Stray (6 page)

There's a thousand thousand words sitting in my skull.  They murmur at me whenever I look at anything.  As I'm writing this there's an awkward echo giving me a different set of sounds, and an image of strange squiggles which I presume mean what I'm writing.  I don't think I 'know' this language, but sounds are suggesting themselves to me in response to things I look at and even things I think.  So I could on one level understand what the greysuits were saying, in the way you half understand those garbled train announcements, where you get the gist and guess the rest.  It's not like having an English-Alien dictionary.

I can even read the squiggles I'm hallucinating around the room, in that I'm sure they read 'No Access' when I glance at them, but if I look at them closely they're not letters I recognise, let alone words.  Trippy.  Still, having a language poured into my skull will save a lot of time, and I'd be 11/10 pleased if my head didn't hurt so much.

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
affects 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.