by DD White
* * *
Grega had tracked down an address for the research specialist named Eromot who had experimented on a perfectly normal sufferer of headaches who now had become a stark raving lunatic with an aversion to clothes. Now Eromot’s patient sat in the prison facility at headquarters. Grega considered not letting Eistia know about it till tomorrow since the workday had become pretty much over and it got late. A full day’s work on Urania would only be about 4 hours long since a day only lasts about seven Earth hours before the Sun has to set for about a 7 hour night. Uranians look speeded up to the Earth eye with more energy on a planet that exhibited a fraction of Earth’s gravity. To the Earth eye, time seemed to flow faster on Urania as the beings there moved around and spoke as if speeded up. Already the Sun set for the day and Grega became tired of these extra long work days that were making it a late dinner and to bed right after that to do it all over again the next day. Still Eistia looked so beat up after the boss had chewed him out for continuing to investigate an Aungtalli closed “accident” that Grega decided that this new bit of information would cheer Eistia the Investigator right up. It did noticeably clear up Eistia’s gloominess right away, and soon both investigators were on the way to Eromot’s address on their way home for the day.
Eromot answered the door, and at first he seemed reluctant to talk about his work at the Ministry of Science, and had dismissed anything he did there as just ancient history at that point. Eromot lived alone and didn’t seem interested in making a spectacle of himself to neighbors or others in general. He seemed reluctant to admit he ever had anything to do with the Ministry of Science for obvious reasons. When the crazy guy Morgamor had been mentioned however, Eromot began to open up with a noticed concern. All of a sudden Eromot wanted to meet with Morgamor, and seemed to want to continue his research on him. Eromot confessed to the investigators that after careful examination and experiment with the guy he concluded that the man had been tuned in to some frequency of energy that caused his headaches. Instead of trying to make this frequency go away, Eromot thought he would see if he could increase Morgamor’s perception of the frequency. Eromot figured out a substance that would amplify the effects of this energy, which the guy picked up on, by adjusting his brain’s serotonin level. He had the crazy guy ingest this substance to amplify the frequency and help the guy focus on what his brain picked up on. At first a precise adjustment of serotonin helped immensely with the headaches, which immediately stopped. The guy testified that he felt enlightened, but soon he developed symptoms of schizophrenia and he couldn’t stop hearing voices.
When Eistia heard that the crazy guy heard voices he asked, “You mean he hears strange voices that then say
that they’re the voice of Beataphoriah?”
“Yes that name you say is one that’s correct
from that ancient devil worshiping sect,” said Eromot to Eistia’s question.
Meanwhile Beataphoriah, an immortal quanta-optic-nanocode being, continued stuck in a virtual reality loop. With what little freedom it had been able to exert on physical reality, during a single point in this loop routine, it had figured out over the millennia a way to reprogram a communications device one sub-atomic state of a quantum bit at a time. After thousands of Earth years of this, Beataphoriah began to try to focus the device on the brain activities of the population of intelligent Uranian life in general, which it hoped still existed out there. It had to get in contact with some intelligent brain out there somehow to establish communication so it could instruct them to release Beataphoriah from this virtual prison of an infinite program loop. As it turned out, so far over the thousands of years it had been trying this, Beataphoriah’s communication attempt still only manages to drive occasional members of the Uranian species completely insane. For the time being Beataphoriah had been trapped, desperately broadcasting for help because it calculated that the star Tze-Doldus may be reaching a point of instability that could result in an explosion, which would be the ruin of absolutely everything.
