The Jetpack Project - An as of yet nameless novel


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6/20/2011 12:24:22

not steve
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Chapter Zero: The Man Who Broke Mountains and Fixed Worlds

The large wooden door of the temple creaked open loudly and uncomfortably. Defray winced and shut his eyes as the clergymen and scattered worshipers all turned their heads to see who had entered, if they weren’t too absorbed in their activities. He held the door open for his daughter Hie as she walked in, oblivious to her father’s shame. Defray wasn’t a particularly pious man, but his guild master insisted that he visit this place while in the city of Laulrun. The real reason Defray was there was to write a few programs for a land lord. He could now see why he was told to visit this place, it was the kind of thing the old man was into, but Defray never had his appreciation for aesthetics. At least not in the same way. His daughter however was completely dominated by the detail. Only a whisper of a smile rested on her lips, the expression she was showing was one of pure awe. Defray considered how much larger the structure would have seemed if he was six years old, and smiled down on Hie. Defray than put his arm around her shoulder and walked down the carpeted trough in the middle of the stone floor.

Central to the building was a giant statue of Coreman in a robe with his arms outstretched, coated in what looked like zinc, but it was a little more blue than one would expect from that element. It was probably an obscure alloy of some kind, Defray though. The building was built in what the ancient ones called “Gothic Style”, with massive arches and vaulted ceilings, and columns stretching skyward to support them. At the front was a massive staircase leading down to one of the tombs, he had forgotten what it was the tomb in this temple held, and the architecture wasn’t giving him any clues. Maybe images on the stained glass windows would give Defray some kind of hint. When Hie looked up and saw him pondering them she ran over to the one at the back of the temple to witness it’s grander in greater detail. She started moving her hands over some kind of pattern in the bricks surrounding the window. Defray walked up behind her and as he came closer realized that it was a mass of binary code.

“Daddy?” Hie whispered, now conscious that the others in the building. “This is Binary, right?” Defray was impressed, where on earth would Hie have learned what binary was? He didn’t talk about his work often in front of her. “Can you read it to me?” She followed up. Defray turned his head to the left reluctantly, and put his right hand on the back of his neck. He technically could, but it would be painful. The numbers were quite small, and he couldn’t make out anything written more than a metre above his head, not to mention the fact that binary was very hard to read. But hey, he had to learn it when he was apprenticing to become a mechanist, and that knowledge might as well see some use, and besides, he couldn’t refuse his daughter after dragging her this far from home.

“Sure sweety, but it might take a while.” Defray looked at what he thought was the final brick, and read the last couple words. “August 9th, 2231, 7:32pm” muttered the man to himself. It appeared that each of the windows had the text of one of Corman’s and presumably the gate keepers' logs written around it. He didn’t know these things by heart, few did, but he knew enough to paraphrase them to Hie.

The window he was currently in front of had a picture of an orange sun setting over a bunch or ruined building silhouettes, Defray was pretty sure he knew what this one was about. Looking into the window, he began to whisper to his daughter. “Once, a very long time ago, the earth was covered with people very much like us. These people were ambitious, inventive and powerful, but very short sighted. In order to keep their world working the way they wanted it to they pumped poison into their air and water without considering how it would hurt them. In order to have all of the metal that they needed they went beyond the sky and stole it from the stars themselves, without realizing what all of the extra weight was doing to the earth.” Defray paused, around one hundred million years had passed between the time of the ancients and the time of his people, but Hie would have no idea what a large number that was, he himself could barley imagine it. It had been three thousand and four years since the current world had began.

Defray turned to the next window, it was a picture of Coreman in front of a giant silver disc hovering over what he assumed was the arctic ocean, with darts shooting into the sky from behind it. “Eventually the ancient ones decided that their world was beyond repair, and left it in great ships in search of another. The only ones who remained were the poorest members of their society, left behind to fend for themselves, and Coreman. Coreman was a powerful mechanist who had all of the ambition of the ancient ones, but with much longer sight. He aimed to turn the world back into what it once was, and fill it with new people. So, he built a colony floating above earth’s magnetic north on powerful magnets, and invited those left behind to come stay there. They would be frozen in time until he was done fixing the earth, but he warned them that they wouldn’t remember anything at all when they woke up. Some people were afraid of losing their memories, and so they volunteered to become gate keepers. The gate keepers were immortal, but only half human. They took care of the the colony while everyone else slept.” For the sake of his daughter, he left out the last bit about the gate keepers. Since their minds were now stored in silicon rather than flesh, and they were surrounded by powerful magnets, they eventually did lose most of their memories, keeping only the last five hundred years or so. They still sit at the station today, maintaining it for no one but themselves.

Defray walked a few steps and looked on a large array of windows, depicting Coreman doing all kinds of things. The logs of his actions at this point were very well detailed, but he was going to have to trim out a lot of the fat. They showed Coreman doing things like spreading seeds across a landscape, crushing mountains with his fists, and pouring over books as he wrote into a giant screen which acted as the backdrop for the window. “Coreman had to do a lot of work to repair the damage done to the world. He bacteria to make the air more breathable, and to clean the water, and he set lots very powerful charges off deep under ground, to cause tremmors which would churn the earth until all the marks of the ancients were gone. He realized that because of what he was doing, when everyone woke up the earth would be covered in shifting magnetic fields and that this would make his people’s way of storing information impossible. So he invented hardware that could still store data in the new climate, but the new hardware was quite bulky, and couldn’t store very much at all. To fix that, coreman spent years of his live building a masterfully written programming language, and a type of file compression which reduced storage requirements to an amount that could fit on his hard drives, unfortunately once something was compressed this way it could not be uncompressed into anything comprehensible. Amazingly, it could still be executed.” Defray quickly realized that he had started speaking over his daughter’s head, but this aspect of the world was his passion. It hurt to dumb it down as much as he had already done. It was amazing how much of the hardware and software there was that had been used by the new world since it’s conception which it’s inhabitants still didn’t understand. They knew how to make it, and how to program it, and somehow that was supposed to be good enough. Today people were always taught not to overstep themselves as the ancient ones had, but certainly some of their curiosity and ambition had to be admired.

Defray turned to the other wall, and knowing that he should probably leave the temple soon tried to summarize more conclusively to Hie. “Coreman deposited many massive hard drives on the colony where he had left the people and the gate keepers, these contained the english language, his programing language, some important technology from his age, and other important information and commands about colonizing the world. He spent the rest of his life burying other massive hard drives and filling them with all the knowledge of his people, called the tombs. One of them is underneath this very temple. We’ve haven’t found them all yet. At the end of his life Coreman was completely incinerated by electricity, uniting his chemical and kinetic energy with the world’s.” At this point Defray motioned towards one of the windows near the end of the series, depicting a black silhouette of a body crumbling in massive lightning bolts, as a white radiant spirit burst forth from his chest.

“Where is he now Daddy?” Hie whispered to her father, this felt strange. He knew he hadn’t spent much time with her at temples, but he expected her to have understood the basics of the faith. Perhaps they should start doing things like this together more often.

“Everywhere, my dear. Every time the wind moves he and all of your ancestors are there moving it, every time a wave breaks on a shore he and all of your ancestors are there breaking it, and every time a child is born a very small bit of his spirit enters them.” Defray said reverently, it was rather poetic. “But it’s time to go, we’ve lingered for long enough.” Defray remarked as he picked a piece of hair off of his daughter’s shoulder. The two exited the temple hand in hand, each having expanded the other’s horizons. The world was a beautiful place, and Hie was the greatest reminder of that he had ever been given.

< Message edited by not steve -- 6/20/2011 22:58:20 >

Post #: 1

6/20/2011 12:26:33

not steve
Member

Chapter One: Cruller and Ethos, The Sandwich Artists

The scent of warm linen wafted into the nostrils of Loam, prince of the largest state on the continent of California, but only by a little. Their neighbours to the south were nothing threatening, a loose and small coalition of city states, but northward lay the formidable republic of Scerovia, who’s width and breadth was only just upstaged by his native Althrone. The scent was pleasing to Loam, and was enough to drive him from his slumber. He slowly opened his eyes and surveyed the room around him. Little had changed since he left it nine hours earlier, save the time displayed on his grandfather clock, and the amount of light shed by the window three metres before his bed on the left wall. The room was always rather dusty in the morning, but he didn’t mind. The way that the light shone through the thickened air was magical to him when he was just waking up. It had a meaning he couldn’t place his finger on, the way that the ridged order of light impacted on the swirling chaos of the air currents in the room. Fundamentally, it was the same thing every morning, but every time he looked back on it he found it slightly different than before. He could see the shadows cast by the tree swaying outside of the window, and the way that they impacted the display before him, he stared at it for nearly ten minutes as his mind adjusted to it’s newly changed state of consciousness. Loam liked to entertain the notion that his maid, for he imagined that it was a woman, knew the joy that the beauty in these morning moments brought him and neglected her dusting duties in this room only because of it, but realized that he was likely trying to see the best in her.

After looking into the light with his head propped up on his pillows a little while longer, it occurred to him to find the source the aroma that had awoken him. The linen was from the clothing laid out before his bed, moments before he had woken up. Today he was to wear a beige sport jacket and pants, with a white shirt and blue tie. Loam cast the tie aside, as he traditionally did, and put on the outfit. He inspected himself in the mirror by the corner of the room nearest the door. Since Loam had decided to start wearing them he had loved the way that they looked. Loam had wavy brown hair of reasonable length, and faded blue eyes. He was of average hight for an eighteen year old boy, maybe a little short, not that anyone would dare tell him that. Loam put on his black shoes and exited the door into the corridor overlooking the foyer. The guard at the door bowed his head quickly as loam walked out, and wished him good morning. Loam returned the sentiment and took a good look at the man. He was astonishingly tall, and wearing light leather armour, enough to stop a dagger that wasn’t aimed properly, over jeans and a spring jacket with the royal crest on it zipped such that he couldn’t see what was underneath it.

Overtop however was a shield bracer ready to be activated and a pike with it’s head lit. He hated this, the buzzing sound that normally emitted form these kinds of weapons was relatively silent, with only a quiet humming noise coming from the generator at it’s base. And though it was kind of the palace security to consider the sleep of those being guarded it upset him that they thought guards at the doors were needed at all. The blade could slice through his arm like a knife through butter if it was so compelled, and Loam’s bedroom door was not the place to be fighting assassins regardless. If they had made it that far than he was probably finished anyway, not that assassination worried him. His people loved his father, even if Loam sometimes didn’t share their reverence.

King Oran was a good man, Loam was sure, but he was hard to live with. Politics were taxing, and it can bequite difficult to separate one’s home life from their work, especially when you work at home, and your sone is your sucessor. Whenever the man was upset his son became his punching bag, and flaw of his was jumped on and ripped apart. Compounding the fact that Oran was Loam’s father, and thus impossible to stand up to, was his silver tongue and rapier wit. Oran was passionate, unyielding and had a daunting presence. These were all great things to have in a king, but horrible things to have in a father. Setting that aside, he had accomplished some incredible feats in his reign. Prosperity and peace for his people, and properly regal reputation for himself. Even the Scerovian republicans had a kind of respect for him, and they absolutely abhorred of monarchs in general. They separated from Althrone one hundred years prior on this very issue, but relations had smoothed over since than. Boarder security to the north was minimal. The south however, was a whole other story. To maintain peace there the Althronian military and navy had swollen to a size both Loam and his father were uncomfortable with. Over at quart the generals were gaining more and more sway over the lords, and Oran’s hostile attitude towards them wasn’t nearly as much of a deterrent to his fellow noblemen as he would have liked it to be. The very things that Oran was praised for were weakening his grip on the throne, he gave the lords and their vassals more power over their region’s finances, opened trade between Althrone and Scerovia, and built up his military. Loam didn’t mind though, progress was progress, and a corroded crown was a crown nevertheless. Too much power in the hands of one man wasn’t much to aspire to anyway, and he knew he wasn’t perfect.

Loam breathed in the crisp air that engulfed him. It was mid spring, and so the panels on the skylight of the roof were opened, it was unusually dry out for this time of year and so all the sensation there was to enjoy was the slight temperature drop off that came from the morning air. Loam walked down the stairs towards the doors in the front of the palace and circled back underneath the staircase to enter the large dining hall to the left of the foyer. As soon as he approached the door he was hit with the smell of the glorious bread baked by Cruller Avarine, no less than an artist in Loam’s mind, and his gorgeous teenaged daughter, no less than a work of art herself to say the least. His father was sitting at the head of the table, at the far end of the room, eating an omelette that smelled of mushrooms and chives, a great combination. The Chef, Ethos Loam thought his name was, although he had never asked, poked his head out of the door to the kitchen and asked what Loam was feeling like having this morning. He asked for a grilled steak sandwich, and could almost taste it already. Ethos was not only an absolutely fantastic Chef, but a quick one as well. He sat down to the right of his father, grabbing a roll as he walked over and bit into it. It was heavenly, as per usual. Light and crisp and yet so very flavourful, how such an experience could be baked into such mundane ingredients was beyond him. Somehow, he wanted it to remain that way. Not knowing the man’s secret made it all the more magical to him.

As he sat down next to his father, they exchanged pleasantries. How was your sleep Oran would say, and Loam’s would reply that it was good as he always did. He asked if his father had any interesting dreams and Oran’s face lit up as he gave a detailed explanation of what his mind had been up for the last nine hours. Loam normally listened with interest, but was rather distracted today. By what he couldn’t say, maybe he was under slept. Ethos soon arrived with his sandwich and placed it in front of Loam, departing without waiting to be thanked. It was as splendid as he had expected, but he dare not interrupt his father’s story with praise to the chef. Loam started paying attention, he was talking about being in a rowboat with a cow or something, it didn’t matter. After the meal the two walked out of the doors together and parted ways, Court was finished at 4:00pm, so he had seven hours to squirrel away. Loam had to attend on monday, wednesday and friday, and it was a beautiful tuesday morning. He felt like reading a book in the glade to the south of the palace, what to read though? Loam chuckled briefly, oh the decisions that a courtly life burdened one with.

< Message edited by not steve -- 6/20/2011 22:58:59 >

Post #: 2

6/27/2011 15:14:31

not steve
Member

Chapter Two: The Three Glass Towers Of Althrone

As Loam marched down the rough cobblestone path that lead away from the castle, he turned his head towards the small barracks of guards that rested on the opposite side of a beautiful garden Loam was to distracted to appreciate. There were two men duelling outside with wooden swords as someone Loam couldn’t see shouted at them. Amidst several others on the sidelines a familiar face popped out at the prince. It was Sir Rostler, or Cede as Loam was told to call him. Rostler was four years to Loam’s senior, well liked by his father, and from what he had heard someone who you did not want to get into a scrap with. He once was stationed on the boarder between Althrone and whatever the name of the country lay to the south of it was four years ago, and rose through the ranks in a timely manor. Apparently however he did something that upset his military superiors, or the other way around, as he ended up back at the castle last year in August. Loam never dared to ask what it was, but judging by the fact that he was still alive it must have been something fairly unusual.

Cede turned away, somehow sensing Loam’s arrival, and walked up to him. As he drew closer Loam could make out the details of his appearance. He had hair shorter than Loam’s by a little, and it was a darker shade of brown as well. Cede’s eyes mirrored the colour of the hair over them. He wore the same jacket and armour as Loam’s guard at the door, but corduroys rather than jeans, a green headband and a cape the colour of some particularly red dirt. Underneath the legs of his corduroys were powerful looking black boots designed for some kind of trudging. Specifically which kind Loam couldn’t say. On his belt were two sheaths, one served as a battery pack and charger for a large two handed blade, and the other which rested on the outside of the first looked like it held a non-electrical short sword. Probably made of wood, for the kind of duels that Rostler had been watching moments prior. Affixed to the other side of the belt was a small wallet, judging by how full the sac was, currently held around ten grams of mercury. Loam lamented that it wasn’t clear, he loved the beautiful metal swirl around. Another pocket on the belt looked like it held a few marbles, each measured out with varying amounts of mercury in them, labelled clearly on the surface by cuts in the glass. All in all he was carrying around twenty grams of it, which was enough for about sixty loafs of bread, or four nights at an inn.

“Morning Prince, and where are you off to today?” Cede questioned casually. Loam was very used to people calling him by his title, but it felt odd when Rostler did it. For whatever reason the man was in an entirely different class of being than where Loam’s regular assertions would place him. Loam disliked soldiers in general, and capes as a rule, and people taller than him were on thin ice to begin with, but there was this honesty and earnestness in him that granted the knight Loam’s trust.

“To the glade, but I have to pick up a book first, and maybe I’ll pop around to the market for a bit.” Said Loam, he loved the market. For the most part the regular people of the world treated him no dfferen’t than anyone else. They knew who Prince Loam was, but they didn’t really know what the man was supposed to look like. Although, being in the presence of a knight all the time usually garnered him strange looks. Whenever he went into town he would lie about who he was when it came up, but it rarely did, and whenever someone asked about Rostler he told them that he was just a friend or something. They never pressed him further than that.

“That sounds quite dangerous, I should probably come with you.” Cede said sarcastically, although you wouldn’t be able to tell from his voice. He was a man of action, not words, and liked to keep to himself when he wasn’t needed. The two walked down the rest of the path in silence, as Loam stared up and smiled at the clouds. Cede admired Loam for being able to see beauty in mundane things, but the kid could be a bit air-headed at times. From what he had heard and seen Loam was a smart guy, but the lack of focus just seemed so debilitating to him. Cede always had clear goals and a path to them, on both macro and micro scales. Things often got in the way of his plans but he never became frustrated, in his mind there could be nothing but respect for worthy a challenge. Loam saw the world in a totally different way, it upset him when people were wrong, it upset him when people did evil things, these kinds of things could never upset Cede. To him morality was far more objective, at any given time all he knew for certain was that he wanted one thing, and his enemy wanted something different. Nothing else was of consequence. It didn’t matter if his enemy knew what he was doing something wrong, it didn’t matter what his reasons were for doing it, all that mattered was that he stood between Cede and his goal, be it peace or war or wrong or right or anything in between, and that was going to do everything in his power to end that.

After pouring out of the wrought iron gates and into the wealthy district of the capital (bearing it’s state’s name) they headed north to the library. Loam plucked a volume from one of the shelves entitled “Out in the Twilight” and left a two gram deposit for it with a false name to the woman at the reception desk. There were five marbles in the breast pocket of his jacket at the beginning of each day, he rarely spent any of them. Rostler looked very disinterested to loam, he was wiping a great deal of dirt off of his cape which Loam hadn’t noticed was there. For a moment, Loam entertained the idea that his cape might not have been redish brown when Rostler first received it. The two exited the old wood building and walked further north towards the market.

Loam and Rostler looked down on the bazaar from the top of the road that lead into it. There were shops selling all manners of goods, primarily farmers coming into the city to peddle their crops. To the sides of the central area were rows of established shops. Forges, weaves, bakeries, cobblers, and even the practice of a mechanist or two. They tended to be right up against the forges, occasionally partnering with them. The blacksmith manufactured whatever kind of hardware a customer wanted, and a programer could write into it moments after it’s assembly. It saved the buyer the trouble of picking it up and walking it across the street, than waiting a few weeks for the programer’s time to be freed up. Loam wasn’t a particularly astute economist, at least not in the small scale, but he had always been very interested in the practice of programming. In his younger life he was too busy being taught how to manage the country, and now he felt he was too old to simply enrol in an academy, and his schedule was far from free. He looked to the west at the three great glass towers (office towers as the ancients called them) in the tradesman’s district of Althrone. One served as a university, specializing high military training but teaching other things as well. The next as guild headquarters for most of the unions in the city, divided among the floors. The final tower, and perhaps the most grand, was the temple. It had a slight golden tint on the windows, and was a little taller than the university, tinted a rosy colour, and the guild tower, tinted an ocean esque green-blue. After waiting patiently for Loam to finish his thought, Cede entered the market behind him.

Cede continued to follow loam as he walked around carts of fruit, inspecting each before deciding against buying it. How on earth could he be so attentive to fruit? Cede was asking questions where they didn’t need to be asked though, Loam was a good kid. He didn’t love his job, but he didn’t hate it either. He got to train in the mornings and evenings, sit in a court three days out of the week, talk with the king about politics in private every once in a while, and following Loam around town wasn’t a horrible chore. It was just boring. As if the spirits had heard his thoughts there was a loud thump as his charge accidentally kicked the stand out from under a large cart of an middle aged orchard keeper. Cede rushed to help the man rebalance his cart, and heaved it back up quickly, but not before about 40% of the fruit had spilled out onto the street.

Loam apologized profusely to the man, but reaching into his pocket he found only the three one gram marbles, which was not going to cover it. Cede, seeing the look on Loam’s face grabbed his own wallet and asked the man for a price. Loam smiled up graciously at Cede, with an “I’ll get you back” sort of grin.

“Oh, I don’t know, about five grams I suppose, what are you doing paying for him though? You are a knight, haven’t you got somewhere to be?” Cede was taken aback, he wasn’t nearly as quick of a Liar as Loam, he looked down at him for an answer.

“He is my brother, and he is taking leave for the day. Thank you so much for being understanding about the fruit, and rest assured he will be repaid.” Spoke Loam, trying to sound both kind and dismissive in the same sentence. Cede was surprised, normally he was a friend, or drinking buddy, or at the most a cousin.

The man looked back on the two puzzled, and a little frustrated. “I don’t believe it, you two look nothing alike. If he is on his day off, why is he carrying a blade? And by the way, what are you doing wearing that kind of suit and carrying around only three marbles for?” Loam, seeing that his charade was being picked apart like a flower in the hands of a frustrated teenager, fell back onto the truth.

“Alright, fine. I am prince Loam, and this is Sir Rostler, my friend and guard.” He said in hushed tones to the man, trying to keep the onlookers from hearing. The man’s expression completely changed once he had heard that. He stepped back and bowed his head quickly.

“Well in that case, your highness, the fruit is dust in the wind.” The man said enthusiastically. “My name is Scry, by the way. You can put that wallet away” He insisted to Rostler. “If you two would join me for lunch I’d call it even in a heartbeat.” Scry added, thrusting out his hand to Loam, which he took and shook. “I live right outside of town, it wont be a ten minute walk.” He claimed, seeing the reluctance in Loam’s eyes.

“That sounds quite nice actually, we would be happy to.” Loam decided. Scry left the sale of his fruit to some associate of his, and the party walked south towards the gates together. Loam chuckled to himself, he should knock over people’s carts more often.

Post #: 3

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