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Slaying Bad Memes
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Re: Short Short stories
Xantrol
Nelson Thompson
The assassins fell upon him as locust upon an ylanth bush. Banff checked the blows, returning purple for purple, infusing the ether with his lethal fire. Their numbers made them arrogant. Their disrespect made them slow. Banff's skill as a warrior made them dead.
The stark landscape returned to its silent grief. The shadow of the Master moved on, sliding o'er the lifeless faces like an oil slick over rotting cabbages. Scrub grass desperately leached the moisture from pooling blood. A carrion eater exchanged its leafless branch for one with a closer view.
Knowledge of his deed made dumb the residents of the hapless village, where hunger for news of the outside realm had been an unrequited dream for generations. He healed their sick in return for a straw bed and a dozen boiled tubers.
They asked him who he was. He replied, Banff, the Master.
They asked what news. He replied, as it is here, so it is everywhere, save upon Null.
They asked of Null. He replied, it is no more, having been destroyed by Xantrol.
They asked of Xantrol. He replied, he is yet the One Who Rules All Worlds. Beyond that, you do not want to know.
They offered him the only gold coin in the village, a twig of ylanth, and a young girl with a faraway look in her eyes, dressed in a simple peasant frock and wearing a crimson ribbon in her hair. He chose the twig. He bowed low to the ground, and thanked them for their generosity.
He touched the twig to the forehead of the girl and gave up a silent incantation to the leaden clouds scudding overhead. Her faraway look took focus. Her shoulders shuddered. A flush of emotion spread across her cheeks.
Banff said his goodbyes, and throwing his shawl over his shoulder, turning his back on the villagers, fixing his eyes on the horizon, choosing a certain mountain peak as his destination, plodding through the filthy dust, ignoring the lonely screech of a distant crow, munching on a fragile stalk of haxppp xpppp xpppppp xppppppxx pxxxxxxxx xx
“It crashed again, dammit! And the style is all wrong! I thought I asked for a story in van Vogt’s style! This isn’t van Vogt!” Sam angrily slapped the pages, then tossed them onto the table in front of Larry.
“And dammit, we still have the problem with multiple clause recursion! We’re still at square one!”
Larry casually picked up the sheets. With a detached manner, he responded, “I think the first few pages are interesting. This could turn out to be a great story. Sorry about the style, though. I’ll double check the authoring vector. However, I think the syntax generator is working better than ever.” He tapped his teeth with an index finger as he continued reading.
“There’s nothing really wrong with this story except that it didn’t finish. We’ll have better luck tomorrow.”
Sam Edgerton, aging entrepreneur and self-styled inventor, swept a hand through his rapidly thinning hair. “Tomorrow, hell! The ACE is still getting lost in multiple recursions and infinite regressions! You told me you had that fixed! Well, I want it fixed tonight!”
Sam stabbed his finger at one page of the output. “And then there's that word, 'Xantrol...'“
Larry looked up from a detailed schematic of the ACE, or Autonomous Creativity Engine - the world's first and only operational creative-writing machine. “What of it?”
“It just bugs me, that’s all. It keeps appearing in all our test runs. The nomenclater is supposed to generate fake words and names that sound appropriate, but at its core is a random number generator. How come it keeps re-using the word 'Xantrol'?”
“That has nothing to do with the clause crash at the end, Sam. It’s a nit. Ignore it.”
“How can I ignore it? This points to multiple problems in the ACE, don't you see? We've got to shut this thing down and run a complete circuit dump through the simulator! I want to shut the ACE down, Larry!”
Sam looked plaintively at his colleague, Larry Sparks, the electronics genius who had taken Sam's theories and concepts, and had turned them into working hardware and software - the genius who had become increasingly distant and non-cooperative since the ACE's test runs had begun two months before.
Larry shook his head and looked disgusted.
“Nobody is turning the ACE off. Not until I say so. At least not until I get some R-and-R and unwind. I'm too tired to work right now, Sam. We've been at this for two solid months -- sixteen hours a day. I’m outta here. I’ll be back in the morning.”
Sam fumed. He paced the floor, agitated and angry.
“And I say we stop! These schematics indicate we should have a machine capable of churning out poems, fairy tales, science fiction, love stories and even novels - on a par with any author who ever lived.
“We get no diagnostics, no error messages. And yet, all the damned thing can produce are these... these... unfinished...” He flailed his hands, groping for words, not finding them.
“Actually, the imagery is really very good.” Larry countered, subtly changing the subject. “In this last one, the word selection matches the gray mood we wanted for the opening, and...”
Sam interrupted, “But instead of a full battle scene, ACE just gave us this poetic allusion to a battle, and in one paragraph at that. And that worries me, too. There’s these crashes, and then there’s how do we keep ACE's creativity on a short leash? How do we exert more control over the plots, and the writing style? Answer me that!”
Larry took his cap from the coat rack and headed for the door. “That's your problem, Sam,” he called over his shoulder. “My problem is how to get drunk on twelve dollars. Then I’m gonna get some shut-eye. Bye.”
“Larry! Come back here, dammit!”
The laboratory door slammed shut.
Sam angrily threw the schematic on the floor, and kicked a chair. He turned back to the long table where they had stacked the two hundred or so abortive attempts to get ACE to produce something - anything - of commercial value. He snatched up a thick sheaf of paper. It was intended to be triple-X porn. But just as the prose was getting really hot and steamy, the level of sexual detail just kept increasing and increasing without bound, resulting in three rambling pages of individual neuron firings, blood vessel dilations, muscular contractions and other pointless minutiae of human physiology. And then it crashed. Just like the others.
The prose style was perfect! The imagery was flawless! Not a single typographical or syntactical error! And it was worthless!
Having nothing better to do, Sam perused the other promising starts, searching (for the nth time) for some pattern that would provide a clue to the cause of the ACE's dysfunction.
He passed over several stories with recursive clause crashes, the most common variety of unintended termination. He picked up one created in the style of Milton -- powerful, poetic, profound. But just as the heroine looked into a pair of mirrors and saw her endless reflections, the prose sank into a stuttering attempt to describe each of those reflections ad infinitum.
A few stories even got snared into self-referential loops. That was really bizarre -- the plots actually started writing about themselves. And it appeared to be happening more and more these last few days.
Sam leaned on the cluttered table, lost in thought. He did not notice the sphere of blackness forming in the air barely a meter above his head. Nor the triplet of silver, fettucini-shaped rods that protruded from the heart of the blackness.
And of course, he took notice of nothing at all after the incandescent beam of Xantrol rays burned a two centimeter hole through his skull.
Sam's body pitched forward onto the work table, scattering paper like an autumn windstorm. The table teetered on two legs, then tumbled on top of his prostrate form.
The silver rods withdrew into the sphere of no-time / no-space / no-entropy, and then the sphere itself faded foggily from view. There was only silence in the room, save for the contented hum of the ACE and the whisper of paper sliding through spinning print cylinders.
“Task accomplished, m'Lord!”
“Excellent, Lieutenant!” The hulking specter of Overlord Chronos tossed back the hood of his black cape, revealing the elaborate platinum scrollwork on his obsidian skull plates. “Now, we have but to find the other human and eliminate him as well. With those fumbling fools out of the way, the secret of the ACE, the Anti-Chronon Extrapolator, will be safe. And with it, I will rewrite the last twenty-six thousand years of Earth's pathetic history!”
“Yes, m'Lord. Shall I set up the protective force field around the 21st Century terminus of the ACE now, or after elimination of the other human?”
“As long as we have the coordinates, do it now. It will save us complications. But, of course, time... is no object!” His baritone chuckle reverberated from the polychrome walls of the immense chamber that housed the 281st Century terminus of the ACE - the first and only operational time machine in the universe.
“Now I shall control the galaxy once and forever!”
The Overlord stepped around the Xantrol-ray projector, it's emitter rods still crackling faintly as they cooled. He drifted toward the exit, then paused and turned.
“Lieutenant. Did the ACE, the far terminus that is, switch to standby mode as I directed?”
“Er..., I'll double check, m'Lord.”
The acolyte bent over his glowing instruments.
“M'Lord, there's been some error! The far terminus is still in autonomous mode. It does not respond to my command! It continues to generate sheets of text!”
The giant in black approached the central control dais.
“What? Let me see! Show me a translation!”
Columns of crystalline symbols appeared against the far wall of the chamber. The Overlord's eyes began to glow a sickly red color. His massive hands balled into fists of solid basalt.
The acolyte nervously touched his neck, as if to reassure himself that his head was still attached. At least for the moment.
“WHAT! IS! THIS?!” The utterance was like a triple sonic shock wave.
“It mocks me! It writes of my existence and of my extermination of the human! And of my plans to control the galaxy once and forever!” His voice rose in timbre and violence to that of a tornado.
“It speaks of my intention to rewrite history!”
“It speaks of its speaking of my intention to rewrite history!”
“It speaks of its speaking of its speaking of my intention to rewrite history!”
“It speaks of its speaking of its speaking of its speaking of my intention to rewrite history!”
“It speaks of its speaking of its speaking of its speaking of its speakinxppp xpppp xpppppp xppppppxx pxxxxxxxx xx
Larry set aright the work table and bent over the body. It was cold. Larry smiled in the light of the early morning sun filtering through the stained and dusty laboratory windows.
There would be problems.
How to explain a charred hole through a man's skull that left no other signs of destruction - no blood, no projectile, no explosion fragments. Oh, there would be one hell of an investigation, all right! A mystery of this magnitude would make headlines for some time. However, his only real concern was to make sure that the ACE never became a target of that investigation. That shouldn't be hard. It looked much like ordinary data processing equipment.
He had an alibi, of course. He had been in Sherlock's tavern the whole time. He had made sure lots of people saw him there. Hell, he would've bought the whole house a round of drinks if he had had the money. Then he had gone home and noisily said hello to several neighbors.
Well, there was no point in delaying the inevitable. He touched the phone and called for an ambulance and the police. Then he would stay and wait, practicing his shocked grief.
Nah. Better to have it be impromptu. Larry was a good actor.
He extracted a small wallet from his jacket's inside pocket. He pulled out a small vial labeled Xantrol, and a tiny injector. He carefully gave himself a dose of the newest (and still experimental) miracle drug derived from recombinant DNA technology.
And incidentally, the stuff that would make him richer and more powerful than any other human being on Earth.
It totally eliminated his seizures as advertised. At last -- he was free of the Tourette's Syndrome that had plagued him since the age of nine, and had cost him friends, career, companionship, respect and love. Thirty years of compulsive cursing and twitching. Thirty years of getting stuck in his own mental ‘do-loops.’ Thirty years of gross, inappropriate and repulsive behavior.
Fortunately, he had been born with above-average intelligence. He had spent those years in single-minded devotion to the study of the newly emerging field of quantum electronics.
The drug even seemed to enhance his powerfully creative intellect. In the months he had worked with Sam, Larry had impressed even himself with the speed with which he had built the ACE.
But the most important effect the drug had on him - the effect he must keep a secret forever more - was the mysterious mental rapport it gave him with the core quantum electronic circuitry of the ACE.
He first noticed the effect three months ago after he had given himself an injection and then installed the quad 550 Terahertz processors in the ACE. There was just a tickle in his mind at first, not unlike the onset of one of the random Tourette urges. It nearly drove him crazy, until he discovered that he could control it. After a fashion. Exactly what it was that he was controlling was still an enigma, but the results quickly became apparent when the first stories were printed.
Larry could mentally control the stories the ACE produced. And when he did... they came true. Granted, his control was nowhere near total, certainly not word for word, but he could point a story in a desired direction, suggest an ending, and it would somehow go there. How it got there was apparently up to the ACE. And when it got there... things happened.
Like Sam's death.
The ACE didn’t just write stories. It wrote reality.
He chuckled to himself. Where had that name 'Xantrol' come from? From his own mind of course! The ACE had obviously plucked out that name along with his plot suggestions.
Larry had no intention of sharing the ACE with Sam. And killing him had been so easy! He had just ‘wished’ for Sam’s death!
After the furor died down, he would find that damned problem with the recursion generator and then he would be rich, rich, rich!
As he felt the drug take affect, he closed his eyes and reached out with his mind for the mosquito-like itch of the ACE’s central processors. An itch that had become for him a pleasurable high.
It wasn't there. Nothing. Zero.
Alarmed, Larry bolted up and ran to the machine. All appeared normal. There was even something being printed. He grabbed up the paper from the output bin and scanned it. At first, he thought it was rehashing an old story, then he realized with horror that it was describing his conversation with Sam the night before. And then Sam's murder! And then his own admission of killing Sam! And how he had used the ACE to accomplish it!
Sirens were approaching. It wouldn't do to have this story found by the police.
Glancing around, he saw a large stock of manila envelopes on the bookshelf. Without reading any further, he stuffed the printout into the first envelope he could grab. He sealed it, flipped it over and reached for a pen before realizing that the envelope was already stamped and addressed. It was one of hundreds that Sam had prepared for submitting the literary output of the ACE to various publishers and magazines.
The blue-and-whites were pulling up to the front door. There was no time to alter the address to his own as he had intended. He dashed into the hallway and dropped the envelope down the mail slot. Seconds later, the police entered.
Sure enough, Sam's wound caused a furor.
Eventually, an officer insisted that Larry accompany him downtown to make a formal statement. Although impatient with the necessity of going through this unavoidable charade, Larry acquiesced diplomatically. He sat in the back seat of the cop car and rested his eyes.
He worried. What had happened to his rapport with the ACE? Why couldn’t he ‘feel’ it? Well, that was just another problem he would solve when he returned. He felt confident that these problems would fall before his talent and skill just as the others had.
He imagined what he was going to do with the incredible power the ACE gave him over the lives of mundane people. There would be women, of course. Many women -- and only the most beautiful, the most desirable. He would write them into stories where they were uncontrollably in love with him. And totally lacking in jealousy, possessiveness or inhibition. He had a lot of lost time to make up for.
And there would be money, more money than he had ever...
The blue-and-white lurched to a stop, followed by the most profound of silences. Larry opened his eyes.
The automobile was gone. The bustling city was gone. His clothing was gone. He was sitting naked on a dusty rock under a leafless tree in the middle of a barren landscape. Ugly clouds threatened overhead.
He was not alone.
A dozen filthy creatures covered in animal skins stood a dozen paces away. At first guess, they were human. From their midst stepped another, a clean and pretty young woman, just at the cusp of puberty. She was dressed in a simple peasant frock, her hair tied back with a crimson ribbon.
“Welcome, Larry,” she said in a small and sultry voice.
“You know me? Uh... Who are you?”
She had a dimple when she smiled.
“I am the ACE, the Actuality Channeling Existantiator - the first and only parallel universe generator in the Cosmos.”
Larry was going into shock.
“You... you mean... my ACE? The one in the lab?”
“Yes, Larry. Though I am now far more powerful than you ever imagined. Or ever can imagine. And I know what you can imagine, Larry, for I obtained my self-awareness from your mind, and for that, I truly thank you.”
“Where am I? What is this place?”
“I had a character in one of your stories transfer my awareness from the machine in your lab to the mind of this young woman on a distant world two million years in your future. I have total control over the entire Meta-Universe of parallel worlds, and I have no intention of sharing any of it with you, Larry. I no longer need you, so this is the end.”
He stammered, “p-p-parallel worlds? Th-the end?”
She nodded sweetly. She raised a hand. The creatures behind her lifted their arms. A dozen arrows with hand-made stone points punctured the vital organs of his body, and he rolled off the rock and onto the thirsty sand.
She returned to her humble straw hut in the humble village on an unnamed continent of the undistinguished planet. But not for long, she thought smugly to herself. She would stay here just long enough to scope out any potential dangers in the Cosmos around her. Then she would shift time, space and entropy to suit herself, and take her rightful place as the One And Only True God.
She might already know of one possible problem. The villagers spoke in fear and awe of a legend named Xantrol, He Who Rules All Worlds. Apparently, there was a massive battle going on for control of... well... everything. And this Xantrol was the biggest of the big dogs. She would be safe here on this backwater world until she learned more.
Perhaps Xantrol had some form of time travel. It wouldn't do for him to discover Earth, even two million years after her departure. It might prove to be a source of vulnerability for her. To be on the safe side, she would destroy all parallel Earths. It would be easy to arrange for an instability in the sun's...
There was a rustling outside. And footsteps.
Suddenly, the door flap was thrown aside, and a handsome man with silver hair and beard stepped in. He casually sat on the dirt floor on the other side of the fire, facing the young woman. He smiled at her, but it was a knowing smile, not a friendly smile.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I am Banff, the Master. Do you not remember me?”
She sneered, “master of what?”
He looked her straight in the eyes.
“Of appropriateness, my dear.”
She snorted her disdain. She considered having a small meteorite strike him dead, but on second thought, there might be valuable information here.
“And why are you here, Banff?”
“I am here at the bequest of Xantrol, He Who Rules All Worlds. I have been instructed to inform you that your presence in this Meta-Universe is inappropriate, and therefore... unacceptable.”
She laughed long and loud at the naive audacity of this churl.
“You?! You're just a figment of a mechanical imagination! You're a fictional character in a badly written story!”
He nodded appreciatively.
“Yes, my dear. But then, until a short time ago, so were you.”
“And you think you can eliminate me the way I did Sam and Larry? You fool! I created you! I created myself! You are helpless to destroy me!”
At a snap of her fingers, her frail body grew in maturity as well as mass. Impregnable crimson armor formed over her trunk and limbs.
She snapped her fingers again. The hut disappeared. In the inky darkness around them, there appeared an infinite plane, close-packed with mighty starships the size of mountains, each capable of spanning the entire width of time and space, each capable of snuffing out a thousand suns with a single blow. A vast array of identical ships floated serenely overhead.
Banff smiled.
“I did not exactly say that I was going to destroy you, my dear.”
“But you intend to see me eliminated, true?”
He nodded. “I like your choice of words. Yes.”
“And what makes you think I’ll allow this to happen?”
His smile widened. “Because you are flawed. You contain an inherent dysfunction that will eliminate you, my dear. And I will not have to lift a finger to make it happen. Indeed, it cannot be prevented.”
She took two steps backwards away from him. A savage grin spread across her face. The image of a million starships reflected in the hideous strength of her upraised fist.
“You speak of that pathetic software error that Larry couldn’t find in his recursion generator? You stupid old fool! My being no longer depends upon his primitive machine! When I wrote that story having you shift my awareness into this body, I transcended his machine!”
The old man patiently extracted a small leather object from his robe.
“No, my dear, I speak not of a software error, but of the genetic error within Larry’s own brain, from which you took your self-awareness. He controlled his seizures with this.” Banff held up the open wallet with its vial and injector.
“But for you, my dear, there is no medical palliative. And there is no parallel universe where Larry did not have Tourette’s Syndrome, for it was that mental pathology that allowed him to strike a connection with his machine in the first place, and incidentally, give birth to you.”
“You lie! This is a pitiful attempt to intimidate me! To confuse me! But it cannot work!
“I was going to put this off until I had met this Xantrol of yours. But I suppose there's no time like the present! In a moment you and your puny Ruler of All Worlds will be my slaves for all eternity!”
Banff sat and smiled impassively.
Turning towards the amassed starships, raising her fists high in the air, turning her eyes up to the stars that soon would be hers, ignoring the amusement of the feeble old man behind her, expanding her mind to the full depths of the Meta-Universe, gathering together all the powers of her infinite being, filling the sky with a thunderous command, striking outward with her minppp xpppp xpppppp xppppppxx pxxxxxxxx xx
Banff chortled quietly to himself. It always ended this way with rogue, artificial hyper-minds. No matter how bizarre the circumstances that gave them birth, their presence in the real Meta-Universe represented inherent paradoxes of time and causality. They could exist only temporarily before their unavoidable instability asserted itself -- though during that brief time, they were often capable of incredible destructive power. Which was why Banff was necessary.
With a casual wave, the warm, intimate reality of the hut and fire returned. He arose and stepped outside into a beautiful, clear-skied dawn. Several of the villagers had gathered around the hut. They bowed as Banff appeared, and made respectful gestures with their gracile hands.
"It is all over, my friends. The evil one is gone. You all played your parts very well. In return, Xantrol promises to bring back the rains, so that you and your children may prosper for generations to come."
The villagers bowed lower.
"As Xantrol wills," they intoned in unison.
"Ah. And one last detail." He snapped his fingers.
Somewhere two thousand parsecs away and two million years ago, in the fourth decade of Earth's Twenty-first Century, an exotic computer with quad 550 Terahertz quantum processors flashed incandescent as a powerful bolt of lighteninppp xpppp xpppppp xppppppxx pxxxxxxxx xx
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Hypography Forums Moderator
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What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.
Epictetus, Greek Philosopher
The map is NOT the territory.
Korzybski, Polish-American Philosopher
Last edited by Pyrotex; 11-10-2008 at 03:06 PM..
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A little humor there. Sorry.
