Monday, October 18, 2004

a fragment

Fragment of a private transmission from D'N'ssh, Conditional Representative to SOL3/SE-2.

...and I'm sure they gave me the wrong body type as well. I'm sure they should have given me a whiter one, and I'm even more sure they got the entire ethnicity mixed up. I am definitely going to officially complain about this: those [untranslatable] at the background department have been getting away with this sort of recklessness too many times. If it were one of them here, they'd know the danger. Already in my first night walk around sydney, I noticed that I was definitely not merging. Apparently the body type I have is one of recent migration to this region but my language coding is of the dominant one. And if I run across any similar individuals, my cover will definitely be blown. The city is like a vast termite colony (see we know more about the nonsentients than the sentients, [untranslatable] the backgroundies). But an abandoned termite colony: huge constructs veer into the sky, but as far as I can tell, they all seem abandoned. Maybe it has to do with the time of the day? Maybe they are diurnal, and rest somewhere else? Inane speculation is not my job. I should have been briefed about this. I spent the first walk idly, without plan or purpose, trying to get an idea of how the system worked, but it was hard without any direct interactions. The only place where the sentients gathered were small rooms, where they imbibed some sustenance and watched a screen. The screen resembles [untranslatable] but only more crude. I stepped into one of them, it was called "Soup Plus", but instead of a screen, they watched some four members of their own kind. Luckily it was dark (for the sentients, I switched to [untranslatable] as soon as I got inside), and the person at the entrance assumed I was one of them. These four sentients were placed on a higher level, and were making weird noises with assorted equipment. What was absolutely fascinating from a [untranslatable] point of view was the fact that the rest of the sentients were eating at the same time. Fascinating and disgusting, but I will be a good [untranslatable] for now and refuse to pass judgment. I knew that I could safely eat anything down here, I made sure I had the right symbionts before I left base, and I had a frothy liquid that tastes like nothing I've ever had in my life. I listened to the noises for sometime, and there was a serious mathematically pleasing aspect of it. Patterns kept repeating, though with different instruments, and every time I idly plotted the pattern on an imaginary [untranslatable], and could reasonably predict how it would go on, it broke down and the noises were different to a significant degree from my prediction. After a while, I gave up, I am not too qualified in these matters. Later I found out out that the term for this patterned/nonpatterned noise was "jazz". Overall it was very interesting, and I expect some more surprises like this in the following days. But what really astonished me was...