The Texas Renegade Returns

Infodump

I was given a few hours to recover from dictionary-injection, and another meal, which helped a lot. Then off to a meeting-type room to talk – actually talk! – to the first greysuit and a new one. Since my internal translation service doesn't automatically make me able to pronounce their words or understand their grammar, I mainly listened and tried to understand what the hell they were going on about. Non-literal phrases especially throw me, just as anything like 'jump the shark' would surely confuse them. They spoke very slowly, and had a plastic sheet on the table which acted like a computer screen and handily showed pictures to help me along. First screen I've seen – all the rooms I've been in are incredibly bare.

The echo in my head had already let me know that the 'Ista' part of 'Ista Tremmar' is a title, a bit like 'Doctor'. The other greysuit was 'Sa Lents', and I think 'Sa' is a general honorific. He's going to be my sponsor.

Centuries ago people called the 'Lantar' lived on the planet I was on. It's called Muina. These people were very learned and in touch with the 'Ena' (which, confusingly, seems to mean 'spaces'). These Lantar triggered a disaster which 'shattered the spaces' and caused thousands of mutant monsters called 'Ionoth' to show up and eat people. So all the Lantar ran away and went to a bunch of different planets. This one is called Tare. They didn't find it a very easy planet to live on, and sometimes the Ionoth things would show up here.

Recently the Tare people started to move between planets again to try and find a solution to the Ionoth problem. They found other worlds where people from Muina survived, but they consider Muina still too dangerous to live on. All the people in uniform I've met are part of Tare's research and defence against the Ionoth organisation (called KOTIS, which must be some kind of acronym, or just doesn't translate).

Remember I said no-one was really surprised to find me at that town? Well, they weren't. They estimate that at least twenty people each year get accidentally whisked off to somewhere else through something which sounds like wormholes: either to Muina or to one of the known worlds or just totally somewhere else. They find about half of them, some alive, some dead, and if they're from one of the known worlds they send them back.

Earth – you probably figured – isn't one of the known worlds. They asked me a bunch of questions to try and figure if I was from a world they'd had a stray from before. They call people who accidentally wander through wormholes 'strays'. Sa Lents is some kind of anthropologist and he says that my description of Earth doesn't match up to the lost worlds previously described and he's looking forward to learning and writing about it. Good for him, I suppose.

Anyway, I guessed right when I said they weren't at that town to rescue me. There's a particular kind of Ionoth called Ddura (massives) which are really rare and from what little I could make out are something like the whales of the Ena. REALLY massive, if that was what was making the incredible noise before I was rescued. They'd detected one on Muina and rushed out to try and study it, but were too late and only got me instead.

I find it hard to believe that the people from Earth are from some other planet. For one thing, you'd think we'd have legends or stories about Ionoth and this Ena place and Muina. And though they talked about this happening thousands of years ago, 'modern' humans have been on Earth for at least tens of thousands. So, not convinced, though since Tare people look just like Earth people there's probably some connection.

Strays count as a kind of refugee, and other than representing a slight curiosity for being from a 'new' world, I'm not particularly unusual. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like Tare has a refugee policy like Australia's, since I wouldn't enjoy mandatory detention. Although they are trying to find all the worlds that the Muinans went to, and so are already trying to find Earth in a way, they didn't seem to think I should get my hopes up about it. Apparently the Ionoth have been really bad lately and they're doing a lot more defensive work than exploration.

Sa Lents is going to be my sponsor. After some more quarantine and testing I get to be integrated into society, and that means a couple of years at least of living with Sa Lents and his family while I learn the language and enough skills to get a job, and he conveniently does a little research project on Earth. He has two daughters – one older and one younger than me – and the older one has just left home.

They started talking about how long it would take me to learn to use the 'Kuna' (a word which also seems to mean 'spaces'), and we had a really confused discussion for a while until I finally figured out what the injection to the temple was for. I don't quite understand the whole 'spaces' thing, but the nearest I can make out the people on this planet are several steps ahead in terms of computers and networks and virtual environments, and before they could give me this internal dictionary, they had to set up an interface in my head.

I'm a cyborg! The Tarens use nanite technology and my head has been exploding the last few days while a computer built itself in my brain. And I'm not hallucinating the dot in the middle of the room or the floating words. That's just the default display of the computer in my head. Before I get sent off with Sa Lents I have to pass basic interfacing-with-virtual-environments training. And currently I have no access rights to anything, so all I can see is a dot.

I just reread all this big long entry and it sounds nothing like the explanation they gave me, which involved showing me pictures obviously meant for children and saying in their language: "Muina. Home. Planet. Home. Lantar. People." And me sitting there looking puzzled, as my injected language tool triggered concept recognition, not words. I'm not sure how much of what I've written down matches what they were trying to tell me. The pictures were more helpful than what they were saying.

It was only when I was taken back to my room and had had a shower that I started crying. Because being rescued and going home are worlds apart. And, weird as this sounds, because I'm not a surprise to them.

Friday, December 21

Say Ah

Another medical exam to start my day – if it is the start. Since it never gets dark outside and the lights don't go out in my room, I'm having a lot of trouble keeping track of time. My meals are all very similar – something fruity, vegetable sticks, either bread or processed fishy stuff – so all I have to go on is when they choose to talk to me, and a watch which tells time for a totally different planet.

Being able to ask questions, no matter how slowly, really makes a difference to the poking and prodding sessions. The doctor is a pretty nice lady. She even apologised for not giving me painkillers, but apparently it can cause problems with the way the interface builds itself.

We had a long, if infantile, chat about the interface, which has left me feeling very dubious. I kept picturing my brain being shredded by little wires, until it dribbles out my nose, but from the helpful illustrations Ista Tremmar showed me, the nanites are so small they build a mesh which coats the insides of veins. Computerised cholesterol? Ista Tremmar said that almost all strays have a naturally strong affinity for the Ena, and for some reason this effects the amount of body 'real estate' the interface grows to cover, which confused me again because I don't understand what the Ena is or its connection with nanites.

Having a large interface may or may not be a good thing, but it sounds like knowing how to use it is what matters. These people spend all their time permanently wired into a really complex virtual world, and they start living there just after they figure out the whole walking thing.


Kuna seems to translate to 'virtual space', maybe. I desperately need a real dictionary, rather than these vague feelings that what they're saying matches something I know about. I still can't quite decide what they mean by the Ena. It could be some kind of other dimension? Or an evil spirit world? The fact that it's involved in travelling really quickly from one planet to another makes me think of hyperspace, but hyperspace is really just a 'magic science' word people made up, isn't it?

Saturday, December 22

Meh

I can't sleep. I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be sleeping right now.

Today was my first session with Sa Lents. I told him I don't think the people of Earth are descended from Muinans, and he said that other Muinan-settled worlds had forgotten their origins too, and that I was definitely Muinan-descended according to my genes. I refrained from pointing out that that could mean that Muinans are Earth-descended.

The rest of the time was spent on geography. I drew a really bad map of Earth with my finger on the tablecloth screen and wrote down the countries I could remember.

I'm supposed to start on interface learning tomorrow, once they're sure there's been no strange issues caused by my language injection, which I reacted to 'poorly'. I am very bored. I wish I'd brought my pippin statue along for company.

Sunday, December 23

Digital mind

No more complaining about being bored. Interface training is giving me some idea just what having a computer in your head means.

The training is aimed at little kids and is as much teaching them to read as it is how to use their interfaces. Just read. They don't teach kids to write. So obvious, but yet so strange. If you can select a letter from the alphabet quicker than writing one out, why bother with writing? I'm being trained by a complex teaching program which looks like a cuddly lady in her thirties. Sana Dura. It took me way too long to realise she wasn't an actual real-time person, but eventually I realised that whenever I interrupted her and asked my scrambled questions, she would answer, but then go back to exactly what she'd been saying, in exactly the same tone.

I did exercises for ages – I want out of this room – and the more the basics settle in, the less straightforward the training becomes. At first it was just me and Sana Dura standing in a colourful room, with her telling me to push buttons which I can see before me. I can't really describe how I push them. I see them floating in front of me and they activate if I want them to. Then I 'graduated' to alphabet and it was a very interactive 'touch the letter' game which put 3D movies to shame. It was as if I was in my room, and also this colourful world of floating letters and flowers and cutesy animals, the two worlds overlaid on each other. I find it very disorienting unless I close my eyes to block out reality.

There are twenty-eight letters in their alphabet.

Monday, December 24

86400

I can turn out the lights! It feels like such an achievement, but so far as I can tell it means that this tutorial program thinks I'm about five now. I can also open the internal doors without having to go poke the locks, and I can make the window go dark like extremely tinted glass. All of it's extremely simple – it's just that having run through all these training exercises I've had an upgrade to my status so that I can use some of the minor room functions. My injected language has also settled in more – I'm not going to be able to speak it properly any time soon, but it helps my memory during all the infant lessons I've been having. Accelerated learning, I'd guess you'd call it, and I'm taking big leaps forward – enough to start asking more complex questions.

During yesterday's session with Sa Lents we used my watch to work out how long an Earth year is compared to a Tare one. Fortunately, while they use different squiggles for each digit, their number system is apparently the same as ours. I don't know how I would have managed if they used binary or base three or something. I'm good at maths, but not that good.

Even though there's now a calculator in my head, I find it really hard to think in their digits, so I only used it for the large multiplications and divisions, and did the workings in the back of my diary. Sa Lents said he found the way I write very interesting – kind of like cave-paintings to him, I bet.

Anyway, one Earth year is worth about three Tare years. Sa Lents is over a hundred Tare years old. Their 'living day' is about twenty-six Earth hours long, though neatly divided into ten 'hours' of a hundred 'minutes' each. What they consider a second is not quite the same as an Earth second, and there's a hundred of those in each minute. For every five of these days the planet has one solar day (which explains why it stayed dark outside so long). I don't in the least understand how a planet can have a longer day but a shorter year than Earth's, yet similar gravity.

The mind's eye

Den = second

Joden = minute

Kasse = hour

Kaorone = 'living day'

Kao = day (single day/night cycle)

So my name is a bit like a reference to time here. That's better than the Earth meaning by far. Cassandra means 'she who entangles men', which has got to be the suckiest name meaning ever, and that's not even getting into the whole cursed by Apollo and then everyone thinks you're mad and you know everything's going to end up a mess and can't do anything about it part. I've never understood why Mum picked it, since she's usually more sensible about names. I can think of ten million names I'd rather have than one which stands for tragic futility and madness.

That's – it sounds circular saying it, but it drives me nuts, thinking that I'm really nuts. I mean, walking through cracks in the world to different planets and having computers installed in your head? The giggling in a straightjacket possibility seems so much more likely.

And I'm not. I'd know, somewhere deep down, I'd know if this was all imagination. Delusion. I'd never have made up being so sick, for a start, or those blisters. I'm not imagining any of this. I'm not.

...

Must sleep more and practice interface less. Then I wouldn't get so worked up over stupidities.

Tuesday, December 25

From here to you

Merry Christmas Mum. Merry Christmas Dad. Merry Christmas Jules. If there was some way I could make you feel better right now, I would.

Wednesday, December 26

Moving on

I've been released from the Institute! I'm on 'parole' with Sa Lents, after a final medical exam where they decided they don't need to keep me under close observation any longer.

One thing the doctor told me just before she sent me off really brought home what kind of society I've found myself in. I currently have the barest access rights to the systems around me, but the government here has access rights to me. My interface isn't just one way, and I'm not in control of it. It's a school, entertainment, a health monitor and an alarm. It will send a distress signal if I'm sick or hurt, and it can stimulate my brain in a way which regulates hormones. I've automatically been 'regulated' for birth control. Rules about having babies are really strict here, and you have to be given permission to conceive, for each and every baby you want. You have to pass some kind of parental worthiness test and everything.

Having someone else put me on birth control without my permission is just...I feel really strange about it, especially considering the uncomfortable conversation I had with Mum about babies at the beginning of the year, when I went out with Sean J. Sean and I have been friends a few years, and we were trying to see if we could be more, but it was totally a bad idea. We were careful enough, the couple of times we did it before the sheer awkwardness brought us to our senses, but if I'd wanted a baby, I could have walked down that path. I don't get that choice here. I'd have to fill out a form first, and hope someone stamped it APPROVED.


Sa Lents is taking me to his family's home on a place called Unara, which involves a long journey by plane (or tanz, as these spaceshippy flying machines are called – they don't look at all like our planes). It'll take a few hours, but my interface practice comes with me everywhere. I've a whole world of work installed in my head, and it's powered by my own body, so won't run low on batteries – unless I do.

I'm growing increasingly confident using the interface, now that I properly know a few basic words. The concepts aren't very different from email or web browsers, just without a mouse or keyboard. I haven't qualified for some of it yet, but have just stopped to write after sitting through the introductory lessons for how to record everything I see and hear, and keep a personal library. Every person on this planet is a CCTV system. I'm definitely going to have to remember that when I talk to anyone, or am in sight or earshot of anyone. I keep telling myself it's not that different to everyone having a mobile phone and access to You Tube, but it's hard not to be a little creeped out.

Talking to people remains a huge challenge. I'm more or less okay listening, at least to get the general gist, but it's going to be a mid-sized forever before I can talk anything like normally. I don't know any of the words. It's not like a proper dictionary. I can't look up cat and find 'nyar'. Instead, I think cat and my head produces an oozy possibility of words and, increasingly, a lot of handy labelled pictures. But it can be hard to tell if it's meant to be a picture of an animal or a predator or hunter or kitten – and abstract concepts are far more difficult. My head fills with pictures and feelings when people talk and an odd kind of certainty of knowing what they said without understanding how I know. The idea comes without necessarily an exact translation. I'm trying to figure out how to annotate my head with words I'm certain of.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited just to get out of that military facility.

Thursday, December 27

Overload

Until today, I'd hardly seen any people. Those couple of blacksuits back on Muina, and a few greensuits and greysuits and the guy who brought my meals. The only people who have spoken to me were Sa Lents and Ista Tremmar. At the KOTIS facility all I really saw were three rooms and a few corridors. And, biggest change of all, my interface was at the most minimal level possible.

During the flight – which was a military flight and not open to the public – Sa Lents taught me the different access options of my interface. This is a bit like choosing to have subtitles when watching a DVD, but so much more. I had to laugh when I turned on the 'Public information: people' option, and you could see people's names floating above their heads. World of Warcraft without the shoulder pads. You can't hide your name, apparently, any more than you can absolutely shut the government out of your head.

There are tons of different display options or filters. 'Open' is full of things everyone can see, and is broken down into different levels – emergency and directional and décor and advertisement and entertainment and so on. Then there's 'closed' or 'tight', which is things only you or a particular group can see. Having made sure I knew how to filter all these display levels on and off, Sa Lents had me turn all but directional and décor off before we reached Unara. This was a good move.

Tare is fantastically crowded. I hadn't realised the extent while I was locked away, but they're seriously packed in. From Sa Lents' description – and the world map he showed me how to display – there are a lot of small islands, but only two decent land-masses, and even those are more Tasmania-sized than Australia-sized. Unara is on an island called Wehana, which is almost all city. Not suburbs, not even sky-scrapers, but this deep below the ground and high above the surface endless blocky whitestone mass – the same as the Institute, but monumentally larger, like a beehive of people. External windows like the one I had are really rare and not even very popular because people feel exposed and unsafe. I couldn't tell if Sa Lents meant that windows really did make you less safe, or if it was some kind of agoraphobia.

So anyway, we flew through very bad weather over a lot of dark, uninviting water until we reached Carche Landing, which is a main 'airport' of Unara, and Unara pretty much tops what you'd get if you compacted Earth's biggest cities into a ball. People everywhere, going every direction, and even the two display filters I had on were just Too Much. The Unaran idea of décor involves holograms of fishes and clouds and winding patterns shifting all over the place and way too much colour and movement. I shut it off.

Sa Lents didn't seem to mind too much – or probably wasn't very surprised – at the way I clutched at his arm. Thinking back it was really just a humungous shopping centre, but airier and with tons of plants (vegetables mainly) growing everywhere, and reminded me vaguely of the Jetsons cartoon with glass tubes with long train things shooting through them. But the constant movement, the absolute mass of people and the height of the central atrium of Carche Landing had me the most freaked out I've been in ages. And the noise. The hive was buzzing.

We boarded one of the glass-tube trains, which thankfully blocked out most of the noise so I could get my head back and look around just at the people inside of the train. I hadn't realised that not everyone here is Asian (or looks Asian, whatever: with black hair and golden skin and 'Asian eyes' I'm calling them Asian). Maybe one in ten Tarens don't look particularly Asian. I haven't seen anyone really black-skinned or any bleached Nordic types, but there's all shades in between and I'm not the only pinkish, brown-haired girl, so I at least don't stick out completely.

Unless we're less genetically similar than I've been told, the dye bottle is popular, especially colours like lime green. Clothes are almost normal, though formal wear for men seems to involve long coats or robes. I was beginning to think everyone on the planet wore tight-tailored uniforms, but that was just the military, of course. Nenna – Sa Lents' younger daughter – dresses like she's out of a music video, but I think I'll save trying to describe Nenna till later. I'm supposed to have gone to bed.

Saturday, December 29

The teens here are your forties

Sa Lents' daughter Nenna is the Energiser Bunny of talk. Or just the Energiser Bunny generally, since she's always moving about, dancing in place, dashing back and forth. I like her, but I'm glad I'm not sharing a room with her.

The Lents have a three-bedroom apartment in an area called Kessine. They've been very nice to me so far, though Sa Lents has been off working at some kind of university and his wife, Ketta, is what I think equates to stock market broker, and spends almost all her time in her home office gazing into nothing I can see. Sa Lents handed me over to Nenna for a couple of days so that she could help me adjust before we started in on our interviews again. He knows how much harder it is for me to talk than listen, and Nenna's really good at explaining everything we do or see, and asking yes and no questions, and bringing some fun to my infant status. And I guess it's not really worth his time interviewing me until I can string a sentence together.

Nenna finds it all very exciting having a stray to look after, and devoted herself to showing me how to change the wall decorations and access the way-too-much entertainment and telling me all the things she thinks worth watching and listening to and getting me to try on her clothes. What was that song? "We'd Make Great Pets". I do feel a little like a new pet, but really Nenna's just a normal kid and doesn't mean anything by it.


One thing I found out right away is that Nenna's absolutely obsessed with the blacksuits. The Setari. The word means something like 'experts' or 'specialists', and after two movies, all the poster-hologram-things in Nenna's room space, and Nenna going on about them constantly, I've figured out they're some kind of psychic soldier. She was really disappointed that I only saw two of them for a couple of minutes.

The movies are highly useful, though I can't tell if they're supposed to be realistic or over-the-top. One was so 3-D I had to look behind me to catch everything going on, but otherwise they're pretty similar to what you'd get out of Hollywood, which I guess means that culturally it's not that different here, for all that most of what's going on plotwise goes over my head. But watching them really helps with my language mountain: I'm picking up the things people say most commonly, and the way people greet each other. Mixing movies and television in with my interface lessons will make this easier, and more interesting.

Nenna's at school at the moment. Despite all the lessons you can have over the interface, there's still mandatory school attendance for sport and practical science classes and other group sessions. Since the city's not open to the real sun, there's three shifts each day instead of a formal night and day. Nenna goes to Shift Three school, and attends four out of six days, which gives me a useful break. Nice as it is to have someone who wants to talk to me, it's also good to have some quiet to think.

I'm not allowed to go out of the apartment yet, but Sa Lents says that when I'm a little more adjusted, Nenna can take me on a tour.

Monday, December 31

This world is not my world

For every thing I find which is similar to Earth, there's as many which are different.

Tare's not a democracy, for a start, or a monarchy. From what I could tell from my session with Sa Lents, it's some kind of quasi-meritocracy. To be put in charge of anything you have to pass exams on related knowledge and practical competence. It sounds like you have to pass exams to get to do pretty much anything; it's all about demonstrating capacity. The top non-military government jobs are Lahanti (city leaders like mayor, except that they're mayors of cities of tens of millions) and any resident can apply to be a Lahanti. They have to pass all these tests and then a council chooses from the top scorers. I asked Sa Lents if people could cheat, or buy better results, or at least bribe the council if they got top scores and he squirmed around the answer a bit and said that such things were very difficult but that no system was perfect.

I'd already thought about the question of cheating and whether having a computer in your head means that there's no crime, but it's not quite so absolute as I thought. Citizens aren't actively monitored, but breaking into someone's house, for instance, when you don't have permission to be there, will trigger alerts. If you attack someone, they can immediately let emergency services observe what they're seeing. If you're knocked out, your interface will send an alert for help. One of the movies Nenna and I watched showed bad guys using programs which changed who the system thought they were, and gave permissions they weren't supposed to have. Probably as likely as any of the hacker excesses of Hollywood but still based on the possible. Tare comes across as hard-working, orderly, and obedient, but not any kind of ideal society. I'm not going to forget the forced birth control any time soon. And they have monster attacks, of course. All the movies Nenna wants me to watch either involve cute boys or monster attacks or both – so not too different from what I watch at home, hah.

There's no stilettos, either. It was a funny thing to notice. Nenna's wardrobe is full of platform boots, and sandals, and a couple of pairs of court shoes, and that's what they're wearing in the movies too. Haven't seen anyone tottering about on pinpoint high heels. Make-up and hair is pretty similar – other than the popularity of day-glo dyes – and there seems to be a complex tradition involving henna-coloured designs on your face. Geometric patterns on guys, and curly tendrils for girls, usually on one cheek or the corner of the forehead or drifting up from the throat. It seems to mainly be worn with really formal, dressed up outfits.

No printed-out books that I've seen. That sucks. I don't mind reading onscreen, and there's no glare or eyestrain problems if you're reading inside your head, but it's just not the same as a proper paperback. Also, no meat in all the meals I've eaten so far, except for fish. And that not very often. At least, I think it's fish. Maybe they cook up the monsters they hunt.

Though it's common not to change surnames when you get married on Tare, the tradition is for the husband to take the wife's name, so 'Lents' is Tsa Lents' wife's family name. That's kind of cool.

Beyond the stars, rampant consumerism

I have money. The allowance has an official name which is very long and vague, but boils down to "Lost Aliens Stipend". Nenna and her mother are taking me shopping for clothes and to see some kind of sport called Tairo.

I keep swapping between excited interest and an unexpected urge to start yelling. I far prefer shopping on Tare to starving on Muina, and yay relatively benign alien civilisation. But the allowance gave me a loud, clear message that what happens now is I learn the language, find a job, build a life here. Getting me home is just not a priority to these people.

Working on gratitude adjustment.

Making a display

Nenna finds my taste in clothes very boring, but otherwise it was a fun day. It's hard not to enjoy shopping, and I found clothes I liked and managed not to have my head explode from all the layered interface displays everywhere, and didn't gawk too much at the occasional person who looked really outrageous – blue glowing patterns beneath skin, hair extensions that reach out and touch passers-by, clothing that constantly oozes and changes shape. Nenna called these kind of people 'teba', which I think might be the equivalent of Goths. Or avant garde experimental artists. They were certainly an exciting reminder that I wasn't in just any old shopping centre.

Plus Tairo rocks.

Picture a big glass box, with the audience in rows all up against the outer walls. There's a hole in each wall, painted a different colour, and a bunch of poles at different heights – a lot like canary perches. Add four teams playing a kind of extreme handball with three balls at once. Then make the players totally Spiderman Jr, able to bounce up the walls and off the poles and leap and twist and somersault – and fly.

Psychic powers, just like the blacksuits. Psychic powers are connected to this Ena in some way, and apparently almost everyone on Tare can use the Ena to some mild degree, though things like flying is elite athlete stuff.

Or, possibly, the Ena or the interface enhances natural psychic abilities. Nenna's explanation was way too confusing.

Anyway, the Tairo match was great fun to watch. I could feel the players thud off the walls right in front of me, and they do things which would make Cirque d'Soleil green. And we had a really nice meal, and Nenna's mother talked to me after about, well, girl-things and how it all works here. The birth control means I won't have periods, for a start, which is a big bonus. And she gave me a cream which is some kind of super hair remover. Use it once or twice a year and no stubble. Deodorant comes in waxy sticks. She gave me a few tips on polite behaviour, and then made me cry because she reminded me so much of Mum, all dry and calm and comfortable, and she held me while I made an idiot of myself and told me I didn't have to pretend not to be homesick and frightened.