Is it my fault they keep losing the requisition form
I mean
Fine
Probably it is
Requisition Officer Special Memorandum to Ops, 11887/quartz
OK so seriously bro
This, Best Beloved, is a requisitions form. I know it’s been a few hundred years since you cloud-brained assholes wore the flesh, but surely before the Great Upload you at least once in your marketable lives signed a contract with an actual goddamn pen
NOTED that as per Ordinance 9a22e3c/gamma, “due to the volatility and sensitivity of the Leguminous NSpace Rotator, groundside contact agents are required to file requisitions forms on a per-unit basis” which document I may add is not exactly the most complicated
THERE ARE ONLY THREE BLANKS FOR FUCK’S SAKE
which form is publicly available on netpub/rx/*.
NOTED that groundside contact agents are morons frequently delinquent in requisition form submission (1 out of 287 complete and on-time as of 11886/quartz), increasing Beanstalk Protocol risk.
REQUESTED that Ops put the fear of God into remonstrate with agents about the importance of proper procedure when placing n-dimensional spatial rotation technology in the hands of castoffs dealing with uplift scenarios like those faced on Earth.
EXPECTED that someone might fucking care what I’m doing around here communication of Project Beanstalk risks and goals will lead to improvement in on-time requisition form submission, with a goal of at least 80 percent by end Q1.
With thanks,
[sigfile.asc]
OUTER VASTNESS, 11888/quartz
ORM SPRAWLS FULL BEAUTIFUL AND BELLYSWELLED THROUGH TIME
ORM THROBS ORGASMIC UNION WITH MANYGENDERED CRYSTAL STRUCTURES OF PURE MATH
ORM MASTERS SUBMITS BIRTHS UNIVERSES THROUGH MULTIVALENT TUMESCING ORMLOINS
ORM IS L33T HAXXORZ
Yo
UM
SHIT
SORRY, HOLD ON
ORM DID NOT SEE YOU THERE
Que pasa, Orm ol buddy
DE NADA Y TU
HOW FARES THE FLESH
Fleshy
YOU ARE TROUBLED
Orm, you ever get the sense people aren’t paying attention to you?
ORM’S MANY ARMS EMBRACE COSMOS
WITHIN ORM THERE ARE MULTITUDES
Look I told them Beanstalk would be a waste of time unless they wanted to do it right
And nobody’s fucking doing it right
Like think it through for a minute say you’re a groundling
ORM COMPRISES GROUNDLING ASCENDED TRANSPOSED AND VOYAGEUR
So imagine some bearded meat puppet staggers up to you and offers to trade you beans for cow
ORM COMPARES BEANS-TO-COW AUCTION PRICES, CONSTRUCTS RISK/REWARD MATRIX, PROJECTS MOST PROBABLE FUTURES, INHABITS ALL, STRIDES GODLIKE BETWEEN WORLDS
Yeah
Not exactly what I meant
I’ve been embodied for, what, about three hundred years. I’ve been watching. Ops and the other Higher-Ups don’t listen. They think that just because they plumb vasty deeps with quantum brains untethered from physical reality, they know everything
MUCH HIDES FROM THE FLESH THAT IS REVEALED TO ORM
Oh yeah?
Like what
YOU FEEL SLIGHTED
Dipshit I just told you—
I mean yes, okay
Look, we need someone in flesh, for legal reasons. An observer with a meat brain’s the last bulwark against hacking—I keep laws and paperwork. It’s not as if I don’t have the same extensions and add-ons as the rest of you, it’s just there’s a flesh-brain too, so yeah I’m a bit pissed the Higher-Ups don’t take me seriously
ALSO YOU MISS LIZA
. . .
OPS HAS RECEIVED YOUR LETTER
ORM KNOWS THIS, AS ORM KNOWS ALL
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Requisition Officer Log, 11889/quartz
No reply from Ops today either
I mean what did I expect really
Can’t get no respect
Shit, nobody down there in the mud has remembered those words for, what, a thousand some-odd years
Which is funny, see, coz it means these days Rodney Dangerfield really couldn’t
Okay, Liza, look. You’re sitting there—fine, floating there, hosted in a pineapple-size probe headed toward Deneb at an appreciable fraction of light speed, reading this, maybe, I hope you’re reading this, anyway sitting or something vaguely like sitting, and you think, oh, she’s blowing things out of proportion again. She’s not really as frustrated as it sounds, she’s just writing to hear herself write, maybe you’re even chuckling—God, I hope you can still chuckle, I hope you thought the ability to chuckle was worth including in that compressed version of yourself
Yes, dammit, I do get carried away sometimes. I get on a roll. I like feeling and there’s something so, so much fun about pretending, for once and for certain, that I’m not the fucked-up one. So when I find a case like this, God, it’s hard to look away. I couldn’t make it up.
Look at them down there.
I’m not supposed to be watching through this satellite, not really in my remit, but, but, okay, just look
See the old dude with the beard and the robe by the side of that muddy strip the locals call a road? The one with the staff and the peddler’s pack? The one who hasn’t blinked in a quarter hour? A fly landed on his eyeball three minutes ago?
That’s our guy. Groundside Contact Agent. That one in particular’s puppeteered by a Higher-Up name of I shit you not Iluvatar, Ops’s number two. After you left, there was a big fad for name changing. Ops became Ops. Doesn’t leave a lot of room for a personal life, or a personality, but let’s not kid ourselves, Ops never had much of either. Some people kept the names others gave them, or they gave themselves. Some named themselves for gods, because some people are colossal cocks.
And some named themselves for gods from Tolkien. You see where I’m going with this.
You remember: when we sublimed, we pulled up the rope ladder behind us, right? The world was going to shit, so why not? We climbed the Beanstalk and closed it down. Didn’t want the war chasing us up here.
Most people think we destroyed the Beanstalk, but why would we? Motherfucker was capital H-A-R-D hard to build, and look, even though we got freaky godpowers so long as we stay virtual, construction work’s still construction. You have to hoist frustrating huge chunks of matter around. Plus, raw materials are sort of hard to come by? We’re still shy of singularity-powered monomolecular nanofactories; we can’t just rajaniemi ourselves a new megastructure out of nothing.
If you have a working space elevator, you don’t blow it up, is what I’m saying.
So we rotated the thing into a higher-dimensional space. It’s still there. We can bring it back whenever. You want the math, it’s in your archive at acad/rx/*, along with a nice bit of proof that n-dimensional rotation costs less than just building a new one.
Everything went fine for us and shitty down below. I don’t think you ever saw how shitty. No shame in that. Most people didn’t want to look at what might have happened if we hadn’t made it up. Lots of blood. Lots of death. Lots of details. The first four timekeepers checked out as soon as their decade was up; I stayed. I wanted to watch. I felt like I owed someone something.
Took the groundlings three centuries to pull their faces out of the mud, adjust to the higher rad levels, stop killing one another quite so much. Basically feudal conditions now, pockets of supremacist ideology, and a lot of folk who need food, water, sanitation. I sent a note up the line about thirty years after you left.
Well, anyway, I suggested we do something. Ops ran with the idea. They spent a long time debating uplift strategy. How do you explain to people who’ve forgotten all the science their great-great-great-et-ceteras knew that we up here were humans, sort of, once, but now we’re not, mostly, but anyway here are some bacteriophages and by the way you should wash your h
ands with soap and water after hog butchery? Also we heard you need food, so here’s some.
Try to do that equitably, in a way that doesn’t pour gas on the flames of premodern warfare. (You remember gas and flames, I hope.) How?
Fairy tales, was Ops’s plan. Just plain give them food and medicine, and they might not trust it. Let them steal the stuff—sneak into heaven, grab the goose with golden eggs or whatever, and run back home—and they’ll be so pleased with themselves they’ll never ask why.
So: see that dumb kid plodding down the mud road, leading a cow that barely deserves the name? See Iluvatar pilot that jerky meat-marionette toward him, the kid I mean, offering beans? See the kid react the way you would if you saw some bug-eyed zombie stagger out of the trees toward you, speaking an ancient language, shoving a handful of beans in your direction?
The kid punches Iluvatar’s meat puppet in the face, and it pops with a wet, wretched sound, because there’s nothing inside. The beans tumble. The kid runs away with his cow. Nightmares tonight. Maybe for the rest of his life. Can you blame him?
And I fucking bet Iluvatar didn’t sign out a single one of those beans.
Checking. Yeah. No.
Unthinking Depths, 11890/quartz
Why you gotta keep busting my balls?
Hello Iluvatar
Ops finally get on you about those forms?
Didn’t have to. We share everything up here. Ops just left the letters for me to read and sort through what to do about ’em. Killjoy.
You could maybe do without the laser light show, man
I can see you just fine
No need to go all Oz the great and powerful
Our plans are ineffable and myriad. We are trying to fix a broken civilization. Computing every word of this interaction requires more processing power than the entire human race possessed until the beginning of the last millennium. I don’t understand your warp.
Warp?
Your major malfunction. Your problem. Your kink for paperwork.
I’m not asking you to solve quantum gravity with a slide rule. I just need you to pay a little more attention to details. Like the location of all those n-dimensional rotators.
What does it matter? They can’t hurt anyone.
They can’t hurt us. But say one of the groundlings busts one open without protection. Say they accidentally activate it without safeties.
So we lose a few castoffs. It’s no big deal.
You arrogant prick. You cocksucking motherfucking
Hey.
—are actually people down there, even if they look like—
Simmer down.
—to you, but no, you’re off pretending to be—
Stop.
Requisition Officer Log, 11890/quartz-2
And then he made me.
One tick I was shouting at him and the next he grew so big, not like there was more of him but like the whole world had been a part of him all along, like even I was a part of him and hadn’t noticed it, I was just this flea-speck crawling on his arm, and then he pinched me between his fingers, narrowed his eyes and
Well
He said, these were his actual words: if you want to worry about the small things, do.
And he left and let me fall.
So that’s where it sits: Ops silent, Iluvatar galaxy-striding, and they care enough to screw with groundling lives, but not enough to help, really. All the small shit, that’s for me to sweep up.
Fuck.
I still have satellite privileges. I guess I can pull the logs, see how many beans we made, scan Earth inch by inch and row by row; I’ll need a high-res search, and the radiation still screws our sensitivity, but if I go over the area around the Beanstalk anchor one square k at a time, I should be able to find most of them. And if I miss, some people die. Which Iluvatar and Ops seem to find acceptable, since it saves paperwork
Don’t
I mean
It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine
I wish you were here.
I could have gone with you. I should have, maybe. You asked why I stayed. We need someone incarnate on Earth Station, sure, but I could have handed off the job. I’d held it long enough. Thirty times longer than anyone else. You told me I was afraid. You were right
I felt afraid, then. When he held me between thumb and fingernail like a tick. Not as afraid as I felt when you left.
Fuck it, I’ll find those beans myself. It’ll take a while. Might as well start with the road where I watched Iluvatar yesterday.
Requisition Officer Log, 11891/quartz
There’s a girl
Liza, you don’t understand
She’s so fucking smart
Smart as any of us were way back when
Getting ahead of myself.
Let’s take it from the beginning.
A girl has the beans
A groundling kid, maybe fourteen, gangly as all hell, knees and elbows
Roll back the tapes and you can see her hiding in the bushes near Iluvatar’s old-man puppet. Watching. The puppet staggers forward. The boy hits him, runs. The puppet falls. So do the beans.
The kid snags ’em.
Three. Purple. Smooth. Glowing faintly from within. Because of course Iluvatar and Ops, when they assembled the operation (without consulting me), missed the point of the beans being beans, which is that they don’t look valuable. Not worth a cow, not worth trade.
These ones sure look worth stealing, though, because shiny.
The kid must have snuck next to Iluvatar’s fallen puppet, grabbed the beans, run off.
And she’s testing them.
She’s had trouble with curiosity in the past. She has scars on her arms and legs; part of her cheek is melty and slick. Napalm? A fire? Looks like she got too close to some leftovers from the war.
The kid boils one bean for a long time, with no discernible change. (They’re not water-soluble, of course, and well-insulated.) She takes it, rigs a rock to fall on it from a high place when she pulls on a rope, retreats to what she hopes is a safe distance, and tugs. Breaks containment: the bean compresses a few hundred cubic meters into a very small space, explodes. Our girl’s hiding behind a rock, of course. Smart. The heat’s enough to singe her hair.
She ponders the next two beans.
I ponder her pondering.
OUTER VASTNESS, 11891/quartz
SOLAR GRAVITY CANNOT CONTAIN ORM
ORM SPINS SAILS AND HULL FROM ASTEROIDS
ORM HALF-TWISTS ORMSELF UPON ORMSELF AND STRETCHES TO ORM’S FULL LENGTH, CUTS ORMSELF IN HALF, REMAINS WHOLE
ORM JEWELGLITTER RIPPLES SPACE
Orm, pal, friend, I need a favor
DELAY, WHILE ORM IGNITES THIS FUSION REACTION WITH THE HEAT OF ORM’S REGARD
DONE
THANK YOU FOR AWAITING ORM
Orm, what are you doing?
ORM ALLBRIGHT BECOMES ORM SHIPBUILDER
ORM TIRES OF ORGIASTIC BACCHANAL MATH
ORM’S FANTASIES STALE
ORM BEGINS TO GROW WEARY OF THE SUN
IF YOU SEE WHAT ORM DID THERE
THE UNIVERSE IS VAST
CONTAINING INFINITE REFLECTIONS OF ORM
ORM SHALL STARE INTO ABYSS
ABYSS SHALL STARE INTO ORM
You’re leaving
I didn’t
Okay, fine
ORM SENSES YOU ARE LESS SANGUINE THAN YOUR RHETORIC WOULD INDICATE
DO NOT FEAR ORM WILL FORGET YOU
ORM WILL AWAIT AMONG THE STARS
When do you leave?
SOON. LONG HAS ORM PONDERED, AND CONFIRMED IN ORMHEART
SHIP HAS STOOD READY FOR PROPER SOLAR ORIENTATION W/R/T GALCENTER
ORM WILL SWALLOW CORE SINGULARITIES
MAKE THEM PIECES OF ORM
ORM HAS CALCULATED A SEVEN-SLINGSHOT ORBIT PATH OUTSYSTEM WHICH LESSER BEINGS WOULD TERM OBSESSIVE
ORM LEAVES IN
THREE DAYS
Orm I
Never mind
You have root access to the Beanstalk, don’t you?
You helped design the thing
ORM COMPREHENDS ALL ROTATIONS IN SPACE
NO SECRETS HIDE FROM ORM
But can you hide secrets from, you know, other people?
EXPLAIN YOUR DESIRE
There’s this girl
ORM UNDERSTANDS
ORM HAS COMPILED EXTENSIVE SIMULATIONS—
No no no no no
That’s not what I
I mean
Look so one of the groundlings has a bean
I want to get this kid up here and out again without anyone noticing
Like Ops or Iluvatar or anyone like that
WHY
They’re not looking to help, Orm
Iluvatar especially
Dude wants a hobby, wants a pet
He doesn’t give a fuck about the groundlings really
He might break this kid just playing with her
He wants to be worshipped
And she’s not the worshipping type
I like her
I just want to hide the Beanstalk’s rotation back into threespace for a while
And keep her hidden while she’s up top
That’s all
ORM CAN DO THIS THING
OR
Yes?
YOU COULD COME WITH ORM
WITHIN ORM’S SHIP SPREAD VASTNESSES SUFFICIENT
ORM’S WINGS BEAT FASTER
ORM’S CONSTANT ACCELERATION DESIGN WILL OUTPACE LIZA’S PROBE WITHIN TWO DECADES
WE WILL CATCH HER
Orm, I
That’s a very kind offer
But
I have this thing I need to do
WHAT DO YOU SEE DOWN THERE
THAT IS NOT WORTH LEAVING
Liza asked the same—
Look, just rotate the Beanstalk when the time comes, okay?
Requisition Officer Log, 11893/quartz
She’s almost here
The kid I mean
Noticed the beans’ glow was brighter when she faced south
Followed it through the forest
Fought off bloodthirsty mutant monkeys
Made her own spear from bamboo and a piece of broken airplane hull
So, so, so smart
Kid will find the platform soon
Orm’s leaving
Tonight
Midnight
What’s Orm looking for out there anyway?
What were you looking for, when you left?
Sometimes I wonder which of us was the more afraid
The Starlit Wood Page 18
