bugs. If Wheeler had any nanny-cams in his room to observe me which I could not detect, then he was a far better Stainless Steel Rat than I was. And although not necessary, I went ahead and used that little bit of magician’s trickery anyway.

I still didn’t know these people that well. If Wheeler’s mom- um, If Nancy, was meditating while standing on her head in some tiny secret room, I didn’t want her popping out of some hidden panel in his wall at the exact moment I made the exchange. If any Murphy’s Law enforcers had bungled in right then, it would appear only that I was engrossed in examining all of Wheeler’s fine photography endeavors from the last decade, and was lifting a photo up to see the one behind it whilst trying not to knock down the little cloth bag where he kept sister-phone.

The old phone that he was holding for Brenda was still in its smallish bag hanging on the corkboard full of pictures where we’d left it several days ago – predictably behind the bunch of pictures I remembered. They had been printed on stiff paper and were unlikely to flap around very much. It was a hiding place which probably would’ve been difficult to find if I hadn’t already known exactly where he kept it. The switch was anti-climactic.

Just like I did with the phone that she had given me to guard, I had gone to eBay, letgo, and wherever else they had deals on used stuff… And simply bought the identical model old phone in the correct color to match the one Wheeler had been given. The one that Wheeler would now have in his room would be impossible to distinguish from the phone Brenda had given him. Right down to the variety of free apps her sister had installed which were no longer available anywhere because the developers no longer supported the old operating system or they’d just plain quit making them.

And that internal page that had all the cryptic id numbers? The one I said I’d screenshot and send her? Of course it was the one for the “new” old phone and so it would be a perfect match if she bothered to check it.

More importantly if “they” checked the screenshots Wheeler and I sent – upon Brenda’s retrieval of the phones – everything would appear to be in order. The only difference between these devices and the actual ones which Brenda had given us... would be that if she or Wheeler or anyone else tried to play those vlog files, the only thing they would see is a blacked out screen and the message: “unknown playback error.”

If they tried to airdrop the video files to other devices, their players would say things to the effect of “corrupted file” or “damaged file.” The files were in fact filled with random gibberish that had subsequently been encrypted.

I and I alone would have the actual vids – which played just fine by the way – in a hiding place only I would know about. The Powers-That-Be would see Brenda trying to cooperate and retrieve the things to the best of her ability, and would conclude that the files didn’t contain anything readable. At that point they could still order her to destroy the phones or execute an “Erase all content and settings” command.

As Brenda was perfectly willing to admit to anyone, she wasn’t a technical expert-type person. (Although that’s something I see possibly changing, soon.) But for now, it wouldn’t be too surprising that she’d somehow screwed up the production of some vid files that were recorded near the end of our senior year.

And of course there was no safe deposit box in a bank in downtown Austin. And there was no storage facility up near Tech Ridge Boulevard, and I didn’t have any relatives at all – close or otherwise – in Austin. Those were all lies just to provide a plausible explanation for my presence in his city both of those times.

Naturally through all of this, I was counting on the fact that my utter lack of interest in all things creepypasta, and continued apparent lack of interest in whatever Brenda was up to, would make me immune to their mind-tampering signals.

I almost blew the whole damn thing by being late. And that was entirely due to my stomach. If I’d “gone vegan” as Brenda had and often urged me to try, I wouldn’t have witnessed what happened. But I’m still technically a flesh-eater. One who makes healthy and informed choices, I’d like to think. So my apatite for dead animal, as she would criticize it, nearly resulted in me being late for our meeting.

A driver’s quick response and a pedestrian’s general physical prowess were what stopped me from witnessing a fatal accident.

Renaldo and Petra

It wasn’t a long walk back to the private parking lot from the little restaurant I had seen about the last dozen times I’d driven or rode through Austin – and never got a chance to stop at. The parking dichotomy was: cheap-but-far or close-but-expensive and I had opted to spend the little extra money and not have a long walk. It was a very safe area either way. Very touristy. The cops seemed to ride by on bicycles about every hundred feet. But just my luck, I walked into a sort of lull – a copless moment in the streets. Had there been one, then he or she could have functioned as a reliable witness and I wouldn’t have felt so compelled to stay and report what I saw.

The way the restaurant had been set up was cafeteria-like; lots of college-age people in the crowd of course. I was hardly the only one sitting at a table by myself, so I didn’t look or feel out of place. The logistics of the joint screamed “churn ‘em and burn ‘em” as far as the employees functioning, while pulling customers in to the assembly line process. The food didn’t live up to the hype. Not disappointing, but something I could’ve easily gotten in San Antonio and for less money. A new problem as I walked to my car, was heartburn.

Whatever combination of spices they were using was about to make it necessary for me to stop at a convenience store or some corner drugstore to get some generic chewable antacids. They had some kind of construction projects going on as usual, and thoughtfully accommodated pedestrian traffic by constructing wooden conduits along the sides of the road where sidewalks would normally be. They were covered in such a way as to prevent falling debris from hitting anybody, so that was good thinking I guess.

But then someone needed to seriously talk to whatever slacker had left a double-wide garage-door-sized sheet of plexiglass leaning up against the wall right outside one of those things. When I first saw it I was like: déjà vu! I honestly thought for a moment that I was looking at Nancy’s art again. A quick blink as the thing warped in the breeze and repeatedly flashed rainbow-refracted sunlight in my direction revealed that it was not the same diffraction grating art, but just a large transparent piece of plastic which had been leaned up against a wall by some careless workers.

I was still across the street when I saw her, and just briefly imagined she was motioning to me and started darting over in my direction. But there were a couple of dozen other people around me whose attention she could’ve been trying to get, and the darting was no doubt just because she had a walk sign and an intersection devoid of any stopped traffic at the light; so reasonably safe for her to power walk on through.

The traffic going parallel to her would have been a different story. Multiple cars all doing the speed limit of 30, I’d say. As long as she stayed in her crosswalk everything should have been fine for the smartly dressed young businesswoman-type in sensible shoes.

It was fine, right until that one malicious gust of wind caught the improperly stored piece of plexiglass and set it in motion like a sail from some Moby Dick era ship. It hit the unsuspecting woman – who still seemed intent on flagging down somebody in my general direction – from her side and swept her away like a giant broom, tumbling her into the oncoming traffic.

I’ll say this for her: she might very well have been a good basketball player in high school or college – definitely not much older than that – and she may have had some martial arts experience. Strong, agile, acrobatic and with fast reflexes... She came up from her little tumble, on her feet, slightly crouching like a fighting stance almost. And then, commenced a standing hi jump that got her almost a good 2 feet off the ground; it was just nearly enough to clear the hood of the oncoming car. In a movie stunt, the stuntwoman of course would’ve run up the hood of the car and over the roof and jumped off, totally unharmed.

Reality didn’t go so well for her; she missed clearing the oncoming hood by maybe a couple of inches. The driver, as I alluded to earlier, really did do his best to try and stop and steer away from her. What he had as proof of his efforts was a minor collision with a big municipal trashcan on the corner where I had been standing.

And I must admit that I was probably out to lunch on the day they were handing out that macho gene that makes guys know f-ing everything about cars. Sort of a sports car obviously, and a bit older. So bear with me... but I wanna say it’s kinda like the one driven by the guy who raced Wooderson. But maybe not as old as 70s. And no giant bird wings on the hood. Same low profile though.

So instead she fell onto the car’s hood, rolled up onto the windshield like a ramp, hit it with enough force to crack the glass, continued with enough momentum to make it onto the car’s roof, and finally tumbled off and fell back to the street. The fall wasn’t as bad as it could have been because she grabbed onto some kind of rain-guard on her way down; it got ripped off the car, to be sure, but it helped her fall occur feet-first and in three stages until she was all the way flat on the ground. Screams echoed around the intersection, but not from her. Several other people had seen her apparently get run down and possibly killed for all they knew.

I had my phone out while jogging the rest of the distance to her, making sure to not only pay attention to traffic but also to be on the lookout for that damned piece of plastic!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Correction, not my phone. That silly phone from Brenda’s sister! It shouldn’t have been a problem; even without a SIM card it should still be able to dial 9 1 1. The trouble was, it was off. I’d have to wait for it to go through all of its start-up gyration procedures, waiting for the apple to appear, etc. Meanwhile mine had gotten moved to my backpack while this one stayed in the zipper compartment of my cargo pants firmly against my thigh where my phone would normally be.

All right never mind, I thought. I can see probably five other people in the area on their phones including the driver who got out and was on his phone. I just concentrated on getting there.

Some guy was already kneeling next to her doing the airway check which I recognized from first aid and CPR training. “I know CPR how can I help?”

“No CPR needed here,” he responded with possibly professional calmness, “she’s breathing fine. We just need to keep her from moving and make her comfortable until the EMS gets here.”

Suddenly shifting his body weight and re-directing his head, his voice switched to a drill sergeant’s bellow with: “has anyone called 9 1 1?”

He scanned the crowd including me but before I could answer, replies came in near-stereo from many directions: “they’re on the way!”

“What you can do, son, is go move one of those A-frame traffic barricades with the blinking lights out into the lane this guy was in.”

I scampered off to follow his instructions; good thinking, since other drivers in the distance were still approaching in this lane unaware, and might need more warning time to change over, slow down, or even stop.

Finally. The cops. A gaggle of them sped in on bicycles. One posted himself in my lane a little further down and thrust out a firm hand, palm-first while directing traffic to move over. Another relieved me of the barricade and just said “thanks, I got it from here.”

Once he finished with the large plastic A-frame thing I got his attention before he sprinted. “Who can I give my statement to? I saw the whole thing.”

He motioned to a patrol car just pulling up and said “He’ll be here for awhile. You can talk to him. For now it’d be best if you’d wait under that awning.”

I stood where I was directed to, briefly calculated my travel time back home, glanced at the woman who was now talking and trying to get herself propped up on one elbow, against an officer’s advice... and also scanned the streets for that absurdly large piece of plastic. The trip home could still happen in time to meet Brenda without having to call her and ask her to wait – If there was no traffic delaying me from getting out of Austin. Okay, so that’s one of those if-a-frog-had-wings kinda things.

Somewhat concerning was the complete lack of any debris at all in the streets, and certainly no giant sheet of plexiglass. My account of what happened would make more sense if the thing was still flopping around some place nearby. Had it been blown down one of these two streets, away from this intersection? No way, with the traffic. It couldn’t have gotten that far.

Just then I thought I spotted it. Right across the street from me. But another blink confirmed I was mistaken; what I’d perceived to be “it” was actually a puddle of water with soap in it. The swirling regions of soapy film on the puddle were making pretty rainbow effects as the stuff steadily flowed into the storm drain at the other sidewalk-corner.

Wait, I thought: it couldn’t have melted. Could it? That kind of plastic would stink up several blocks of the city if it had melted to a liquid form and that was in fact “it” trickling into the street drain.

“Officer Fazzio, is this the one who saw something?” Another booming voice startled me a split second before a shiny badge gleamed at the corner of my vision. The patrol car dude reminded me of some character from those Police Academy movies. I tried not to giggle but did smile just a bit; with what hopefully passed for a pleasant disposition.

“What happened?” his monotone delivery was much more like a Vulcan than a silly movie personality.

I matched him as a fellow Vulcan would, giving an exact geometric description of all our locations and momenta. When it came to the plastic thing – as I noticed the soapy looking liquid puddle was all gone – I simply called it a “piece of construction debris” and possibly plastic which had gotten caught in the wind. I made it perfectly clear that it was neither person’s fault. The driver looked to be going the speed limit and tried hard to stop and avoid her, and she had been crossing properly before the thing just knocked her off balance.

I asked him if anyone else had seen a piece of plastic or some kind of construction material blowing into her. He avoided answering and just said to stick with what I saw.

In retrospect that was really stupid of me to ask. Of course he couldn’t give an answer either way without the risk of biasing my observations and my description. He asked me just a few more questions, thanked me for my time, and then before I could say anything he dashed off as other officers were beckoning to him. They all had to go suddenly and only one bike cop stayed back to handle traffic.

The paramedics almost had her ready to transport.

I could take as long as I wanted to go and get my car. They’d just be drooling over how much they were getting to charge me, the longer I left it. But I’d already started walking on in that direction when a classic text tone called “minuet” got my attention from the gutter. Not quite the gutter, I saw. At the corner where the woman got hit, daytime crews had previously stuffed canvas-looking sandbags along the corresponding storm drain openings on this side. The gaps were enough that water should be able to flow through, but they would prevent large chunks of construction material from falling in. Possibly a city regulation? Now if only they could pay attention to the regs about not letting shit that’s big enough to knock people over go blowing down the street!

I may never grasp senseless bureaucratic red tape. The ambulance driver was already in his seat, they’d positioned her on her stretcher or gurney or whatever it was called, parked outside the open ambulance back doors... waiting... while the one other guy walked up front to the driver with some kind of electronic clipboard. Well, it was good to know her injuries evidently weren’t that bad, I supposed, since dotting i’s and crossing t’s was more important to them.

Some stuff had nearly spilled out and I scooped it back in, trying not to touch too much because I would’ve felt creepy at the idea of going through someone’s stuff. But I couldn’t help seeing the company ID badge. And her name I guess. The minuet continued to play multiple times rapidly – someone sending her multiple texts in a row. Petra Mitternacht? That’s what the split second glimpse of the badge seemed to read.

“Petra” was right out of my dad’s old college German textbook; one of the sample characters I think. It might also have been a popular name elsewhere in Europe. But the other word? It wasn’t a surname that I knew of and I was pretty sure it just meant midnight. A second split-second glance as I jostled the thing around to keep stuff from spilling out revealed it was part of the name of her company: Mitternacht Cryptosystems. With no last name indicated for Petra.

A very intriguing company, to me at least, since cryptography and cryptanalysis had become two of my favorite hobbies in the last couple of years. Under other circumstances I would have loved to chat with her about what services her company offered, what her job description consisted of, etc. But as it was, “Ma’am, I think you dropped your bag” seemed most appropriate as I handed it to her. She thanked me and said a few other things about being glad her phone went off otherwise she’d have forgotten about it in the chaos.

It was enough speech that I could discern a decidedly German accent. By then the EMT had sprung into action and no doubt come to see who was interacting with the patient. She was holding onto her bag, sort of hugging it against her chest like a kid with a stuffed animal when the ambulance driver appeared from out of nowhere and they finally started reaching for the gurney to load her into the back. I returned to about the same place where I’d talked to the cop and behind me I heard her say “It’s alright, she’s my boss. She’s going to follow us to the ER.”

I didn’t actually see her boss but guessed she was in one of the nearest cars presently stopped at the light.

Then I noticed that light levels had changed rapidly as some clouds seemed to have rolled in to cover the sunset. A sunset which I was catching the end of through a reflection in a store window. I sort of spaced. I don’t remember visibly observing anyone leave.

Noise levels switched abruptly as well; the ambulance was gone as was the bike cop. Just a normal urban intersection again. Not sure why I felt it was appropriate to wait until the ambulance had gotten underway. It just was the correct thing to do. The secondhand-type store’s window display proudly showed off different tackle boxes. The dark-greenish one offered the most overall storage volume, in cubic inches, for the price they were asking... I wasn’t really clear on what had prompted me to estimate such a thing. It wasn’t like I was going fishing any time soon. Most of my friends these days were “alternative” type people, many of whom were experimenting with veganism or at least vegetarianism. But my brothers would gladly go –

Brothers? Home. Shit! I still have to get back to that parking lot, pay, get in my car... I’m so fucking late! Well at least my heartburn had somehow magically disappeared, so I wouldn’t have to stop anywhere.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

First Edition. © December 16, 2015.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 12. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 5

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 12. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 58

↩️return to previous section, section 11

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Brenda and Renaldo

I called her from Kyle but didn’t let her know that. I just told her I was driving as fast as I could and would try and make it home shortly after sunset. To my relief she’d said to slow it down and take my time; she was running late too.

As predicted, the purpose of her visit that night was absolutely what I’d thought it would be: she knew exactly what proper answers to give to the multiple challenge questions I asked – things that only Brenda and some very close friends would know. And not even phrased in the form of questions per se.

I had to play along with it now, before I could “give her back her phone.”

“Oh, I see you found a use for that top after all,” I motioned while feigning an interest in her outfit. “That’s the one you made as a sewing project for Ava two years ago, right? But by the time you got it all done her boobies had grown more and she couldn’t comfortably button it!”

“No, you’re way off,” she said in a way that made my skin crawl, “it was Cecilia I made it for!”

A one hundred percent correct answer to a thing that wasn’t supposed to sound like a question and answer exchange... and didn’t. One of a series of five such verbal interactions to which she responded in precisely the way she was expected to. That is, if you only paid attention to word choice.

The way she spoke reminded me of how my youngest brother had sounded the other night when my mom got after him for putting out the trash can when it was supposed to be a recycling can night. Sure, he responded. Okay, I’ll get up mom, and do it now – or words roughly to that effect. But he spoke them just like you’d think a person would after being awakened from a deep sleep to the sound of someone chattering away.

That was Brenda. She sounded like she was sleepwalking. Are sleepwalkers able to speak and answer questions? I should look it up. But groggy as hell, like she was about to fall asleep on her feet. There was more to it than that; her facial expression was off. At times it was almost as if someone had inserted electrical probes into her facial muscles and was trying to work her like a puppet.

To add to the creepiness, she saw that I had Suicide Squad paused right before Harley’s line about the voices: “that’s not what they really said.” Brenda thought that line was adorable. We were always talking about binge-watching DCEU someday. She mentioned our vague plans again and that we should do it soon and then went on to chat about Margot Robbie on Instagram from last month or something.

Her voice throughout this was utterly Normal Brenda. Then after a long pause I said “well...”

She nodded and said “oh yeah,” as in let’s-get-on-with-it. When the pre-programmed conversation resumed, for the remaining 2 challenge questions that didn’t really sound like questions? She was back to sleepy-voice Brenda. It worried the fuck outta me! Who in the hell was doing this to people’s minds? To her mind??

She got the phone from me, examining it briefly, and was of course unable to tell it apart from the original. So as far as she was concerned: mission accomplished. And back to regular fully-conscious Brenda voice.

Since she’d filled me in on the Wheeler phone situation also, back when she brought this one for me to look after – and it was understood that I knew about that one too – I asked her if she wouldn’t mind me driving her up to Austin. Or if she really wanted to take her car, we could switch off and tag-team on the driving. Though I couldn’t really explain to her what my concern was, it was easy enough to explain to myself internally: if she sounded that damned tired while talking, would she be alright to drive? It was dark already, and if these mind-scrambling goons who were traipdaising through her synapses with such little regard for damages they might be inflicting, were also making her tired... that was a potentially lethal combination. All because they were hellbent on making sure some damned comic book character got erased! The fact that I saw a woman nearly get killed by a car in Austin earlier in the afternoon might have had me on edge too.

She was cool with me coming along and was kind of excited about introducing me to Wheeler; something she once again communicated to me in her normal voice.

Wheeler and I had planned for this possibility: that Brenda might one day introduce us, and that we would agree to act like it was our first time meeting. Once he understood the logic of it, he was all for it. If Brenda became aware that we had already met somehow, for some inexplicable reason, her puzzlement or curiosity over this might also alert the mind-manipulators and cause them to go nosing around more deeply into my business. And since part of my business included backing up her files in a way that protects them from the Erasers... in other words, since it helped Brenda... he was on board for this little bit of subterfuge.

As we cruised through SoCo and passed her favorite costume shop that she loved as a kid, just after 10:15 that evening, I did briefly worry that this mind signal-pulse might have turned Wheeler into some kind of driveling idiot if they’d cranked up the power enough this time in order to make sure they finally got to Brenda. And if it did do that to him, would he be able to keep up the “we’ve never met before” pretense or would he slip up and go Fredo?

No problems. Fortunately his mom and dad were away on some week-long spiritualism and crystal meditation retreat, as I’d learned earlier. He was normal as far as I knew, gauging him by what I’d observed during our first two meetings. Wheeler and I exchanged nice-to-meet-yous and heard-a-lot-about-yous and Brenda was pleased to see that we were hitting it off nicely; once she was again back to being Normal Brenda, that is.

During their witty exchanges of only-Brenda-would-know factoids, she was doing that same sleepwalking, or rather “sleeptalking” thing. I could see the look of consternation take hold of his face as he no doubt worried in the same way I had 70 miles to the south during astronomical twilight.

As much of a relief as it was to have normal-voiced Brenda back, it was also good to see they hadn’t decided to “up the voltage” as Professor Hathaway had suggested. Wheeler had been very careful during all this, to absolutely not reacquaint himself with Stalko-Taco. Once he’d grasped what Brenda was trying to say was being done, the thought terrified him; the notion that someone or some things had been stomping around through his brain cells was mortifying to someone who had already taken and aced 6 college mathematics courses while still technically in high school! Like Hans Zarkov pleading with Ming’s interrogators!

Whatever he did worked – it armored him alright. Either that or the Erasers didn’t send out a worldwide pulse this time, but simply dispatched an agent, with a good old fashioned flashy thing, who just visited Brenda.

Wheeler filed Stalko-Taco in the category of some really gross YouTube vid that he might have started to watch, but then hit the back-button instead. Something he would have no interest whatsoever in watching. His strategy had paid off, in the form of an unassailed mind. When I carefully questioned him later, he remembered Brenda going on and on about some obscure creepypasta character, but had no desire to view any copy of it – whatever materials she might have had.

If they did send out another worldwide signal, it had most decidedly left him alone. Suffice to say he never watched or attempted to even examine the backup vlog vids that Brenda had placed on the phone that resided in his room for a few weeks. So technically he didn’t know that he had any Stalko-Taco related materials in his possession, in case they would have broadcast another “destroy everything you have about the Taco” signal. The idea had been sound.

I was kinda glad to be done with this phase of the chess game with whoever these people (or aliens) were. Now that they had made their next move, I could plot mine. The next night, on some property that my dad had invested in but never got to fully develop during his lifetime, I sealed myself in a homemade SCIF below ground level in a small tornado shelter that the previous owners wisely thought to dig and construct. It was a bit away from where we parked our camping trailer, so even without the soundproof walls I wouldn’t be disturbed by my brothers carrying on. Within the shelter, and within my SCIF, I climbed into still another layer of protection: my homemade human-sized Faraday cage. With a hand-crank generator that would charge USB devices, I at last watched Brenda’s videos. And with this act I quite possibly became the only person left on Earth to know the full true story of Stalko-Taco.

His Cerebral Phosphorescence

“Extraterrestrial intelligences, or aliens, don’t exist. Period,” declared the world’s third smartest human to his reflection in the hallway mirror at home before he left. In what little private time he had, Swifty had built his own polygraph: thermometers and / or thermocouples of course, and ohmmeters sensitive to variations in skin moisture, a pulse-ox, plus blood pressure monitoring, etc. Even a voice stress analyzer along with the software he would need in order to interpret the results. All of it had to be destroyed and disposed of long ago since he had passed the point in his career wherein he could not be found with these things. We wouldn’t want it to look like we were practicing to beat polygraph tests, he thought, smiling to himself.

He had the idea ever since the Cliaandians handed diGriz the egg at Glupost. It was unimportant now, as he’d long since mastered it. But a little rehearsal in front of the mirror sometimes helped. Honest old Swifty had been beating these things routinely since the late 80s. They were a joke to him now.

What wouldn’t be a joking matter would be if it became known that he was working on an E.T. angle on anything at all. Though not treasonous or a security threat, it could cause his career to go the way of the “Stargate Project” in a heartbeat. The official party line was no psychics, no paranormal shit, no E.T.’s… Nothing otherworldly whatsoever was allowed to exist. If there was a problem, you looked to this world for an answer, or you would answer to the budget decision makers.

Evidently, a majority of the voting public did not admit to belief in these things and wanted their elected officials to be “pragmatic” even though a majority of Americans in 2019 might not have trouble accepting alien-based theories. If they asked him privately (were such a ridiculous notion as “privacy” even possible) he would tell them the truth, and most people would be disappointed or just think he was a lying, high-ranking government official who was part of the “cover-up.” But reality was unfortunately bland. Edward Snowden was quite truthful about that.

All supposed incidents involving UFOs that the public has knowledge about were in fact governments of the world fucking with each other by way of experimental technologies; when caught – that is when evidence turned up at a “crash site” or other things that could expose them – they would rather have the people think they were lying about aliens than find out what they were really lying about.

In the old days, supposedly they’d even go so far as to plant dummy “alien” corpses at a crash site and allow video or film clips to be “leaked” of things like alien autopsies or whatever. They went out on a limb – taking a chance that people would be stupid enough to buy into it. But evidently it worked; it had also paid off big for everyone from Hollywood producers to bloggers and people who sold trinkets and t-shirts at Roswell.

Just like the moon landings: many people believed it was all a hoax because of the fake photos and some film clips. They’d rather have a huge fraction of the population believe it was fraudulent, than show them the real pictures. You know, the ones that clearly show the US placing nuclear devices on the moon in flagrant violation of the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty. Whenever someone at the NSA had doubts on this, Swifty’s response was always to tell them “Complete this sentence: Our government would never put nuclear missiles on the moon, because ___________.” That wiped the smiles off skeptical faces real quick.

Back to the conundrum of the moment:

“There is a possibility that a bunch of people higher up than I am in the government are simply yanking my chain,” I thought glancing at myself in the rearview mirror now. But that would require the existence of multiple government employees who are all more intelligent than I am. I decided a while back that I’d rather believe in the aliens; it’s more plausible.

But as I always remind myself, just to make sure I’m keeping my ego in check... it’s not just ego. I’ve always made certain that I can back up assumptions about being more intelligent than someone else with evidence. Most people provide me with copious amounts of evidence all by themselves.

As far as the physical type of data? The most convincing evidence I ever encountered was the Stalko-Taco teleportations. I called them the “burrito” teleportations at first since one of the cops claimed his police car had been vandalized by a giant burrito.

Shortly after that, emails out of Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, Burlingame, etc. related a story of a giant taco that was very protective of its young hungry human friends. Nothing about shanghai-ing a bunch of cops. But since “Stalko Burrito” just didn’t have the same ring to it, I’ve since codenamed them the Stalko-Taco teleportations in my mental notes to myself... where they have had to remain exclusively. Regardless of whether people were hallucinating about the taco or not, the mysterious “teleportations” did occur. Retracing what happened, the first calls to police regarding naked people in the various cities actually started coming in only three minutes after all four of them simultaneously went radio silent.

No spacecraft in the world, even now 22 years later will get a person off the ground in San Francisco and on the ground in Greece in three minutes, and do it without showing up on any radar or other detection system.

What is more disturbing is the fact that there is either a second NSA within the NSA secretly keeping blinders on us, or that the aliens are somehow not only erasing memories but also re-programming minds with false memories. A little birdie told me that surprise random polygraph screenings would be today. That’s good, it will have me nice and relaxed before our meeting with the people from Mitternacht.

They were actually a pleasure to deal with compared to other private contractors. Although it was US government we could use a local German company for our European ___________ ___________ (thoughts redacted). I knew I could expect anyone representing Mitternacht Cryptosystems to not be a novice when it came to cryptanalysis and math in general. After an uneventful day at work, the polygraph test had not occurred as (un)scheduled. I couldn’t do anything about it, since I wasn’t supposed to know it was happening.

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I couldn’t see who hit me, chloroformed me, tranq-darted me from behind, etc. Whatever they used on me had completely worn off by the time I’d been transported to my destination. There was a sense of “no time” or perhaps “wink time,” like I had just blinked and then appeared here. Warehouse. In a warehouse district I surmised from the limited view I had through the tiny, filthy window in the distance. I could see the plastic ties securing my knee joints and ankles to the chair legs; guessing the same kinds of things were binding my wrists behind the back of my chair. Efficient, I suppose my captors thought, but they had carelessly neglected the chair itself.

It was metal, true. But antiquated. It reminded me of a chair in an old office where my dad worked in the early 70s. It had welds that might possibly have been produced by human welders, who might very possibly have died of old age by now. No effort was made to bolt the chair to the floor or to anything else.

I had to act fast. Something wasn’t right about all this. Whoever abducted me from Camp Picket had to be a genius plus another thirty IQ points to get past all the NSA’s measures, but then keeping me here, unattended, with this kind of restraint? It was a plan worthy of the original Mission Impossible series, but then for some reason turned over to Beavis and Butthead.

I bounced.

And repeated.

I didn’t want to fall over, yet. After about the sixth impact I think, something cracked. Either a bolt came out or a welding joint snapped.

After rolling around on the floor for a bit and getting my bearings, I found that it was enough to get my hands in front of myself and free one leg. Although still tied together, I could easily use my hands to slip the wreckage of the chair off my other leg. I was now free to walk around the warehouse with my hands tied in front of me instead of behind me. It would’ve been too much to ask to find a box cutter or some kind a blade. It came in the form of an old fifty-five gallon drum trash barrel that looked like it had been used by homeless people to burn stuff. The rim where it wasn’t rusted away, included a jagged enough edge that it might work for what I had in mind.

After an eternity of dragging the plastic tie along the sharpest edge I could find, there was only a groove in the plastic to show for my efforts... and it was too late anyway as the sound of keys rattling in the door told me they were coming. Old fashioned sodium pentothal? Sodium amytal, pentothal morphine, scopolamine… There were a thousand things these idiots might try. And I would have resistance to none of them. The frustrated voice sounded deep and stupid as it mumbled something about fucking keys. Okay, so it was Butthead who had been entrusted with the keys.

While he messed around, confounded by the mechanism of a door lock, I took advantage of whatever little time I had to hide behind a disorderly mountain of discarded cardboard boxes. They looked old enough and dusty enough to probably be a real estate development for brown recluse spiders. I had no plans to roll around inside the damned things. Just a game of cat and mouse with Butthead, when he finally located the correct key. Instead of a spider, what I did find was a box cutter. Duh. 20/20 hindsight; of course it made sense to look around boxes for a box cutter. But it had been a calculated risk; if there hadn’t been one and I’d gone traipsing around looking, I might not even have a decent groove started.

The groove was a blessing as it kept the blade straight and just where I wanted it, preventing me from cutting my wrist. Still, my grip was weird and ineffective. So when I finally got the band to snap, the ancient rusty thing bounced safely to the floor. With enough noise of course to draw Butthead’s attention over to my box pile after he finally got the right key in a second earlier.

Bad.

I had hoped for a minute or so of confused gawking at my chair’s wreckage and looking around for me. Instead, he was loping over to my exact location behind the box fortress.

I had one thing that might work: a fire extinguisher from the wall. If I tried to engage him with the box cutter then our fighting skills would be pitted against each other and he would likely win. So I went with the more dishonorable tactic of pounding the base of the fire extinguisher into his forehead as soon as he came around the corner. Since I am not renowned for my strength, he merely staggered and held his hands over his head. Not a particularly imposing fellow; maybe a tad over six feet. But stoutly built, early/thirtyish, dark hair. Fortunately the dusty antique still had an adequate charge. It wasn’t CO₂ but something suitable for electrical fires and a yellow powder was blasted into his mouth as I squeezed the lever while he was opening it to scream from the forehead impact.

It caused him to choke as he fumbled for his Beretta 93R. Since he was momentarily blinded also, it was fairly simple for me to knock it out of his hand, bouncing it onto a piece of cardboard below. He reached his other hand instinctively for something on his other side under his jacket. I could just make out the details of a second shoulder holster rig. This time I swung the extinguisher sideways and whacked him in the back of his head. It was hard enough to break the handle off and drop him to the ground. Unconscious or dead. I didn’t care at this point. To paraphrase my childhood antihero a bit: “The novelty of this little situation had entirely worn off” and “I was in a skull-fracturing humor.”

Thankfully, the body of the extinguisher bounced into a different pile of cardboard instead of clanging noisily onto the cement floor. I got his machine pistols – the second one, also a 93R – supposedly unavailable to anyone but law-enforcement, and noted he had chambered a round in each already and carried them both with the safeties off.

Moron!

I don’t care how good he thinks he is, sooner or later something will go wrong; he’s an accident looking for a place to happen. I used one to cover him while I got his keys, and went through his pockets. No ID or wallet, but a phone. By “cover him” I mean I shoved a gun barrel into his gaping mouth and kept it there during the search. If he regained consciousness I didn’t want him pulling some Krav Maga shit and getting the gun from me. It was on “three round burst“ I noticed. I left it there. But since he stayed down, I removed the gun from his mouth and chose not to “finish my kill.”

Not that I had any sympathy for this scum who was undoubtedly a true enemy of the state, but my concern was that the report would likely cause Beavis to come running in to investigate. Whoever they were, even the dumbest of them would surely be curious about the gunfire. So, safeties on, mags out, rounds ejected and caught in my hand, I reinserted them in the magazines, and re-introduced the magazines. Butthead went with brass and teflon slugs, I noted, for both pistols.

The door on the far end – the exact opposite from where Butthead had entered – was the natural choice. It was unlocked. Unbolted. Not blocked in any way. My, but they certainly had a lot of faith in a decrepit old chair and some plastic riot ties.

My new problem, as I attempted to use the stars to navigate, was that there was something wrong with the stars… And the moon.

It was a waxing gibbous about two days away from being full on the night I was abducted from Camp Pickett, Virginia outside my office. At first glance, it had appeared to be in the exact same phase tonight and I must confess, I don’t recall what constellation it was in; I was a bit preoccupied with my alien conspiracies.

So either it’s still the same night, or it’s now a waning gibbous that’s two days past full? And sorry to say I couldn’t be sure just now what its direction of curvature had been when I glimpsed it. I was too preoccupied with running. I needed my right hand free, an unobstructed view of it, and some privacy. Some place away from the warehouses where I could see the horizon and tell which ways east and west were, would also help. But at the moment, I really needed to focus on running.

So I’ve either been gone four nights, or it’s only “later tonight.” But there’s another problem: the stars are telling me my latitude change. I can only guess my longitude change less accurately because that depends on the time – another version of the same problem ancient navigators had before John Harrison’s nautical chronometer.

My latitude has changed by a little over five-hundred nautical miles to the south – about seven and a half degrees... pausing for another second to avoid being seen by a distant driver, I also found out which ways east and west were from the different brightnesses of the horizons. I got the estimate of around three quarters of ten degrees using a trick with my fingers that I learned as a kid – adjusting my positioning for my now larger fingers – once I had a north horizon view and could see some familiar stars. The time is just after sunset here and I would say on the boundary between civil and nautical twilight. I’m almost certain it’s evening; it just feels too damned hot to be pre-dawn twilight. It’s possibly a tad on the civil-twilight side; It’s earlier than it was when I was walking to my car, judging by light levels alone. Had I moved one time zone to the west, as the light levels are implying? This would make it just after I left work in Virginia.

At last, a place where I could rest for a few milliseconds. Butthead’s phone was locked but the time and date confirmed that yes, in Virginia I would’ve just left work less than 15 minutes ago... if his timezone was central. Allowing time to wrangle my way out of the chair, mess with a jagged piece of metal and a box cutter, attack Butthead, steal weapons, useless keys and a phone from him, make my way out of the warehouse, and run here? That only left about 1 to 2 minutes to transport me.

If the moon is waning and Butthead’s phone was purposely set wrong, I’ve been gone ninety-six hours and regained consciousness roughly ninety-six hours and 1.5 minutes after being abducted.

But if it’s still waxing? And if everything else that I am reading is reliable and the time on Butthead‘s phone wasn’t deliberately faked? Then I regained consciousness only 1.5 minutes after being abducted.

I entered another area between two warehouses, both presenting nothing but solid walls with no windows whatsoever. About midway down the corridor I felt safe enough to briefly store my right hand Beretta in my belt at my waist. I got my right hand ready to do the backwards C / forward D tricks (the logic could be extended to gibbous moons also) and looked around for the actual moon. I know I could have just looked at it and thought things through without physically using my hand, but this was too important; absolute certainty was required and I worried I might screw it up. Then a clear view... as a cloud that had been obstructing it moved away. The backwards-or-forwards letter rule confirmed it. It’s only “later tonight” and not four days later.

The city could be Houston or New Orleans or maybe somewhere else in the south. All I was seeing were warehouses. Texas plates on almost all of the parked vehicles clued me in. An oil change sticker on a van gave an address on Stella Link. Houston then.

If everything I estimated was right? Then no aircraft or space vehicle could transport me from Blackstone to Houston in less than two minutes. But even if some experimental spacecraft existed? A spacecraft would have had to have been prepped and ready right there in the parking lot so that my unconscious body could be shoved into it. I think I would’ve noticed a vehicle like that.

So I’ve either been teleported here – beamed, like on Star Trek – or someone messed with the time and date setting on Butthead‘s phone because they wanted me to think I’ve been “beamed.” Well, that and saturating the cars on the streets of some warehouse district with Texas plates… and placing a blimp or some kind of hovercraft over me to project a fake moon image??

No. Butthead wasn’t planning to get clubbed unconscious or killed and surrender his phone and weapons. Nor did they intend to show me the moon and the stars outside. Or parked cars. I had been beamed.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 13. 4 chapters, ending with chapter 62

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 13. 4 chapters, ending with chapter 62

↩️return to previous section, section 12

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Prajina and Renaldo

The paramedics almost had her ready to transport.

I paused for just a second to accommodate the dark blue BMW that seemed to be veering over into the turn lane even though no turning would be possible due to the ambulance which was parked there. Once the car had passed, I lunged at the ringing bag...

I’d missed it before because the tote bag sort of blended with the sandbags. Just as I heard the minuet, the accident victim raised up a little on her stretcher and reached out an arm while murmuring something. It was obvious what I needed to do. The driver of the BMW had basically parked in the turn lane; not normally possible, but in this case it wouldn’t matter because no one from the side street could utilize it for a turn at the moment. A city official showing up to check on things, perhaps?

She wasn’t totally unsupervised though, as the traffic-directing bike-cop was about 15 feet away and had an eye on her while there was a significant lull in the traffic. He heard the same tone, saw both of us, saw what I was doing and was okay with it as I approached her with the hemp cloth bag from the street. Brenda would approve: no leather or any animal products in the thing as far as I could tell. Meanwhile the illegally parked BMW’s driver was on the phone with the car’s speaker system acting as a hands free speakerphone for the call. I sometimes wondered if people knew how loud their call was to us pedestrians out here. It wasn’t too bad; I couldn’t exactly make out any coherent speech but just murmurs. Anyway, back to her bag.

The BMW driver had gotten out of her car and approached Petra. Her boss looked like she could have graduated with me and Brenda a few months ago; apparently about the same age as her injured employee. Well good for her if she’s a boss already! She’d brought her phone over and had it out taking pictures of Petra. With her consent obviously; she also waved a bit to the two EMS workers and the bike cop to make sure she didn’t accidentally get them in the pictures, I suppose, just in case it was a problem for them.

I saw Petra motion to me and the boss turned to look at me. She waved and beckoned me over. All three of the public servants were more or less standing around like stoners that my brother Marco would party with, just looking a bit spaced-out. They must find their work fairly boring at times, I guess. Anyhow, since none of them had a problem with me approaching the patient again, I went on over and addressed them; the boss first.

“Hello ma’am, I wanted to let you know your employee did nothing wrong and neither did the driver. It was a freak accident that some giant piece of plexiglass got caught up in the wind and knocked her down in front of traffic.”

I spoke quickly to make sure she didn’t think I was some weirdo who just loitered near accident sites, and also made sure to say “employee” and not hint that I knew her name. In other words not admitting that I saw contents of her bag during the five seconds that I carried it.

“...and I also made this clear in my statement to the police,” I interjected, just as she was initiating her handshake. I responded in kind.

“Prajina Ranganathan,” she offered, completing the little formality with a surprisingly strong grip. Then she introduced Petra by name as well. With introductions out of the way she thanked me for my detailed observations and subsequent testimony, but there was another problem:

I noticed for the first time that Petra was bleeding slightly from her mouth and had now started a kind of coughing that appeared to be causing her intense pain in her rib cage. Just as I was about to yell, not too politely, at those ambulance-worker guys to hurry the f*** up... a number of super bizarre things came to my attention.

The entire world had become very quiet. Birds in the distance had caught an updraft of some sort that was allowing them to hover like little Harrier jets. All cars that I could see had parked in the streets and were going nowhere. The two EMS workers and the cop weren’t just unenthusiastically spacing out, but were... posing? Like... mannequins?

It wasn’t just very quiet… it was impossibly quiet. An impossible silence like I’d never heard before.

Holy shit! The birds aren’t hovering, they’re frozen in mid-flight. The traffic isn’t at a standstill, it’s frozen. The three public servants aren’t choosing to pose like mannequins, they are frozen! The world is quiet because TIME is frozen. Except for the three of us. Objects in the distance I noted, which workers were loading on or off of a truck, were just suspended when they should have been falling due to gravity. This should not be possible according to what I know about physics.

“Sorry about stopping time for awhile, Renaldo. But I can’t risk these twenty-first century people seeing what I’m about to do,” she positioned her hands about a foot away from Petra’s upper torso and jerked my attention back over to herself instead of the weirdness of the world. While moving her hands in the air just over her employee, she went on chatting. “And I believe you about the giant plastic sheeting. From your description of the size it sounds like you and Petra encountered perhaps five of the creatures at once. But they are perfectly capable of not being blown off course by the wind. What you witnessed was no accident but deliberate. It was attempted murder.”

Just then a bluish-white glow started to emanate from her hands accompanied by a sound like a higher-pitched lightsaber slowly swishing around. I couldn’t get my mouth to say anything but my mind wanted to say a thousand things. The glow started out like light, as if something was shining from her hands... but it changed into a sort of mist that was surrounding Petra’s upper body, though the mist was still glowing brightly with that same pale blue.

As pretty as the effect was, something else caught my eye: the soapy liquid that had flowed into that storm drain earlier... it was now flowing back out, into the street. Then it rolled into about 4 big puddles plus a little left over, the puddles congealed into rectangular hard pieces of plastic, the plastic sheets began to hover above the street and then upright themselves so that I was looking perpendicular to their surfaces, and that remainder of the storm drain soapy liquid rose up into a form like a Lehmbruck sculpture that Wheeler had had as a screensaver on his desktop... except it seemed to be alive and moving and trying to walk towards us. Sure. As long as the laws of physics are waving bye-bye to this universe, why not?

Prajina saw a glimpse of the spectacle but since she evidently couldn’t let her attending-Petra-with-a-glowing-blue-mist thing be interrupted, she urgently called for my attention:

“Renaldo! Please reach into my messenger bag and get out the tablet-looking thing in there. It’s the only one of its kind, you can’t miss it,” she continued her instructions as I complied: “but absolutely don’t try and turn it on, just bring it to me please... I’m almost finished tending to Petra.”

Once I found the device and got it out I turned towards her... but something else unexpected caught my attention. All of the weird shapes stopped moving instantly, and then began to flee. I mean, can a flat piece of levitating plastic run away in terror? They certainly did a good impression of it. And the living Lehmbruck sculpture took off with them, like I scared the shit out of them – metaphorically speaking – with Prajina’s tablet. What did they think I was going to do? Whoop their asses with it?

I heard mild laughter and heard Petra say happily “it looks like they are learning,” then I saw that she was okay, sitting up, legs dangling off the gurney, while twisting and stretching like a person who just woke up from a nap. Prajina wasn’t laughing but smiled hesitantly and agreed while clarifying: “yes, however so far only learning self preservation.”

I finally managed to stammer a little something out, handing Prajina her device: “y- you- You... healed her. And you freeze time!? And you healed her just like those angels from that Charmed show!”

Prajina smiled more warmly this time: “I’m no angel. Just a human being using alien technology that’s a bit older than macroscopic life on Earth.”

So, older than 613 million years, I thought. But refrained from speaking because I could see she had more to say. That means my estimate of L in the Drake equation is not too high after all. And she’s implying that she’s a time traveler too: saying 21st century people. How would a civilization’s access to time travel influence L? It would increase it, right?

“You were correct, by the way, to interpret the Drake equation the way you did,” she said reassuringly as I immediately wondered if she could also read minds. “Your friend Brenda publishes her thoughts on Tumblr as you know,” she clarified, “and she credits you with having taught her.”

Alright I thought, let’s not jump to the mind-reading conclusion just yet.

Statistics.

Any two intelligent humans discussing extraterrestrial civilizations are both likely to think of that equation as a matter of course. And more curiously, how is it that she knows Brenda, or knows of her online? And even though Brenda acknowledged me on her Tumblr, how does Prajina know that I’m that Renaldo? Before I could ask she continued:

“My usual policy of not letting twenty-first century people see me doing this healing process, would normally have applied to you as well. But I have to ask you something involving those creatures, and letting you see for yourself that they are creatures and not improperly secured construction materials, was better than telling you,” she paused for a breath. And I realized, yes, it would have been fairly tough to convince me with words alone that inanimate objects were actually alive.

I watched as she put her tablet away without having ever turned it on, and listened to her attentively.

“but I didn’t intend to involve you in scaring them away. It was just that healing Petra was a matter that I saw needed immediate attention.”

She pulled a case from her bag that had a red cross on it like a first aid kit and started to open it.

“The bottom line is: I can make you invisible to the creatures; as I am. It would involve an implant which would reside on your skin somewhere and would be indistinguishable from a freckle and quite painless,” she stopped, holding up a thing that looked like a tiny Petri dish.

“It needs to be of your own freewill though. I can’t just freeze time – including you – and give you the implant without your knowledge and consent... even if it’s to do you a favor,” she was interrupted this time by Petra.

“Wasn’t I supposed to have been invisible to them also? Did something go wrong?”

“No,” she offered, “you were and still are. From the way everything was described to me, it seems that when you were trying to get Renaldo’s attention he looked into the crosswalk. They saw his curious gaze and reasoned that somebody was there; the fact that they saw no one implied that it was someone who was invisible to them. So then they took a chance and tried to push whomever it was into traffic. I’m sorry to say, but I think they were hoping it would be me. You got caught in the crossfire, so to speak.”

She and Petra continued their conversation in German for several more seconds. It wasn’t anything secret that they were trying to keep from me, and of course I understood every word. Just some mundane stuff about checking her bag to see that nothing fell out during the impact and tumbling around, and how they’d be leaving in a couple of minutes. Prajina spoke the Hochdeutsch of the textbooks, as far as I could tell. Petra was a bit more from the south, like Baden-Württemberg I’d guess. Schwäbisch I think they called it. Possibly from Stuttgart?

Prajina answered my questions diligently, provided me with four chewable antacid tablets when she could see I was in distress that way, and also provided another key piece of data – an additional perk: Once I had the implant it would also be possible to temporarily extend my invisibility protection to other people by merely touching them. Even just holding someone’s hand, as long as there’s skin-to-skin contact, would ensure they too were invisible to the creatures.

After a few more of my questions were answered, I went through with it. Any kind of implant is serious business. But as I recalled, the things were homicidal. Which spawned another alarming thought in the back of my mind: Nancy’s art! At first I could’ve sworn the street thing was the thing from the hallway outside Wheeler’s room. But what if they had the ability to disguise themselves behind that diffraction grating sheet? In other words, what if it was the same thing from his hallway? Or a colleague of the creatures from the same dimension? With a guarantee of no other side effects and her assurance that any dermatologist of this century would only categorize it as a freckle, it was a no-brainer; I told her yes.

It was on my upper back, off to the left near my shoulder. I just had to pull my shirt slightly to let her implant it. She did some before and after photos with her phone to let me see there was nothing there before and that there was a freckle there afterwards. As well as a tiny vid up close of me rubbing it with my finger to demonstrate that it wouldn’t come off. Bathing, sunlight, and any skin products I might use, she further assured me would have no effect on it. Nothing but a cut wherein it got physically carved out of me with a chunk of my flesh would ever remove it.

Next she deleted the pics and vid from her phone and then I saw her go into recently deleted and delete them forever. Then she sort of surprised me and pointed a different phone towards me.

“Smile! This one’s for my Instagram.” Fake camera shutter sound confirmed she’d taken the picture, along with her having accidentally set the flash on even though it was still broad daylight. My expression was probably more surprised than smiling. It just seemed a little out of character for

for

her

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“This is where we leave you Renaldo. You will completely forget the last ten minutes. I don’t exist and I was never here. Go back to that store window and look at it. You must calculate the best deal on the products they have on display.”

Lucy

There are no small parts, only small actors. I had to unlearn what I thought that meant before I could learn what it meant. I was surrounded by large actors at the after party. Even though my part had been “minor” in my opinion – small – they made me feel like I was as important as the lead characters. Margaret’s most important function it seemed, was to get banged by Borachio. That was, in my amateur analysis, how it appeared.

It was my first time trying Sailor Jerry. I had previously enjoyed the “pagan romantic,”

regular dark spiced, not the silver spiced.

“That’s high school rum,” Poseidon had told me, “Captain Morgan is only like 75 proof. This shit’s 92 proof. You’ve graduated!”

Now I’m told that pagan romantic makes a 100 proof… But we best not go there. “Why did we need an anagram for a brand of rum?” I wondered silently, chilling to Grace Slick pouring her heart into a live performance of White Rabbit as the presumably least drunk crew member drove the van-load of us to my hometown to meet the other cast and crash their after party. I can’t believe my idiot friends and I used to skitch across this bridge. Nowadays you couldn’t because there were cameras at all of the automated toll stations. The speed limit was 45-ish maybe, not including access pass checkpoints where it dropped to 25 I think; fortunately it was crowded even at night sometimes and they only went just below fortyish. When you’re sixteen you think you're death-proof apparently!

So “chat be m” I understand for their play, since the not-saying-Macbeth-in-a-theater thing was taken seriously by actors everywhere for generations. It could’ve also been “chat b me,” but they preferred the other one because it sounded like they were chatting about a bowel movement. Their typical sense of humor was exactly on par with my friends from high school.

I explained to him that we could never pull another skitching stunt like the time of the `96 parking-garage rave thing. Not only because of too many cameras; it was some automated toll “booths” as well. There had still been many human-staffed ones back in ‘96. But no, not only that: now everyone was worried about liability. Drivers wouldn’t cooperate; it actually might have been officially made illegal now. Not that that would have stopped our group of skaters... but the drivers, yes. In either case, they all adored my stories of “the olden days.”

Weird Shapes

Lucy blinked. On the side of a moving van from a rental company which had momentarily matched speeds with them, she saw a weird optical illusion. Weird on multiple levels. It reminded her of some hallucination she had after she thought the ayahuasca should have worn off... on the night of Hillbard Ravenhorn’s performance in `96, which was also the beginning of Stalko-Taco by her reckoning. And that just happened to be the night of the skitching she was talking about to her new captive audience.

This was a critical moment for them. The Villanueva woman had done her best to “make the stars and planets all line up just right” as she and the other human, her ex-boyfriend Jared often said.

Right place. Right time. Put her with the right people. And most importantly, intoxicated enough to blab about everything but not so wasted that she’d lose consciousness.

There was nothing for them to do. But still they had wanted to send some observers to see things unfold their way. One of those “Bohemian” stage actors was going to get a major movie role one day surprisingly soon; he was destined to make it big... to eventually branch out from film acting into film directing. And Lucy would put the idea of a Stalko-Taco movie script into his head. On this night as it turned out. The film that would be unremarkably “meh” as far as box office performance, would have a behind-the-scenes scandal associated with it which would drag down the completely innocent President Black almost eleven years after its release. The timing of the scandal would be perfect for ruining his political career – annihilating his chances of re-election in 2040.

The things, plural now – as they had been at the rave, were moving and shimmering in exactly the same way. She wondered if she might have triggered a flashback by thinking about the skitching/stoned/rave/Stalko-Taco night. DMT or ayahuasca flashbacks shouldn’t be like this, though.

“Hey Whoopi Cat,” Puck from this Spring’s Midsummer said waving a hand...

Lucy smiled at that because she knew the complex private joke he was referencing.

“No it’s Lucycat. Whoopycat’s her mommy,” Hero from tonight corrected him.

She realized they were trying to get her to snap out of it or whatever, ‘cause she’d spaced.

Ayahuasca! Damn!

Back to Lucycat

Actors. I thought of the Paula McFadden character while talking to Poseidon earlier: Ask an actor a question and he gives you his credits. And the self-styled actor-surfer “Poseidon” happily did.

UTBU, Catch-22, Romeo and Juliet; these were the kilns in which their acting personalities were baked in their youth; high school and sometimes back to junior high or middle school.

I relayed to him that I was having a DMT flashback. They all thought it was awesome. Predictably, some wanted to know if I knew where to score some. Sorry, I told them. If I knew my way around Oakland better and could find where Gonk was hanging out these days... Boom! That got some attention. Excited cries of “you know The Gonk?!” Damn. He does get around. His reputation preceded him even with this theater crowd.

No. No psychedelics or anything like that for me. Just drunk off my ass on “rine and wum,” thanks to Poseidon. My pronunciation became a sort of meme for the evening naturally. I revealed perhaps a little too much. To this day I have no memory of ever arriving at the other after-party, but I was seen there by many who assured me I had a really good time! Hadar’s project was still on hold the last I heard... had it been a whole year ago? Or maybe more. The name creepypasta had taken off and was complete with a plausible parallel etymology. The stories were starting to creep people out, appropriately.

I wanted to expound on everything I was thinking about that might have triggered the flashback, if that indeed was what I’d experienced. But as we hit a major bump that jostled everyone in our van, only two words came out while I grappled with my dizzy mind. Maybe it was one word since Hadar liked to hyphenate it: Stalko-Taco.

That got some attention as well. Right away a male voice I couldn’t identify, belonging to someone who clearly knew about the creepypasta phenomenon, asked “you mean, like, the creepypasta character?”

I saw the other Puck – the Puck from last summer’s Midsummer, pull out his fancy smartphone; he was the one who’d made a Mondrian de Stijl pattern case for it. And I guessed he had started a little video going.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Flashing forward just for a moment: I was right. A couple of years later when I let him fuck me, I saw the phone in its dusty old Mondrian cover in a wire basket full of pens and markers on his desk. Since it looked un-used I casually asked him if he still wanted it anymore. I meant the case.

He said to go ahead and take the whole thing, phone and all, because it was two phones-ago out-of-date, he couldn’t find an older style charger for it, and it was basically a door-stop now. That, and he said the painting was on a cover that wouldn’t fit any newer phone in existence; he was also partial, by then, to his online-purchased Edvard Munch Scream phone cover.

I had it for what seemed like years, just sitting around as a piece of art. I even got married in the meantime. Never bothered to charge it up or look at anything on it. Vaguely I recalled that he said there wasn’t a password. Maybe. Or did I just imagine that? Anyway, it sat in a type of frame I made for it out of an old macaroni box and hung on a wall of my new wife’s apartment. After memories started getting erased, and after we identified the “if you weren’t a fan but had evidence or knowledge of it anyway, your memories are still intact” phenomenon... and after the one I nicknamed “Summer Puck” couldn’t remember Stalko-Taco at all?

I put two and two together and realized he probably would have destroyed this phone when the “worldwide hypnotic brain-scramble signal” went out, as Jared, Keith, and Gonk had named it. So I wondered if my vague almost-a-memory of that night was real. Finding an old charger in my wife’s “packrat room” as we called it wasn’t actually that hard. And wow! Was it ever real!

The story I told that night on his old phone video had never appeared in the Internet version up until that point. I let it slip out that “it” had ripped their cars apart and possibly incinerated four cops with a death ray, but went on to explain how they had just been beamed with some kind of teleportation device.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Returning to the night of the blurred-together multiple after parties:

...sometime later, a few hours after sunrise:

Lucy pondered that if this scene from her life had been part of a story or play/screenplay that she wrote, an editor would’ve tossed it back to her for a rewrite. They’d have called it trite, cliché, uninspired... Yes, this part of her life had become cliché. Waking up in a strange bed, with people she hadn’t remembered going to bed with the night before; no memory of how it came to be. It wasn’t the first time for that, but it was her first time being a hucow, that she could recall. The less said about the breast soreness, the better. It was more like nipple and areola soreness from the way the things were clamped on earlier. The machinery was gone now and all that remained were the photos and video clips that had been airdropped from some guys’ phones.

She viewed the scenes on a phone that some unknown nude-except-for-some-hiking-boots Scandinavian-looking woman held up for her to see in the deliberately-dimly-lit-because-we’re-all-hungover apartment. Lucycat’s reaction to it was like a roadkill can’t-look-away combination of skin-crawling weird feeling but mixed with strange fascination.

The other woman she woke up next to was someone she recognized as one of the others from the milking racks. Hers, specifically. They were grouped into pairs since each milking machine had four “suckers” or whatever they were. She found out later from a woman who – like her – was also having trouble getting her cowbell off her neck, that some of them might have been goat-milking machines. Besides her own milking rack partner, there were six others, or eight in all including tall-blonde-hiking-boots woman.

So this was actually a sexual fetish for some men?? The hucow thing? A milking fetish? She wasn’t quite sure what to call it! One of the other women assured her that it was, as Lucy helped her out… now also recognizing her from earlier last night at the first after-party, once they finally got her cow-head mask off. Her areolae were darker too, she said. It was as if the machines had given them all hickeys there.

Not surprisingly, Lucycat Beall had absolutely no memory of spilling the whole, true Stalko-Taco story the night before. She and the others were currently focused on finding the bathroom, their tops, their phones, and their car keys. Pretty much in that order.

The newer, much more successful and well-received version of the Stalko-Taco story appeared online within roughly a week of the night of the merged after parties. For years, no one from the original skater crowd, including Lucy who had talked, ever had any idea who’d talked.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Upon seeing the blast-from-the-past vid of herself on Summer Puck’s old phone, she promptly confessed everything to Keith. Although they might all share some legal culpability for something if charges were ever brought, he was still regarded as the lead decision-maker for all things Stalko-Taco. She knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t be upset, and she was right. He wasn’t. But as far as what to do with the old video? The phone?

His request to her sounded a little bizarre... hold onto the phone in a safe place, for now. And write a letter, snail-mail style, to a kid in Houston who knew their mutual friend, Gonk. She didn’t exactly understand what it was about or why he and Gonk couldn’t do it since they apparently knew the guy. But she’d felt bad upon finding out it had been her who spilled the beans and caused the mega-popular version to come into existence online. He assured her that he was no longer worried about “getting in trouble” over it, because it was a part of something much bigger.

She was kind of alarmed at Keith’s new cavalier attitude that nobody, including an entire police force or the national guard or whatever, could touch him... since his taco could simply beam them all naked to Euro Disney or something. And not only that, it seemed that the taco or some other power was adept at erasing the memories of any people who got too interested in Stalko-Taco. So basically he was right. But on that note... this memory-erasing power really scared her.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 14. 1 chapter, ending with chapter 63

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 14. 1 chapter, ending with chapter 63

↩️return to previous section, section 13

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Swifty

As long as Butthead’s phone was charged, in accordance with his responsibilities for reporting a national security breach, Swifty began to dial. He did not need 9 1 1, but an NSA equivalent for this situation. Unfortunately, even the top cryptanalyst on the planet couldn’t just crack an iPhone password with no special equipment or software. So 9 1 1 it was.

The secret words in response to the operator’s “what is your emergency?” were unknown to most civilians and even to many government employees. The operator knew exactly what they meant when he answered: federal agent in trouble and can’t get to regular-secure phone. After a bored monotone carefully worded phrase which basically meant “Hold please...” in their code, Swifty was transferred in a fraction of a second; no hold time at all, to speak with the second operator: “what is your callback number, sir?” she calmly intoned. Anyone eavesdropping would hear him reporting a dumpster fire and a 9 1 1 operator thanking him and declaring help to be on the way. The call to the next operator would appear to have been placed by the caller (him) after finishing with emergency services.

The number was easy enough. A sentence that he had worked out as a mnemonic gave him the letters which converted to numbers. Instead of “DID he come from here?” the word did was replaced with “Dad.” D - A - D - H - C - F - H (4148368) with the new Baton Rouge area code that he used to call his boyfriend Quinn for all those years, starting roughly in the late ‘90s. B – Y.

The “callback number” was not his; it was nothing of the sort. It was the number he wanted emergency services to call for him and connect him to.

It didn’t matter what he said when they answered. Just the fact that this number was being called at all would set the wheels in motion. The cavalry, swat team, or whatever, would be directed to his location. He thought as he ran through the labyrinthine district of old warehouses:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Excellent. I will definitely need backup. Substantial back up… Even with two machine pistols. I started to finally get winded; unusual for me since running is actually the one athletic thing I’m kind of good at. I have no idea what Beavis might be armed with, or for that matter how many Beavises there are, or if Butthead has regained consciousness yet.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Though not the track star he’d been in the eighth grade, Swifty had decided he could start by putting some considerable distance between himself and that first warehouse, and he did. But it would again be necessary to stop moving so fast so they could get a good fix on his location.

...and he had a connection now. A friendly voice came through on his unsecured line; she greeted him with a sunny, casual “hello?” Though a detailed message wasn’t needed to get the rescue operation started, he wanted to give as much data as he could.

“Hi honey,” he began. Not hi sweetie, hello dear, hey darlin’, etc. So they knew right away what department he was from. Voice print analysis would’ve already indicated a high probability that it was him speaking. He had been a consultant on the team that wrote that software and knew roughly what her screen was showing right now.

“I’m running late and still haven’t gone for groceries yet.”

“Okay,” she replied matter-of-factly, “will you still be able to stop and get the stuff?”

Something moving in between trash cans caught Swifty‘s eye in the corner of his vision. Not human. A raccoon? Possibly a possum? Maybe a big rat in the shadows casting larger shadows. He continued: “yes, of course. And I remembered we needed cooking oil, more coffee creamer, peanut butter, and also grapes… And oh yeah, I’ve been wanting to try the amaretto-flavored creamer lately.” He went on listing a few more “things they were out of.”

“Oh good,” she cheerfully chimed in, sounding relieved, “can you think of anything else we’re out of?”

“No, that’s about it for now,” still trying to keep an eye on the thing moving in the shadows between trash cans, his attention drifted from the call a bit. He saw another one now. So, two. They were too big to be any of those other things. Large, dog-sized maybe? But something about the shapes didn’t convey “dogs.” He did have the presence of mind to continue the call, speaking properly. There weren’t enough detailed words in the grocery code to describe the weird things he was eyeing up in the near darkness.

Dogs would have been easy to describe in the coded language; letting them know if his captors had guard dogs, attack-dogs, etc. would certainly be relevant – to let the rescue team know what they were getting into. To his relief (as a matter of official procedure) he knew they would not use anything lethal on dogs, and why, had there been any. The partial shopping list allowed him to give them as much information as he could about what had happened.

He remembered to specify “amaretto-flavored” coffee creamer, which changed the meaning from just a pistol to machine pistol or possibly small sub-machine gun. Either way it let them know that his abductors had automatic weapons. They would respond appropriately, and helicopters would be their most likely mode of transport, he guessed. He almost felt sorry for Butthead if he was conscious. If he and any number of Beavises came scampering out of that warehouse – assuming Butthead sounded the alarm – they would be in for the firefight of a lifetime.

Since it was an open line, with one end being a cell phone no less, they had to assume that an enemy AI could be listening; part of someone else’s “TIA program” or something analogous to it. It would hear nothing but a mundane conversation between two people. He tried to visualize what naval bases or other installations were nearby, estimate distances, helicopter flight times, etc. And also to factor in the time it took to scramble a team.

He didn’t really know what the operation would consist of, but her responses in the banal conversation code fully assured him that they had: seized control of the 9 1 1 system, locked onto the exact location of his signal on Sawyer Street near some railroad tracks, and were definitely sending in the big guns; “the heavy artillery” so to speak.

Meanwhile, back to those weird things in the darkness… If only they’d proven to be stray animals as he first thought. There were three of them now.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A new logical conundrum was staring at me. If my captors had given me drugs as part of my interrogation, then why leave me tied to a chair alone in a dusty, nearly dark old warehouse with only the gibbous moon and a distant street light shining in through skylights? Had I been given drugs? Almost certainly. There is no known physical phenomenon that can act like what I’m seeing! Those dark things amongst the trash cans! They had to be hallucinations.

Perhaps I had already been interrogated under the influence of whatever drug or drugs they’d administered, told them everything they requested, had no memory of any of it, and simply woke up before they were ready to get rid of me; either a corpse disposal or a return plan with some plausible explanation.

Damn hallucinations! If only I’d done more drugs during my college clubbing days with my friends! Then perhaps I would know more about hallucinogenics, drugs in general, and which one could possibly produce these kinds of side effects.

Seriously, my sarcastic thoughts aside, I pondered: Holography? Yes, maybe. As choices of subject matter for holograms go, amorphous blobs wouldn’t be all that challenging. Emissive conducting polymers? Yeah right, moron. Enough to cover a quarter of the street, much of the sidewalk, some trash cans, and the side of a warehouse? And in either case how would they have even known I’d run this way? My shuttle run betwixt the buildings had consisted of random turns. Even the fact that I was going to escape was something they couldn’t hav– –

Kraj! I flashed back to the Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge and the Stainless Steel Rat Wants You from my childhood. Seized by the same doubt he was experiencing when he escaped from Kraj and the Gray Men. What if my whole escape was an elaborate illusion? The warehouse, Butthead, the phone call? Had I revealed our code to them under the influence of some drug-induced fantasy world and was I still really strapped into a hospital bed and being readied for phase two?

Like diGriz, I had to assume this was real or I would accomplish nothing by standing here lost in thought. So I must behave as if this is real. I did escape. I am here.

But I’m still on drugs, right? These things?

What looks like that? What moves that way?

I’ve got it: cartoons! From cartoons, anyway. Instant hole. The Ant in the Aardvark, the Road Runner and Coyote. And maybe an earlier cartoon just called “instant hole” or something like that? But these things weren’t limited to circular shapes only. Though two-dimensional, they could change their shapes to square or rectangular; I watched as they morphed from shape to shape, but while staying 2-D.

Their movement across surfaces reminded me also of times when the cartoon character gets smashed into the side of a cliff or a building, then while flattened, the 2-D version of themselves would slide down to the ground. But these could slide upwards as well.

Up from the street, over a concrete curb, onto a sidewalk, up to a warehouse wall, and finally up the wall… morphing into two identical rectangular shapes of a size that would be reasonable for windows. The third one chose to remain on the sidewalk as a nondescript blob, looking like an oil slick in the waxing moon’s light.

The other two had not only become rectangles, but started to decorate themselves as windows also. They took on a rusty metal grid, each one of them looking like it was composed of several small panes of glass. The “glass panes” started to reflect the moon and distant street lights. The glass then acquired the look of a filthy, dusty coating; enough to discourage a passerby from trying to peer “through” them because it would simply be hopeless to expect to see anything. Anyone driving by would assume the old warehouse wall had always contained those two dirty windows. Anyone that is, who hadn’t just watched them slither up from the street and become windows.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

He spotted the first helicopter coming in just above rooftop level. The local cops would’ve been ordered to stand down, but would be available if any a– –

The explosion was still far enough away from him that it did that flash-bang timelag thing. There was a noticeable difference between the time of the visible explosion and the sound shockwave, like on the range when they had fired the M-203‘s. Whatever beam the left window had fired acted so quickly that he hadn’t even had time to mentally register what was going on. It wasn’t a visible-light laser beam like in typical sci-fi. Perhaps an infrared laser could do it. Heat waves like a stretch of road through a desert on a blistering hot day emanated from a line that directly connected that window-creature to the burning mass of debris from the exploded helicopter.

All of the gunship’s wreckage was still adrift in the night air. And it happened so quickly, he tried to tell himself, that the crew and passengers had felt nothing. He didn’t know that for sure and had no time to contemplate anything as he instinctively went for one of Butthead’s Berettas.

If we’re still going with the theory that this is all real and not a hallucination, then that “window” just downed a helicopter gunship and killed several US service-members. Twelve people would be a reasonable crew size or passenger complement for something like an old Huey; he wasn’t sure how that translated to the modern helicopters. So as another cartoon once said: “them’s fightin’ words!”

Both of the window looking things had now detached themselves from the outer wall and were presently levitating over the curb.

Fine, he thought:

The closer they are, the better my aim will be. My fighting skills are basically nonexistent – I perform feats of math and logic for the NSA – but it was as if I was guided by some of the recently dead special-ops guys. In one fell swoop I got a Beretta out, removed the safety, chambered a round, and set it to three-round burst.

My first volley of “armor-piercing” rounds went point blank into the “left window.” It was the one that had fired “the beam” as I’d mentally cataloged it.

There was already a new beam emerging from the other levitating flat structure as I did this. The window on the right, as it were, had that shimmery heat wave kind of thing coming from it also now. I dared permit myself a few milliseconds of sideways glance.

My eyes came back to it immediately and I directed a second three round burst into that one as well. It had indeed demolished a second of three helicopters, though this one didn’t completely explode in the air. I could hear it behind me making that “aircraft coming in for a crash landing” whine, then the impact of the wreckage jarred my bones even though it was still a considerable distance behind me. Along with this came enough light from the fire to cast a dance of shadows on the warehouse walls.

I am getting those men killed! The panicky voice in one corner of my mind was rebutted by a more logical one: enemy combatants are killing those men. If they were attacking the Pentagon, or Langley, or Fort Meade, a military response would have been mounted. You are a piece of equipment that is valuable to this nation. They snuck into Camp Pickett, stole the piece of equipment, and now special-ops guys are trying to retrieve it.

And if you had gone to them with your alien theories? That is obviously what these are, I think it’s safe to say: aliens? If you’d gone to them with this, they wouldn’t have been able to say they believed you even if they did. And these things? They would still exist and attack sooner or later. So your failure to be

chicken-little and warn everyone about “the aliens“ didn’t cause this either.

My ponderings didn’t get in the way of blasting these fucking things. But an inevitable observation required me to do something else. As I took out Butthead’s second Beretta I was amazed at my sudden dexterity as I chambered a round while still holding the first pistol. Their response to my shots had been unexpected though, just purely from the point of view of physics: they weren’t reacting at all.

It wasn’t as if they were heavily armored like with metal plates or something, and my bullets simply wouldn’t pierce through them. They were levitating objects. Even if they were somehow equipped with enough armor to deflect the brass-Teflon rounds, the knockdown energy of three 9mm slugs hitting in rapid succession should’ve at least moved them slightly... possibly like a paper mobile hanging from a string, reacting ever so slightly to an air current? But no. Nothing.

If they were holograms as I previously thought? That could account for the lack of effect. (Never mind how holograms could fire laser or maser beams.) I hadn’t noticed any bullet holes in the metal wall of the warehouse behind them. Should I be worried that bystanders could be hit by stray bullets if anyone were inside? No way to tell at the moment. But if not holograms, then another possibility was that Butthead had loaded up with blanks. Absurd, yes. But not technically hard to comprehend. Would this require some kind of blank firing adapter like the M-16 had when we’d used MILES gear? That depends: are they gas operated? Probably not. But that’s beyond my level of expertise in firearms.

I did know that blanks would contain some sort of wading; the slugs which I’d observed would need to be ejected properly for an automatic pistol to operate right. The blank thing seemed very unlikely.

And moving on to another aspect of the blanks question: it was just absurd, because really, who packs this kind of fire power in dual shoulder holsters and then for some reason chooses to run blank ammo through both of them? A guy trying to scare someone? Or someone who actually did intend to let me think I escaped, wanted to employ an elaborate ruse to make me think I was well armed, and wanted to see whom I would contact and how, and what the response time would be and what it would consist of…

I cut myself off, mentally, although this line of thought in my head had only taken microseconds; I devised and Alexandrian solution. Rapidly switching the first selector to single fire and with the new one already on single, I placed two calculated shots from each pistol a few degrees off and down, into the base of a large block-ish heavy duty plastic trashcan.

Nope. Not blanks. My experiment confirmed it not only with a noticeable double recoiling of the garbage laden can which spun it around almost 90° but also with an enormous “exit wound” on the other side of the can as both slugs pooled together their momentum in blasting out a watermelon-sized hole. It disgorged a torrent of crap into the gutter, some of it old paint and possibly glue.

Though my attention was only diverted for one or two seconds, the third entity had begun to morph in the absence of my gaze. It had been a calculated risk, once again, but I thought it worthwhile: if I had been blazing away with blanks, then clearly there would’ve been some more productive use of my time that I could have been pursuing.

Now the third entity, which had never chosen to assume window-like form, was struggling to rise up from being an oil slick on the ground and attempting to become three-dimensional… And humanoid. For its efforts, the form it achieved was somewhere between one of the shadow beasts that Patrick Swayze had seen coming to carry away the bad people in Ghost and the thing that killed Yar on Star Trek the Next Generation.

It’s failure to mimic human form didn’t hinder it’s ability to use the heat ray – yes, it was equipped with one of those also. It powered up quickly and I could see the heat wave effect disappearing out into the corner of my vision. I didn’t need to visually confirm that it was going after the third helicopter! Both guns out now, with both on three round burst, I went full throttle Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton in the bungalow. Check out time!

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

0 notes

devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 15. 3 chapters, ending with chapter 66

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 15. 3 chapters, ending with chapter 66

↩️return to previous section, section 14

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Castadiva

“Castadiva is at La Movida Madrileña in LA!” The paparazzo eagerly spoke into his watch, like a kid at a sleepover who was too excited to sleep and sending messages to other friends who weren’t present that evening.

It was a sort of business “luncheon,” although transpiring after midnight, with her agents & PR team and the studio people to discuss her contract for working as a costume designer on the movie. The movie of course was “Stalko-Taco Doesn’t Exist. Really.”

It’s a very current, kind of hip-trendy establishment... or so they’d spin it in the tabloids. The place reminded `Diva of what Paige said on Charmed: when you’re trying to be that hip, you’re not. Or was it: if you’re trying that hard to be hip, you’re not. Something like that. She’d find the episode later. Her husband and her wife were both fans. They’d most likely wanna watch it with her.

So when she saw things on the wall that looked just like the stuff from the parking-garage rave back in ‘96, she just assumed it was some light show gimmick. Apparently it’s stuff that people who do lighting – lighting techs? – like to use. The music was certainly the same as the stuff that the DJs played at raves back in that decade, and the costumes too. Some weren’t quite getting it. Their ensembles were either for the wrong venue or a little off in time. They succeeded in looking a little bit dated. But not in a fun retro way; in a clueless, sad, we-think-this-is-what-we-really-should-be-wearing-to-look-hip kinda way.

She had brought along Anita. Anita De Kennmey. `Diva had gotten her an acting role in the movie. Her agent had taken on Anita, agreeing to represent her. More like, he knew how to follow orders when `Diva spoke. He’d learned from experience that it wasn’t really possible for her to send him a bad lead. And regarding Anita’s part, it wouldn’t even really be acting for her – since the role was for a drag queen performing on stage – what Anita was for real in her life. Though with a declining level of success lately. It was the least she could do for her, after everything. Unlike the others from those days, she didn’t want to take any gifts that `Diva offered... Houses or jobs as live-in on-sight supervisors.

Ms. De Kennmey had been her “ticket out of here” back in the day, Castadiva always reminded her. Out of the shelter. It was her big professional break. Getting an actual performing drag queen who had a large audience, during her on-stage show, to not only wear her designs that she made... but to point it out to her audience whilst twirling around to show off! “Doesn’t this look utterly fabulous!?” And then of course when the cheers died down, getting in the plug: “made personally for me by my fashion-designer friend, CASTADIVA TALAMANTEZ!!!” She would yell like a tv announcer introducing a superstar-guest on a show.

And of course she would just happen to be there in the audience – Anita motioning a hand out into the crowd, spotlight picking her out, “give her a big hand everybody! Castadiva!” What they had given her, was more business. The drag community adored her designs. She was easily able to make things in triple extra large sizes, and to accommodate bulky shoulders, and all the other needs that their special world naturally preferred. Not that other drag queens couldn’t and didn’t sew their own clothes, but the number of newcomers who weren’t hooked up with anyone in fashion in San Francisco back then was astounding. Her prices were reasonable; those who ordered that shit online had to pay through the nose for it, no question about it.

Many gay men who were part of the audiences at those shows, but not in drag themselves, wanted to know if she could do men’s clothing. Admittedly, she did knock-offs at first. Sort of. But yes, she could, and did. To the point where she had so many backorders, but also enough cash deposits, that she both needed to and was able to hire a professional seamstress to help her. Then another. Then eventually a small squad of seamstresses. Then a squad so large they had to get some professional office space in Oakland and stop working out of Aurelio’s apartment. All that business in the span of several weeks just from a few basic hacks.

She got away with it though, because the designers she was knocking off were not vegan. Her cruelty-free and vegan garments were all the rage in the Bay Area and soon throughout Cali. Structurally and geometrically they might have been similar with only a few signature variations to set her designs apart. But she didn’t really regard them as copies since she wasn’t abusing, torturing, and murdering animals to produce these shapes.

An interviewer from the online component of a major fashion magazine, with obvious malice aforethought towards her career, had asked her while trying to sound innocent and serious: “Even though you’re making a few changes that are sort of unique to your work, aren’t you basically just copying (insert names here)?” as he listed some of the purported victims of her fashion-plagiarism.

Her daydreaming was suddenly and viciously interrupted by Stalko-Taco. Or so it seemed for just a second. A hologram. A really expensive one, she could tell. Arranged by the clowns on her side or the clowns on their side? Most likely theirs. They had money to burn on that kinda shit. Her people wouldn’t do it with their own money, and couldn’t use hers without authorization; she most certainly had not given any.

To say that these people were rich was vague and useless. It would be like saying her friends in college were drunk – at a particular weekend happening. So what? Everyone was. You’d need to be more specific if you had some kind of point to make, e.g. the one that was drunk enough to get a tattoo of “liquor in the front poker in the rear” on her lower back with an arrow pointing down her coin slot; the one they called the ambulance for at Arbratto’s when he collapsed on the DJ due to alcohol poisoning while trying to request Rock Your Baby from the seventies, etc. Which drunk? And how drunk?

So: specifically, Castadiva Talamantez was a centimillionaire. But only a little one, weighing in at just over $330 million. Most of the others had more than her net worth; multi- centimillionaires? If that’s even a word. And billionaires. That’s a word. And there were at least a couple. But none of them had any attitude about it; her philanthropy was widely respected and it was estimated that the number would’ve been at least doubled had she not so freely given of herself.

Mr. Seven-hundred-twenty million and Ms. Nine-oh-five million had been the principal oenophiles in the wine debate session she’d inadvertently started and they were responsible for the two varieties of swill she was presently able to choose from.

Her heart was leveling off from the revving up it went through when their moronic taco appeared. They all laughed as it started its Irish jig or riverdance or other number. The dancing didn’t quite match the musical beats that filtered up through the floor from La Movida Madrileña’s downstairs nightclub section. It was the one she’d mentally nicknamed bald-billionaire who ultimately claimed credit for it. The paparazzi were devouring it enthusiastically – it was sort of a movie trailer or coming attractions announcement – and the brightest of them realized video was the best way to capture it – but either way, no flash! Contraindicated with projected holograms.

She thought that if she’d been a better magician, she might’ve slight-of-handed the wine glass she’d started, under the table and carefully dumped it out to get rid of the rest of the shit. But that still wouldn’t get her the Carménère that she really craved. Then, even if she had the Carménère, would the residue of the previous wine spoil its taste?

Well it seemed that the real Stalko-Taco, who was present somewhere nearby, was going to solve the problem for her. She watched expressionless as the glass drained; the wine disappearing as if it was being guzzled by some invisible vinophile. Then she watched a clear liquid appear to rise up internally from nowhere and fill the glass – presumably water? Then it drained into nowhere once again. Finally a dark red liquid rose up to take its place. Who did this character think he was, Jesus? She pondered that Jesus would have probably avoided all the pretentiousness of this place. Although he was supposed to be focused on sinners and frequently sought their company; most likely no shortage of them here.

Anyhoo, back to that real actual wine which had actually appeared in her glass... She thought to herself: “No way, guys. Whoever you are. I’m not drinking it now.” At least with the other stuff, the establishment’s own sommelier had overseen the wine when they brought it out.

Something kind of psychic was also happening at the same time. `Diva could almost swear that she was in contact somehow with Amber.

Amber was in San Francisco still, so not physically there. But at her moment of being startled, with her heart racing a little bit and blood pressure no doubt spiking, she almost imagined that she could see a ghostlike translucent form of Amber across the table.

Now gazing at her new wine offering, she could hear Ambraluxia’s voice softly speaking in one ear over her left shoulder and simultaneously felt a gentle touch of a hand on her left shoulder. The spoken word was merely her first name: Castadiva.

There was no one sitting on her left side at the moment. She hadn’t had that much to drink. But no. Still not gunna drink it... whoever or whatever you are!

She slid her phone out and DM-ed Amber. Amber answered her at once: “Hey girrrllll! I was literally just thinking about you thirty seconds ago!” Her otherwise bubbly reply momentarily creeped `Diva out more... if whoever was trying to fuck with her had also hacked into their channels of communications, she might not be talking to the real Ambraluxia.

On the other hand if it was really her, then the psychic visit from moments ago very well might have been real; because that thirty seconds ago comment fit perfectly. And if that was real, was something benevolent like the actual taco responsible for filling her wine glass?

They were returning to the table, but in phones-and-devices-out mode. So she knew they’d be back at the discussion again soon, but she still had a minute or two for Amber.

“In boring business meeting rn. Might not be able 2alk much, but I thought of u 2. Like almost a psychic vision.” She saw that Amber was live streaming on another account as well; a public Wiccan ritual, but that they were in a guided meditation at the moment. So her first and only priestess was about to be very busy again momentarily. “It looks like we’ll both have to go soon. Can talk later today if you want. Sorry for addressing you as Amber & not ur craft name. Didn’t know u were in ritual at – –”

“Don’t be silly girl. You’ve known me long enough its Witchever 4u I wouldn’t even care if you still call me Batgirl!”

Yes. She had to go too. But the “Batgirl” thing put her at ease. That was truly the real Amber she was speaking with and not a simulation or imposter. Still, reaching for the farther glass which she hadn’t tried yet, and knowing they might be watching... Miles Raymond’s advice came in handy (though never taking him seriously about the merlot thing).

Swirling it in her hand but also wrapping her palm up around it like with a brandy snifter. Was that appropriate? Probably not. But reds are supposed to be room temperature or something close, and it was seriously chilly the way they had the air in La M.M. – so maybe it gave the impression that she cared about temperature. And smell. Get the nose in there. Noses and smells were a big deal to them. And finally sip.

“Hmmmm.” Loud enough to be heard by those nearest her. Including Ms. $905 million & Mr. $720 million. It kind of reminded her of the time she tried to mix isopropyl rubbing alcohol with some cranberry grape juice, she thought while thoughtfully tilting her head just a bit. She could see smiles on several of the faces; they really seemed to care a lot about what she thought of their wine selections. After another couple of somewhat larger sip-gulps she managed to get out “not bad” while keeping a straight face and merely raising an eyebrow as if impressed.

“Okay now the other one!”

Shit! They hadn’t seen her already try it before and during the hologram taco commotion and were now unknowingly encouraging her to sip from the glass that was either supernaturally tampered with or manipulated by some clever technology. The other swill? Miles’ probably-didn’t-de-stem comment might’ve applied to it... had been equally unimpressive. What had Gordon Gekko said? That’s a dog with different fleas?

She bought more time as she happened to make eye contact with the sommelier: “I know you probably don’t do food, but would it be possible to have them bring me some water crackers perhaps and some hummus that isn’t very spicy?”

“An excellent idea, ma’am!” He enthused with genuine sincerity, adding “you would most definitely want to clear your palate between tasting these two – and that plus a few more moments to let it breathe should work splendidly.” He’d already motioned to another server who overheard, and the kid was away before he finished complimenting `Diva.

The business conversational tone had resumed at the table and her mind wandered once again to her interrupted thoughts before the holographic taco disturbance: the interviewer with “...aren’t you basically just copying,” and so on.

Her immediate, sassy, but forceful reply of “No, I am not copying them. I’m correcting their mistakes. If they don’t like it that I’m making clothing that on the surface resembles their design attempts, maybe they should try and make their clothing right in the first place. Then it wouldn’t be necessary for someone to go back and fix their mistakes...” pissed off all the right people.

It completely floored that interviewer – unintentionally catapulting her to international stardom, but there was no time-delay like in tv.

The question he asked was just supposed to have demolished a nobody.

Her answer instead, he knew immediately, would cause controversy, get people inflamed, get her adored by others, win her new followers who’d have never known about her otherwise. It only took her about sixteen seconds to rattle off the words clearly. By the time he put his coffee cup down and fumbled around looking for a mute button or something, it was too late.

As he live streamed her words around the planet he looked on helpless as the woman who could soon afford to buy the parent company of his magazine was born from a homeless person who had eaten out of trash cans at bus stops a few months ago, who was toying with her badge that she still liked to wear from the homeless shelter in a simple childlike manner.

Bendergeld, who infuriated both feminists and vegans at once (and not to mention the actress who played Paige) and was always decried as a huge thundering asshole in her town, died before he could have issued a retort if he’d cared to – and still got no sympathy in death. The “respect and don’t speak ill of the dead” thing evidently didn’t apply to him online, in comments sections of Castadiva’s and other people’s posts. Once dead, as he was no longer in charge, the enterprises he’d overseen gradually backed off on being animal-hostile.

Meanwhile fur was officially outlawed in California – a state which would have had the sixth largest economy of nations on Earth had it seceded and become a nation. The financial impact was noticeable. And again, wearers of animal-hostile clothing or users of animal-hostile accessories who didn’t get cups of red acrylic paint dropped on them by drones from overhead or shot with paintball guns, still were harassed and got stickers reading “assholes wear fur” surreptitiously stuck on their backs while walking in public and were followed and live-streamed on social media; sometimes by her old friend and “original Stalko-Taco pal” Keith if he crossed paths with them. He always had a supply of stickers for various occasions as he went out on missions to do his guerrilla graffiti art for the cause.

As the 20s roared on, one of the other butthurt designers whom the interviewer had referenced? He bill-cosbyed his way out of a career as the archaic chloral hydrate-and-wine date rape drug he concocted was revealed to be the cause of death of the fetus of one of his employee-victims... a woman who didn’t just win her civil court case against him but subsequently won her proxy battle and acquired a controlling interest in his company. The “I wouldn’t have used it on her if I’d known she was pregnant” comment from a YouTube interview was deemed admissible and appalled jurors at at least three of his trials. (His admission was relevant and admissible for other plaintiffs as well as the one who had lost her unborn child.)

Then speaking of trials and prison sentences... Still another one of these cretins died an unfortunate death, drowning in prison when other prisoners somehow found out he was in for… well, forget about what he was in for.

Along with a few other whiners, it seemed like all the people who’d had a problem with their designs being “copied” by Castadiva, had far bigger problems than their designs being copied by Castadiva... death and jail time being chiefly among them.

But never minding all that – it’s now trivia for investigative journalism tv specials that run marathon-style on weekends when the full-time news networks take a breather. Ultimately it was the economic pressure that began to work as label after label decided to drop cruelty from their fashion repertoire. By the late 20s that kind of “fashion” had become associated with being “lower class,” just like smoking cigarettes had become a lower class thing in the previous century. One successful action movie after another adopted the trope of the fur or leather wearing trailer-dwelling-meth-lab-rat. It ceased to be thought of as the choice of civilized people and became regarded as “trashy” looking.

California emerged to be just the right place at the right time for her to thrive. They lovingly embraced her: a Chicana designer who grew up in Echo Park and El Monte, who was a cruelty-free vegan from the beginning, and just felt like “one of their own” to Californians. Why buy things made by assholes? Instead you could buy from sweet Castadiva, whose name they learned, meant “Pure Goddess” in Latin.

The light-show-gimmick things on the wall would have gone completely unnoticed to `Diva and become part of the same distant memory bundle as the rave of yesteryear, had it not been for another peculiar sighting: a woman. So familiar! But who…

Weird Shapes

The Princess of Pentacles intervened and stopped the one employee of hers who was having some inappropriate fun with an important, principal player in the part of this universe which they wanted to see become reality.

They were standing by to disassemble him into his component particles if needed. But only as a last resort as they had reason to think it might upset The Princess.

That, and he was valuable to them as well. It was just a matter of getting each blob-of-quarks-and-leptons to interact perfectly with the others.

It really would have helped them if they had understood the rules of behavior for quark-and-lepton-blob society. They were slowly learning what they needed, thanks to The Princess.

Brenda

Once she got the hard copy of the Stalko-Taco story, her first reaction was to want to contact that kid Travis. She never exchanged information with him back then, and what’s worse, she found out that the teacher who supervised the special classes (normally on the faculty at another middle school) had since retired. While the staff at both Grissom and Chaffee clearly remembered Bren and were happy to hear from her again, no one knew what she was talking about regarding notes from the creative writers’ version of the Summer “camps” for the arts.

Then her memory gripped her and she felt those goosebumps again, like electricity making the hairs on her arms stand up. An old Sanyo katana. Years ago. It didn’t work even then. Her dad had upgraded to a “BlackBerry” and gave her the deactivated phone because it could still reach 9 1 1, as all phones had to in accordance with federal law. Finding it was simple. Finding the charger took another two evenings. But when she did finally get it charged up she was awarded the payoff: a photo.

Yes, the thing was state-of-the-art back then and it had a camera on it. The lighting was good enough since natural sunlight was shining in onto the teacher’s desk. Surreptitiously, and probably somewhat illegally, she had snapped a photo of a printout on the teacher’s desk when no one was looking. The teacher was out of the room, most of the kids hadn’t arrived yet, and the three others who were there were facing each other in a triangle completely engrossed in their conversation and paying no mind to her.

It was honestly just something she wanted to do related to politeness and socialization: on the first day everyone had stood up and made their introductions. Not exactly as useful as it might seem. A room full of about thirty kids from almost as many middle schools? Rapid introductions and brief blurbs at best. To be able to recall names and places of origin and anything else relevant they may have said about themselves, she would have needed to have a video camera rolling throughout the session. At least this way, she’d reasoned, she could approach people during breaks and appear to know their names if they had a t-shirt or other garment on which identified their school (something the teacher had strongly encouraged them to wear and which roughly two-thirds of the students seemed perfectly willing to do).

So now, years later, she had it! Travis‘s full name, first middle and last, along with his school name. It wasn’t much to go on. No city; but it had to be someplace pretty close. San Marcos, it turned out. Next, google to the rescue. The boy had done well for himself in other areas; won enough awards in forensics, math, and something called industrial arts (for drafting) that the local newspaper had actually printed an article about him. It was one of the easiest searches ever. And yes, his parents were from an old enough generation that they still had a listed landline in 2017. Fortune was smiling on her.

But it was short-lived. She basically had the same conversation with him about Stalko-Taco that she was to have with Wheeler later on, minus the cosplay, outfits, Polaroids and stuff. And minus one other thing: he had absolutely NO clue who she was.

Yep. It was as if his memory had been wiped clean of it, and then some.

Just as she was about to hang up after apologizing for disturbing him, he implored her with a sense of urgency that she could practically feel through the phone.

“Wait!”

His one word seemed to send a magical psychic vibe out into the universe, like that moment when Kyle McLaughlin obliterated Sting – demonstrating that he no longer needed the weirding module. Ok. He had her attention. She waited.

She admitted in her vlog entry that she was probably being melodramatic with the Dune analogy. But the guy’s word did grab her attention with its powerful emotional delivery.

“Hey Schmidt-bug! Are you gunna sleep in your geek-cocoon tonight or what?” My brothers insisted that I looked like a teen-version of Ted Schmidt from that old Queer As Folk cable show. Personally I only saw a distant resemblance in him. Like maybe we could be cousins. But that applied to half the guys in San Antonio as well. How I came to also be associated with a bug was shrouded in the mystery of their peculiar logic.

I began putting away my devices and hollered up to them that I was coming out to get food as soon as I could get there, while I maneuvered around and opened up the Faraday cage. And yes, you guessed right. It’s not really Brenda again, but me writing a synopsis of her story from the many hours of vlog files that I now have access to on her two actual phones that she’d intended to use as backups in case her memory “got erased.”

I wondered if I would notice if my memory of any class throughout my school experiences simply got erased from my mind. How would I know? It’s an obvious logical paradox. If someone asks you to list all the things that you can’t remember? You can’t produce that list. Duh. If you could, then that would mean you could remember them.

So for starters I wanted to talk about her journey to organize “The Rememberers” as she first called them; now called “The Un-Erasables.” Upon realizing that she alone seems to remember this particular story, and then finally finding evidence of it to prove that it wasn’t just her imagination... What does she do? That’s what led me to Travis. And his reaction gave me some insight into whether I’d notice a class being erased from my mind. Peripheral evidence; that’s what did it for him. He knew something wasn’t quite right.

He knew for a fact that he went to this “creative writing camp” a few summers ago. There’d been a certificate of completion or whatever that he ran across in his records once in a while and other clues like friends and family who knew he was there and had verified that it happened... but he’d thought a number of times how odd it was that he remembered absolutely nothing of the experience. What had he done, he wondered, slept through the entire thing?

From what I’ve learned about him, he’s the exact opposite of an un-erasable. Some of his other memories vanished even though they didn’t have anything to do with Stalko-Taco. Not only could he not recall the symposium itself, he had no recollection of anything else he might’ve done in the intervening hours or on weekends during that part of the summer.

Brenda and I both had a habit of putting the term camp in quotation marks, because it wasn’t a stay-over or even a single overnight kind of event. Students just used some form of transportation to get there every day and met, Monday through Friday in a classroom for four weeks, like with many summer schools.

Brenda said they’d arranged a high number of interesting field trips during the short time; they had the use of any number of school buses which they might’ve needed. Six trips, altogether. The botanical gardens in Austin, some lesser-known small museums, and one big one down in San Antonio that took up a whole day. The teachers who participated in the workshop agreed that “changes of scenery” were conducive to creative writing. The same classroom again and again was conducive to dark-and-stormy-night and Webster’s-dictionary-defines appearing at the beginnings of essays.

Furthermore, there had been other assignments besides just the creation of a writer’s guide. That one, for which they’d both chosen a creepypasta, was only one exercise out of many. And Travis unfortunately remembered none of them. And none of the field trips. He couldn’t recall even one of the other students or the three teachers – the one in charge plus two teaching assistants – who had taken turns at the helm.

Not only that, he couldn’t find any of his notes or handouts – any other printed materials whatsoever from this seminar. It could be that for some students who found school in general to be really boring – my brother Franco immediately came to mind – forgetting about a class with this level of thoroughness was commonplace. But for me, Brenda, Wheeler, and I was pretty sure for this guy Travis? That was simply unheard of. Moreover this was an optional thing; a voluntary class that smart students participated in because they wanted to and found it interesting.

Now it was all completely gone. Travis had actually paraphrased the Roy Batty thing about teardrops in rain when talking to Brenda about it. Hmm… drama queen much? At the same time though, it made him sound interesting. Like someone I might like to meet someday.

That was quite impossible now. Any association with him would amplify my chances of getting on their radar. Whoever they were.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 3 years ago

Text

Section 16. 1 chapter, ending with chapter 67

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 16. 1 chapter, ending with chapter 67

↩️return to previous section, section 15

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Castadiva

Yes, a woman. She got `Diva’s attention but it wasn’t clear just what was special about her…

Oh my god! Eileen... Villarreal? No, that’s not it. New Home? New Settlement. Villanueva? Maybe.

But no, wait. Jared.

Yeah, his ex-girlfriend; aka “the bullet he dodged!”

We’d had an extensive conversation about what her name was and why. Just trying to remember the first last name before the hyphen… Italy. Venice. Canals – that’s it.

Eileen Canales-Villanueva! But she wasn’t Hispanic at all. The surnames came through her mom remarrying plus official adoption as a teen, followed by her own failed marriage which had included her decision to hyphenate; so not the Spanish naming tradition which results in two surnames with a hyphen in anglophone countries.

Then in college in the late 90s and subsequently in grad school, Jared had reported, Eileen found it useful to be thought of as a minority. She said it was to “defend herself against the politically correct thought police” in a culture of “reverse discrimination against whites” on college campuses around the country. Whatever. Loser. But she had looked “vaguely Mediterranean” as Jared described her, spoke enough Spanish with an LA American dialect, pronounced it well enough, and even knew cultural details including saying the sana sana thing for kids... so people bought it.

All the power-brokery wheely-dealy types at the table, on Castadiva’s side as well as the studio’s, had taken another necessary break for communing with their phones before negotiating could resume. So she didn’t look too awkward, lost in thought, surveying the crowd and the scenery. And she avoided any more gaze in psycho’s direction lest she accidentally make eye contact and the “entrepreneur” might slither over and try to begin smarming up a conversation.

She focused instead on the weird wall art with its moving two-dimensional light show. She tried to appear interested artistically in the wall art while avoiding sipping her mystery wine that came from either the $6,000 bottle or the $4,000 bottle. She couldn’t remember which one they’d given her to taste in the other one, but obviously it wasn’t the same choice anymore; it hadn’t mattered since they were both crap and reminded her of cleaning crews using chemicals to try and clean floors in musty old buildings.

The grocery store Chilean Carménère at Desmond’s house-warming party had been better and reminded her of springtime backyard barbecues in Austin during her college days. Thank Goddess and God there’d been vegans in Texas. Austin was weird, they’d told her. It was a wonderful weird for her. Meanwhile that cheap wine served at “Parkinson’s guy’s” party, for those not abstaining due to AA or other sobriety goals, had brought back that combination for her and the other Austinites… of dark chocolate and smoke from the grill. Grilled tofu and bean-burger patties – that saturated the warm night air accompanied by The Chemical Brothers: Setting Sun.

A new problem, as she was taking in the scent of the new “other” wine now that her clearing-the-palate ruse was played out: the light show wall, as she’d been calling it in her mind, momentarily turned into a sort of giant screen TV monitor. Something she also thought could simply be part of the show. But in such a way that it was a glitch. Maybe not running correctly. Just for a second, it showed some scene from a movie where a soldier is running, carrying another soldier on his back – presumably wounded – and he gets shot down somehow. Then it blinked rapidly and flashed to some kind of blood and guts monster from a horror movie. Then blinking rapidly again, It flashed to the tailgate of a truck, from the perspective of somebody looking down at the street behind the truck, which was in motion. The person looking down was on a skateboard.

When it panned out rapidly, the person was revealed to be none other than young Castadiva back in 1996. It startled her again for a number of reasons. There was no video footage of that skitching incident. Even if they’d had phones with video capabilities back then it’s unlikely that anyone riding near `Diva would’ve maneuvered a phone or any other kind of camera into position at that specific angle to capture something like this; and they certainly couldn’t have done it without her noticing.

Now she really wondered about drugs, hallucinogens, something possibly being used to spike her previous wines, and she remembered that awful chloral hydrate story. Fuck it. The new stuff smelled just like Carménère. If “they” were going to drug her... whoever they were, then they already had. Moreover, she was seated at a table with people whose aggregate net worth exceeded the GDP of several developing nations; they could certainly get her the finest medical care if she had been poisoned. Two of them had availed themselves of the helipads on the adjoining buildings’ rooftops and arrived in their helicopters.

She took a sip. Then a gulp. Other than maybe the brief interaction with Amber, this was the best part of the evening so far. It truly was the type of Carménère that she remembered from Austin and from Desmond’s party.

“Aww yeah! Someone just had an Anton Ego moment! She likes that one better,” the voice from the table punctuated her downing of the “second” wine as they perceived it.

It was indeed her current fave, that same formerly-thought-to-be-extinct Carménère varietal from the other night. But as far as the rest of the table knew, she had just chosen nine-o-five woman’s wine pick over seven-twenty man’s selection. The woman was gleeful about it, as if patting herself on the back and also kidding 720 man. His selection had turned out to be the $6K bottle.

They appeared to have a playful rivalry though. In fact they were even a bit flirty. Both married, however. To other people. And were they not into swapping or openness or polyamory or anything? Or might they consider merging the two old-style marriages into a polyamorous tetrad as California Law now easily allowed them to do? Oh well, she thought, not her business.

The wall was back to being more or less an art exhibit as far as she could tell, and not displaying moments from her personal life which couldn’t possibly have been captured on video.

Then déjà vu hit yet again. This one was a “normal” déjà vu, but big time! It occurred to her that Eileen had been at the parking-garage rave that night after all!

“The position she is in right now at La Movida Madrileña relative to the weird colorful shapes on the wall, is exactly the same as her position that she’d been standing in back in late ‘96, relative to the same weird colorful shapes,” she typed rapidly with predictive spell check to record her thoughts for possible later conversation with Amber, but didn’t want to look as if she was on her phone when others had gotten off theirs and resumed the business at hand. So she supplemented her typing with some old fashioned scribbling with a pen on paper in a notebook-style day planner which some assistant had provided for her. Good, she thought. That made it look more like she was jotting down notes and therefore paying attention to the meeting.

Was this woman part of the lighting crew?! Based on what she knew about Eileen it didn’t really seem likely; she wasn’t the type of person to have skills, work at jobs, initiate and oversee projects…

No. She was a self-styled entrepreneur. Just like the old Leno segment “Jaywalking,” there were opinion polls all the time that revealed the startling cluelessness of many Americans with regard to simple general knowledge. Maybe it was 2024 or as recently as ‘25... but entrepreneur had been one of those words in some well-known university’s public opinion poll. About a third of all Americans thought it meant “unemployed.” Another third were equally convinced that it meant “con artist.” Within the remaining third were people who had various ideas about business startups, venture capitalists, investment strategies... some of them may have really known the dictionary definition.

But in follow-up questioning, the majority who thought it meant “unemployed con-artist” were quite sure that if you met an entrepreneur, then at some point during your conversation they would hit you up for money.

She noted that her wine glass was automatically refilling itself with Carménère while in her hand and thoughtfully sipped to get the wine level back down to where it was when they’d seen her enjoying it, if not lower. Otherwise it might look weird; as in people wondering when she’d grabbed the bottle to refill it.

Yes. The hitting you up for money thing… It wouldn’t be like can-you-spare-a-couple-of-bucks or begging or anything. It would be in the form of an “investment opportunity.”

Something you could get in on the ground floor of... with them. Something nice they were going to do for you just because they knew you; just because you know them. You’re going to get lucky and be able to invest in whatever scheme, plot, project and so forth that they have going on at the moment, up their sleeve.

But yeah, it would never just be: I made a killing in this particular sector of the market. I did this-that-and-the-other-thing and I got wildly rich. It’s an incredibly good strategy. You should try it. Go to your broker or if you don’t have one find one, and see about buying (this, that, the other thing) whatever. It can work for you. And then: oh well, good day. And they’re off, having just given you some honest good advice.

Another centi-millionaire seemed interested in her glass level and smiled, asking her if she’d like it to be topped off. She politely thanked her and said she was good for now.

Innocent investment advice? No! It’s always something they’re doing; it’s right now. And they wanna let as many people as they can in on it right now. And there’s always a cost. An upfront cost. Sure, they’ll do what they can to minimize it. Double talk, not letting you know right up front the exact amount that they’re going to hit you up for, all the usual tricks. What it all amounts to is exactly what the poll respondents insinuated: hitting you up for money.

The other important follow-up question, which applied to everyone, was “would you trust someone who described themselves as an entrepreneur?” The overwhelming majority, something like ninety-two percent, indicated “hell no!” There was no way that they would trust somebody who identifies themselves with that word.

If the taco was putting Carménère in her glass because it was reading her mind and knew what she wanted, she reasoned, then concentrating on visualizing the glass staying relatively empty might work. If this silly thing was stuck in some damned lather-rinse-repeat loop, it might well succeed in getting her inappropriately drunk. And since it’s no longer the 1990s, obviously that’s not what she wanted. Visualize it: glass staying like it is. No more wine appearing in it.

So only eight percent do trust them? As a percentage, people are more likely to: drive the speed limit even though no cop was watching them, return shopping carts to the appropriate collection point in a parking lot, sincerely believe an acquaintance who said they had a “family emergency,” or believe that dogs really do eat homework... than they are to trust an entrepreneur.

So why exactly, she wondered, would someone in this day and age still choose to identify themselves with a word that they know means “unemployed con artist who is going to hit you up for money” and “person who is not to be trusted under any circumstances?” Really. You might as well just get a T-shirt printed up for yourself that says scammer on it.

But that was the word that Eileen had and obviously still did roll with: she was actually wearing a T-shirt underneath her jacket that said something to the effect of future entrepreneurs of America, or young entrepreneurs, or whatever. It had a nice little logo, for some kind of organization. To use it back in the 90s when she was dating Jared was understandable and perhaps excusable. But now? Did they really not know that they were giving themselves away? The back of her jacket was far more interesting. She’d had the entire thing covered by a giant “Princess of Pentacles” tarot card design.

Just then a guy blinked into existence from out of nowhere. The timing was perfect so nobody happened to be looking in his direction. Except for herself and Eileen. He appeared right in front of Eileen in fact, and she was completely unsurprised. Like she’d been expecting him to beam in.

Castadiva’s past experience with teleportation and her cool buzz allowed her to just chill and take the spectacle in along with the scenery.

Mostly.

His sudden appearance from out of nowhere had somehow triggered a weird tingling sensation over much of her skin, which seemed to be centered around her buttocks.

Strange. On multiple levels.

He resembled the curly-haired blondish big jock character named Benny from Dazed and Confused; but not the actor who played him, as he was in later roles. Yeah, that character. Maybe a little more paunchy in the middle – so perhaps not in good enough shape to play any sport for real.

And he had on a cheap suit. One that said: “I have a job. Sort of. I can’t wear jeans and a T-shirt to it. I had to go shopping for some better clothes. So I went to either thrift stores or discount stores and found some cheap clothes that technically meet the legal definition of ‘suit.’” Yes, truly she thought, in a court of law his attorney could argue that what he had on absolutely did qualify as a suit. It even included a tie. The judge, after repositioning his glasses on and off the bridge of his nose, would nod and say, okay, he’d allow it.

But the dude’s overall look screamed “I can barely make enough money to pay rent in El Monte!” So what was he doing here, at La Movida Madrileña? She wondered.

The conversation slowed again as lawyers discussed merchandising: designs that were produced by Castadiva would officially remain the intellectual property of her design house. But if she wanted to sell them in stores – they speculated, assuming the movie became wildly successful and people might really be interested in buying them – would the movie studio and producers get a cut of the sales? Yes. They agreed. Now it was a haggle over percentages. And seemingly dozens of other details.

During the lull, a producer woman – approximately $500 million net worth according to `Diva’s people – noticed her curious look and inquired.

“Oh, it’s nothing really, Maura. An occupational hazard of being a fashion designer I suppose. The gentleman showing that woman in the tarot-card jacket something on his notebook, seems a tad underdressed for this venue – and that’s not a criticism at all – but it’s just tough for me not to notice and overthink what people are wearing,” Castadiva tapered off as she saw that Maura was visibly starting to chuckle.

“No need to apologize dear, my friends and I have done pretty much the same thing since kindergarten!” she said after briefly laughing in a way that sounded like they could have used her on a laugh track for part of a fake studio audience.

She explained that he worked for the studio and was part of the production team. Not an actor for this enterprise, but that she had overheard him to be having some kind of audition earlier in the day. And she admitted he was rather slovenly dressed – something about the fit was off too; she speculated that it might’ve been something to do with the audition he went to because he was usually a bit more appropriate with his clothing choices.

Well, she thought, if the role he auditioned for was any kind of science fiction? That ability to teleport might come in handy. But seriously? Other than she and her friends, how many people know about this and are comfortable with it? He and Eileen evidently are among them.

The streaming monologue of Maura’s conversation had continued against the backdrop of Castadiva’s thoughts. She couldn’t remember his name; didn’t remember who the woman was either. Not an employee of the studio or any individual producer’s staff. She had seen her before and thought she might be a girlfriend but probably not his wife… then she motioned to the data glasses that Castadiva had in front of her neatly folded and put away in a translucent forest green case – or augmented reality glasses, or whatever they were calling them these days.

They were glasses that looked completely normal for the season of late 2027 or early 2028, and displayed info on people as well as places, things, and even actions. Miranda Priestly could have used them instead of a personal assistant to tell her who everyone was and know various factoids about them. Furthermore, the setup gave the net worth of everybody in the meeting as you looked at them. This feature was programed by someone on `Diva’s team to do that.

It made her feel uncomfortable.

“Why don’t you put them on and tell me what his name is because I honestly can’t recall. And just out of curiosity what do the glasses give you for my net worth?”

“Um, I really prefer not to use those things on people I know,” `Diva was caught just a little off guard that Maura knew exactly what they were for, and went on trying to politely explain that her accounting and legal people had –

when Maura interrupted:

“We know, my dear! that’s what makes it so sweet of you. It’s obvious that the things have been provided for you, that you were seriously uncomfortable with using them, and that you’ve decided not to use them. It makes it seem like you have… Integrity? If that’s the correct word? I think it is. Believe me, everyone here is either wearing the same damn things or something very similar, or has a personal assistant who wears them for him or her, and relays information to them by some kind of device. That’s because some of them want to look like you; a person who doesn’t feel comfortable using those things. But they’re not like you. You are actually genuine in the sense that you are uncomfortable.”

After Maura Half-Billion’s encouraging words, Castadiva went ahead and put them on, realizing everyone would understand she’d urged her to do it in order to acquire a piece of information. She immediately got the man‘s name and Maura just as immediately remembered with faux facepalm gesture, agreeing, yes that was it. The number she saw on Mr. Cheapsuit was somewhat disturbing. The digits were red and displayed something to the effect of -$6000 and change. Eileen of course showed nothing since she wasn’t an employee and hadn’t been entered into the system.

She solemnly told her new friend “well since you asked Maura, it shows five-hundred-million dollars and change for your net worth.” Then hoping to change the subject, she quickly told her the disturbing red negative number that was displayed on Mr. Cheapsuit and expressed her puzzlement over what it meant.

“That’s not too far off. I ‘kicked ass and took names’ last month, I’m happy to say. So it’s actually up to about $550 million. But quarterly filings haven’t been processed yet so whoever vetted me didn’t know about it or did the figures more than a month ago,” Maura said motioning to the 6K bottle which was presumably the one Castadiva didn’t like.

“Oh, yes go for it hun. I’m done with that bottle,” she assured Maura, continuing to sip from her “4K” glass which she’d noticed had conveniently and magically refilled with Carménère again while no one was looking, and allowed Maura to go on.

“The guy is probably in debt. Some of these working-class types have zero savings, zero investments… so zero net worth you might think… but then they do manage to rack up credit card debt or other debts and just struggle to pay the minimums. Oh wow! Your red negative net worth display just clued me in; they’re probably using an artificial intelligence thing to vet everyone in the corporation and it’s just going through the entire roster. Tarot card woman doesn’t work for us; isn’t part of our investment group at all. So there’s likely to be no number for her or even a name. She’s blank, right?”

“Mmm hmm,” `Diva said while swallowing a fraction of a cracker with some hummus. She didn’t want to admit that she knew Eileen, fearing what the sleazy con artist might try and pull in the future – just in case one or more of these people ended up being her intended targets.

`Diva changed the subject away from Princess of Pentacles woman: “and La M.M. employees are a different text color and font… not sure why I would possibly need to know their net worths. Any ideas?”

“Very likely it’s because this place is owned by a parent company which one of our merry little band of producers here is also invested in. Or… Possibly to aid in tipping correctly? What does one tip a sommelier, for example?” She began to laugh-track, but was interrupted by some actual business and `Diva tried to appear attentive at least, so she didn’t get to write down Mr. Cheapsuit’s real name in her tiny old-style paper notebook. She forgot the name already – thanks, wine – and it did bother her now that she’d written him down that way. There was no way she’d be willing to put the glasses back on though, with her legitimate excuse no longer in effect.

The negotiations were boring as hell to her. Around the far right end of the video art holographic wall she observed two women taking turns at trying to politely flag down a server. She wondered, lost in thought, if the waitstaff also possessed some sort of net-worth-analyzing tech that caused them to blow off those whom they believed to be poorer customers.

No one at their big banquet-table-slash-boardroom-table would have trouble flagging down a server; they’d practically show up here before these super-elites knew they needed anything and could even begin to raise a finger.

Guess that’s how it goes when any one of them, just on a whim, could tip you an amount that exceeded your salary for the next several months. Just then, Mr. Cheapsuit blinked out of existence for a fraction of a second and reappeared with his hair more neatly combed.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

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