Falerin
Legendary Loremaster
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Chapter 1: A reflection on disassembly and a disassembled reflection. As I arrived I instantly knew that something had gone horribly wrong. I knew because of the tremendous pain that flooded through my senses and the sense of great violation as the mechanisms generally provided to stabilize the hall and enable transit to records of past events were instead turned toward me and began to pull the very fabric of my being with a force akin to Celestra, the Huntress wielding her infamous gauntlets. I tried for a moment to resist the drag, but my young form, which was presently in control, was not used to such horrendous assaults and I quickly realized that the damage I would take from acquiescing to this fragmentary intrusion on my sovereignty would be far less than the pain. The pain was quite exquisite indeed; my very soul being shredded. In the past when all of my analogs pieces had been subsumed into a greater whole, this could never have happened, but since my previous fragmentation, I had allowed the many parts of me to coexist in peaceful assembly. While this weakened my coherence, I felt that this strengthened my person as a whole. The cost of potentially being fragmented against my will seemed negligible compared to the benefits of having such a faculty at my disposal the remainder of the time, and indeed being able to simultaneously look at events from many different perspectives had been of considerable help to me on countless occasions since. It was superior to simple colocation for each mind had its own conceptions and viewpoint and the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, whereas before the whole was simply a forced assembly of many pieces. Even now, as I felt my pieces being shattered and scattered throughout the Hall of Memories, the threads that connected them allowed me to maintain communication. I could not simply draw myself together but I could examine the issue from multiple perspectives simultaneously and process this information in parallel, like a multicore processor on a high end gaming computer or the many parallel processors of homebrew supercomputer. Distributed processing had distinct advantages. The computer analogy percolated through my minds, and all at once it became apparent to me what was occurring to my Avatar likewise had analogies to a computer program. In fact, the activity was like that of certain malware. The Abode sought to open a door on a specific time period and the addresses contained in that request were being corrupted and overwritten, and so the doorways were opening not upon the expected location but upon another different location. I realized quickly that the error checking parameters that the Abode had erected hastily himself, while insufficient, were a very good thing indeed. For, with the registers so corrupted, had those constraints not been in place, those scattered may as well have simply ceased to be. Not only could they have been lost anywhere, in not only the present Lore’s present history, but Lores' many entire. Indeed the resultant addresses may have scattered them literally any when, including times that never were, and those that never could be. Worse, with sufficient corruption the result was a segmentation fault, undefined behavior, the beings may have simply had their minds sent to no place at all.
< Message edited by Falerin -- 11/26/2013 9:11:51 >
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