Back to neo-Aegea: Jonas and the Metro Part I

Dear Readers,

  Neo-Aegea remains a major focus of my research, and it also seems to build a large amount of reader response, so I thought that I would provide another primary source from the neo-Aegean dataset that I have.

  Like the things you've seen before, this source is a story from neo-Aegea.  Remember that neo-Aegea lacks the robust media that you are used to in your time stream, and so storytelling will be a more serious profession there.  These stories represent one of the main entertainment outlets for the Aegeans.  If you saw my post yesterday on Augury, you can imagine that this is why the stories come in with such a strong signal.

  The story today is once again by the Homerian "Civet the Storyteller," though I cannot say if it's an ancient oral story that Civet wrote down for the first time, or if it is something a little more original.  It clearly has a basis in several Judeo-Christian biblical stories, but of course mixed with Ancient Greek paganism and culture from your time stream.  Perhaps you can give me some insights to elements I do not understand about it.

Below, see my translation of the story's first part, after the jump, since I have finally gained the ability to add jumps.  Over your weekend, the second part will go up.  Once again, words in brackets are stage directions for a public performance by a storyteller.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism

University of Constantinople

    Athena, a major player in this myth.

On Augury

Dear Readers,

What an auspicious date for you to read about Augury!

This is one of my posts that isn't really part of a series, or anything else like that. I feel like, in the course of what I've been writing about, I have not given a lot of attention to Augury, so I want to write a little about what it is and what it does for my work.

Don't expect me to get too technically detailed here, since I really am not a very technical person to begin with, at least when it comes to highly sophisticated pieces of technology that can look across timelines and uncollapse collapsed probability wave functions back into their original distributions. That's where it gets over my head.

What Augury does for me, though, I can wax a little more poetic about.  There are science fiction stories where technologies like Augury allow people to literally "see" the future, and then usually some kind of hijinks ensue which show the hubristic people that they should not have such technology.

These stories are absurd for a few reasons.  For one, they never really define what it means to "see" the future.  Do you see it in video, an eye onto wherever in the Universe you want to look?  Even for a device that can see the present, that would be pretty impressive.  Another problem is that I doubt such technology, if it were in the right hands, would really cause a problem.  The ability to see future possibilities would just allow people to make wiser decisions.  The uncertainty to the future remains.

The biggest problem, however, is that they always see the future, as if for some reason no one could imagine a technology that could view the past, alternate pasts, or alternate presents.  Augury does these things for me.

You see, the Augury technology that we use at the University is no simple futuroscope.  It's a complex beast.  First, you can't just "see" another time stream.  It does not work that way, though I wish it did.  All that Augury can pick up is cultural elements, emotional products.  Things driven by sentient personalities.  I can't "see" buildings unless they are depicted in some form of art.  It's only through records that Augury shows me day to day life.

Of course, some records give me snippets of everyday life.  Sometimes a video here or there shows something.  Surveillance records, unfortunately, are often deleted too quickly for us to pick up.  And the more copies there are of something, the stronger the signal.  This also makes it harder to pick up outlier time streams, but signal boosting is a highly technical matter that, as I said, I don't particularly understand myself.

What I do understand is the rich tapestry of cultural data that I can get from the Augury Department.  They feed me something raw, a slightly interpreted stream of video, photographs, writing, art, music, the lot of it.  The data come in in chunks from specific time streams, spread across a period of time in each stream.  I like to think of each piece of data as one of the Fates' threads, interwoven with the others initially, but now separated.  Augury feeds me the unraveled quilt of time, and it falls to the Anachronist to study the threads in order to learn how to sew it all back together.

I like the romanticism in that.  My newfound profession excites me because I am a kismet hunter, a spelunker in times long past and long to come.  And these disparate threads come together towards the pursuit of an age-old question that humanity struggles with every day: "What the hell is going on, and what does it mean?"

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

A Day in the Life: Martian Milestones

Dear Readers,

Yesterday I posted a folk song from a specific time stream's Mars colonies, one written early on during their history. While I'm tempted to write a long piece of analysis on the idea of grassroots music vs. the genre of folk music, sadly Tuesday is not the day for me to do that.

Tuesdays are for A Day in the Life, where I post a "slice of life" from one of the different time streams I study. I've been on a Martian kick lately, so I'm going to stay on that for this Day in the Life.

Last week I posted a primary source from a colony founded by refugee Armenians from a war that your time stream has not seen. I do not know if it will see that war, but I wouldn't rule it out. Either way, it's likely that you're removed from that particular source, but the challenges those settlers faced are pretty common among time streams where Mars is colonized. Human life on Mars, when it first gets started, will be pretty tough.

Yesterday's Monday Muse gave you a folk song from another Martian colony time stream, which had many challenges shared with the first. It also depicts a hard life with scarce supplies and the like, from its skinny girls and pleas to return from Olympus City.

Well, those of you who follow my Friday Seminars know what I'll do with that. Those two primary sources have a lot of emotional undercurrent, and I'm going to use that to get at the real spirit of Martian colonization. Hopefully my efforts, presented below in fictional story format, hit close to the mark.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

The blue Martian dawn looked so much like an Earth night that it just made Levon feel like he woke up too early. He still needed to get used to life here, if he expected to survive it.

Levon turned away from the window, to face his bedroom. He tiptoed past the head of the bed, so he would not wake up his wife. Eliza needed her rest, for their child's sake. With so few children in New Kharkov, her role as a full-time mother was more important than anything he could ever do as one of many farmers. Funny, to think of feminism back on Earth. The only people who really mattered on Mars were women. Men are cheap, in an evolutionary sense. Levon certainly felt cheap.

If Mars taught him anything, it was the cheapness of life. People died every day, from malnutrition, usually. Accidents came in second. Then the strange diseases that came with life on Mars. Bone diseases, mostly. Ah, space.

He got on his rubberized farming clothes. Aside from the workboots, they felt so different from what he would have worn on Earth as well. Here, nothing could be the same. Instead of fields, they used vertical hydroponic farms. Instead of corn, wheat, or rice, they grew legumes and vegetables. Real bread felt like a luxury. For good reason.

Still tired and unmotivated, he snapped up the suit. This would be another day of menial work with no evidence of payoff. He found it hard to look forward to. Plus, Akim's wife looked like she might die, and so he knew his friend would not be at the farm today. The man found--and now might lose--two wives in as many seasons. Such is Mars.

Dressed in the black rubber suit, Levon squished his way out of their family's colony quarters. At least this morning he would be on time to the farm. When he ran late, the boss often cut him slack, but that made the other workers angry. They felt he got privileges because of his child.

"Look at Levon, so virile that he can't even work," they'd tease. He resented it, of course. It's not like he knew that he would be so "lucky" that his sperm would work in the lower gravity. He wanted to accept that they just felt jealous, but he could not.

Levon tripped over something on his doorstep as he walked out. What's this? He looked down and saw a letter. For the next minute, he debated whether or not he would bend down to pick it up. He shrugged, and went for it. As he squeaked his way down, he heard a tremendous boom and felt the ground shake. Startled, he grabbed the letter too hard and crumpled it a little.

What the hell was that? He shoved the letter in his pocket. It could wait. If the farm went up for some reason, they would need him there. He rushed through the habitat section, practically running, though his suit turned it into more of a stumbling, too-fast walk.

On the way, he saw his neighbors poke their heads out their doors, bleary-eyed and surprised. It seemed a lot of people heard the sound. No one seemed to know the cause, until he saw his friend Garabed, letter in hand, flag him down from one side of the corridor.

"Levon! Did you read this?!?"

Levon slowed himself down, in the least graceful fashion possible.

"No, why?"

"Because it explains why you don't have to run. In fact, you don't really need to rush anywhere."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Hagopian. He just blew himself, and the rocket fuel, all to hell. We're stuck here for a long while."

The news hit Levon like a rockslide. "Shit, what?"

"You heard me. We're here for good."

Levon did not know how to react. For a month, all he wanted to do was pack up the colony and leave. They had so many problems since arrival. Half of the people who came, were dead. They were better off with the war back home, war crimes or no. And now Hagopian went and did this.

"That coward. Killed himself too, just so we couldn't argue. Who's gonna take over?" Levon tried not to growl at his friend.

"Letter doesn't say."

"Damn, well, I still need to get to work, I think."

Garabed nodded and Levon left him in the corridor. He decided not to try and run anymore, though. Even with the explosion he would still be early. Plus, he did not want to take the chance that he would trip inside one of these stainless steel deathtrap corridors.

The farm seemed quiet when he got to its vertical fluorescent hydroponic jungle. The watering machines whirred in the background, but their volume was closer to Earth crickets than heavy machinery. Here and there he heard mice scurry through some of the planters. No matter how hard they tried, the colonist found it hard to sever the bond between humans and rodents.

We could learn a thing or two from them. They're not having birth problems.

He looked around. Nobody else at work yet. Just Levon and the soybeans. He went to punch in at the thumbprint reader. Right as he walked up, he saw it on the screen:

"Work suspended in light of fuel crisis. All employees on one day unpaid leave."

Levon punched the wall, hard. "DAMMIT!" he yelled, then, "Aw, ouch." He rubbed his hand, bruised, no doubt, on the unforgiving metal.

Two hours old and this day already got itself into the running for his worst on Mars yet. At least he knew the farm could run itself for the day. Maybe they would make it through.

Monday Muse: Colonial Ballads

Dear Readers,

One thing that I find fascinating in the records that Augury pulls are the songs and poems that come from different cultures. I also find them colossally difficult to translate, since a song is rather influenced by cultural norms. I posted on that specific topic a little while ago.

Still, I feel like you will all miss out on a big part of my work if I fail to provide translated poetry and songs here, and so I plan to do this, starting today. Just bear with me if the translation seems a little strange.

Today's continues last week's Martian colonization theme, but this time it's a folk song from the Martian Colonies. Folk music is somewhat interesting; in your time stream, contemporary to you, it is essentially a "style" of professionally produced music and no longer what it originally was. That is to say, where it once was an organic genre that developed from analog instruments around campfires, it is in your time the realm of professionals.

This is important to note because that will change in these Martian colonies. Ready access to media is what makes you seek out professionals for even folk music. But the early Mars colonies will not have easy access to Earth's media, due to infrastructure outages and other problems. Therefore, they will begin to develop their own folk music, much as soldiers of WWII developed folk music when they could not get radio access.

Like those soldiers, however, the Martian colonists will have a long tradition of 20th Century music on which to base their folk traditions. Songs written in the chaos of Martian dust storms will rise from the rock classic earworms that defined the colonists' parents' generation. Like the one partially translated below. You should recognize the original song, but this version has a much more bitter twinge. It was written, as far as I can tell, to record the plight of the vertical farmers in the early colonies.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Deparment of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

"Olympus City"

Chorus (x2)
Take me home from Olympus City
Where the grass is dead
And the girls too skinny
Take me home (oh won't you please take me home)

Just a farmer livin' under the dome
Growin' soybeans in styro-foam
The beggars ask,
"So give me something to eat"
I'll feed you at another time
Get[yerass] back down in the mine

Rags to riches
Or so they said
We'll just
keep pushin' for our daily bread slice
You know it's, it's all a gamble
On cold Martian Ice
Everybody tryin' to breathe

Chorus (x2)

Weekend Worlds: Inconvenient Currents (Part II of Riparian)

Dear Readers,

For the second part of this "weekend world," enjoy more of Thomas and Sam's life in New York City, after the Great Flood. One of many time streams that flow out from your own.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

Thomas flipped the switch next to the wheel, and listened to the low whine as the engine powered up. He had to strain to hear it.

He chuckled, “Well, it’s still no Ferrari, but it’ll do.”

Sam smiled, “Yeah, well, this one doesn’t take any gas, for one thing.”

“True enough. Glad I bought this thing. All my friends thought I was some kind of bleeding heart.” He started to up the throttle and push it off from the High Line.

Sam punched him in the arm, “That’s because you are some kind of bleeding heart, Tommy. But at least now you get to say ‘I told you so’ while you drive your hybrid boat through Manhattan.”

He laughed while he sped up to take them up Ninth Avenue. “If only that made me feel better, Sam. This city is a shadow of what it was before. And with New York, so goes the world.”

She kissed him on the neck, “But we’ve got fish. And each other. Life’s only gotten better, for me at least.”

Thomas grinned, “Well, there is that. Life’s a lot simpler.”

They looked uptown, at the orange-lit remnants of the Meatpacking District. All old nightclubs, long removed from their velvet rope, the buildings reminded everyone of different times. Whenever he thought back to that era of excess, Thomas imagined black coal-smoke clouds lined with gaudy gold and silver. He would skip the gold and silver if it meant no more coal. Nature decided the question for them, anyhow.

This time of day, traffic started to get bad. Never so bad as when cars drove on the streets fathoms below, but nautical traffic is a totally different ballgame. With “brakes” not really an option, it took a lot more effort to avoid collisions. And Manhattan’s avenues were never designed for boat traffic.

“Would you look at that?” Sam pointed.

Thomas probably should have focused on the waterway, but he let his eyes wander for a moment. Just enough to see what made her speak up; what a massive raft! The thing looked like it was thrown together from pieces of many different boats, patched together with tarpaper and pieces of old shipping pallets. Still, she looked beautiful. Painted and clean, a huge black paddle wheel kept the vessel going down the avenue.

Looked like she had a smart designer, too. Though long, the ship’s hull stayed thin and agile throughout. Whoever engineered it kept the concerns of city boating in mind, for sure.
He looked back ahead of him, “She’s a beauty, all right. Someone’s a romantic, though. Looks like one of those Mississippi riverboats.”

Sam smiled, and though Thomas could not see it, he heard it in her voice, “That’s what I like about it. Mixes the old and the new, like everyone’s had to.”

He saw her point, but she always liked that sort of thing a little better. Even before the Flood, she mixed the past, present, and future. His eyebrow raised as he got an idea.

“Why don’t we build one?”

Sam giggled, “Yeah, great idea.”

“No, I’m serious. We could do it. It might not be so practical, and of course we might run into a pirate or two who wants to take it, but if we took our time, we could make a riverboat like that. We’d still have this guy for the short trips.”

She stopped laughing, “You’re serious, huh? Where would we get all the materials we need?”

“Just look around you, Sam. Nobody’s using this city. There’s enough stuff to go around. We’ll loot and trade, like everyone else.”

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try. It’s not like we do much else but catch fish, sleep and hide. Let’s do it.”Thomas smiled. After months trying, he found something he could give her to look forward to. For the rest of their ride towards Columbus Circle, he said only, “It’s good to have more than catching fish in life, for once.”