Wednesday May 19th, 2021

The exercise:

Write about: an upgrade.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Ah, you've decided that it's cheaper to upgrade Miles than fix him? I hope the upgrade retains all the bits you love about him :-p

An upgrade
"Tanglethread?" Lady Jeniver's mouth twisted as though she'd tasted something bitter. "Wrong universe, surely?"
"He seems to have established a connection to the Loom of Doom," said Genius. "Or maybe the Loom has found him, which honestly seems more likely if you ignore the extraordinary coincidence of who it's managed to latch on to."
Lady Jeniver's left hand twitched a little, her fingers curling up and then uncurling as though she realised she was making a fist. "The Loom is a strange creation," she said. "Even in terms of universes: when we first started theorising about parallel dimensions and then went looking for them, something like its universe was an outlier in the theory. We only had a version of it at all because we'd looked for ways to upgrade the base cases to help us understand what we actually found. We never though that there would be a universe where some sentient object attempted to weave the fate of everyone into some grand tapestry. Did you know that we're still trying to work out if there's a universe somewhere where it can sell this tapestry if it ever completes it?"
"Sell?"
"Well, it has to do something with it when it's finished. Sell, display, or destroy. We figured that sell has the most value to the Loom, but it's not exactly... rational."
"Huh," said Genius, trying for neutral. The idea that the Loom of Doom could be treated as an intelligence was a new one to him, and he didn't like it very much. It made him wonder about other objects and how they might feel about the way he casually treated them. "Well, there's a connection, and the Dark Mark. So I daren't break the connection, not at least until we know what's going on there."
"Oh good lord," said Lady Jeniver. "That's a nuisance and a half. Worse, that's ringing bells in my head about some of the Akaran prophecies, and we thought we'd closed them all off. The Scrying division will not be happy if we have to redo any of that work."
"Didn't we make a lot of that work illegal after we'd done it?"
"Yes! And for excellent reasons too, this is not good news, Mr. Loci, not at all. Get back to the Ramshackle please and keep an eye on our newly-minted Tanglethread. And his connection to the Loom -- my guess is that we'll have to sever it no matter what the consequences because the Akaran prophecies... well... you know. Under no circumstances should we allow the Loom to upgrade the connection, either!"
Genius did know. The book was the only book of prophecies that started with an author's foreword that seemed sane, and it could be paraphrased as "Please don't let this future happen."

Marc said...

Greg - hah, not sure Kat would be okay with that. Or Max. Or... anybody else.

Ooh, this is all rather dire. And fascinating. I feel like maybe I should feel at least a little bad about finding it fascinating...