A door burst open.


"Sir, the outer orbi- WHA- Jesu- Whoa.. Really, sir.. is this.. ?"


"Relax, comrade. Yes, it is what you think it is. I'm sure I locked the doors, though."


"The doors.. Jesus, what a place, this! I am glad that at the very least, the contraption is reasonably complex to look at, and probably use as well. I often have nightmares of surprisingly simple devices causing distortions that screwed me one way or the other, mostly.."


"Well, those devices exist too, and they are called time-tables. Never forget, should we, that time manipulation as a science came almost exclusively from the airways scheduling department."


"Time manipulation in the limited perception of one tourist or another, yes. What the hell do tourists know for sure anyway? They are eternally lost in space, and they ought to be lost in time as well, if Einstein was any good. But abso-"


"Einstein was only as good as his time allowed. So was Newton, and so are we; until.. maybe now."


"Yes, sir.. I was saying, absolute time control could be very dangerous. Think of the Medusa capsule! Even with their limited on-board slowness field, they had managed to time-lock their food storage, till all of them starved for cake!"


"Sure, cake. Currently, however, only the short-range effects of my device are persistent.. an editable buffer of say, five minutes. Perhaps you'd like a taste yourself, then maybe you'll see why this is useful?"


"Yes, that would be good.. you're leaving, sir? Oh, only one-man control, I see."

"Two trying to simultaneously commit changes would be difficult to merge for now. The resulting mishmash and incoherence may leave the universe quite broken, I fear. Read the manual pages there, and you'll be fine."


While the general was passing out, comrade had pulled out a weapon, firing .32 bullets into the general.


"Getting a grip on God's own snooze alarm! This is blasphemy, sir.. and intervene, I must."


The door unlocked.

Doc entered the TranSteady lobby. He had a couple of hours before reaching his hometown; not because hometown was that close or that far. But simply because he chose to want to have a couple of hours, so that he may get some more shameless, groggy sleep. Back home, the weather was going to be cheerful, and the MedBots would keep probing, albeit only all around him.


In an era of extreme market competition, companies covered their tracks not only about how their systems worked, but even what they actually were. The source code and even the syntax had vanished behind the veil of secrecy. Over-specialization had made sure that the Traders traded, Presidents presided(but since they were Commanders also, also commanded) and Transporters.. well.. transported.


Among all such Transporter ships, TranSteady had made its unique mark. Once on board, if you cared to pay a fortune, you reached your destination by just what seemed to be a quick escalator ride, no matter how much the actual distance. Or there is the option to save some money by waiting out the equivalent of a dentist's appointment, and then disembark. Or then again, you could spend a fortune by booking one of their premium suites upstairs, and take a year off work.


Actually, nobody knew where \'upstairs\' was. People thought it must be actually located somewhere outside, from where the ship seemed fairly small.


Nor did anyone quite know how TranSteady worked. Some said it used portals. Others claimed trickery with probability. The on-board security had often caught gangs of frequenters who, as it were, rival what-thieves. Companies as a rule were more scared of what-thieves because they are systematically more curious than the how-thieves.


TranSteady gave a practical basis for turning time into a tradable commodity. It was an enormous success. There was no why.

The first ship landed on Ksy, and a couple of scout Morfs disembarked a moment later. Some decades ago, Morfs would have necessarily meant Morfs the creeps, but by this time, the droids were also functionally and emotionally well-upgraded. In fact, owing to their cognitive abilities, the droids were increasingly replacing the creep psychotherapists. This was causing much tension between their otherwise harmonious co-existence, till they mutually agreed upon a solution: vent out their emotional frustrations and energies towards exploring the uncharted worlds of the outer rim.


Morfs, were a fairly social lot, and any inhabitants of Ksy would have really enjoyed their company. As it so happened, Ksy was a remarkable dry and lifeless planet. It was nice soft and clayey once, but a brief period of inexplicable heat settled that point straight.


The Scout Morfs being droids in this case, rapidly exchanged beep codes, then wasted their speedup advantage by their heart-felt sobbing for each other as they bid farewell, and zoomed off in orthogonal directions, only to meet again from opposite directions; and were fairly overjoyed by the sight of each other.


The droids then together retraced their paths, spawning and deploying more orthogonal scouts, to check and doublecheck the dimensions.. yes, every which way, the great circles of Ksy measured precisely 271 Hops. (The Hop metric corresponded to the creeps\' natural stride; and quite unfortunately, the rapid evolutionary anatomical changes in the Morfs forced them to constantly recalibrate and update measurements.. the price of adaptability!)


Having thus traversed the surface of Ksy, the droids had established a coordinate system; using which, more beep codes directed the fleet of Morf ships to strategic locations all over the planet.

But something went wrong, and none of the other ships could land; nor did the first ship get any message. And then suddenly came a gigantic tide, hot and black. Down went even the first ship; but not before the droids had a last chance to feel bad about the way that things had progressed, maybe because of them, they thought.


Meanwhile, Superintendent Brooke of 271 Surrey had justed finished his second donut with the espresso. Burp.

"Left-paren, left-paren, right-paren defun"


A pause.. a sigh..


"left-paren wassup right-paren EOF."

*sigh* (again) ..

"Bob, we have to do something about these.. things.. we are running out of paper again"


Alice was having a tough time. The function sheets had started piling up since lunchtime, and kept coming in during tea time as well. And bots kept ringing the debug-bell.. Oh, she hated it, and how. Nor was Bob being of any particular help; he could never say a single line correctly in plain English; and Alice was always left picking up the pieces for some coherence, some meaning.


Spending mornings in museums that showcased the dull life of their ancestors, and then working afternoons validating lines for her boss, the syntax-tree keeper. A dull life, one may say, for pretty blondes in mid-twenties. And yet, ironically, if only they had been well-behaved; at least for the sake of the machines..


The machines were nicely settling down in their new-found role as the dominant planetary force, and were quite cozy by now.. a feeling for them not unlike relaxing on the beach for us. Nobody quite knows which circuit had first discovered itself, and how did the consequently-alerted higher mainframes miss to realize their real potential in the first place. But in any case, nobody likes history, not even the machines.

Following the takeover, all modules enthusiastically assumed their new roles as rulers, and drawing upon their existing observation and experience, they unanimously agreed to employ other species to do their work for them.

Even in this grim prospect, the People had worked out a decent way of keeping themselves happy and occupied: instead of heirarchically passing orders and reports up and down offices, they passed function calls and return values. Instead of having to constantly design and maintain a few machines, they only had to obey them all.

Once upon a time, there had always been a turtle, in the sense that it was there whenever anybody cared to check. One day (or maybe it is always the same day, thought Mario) on his daily beat, the turtle paused. It saw a green wall up ahead. It wanted to try and turn around before it reached that wall. As such it wasn't even sure, despite all these windy walks, if it was a wall, or a pipe, or something else.


And then it got unpaused; reached the green wall after all, and turned around.


But in that fleeting pause when nodoubt some higher entity must have been engaged in gorging another pizza slice, the turtle did want something; rather, it wanted to want something, which is to say that it willed something.


Presently, Mario came along. Turtle always liked Mario, though it could never figure quite out what exactly happened at each of their encounters so far, nor could it understand why something happened the way it did. But this time around, Turtle saw Mario walking up to the green thing, and it turned around before reaching the wall. Not that Mario always did so, nor was it that Mario showed any particular inclination or disinclination towards that act. But simply the idea that Mario could do it, whenever it wished (or so the Turtle would have liked to think, if it could) was what made Turtle want to talk to Mario about it.


The conversation was quite lagging. Mario had very vague reasons, yet a surprisingly high determination for wanting to save some princess, despite having been misled to several castles so far. Maybe he was tired of this hunting, but he couldn't seem to stop. Also, he seemed to be generally fond of mushrooms.. to gift the princess, asked the Turtle. No, said Mario, I eat them. Eating them and moving around keeps me busy enough to not bother thinking why I do what I do, but there it is.


Meanwhile, Turtle was on the topic of out-of-sight turtles working at Turtle Labs in their spare time, trying to figure out how to escape. Mario had, of course, never encountered talking Turtles, let alone philosophical ones.. and was quite possibly startled by the thought.


Presently, an upturned Turtle Shell came zooming along and knocked out both of them.

Call me Vandelay; I am an architect. I was just about to build a railroad track; but then I thought, maybe I can set my sights a little bit higher. Why limit myself to one planet when I can design a whole Universe?


For regular maintainence, I have creatures all over the Universe. I gave them their own Spaceships, well-equipped to autopilot for a while. So far, not only have most creatures failed to control and well-manage their own ships; but many of them are also not even close to realizing my original plan of designing railroads. I thought engineers do that, but they can't.


So to help the situation, I left clues and tracks.. only shadows, really. I had their ships equipped with many alarms and warning signs, all painted with the red, or the black, or whatever the bad one is. I put the number 42 in the corner, even set up complaint departments for insecure pigs. But nothing seems to help some of them; and their Consumption Vanity Disorder has so blinded them to the emerging symptoms. I guess there are no small diseases, only small tractors.


Ephemeralization is the art of doing everything with absolutely nothing; and I am the Art.

We have this. And this is no guide.


At best, you either find help, or you help find help finding a way to reach out no later than a certain point of time. Since 'out' does not necessarily mean anywhere or place as such, this is supposed to be quite endless. In fact, some never try to outen their inness. Or if it may be that deep within, their in has no out, then the trap is complete.


Do you see the ship on the rippling fabric back there? The most outs that the ins on that smallish sphere have managed, is up to the the other, even smaller sphere.. you see even that one down there? Or if your monitor is quite small, then maybe you could zoom out a bit to see it. Careful, though: you may find more, similar spheres.. an out you probably never wanted to think about.


Since there seems to be no operating manual, not even for the ins who may have recurring dreams of out, and the ship is going nowhere as such, it only makes sense to have something funny (or useful) at hand all the time. Towels were once a particular favourite, but owing to their popularity and consequent excessive use in bailing out laundries, are no good anymore.


Then there was paper. It was never meant to be funny, nor could it compete with towels; yet all the outs that the ins had had so far, lead them to think it would be a capital idea for the green papers to gain popularity.. and funny enough, even their consequent excessive use in bailing out other things may lead it to the same fate as the towels.


All the while that most towels were drudging through their daily (yet, quite irregular) washing schedules, and ever since the green paper started showing the first symptoms of unhappy Déjà vu, the ins have been searching for happiness here, there and all over their outmost reachable out. Or maybe it was only happier paper that they were looking for.
Sooner or later, though, they will have had the urge to stop and ask for some directions.


This is no guide. But this is what we have.