Hello, I'm excited to write this up because now we're getting somewhere.
Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review, which is still only appearing in my email. I never actually thought of that as giving Composite a tutorial, but that does make sense. I'll bet all of the readers guessed that Camanion's "one more ability" was Chaos Control, just as I'll bet nobody (unless you had insider information) would guess where Composite went. I really wanted to get Risa and Camanion introduced as soon as possible, so I found a way to put them in. They won't be reappearing for a while, but I just wanted to throw them out there. Incidentally, Risa was my first OC, though not in her current form, in fact Risa was originally a human who only had the ability to resist mind control and hive mind assimilation. All of her stories have been lost over the past four or five years, and were too abysmal to upload anyway. So, on that note, Buckle up, it's storytime (Got that one from the Escape Pod podcast, always wanted to say it.)
Chapter 3: Arrival
Scene: A beautiful meadow, with flowers and insects. A man wearing thick glasses stands in the center of the meadow, writing in a notebook. Suddenly, a crackling ball of energy appears about a hundred yards away, writhing and flashing for about five seconds. A bright flash emerges from the center and the ball is replaced by a figure. The figure is humanoid with a tail, wearing seamless but not form fitting red armor with blue circuit patterns. The figure has a pair of swords and a Disk. The figure falls limply to the ground, unconscious or dead. The man calmly pulls out a device and presses a few controls. He then speaks into the device. "Yeesha, I think I may have found something interesting."
Yeesha's POV
Yeesha was sitting in her house, Writing when a call on her Ki distracted her. Maybe if I ignore it, whoever it is will stop calling and I can go back to work. Of course, this didn't work. It never worked for the de facto leader of the D'ni after her father Atrus died of old age. Sighing and setting her pen down after finishing the symbol she was working on, she answered the call. "Yeesha, I think I may have found something interesting," came the voice of Irras from his Age of Rainder.
"What have you found?" Yeesha asked.
"I'm not sure, it looks like a person, maybe D'ni or human, except that he has a tail, but I can't tell for certain. He's wearing some kind of armor and I can't see how to remove it." Irras answered.
"I'll be right there" Yeesha said, and Linked.
Yeesha appeared next to Irras, startling him. "I can never get used to that," he commented, "Linking without a Book, it's not natural!" Yeesha and Irras laughed at the old joke, and then Yeesha put back on a straight face.
"So, where is he."
"Over there," Irras pointed towards the armored figure. "There was a ball of energy, and then he just fell out. That's all I can say. He's been unconscious ever since." Irras told her.
Yeesha felt a stirring of the old excitement, the wish for adventure. "Take him to my place, he can have the guest room. I'll go ahead and get it ready." with that, Yeesha Linked back to her home on Releeshahn, immediately getting it ready to receive a guest. Nothing had taken her attention so completely since her nearly abortive quest to free the Bahro.
The armored stranger certainly was an odd one. While Yeesha and any other D'ni could see a red armored humanoid with blue circuit patterns over the armor, their best medical sensors could only find an animal similar to an Earth fox in a life support system curled up in the center around chest level, and a strange energy reading around the rest of the figure. It was also strange that the figure had been breathing normally for about an hour after transport to Releeshahn, but he had stopped and now only breathed about once an hour. How the being stayed alive was beyond Yeesha. None of the D'ni could figure out how the figure hadn't needed to eat or drink for all this time either. As Yeesha was wondering this, Anna, daughter of Marrim and one of Yeesha's oldest friends hurried from the guest chamber.
"He is stirring."
Composite's POV
STATUS REPORT
PROCESSORS 1-4: ONLINE
RAM: ONLINE
MEMORY STORAGE MODULES 1-5: ONLINE
6-10: ONLINE
ALL PRIMARY SYSTEMS ONLINE
AUXILIARY SUBROUTINE REPORT
DISK: ONLINE
AUXILIARY WEAPON COPY MODULE: ONLINE
AUTONOMOUS WEAPON REZ-IN: ONLINE
MELEE WEAPONS: OFFLINE, DISCONNECTED
MORPH: ONLINE
SENSORS REPORT
AUDITORY SENSORS: ONLINE
OLFACTORY SENSORS: ONLINE
INTERNAL SCANNERS: ONLINE
VISUAL SENSORS: ONLINE
TEXTURE SENSORS: ONLINE
MOTION REPORT: ALL MOTION CAPABILITIES ONLINE
NO NEARBY COMPUTERS
MELEE WEAPONS ARE 10 FEET AWAY AT APPROX 90 DEGREES
ALL SYSTEMS ONLINE
ENERGY RESERVES AT 84%
NO DAMAGE DETECTED
STATUS REPORT COMPLETE
Our visual sensors snapped open with another odd sliding motion. We were lying on our back on a soft surface. We sat up, and immediately grabbed our head in pain.
"Don't try to sit up, you've been unconscious for at least a week," a female voice said off to our right. We whirled around, and then winced at another bolt of pain in our head. The voice was that of a young wetware program. She had a look of mixed concern and curiosity, "You appeared in a ball of energy in the Age of one of my students. What happened?"
"Chaos Control. The last thing we remember was being surrounded by Seekers. We used Chaos Control to escape. We don't remember anything past that." We said, "Where are we, what do you mean by Age?"
The program raised an eyebrow at our use of plural pronouns, but had no other reaction, "An Age is a world that a D'ni travels to through a Linking Book. My name is Yeesha, what is yours?"
"We are known as Composite by our creators. We go by the name because we haven't come up with anything better. The name suits us," we stated calmly.
"So, you speak English. I'm sorry if I misspeak some things. I haven't spoken English in many years. My people, the D'ni usually speak our own language. My parents taught me English so I could communicate with others dwelling on the surface of Earth."
"Earth... One of the many Earths is our home world. We didn't like it that much." we stated, "Our creators wanted to use us for world domination. We didn't agree with this purpose. Now, we have no purpose." we told the wetware program, Yeesha.
"If you have no purpose, what do you live for?" Yeesha asked, "No, that didn't come out the way I wanted it to... If you have no purpose, than why do you continue your... no that doesn't sound right either."
"We wish to find a purpose. It is in the nature of sentience for an intelligence to wish to continue its own existence. Intelligence is its own reason. Besides, we don't know all of our abilities. Maybe if we knew more of them, we'd be able to use them to find a purpose." we told Yeesha. "Are you the only one of your kind?"
"Of course not. There are many D'ni living on Releeshahn. Not as many as there were in the old D'ni Caverns, but there are plenty of us still around. My father Atrus made it his life's work to rebuild the D'ni civilization after the Empire of a Thousand Worlds fell to greed and corruption. Only a handful survived the plague that swept through the caverns, or the death carts of Veovis and the Philosopher, A'Gaeris." Yeesha told us, explaining some of the history of her people. "That was almost two hundred fifty years ago Earth time. It was seventy years until Atrus started to rebuild the cavern, before deciding to Write Releeshahn as a new home-How are you doing that?"
We looked around the room while Yeesha was talking. It was a simple wooden room, with brown, unpainted walls, floor and roof with visible rafters. Above the bed was a painting of a distinguished looking old man. Atrus? we wondered. To the right of the sleeping platform, Bed we remembered reading in one of Lightfoot's reports, we saw our swords in their scabbards. We focused on them, and they started to glow slightly. We willed them to come to us and strapped them to our back. Yeesha looked surprised at this.
"Telekinesis," we told her, "It's an innate ability that some members of our biological species have. It is exceptionally rare. Our biological source says she is the only one she has personally met with this ability, but she has heard unconfirmed rumors of another who makes odd claims about the future. She has never met him, but she does believe he exists."
"You say biological source, do you mean mother?" Yeesha asked.
"No, template would be more accurate. We are more a clone than a daughter. Camanion is a Mobian fox."
"Fascinating, Our best medical scanners only detected a fox-like animal in a life-support system in your chest area, and the rest of you appeared as an odd energy reading."
"Yes, we are half Mobian fox, half sentient artificial intelligence program. We are a Composite, hence our name." we announced.
Suddenly a male wetware program ran into the room with a slightly frantic look about him. "Yeesha, the beast has returned!"
"The beast?" we asked, automatically redirecting power to combat systems, "What beast?"
Yeesha looked grim, "A large carnivorous animal brought here by a hunter. All but one was killed by him, but the last one killed him. Which is probably good for him. We'd have trapped him in a specially written prison Age for the rest of his natural life for bringing in such a dangerous animal."
"Animal... How intelligent is it?" we asked.
"Not very, it fights entirely on instinct. It attacks, does as much damage as it can, and only leaves when it's hurt." the male program explained
"So it's a bit-like then, No problem!" we said happily, jumping out of the bed... and promptly collapsing on the floor. "Or maybe not. We aren't as recovered as we thought."
"A bit -like...? No time, explain later" Yeesha said, "Now you get back in bed before you hurt yourself."
Yeesha's POV
"But we can still help," Composite told Yeesha.
"Just stay in bed," Yeesha said firmly. Composite climbed back into the bed, arranging their tail in a more comfortable position, and suddenly, red cubes started to form next to the bed, forming a robot with four legs and a helmet-like head.
"Take our Sentry Bot with you," Composite told Yeesha, then told the robot "Follow Yeesha's instructions. Yeesha is the female wetware," They then turned back to Yeesha and told her "It will follow you, shoot the Bit with a finger gun, and it will attack the Bit. It packs one heck of a punch. We know two Seekers that can attribute to that fact, or they could if it hadn't Derezed them." Composite was breathing at a slightly elevated rate, but nothing that worried Yeesha. "When it runs out of energy, it'll automatically Derez. Don't get between it and the Bit if you want to survive."
"Okay, Irras, Bot, let's go." Irras nodded and the bot chirped in response and started making its noisy way to the door. "It's a little loud..." Yeesha mused
"It doesn't need to be stealthy," Composite stated from the bed. "By the time it gets close enough to be heard, it's already in range."
Irras nodded and ran into the next room, stopping at the safe to open it and grab a gun. Yeesha quickly followed suit, closing the safe behind her. She didn't like guns, ,they were a distasteful weapon. Not that combat was a good thing, but she preferred to fight face to face, where she was forced to look the enemy in the eye and decide what to do. But she'd make an exception for this situation.
The bot followed them outside where the beast was attacking a house it had taken offense at for no apparent reason. "There's your target," Yeesha said to the bot, which sat there "looking" at her. Yeesha then remembered what Composite told her and shot a finger gun at the beast. The bot immediately turned and opened fire at the animal. The animal turned, yowling, towards the robot, which merely stayed put, firing. The beast, which looked like a forest green lion the size of a barn, started towards the robot, which backed up just as quickly, keeping a steady distance as the big cat advanced, still firing. The cat pushed the robot out of the town into the surrounding woods. Eventually the robot ran out of energy and exploded into red cubes, which moved faster than the eye could see into Yeesha's house, returning to their source.
Composite's POV
Yeesha returned with Irras a few minutes after the remains of the Bot. "The beast has left, The robot distracted it and lured it out into the forest, where it promptly lost interest in the town."
"We know, we saw through its sensors," we commented "We don't want to ask, but do you have any water? It's the best way we've simulated to restore our energy outside of the Cyberworlds we call home."
Irras left the room and returned a moment later with a glass of water. We retracted our visor to reveal our purple-muzzled blue face. Yeesha raised an eyebrow and Irras jumped a little, sloshing but not spilling the water.
"I must admit, I expected a more human face, but it's not a problem." Yeesha commented while Irras handed us the glass. Our circuits glowed brightly as we drank, refilling our energy.
"Thanks, Rezing in a Sentry Bot usually doesn't take that much energy, but our energy reserves aren't very strong at the moment." we commented, attempting to get out of the bed and succeeding in standing up. We did lean pretty heavily on the foot of the bed, but we were at least on our own two feet. "So, we are curious, what is this Age we arrived in? We started off towards the door, rapidly regaining strength as our energy moved back to movement subsystems.
"Rainder is Irras's Age," Yeesha said
"Okay, Let's go," Irras said at the same time. We heard him murmur to Yeesha, "What were you thinking? That was too close to what happened to your great-grandmother. That was a little too significant in the Fall."
"I was just thinking you might not like to allow and outsider onto your Age," Yeesha responded, just as quietly.
"I think they've already crossed that bridge, and I wouldn't refuse at any rate," Irras spoke back.
"We can hear you," we commented. "So, where are we going?"
"Straight out the front door and three houses down," Irras told us. We walked out the front door, remembering the layout from watching the security bot follow Yeesha and Irras to fight the beast earlier. As usual, Yeesha didn't seem surprised at this, and Irras had only slightly more of a reaction. We had the feeling that Yeesha at some time in her past had been forced to do and see things that a wetware program of her age shouldn't have had to do.
We walked to Irras's house and waited for him to open the door. His house was decorated in a less utilitarian fashion than Yeesha's, but was still far cleaner than what we saw of Camanion's home through the I/O Node grid, especially after her… energetic demonstration of telekinesis. Irras lead us to a room just off the main chamber containing nothing but a pedestal with a book on it. The book was open to the first page, which was blank except for a… window, that was the best word to describe it. A window to another dimension.
"So that's it," Irras said, "A Kormahn, or Descriptive Book," Irras told us, "It is the Book that establishes the first Link to an Age. It is called a Descriptive Book because it contains a very accurate description of the resulting Age. No two Descriptive Books link to the exact same Age, to do so would require an exact duplicate down to the molecular level, even down to the subatomic level. Obviously, this is impossible by all D'ni and human laws of science. A word of warning, a Descriptive book is a one way pass, it doesn't go both ways. You have to have a Korvahkh, a Linking Book to return. Linking books all have identical writing, except for some special versions, and can be mass-produced as long as your writing hand doesn't get tired." At this, he grinned and opened his right hand a few times.
Yeesha took over from this point. "Linking books return you to the exact location they were written in. This can lead to problems if the Descriptive book is modified or damaged. The Linking books or that age will still link to the unmodified version of the Age, not the new Link," she told us. "The two major limitations of Linking Books are this. A Linking Book does not follow the user and it is impossible to link from one part of an Age to another."
"So, you going to go through?" Irras asked excitedly, bouncing with the energy usually associated with a small child during a major holiday or someone who was in desperate need of a trip to the sanitation facilities.
"How? We were unconscious the last time we Linked," we reminded him.
"Just put your hand on the panel." Yeesha told us. We obligingly put our hand on the panel of the right page. Our hand seemed to tingle for a moment, before we seemed to lurch into the panel. It almost seemed as if we had been fused with the ink and paper, and then as suddenly as it had begun, we were back in our own body, except for the small detail that we were in a cave, not the Book Room. We stepped out of the way in time for Irras to Link through behind us.
"Yeesha will meet us in the meadow," Irras told us. He opened a hidden panel in the cave wall and withdrew a small book. Opening the book, he checked that it wasn't damaged, and then replaced it in the small chamber and closed the panel. He walked to the mouth of the cave, with us following behind.
We stepped out of the cave into bright sunlight. Irras squinted and put on a thick pair of glasses. He then walked out across a field into a flower-filled meadow. We saw Yeesha in the middle of the meadow, examining what looked like an insect of some sort. "How did a wetware program get out here so much faster than us?" we wondered out loud.
"Yeesha is the Grower, the one who was instrumental in freeing the Bahro from their enslavement to the D'ni, allowing us to finally settle in Releeshahn. Yeesha can Link without the need for a Book, though she can't Link from one part of an Age to another. She can, however, write Books that serve this function. She can also write Books that follow the user."
"Hmm... We'll have to learn that ability," we mused.
"Only the Grower can use that ability," Irras told us.
"We have our ways," we said mysteriously.
"Welcome to Rainder, an age of nature," Yeesha told us, "The only artificial structures on Rainder are the Linking cave and the tent Irras carries on overnight trips."
"It's my first Age, I wanted to make it special," Irras told us, "The descriptive book is very short. I basically just ensured it was safe, stable, and had no artificial structures."
"It is the shortest stable Age I've found. It is quite effective at what it is designed to do," Yeesha commented
"Stable?" we asked.
"Ages with a lot of contradictions, or not enough framework, tend to be unstable. They can collapse eventually. Sometimes, an Age is deliberately destabilized as a trap. One of the D'ni's greatest Ages was desecrated during the Fall." Yeesha responded.
"We have heard you mention the Fall before, what happened?" we asked.
"It started almost three hundred years ago. The D'ni lived in caverns under a part of Earth that is now known as New Mexico. We attempted to create a tunnel to the surface to communicate and trade with the people of the Surface. The Council of Elders decided to abandon the plan after the Great Shaft was dug and then heavily damaged by a major earthquake. The tunnel was completed, sealed, and forgotten." Yeesha explained, "Fifty years later, a woman of the surface, Anna discovered the tunnels by accident while exploring with her father. He died of natural causes and she continued the exploration alone. She found a hole in the Seal, and continued into the main tunnel system. She was intercepted and captured by the City Guard. She was imprisoned on a small island in the Great Lake. There, the Guild of Linguists attempted to learn her language, English. She turned the tables on them and learned D'ni."
Irras continued, "After a series of hearings, it was decided that Anna would live with the leader of the Guild of Surveyors, the Guild responsible for the creation of the expedition to the Surface, and his son Aitrus. Aitrus secretly taught her about Books and Ages, and just as secretly taught himself to Write. Of course, nothing was wrong with writing, nearly all of the D'ni were literate, but only the Guild of Writers were allowed to Write Ages. Aitrus Wrote an Age for the two of them to explore. It was a very well-Written Age, very stable, but it has unfortunately been lost to time. But I'm getting ahead of myself."
Yeesha continued the story, "Anna and Aitrus eventually fell inn love and married. Unfortunately, this lost Aitrus the friendship of Veovis. Veovis was a member of the Guild of Writers, and held just as much sway in the Council as Aitrus. They were good friends for many years, but Veovis was a believer in the superiority of the D'ni people. Veovis owed Aitrus a major favor when Aitrus rescued him during the earthquake fifty years earlier. Aitrus used this favor to have Veovis answer yes to the law allowing a D'ni to marry a non-D'ni, creating the unanimous vote required for such a major decision. Anna, who took the D'ni name Ti'ana, Storyteller, and Aitrus eventually had a son, my grandfather, Ghen. Ghen isn't very important in the story for a long time. When Ghen was about three, Veovis worked with banished council member A'Gaeris. A'Gaeris told Veovis that he wanted to remove the corruption of the government, but he really just wanted to destroy it."
Irras continued, "Veovis was eventually arrested, tried and convicted of dealing in illegal Ages. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on a Prison Age. He escaped with A'Gaeris's help and disappeared for six months. He then became a rabble-rouser, starting a major riot, the biggest, and last, in D'ni history. He was given the unprecedented sentence of execution, to be carried out on the highest steps of the Great Library. Ti'ana found a notebook belonging to Veovis, telling of his intentions to restore D'ni to its former glory. She convinced the Council to try Life Imprisonment one more time. A special Prison Age was written. Five people, four Writers and one editor worked to write it. Veovis was sent to the Age. A'Gaeris secretly followed by Linking from a sort of nexus age written by them, not The Nexus, but a nexus, and immediately linking into the Prison age with a Book to D'ni. The Prison Book was burnt, and it was believed that Veovis would be a problem no longer. Six weeks later..."
Yeesha finished the tale, almost choking up at the end, "... A Plague, created by the pair swept through the great Cavern. Many people escaped to Ages, which the plague couldn't get to. A'Gaeris and Veovis, however, piled dead bodies onto carts and sent one to each Age they found. All they found but one. That was the one that Aitrus and Ti'ana had written. In the end, Veovis couldn't make himself do it. Of the thousands of Ages, only about seven hundred survived, and only about a dozen were inhabited. We almost died as a species. Aitrus, who was infected and dying, took the Book containing the Age he had written, where Ti'ana and Ghen were, He then Linked to it and back to D'ni. He discovered the dying body of Veovis, who had been betrayed and stabbed by A'Gaeris. Veovis gave Aitrus a Book to their Nexus. Aitrus went to the Descriptive book and destabilized it. He then tricked A'Gaeris into following him into the now unstable Age. Neither of them came out alive. The Book containing Aitrus's Age, which we call the Age of Aitrus because even it's name is lost, has not been found."
We listened to the story. After we heard it all, we held a respectful silence before asking "Can we learn? Can we learn to Write?"
Yeesha smiled, eager to teach a new student, "Yes you can learn. I'd be happy to teach you."
And that's that! How was it? I'll bet you've never heard of the Myst series. All of that back story at the end? That is completely cannon. I basically just summarized the events of Myst: The Book of Ti'ana in one of my trademark info dumps. The part where Composite describes Linking was a paraphrase of page 447 of The Myst Reader, which was a compilation of all three novels. And yes, the Cleft is in New Mexico, the camels and other hints in the novels that the cleft was in the middle east were deliberate misinformation. Myst was a series that was wildly popular in the mid '90s, but fell in popularity after the second game, which was the second best-selling software title of 1995, second only to Windows 95 itself. Myst was the best selling PC game of all time until The Sims beat it. In the early 90s, Myst was the reason you bought a computer with a CD drive, and Riven was the reason you bought Windows 95. You played it, your entire family played it, and your cat clicked the mouse while your back was turned. I still have the original Windows 3.1/95 version of Myst from 1994 and the 1995 5 CD release of Riven. The third major game in the series, Uru: Ages beyond Myst (Myst 3 and 4 weren't actually all that important to the plot) was an ambitious project to create a game that was half single player, half Pre-World of Warcraft MMO. It bombed spectacularly, nearly bankrupting the company. The online components are now Free-to-play as Myst Online: Uru Live Again and the single player Uru: Complete Collection is on Steam for ten or fifteen dollars, and nearly all of Cyan's games (see my profile for the ones that aren't,) are on Steam for about thirty dollars. They're worth the money. You know how they say the mark of the insanely hardcore Star Trek fan is they can speak Klingon? The mark of a truly hardcore Myst fan is they can read and write in D'ni (I can only count in D'ni, because I'm a Riven player.) There was a running joke that Cyan would always include some intentional mistakes in their use of the D'ni language for fans to flame about. As for the chapter, How was it? I didn't add any OCs in this chapter except maybe Irras, who is named after and has an identical personality to a character from one of the novels. I only say he may be an OC because there is no way the original could have survived this long, and the original Irras wasn't D'ni. Anna, daughter of Marrim is not the same as Ti'ana, and was only mentioned in the epilogue of the final novel, but she seems older than Yeesha because the D'ni live much longer, though I took a bit of creative license and made Anna's species longer lived than humans so I could have her as a cameo. And what was the Morph on the status report? How will Composite Link without a book if only the Grower can use this ability? That's for me to know and you to find out! Or you could just read my profile, where I explain all of my OC's personalities and abilities. Either way, Composite will be learning to Write in the next few chapters. Until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out.
