The Aleph

BrikWars fiction in long-prose form. Trigger warning: Walls of text

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stubby
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The Aleph

Post by stubby » Fri Jan 13, 2017 11:30 pm

“There’s one truth in the BrikVerse, and we’re going to find it!”

Timmy was getting excited, clutching his hammer and tether tightly in anticipation. Most of the Timmies got excited around that part of the speech, and this one was a prodigy. He’d picked up the memetic counter-distortion drills faster than Doctor Kuyper had ever seen. If he’d been born a Trattorian he’d have made full Citizen in no time.

The Doctor was lying, of course, as he always did. He wasn’t looking for truth within the BrikVerse. He was looking outside of it, and without authorization, which was why he needed Timmies in the first place. A missing Trattorian research assistant might be noticed by someone who mattered, but orphaned Emerian refugees were a ducat a dozen, utterly disposable. If one disappeared (or, for the sake of argument, several hundred of them), no one in authority was going to bother asking the kinds of questions that might expose his project.

"It's a big night! Tonight we're going to the heart of time and space themselves - beyond Turns, beyond Inches, straight to the source." Kuyper hadn’t always limited himself to Timmies. Early on, there’d been Jimmies, Tommies, Janeys, Dannies - too much trouble to remember. With his typical innovative genius, he’d changed methodology to always recruit kids with the same name. Besides maximizing efficiency, it helped keep the townsfolk from realizing it was a different Timmy each time they saw him, and the creepier the rumors got about his adolescent “companion,” the better cover they made for his true activities.

The Doctor made a grand gesture and activated the state-of-the-art tunneling submeta recontextualizer, cartoonishly camouflaged in cardboard and duct tape and labeled "MAGIC PORTAL" in glitter glue block letters. “We’re drilling out past Human space and back around again into the memetosphere. You’ll have to be quick! There’s a chance of insanity if you stay in metatextual space too long,” he said with a jolly wink. This was technically true: the chance of total brain explosion was one hundred percent; the only question was whether the Timmies moved fast enough to send anything back first. Unregistered extra-spatial anomalies were both incredibly valuable and incredibly illegal. The costs in transdimensional equipment and Emerian children were negligible by comparison.

Kuyper hoisted Timmy by the rope tethered to his collar, tossing him with practiced ease into the spiraling vortex as it folded infinitely back in through itself, impossibly larger on the inside. It was impossible to see straight in the hyperbolized space, but it looked like his theoretical calculations were dead on - Timmy's arcing trajectory was taking him directly into a shining Aleph, a singularity containing all perspectives of time and space in a single hyperspherical surface. It was an impossibly precious score. “Timmy! Tether pitons to that Aleph and send it back here to me! I'll hold the door!”

Hammer and piton in hand, Timmy intersected the singularity and instantly fractaled outwards. “Send it back here to me! Back here to me!” Echoes of Kuyper’s voice sounded from within the Aleph and from the fracturing mouths of the branching Timmy facets, increasingly distorted. “Here damee! To me! Bageerto me!”

The Timmy(ies) positioned its(their) hammer(s) and piton(s) carefully at the Aleph’s extremity(ies), nailing it and himself(ves) down and back into a single unified Timmy.

He nailed his left wrist to the formless Dark Ages at beginning of time, his right to the kataklysmik explosion at the end. “Backto me! To mee! Doomee!”

Kuyper was hauling frantically at the rope, but it came back empty, with threads twisted into Moebius knots lacking beginnings or ends.

The "MAGIC PORTAL" was venting plasma and spatial distortions in oktopustikan loops. With both hands fastened in place, Timmy continued hammering, nailing his feet to the Hill and his head to all of the the outer limits of the BrikVerse. The machine overloaded, twisting shut on the vision of Timmy self-crucified across the infinite axes of time and space.

“Dimmee!”

“Dimmee!”


Doctor Kuyper was alone in the laboratory, but the call kept coming. He whirled around. Vacant-eyed Timmies by the dozens and hundreds were staggering mindlessly out of the walls, the electronics, out of the spaces between atoms, smashing through furniture and equipment with impossible strength, converging on him from all sides.

“DIMMY! DIMMY!”

The laboratory was off the grid, hidden and shielded from outside monitoring. No Trattorian security forces teleported in. The Black Box Bureau containment squad did not appear.

“DIMMY! DIMMY! DIMMY!”

In his final moments, Doctor Kuyper couldn’t tell if the horde was made up of the same Timmy reflected infinitely, or all of the previous Timmies together. He’d never learned to tell them apart.
Natalya wrote:Wtf is going on in this thread?

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stubby
tl;dr: the rule of fudge is the entire rulebook
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Re: The Aleph

Post by stubby » Fri Jan 13, 2017 11:33 pm

Hopefully this renegade researcher fits well enough into Trattorian culture, but I'm open to criticism if Colette thinks otherwise.
Natalya wrote:Wtf is going on in this thread?

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Re: The Aleph

Post by cleanupcrew » Fri Jan 13, 2017 11:42 pm

stubby wrote:Hopefully this renegade researcher fits well enough into Trattorian culture, but I'm open to criticism if Colette thinks otherwise.
I love it. It's also horrific and twisted, of the right variety.

Not sure if our Alephs refer to the same thing, but if they don't your definition is substantially more interesting than mine.

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Re: The Aleph

Post by Quantumsurfer » Sat Jan 14, 2017 1:20 am

On point.

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Tzan
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Re: The Aleph

Post by Tzan » Sat Jan 14, 2017 10:25 am

:D

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stubby
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Re: The Aleph

Post by stubby » Sat Jan 14, 2017 1:38 pm

Colette wrote:Not sure if our Alephs refer to the same thing, but if they don't your definition is substantially more interesting than mine.
I was just using the Aleph of writers like Borges and Coelho. I'd forgotten you had one also, although I think yours was what gave me the idea for the story originally.
Natalya wrote:Wtf is going on in this thread?

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Kommander Ken
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Re: The Aleph

Post by Kommander Ken » Sat Jan 14, 2017 1:57 pm

Never knew what an Aleph was until today. Yay learning!

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Tzan
Has anyone ever used those holes before?
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Re: The Aleph

Post by Tzan » Sat Jan 14, 2017 2:12 pm

stubby wrote:"I'll hold the door!”
In his final moments, Doctor Kuyper...
Lesson learned: If you are a character in a story, don't be a door holder.

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Re: The Aleph

Post by Zupponn » Sat Jan 14, 2017 6:59 pm

ImageImage
Z: Psst. Hey Ken.
K: What's up?
Z: I like your avatar.
Image

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Re: The Aleph

Post by Kommander Ken » Sat Jan 14, 2017 11:52 pm

[Achievement unlocked]

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