"What's your name?"
"I don't have one," the golem said.
Euclidia touched her chin. "Well, we can't have that. It's not black at all. Let me see..." she looked around. The island of Gyali wasn't much to look at, the northeastern part being almost entirely made of obsidian, their precious ore. The continuous mining of that ore was of the utmost importance, but no one was crazy enough to go and pressure the obsidian golems to keep working. "I got it! I'll call you, Tria. Is that black?" she asked, calling him the Greek number for 3.
"It's sharp."
She perked up, having made some headway. "Black! So, Tria, tell me. We need the mines working. What can I do?"
Tria shuffled a bit in place, making the darkness move. "Mining is black."
"Yes! Mining is black. Let's all go back to mining!" she exclaimed, her arms forward.
"But the Geometers come in ships."
"Yes, to carry the obsidian. By the harbour, over there," Euclidia pointed.
A brief pause. "We want a ship," Tria said simply.
Euclidia exhaled sharply. She wasn't sure if the others would agree to that. She wasn't sure if the others should. "What if that's not black?"
"Then no mining," Tria shrugged, and he was large enough for Euclidia to notice. Really notice. The golem was four times her height and she was but a twig of a girl.
But she wouldn't take no for an answer. And not even a 'not black,' dammit! She was a Geometer, a mistress of the black.
"Tria, that makes me angry," she said, summoning all the menace a tiny girl could muster against a rock formation that talked.
"Sharp."
"You leave me no choice..." she said, starting to gesture with her hands in specific, practised motions.
Tria shrugged again.
Euclidia ripped out obsidian from the ground, making the rocks float from the island around her. They hovered over her hands, but they were dirty, rocks really. She slashed the air with her delicate hands, and entire bits of the obsidian were cut away. With each gesture, the obsidian got closer to its final shape.
A rhombus that was sharper than any blade.
She carved out more obsidian in the air, her weapons of destruction spinning around her with menace.
"Tria!" she shouted with authority. Sure, she had come to talk, but she wouldn't back down from a fight. This was just her obsidian, her birthright, talking back at her. Now sorry it would be. "I want you to start mining again!"
Tria stepped out of the cave for one last shrug, and he was exactly as the scrolls described them, but she had never seen one up close. She gulped audibly, looking up.
Okay, this was why the other Geometers chickened out in coming here to chat.
Euclidia couldn't back down now. She raised her hands in a threatening gesture and her obsidian rhombuses flew very quickly towards the golem. They smashed on its body, making deep cuts and breaks. It groaned in pain, a cry that sounded as if it was coming from a deep, glassy well.
"I don't feel black doing this, Tria!" she said, trying to reason with the golem. "But I won't accept you not mining." She raised ten more obsidian ores from the ground and slashed them in the air, now warmed up. She readied the new projectiles in an instant.
Tria ran up to her before she could blink and raised its massive arm. He brought it down next to her, being physically unable to harm her directly. But this entire part of Gyali island was made of obsidian, so the powerful slam broke off pieces that flew in all directions.
Tiny shards of obsidian with edges three nanometres thick flew and slashed Euclidia's body. She cried out in pain and ironically, raised more obsidian rocks as a shield to help her. She quickly slashed a rectangle shield out of the hovering rocks and kept it there to protect her. Blood poured out of her torso, she had gotten a deep cut over her belly button. Wincing, she said, "Tria, that wasn't black at all."
"Sharp."
"Yes, sharp, dammit!" she said through gritted teeth, holding her stomach. "Fine, you'll get your ship."
Tria didn't seem to respond with any body movements. He was, after all, a pile of obsidian ore.
"Did you hear me?" she repeated, now actually worried about the blood gushing out of her.
"Yes. Where is the ship?"
"Well, I didn't bring it yet! Obviously," she snapped back. She realised this wasn't getting her anywhere. "Black. You can take my ship."
Tria turned towards the harbour, which was just a sturdy pier really, and then turned back to her. "That's black."
"Sharp," Euclidia said, sucking in air. She checked her stomach, this was going to leave a nasty scar. She didn't mind, she thought it would look badass.
Tria said nothing. He then turned around and went back inside the mine. Euclidia kept the shield around her just in case, and waited for a while. At some point, she heard the familiar slamming of the golem's arms on the mine's walls.
She sighed in relief. "Mining resumed. So black..." she said to herself.
Then she turned around, frowning. Hmm. How was she gonna get off the island if she was going to leave the ship here to the golems?
It must have been the blood-loss, because she felt silly for not thinking of it immediately. She had all the material she needed all around her! She raised large blocks of obsidian ore and slashed them, wincing in pain as she gestured the arcane movements. She cut the obsidian into a half-diamond shape, elongated. It was basically a canoe, big enough to hold her small weight.
She sent it to the pier and painfully hopped inside.
On her way home, bleeding, but victorious, she understood why the Geometers always send the youngest of them to negotiate.
The End.
The Root of the Problem
‘Expose the root,’ the instructions said. Okay, sure. But how?
Digger scratched his head and went through the file once again, scrolling without really focusing on any point in the ancient ypertext. The builders had created all these wonderful cyborg trees that give them all life, that give his entire village life.
Digger was an initiate, one of the few who had access to the sacred ypertexts and could read the code. The code of life, the code of the entire dome. For the dome gives life, and the dome takes it away.
Digger sighed and closed the holy tablet. It was running out of power for the day, and he needed to save some for tonight, if he was going to work through the night. That was the only way he'd make it in time, before the solstice. Why was the solstice such a problem?
Nobody actually knew. The initiates pretended to know, but they really didn't. Digger had asked all the questions in his mind, but he had gotten no real answer.
The problem was that the sacred ypertexts had been rewritten, censored through the ages, and Digger even suspected that they had added some bits to them to suit whatever law the initiates wanted to pass off as dogma.
Hundreds of little notes at the side of the ypertext, some even pointing to things that weren’t there any more. That was a blatant clue that things were missing.
Really now.
Expose the root. Expose… the… Yeah, obviously, Digger said, rubbing his chin in front of the old tree. Its roots were exposed. How was he supposed to do it again? Or more? He unfolded his trusty shovel and started to dig around the cyborg tree, having nothing better to do.
After an hour or so he was hot and sweaty, left in his t-shirt. Digger sat back down on the dirt, then let himself fall on his back. He was one with the ground, one with the dirt, a holy communion.
Expose the root.
How, ypertext be damned? How was he supposed to do it? The ypertext seemed to consider this action such a normal step, it was the first one in every instruction. Nobody had ever seemed to crack it.
The hours were drawing near. He only had something like three hours until the solstice. That, the text said, would be bad if you hadn’t ‘run the S crypt.’
Another mystery. That S crypt.
Digger opened up his holy tablet, it wouldn’t matter if the solar
panels wouldn’t recharge it, if his time was up, that was it. He scratched his head, rolled on the dirt between the exposed roots and tried once again for about the millionth time in his short life to decode the ypertexts.
He swiped angrily at random. “Bah! Nothing, nothing’s in here…” he said, and threw the holy tablet to the side, making a puff of dirt whirl in circles.
He realised that this action was stupid, an initiate would never dishonour the sacred tablet like that. He picked it up again, mumbling a prayer for forgiveness. “Forgive me for my kernel is weak. Forgive me for I have sinned. Forgive me superuser.”
He threw the holy tablet in his lap and focused ahead at the dim lights. His head leaned to the side, he was so tired. He was thirsty, and dirty, and frustrated beyond measure. All he wanted was a bath and some bread.
Digger idly swiped the holy tablet open, it was a gesture he did often with no particular reason. And his gaze fell on a word.
‘Root.’
He stood up and gripped the holy tablet. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he quickly read the ypertext, scrolling up and down to go through every note there was. For the first time in his entire service, he had found a reference to the root!
Finally.
The ypertext said, ‘To get to the root of the problem, go to the holy tree and open up a consul terminal.’
He knew how to do that! He quickly pressed the Ctrl, Alt and T buttons on the holy tablet.
The consul terminal’s blackness showed up.
“Great! Now what?” Digger said to himself, going back to the instructions.
‘Then enter su.’
That always baffled the initiates. ‘Su’ must have had a divine meaning, some said it was the short name for God. Digger was too tired to think theology, so he just took it literally.
He typed ‘su’ into the consul and pressed enter.
‘When inside the roots, the hashtag should appear.’
Those hashtags were another point of contention amongst the initiate scholars. They said that it meant a lot to the ancients, for some arcane reason. They were obsessed with them, and with something else called emochi.
Anyway, there was no time. Digger scratched his head. Think, Digger, think. He had read some crazy guy’s theory that the hashtags could also be represented as the symbol ‘#.’ It always sounded stupid to Digger, but he was prepared to try anything. So, he checked the consul. And yes, there it was! The ‘#.’
By the Holy Tree, finally!
Okay, now what?
He read the rest of the instructions and followed them to the letter, reversing the translations by using his knowledge and utilising the ramblings of the crazy scholars. It turned out that the generations of initiates had somehow turned the holy ypertext into something that the holy tablet couldn’t understand. But if you had spent years of reading all the research and the theories, you could follow the thread back to the original version of the ypertext.
Just how Linus Torvalds wrote it.
Digger typed in the commands, the trial-and-error took him more than two hours, but he was going at million-miles-per-hour now. He was typing and testing everything he could think of.
And as the last minutes counted down, and as the dome was ready to collapse, he finished it, following the instructions to the letter.
Digger pressed one final enter with a flourish and looked up. He felt woozy after such intense concentration, adrenaline leaving his body.
The Dome came to life.
Digger fell on his butt, clutching the holy tablet in his hands, looking up at the opening ceiling. It creaked and complained, but it opened up to the sky as the morning sun shone inside.
Digger could swear that he heard the cyborg tree sigh.
The End.
Time-Travel Traffic is the Worst Kind of Traffic
Seriously, I get into my DeLorean after a nice nap, ready to go to work two weeks up, early in the morning.
I pop down to the coffee shop, and there's a sale, dammit! Everybody's there, crowding the place, DeLoreans all over and nowhere left to bloody park or nothing.
I don't mind paying full price for my sweet bucket of caffeine so check my to-do list for an empty slot, I travel down one day, park at my usual spot one second after I just left sometime ago, and I rush inside the coffee shop because this has already taken too long. Yeah, I know I'm a time-traveller but I ain't getting any younger, lad.
So, I go in the coffee shop, and it's that ginger babe, right? With the killer knockers up to here. I walk up to her all macho like.
"Hey, Kathryn," I nod at her, looking like a stud.
She presses her lips together and throws an entire coffee on my face.
I scream like a little bitch 'cause I think I'm scarred for life and everything, but it's just moderately warm. I spit out the foam.
"Why d'you do that for?" I squeal, going for the napkins.
"You stood me up yesterday, and you're coming in here, getting your coffee like nothing's happened between us," she says, hand on her waist.
"Kathryn, you know I'm a time traveller. Things get mixed up, sweetheart. When was this?" I wipe away the coffee from my shirt but I know it's already ruined.
She points at the exit. "Five seconds ago."
"That wasn't-" I complain then stop, exasperated. She might have an amazing pair of titties on her but she can't wrap her head around time travellin'. I take a deep breath. "Look, this is my preferred day, remember? From your point of view, I'll be coming in here every five minutes for the rest of your shift. I wasn't gonna pop in today, it wasn't on my schedule, see?" I show her my neverending to-do list. Being a time traveller basically means having a nevernending to-do list. They never tell you that beforehand.
She raises her nose at my list. She crosses her arms under her chest, making her titties perk up and threaten to leave the confines of her bra.
Did I really score last night? Lucky bastard, my future self.
"So, you're saying you haven't gone out with me yet?" she asks, her mask of anger showing cracks.
"Not yet, no. I'd love to!" I say, arms open in surrender. It also helps with drying up myself.
She smirks and I can imagine her lips running all over my crotch. "Okay. I'll forgive you, for now. The usual?" she asks, turning to make me my coffee.
"Yeah, exactly the same I ordered five minutes ago," I say, smiling. I check my breath as soon as she turns away from me, then lean in on the counter. "Hey, Kathryn, did we..." I click my tongue. "You know."
She smirks even more, looking naughty as an elf. She pours the hot coffee with the steaming thing. "You should remember those things. A girl gets upset when you don't," she said, indifferently.
"I told you it's in my Yet, darling," I snap back at her, then calm myself down.
She waves my comment away, and passes me my sweet tub of coffee.
I take a sip, it's hot and sweet like a Turkish delight, just the way I like it. "Thanks, love." I plop down payment, plus a generous tip. And then I nod goodbye and I'm outta there.
As soon as I get in my DeLorean, it bugs me. What did I do in her Past? I note down the exact time and unpark the car, then drive away. As soon as I'm gone, I see my DeLorean in the rear-view mirror popping up and parking at my spot, the one I just vacated.
Normal stuff for a time-travellin' bastard, basically.
I go to the dry-cleaners and take off my shirt. I plop it down on the counter. "When will it be ready?" I ask the man in there.
He tells me.
I run out half-naked and get into the car, pop Up three hours and pick up my dry-cleaning. I pay the man and put on the shirt, clean and warm, it feels perfect on my skin. Then I note it down, get back in the car and go to work to finish my morning shift.
During tea-time, it's still bugging me. I say 'Excuse me' and go down to the car, then pop Down to last night. I drive with no purpose, then realise I'm stupid. I don't have her address!
I pop Up three days and stop with the alarm lights in
the middle of the street outside the coffeeshop. My future self is inside, getting his coffee. I open his DeLorean and check his to-do list, I'll surely remember to jot her address down. There it is, 5 Highlord Lane.
I leave the to-do list and hop back in my car, then pop back three days Down. It's night, and I find the address.
I wait a bit, I can see Kathryn's hair in the dim light of her apartment. It's all nice and romantic, go me! I-from-inside seem to get all the moves right 'cause I score, putting her on her back on the sofa. I bite my lip from outside, damn, this is getting me hot and bothered.
I can't wait. I pop Up one hour, and they're still getting it on. That's weird, I never last that long. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm more of the wham-bam-nice-to-see-you-ma'am variety.
Frowning, I pop Up one hour again.
Still getting it on. Okay, this is freaking me out, I know for a fact I cannot last that long. I can barely go a second round, let alone a second hour.
I sneak close and check inside the window. I'm certain I'll see someone else in there, but my damn DeLorean is also parked outside. I peek inside, and those are my pants on the sofa alright, I'd recognise them everywhere, they got that nice weathering in the bumcheeks.
I scratch my head, this is getting weird.
I get back in my car, pop Up another hour. This is late in the night now. I, as in the one inside, am still getting it on!
Bloody impossible!
I stick around under her window and wait this time, this cannot be.
After a time, I hear talking. Me is sayin' "I'm off to the bathroom and back again for another round, right love?"
She's lying on the bed, all messed up, hair, sheets, lipstick. She's covered in a thin layer of sweat and she's got the widest grin I've ever seen on a satisfied woman. "Yes," she breathes out huskily, barely making sense. "I'll wait a moment."
And then I see my future self pop out of the apartment. I hide behind a bush, and see myself sneak out, cross the street and go into his DeLorean, then pop away.
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