A Hair of Delphi - 5 - TV Time

Author's Preface:

Speed is an issue that I have noticed in this project. And that issue is becoming overbearing as I realize that the story is moving too slow for how many weeks I have been placing this on the blog now.

It is difficult with a serial piece to have such a small time frame, the frame has to be larger and move more quickly for readers to continue wanting more week after week. I think the slow start is okay, but within two more excerpts, I need to cover some serious time.

To see previous installments, please check the index.Until then, please enjoy "TV Time."

June 20, 1998

Two hours of infomercials about the new hit CD compilation, never dulling knives, and world class jewelry (guaranteed to never lose their sterling luster!) were followed by the morning recap of last night’s news.

A residential fire in Haverhill destroys two homes--No details reported. The World Series is two months around the corner with the assumption that the New York Yankees will be competing against the San Diego Padres. The British pound continues to increase in strength over the US Dollar at 1 British Pound Sterling to $1.667.

In local news, yesterday, a maintenance man on campus felt lazy in his duty to clean the moss and discoloring off of the buildings and monuments and used a high pressure hose to break off the hand off Allan Halsey’s statue in the central quad. It is left unsaid what plans are being made to take care of first, the statue, and second, the janitor.

I still could not sleep after my terrible dream. The images of the machine and of my own death and dissolution into a data stream in a computer still flashed in intervals between scenes of people on the television cutting a rubber pipe, and then slicing a tomato with the same kitchen blade.

The news station signed off their morning report with a wide angle shot of the sunrise over the riverfront and a cartoon began after the following commercial. I clicked off the TV. It had been a very long time since I last watched Saturday morning cartoons. I decided that I was not quite old enough yet to watch them again this day.

My computer was still installing the Disc Dr. Jacob Abernathy gave me. By the time the program came online, I would be able to see not only the first sample he scanned for me, but also the other five I left with the doctor to be scanned—scanned into the fear inspiring machine he calls Martha. I looked at the computer screen. The program was still installing: 29.48% complete.

Of course, Microsoft in its inimitable ability of understatement created its programming to never tell a true estimation of completion time. Three hours before, I started the installation and the estimate was for roughly eight hours. Now it required at least another 07:38:19.

Day light broke through the blinds finally around 7:23 am. The brilliant rays comforted me, as if they washed away the overwhelming ilk of the night before. I no longer felt ominous shadows of terrible dreams pushing against me, minimizing me. On the contrary, I felt a mite claustrophobic and the intrinsic need for exercise arose.

Facing the alternatives of staring at the television or the laptop computer for another seven hours, I decided to call upon Dr Jolene McDonald, another of my fellow resident physicians at St Mary’s, for a walk and lunch. We agreed to meet after her shift ends at eight.

It is now 7:45 but, living so close to the school and the hospital, I will have no trouble meeting her in time. It will be refreshing to walk with Jolene again. Perhaps I can get a second opinion on the situation at hand.

A Hair of Delphi - 4 - Dreams of the Lab

Author's Preface:

I don't have much to say on this page, outside of the fact that when I wrote this segment, I included a part that had to happen since I wrote the first segment. I'm sure you'll understand as you read.

To see previous installments, please check the index.Until then, please enjoy "Dreams of the Lab."

June 20, 1998

4 am. Restless pondering and a continuing ache in my stomach produced terrible images in my sleep tonight.

My dream placed me in Dr Jacob Abernathy’s lab. However, instead of finding his smiling British ruddiness, malice and sadistic glee was there. I fell back and tried for the door, but could not unbolt it.

Abernathy held the ax over his head, looming over me as I collapsed in fear.

Now, the careful reader may ask: “Where did Abernathy acquire this Ax?” And, to be honest, I do not know. It is the curious ability for nightmares to create more terrors out of the nothings than the somethings in life.

For, in reality, there was no ax in Jacob Abernathy’s lab—just a table, a cabinet, three shelves . . . And Martha.

The idea of Martha, that giant wall of technology, made me shudder in my dream. Its eight monitors were watching eyes, clicks came from the keyboards hooked to it. Abernathy was trying to force me into the man-size aperture of the machine’s scanning device! I knew that if I befell that fate, I would be dissolved like the hair sample from that afternoon.

Eventually, the demonized dream pushed me into the device and the plexiglass door came down with a horrifying “shunt” followed by the hiss of an air seal closing. I could not hear outside of my breathing in the chamber. I felt small and claustrophobic at the same time. I was close to being beyond the size limit of the chamber, it being seven by three by three in feet, and I 6’1” with 2’ wide at the shoulders.
The red laser began to scan me, much faster than it would in real life, I felt the heat, or I thought I did, of the beam. The laser turned blue, and I could feel the agony of my skin burning. I screamed. It echoed against the walls of the chamber. Abernathy was laughing, holding his Ax above his head in triumph. I could not hear it, but I could see his laughter. I looked down at my hands—they were gone.

I awoke to banging on my apartment door. I pulled my robe over my undershirt and shorts and shuffled through the living room and flipped the cheap latch. Mrs. Bell, the landlady, nearly wobbled over, still rapping against the door as I opened it. Some of her pink curlers flew from her head as she stumbled into my doorway.

“Mrs. Bell? What can I do for you?”

“Do for me? Lawrence, I came up here because Jenson said it sounded like someone was getting stabbed in here!” She gripped a handful of frizzy black hair out of her face.

“What?” I chuckled for lack of any better response. The draft of the hallway chilled my legs. My head and heart still pounded from the dream I was brought away from.

“He heard screamin’ and screamin’ and said that if I didn’t come up and check on you, he’d be busting in with his shotgun!”

“There was screaming? I was having an especially terrible dream, but I did not realize.”

“You were still screaming when I got here. I’m surprised you heard my knocking.” Mrs. Bell was a caring woman. She reminded me of my mother, but only in her attitude.

“I am sorry to disturb everyone.”

“No—no. It’s fine. Don’t you worry about it. We’re just glad you weren’t getting stabbed to death. I’d hate to have to file a police report.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Bell.” The joke made me feel better about waking the neighborhood with my terrible thoughts. I noted that my throat was sore now. I wondered how loud I was screaming.

“If there is anything you need, like a heavy sleeping pill, I can get it for you.”

“If I recall correctly, I prescribed you that medication when you came into the clinic last month.”

“Oh. I suppose you did.” She brought her hand over her mouth and looked up in a thoughtful pose. This was a common behavior when she talked herself into a box.

“Good night, Mrs. Bell.”

“Good night, Mr. Abernathy.”

I closed the door and latched it again. I walked back towards my bedroom but slumped into the pre-furnished recliner. I looked around the room, it was still and dark—peaceful in its own way. I did not feel like going back to bed. I was restless now—Not afraid, but restless.

I stared at the data disc Dr Abernathy handed me yesterday afternoon. It sat on the coffee table like a stagnant memory of the dream. But it is best to let those images leave my mind, and to bring the controlling calm back to my thoughts.

I pulled my computer bag and pulled the laptop out of it. After the usual two minutes to boot up, I pulled the disc from its sleeve and set it into the disc drive. The click of the disc drive closing into the laptop was satisfying for some reason. Whether it was that now I did not have to see the thing anymore, cloaked by the eight pound shell, or just that I was exerting my human mastery over technology by shoving it into my computer, I do not know.

The install file began its auto-run sequence once the computer recognized the disc’s presence. “OK to start Installation?” I clicked “YES” on the pop-up message.

“Program Space requires 1.9 Gb space: OK to start?” Wow. 1.9 Gigabytes? I checked my C:\ drive status. About 2.5 Gigs available. This Toshiba only had around 6 Gigabytes in its entirety, and that’s before the Windows programming. But that was alright, I usually kept my files on the Miskatonic server—it was safer from losing data anyway. I clicked “OK” on the second pop-up.

“DATA TRANSFER IN PROGRESS - - - -
00.12 % COMPLETE

ESTIMATED COMPLETION IN - - 08:15:32
00.12% - - - - 08:15:31
00.12% - - - - 08:15:30

I am no longer dwelling on the dream, but I still felt restless. I wonder what television comes on at 4 in the morning these days.

A Hair of Delphi - 3 - Meeting Martha

Author's Preface:

A Hair of Delphi is not going to be like many of the Lovecraftian stories, written by Lovecraft or his followers. I am trying to avoid anything too off-the-wall, really. My own idea is off-the-wall enough for myself.

However, I do plan on making the story shift greatly into the Lovecraftian theme around half-way through. But that is for later developments.

To see previous installments, please check the index.

Until then, please enjoy "Meeting Martha"

June 19, 1998

I stood in front of the machine named Martha that covered the entirety of the north wall in Dr Jacob Abernathy's Lab. The Monitors, the sample chambers, it all felt like I walked into a terrible corruption of a medical viewing room. He brought me to test his machine and to view my samples. If this test was a success, he'd be in the papers, and I'd have a lab to use for the rest of my PhD track.

However, the test came at a significant cost: the sample that gets scanned is obliterated in the process. While the electron scan translates the physical essence into substantive data, the loss of the original sample harmed my future finding's credibility.

My question on the destruction of a genetic sample brought a deal of trepidation as I saw the man-size scanning receptacle. But my curiosity still managed to sway my decisions. “Yes. I have hair samples.”

“We'll run just one for now, so you can get the feel for the machine. Then, based on what you learn, if you decided to work with me on the betterment of both our projects, I'll teach you how to operate and maintain Martha. For now, may I have one of your samples?”

I handed him the sample of my hair from this morning. He placed the strand unceremoniously into the smaller chamber and pressed the large button above it. The button glowed green, and all of the monitors clicked on with small buzzes to alert their awakening.

After a couple of silent minutes—“Time to warm up,” he said—the machine began to breathe, cooling fans started to churn, making an odd semi warm breeze in the room.

I expected the machine to whir or shake, or even hum. But it sounded as still as before it turned on, with the only sound being the quiet breeze of the fans lining the bottom of Martha's wall.

A red laser shot from the ceiling of the chamber and began a sweep of the area inside. First horizontal every micron; then vertical; then a circling laser lighted through. Each side of the cube was scanned in this way, according to the video playing on Monitor 3.

Monitor 1 recreated a 3-dimensional image of the hair. The beam changed from red to blue, this time amping in speed, quickly sweeping the site of the sample selectively. While the first scan required nearly 10 minutes, the second used only 89 seconds by my wristwatch. The door to the sample opened as monitors 2, 4, and 5 brought up data clusters, and Monitor 3 switched to a second image of the hair. What was left of the hair—it looked like an ethereal shell—crumbled away to dust shortly after the fans' breeze touched it.

I marveled at the fading dust. Or maybe it was the utter destruction I was in awe of. I turned my head to the monitors again. The sample was now only in the computer.

“What now?”

Jacob Abernathy merely motioned at the machine. “Well, the clusters have realigned to their original natural state now, and we can work with our new data.”

“How?”

“What do you see on Monitor 4?” He pointed to the right most screen on the top row.

I read a clip from the mass of data strings: “G-A-T-C-T-C-A-G-A-T-C —a DNA sequence? It can read the code that fast?”

“Yes. Yes, and more. What do you notice about monitor 2?”

“It looks like a lipid compound: wax monoesters, triglycerides, fatty acids, and squalene . . . Is it oil?”

“The natural oil you persperate from the Sebaceous Gland. Good, you are quick to think and learn, as I suspected. And now, Monitor 3.”

“It is the image of the hair.”

“Yes. We can magnify it, stretch it, contort it in every way as if we still held it in our hands, and more even!” Abernathy showed me these options by inputting commands with his first keyboard and mouse. “So. What do you think so far?”

“I am intrigued, to say it lightly. However, you said that you also incorporated holographic and even—“ I stumbled as I got to the word, “virtual reality technology in this process,” It felt almost wrong to mention VR scientifically.

“Yes. But I think it would be best if we pause here for today. I can save this scan in the database. You can access it—oh wait,” He paused to rummage through a drawer in the corner cabinet, “Here, take this disc,” as he freed it from a mass of files and handed it to me.

“Install the program on your own computer. You'll be able to access Martha's mainframe—I'll put your Misk-U student ID as the log-in—and I can even load your other samples for you today. Spend the weekend looking at the data and come back around this time on Tuesday—I teach classes all day Monday—and I'll be glad to answer any more questions you think of and discuss this monumental opportunity—for the both of us.”

I thanked the doctor and left him with the other samples.

It is 4:06; I am writing this now in the car. I am not sure why, but I feel short of breath, as if I ran all the way across campus to the staff lot. I feel hungry again—or maybe sick.

I am not sure what to think of the machine, or the sample that was destroyed and yet preserved, or even the chamber big enough to put a person in. I have the disc he handed me sitting in the passenger seat.

I think I will wait until tomorrow morning to load the program.

Henry James' "Daisy Miller." A Reinactment

Author's Preface:

So here we see how Guerrilla Literacy began: In an American Literature II lecture hall being bored out of my life's breath.

Henry James' Daisy Miller: A Study is a 19th century novella of a man with an idiocy-disorder that follows a woman halfway around Europe, only to be spurned again. The major theme is developed through the man pondering why the woman (an American) is nothing like other American women, and absolutely nothing like European women. Really, the comic (though stick-figural as it is) sums up the only action of the story quite well.

 

Ug on Religion

Author's Preface:

I think from aside the original piece, this may be my favorite piece I ever made for Ug.

My respect for Pope John Paul II -- I don't think I could ever truly express it. So why not just satirize him like everything else? Something that will start to show up is playing with line breaks and also with text alignment. Studying Modernism does things to a man's poetry. We'll see how that works out throughout my future work.

I want to bring attention to the quote for two reasons. One, I completely agree with John Paul II's message. Second, I simply broke lines where I felt natural pauses existed in this quote. The fact that it creates an interesting triangle effect is quite interesting.

Also, Anachronisms are fun, expect Ug to have a lot of those.

To see other works, check out the index. Otherwise, please enjoy "Ug on Religion."

"Ug on Religion"

Ug remember words
of Pope John Paul II

    “Young people are threatened . . .
By the evil use of advertising
techniques that stimulate
the natural inclination
to avoid hard work
by promising
the immediate
satisfaction
of every
desire.”
Ug think that fine and dandy,
But Ug still want sleep in on Sunday.

A Hair of Delphi - 2 - Lab 318

Author's Preface:  

Here, we continue the horror serial, A Hair of Delphi.

As said before, this serial is set in the Lovecraft universe. H P Lovecraft has a great deal of writer-followers that write a sort of Fan-Fiction for his universe. As this may seem unprofessional, both Lovecraft and his family enjoy his works being reused and recreated in new and wonderful ways, and his general information on the world is open for use (with proper mention, of course)

Things start off a bit rocky for Dr. Radcliffe, and for my narrative. Easing myself into the serial style of writing. As with all of my pieces, A Hair of Delphi is in a state of revision. Reading and Commentary will continue to better all of my works.

So now, please continue into "Lab 318"

June 19, 1998

I met Dr Abernathy at 2:55 after a hurried trip over to the university convenience store on W. College to grab a cold ham and cheese. It took the better of an hour to find a staff parking space, cross College, buy the overpriced sandwich, walk to Atwood Hall, and eat in the first level lobby. I should have bought a drink as well. I wasn't thinking about it. But I'll survive.

As I said, I met Dr Abernathy in his office on the third floor around 3 pm. He is a plump fellow—ruddy in the cheeks—with a rust colored hair that was never formally introduced to a comb. I remember first hearing about Abernathy from a colleague that met him at last year's Halloween party. Apparently, Abernathy won the costume contest by coating his hair in Talcum, wearing his usual grey cardigan and matching tweed jacket, and introducing himself as Albert Einstein.

This was the first time I met the good doctor in person. I had spoken with him twice previously over the phone and knew him through reading his textbook, Advanced Genetics (4th ed), in my undergraduate years at Boston University. The first call entailed endless questions I produced on putting my theories to paper and beginning my thesis; this was a month ago. The second occurred yesterday with his invitation.

“Yes! Come in! Do sit down!” His British accent sounded pained and scratchy. “I apologize for my voice, first off. I have a sore throat today.” Laryngitis? No, probably not. Maybe strep throat then, or heavy smoking? His teeth are only slightly faded though.

“Yes. Dr Abernathy. I'm Lawrence Radcliffe. It's good to finally meet you,” I offered my hand. He coughed into his. I flinched a little. Had it not been for wearing my gloves, I would have retracted my hand immediately.

He gave my hand a hearty shake—Can I use disinfectant on leather? Not to worry; I didn't like the gloves that much.

“Please, Dr Radcliffe, call me Jacob—And may I call you Lawrence?”

“Yes, please do! It is an honor to be able to work with you.” I carefully pulled my gloves off and placed them on the filing cabinet next to the door.

“Please, please sit, Dr Lawrence Radcliffe!”

I complied.

“I'd like to discuss any other questions you might have before I introduce you to Martha.”

“Martha?” I was not aware that Dr Abernathy had any collaborators or aides. He was notorious for sending assistants away.

“The device—I'm sorry, it is hard to think of my inventions as cold impersonal collections of inanimate components. I made them, after all. I give them pet names.”
I was told that Abernathy was odd. Now I had to question his sanity, and my own for finding the explanation heartwarming, rather than alarming.

“You did bring some samples, yes?”

“Yes. I brought a select number. I did wonder how the scan works, however.”

“Ah yes. Martha—the machine—has a two stage scan cycle. First, it starts with an imaging scan to record the physical macro-construct of the sample. This is followed by the deep tissue electron probe. I took the idea of the electron microscope and simply enlarged it. Once the data filters through the system, it uses three-dimensional imaging systems to recreate the sample.”

“Would that not mean that you destroy the original sample?”

“Yes, the original is gone, but saved in the databanks.”

“But it seems fruitless if you can not prove the original existed.”

“And that is why I must show you the process in action. Would you mind looking at Martha?”

Between the options of leaving now and renting lab space from the school for the next few years or trusting Dr Abernathy's claims for a few more minutes, I chose to follow him to lab 318 on the far end of the wing. There weren't any windows on this side of the building—probably to protect the transfer of samples from one lab to another. He unbolted the door and with a sweep of his arm, welcomed me into his lab.

The room had a soft blue light. Too dark to see too much in detail, but light enough to move around in. Abernathy flipped two switches, the blue went off, replaced almost instantly with a blinding white light.

“Sorry, I forget to warn people about that,” He chuckled, “I need the drastic light settings when working some times.”

“That's fine, I'm okay,” I lied. My eyes burned from the sudden change. I turned away from the bright overhead light and looked at the wall to my right. “Is this Martha?”

I don't think it could be anything else. The machine looked like a replica from the old Star Trek. Eight large screens were currently dormant, resting against the science-fiction-gray wall. Three keyboards with mouses sat on shelves under the monitors, each hooked into ports on the wall. In the far corner there were two openings. The first was the size of a large lunchbox: around eight inches in length, height, and depth. The second could fit a grown person in. The space reached the ceiling, about seven feet, and had an internal depth and width of three feet in both dimensions.

“Yes. This is Martha. Would you like to try her out?”

I hesitated.