Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
ZAQ1
This is the first story I don't feel like throwing away after the first half-page. Please read and give opinions and criticize! Cruel criticism is openheartedly welcomed.
(note from Admin-Siggy point of view: that doesn't free up other stories (when we get some) for "cruel criticism." Only when they ask for it. And I mean literally ASK for it.)
I'll post a few placeholder posts, considering this has reached 11,300 letters including spaces in three short days with no more than six hours combined. A single Runboard post only accepts 10,000 characters including spaces.
Last edited by Siegfried, Jun/19/2005, 2:07 pm
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 1:50 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Chapter One: Sigmund Russell
A lone man walked down a very long and empty transparent hallway, empty save hundreds of side passages and an occasional monorail train shooting by below or above him. As he neared one of the many stations, one flew by overhead from behind him (the ones above the hallway were suspended from the ceiling of a much greater tunnel full of monorail systems all the way around the outside wall). It stopped so quickly he had to marvel that the people within didn’t fly forward even with the gravitational stabilizer in each car.
He ran to catch this train, knowing well that he would have to wait for two minutes for another to come along when he could easily be at his next stop in less than thirty seconds. He caught up to in time to stop the doors from closing and entered. As the train took off, he felt his ears pop and also felt slightly nauseous just for a second as the train accelerated to five miles a second instantly and the gravitational stabilizer kicked in immediately.
There were few stops for the special trains, which were on tracks 1-8, only eight stops in total, before it made one complete circle only to make another 24,224 and ½ of mile journey. It was 3,028 miles between each stop, making it a five-minute trip from one station to the next. The train was nearly empty, since few people had to travel that distance at that time, since half of the population of G.H.I. 81,027A7.1 was either asleep or at work, depending on their preference, since the time was counted the same everywhere.
He sat down, not wanting to stand for ten minutes to get to his station. He looked out one of the windows, watching what he knew to be lights spaced 20 feet apart form an endless band of light between the two stations.
The train arrived on schedule, as always. He sighed. The worst-case scenario was when the trains were off by more than a second was so seldom that you could memorize the timetable for your most used station and count down. It would be stopped by the time you got to zero. The trains, if delayed a few seconds by people boarding at the last minute (like he had), would automatically compute the exact speed needed to make up for that second and accelerate to that speed. The computers were always exact, being separate from the rest of the train’s computers and trained to do only the job of that single calculation and aided by superconductors.
He continued on out the train and to a corridor that all of the other people getting on or off the train passed by. A large door blocked the other end of the corridor. This he walked up to and put his hand on the scanner toward the right of the door. A beep of confirmation sounded, and after a second’s delay, the five foot thick door made out of stainless steel parted in three layers, the outer one vertically, then horizontally, then vertically, so quickly that it was as if the door just disappeared. Through the door there were eight smaller identical doors. All of them had green lights above the door and a keyhole on each side. He took out two long cylindrical keys that worked like all other cylindrical keys except they had many more notches on the outside all the way up the keys, several thousand microscopic bumps on the inside of the cylindrical parts of the keys, and a computer chip in the handle of each key. He placed one in each keyhole and turned them simultaneously.
Once again, the door slid open so fast it may as well have disappeared. Filling up most of the small, standing-room-only room was what looked like a giant transparent pill-capsule. He stepped into this (after having to go through a special scanning machine), and turned around. After the door of the pill capsule closed up, the glass itself turned green. He immediately pressed a button on a small pole at his right. The door slid open just as quickly as before, and he stepped out into the corridor. This time, since he was on his way out of the transport-tube dock, he just had to do a quick hand scan at the large door that, he knew, led into a large room. Within the room, a holographic model of the solar system as well as all of the stars visible in the outside sky on all sides of the chamber because the floor was transparent. He walked to the opposite end of the cavernous room, where a green square, divided in half by a green line, was used to show double doors.
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 1:52 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Chapter Two: G.H.I. 81,027A7.1
The man’s brother, a very important looking man, sat quietly behind a beautifully carved and superbly crafted desk, in an equally magnificent matching leather chair. The desk and chair were made out of the most expensive wood on the market, from the gigantic but rare Lampshade pine, which was so expensive it costed nearly 1¾ per standard minor-cube. On the desk was a paperweight made out of crystal. It was a three dimensional picture of a moon with a space station in geostationary orbit around its equator connected by eight gigantic elevator hubs with a very small section of a giant gas-planet on one side and the gas-giant’s rings just on the other side of the moon. There was also a pair of very expensive platinum pens, directly behind a name plate with the name “Mr. P. Russell” engraved on it in an almost midieval script.
Directly behind the desk lay a large viewport with tint-mode switched off, giving a spectacular view of the same moon and gas planet, and two stars orbiting each other seven plainwidths away (the screen automatically tinted that area only, so you could look at the stars without damaging your eyes). The structure that was attached to the moon orbiting at the equator and connected to it by gigantic elevators spread in an almost complete circle, part of it being interrupted because the moon hid that section of it from view. Several ten-mile long towers extended both up and down to connect to various research and office stations and SPOWPs (strategically positioned orbital weapon platforms). The one in which the office was in, however, was much different. The office was in one section of the tower, which, rather than being connected directly to the station-ring, it was extended above the northern polar region of the moon, it’s base being secured to the moon by going all the way through it (there was a similar office on the south pole as well) and held to the space station by four long tethers, each containing eight transportation tubes.
Far off, beyond the spectacular ring system, two more moons were visible, one a mere ten thousand miles beyond the other, while the closest was about thrice that distance from this moon to make room for the first of three spectacular ring systems. On the closer moon you could just make out the faintest glow (it was in its waning crescent phase, before it reached the light gigantic mirror on the far side of the gas giant), where a vast city covering nearly half of the moon was located. Around this moon, a big construction project was taking place because it too was to put a large ring-shaped satellite around it.
The moon where the office was located, known as G.H.I. 81,027A7.1 (commonly called “71”), was the second largest moon in the entire 81,027 (or “‘027”) star system. The moon’s gravity was nearly 97½% standard, meaning that it was almost the average size of a terrestrial planet. It’s name means that it is the closest habitable moon to the seventh planet orbiting the 81,027th star system discovered to have habitable planets or moons.
The man stepped further into the room.
“Hello, Percy,” he said.
“Siggy! Hey! Long time, no see, huh?” his brother replied, looking up for the first time. “I have been very busy. I have so little time to go off-planet these days, I doubt I’ll get another chance to take vacation ever again.”
“Well, I do. That’s what I came here for.”
“Well, it’s about time,” his brother remarked, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t seem to remember you ever taking a vacation, least not since your disastrous trip to the Richie-Harrison system. Where were you planning on going this time?”
“The very first extra-solar colony established.”
“Which one of so many?”
Siggy smiled, “I mean the first extra solar planet colonized after Old Earth. The one in the Alpha Centaurus system. I want to go to New Earth.”
“You want to go where!?—Ooof!” his brother barked as he jumped up from the expensive chair, hitting his head on his hovering desk lamp.
“New Earth”
“What’s that you say? You want to go commit suicide? There’s a good reason we abandoned that planet as soon as another habitable extra solar planet could be found.”
“I know,” said Siggy. “I have had my history quite literally drilled into my head since birth, and thanks to all of the automatically inserted superconductor microchips in it, I remember all of our history as well. If only they had one of those that could be programmed by your own head to keep your memory…”
“But, Siggy. It’s no different than commiting suicide. It’s uninhabitable. The history chips can’t be totally wrong. Especially because all of the other uninhabitable planets and moons aren’t stressed quite so much. It can’t be a cover-up, because I am high in the government and I have just met the first person I ever met who ever wanted to go to anywhere near the Centaurus sys—”
“Percy…you know that no good reason is ever given that makes it uninhabitable.”
“Yes, I know as well as you do, having been the head of the history department back on Mars. But Siggy, there’s more than the fact that there’s not a sufficient supply of water on the surface. The fact that between the crust and the mantle is a layer of boiling water doesn’t make it abundant in water. Sure, it was only two millennia ago that we found it, and eighteen centuries since the second extra solar colony was founded, a century before Earth was setting up colonies all around the Orion Arm. Then we discovered how to go a thousandfold faster than light speed as well as the gravity well generator, and the next thing we know there are colonies all over the galaxy. Then, almost a millenium ago, a re-supply ship from Old Earth, which by then had completely done away with pollution as well as turned the entire small Mars colony into a desert habitat and further into an Earth-like wildlife reserve and become a planet wide city, arrived at New Earth. As you know, they found the entire city which had spread over 1000 square miles and blossomed despite the fact that it had to generate its own oxygen had been completely deserted. And the cause of—and they found no reason for the complete disappearance of hundreds of thousands of—”
“Percy, have you ever heard of zack-one?”
“Hundreds of thous—what?”
Siggy smiled again. “Zack-one; Z-A-Q-One. Percy, I know more than you think.”
“But how—?”
“It’s amazing how much you can learn from the “old salts,” smugglers, and people who had been smuggled in space. Oh, and no hard feelings for hiding the fact that you know it.”
“I—I am the only one here who does know it. It still makes the planet uninhabitable, more-so, in fact. ZAQ1 program is responsible for the internal problems, while the planet itself caused all the other, external problems.”
“If ZAQ1 was man-made, it should still be dependent enough to be man-controlled.”
Percy sighed, suddenly looking much more tired and old. “Siggy, ZAQ1 is the dark side of modern technology. We should never have completely given a whole group of tens of thousands of colonists over to the care of the inexperienced yet extremely self-centered and self-trusting artificial intelligence. We should never have created ZAQ1.”
“Hmmm,” Siggy sighed. “You’re right, you know. Too right. We should have never given a paradise to the control of intelligence that doesn’t know the difference between paradise and a hole in the ground.”
Percy rose again (having sat back down a moment after he jumped up in surprise) and walked over to the viewport and looked out, staring off beyond everything in “027” at the countless stars spread across the sky. Siggy went and stood by him. He focused on one rather distant star, one which he knew from his astronomy microchips to be the one around which New Earth revolved, with its 32 hour days and city controlled by the dark side of all of man’s creations in the form of a planet-wide computer program whose name originated from the first vertical row of letters on a keyboard.
Last edited by Siegfried, Jun/19/2005, 2:32 pm
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 1:55 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Chapter Three
Placeholder Post
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 2:24 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Chapter Four
Placeholder Post
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 2:25 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Re: ZAQ1
Placeholder.
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 2:25 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Re: ZAQ1
Placeholder.
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 2:26 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Re: ZAQ1
Placeholder
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 2:27 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Re: ZAQ1
Placeholder
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 2:27 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Siegfried
Supreme Lord of the Tea Factory
Global user
Registered: 07-2004
Location: Stanford Torus
Posts: 668
Karma: 23 (+23/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Re: ZAQ1
There! Perhaps I should create a discussion thread in case this goes a lot further than even I had hoped.
---
Siegfried: Fafner-slaying, god-dooming Walsung.
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin:
http://com4.runboard.com/bhiddenvillageoferedluin
Entmoot, the site that got me interested in message boards:
http://entmoot.tolkientrail.com
|
|
Jun/19/2005, 2:29 pm
|
Send Email to Siegfried
Send PM to Siegfried
MSN
Blog
|
Post Reply
Powered by AkBBS 0.9.5b - Link to us
- Blogs
- Hall of Honour
- Chat
Click here to get your own free message board
|
You are not logged in (login)
Board's time is: Nov/21/2009, 1:27 pm
|
|
|
Nurvingiel's MSTs
*~*~*
Brendan's Classical Music
*~*~*
Star Wars: The Rebirth of the Galaxy
*~*~*
Back To Top
The Hidden Village of Ered Luin ShoutBox
Webcounters thanks to freewebs.
|
