From: paul underhill
To: marie_evelyn@eng.cam.ac.uk
Subject: a dance with planets
Send reply to: underhill@unios.un
Date sent: Sun., September 23 -- 09:25:44
Status: Confidential
Encrypt ion: XLV-MorseBinary
Marie
I don't know what to write. There is a numb stillness here... I feel like someone who's had a
limb crushed in some terrible accident — seeing the damage, I still wait for the pain. My dear
friend, what can I say?
I'll write what happened:
At about 10:30 AM GMT she called me to the quarters that she used as her room and
asked me to help her suit up. I don't know why she asked me in particular — but she
dismissed the three hovering staffers from Cape Town - Aujourdhui, who I'd only just met
and two young comp-techies - closed the door and keyed it for "do not disturb." She told
me that she wanted me to help coat her with the electrolytic paste for the suit. Then, quickly
but with her usual blunt efficiency, she took off all her clothes. I remember noticing that her
brassiere was torn at the back where it hooked together. I was embarrassed and looked
down; it's simply been too long since we were lovers, and I felt uncomfortable with her
nakedness. The room was warm, insulated, but my knowledge of the polar weather
outside made me feel cold for her. She took a jar of blue paste from a bag and asked me
to do her back. Then she surprised me by removing her hair. It was a wig, white streak and
all! Her head was covered with a dark fuzz of hair only a few millimeters long.
She smiled and said: "It's for the electrodes. For the AIVE suit." She started coating herself
with the paste.
Every area had to be coated. I guess it's blue because that way you can see where
you've missed. I found it to be a disturbing experience, touching her intimately, but
alienated by the blue goop and the strange context. I fancied that I could feel a
restlessness in her body, but that may have been my projection, or the air of excitement
pervading the whole dome area... When she was done she looked as wet and blue as
Alexis did when she was born. I said "I ought to hold you upside-down and smack you to
make you breathe and she grinned and said "They don't do that any more" and leaned
forward and kissed me lightly on the mouth. Then she turned and took the suit from its
stand and squeezed and tugged herself into it. It's a dark rubbery black, and made of a
clingy rubbery-plastic stuff, but it's covered in golden circuitry so it has a bit of the quality of
a tiger in negative. Not that she looked feline in it. She still looked strong, square, and
structural, but with more of a stomach than she used to have. As she was dressing she told
me about the suit.
"There is a separate helmet with the VR goggles attached to it. What they are is two thin,
transparent, ultra-high-resolution video screens, one for each eye. Look, " and she held
them up to the light, "Together they give the illusion of binocular vision. The goggles can
also let light through, so that the world is still visible."
I looked through the goggles. It was about like using an ordinary pair of dark glasses.
"There are induction speakers that are pressed up against these bones behind the ears
here. They give sound. You can tell it from outside sound, but it seems just as real. And
the suit itself is covered with sensors, feeling each movement of the body. There's a
special concentration of them in the gloves. We use the sensors to communicate with
Abie, with the computer. This means that reality can be edited, overlaid with whatever
images come out of computer space. You could write your name in the air, using the glove,
and see it, right there in front of you. It's a magic world." She put a glove on, tugging at the
fingers, and I helped to splice the connectors together. I was aware of the intimacy of the
moment, even though we were restricted to the rituals of getting her ready for meeting the
Damned Thing.
She opened a drawer and took out a small bottle of pills. "Brain stimulants." she said, and
put two into her mouth. I raised an eyebrow. "No, not speed or something. Mixed for me by
the very dean of Pharmacology at UWC. Crammed with wholesome vitamins and
antihalucinogens. Try one?"
"No thanks"
"The suit narrow-beams and receives data from the golden antenna at the base of the
spine here. It's all done with infra-red. I sometimes think that giving it a tail is a designer
joke, but they tell me its really the smartest placement. Doesn't get in the way." She
wiggled her bottom and the tail wagged. "The tail is new. The last suit had a wire umbilicus,
but I kept tripping over it. The whole thing's heated to a comfortable temperature, and I've
had the soles of the feet designed for the ice. Have you any idea how expensive these
toys are?" and I said "Yes. I handle the budgets, remember."
I had worked out by now that we were already in computer space. She started testing the
suit, and I saw that there were infra-red scanners and receivers in the room, that we were
being recorded. I have always admired Sophie's sense of self-documentation, and her act
was holding up pretty well.
"Can you talk to them?" I asked her, and pointed at an infra-red scanner.
"Oh, yes. To him, actually. I call him Abie, it's a corruption of AIVE. Hello Abie. Hello
wakes him up, but only my voice." and the room said "Hi, Sophie." The sound came out of
the air, out of the whole room.
When she was satisfied that everything was working, she said "OK Abie, we're going to the
dome now." and the voice of the room said "See you there," and she took her helmet under
her arm and walked out. Why had she asked for me in particular? I still can't tell you. "Old
times' sake" doesn't make sense.
There were people waiting outside, and an entourage gathered around her immediately.
We went to the dome. There must have been about a hundred people there, all waiting for
some big moment. She stood in the doorway with the helmet under her arm, her head blue
with a stubble of hair.
"I want all non-essential staff cleared please. I've asked for video to be set up in the
canteen, and people who want to know what's going on can watch from there. That means
only the Cape Town crew and the operators stay. Oh, and committee members, of
course." She smiled at Altmann.
Then she put the helmet down and started a slow circuit of the dome, checking equipment,
tugging at cables, tapping at keyboards. The people started to file out, until only the five
Cape Town crew members and six operators were left. Ernst Altmann, Bevan Lacklustre,
Carol Staghunter and I stood near the door. She turned to us: "Please sit down and get
comfortable. This will take a while, and please remember that it's not a circus." I must say
that I had been thinking precisely that: how well-orchestrated her act was.
She put the helmet on and started waving her hands about and talking in a low voice to the
throat mike. Then she came over to us and gave a little speech. She didn't lift the goggles
and I had the impression that she was being prompted by something she'd already
prepared. I have now found in the sound logging database a transcript of what she said -
and here it is. I've also made a drawing that shows, at a high level, how she linked herself,
the computers and the Object. It's rough, and there was much more mess and cabling.
Transcript of Dr. Sophia Zaar,
23 September 20-- 11:42 AM GMTWe're going to set up a feedback link with the Object. I'll be in charge of the operation; in this suit my entire body and sensorium become the Master Console. The computer environment, which we call Abie, will direct the holographic projector on the tracking arm, and so we'll be able to project symbols into the input space in direct response to high speed co-translation. What we'll do is use the computer space to translate instructions and language from me, turn them into holographic renditions of the Object's symbol set and project this into the input space. The difference is that we now have enough speed and enough computer kit around to render immediate translation possible. So, I'll be able to understand, and possibly respond in real time to, the output set that I hope to obtain. We'll start with simple stuff, like Carol's famous question, and move on from there.
We'll use holography and sound to simulate features of the virtual reality. That is to say, you'll be able to observe some of the "sea of data" in which I'll be immersed. I'll see more; menus, blips and so on, all of it stuff that I'll be using, and I may overlay various patterns and things that you won't get. I'll be able to talk to Abie, and he'll obey nobody else. If I want to speak to the Object, he'll do it for me. He and I'll translate together, with his whisper in my ear.
It's time to get on with it. Are there any questions?
There weren't any questions, and she got on with it. She went and stood in the middle of
the circle of exposed ice, around which the DT rotated once a day. She started using the
gloves, waving her hands; it was like someone conducting an orchestra. At that time the DT
looked a bit like a Klein Bottle with its base rooted in the polar ice. It was silvery and
transparent at the same time, and I could see the place where the neck poked through the
impossible hole. As usual, the thing seemed immobile, absolutely static, even though I
knew that it was traveling about 36 meters a day in its circular path. I asked Carol how long
it had held that particular shape and she said "About three hours now." The input and
output tetrahedra were in either side of the "bottle's" bulged body.
There was a noise at the door, the sound of shouting. Her voice filled the dome, clear, but
not loud: "What is it?" One of the guards said "It's professor Sambodhi, he wants..." and
Sam's voice shouting "What the Hell!"
She said "Well, let him in then," and walked from the ice circle towards the door. The guard
looked apprehensive and I heard Altmann mumble "Drunk again," but Sam looked more
pissed off than pissed to me. Sophie went right up to him and although we couldn't hear
what he was saying, she left her speech channel on, broadcasting to the whole dome: "No,
Sam. I assert my right to disagree... I will... Listen, Abie will look after me. He's the
intermediary, and he'll sever all links immediately if I... No, I can't let you do that... All right,
do what you like, as long as you don't get in the way... No, it's fine, I won't notice... Sam,
trust me. Please... Thank you... Oh, shit I've been on the air."
Sam went over to where the computers were and heaved his squat body up onto one of the
cases. He settled down cross-legged, looking angry and serious. He was wearing a
brocade robe over his down parka and looked like the Grand Panjanjarum. In his one
hand he had a strange dagger-like thing with three blades and in the other a shiny golden
thingie, I don't know what to call it, in the other. They were clearly ritual ornaments but the
guard must have taken the dagger for a weapon. Sophie came back into the middle of the
ice. She stood still and looked at Sam, and they nodded at each other. Then she got back
to waving her hands and muttering.
"Holo on," and the space around her lit up with tiers of transparent glowing symbols —
letters, numbers, icons and a set of what looked like much magnified wiggling symbols
from the DT.
"Aux sound On" and we heard her breathing and, I think, her heartbeat faint in the air around
us.
"Symbol-set :Text.
"Domain: linkage.
"Sub domain diagnostic all system links check.
"Import this set please Abie" and her hand gestured in the field of light.
"Go" and the space around her lit up with wiggling holographic tokens.
"All right, Abie get this: Who am I?" Her hands moved. She touched two signs and they
glowed more brightly. Her fingers wiggled on a virtual keyboard visible only to herself.
" Abie, tell it to her." and a thin bright green laser thread connected the tracking arm with the
DT's input space. Two sparks glowed there, and then the output tetrahedron filled with
wigglers. I was excited, even more so than when Carol had obtained a response: Sophie
had caught her fish, and now she was going to reel it in! Altmann said "Ah." Everyone else
was silent.
The shape of the Object changed. Always takes me by surprise. Didn't flow or merge -
one moment it was the three-metre silvery Klein bottle, and the next it had the form of a
weathered grey boulder, the laser beam still piercing one tetrahedral hollow, the other
hollow still lit up with output. She was unfazed.
"Scan and download, Abie." and suddenly she was in the middle of a multicoloured
snowstorm of glyphs, each about the size of a bumble-bee and made of light. She moved
among them and we heard the sound of their shapes, and of the shape of Sophie moving
among them. Strange sound; not music, but not noise either.
"New stuff, definitely new stuff... ah... ah...." And then she started translating. Her translation
of the output is the first one of this last bunch I'm sending you. See what you make of them.
But the translation process was what got to me, event though I had some idea of what to
expect.
"... planet sign. Put it there. Hmmm... " She connected things to each other with threads of
light. Glowing words in English began to scroll through the space in front of the stacked holo equipment.
Then Sam started chanting. Enthroned on an XNN 340 computer cabinet, he stroked the
three-bladed dagger with his right hand. As she moved among the light, his high-low voice
began (and this is the transliteration transcribed:)
OM SO BA WA SHUD DHA SAR WA DHAR MA SO BHA WA SHUD DHO HANG OM SO BA WA SHUD DHA SAR WA DHAR MA SO BHA WA SHUD DHO HANG...
and so on and on and on....
She put her hand into a space in the English text which glowed deep indigo, and a thread
connected it to a grouping of wigglers in the air on her right.
"Isolate and amplify. Abie, make music," and a complicated sound, a series of rhythms
with overtones that approached but evaded harmony. She started to move with the sound,
the suit feeding her movements back into the music.
"Phase me, Abie. Ah... ah... this, it's a maze... a labyrinth tangle twists and lost-getting. And
that one's its like the eating... its fooding good-in-the-mouth energy, and this. . its shitting
dropping dumping leaving here's talking its loving ouching dying..."
She danced and mumbled, sang and twitched. At one stage she took a single symbol and
enlarged it, bigger and bigger, getting closer and closer: "Get this one again, Abie, I need
more definition," and I could see that there were layers, hierarchies of order within the
structure of the moving wiggler. Like finding organs inside a strange animal, and cells in
the organs, and organelles, groups of molecules...
After about half an hour there was only one indigo gap left in the English text and she said
"Right, that's enough for now. Stow it Abie, and lets get another one. Get this Abie: Who am I?
Tell her. Now" and the space lit with symbols again, and she danced again. This time it
only took her fourteen minutes, and I could see that she was speeding up all the time.
"OK, Abie, we're getting it hooked." She asked her question again, got another answer and
translated. The computer was picking Sam up, and I noticed bits of his chant scrolling up
through the air in front of him. I wondered if Sophie had put it there as a screen between the
two of them. My main memories of that experience are overlaid with the symbols of
computer space.
The next interpretation took twelve minutes, and the one after that came out fairly clear with
just eight minutes of tinkering. She grinned. "We're closing the gap, getting there. Soon be
talking. Real time. Maybe five more. Let's go, Abie. Get this: Who are you? OK, transmit.
Go. Do the entire sequence."
The sound got louder and faster. I wonder now whether her excitement wasn't pushing her
heartbeat up, and the heartbeat somehow cueing the whole thing.
Then it gets confused. The whole space was full of squirming light, and she was moving
more and more rapidly. The edges of everything in the dome seemed covered with
rainbows. The sound got louder, or filled my attention more. I could hardly see Sophie
among the holographic data storm around her. She got the seventh translation down in two
and a half minutes. I could see sweat on her chin, virtually the only part of her exposed.
Listening, I could hear that her breath was quick. The last ones took slightly over, and just
under, a minute.
Then she said: "We're ready, we're in real time. Abie, connect me directly to the input
space,"...and the laser connected into the Object again. She started to mutter, I could
hardly hear her. I think she may have taken sound off the air, or turned it right down. She
walked right up to the output space. Twin lines of pale pink light came from the hollow, one
into each lens of her goggles. She was absolutely static, silent. Slowly the images in the
air winked out. Sam, too, became quiet. I don't know how long she stood there. Altmann said about two minutes, but I remember it as being much longer. Sam slowly got down from
his perch on the computer and started to move onto the ice, towards her.
The silence meant that the explosion, (or implosion, which it in fact was) caught us off guard.
I must say that I almost shat myself. The noise ripped through the dome and echoed off the
roof. And then, she wasn't there, and nor was the Object. The space where she'd been, the
still-rigid helmet lying next to the dent in the ice where the Damned Thing had been. And
nothing.
And that's the end of it. The rest is speculation. Sentences starting with "It is thought" or
"Possibly". She was there with it. It emitted beams of light into her eyes. Then she wasn't
there, and nor was it. And the air, pressing into the space where the Object had been,
squashing her body-space flat with its pressure, made a hell of a noise, but really had
nothing to do with her: she had already gone.
Naturally, we played back the recording-dumps of the whole event. Over and over. We'd
had twelve recording devices ringed around the dome, linked into the computers, holoscanning all details in the dome. Only one anomaly emerged: there seemed to be a
glimpse, a flicker of movement just before she winked out. We slowed it down and down.
There simply wasn't enough time in those nanoseconds to truly show what happened.
Cutler thinks that what we see happened before the implosion, that the implosion shook the
recorders to show some sort of slippage, but there's no way of being sure. What the
recordings show, in a time/space of exactly . 0023 seconds seems to be that she turns at
ninety degrees to the plane of each recording device and strolls away, dwindling like
someone moving off over the horizon. Each device shows her turning ninety degrees,
which is to say in twelve different directions, one for each recorder. The computers can't
put the thing together. Slowed down like this her stroll over the edge of the world looks
jerky but leisurely, linked like an outrigger to the barge of the DT by pink lines of light. It
takes less than three hundredths of a second. Then she's gone.
The rest is confusion. I can't tell you more because nobody knows more. What do I feel,
think? Well, I don't think she's dead, but I can't be sure. I don't think we'll see her again, but
how can I be sure about that either? There's no clue, nowhere to look, nothing. Sam says
he could have stopped her but he's not sure he should have, and also that he was too old
and slow and drunk.
He said something which I don't really follow: "You know what she did? She manifested the
body of light. The body of light, Paul. A great practitioner, and I never suspected. Never.
How could I?" I asked him, "Where is she now, then?" and he just shook his head and said,
"Everywhere. Now that body is everywhere." I left him mumbling about "a great
practitioner," and "A dancer with Dorje Phurba."
Everyone is trying to be terribly nice to him, and excusing his strange behaviour on
whatever grounds they can think up. I went to his room, and he was pissed and crying. Sat
on his bed and held his hand for a long time. Here we are now, with all this junk around us,
meaningless in the polar ice. The ice and wind are how I feel. I wish I could cry like Sam.
My dear, what can I say? I wish I could hold you. I wish it hadn't happened. I'm sending you
the last translations, make of them whatever you like.
With love 
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