ACTIVATING THE BITTER MIST PORTAL BY THE FLAT ROCK There is a large flat rock here. To the south you see the back wall of the house, containing a window that is currently closed. Narrow pathways lead northeast and northwest through thorny bushes. You could also go southeast, slipping around to the side of the house. The bushes block travel in all other directions. >se BY THE RASPBERRY BUSH You see Agador-Spartacus in the area outside the back door. He's wagging his tail. >s OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR Agador-Spartacus stands before you, wagging his tail affably. >w KITCHEN You see an envelope, a large stack of catalogs, a phone bill, a gold key, "The Bedtime Story Book", "The Boy Who Had No Words", a yellow feather, a small phone book, a short blue sock, a long black sock, a handwritten note, a bath robe, a pair of brown shoes, a short brown sock, a short black sock, some ballet slippers, a fake can of spam, a mug of black coffee, a plucked daisy, a plucked tulip, two short white socks, a brass token, a copper key, a large towel, a small Phillips screwdriver, a small tape recorder, and a basket here. You see Agador-Spartacus in the area outside the back door. He's wagging his tail. >take mug You take the mug of black coffee. You see Agador-Spartacus in the area outside the back door. He's wagging his tail. >taste coffee The black coffee tastes quite bitter. You see Agador-Spartacus in the area outside the back door. He's wagging his tail. >e OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR Agador-Spartacus stands before you, wagging his tail affably. >n BY THE RASPBERRY BUSH You see Agador-Spartacus in the area outside the back door. He's wagging his tail. >climb trellis You climb up the trellis. DOME LEDGE (east) A narrow ledge surrounds the black dome on all sides. You see a wedge-shaped opening over by the south part of the ledge. You could climb down the trellis to get east of the house. You also could go northwest to get to the north part of the dome ledge, or southwest to get to the south part of the dome ledge. >sw DOME LEDGE (south) A narrow ledge surrounds the black dome on all sides. You see a wedge-shaped opening in the dome here. Through it you can see a room that looks like a laboratory. To get to the lab you could jump down, but you wouldn't be able to climb back up. To the south is a windowless wall on the second story of the house. To the west you see a balcony protruding slightly from the side of the house. If you don't mind risking a small leap you could probably get over to the balcony by going west. You also could go northwest to get to the west part of the dome ledge, or northeast to get to the east part of the dome ledge. >d LABORATORY The room looks like it used to be sort of laboratory, but now it is covered in dust and soot. Your eye is immediately drawn to a bizarre machine standing in the center of the lab. It looks like it was made out of parts taken from household appliances. On the east wall is a lab bench, with a metal stool nearby. There is a large lever mounted in the center of the lab bench. The lever is currently pushed down. There's a wedge-shaped opening in the black dome above. Shelving with model railroad track runs along the north and east walls. The shelving widens into a platform above the lab bench, quite close to the large lever. To the west you see a pair of metal doors, which are currently closed. There is a window on the north wall. The window is closed. Your nose itches. The train is stopped at the platform above the lab bench. You see a tray containing a glass of lemonade on the platform above the lab bench. You see a green candle (lit) here. >wave fan You wave the fan. As the fan flutters in front of your face, you feel yourself being somewhat hypnotized by the rippled reflection of the rising sun on the dark water. Holding the fan near to your face you inhale deeply. Your nose tingles, and you feel as if your sense of smell is being enhanced by the fan. Filtered through the fan, the smoky smell plunges you into a memory. But the memory is not your own! This memory comes from a far distant place, from a space station that is 25.7 light years away from Earth. The memory revealed by the rising sun is quite fresh, perhaps only ten days old. It belongs to Anthok, an alien who looks like a round green blob having three arms, one leg, and a rather large antenna on top of his head. Anthok is with his friend Cruple, who looks quite similar to Anthok except that he is orange and slightly smaller. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- A light on the communications console is flashing, indicating that an incoming message is about to arrive. Anthok and Cruple bend antennas towards each other, touching them in order to receive the communication. Judging from the slight aftershock and a brief explosive puff of smoke, it's clear to Anthok and Cruple that they are receiving a local intragalactic transmission, from a mere 25.7 light years away. But, to their surprise, the message arrives as a simple electromagnetic signal, having traveled no faster than the speed of light! How bizarre. How primitive! The content of this transmission is fairly boring, Anthok and Cruple think to each other telepathically. But at least it appears to be generated from brain waves focusing on sensory impressions, so there isn't any need to bring in any babelfish to provide a translation. The message presents visual images of some laughably naive mathematics, followed by an auditory language tutorial featuring a boy named Hamlet. After this comes the rhythmic frequency patterns created by someone named Beethoven, with an especially loud bumpy part at the beginning. "Good stuff," Anthok says, before he and Cruple fall into an argument concerning whether Beethoven is doing a stand-up comedy routine or reciting a ritual incantation intended to remove warts. The sensory impressions relating to smell are, quite frankly, rather offensive. Reproductive organs of small plants! Enough said. But the last section of the message causes Anthok and Cruple to gasp in astonishment. The final sensory impressions are delightfully advanced! ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Anthok and Cruple speak to each other telepathically with quivering antennae, suddenly excited about this primitive being who has sent the transmission. "He knows sweet! He knows salty! He knows sour!" Anthok exclaims. "He knows broccoli!" declares Cruple emphatically. "But if he knows broccoli, then why is he using electromagnetic?" Anthok wonders. "It took 25.7 years for his message to get here!" "Maybe his belly doesn't have any magnetronic capabilities. He might just be eating the broccoli without a transformation," suggests Cruple. "Yuck!" Anthok replies. "Why eat it if you can't transform it? Broccoli tastes bitter to me!" "Of course," says Cruple, "That's the hallmark of all mature species. You haven't finished evolving until you hate the taste of broccoli." "Come to think of it, I don't think his mathematics included any taste transformations at all," Anthok ponders. "He showed us something that he thought of as Bessell/Laplace functions, but they were missing key operators. I bet if we sent him the completed equation set he could figure out how to build an artificial cavity to do the taste transformations. Then he'd be able to send us messages that would travel at an acceptable speed." "Let's do it! " Cruple cries, and he begins to work on message preparation. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Anthok adjusts the environmental controls to increase the artificial gravity and to add some oxygen into the air of the chamber. He then fills a flask with Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster mix and begins waiting for it to reach the strength maturation threshhold. Breathing oxygen makes Anthok feel a bit grouchy; he and Cruple normally prefer pure nitrogen, but the oxygen will help him to more quickly metabolize the bacteriomites in the Gargle Blaster. Thanks to the boosted gravity, the Gargle Blaster stays mostly in the flask, which is a good thing considering how annoyed the cleaning hologram was the last time they got droplets all over the walls. Anthok flicks his antenna in a complaint about the stupidity of picking up stray holograms and reprogramming them to do menial cleaning chores. "I heard that!" Cruple snaps back. "He's a perfectly good hologram and it's not his fault that he hates cleaning. He was created to be an Emergency Medical Hologram, you know. But nobody in the civilized galaxy NEEDS medical assistance these days. And don't tell me to send him back where he came from because we don't know where he came from." ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- "I think he comes from the same place as Douglas Adams," Anthok says. "You don't even know what the Adams species looks like," Cruple argues. "I know that they have opposable thumbs," Anthok says, pulling out his Siriusthan translation of the "The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy," which has a large picture of a thumb on the cover. "That's ridiculous, nobody has opposable thumbs..." Cruple begins to say, but his sentence trails away as he realizes that the cleaning hologram does indeed have thumbs, and that they might be considered opposable if Cruple could only figure out what "opposable" is supposed to mean when referring to alien body parts. Cruple grumbles something about being opposed to thumbs on general principle, but Anthok realizes that this is just the oxygen talking. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Then Cruple goes back to preparing the content of the message that they are about to send. As Anthok puts down his book, he suddenly has the odd notion that someone else is here, although clearly he and Cruple are alone. The holograms are all turned off now, and what he sensed didn't feel like a hologram anyway. Anthok glances over at the transparent panel to the airlock, but the panel is still closed and the airlock is empty. Could he possibly be sensing a paradox vortex, the wake left by someone who foolishly destroys himself through causal carelessness? Surely not, Anthok thinks. Every preschooler knows the basics of temporal safety! And yet, what if some poor soul had indeed annihilated himself by imploding his own subjective reality into a cause-and-effect contradiction regression? If that had happened, there would be no way for anyone outside the vortex to detect it. Connectivity, the basic fabric of reality, automatically adjusts its patterns to protect the survival of the outer conciousness matrix. The area isolated by the severed connectivity would shrink into a singularity and cease to exist, and any events that might have been experienced there would not be a part of the subjective reality on the outside. Aha! Anthok thinks. That proves that it didn't happen, because if it did I would not be able to sense it! Not unless the disconnection was incomplete, he muses. But Anthok can't come up with a way to imagine how something like THAT could ever happen. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- The Gargle Blaster starts to smoke and foam over the top of the flask. It's ready now! Anthok takes his flask of smoking liquid over to the reclining sofa, thinking that he needs to remember to order some more Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster mix since this is the last of their supply. Anthok lies flat on his back on the reclining sofa. He drinks deeply from the flask (apparently his anatomy has no difficulty drinking while reclining) and before long his belly begins to rumble. Then a beam of faster-than-light radiation bursts from his abdomen. It curves as directed by its internal parameters and passes though the space station hull by temporarily modifying the section of space-time where it passes through the wall of the space station. After a minute or so the curved beam fades and exhausts itself. Anthok begins to feel the usual post-transmission nap coming on, which is the main reason why he always does his transmitting from a reclining sofa. Cruple asks, "When will the primitive creature receive our transmission?" "25.7 years ago," Anthok replies, "right after he sends out the transmission that we just received. That's assuming that he's capable of handling a basic reception coupling, of course." "I imagine he'll be quite surpised to get a reply so quickly," Cruple chuckles, "But at least you didn't arrange for it to arrive BEFORE he sent his transmission to us." Anthok gives a snort of disgust. "Of course not, that would have been rude. You don't want the primitive to think we have no manners, do you?" ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Suddenly Anthok has a disturbing thought. "Do you think we should have warned him about the broccoli magnification effect?" he asks. "I would think that would be more than obvious from the bitterness coefficient, don't you think?" says Cruple. But Anthok has already drifted off to sleep. As the memory ends, the fan turns in your hand. The other side is facing you now. >wave fan You wave the fan. As the fan flutters in front of your face, you feel yourself being somewhat hypnotized by the rippled reflection of the moon and stars on the dark water. Holding the fan near to your face you inhale deeply. Your nose tingles, and you feel as if your sense of smell is being enhanced by the fan. Filtered through the fan, the smoky smell plunges you into a memory. But the memory is not your own! This memory comes from a far distant place, from a space station that is 25.7 light years away from Earth. The memory revealed by the moon and the stars belongs to Martin. The memory is quite fresh, perhaps only ten days old. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- After traveling through outer space faster than the speed of light, the phone booth comes to rest near a large white cylinder that Martin assumes is a space station. Without any way to communicate with whoever might be inside the station, Martin has nothing to do except to float around weightless inside the phone booth and hope that someone will eventually notice him and bring him inside the space station. While he's waiting, Martin thinks back on the series of events that has led him here. Almost 26 years ago, Martin's father and his research partner Jorucho Takamine sent messages into outer space aimed at several nearby star systems. The message sent to this system would have spent 25.7 years in transit, but his father and Mr. Takamine received a reply transmission from this region almost immediately. The content of the alien reply caused Martin's father and Mr. Takamine to modify their equipment in an attempt to transmit faster-than-light signals, but their understanding of the mathematics was incomplete. With a lump in his throat Martin tries not to think about the laboratory accident that occured three months later, the terrible explosion that killed his father. In the years that followed, Mr. Takamine switched the focus of his work towards the development of a faster-than-light space travel mechanism. He filed the patent application for the Kessler- Takamine Drive this past October, on the 25th anniversary of the accident. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Recently, Martin was able to gain access to the audio cassettes containing his father's research notes, which Mr. Takamine had hidden in his Japanese garden. The tapes and his father's old tape recorder had been stored in the teahouse, right next to Mr. Takamine's FTL drive prototype, almost as if enshrined in tribute to Martin's father. Martin had longed to hear the sound of his father's voice again. But listening to the tapes was unnerving, almost as if his father's ghost had returned to speak to him. The recorded notes contained the exact coordinates from which the alien reply transmission originated. But according to Martin's calculations, the original message sent from his father to the aliens was scheduled to arrive in only a few more days! Taking the coincidence as a call to action, Martin began forming a plan. He would travel into outer space and try to stop the aliens from sending their reply to his father! ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- When Martin left the teahouse, he couldn't bring himself to take his father's tapes and tape recorder. But he did "borrow" Mr. Takamine's drive prototype. Guiltily Martin wonders if Mr. Takamine will ever forgive him for taking it without permission. Last night, Martin finished installing the drive, loading the fuel, and programming the coordinates into his phone booth. But he still felt nervous about his plan. Martin tried to bolster his resolve by recording a message on an audiocastte, sort of a symbolic message to his father. He walked out to the waterfall and dumped both the cassette and his newly purchased tape recorder into the ravine, which somehow seemed an appropriate thing to do considering his memories of what had happened there so long ago. Martin spent the rest of the night at home, talking to himself and trying to decide if he really was going to go through with his crazy scheme. Martin tried to boost his courage by watching a movie, but even the bravery of the Gary Cooper character in "High Noon" couldn't inspire him to make a final decision. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- By morning Martin was still undecided. He spent some time looking for his pocket watch and feeling sorry for himself as he thought about the day that his father had given him the watch as a gift. How could he could lose something so important? But while thinking about his father, something clicked in Martin's brain. Yes, he told himself, I've made my decision to go ahead with the plan. And Martin knew with absolute certainty that from that moment on, he wouldn't let anything get in the way of what he intended to do. Suddenly Martin's attention is pulled back to the present. The space station hatch is opening! The phone booth is pulled into an airlock just barely large enough to accomodate it. The outer hatch closes and the airlock fills with what Martin hopes is breathable air. But the question seems moot since there isn't enough room for Martin to open the phone booth door anyway. In front of the phone booth door is a transparent panel. Two round blob-like aliens are staring at Martin from the other side of the panel. One of them is green and the smaller one is orange. Martin, who has an extremely vivid imagination and a strong sense of intuition inherited from his mother's side of the family, seems to be picking up bits and pieces of telepathic communication between the two aliens. (They are telepathing rather loudly because one of them is getting a bit deaf in the antenna.) The aliens are surprised to be in the presence of such an odd-looking visitor, one who has such poor body roundness, a less than practical arm-to-leg ratio, and one who has no antenna! The aliens decide that they had better figure out what Martin is and whether or not he's dangerous BEFORE they open the airlock panel and let him out. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Martin feels that he should show off his advanced evolutionary features, so he wiggles his opposable thumbs at them in a gesture that he hopes will not be interpreted as hostile. As an afterthought he decides to wiggle his ears too. (That always seemed to put his sister in a good mood when she was little.) Looking closely at Martin's opposeable thumbs, the aliens suddenly remember where they have encountered this species before. The green alien pulls out a copy of "The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy" from the bottom of a tall stack of miscellaneous debris. He points to the book proudly, as if to suggest that he was instrumental in supplying telepathic inspiration to the author Douglas Adams. Then the orange alien pantomimes the movements of a swimming fish. Martin intuits that the extraterrestrial is wondering why an antenna-less creature like Martin would go on an interstellar journey without bringing any babelfish with him to serve as translators. And what happened to that meteorite with the mating pair of fish that we sent to Douglas Adams? Did it end up on the wrong continent or in the wrong century? If Mr. Adams ever wrote a thank you note for the fish we never saw it. And why is it always impossible to remember where you saved the tracking number whenever you order something over the Net with Super Saver shipping? The unlikely turn of these questions causes Martin to wonder if his imagination might be starting to play nasty tricks on him, or perhaps that his sense of intuition might have been damaged by the warp speed travel. Martin decides to stop paying attention to his intuitive side. The alien questions aren't really directed at him anyway, and he has no way to reply since he has no antenna and they probably don't understand English. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Then the aliens become distracted by something else. They walk a short distance away from Martin. (Actually it might be more correct to say that the aliens HOP away from Martin since each alien has only one leg.) The aliens touch their antennae together. There is an aftershock and a puff of smoke. The aliens seem excited and their antennae are quivering. The green one turns some knobs and pours some liquid into a flask. Martin feels the gravity increasing to a more normal level. The aliens keep looking over at Martin. After a bit of antenna- quivering they seem to come to a decision. The orange blob pushes a knob and the airlock panel opens. The aliens hop back to Martin and the green one begins to speak in oddly accented Shakespearean English. "To be, or not to be, that is the question. Art thou Hamlet?" Startled to find that the aliens can now speak English, Martin remembers that his father's message to the aliens included a recitation of Hamlet. They must have just received his father's transmission, Martin realizes. That means that it's not too late to keep them from sending a reply. Martin tries to explain that he knows that they are about to send a transmission, and that the message that they are about to send was received by his father almost 26 years ago. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- The orange alien tells him: "Young prince, thou hast the right of thought A missive seal'd awaits its flight And time hath now the moment brought To cast it forth. O day and night, So wondrous strange to bear the scorn Of time long past still not yet born For mem'ry's work this cup has wrought What's sent to reach thy father's sight." "Don't send the message to my father," Martin begs them. "That message caused him to die!" The aliens seem distressed to discover that their decision to send the message has caused the death of a sentient being, but they are confused as to why Martin thinks that he can change this event. The message sent to Martin's father exists across a hypervelocital interval, and the uncertainty level of the message would therefore revert to the value of the least uncertain point within the interval. In this instance the least uncertain point on the interval is the receipt of the message by Martin's father, for which the uncertainty evaluates to zero (as evidenced by Martin's clear memory of how those events transpired). ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- The green alien briefly wonders if Martin is trying to actualize a circular causation loop. But, no, that doesn't make any sense either, he thinks. Circular causation within a time travel loop is not possible in this case because the terrain is untwisted, meaning that there is no uncertainty surplus available in the present time for Martin to swap into the past through a causal inversion. If the terrain were twisted around Martin as a causal agent, Martin would be uncertain about what had actually happened until he actualizes the causation. Everyone outside of the twist, on the other hand, would experience reality in a chronological (rather than a causal sequence), and would remember the same events as having been already actualized by Martin's actions in the past. But since Martin has no uncertainty about what happened, it is impossible for him to successfully exert any causal influence on those events. Attempting to force a causal change without an uncertainty surplus to swap into the past with would violate the principle of conservation of uncertainty and be nothing more than an act of personal suicide for Martin. Of course, thinks the orange alien. Everyone knows that it's impossible to impose an inversion twist on untwisted terrain. That's the Zeroth Law of Causal Dynamics! ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- Martin is a pretty clever guy and perhaps might be able to understand all of this if he weren't currently refusing to listen to his intuitive side. But without being fully open to his intuition he can't understand what the green alien means when he says: "Why day is day, night is night, and time is time. There are more things in heaven and earth, young Hamlet, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. I will be brief: This noble son is mad To take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. --To die,--to sleep,-- Nay, struggle not to end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. But let the native hue of resolution Be sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action." ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- The green alien takes a flask of liquid, which is now smoking and foaming. He starts to lie down on the couch. Martin intuits that the message is about to be sent and becomes desparate. Martin cries "No!" and leaps onto the couch, knocking the green alien to the ground, spilling the liquid, and breaking the flask. With this action, Martin negates the sending of the message and all of the events that are caused by it. This includes the invention of the Kessler-Takamine drive, which could never have been designed by Mr Takamine without the knowledge sent to him and Martin's father in the alien message. So Martin can't actually be here since the vehicle he came in couldn't have brought him here. Even more importantly, Martin's action removes Martin's own motivation for wanting to come here to take that action. Suddenly Martin realizes that he is not here at all, but instead is at home taking a nap on his sofa. But staying at home has the effect of negating his interference with the alien message, which means that the message was sent, the Kessler-Takamine drive was invented, and that Martin is here on an alien couch fading into non-existence from the strain of having his conciousness split into two contradictory halves. The overall effect is something like a flickering strobe lamp, with Martin's existence oscillating between two different locations separated by 25.7 light years of spacetime. The frequency of the flickering is quite rapid, with moments of consciousness as small as a quantum time unit. Consciousness cannot be maintained under such conditions, at least not for long. ------------- Press space bar to continue ----------------- As a result, the half of Martin that is on the alien couch is now in the process of slipping into a coma and entering into a lucid dream. By an odd stroke of good fortune it happens to be the same dream that the other half of Martin is already having as he naps at home on the sofa. And so, Martin is reunited as a whole being inside of the dream, while his physical existence outside of the dream collapses into nothingness. The last thing that Martin understands before slipping off into his dream is the sobering thought he has broken almost all of his connections to the outside world. As far as everyone else is concerned, he will have ceased to exist and none of the recent events involving him will be retained by anyone else's reality, nothing that he did after making his final decision to change the past. The aliens will not be aware that Martin was ever here, and therefore the orange one will not understand why he feels the inexplicable need to stand here misquoting Hamlet: "To sleep! perchance to dream:--ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, In that undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns." As the memory ends, the fan snaps closed. >x machine The soot-covered machine looks like it was made out of parts taken from common household appliances. The top of the machine is a cubical box resembling a small microwave oven. There is a door on the box, a start button, and a stop button. Built into the door is a red-tinted convex lens. The microwave box door is closed. The microwave box is mounted on a stand that looks like it was made from a camera tripod, a gyroscope, and a record turntable. There are several knobs and dials here, which lead you to believe that this part of the machine once served to provide adjustable positioning for the box above. But none of the knobs and dials are usable anymore; it looks as if all of the moving parts of the stand have been melted and fused together. One of the tripod legs is broken, and two of the corners of the microwave box are partially collapsed into the stand. The deformed gyroscope looks like it came out of a surrealistic nightmare. The red-tinted lens on the box is now pointing to the west, although you are fairly certain that its original orientation would have been generally upwards. The bottom of the machine appears to be some sort of motor and/or generator installed inside the frame of an antique jukebox. A large copper coil runs through the center from the top to the base. Some of the other parts of the machine look like they might have once been part of a lawn mower or canister vacuum cleaner, whereas other parts are unlike anything you have ever seen before. The outside of the machine is covered in thick dust. It's fairly clear that the damage suffered by this machine must have happened a long time ago. >open microwave door You open the microwave box door. The microwave box is empty. >put mug in microwave The mug of black coffee is now in the microwave box. >close door The microwave box door is now closed. >push start button You push the start button and it pops back up. The microwave box begins to give off a mechanical hum, and you see a glowing light behind the red-tinted lens on the box door. After a few seconds the box begins to shake violently. When the box approaches a level of shaking that seems ready to break it apart from the rest of the machine, you hear a loud boom and you find yourself momentarily blinded. You blink until you regain your vision, but it is still difficult to see because an intensely bright beam of light is eminating from the lens of the box. The doors of the lab appear to have been thrown open. The metal chain lies on the courtyard ground, broken. The beam of light shines west through the open metal doors, cutting across the courtyard to strike the center of the west wall. The light beam seems to be interacting somehow with the red rock of the wall, causing the center of the wall to appear shimmery and insubstantial. The microwave box is no longer humming or shaking, but the beam of light is still here.