OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO oOOOO OOOO. OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" .OOOOOO OOOOOo OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO OOOOOOO. OOOO oOOOO OOOO .OOOO OOOO OOOOOOOOo OOOO OOOO" OOOO oOOOO OOOO OOOO "OOOO. OOOO OOOOo .OOOO' OOOO .OOOO" OOOO OOOO OOOOoOOOO "OOOO. oOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO..OOOO OOOO "OOOOOOO OOOOoOOOO" OOOO .OOOO"""OOOOOOOO OOOO OOOOOO "OOOOOOO' OOOO oOOOO ""OOOO OOOO "OOOO OOOOOO |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | There Ain't No Justice | | | | #114 | | | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| - Metamorph - Chapter 03 by Arifel III The Wise One must wander among the Worlds... - Apollonius Sophistes i looked around the back yard. a washing line; a wheelbarrow; some hanging baskets that once contained plants. the cats had gone up to Queensland with the rest of my family and the house was being sold. all of my old posessions had been moved into storage. the place looked empty, forlorn; not at all like Mission Control. not even the most objective assessment of the back yard could identify it as the site from which Lydya and i would launch ourselves out into space, to Nereid, to add our names to the Metamorph monument. `do you know where we're going?' i asked. we were both speaking in that vague way we have when we're concentrating on complex internal changes. `four three three four point four three two million kilometres. if we use bananafishbone's half-field drive, we can reach forty percent of the speed of light, once we're above the plane of the ecliptic. no, i don't know exactly where we're going. i have a rough idea of where Neptune is, this time of year. we can use mass sense to find it once we're within about one hundred and fifty million K'.' i consulted my ephemeris. `Neptune: right ascension nineteen hours, thirty-one minutes, thirty-four seconds. declination minus twenty-one degrees, nine minutes, twenty-one seconds. currently thirty-one point one four six AU's, say four thousand six hundred and fifty-nine million kilometres away. assuming we can get up to one hundred and twenty-four thousand km/s... about ten and a half hours. what's this half-field drive like?' `i've never used it myself, but i'm told that it creates a low-level field around you that moves you partially out of reality. shifts you from zero to forty percent of the speed of light, instantaneously.' i raised my eyebrows. `it sounds ludicrous; i won't ask where all the energy for that comes from. all the components are biological?' she nodded. `it's possible for one person to create the field. it's easier for two. the breakeven point is five people, but we two can get there and back easily.' i looked up the plans, noted that they required some pure aluminium. i considered synthesising it, but decided that there was enough refineable material around, in the form of discarded cans. as usual, Lydya had been thinking ahead; she produced a crumpled can, crushed to the size of a golf ball. i smiled, accepted it from her, put it in my mouth and swallowed. my stomach would take it apart, atom by atom, discarding the dross and storing what we needed. other parts of my stomach were preparing the drive itself, creating links of superconducting material, tiny diamond struts, channels which i pumped clear of matter, perfect vacuum, ridges in which sliding iron pellets would act as control surfaces. the objective observer i mentioned earlier would have thought that we were simply sitting cross-legged on the grass, dispassionately meditating. on one level, that's all we were doing. on another, i was re-categorising the volumes of information i'd copied from her, creating indices for data which i personally found particularly interesting; on another, i was enjoying the feeling of mild summer sunlight on my skin; on another, somewhat more human level, i was marvelling at the feelings she'd inspired in me. it wasn't that she'd worked the Change (and was therefore something akin to a mother to me); i felt i loved her for her other qualities, her dark sense of humour, her appropriate seriousness when required and her discordian frivolity when being serious wasn't appropriate. about twenty minutes later, we'd both completed our drives. she passed me a pellet which contained notes, biomodifications which would allow us to survive in vacuum for extended periods. my body implemented them automatically. whoever had worked them out was good; we looked unchanged, externally, but i noted all channels into the body had been reinforced, from the inside; we stopped breathing. our skins toughened, requiring just a little more effort than usual to bend. we weren't going to change, internally, that much; i for one wanted to stay at the biological level for the moment. this was a stage that some Metamorphs went through, apparently; exchanging all of their soft, organic components for ones made of other, stronger things; living, but not DNA-based. less fragile; more adaptable. there were some that went what was termed `the whole "Childhood's End" path', changing their forms for structures of energy. we never heard from them again. she sat on the grass, staring at me. i stared back, not wanting to use any special means for determining what she was thinking; i should be able to work it out. she was either unsure about wanting to go on this trip, or wanted to know if i was completely sure that i wanted to go. i waited. `are you certain you want to do this?' i'd given it some thought. `you told me of the Berserker stage.' this was where the Metamorph finally realised its position and `went to town', doing strange, bizarre and sometimes dangerous things. throughout the ages, these incidents had given rise to many (for humans, anyway) inexplicable characters, such as Heracleitus, Spring-heeled Jack, the Wandering Jew, Gilles De Rais, most of the ex-rulers of Wallachia who'd ever been accused of being vampires, Adam Weishaupt, and such (i had been relieved to learn that Jesus wasn't a Metamorph - he had merely been misquoted). i knew enough of myself to know that when i hit this stage, i would hit it hard; i though that this trip might avert it for a while. `delaying that stage may make it worse.' she said, following my reasoning. i stood and stretched, not from any need to do so, but simply because it felt good. `so be it. if i'm going to be the silliest Metamorph there ever was, there's no avoiding it.' she gave me a warning glance, and i recalled what she'd told me of our Law: A Metamorph may not kill another Metamorph. If a Metamorph should step outside the Law, a conclave of Five was required to bring the Rogue to justice. the sentence is death. Each Metamorph may bring one other being to become a Metamorph. (interesting, that one; i'd thought the `one begets one' law a mechanical limitation) Maintain secrecy. Maintain a semblance of rationality. i'd come to know their standards for rationality; they were broad and completely unrelated to human standards. with interest, i noted the absence of any rule that forbade killing humans, and i thought of my list of people i didn't particularly like. maybe i'd look some of them up when we got back. she stood, the sunlight through the branches of the lemon tree dappling over her face. `you don't want to wait until night, so that no-one will see us?' she smiled. `rules for Metamorphs, number seventy-one: act as strange as you like. chances are people won't believe their eyes.' i acknowledged this with a nod. `let's do it.' inside my body, energy began flowing along conduits within my bones. it wasn't electrical energy, and i could do far more with it than the tricks mankind had learned to perform with electromagnetism. my view of the world around me wavered as an ellipsoidal field grew around me. a similar field enveloped Lydya's body and we both lifted from the ground, like balloons drifting on the wind. the music playing through my mind was the sweeping organ solo from `stagnation' (a track from the very first Genesis album, and i tried not to think of the lyrics) as we rose above the treetops, above the roof-tops... wau, this was like one of my dreams. between my feet i could see power-lines strung from one pole to the next, over the house, along the street. in my dreams, i used to dread flying into them. we rose rapidly. i had no idea as to what our motive force was; a cursory check of my archives told me it was a gradual lessening of earth's gravitational field's ability to hold my body, which meant that once we were in open space, we'd drift. of course, once we were out of range of any gravitational fields, we could point ourselves at Neptune and activate the Half-field drive. for a few moments, i resisted the temptation to look down at the receding earth, and instead i glanced over at Lydya. her body was encapsulated in the field, and she'd managed to give it a glittering, golden aspect. well, two can play at that game, i thought. a brief flurry of what i'd come to know as Inner Secondary Thought occurred, and my mind was presented with options for colouring the field. i ran bright blue-green hexagonal grid lines over my field, red fireflies darting along the lines and flaring yellow when they intersected. i wasn't concerned with wasting energy on such displays; i knew that, if necessary, i could collect sunlight, or scoop hydrogen from the air, or even convert some of my own mass to energy. the options were endless. there was little chance of being stuck halfway, out of fuel. i modified the shape of my field, so that it followed the contours of my body, spread my arms out and together, we shot up out of the atmosphere. the gradual change of the colour of the sky, from summer azure to midnight blue, was something i wanted to see again and again. unfortunately, i hadn't activated my sensory recorder, so if i wanted to see it again, i'd have to drop down to the earth and start over. i was on the verge of doing this when i felt insistent waves of, something, gravitic in nature; at least, it wasn't on the EM spectrum - of course. it was Lydya. i tuned in: `increase the field's opacity to full. we'll need to be left behind by the earth - you know what i mean? we'll need to drop out of its gravity well completely before we can use the drive.' i waved an acknowledgement and complied, rather more quickly than i'd intended; i shot away from her so fast she appeared to vanish. i tumbled end over end, righting myself with difficulty, orienting feet-downward by force of habit. the sight was breath-taking. it was the standard NASA shot of the earth from space, but being there made all the difference. the silence was profound, and i felt the cold as an absence of heat, not as something crippling. we were in the shadow of the earth, a crescent of sun lighting the curve before me, like the span of a huge bridge. i forgot about Lydya for a moment, and simply hung there in space, like Tetsuo, taking in the view. awesome. i could understand the astronauts who took it as a religious experience, and i could understand those who saw the earth as a living being. of course she was. i saw a flare of bright green light off to my left and below me; instantly, my eyes centred on it, ranged, zoomed it. it was Lydya, not merely freeing her body from the influence of gravity, but expending energy to drive towards me, energised atoms trailing from her feet. i laughed. `you look like Astro-boy!' i sent to her, using the gravitic band as she had. she came level with me, her hands on her hips. `what did you do?' i checked back. `let's see... uh, i drove field strength up to one hundred percent... ah. if you do that in less than a certain period - say, zero point zero zero four milliseconds - the field strength goes up over theoretical limits, and forms a sort of repulsion field. it repelled earth's gravity and your field, too, so i got shoved away. it won't happen again, captain.' she gave me a mock-stern look. `see that it doesn't, ensign.' she turned to take in the view. `wonderful, isn't it?' i nodded. `we aren't on any sort of tight schedule, are we? i'd like to stay and watch the sunset from up here.' she mm-hmmed her agreement. just then, i felt more waves, these definitely EM-based, coming from behind us. i turned to look. using the waves as a guide and by amplifying the available light, i could just see it; a satellite of some kind. `what do you make of that, Lydya?' i asked, pointing. `spy satellite. American. oops - we're over their territory, aren't we?' i looked down, nodded. a wicked grin animated her features. `let's go pay our respects.' i grinned back at her. we dimmed our fields' special effects to the point where it appeared that we were simply hovering in space, unprotected, and then we drove ourselves towards the satellite. i grew wary when i saw what looked like particle weapons on the thing. `do you recognise those funnels?' she nodded. `yeah. our skin-shielding will be adequate. you might want to go clear, though.' this meant modifying the field around us so that light would be bent around it. it only worked effectively at a distance. `don't be rude! let's go say hello.' we approached something about the size and shape of the Apollo command module, white-painted metal, detailed with antennae and fish-eye ports which concealed cameras. the funnels pointed forwards, along the thing's main axis. we floated around it until i saw a tiny United States flag and the NASA emblem. there was a third symbol, between the others. i couldn't believe my eyes. `i always wondered about that one.' i sent, pointing to the red, white, black and gold eye-in-the-pyramid symbol. `oh, that's just Kelly. he did that, just after they were launched. he's a notorious put-on artist. always has been, ever since he worked with Dr. John Dee back in the sixteen-hundreds.' i regarded the design with my head to one side. `not bad. it lacks something. to be frank, it's not Art.' Lydya looked up at me sharply. `something wrong?' `that's one of the signs i've been warned to look for in possible Rogues. that infamous three-letter word.' i frowned. `i haven't been a Metamorph for more than a week! give me a chance to hang myself properly!' she smiled. i moved closer to the satellite, extended my index finger; i expanded some of the capillaries and made some radical alterations to the blood flowing in them. when it came spraying out, it was bright yellow acrylic paint. distributing other colours from the middle and ring fingers, it took perhaps four minutes to render a creditable copy of Vaughn Bode's `Cheech Wizard', giving the finger. i added a speech balloon; `BLESSED ARE DA PEACE-MAKERS.' Lydya examined it critically. when she looked up at me again, that manic grin was back. half an hour later, we drifted back a few metres to get a better idea of the whole work. frankly, it looked more like a hippie's kombi-wagon than an orbital defence satellite, bright pink and purple swirls that would have done any Moscoso poster proud, or like a subway train that had been shunted into an unguarded area. i was particularly proud of the doves. Lydya floated over to me and gave me a mock-worried look. `do you think we'll get into trouble for this?' we both laughed as we drove off into space. we'd pushed up at about forty degrees to the plane of the ecliptic for about half an hour; i had no idea how fast we were going, but whenever i queried the sensor which measured gravitational fields, it reported that we were still too close to the earth. the half-field drive would only function when we were outside the gravitational field, and i hadn't bothered to work out how far that was. i gave the problem to my back-processor, and almost immediately it spat back an answer; at this velocity, we'd be at the jump-off point within five minutes. i devoted four seconds of this time to establishing the exact orientation we'd need to assume before jumping off if we were going to reach Neptune; the rest of the time i mulled over an idea i'd had long before i became a Metamorph. i wanted to design a tiny robot, a Von Neumann machine, no bigger than a grain of rice. its task was going to be, firstly, to build several hundred thousand copies of itself by mining a large asteroid (or small moon, i hadn't decided which yet), establish nanogravitic communication with the others, link with them to form a sort of low-level gestalt mind; secondly, to map the surface of this large asteroid or small moon, construct a 3D map of the surface and then proceed to sculpt it into a perfect cube. seeing the end result in my mind, i wondered if it would be overkill to get them to carve the designs of a certain well-known puzzlebox into the sides of the moon. i decided why not, what the hell, and incorporated the designs into the seed device's instructions. i was using a system very much like DNA, except with better redundancy, more compact storage and only slightly slower chemical transcription speed. the end result was a lot like that lacewing fly in some respects. i'd first considered powering it by the common Metamorph system, something like low-end fusion, but i couldn't rely on it being able to find ice to use as fuel; i considered the next step up, which was a system which utilised the total conversion of mass to energy. this (without spending a serious amount of my time considering alternate designs) raised the minimum unit's size to just over a cubic centimetre (about the size of a large bee), which would slow down reproduction time and reduce the numbers of units which could be made from a given amount of raw material. unacceptable. i'd consider this more on the way; we'd arrived at the jump-off point. the earth was a pale blue-white tennis ball somewhere far below, between my feet. stars glared at me from all around; i'd never been aware of the range of colours they'd had before. Lydya drifted a few metres away from me. she beckoned, and i jetted closer. we hadn't bothered re-colouring our fields since leaving the American satellite, and she was harshly lit, shadows falling in stark, sharp lines. distant starlight glimmered through stray strands of her hair, and i felt an impulse i hadn't felt since i'd been changed. unfortunately, the mechanics of copulation in a vacuum were too many and varied to bother with now; besides, we were on a pilgrimage. possibly on the way back. smiling, i could see that the same idea had occurred to her. we embraced, legs entwined, chins nestling on each other's shoulders, our fields merging. i felt her half-field drive powering up; i activated mine. it was a considerable drain on my reserves; i was glad we were pooling resources, otherwise i would have had to make serious modifications to my storage systems, which would have entailed major physical changes. the stream of information from my senses, my primary link to the real world, gave a slight hiccup; the light i was receiving, radiant energy on several different frequencies, mass-sense information from the distant earth, all seemed to give a tiny hitch, as if i was hearing it all on the AM radio in a car and i'd just driven under some high-tension power lines. it was all still there; i could see black space peppered with stars, but there was a difference, an indefinable hazy something. i had the strange sensation of being a spinning top, balanced on a point somewhere outside reality. by leaning slightly in any direction, the half-field would throw us in that direction at over a hundred thousand kilometres per second. it wasn't a physical leaning; i asked my back-brain, and it replied (in so many words) that it was a function of the field's control system. we'd oriented in the proper direction; we were going to skim above the plane of the solar system like a record player's needle scratching out from the last track to the first on an old LP. together, we counted: `One... two... three!' and together we leaned forward. at first, i couldn't see any change; the stars ahead seemed brighter; those behind noticeably dimmer; the earth had shrunk to the size of a pea and was receding rapidly. i giggled. `ahead warp factor four, ensign!' 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