nanowrimo.txt

Interface Culture -- Constructing Language Barriers

Chapter 1: The days, which remain (Lisa)

You stand in the Kennedy Street and look at the large house, more a villa
than a house, and wonder whether it is a good idea to just ring the doorbell
and ask for Mira. The large, huge manison is awe-inspiring, but for the
family inside it, it is surprisingly understated. The family inside it is so
clearly out of your league that you feel inadequate even for approaching
them. Mira told you of her family but until now, you always thought she was
joking, now however, things seem different. You ring the doorbell, just
because the indecision bugs you more than doing something inadequate. As you
did this, the thought appears in your head that maybe this all was a trick.
That maybe Mira told you a wrong address. That this is all part of a big
practical joke which some of your cruel classmates made. You did not invite
these thoughts into your head and seem unable to banish them until a voice,
seemingly out of nowhere but in excellent clarity and with a slight Russian
accent asks who's there.

"Lisa Lanikesch," you say. Your voice trembles. "I want to meet Mira. She
expects me."

With an almost inaudible sound, the door swings open and the perfectly
landscaped front garden of the Gruenfeld family was visible. You slowly
follow the way to the white house. The architects must have been fans of
Disney and of various mythologies because the house looks more like a cursed
castle (not one of an evil king, one in which a good ruler lives, which
however unfortunately carries a curse) than like a place in which actual
people live. Your steps make no sound, which contributes to the eery mood.
It seems as if the material of the way (which looked perfectly normal to
you) was a special material, which was designed to absorb sound. You suspect
however that the inhabitants of the house are aware of every step you make
via sensors. 

The door opens as soon as you reach it. A person of indfinite age who gives
the clear impression of having done physical labour in her posture and her
looks opens and invites you in. Her voice is the one you heard after ringing
the doorbell. You greet her politely. She tells you to follow you to Mira's
room. Mira however was too weak to come to the door herself. As she says
this, you are worried. She never mentioned being weak when you communicated
via the internet. With a remarkable speed, with which you have trouble to
keep up, she leads you through an intricate maze of little twisting
passages, all similar. What little you perceive in this race through the
house shows wealth and simultaneously a love of various religious and
spiritual traditions of the world. It does not necessarily show taste
though. For you, it does not look like a house which is inhabited. It looks
like a bizarre form of museum of spirituality and ugly big-format art.

Eventually, you arrive at a door which looks out of place since it is the
only door you have seen so far, which is painted in a bright pink. The woman
knocks and announces you arrival. You correct your guess about her accent,
she sounds more belarussian than russian. When the door opens, you notice
the thin girl who opens it. She looks as if she lost a lot of weight in far
too little time and even though she spent a long time to look presentable
she looks as if she had a bad day, week and probably month. Something looks
very off about her hair, even though you cannot pinpoint what exactly it is.
The dark color and the hairdo reminds you of Ngienda Raiders, the series of
books, animations and live action movies, which you both enjoy. Looking down
at her clothes also shows quite a bit of similarity with one of the
characters. You recall that she indeed did mention that Sel Ntena was one of
her favorite characters. 

"Hello SelLitsa!" she says, using your user name in the forums which
resembles your first name quite a bit. Her voice shows the genuine happiness 
of eventually meeting you. A mountain of worries falls off you. This was not
a trick. You really met Mira Gruenfeld also known as PersonOfLight from the 
Ngienda Raiders fan forums. 

"Hello PoLly!" you say, using the nickname of her nickname, "I am happy to
meet you!"

You hug somewhat cautiously. You often exchanged virtual hugs over the
private and open chats, but in real life, it is something very different. 

Stepping into her room, you realize that every single centimeter of free
wall is occupied by something Ngienda Raiders related. Posters of films and
characters, animations, some paused and some continuously looping, schemes
and blueprints of the ship and much more. Only around a power plug, a bit of
free wall remains and shows that this room originally used to have pink
walls. "Wow, and I thought that I was a Ngienda Raiders fan." you say, quite
honestly impressed.

"At first it was only a reaction to my parents insisting that the walls
should be pink. I hate that color." she stated with a shrug.

You empathetically nod. "I dislike it as well. Just because I am female, I
am supposed to like it. How crazy is that? It is not as if having ovaries is
anyhow related to color preferences."

"Indeed. Fortunately, none of the Raiders uses it." You both sit down in
comfortable chairs, which adjust automatically. You are impressed but not
suprised by this kind of luxury. From what you have so far seen of the
Gruenfeld household, it only seems natural. 

"They considered giving Sel Kvi a preference for that color, apparently.
Fortunately, it never happened." You both chuckle at how out of character
that would be for that Raider. 

Mira offers you a glass of cola (the store brand, which you mentioned on the
forums to prefer) and herself has a glass of water. For a while, you both
chat about seemingly random things. Sel Kvi, the other characters and of
course the fanfictions which both of you wrote. This is how you noticed each
other: both of you write the same kind of fanfiction, not just the one in
which random people you love find each other and do things which probably
are illegal in Saudi Arabia. Both of you like the kind of fan fiction which
takes the characters and the setting seriously. Of course characters ended
in the bunks with each other, but even then, it never seemed forced to you
and you know that both of you spend more time on 'realism' (as much as a
science fiction story can have that) and authenticity than some others.
Mira's special obsession is Sel Ntena, who in the series is a minor
character while you do not have a clear favorite. You like writing about Sel
Tsini and Sel Kvi but this is mainly because it is very easy to get these
two to share a bunk. Apart from the rather obvious things to write about
however, you both explore the world, in which the Ngienda Raiders exist. For
you it seems kind of pointless to choose such an extravagant scenario as the
world of the Raiders and just use it to write about the things, which a man
and a woman (or two men or two women, this is the twentyonepointfifth
century and homosexuality is no longer the taboo it once was). 

After a while, however, the topic moves towards the real world around you:
Your parents who both insist on good grades, feminine appearance, good food, 
polite manners and a definition of a tidy room which seems to mean 'empty'.
Her parents additionally seem to subscribe to all kinds of esoterical
humbug: Homeopathy, crystals, yoga, veganism and a strange new age religion
which a Mongolian guru teaches. One of these people who preach ascetism and
drive the most luxurious car out there. Hearing this angerey you quite a bit
and more than once, you use expressions, which are not acceptable in polite
company. Mira assured me that the kind of equipment which is supposed to
monitor the language are deactivated (and herself used quite a few choice
words about this kind of control and distrust). Then, she takes her hair and
suddenly, she is bald and holds a wig in her hands. "Oh," you murmur, trying
not to appear as if this caused any negative emotion, "this explains why
your hair looks strange."

"Yeah, I am bald, radiationtherapy took my hair. Having cancer is no walk in 
the park." she makes it sound as if this was something she talked about too
often to have much emotion behind the words other than a bit of resignation. 

"I am sorry to hear this." you say. Even though she was quite laconic about
her illness, the revelation hits you like a ton of bricks. "Will you
recover?" 

"This is the issue, probably not. If my parents were not so completely
obsessed with all kinds of bullshit, it could have been, but I was taken to
homeopaths, naturpaths, herbalists, gurus, faither healers before anyone
bothered to bring me to a real doctor, one who actually saw a universtity
from the inside. All this natural BS did was waste time and give the cancer
time to metastasize. They are trying to kill it, but the outlook is not too
glorious." Her face shows anger and frustration and her voice resignation.

You look at her sadly. You are at a loss of words and fighting back the
tears. You stammer something, trying to say something when there are no
words in your brain. You then get up, go to her and hug her. You cry. She
cries as well.

After a while, you both steadied. The wave of sadness passed over you. "Do
you know that you are the first one, who reacted without any form of agenda
or ideology upon hearing this? My parents reacted by blaming the supposedly
dangerous radiation, as did their guru. The quacks wanted to promote their
ind of quackery and for many of the doctors... well, they are paid well so
they try what can be tried. No matter how slim the potential benefits.
Compassion is rare. Real one at least..." the sentence trails off.

"I am sorry to hear this" you explain.

"All life is finite. We are dieing in installments on every day. I came to
accept that. I am just sad about all the things I have not done, all the
places I have not visited, all the dreams I have never even attempted to
make reality. Maybe you can help me with this."

You are surprised. "What do you mean by that? How can I help?" 

"You are the best writer I know. I cannot experience things myself anymore
if they are not in my room, but I can read what others experience. And I
would like you to be my eyes and hands. I would like you to do these things
for me and write about them. Tell me about the good things, the bad things
and the strange things."

You imagined many things, which she could have asked about, but not this.
You stammer words of confusion.

"Don't worry about anything but the time which you are going to lose due to
it. My family cannot understand why I want to do this, but they understand
that it is important for me."

"I actually wondered why you asked me..." you clarify.

"Well, you are my favorite writer of fanfiction - and the only one who
bothers to describe the scenery well." 

Chapter 2: Banned in Burma (Shkey)

You never flew deportation class, but there is a first time for everything
it seems. The lack of privacy, space, ability to move and dignity does not
bother you as much as the fact that this is happening at all. That you
fucked up, royally. That you were caught and only the intervention of your
tribe allows you to get out of the situation and the country alive. You
managed to trade illegal tech in a few of the bad shitholes among the
shitholes. Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Emirates, Zimbabwe and others, which at
the moment escape your memory. And until now, it worked. You managed to
exchange shiny tech for stable currency for your tribe, the Jja Cane and at
the same time made sure that the other tribes and trade networks would not
get into these countries too easily (it cannot be prevented, of course,
illegal trade networks fly onto new markets like flies onto shit). 

Myanmar probably is a writeoff though. Maybe this country fell into the
grabbing hands of one of the other networks and he ran into one of their
defenses (you suspect the Kytva to have their shit-stained hands in this
mess or maybe the Somas). Or maybe this was just what it seemed to be: a
damn small and damn paranoid, isolationist government cracking down on
something which they thought threatened their rusty-iron grip on the
populace. If the country was laced with people who actually are loyal to the
government or whose loyality they bought, this was not impossible and would
go a long way to explain the fuckup, your fuckup. There are a lot of reasons
why this could have been wrong. Your mind starts to enumerate each and every
one of them along with a lot of reasons why he was responsible for them to
happen. He tried to force himself to optimism or whatever passes as such in
such a stupid situation: He was permabanned from Myanmar, sure, but the
tribe probably could just send someone else. It might have been his last
trip to Myanmar, but not the last one of the Jja Cane.

You do not mind being hand- and footcuffed. You just mind the faraday cage
because it confines you to your own mind. Not that there was much in terms
of transmissions in Myanmar.But the difference was that now there was no
chance to notice even when it would happen directly in front of your nose.

You think back of the inprisonment. It does not bring happy memories back:
the policemen and -women are brutal and cruel. It was no comparison to that
one time when the police in Hungary caught you skinny-dipping. These people
violated law, their own national one, but no one cared. In some places,
knowing that they violate procedure is worth something. In others, not
quite. It suffices to say that Myanmar falls into this last group.

You are fixed to the seat of the plane while it takes you and others to a
place, you are not quite sure about. You mentioned to the administration
that you were a German citizen, which is not quite true, but you can pass
off as one. The cover identity of your tribe hopefully is good enough to
have passed the scrutinity of whoever checked it. In these days, counterfeit
identities do not mean just fake papers. It means having in the relevant
databases entries which relate to the person. Normally only certain
databases are checked but people can be insane enough to check the municipal
records or similar places which are not immediately obvious, the disguise
falls apart quickly. It is quite possible that the Germans are extra
pedantic about the correctness. I mean, that is their stereotype. There
probably is something to it. You decide to stop worrying and try to sleep a
bit despite everything which happened. Approaching this without sleep would
just make you react worse.

After what seems like half a day later, the deportees (a group of human
rights activists and you) arrive at the airport near Frankfurt and after
about the same time and mid-numbing bureaucratic procedure, they (including
you) are allowed to leave. It is cold and you havve nothing but the clothes
on your body (a pair of cheap jeans and a beige t-shirt) and your passport. 
The cold air of the evening chills you. Your clothing was chosen for an
morning in Rangoon, not for a night in this nest in the EU. You realize that
you are probably hours away from the nearest city as well and pennyless (as
well as centless). You are suddenly sad about the fact that telephone cells
are becoming as rare as penguins in the Sahara, so you can't even contact
someone easily. You start walking into the direction you expect the city to
be, hoping that the movement will keep you warm. 

Only a short while later, you hear before you see someone cursing in the
manner technology is cursed at. When walking around a corner, you see a man
in an expensive suit attempt to use an organizer, which looks as if it too
was expensive. You see a chance and ask whether you can help. 

"I don't think so! This fucking piece of shit refuses to turn on anymore
because it supposedly was stolen. I paid 5 million dollars for it and it
only causes trouble!" Despite the inflation which ravaged the dollar, this
was a lot of money for something to make calls with.

"Maybe I can help," you offer when you see the logoof the company which made
it. "I know a bit about these things."

"Please do!" 

You would never ever get an organizer of this brand because while they look
very good and are designed with the psychology of the users in mind, the
implmentation is shoddy at best and crappy at worst. Security holes get
fixed when the first over 90 year old great-grandmother has exploited them
and posted about this. Or later. You have read about the issues about the
gait-recognition when the thing first was released and about the latest way
to unlock them on the flight to Myanmar. Thus you had a good idea what
happened and how to fix it. And lo and behold, the gait recognition did
complain about an illegitimate user. Gait recognition is a way to recognize
the user by the way he or she walks and moves. Normally, it is pretty
reliable, but in this case, it works within too narrow parameters. New shoes
or an injury of the foot or hurting legs from an intercontinental flight can
easily confuse it into locking the phone. You attempt to enter a specific
sequence of gestures from memory. You are not quite sure whether this will
work since it has been quite a while ago when you read it, but apparently
fate wants to compensate for the rotten luck in Myanmar. The phone unlocks. 
"It works! Say, can I maybe make a quick call? I am without a phone and
a few days earlier than everyone expects."

"Sure!" the American says, happy that his toy is working again.

You enter a long number, the ringing tone of a foreign country is heard five 
times until someone answers. "Hello?"

"Hi Samuel, can you pick me up?" 'Samuel' in an indication for an unsecure
line and eavesdroppers. You know that the person on the other end of the
line most likely has a completely different name.

"Sure. Where are you now?"

"Near Frankfurt. On some airport. Don't ask." 

The person on the other end of the line has the good manners not to ignore
this hint. "I have your position. I'll ask Torsten to pick you up, k?"

"Most excellent. Thank you!"

"You're welcome! Good bye!"

"Good bye!"

You delete the call from the list of outgoing calls and hand the organizer
back to the American. There is no reason to announce to this person that the
number you just dialed was a number in Mongolia while he is still close
enough to smack you. Then, until this Torsten arrives, you start pacing. The
airport is a cold place, not only in terms of the temperature but also in
terms of the architecture which is trying very hard to look as impressive as
possible and thus looks utterly uninviting. It probably used quite a bit of 
taxpayer money as well. You know this form of architecture far too well. It
reminds you of airporta and other official buildings in all kinds of
countries. No matter whether they are supposedly democratic or
authoritarian, there always seems to be this urge to make buildings which
make it exceedingly clear to people that they are small and to construct
them out of steel and glass-replacement. Your interface has an option to
translate German and thus, the place looks utterly confusing and
disorienting. Thanks to the work of the plugin, it does not look much
different than any minor American airport or any regional one in Mexico or
Thailand. The same ads try to sell the same products, the same kind of
chatter asks the same questions, the same suit-wearing people pretend that
they are important. Only the name of the airport and the logo of the public
transport (a white S in a green circle) seems to be specific to this place.
The sidewalk of the road is broader than it is common in the States. There
are many cars, most of them apparently using Sieger-technology. While in
other countries, nostalgia or the lack of funds for a replacement make
gasoline-powered cars a common sight, here the new technology was seemingly
accepted easily. Of course that makes sense to you upon further thought
since Sieger was German, but the lack of the typical smell despite the large
amount of traffic becomes a strange thing the longer you think about it. 

You have no watch and you have not seen anything like this around you, but
would estimate that you paced for about half an hour when a pink car stops
near you. A person leaves it and looks around. "Markus?" he calls. You
remember that this was the name of your fake identity.

"Torsten?" you reply.

"Yes! You didn't recognize me?" there was a well-played hint of reproach in
the voice.

"How could I in the darkness here?" you ask rhetorically and move towards
him. As you climb into his car, you start to question this person's sanity.
The inside of the car is completely pink. The seats, the instrument board,
the steering wheel, even the radio. However, Torsten is male. 

Torsten drives as if he is above the age of 70 even though he looks as if
he is either barely over 20 or knows some very good plastic surgeons. You
look out of the window and see the lights of the city. During the night, the
area looks like any other place, just with less Kentucky Fried Chicken
restaurants and more LIDLs and Aldis. The roads are curvier than in the
States and it is almost impossible to have an idea in which direction you
are going. "Where are we going?" you ask.

"To the local one." he replies.

The translator implant seems to struggle with the utterance, but you derive
that he means the local headquarter of the Jja Cane. "Is it far?" you
enquire.

"Is not far. In Wiesbaden." he replies. 

This makes you realize two things: He speaks German natively or learned it
himself, but does not rely on the services of implants to speak it and he is
not in the mood for any talking. You decide not to say anything either even
though you have no idea what (or where) Wiesbaden is. As soon as we leave
the city and enter a highway, Torsten, which surely is not his real name,
stops driing grandmotherly and drives with a speed that is more fitting of
formula 1 than making a trip to a nearby town. You are slightly concerned
about this change of attitude and style but try not to show it too much. He
seems to notice despite that and remarks that with the autobahns are
unlimited speed roads and he loves to exploit that. Before the Sieger
engines and artificial driver software were common, few places of the
autobahn actually lacked a speed limit but now, these were removed. 

You nod. It makes sense that if speed limits are no longer needed for safety
and environmental reasons, they are removed, but maybe the fact that it
makes sense makes it in your eyes a very unlikely piece of legislation.
Looking at the signs makes you realize that the location Torsten named is a 
city, which is soon reached. Torsten steers the pink car through the very
limited traffic of the nightly city and towards something which would be
considered suburbia in the States. He stops his car on the driveway of a
house which looks completely unremarkable and very similar to the houses
around it. "Welcome to the domicil" he says as he climbs out of the car.
You follow him to the house to the left. "That is not the place to which the
driveway belongs to, eh?" you ask.

"Yeah, the car does not belong to the organisation but to a relative who
lives there. She just allowed me to use it." He explains.

"That explains the color, I guess." you say with a grin.

"No, it does not. The car used to belong to me and I just like it." he
replies and as if he read your thoughts adds: "I know that it is a
supposedly female color, but I like it. Nothing to be ashamed of."

"Oh. I guess my stereotyping was unjustified," you reply.

"It was, yeah." he says while unlocking the door.

The house looked dark and uninhabited from the outside, but the inside is
well-lit. You are in a hallway with white walls and a brown floor made of a
strange, artificial substance. It feels softer than expected under your
shoes and every step seems to be completely silent. The light comes from
small LEDs, which are on the edges between the walls and the ceiling. Three
wooden doors with plastic handles in red, green and blue lead to unknown
locations. Based on your experience with these places, probably into traps.
And just as expected, Torsten leads you to a piece of completely
unremarkable piece of wall. Then he makes a quick gesture and it swings back
to reveal a small hallway leading to a large room, which looks much more
inhabited, not only because of the poster of a soccer player on the opposite
wall. As you go through the hallway, you ask Torsten: "Nice trick, but
doesn't the technology fail occasionally?"

"This is why someone is always here," he replies, "but so far, it didn't
happen. You're Shkey, right?"

"Yeah. And how are you called?"

"I am called Jy." He pronounces this like the first syllable of 'yikes'.

Jy enters the larger room and you follow him. This room apparently is not
only used for official duties, since currently, a group of people follow the
projection onto one wall which shows a soccer game. "What's the score?" Jy
asks.

Someone who watches replies: "Lithuania leading 5:1."

"How could Azer-fucking-baijan score against the world's best defense?" Jy
asks.

"Dumb luck and blind referee." this person says.

"Ref is greek!" another one complains.

"You're a sportsbar here?" you ask.

"Some people need to disappear for a while," Jy explains. "And even when
they are away from the world, they need their respecitive national teams.
And league matches."

"Ah, makes some form of sense," you agree, despite not quite understanding
the fascination of soccer. 

"Definitely, I mean, what would you do if you have to wait a few months
until the immediate focus of the police shifted? Cal and Hesk are still
hunted men since that stunt in Brussels." Jy explains.

"/That/ stunt?" you ask, referring to one incident when Europol was
infiltrated and fake information was fed into their computers leading to the
arrest of three members of national parliaments who opposed implant
legalisation and clearing the names of thousands of Jja Cane. 

"One of the many ones which happened in Brussels," someone said. "But that
one had the aim to bug a ministry. I think the one of agriculture."

"You bugged the ministry of agriculture?" you ask with disbelief.

"We pretty much did, yeah. They use the building to discuss and do various
odious things." Jy explained. "And I don't mean the things which they do
between consenting adults in broom closets. Quite a bit of the legislation
against the tribes happened there."

"Oh, makes sense," you say even though you are not quite certain about this.

"You would too want to eavesdrop onto europol explaining to politicians how
they are planning to fight us." Jy said. He was right.

"Definitely!" you agree.

A while later, you are just eating the first real meal since Rangoon in an
improvised kitchen when Kjat enters the room. He was introduced to you as
the chieftain of the German state of Hesse. "Hey Shkey," he greets, "I have 
heard that there was a SNAFU in Burma?" SNAFU of course refers to the
military abbreviation Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

"A big one, yeah. They got me and permabanned me," you say with an attempt
to laconically brush over something which still bugs you.

"Good thing that it happened there and not in a decent country. No one
believes the generals there. They say that you were permabanned for trading
illegal technology and everyone and their little dog thinks that you said or
thought someting against the regime. They are as believable as someone who
was caught in bed with another person, both naked and you claim that you
never intended to betray your significant other." Kjat states drily.

"None of the places, which I worked in except for the states is a decent
country. Zimbabwe, Laos, Vietnam, Emirates... this is probably the only
decent country my work for the tribe led me to." You move your left hand 
through your hair as if you still had some dirt from a foreign land on you. 

"That's intentional. Newbies can learn the ropes of the trade better in
such countries and apparently, this also is supposed to help them to get the
idea behind Jja Cane." The last sentence seems to be very doubtful to the
small, slim, man with long blond hair who is in charge of the Jja Cane
operations in this country.

"The idea behind Jja Cane?" you repeat confused.

"Yeah, the idea that free flow of tech and knowledge is the key to
development." Kjat explains. 

"I never saw it in such a way," you admit, "for me, it was just so very bad
that the police and the upper echelons of the states have access to all
kinds of neat tech, but we are forbidden to use it."

Kjat laughs. "I can understand that motivation. Hate of the government and
envy of technology are virtues not vices! I mean, I am not an anarchist, I
do understand that roads have to be paved and I do understand even that
murderers have to be brought to justice in a society, but goernments these
days do a lot more than infrastructure and fighting crime. And they do the
fighting of crime and the providing of infrastructure really, really badly.
They are much more concerned with fighting imaginary crimes than real ones
and care more about staying in power than about providing good
infrastructure, even in rural areas."

You are not sure whether this is true. "You're in a first world nation.
Roads are paved here, running water, electricity and public transport
exists."

"Surely they do, but there are quite a number of potholes which no one cares
about while at the same time new prestige projects are implemented and the
police funding is increased once again. Not even to fight the bad people who
screw you or screw you over, but to fight trade networks and copyright
violators - and tax fraud! There is a reason for a certain amount of taxes,
but there is no reason for such a high one. I can even understand paying for
public schools if people were taught there instead of receiving
indoctrination and getting told to spy on their parents about drug and tech
use. People are controlled, spied on, treated as children until their death
and have to pay for that via exorbitant taxes. This is a reason why I am a
Jja Cane." Kjat angrily states this, accompanied by far-reaching gestures.
He seems to be especially fond of moving the flat hand downward quickly in a
strange half-circle movement.

"I guess you're right," you admit.

Kjat suddenly straightens his posture and changes the topic: "Can you
imagine working in the first world for a while? There are tasks which have to 
be done here. It does not quite compare to the places you worked in since
there is much more hidden surveillance and paranoia, but there is running
water, which is always a plus." 

You are a bit suspicious. "Is that a demotion?"

"No, it is a sideways-motion, even though that is not really a word. It is
still a crappy job, but one in the EU, not in the various LDCs of this
planet." he explains. LDC of course refers to Least Developed Country and is
the politically correct term for shithole.

"Administration wants me out of the LDCs for a while?" you ask.

"I want a trustworthy person for a job and while you have gotten yourself
into quite a SNAFU, but never broke and gave the Burmese anything relevant. 
As is noticable by the fact that none of the local contacts have been raided 
yet." he explains. "Administration is completely uninvolved in that and if
you say yes now, can't do jack about it."

"I didn't know that chieftains can act so freely," you say and immediately
curse yourself for your direct statement.

Fortunately, he does not seem to mind. "Well, normally, they cannot, but in
this case, it is really important and if a priority 1 issue hits someone,
anyone, then administration expects a quick response and relying on
authority would only slow one down."

You are rather worried now: "Priority 1? The highest, I ever did were
Priority 8 tasks. What the fuck happened in Hesse‽"

"It did not exactly happen here, it just reached me first. One of our
programmers considers leaving and made her wish very clear by removing
herself from her normal location. Since we are not sure what exactly she is
up to, we need someone to entice her to revise her plans." Kjat states,
fighting for a calm appearance.

"So... I am supposed to track her down and stop her from contacting the cops
or other tribes?" you ask.

"Pretty much, yes. You're not alone though, you'd work with the local
group here," he explains.

You are not sure what to think of this, but it does beat some of the other
things you could do now. A quick mental list of the advantages and the
disadvantages of accepting this task makes it look good though, and thus you
accept.

Chapter 3: Somewhere, Somehow, Somewhen (Ekatarina)

You are in Austria and this alone is remarkable. The air smells different,
mountains are visible as if it was a dream and the people have a very
distinct way of speaking, which sounds very pleasant to you after all the
streamlined, interface-translated German you heard during the last years.
One wall of the hut you inhabit now is white and even enough to be usable as
canvas for the projection if your computer. You are free, for the first time
in years. You got away from everything around you and now have some time to
breathe, take a bath in the nearby lake, meditate, write, think, and maybe
regain some sense again. Your life eventually is in your own hands again,
not in the hands of some chief or king or administrator. You bought crisps
in Klagenfurt and now you open a bag of your favorite flavour, look down
into the valley and eat them. Even such limited luxuries were not possible
earlier. When your time usage, your moement patterns and your monetary
transactions can all be controlled at a moment's notice, you adapt your
life accordingly at least until you reach the point where it no longer is
possible, where you just have to run away. 

You are aware how ancient your current computer is, but it is the only one
you can trust because it was never alone in a room with one if the Jja Cane
and because it was not allowed into a network since Seipenbusch was
chancellor. However, the hardware will suffice for what you plan to do with
it, which is mostly writing and some minor programming for your own
purposes. And for languages. The internet access you used was not
trustworthy, thus, you stopped viewing these kind of sites, however, the
interest for linguistics and constructed languages is still unbroken. You
open a notebook. A notebook out of real paper into which you entered over
the years all your notes about constructed languages in green ink. While you
watch how a large bird slowly circles through the sky, you enjoy the quiet
and calm of this day, the luxury of really bad (as in unhealthy) good (as in
tasty) food and think about the languages which you created. Semexai Qi
screams to be improved.

Chapter 4: "You are doing what‽" (Lisa)

When you return to the city in which you normally live, you are quite
excited. The slowness of the public transport and the general annoyances
caused by the others who use it seem to be caught in an invisible net out of
good mood and looking forward to fulfilling the last wish of Mira. The
streets of Hürth, streets which you know since years, have been positively
transformed even though the only thing which is different is your outlook on
them. You sing, badly and offkey, but very enthusiastically while
approaching your home to tell the great news to your mother. Your father
needs to be informed as well, but you try hard not to think of that issue.
He probably will not even care and you can only care less about his opinion
on you and your life if you tried really hard. Your parents divorced when
you were still young and so 'Father' is a person who seldomly pays child
support and once tried to kidnap you and escape to Sweden with you while he
was drunk. You are a bit annoyed that this personoid sneaks into your
thoughts and instead concentrate onto singing. 

Your mother seems to be disappointed by the fact that you came home at a
time which she arbitrarily defined as 'late'. If you asked her, she would
deny this, but you know her. She is strange like this. On the one hand, she
often says that she is perfectly acceptable with you doing things like
coming home late, on the other hand, when you do take the liberty to to so,
she will find discreet ways and means to let you know that you disappointed
her - and then pretend it did not happen and you are imagining things. This
makes it impossible for you to know what exactly she wants from you. "Have
you returned eventually?" she asks.

You shake your head, grin and answer: "Actually, I am still in Cologne,
chatting with Mira." 

"How was the trip?" she asks.

You try to put it into words. "It was intense. I never expected it to be
like that. When you have time for a long talk, I can tell you about it." 

The refusal to talk about it right now is not something she likes. She looks
at you with a stern look on her face. "You did not do any things, I would
disapprove of?"

"If you would talk about what you disapprove of, I could give you a clear
answer." you reply, sterner than you wanted it to sound. To save the mood,
you add: "I am not talking about it right now because I know that you do not
have 5 consecutive minutes to listen."

"What are you trying to imply by..." she does not get to finish the sentence
since the ringing of the phone distracts her. 

"Exactly that!" you say while she listens about the person on the other
end of the line and seems not to care about your existance at all. Her job as 
teacher does require her to be reachable by parents, however you would prefer 
if she would switch off the ringing annoyance occasionally - or if you had a
flatrate so that you could call her when you needed her attention. Though
you remember that she reacted very annoyed when you did this the last time,
questioned your sanity and denied that she used the phone too often. Your
good mood evaporated completely. You know of course that something like this
was going to happen, but you did not imagine that it would happen so often
and with such regularity. You switch on the telepresential and stepped into
its small cube as soon as the projections are visible. You spend a few
minutes looking for a good 3D simulation but find no good one. You
eventually decide to follow one, which is not too bad and has a lot of quick
motion - fully aware that this is going to mess up your mother's quality of
the phone call since you are sharing one connection and the telepresential 
tends to eat bandwidth. Your mother still has not figured out what makes her
calls suddenly lose quality and you are not going to tell her.

It takes about half an hour until she eventually has time for you. Her
students and their parents were rather challenging as she explains. She
loves to say that every parent think that there are two sorts of children:
the stupid, up-to-no-good, bullying, drug-consuming rowdies and their own
ones. After she finished talking about the latest incident which apparently
was caused by a can of non-school-certified soda, she has time to listen to
you. You decide to make sure that her attention will not wane and thus start
the biggest surprise: "Mira wants me to travel around the world for her and
write about it."

Mum looks at you strangely, as if she is not sure what to make of it,
however, you realize now that you have her full attention. "This is a kind
of joke?" she asks suspiciously.

"No, it is not. Mira's family is rich and Mira is dieing. So she wants to
experience certain things and places at least per proxy even though she
cannot leave the bed for longer than a few hours." you explain.

"Are you sure that this is not a joke?" Mum asks again.

"It's too elaborate to be any kind of joke. I mean seriously." you start to
list the points speaking against the idea by counting on your fingers.
"Someone would have to have access to this unbelievable house of theirs, it
is not a nice place to lie in, but it sure does cost a pretty eurocent.
Someone would have to either keep up a membership in the forum for several
years or hack one of our accounts and read several years worth of private
and public messages to be adequately prepared for all the inside-jokes we
shared. Someone would have to simulate being her which includes looking
pretty taken apart by the disease and someone would have to have a good
reason to do all of this. This is not a small gag for a radio station, it
would involve lots and lots of preparation and why would anyone do that to
an average student with a penchant for Ngienda Raiders? Apart from some
deranged grudge against me, which however is pretty unlikely seeing that I
never knowingly caused grief in anone's life. And if I did, why didn't they
simply beat me up? That would be the logical idea, not to divise some
Xanatos roulette, which can only go wrong." You realize that you talked too
much because you were nervous and thus stop.

Mum looks at you in a way you cannot understand. "So, what do you think is
this?"

"I think this is just what it seems to be. Mira Gruenfeld wanting to
experience certain things, at least by proxy before she is gone." you
explain.

The name makes your mother perk up: "Is she that Mira Gruenfeld, seriously?"

You are unsure what she refers to and say so.

"Mira Gruenfeld, heir of the Gruenfeld family, which is in charge of Sieger
Incorporated." Mum seems to be offended about my lack of knowledge.

"That car company?" you ask.

"Motor company," she corrects. "They are pretty well to do because they hold
the patents on the Sieger engine. Every company which uses the technology
has to license it from them."

You suck in air and then release it audibly in amazement. You knew that
Mira's family was rich but you had no idea just how rich they were and while
this does not give you a number, it gives you an idea of it. "I thought it 
belonged to Sieger." you admit.

"Not really. Sieger was the inventor, sure, but he at one point left the
company apparently after a big argument between him and the one who was in
charge of the business side of things." Mum explains. "Sieger is rich, sure,
but not as rich as Gruenfeld, the CEO. I think he recently started
working for a rival company in the research area." 

You move the discussion back to the topic. "I see. So... do you allow me to 
do what Mira wants?"

Mum is not sure in the least and you notice it: "You will miss a lot of
school, you are aware of that, right?"

You predicted this point from your mother and thought of a reply already:
"Not all education takes place in a classroom. This will teach me things,
which no school can teach me. About different places, cultures, attitudes...
you often talk about that education should be more than learning for the
next test. Can you imagine this as a project in Geography, English and 
German?"

She teaches maths and biology, but can see the point of this. "I know, but I
am unsure. A lot of things can happen to you when you are away. Really bad
things, I mean."

"Ninety percent of the people who die do so in or near their house, so I
should actually be safer while I am away." You are unsure whether that is
actually correct, but you read a statistic like that once and since then
cannot get it out of your head. 

Mum grins. "Nice try, Lisa! But worries are not rational. I know that more
people die in traffic accidents than when skydiving, but I still would fear
much more if you went skydiving than to Marja's place." Marja is a former
classmate from primary school and you still get along well. 

"I can call every day, that is not the issue. It's just... if I would say
no now, I cannot get this chance anytime in my entire life. Do you
understand that. This is not only about your security and about the fuzzy
feeling of knowing where your daughter is. This, for me at least, is a
once-in-a-lifetime chance. Not doing this because of the threats is like not
collecting the million Euros you won in the lottery because you might get
into a traffic accident. Or rather, someone else fears that." you are
agitated and realize that you raised your voice while speaking.

"Well... yes." Mum admits, "but what will Lukas say?" 

You roll your eyes. Lukas is your father. "Oh, he likes foreign countries,
so I do not think he will disagree. I think he is especially fond of
Sweden." That was a low blow, but you could not resist.

Mum's facial expression turns more angry: "You keep bringing this thing up
even though you know that he only did this because he cares about you. He
would not have done this if he would not care at all about your wellbeing!"

"But at the moment you are using him because you do not want to make a
decision yourself. And I have the distinct impression that he does not care
too much about me because he does not particularly showr me in attention. I
do not demand much, not even paying child support, because I know that he
cannot do that, but I do expect remembering my birthday. Not calling 3
months later because he never cared to remember the date. If he would care
about me, you'd talk about marks not money, and I mean because he asked, not
because you told him. And c'mon you never cared about his opinion when you 
selected my school or my electives." 

"Well, it is a too big decision for me to make, Lisa." Mum says defensively.
"If something happened to you on your trip, I could never have a calm night
again."

You feel that this requires throwing something heavy onto your side of the
scales: "If you would not allow me to do it, I will spend my life thinking
of how awesome it would have been and regretting your decision. Most likely
nothing worse than train and flight delays will happen anyways! It's not as
if I am going to report from war zones and battlefields."

"Can I have some time to think about it?" Mum asks.

"You don't exactly have much time, if you know what I mean. Well, you do,
but maybe Mira does not. But there is nothing wrong with taking a night to
sleep over the decision." You take a deep breath and swallow a reproachfull
comment about her using this strategy repeatedly to make deadlines pass and
render the entire decision moot. It is one of the many ways in which she can
indicate her displeasure with your plans without saying anything against
them directly.

"I will think about it then, Lisa. Please do not hurry me!" she replies.

"I won't, Mum... thanks for thinking about it." you say and return to your
room. true to your word not to hurry her, you tell Mira that Mum was not
against the idea in principle and ask her to hurry Mum instead.

Chapter 5: Somehow, Somewhere, Somewhen 2 (Shkey)

"So, let me summarize: Ekatarina Melnikov lived in Köln and worked for the
network since 23 years in which there never was any reason for complaints.
She worked efficiently, discreetly and in time, right?" you ask.

Kjat nods.

"Then, suddenly, without a warning or a reason, she disappeared and sent you
a mail, stating that she quit. Your attempts to call and IM her went
unaswered. What about tracking her gadgets?" you enquire.

"Led to her home," Kjal replied, "where no trace of her was found."

"Any signs of raids?" you want to know.

"The neighbors heared nothing." Kjat states. "Kpo went there playing the
concerned coworker, asking neighbors, trying to find things out." He pauses.
"Well, it was not really an act. She is a coworker and concerned did
certainly describe her."

"What about her friends?"

"She has not contributed in the usual social networks in ages." the german
chieftain explains.

You mentally curse about the translation interface and its tendency to
occasionally fuck up. "I mean, people she trusted, confided in, was a friend
of. Not the definition of friend which includes everyone you added in a
social network. Does that make sense?"

He looked a bit embarrassed, as if he assumes the source of the
misunderstanding to be on his end. "Yeah, definitely, we don't know whom she
confided in. We kept her on a very long leash, you know."

"I thought <ou'd be very controlling so that no one tattles to police of
rivaling tribes." you say in onest confusion.

"We do that in the beginning, but after someone earns the trust of the
tribe, there is less and less control. And as I said, so far, there has not
been a single reason to distrust her." Kjal seems to feel uncomfortable
about that, even though you see no reason for this reaction.

"Parents?" you ask.

Kjat grimaces as if the topic had the approximate smell of a heap of dung
and he was asked to take a good sniff. "They are no longer alive." He sees
the look yo give him and explains: "A heart attack and a traffic accident
within one week. She went through a really bad phase as you can guess. At
that time, she still trusted me, saw me as a friend. That is why I know
about it. And why the entire affair landed here in Hesse."

"You are no longer friends?" you change the topic.

"Can we just say that I did something risky, which went wrong and destroyed
our friendship?"

You nod. "When?"

He looks at the ceiling and breathes in audibly. "9 years ago? 10?
Kazakhstan just won the world cup."

The prejudice that all europeans love soccer once again is confirmed. You
try not to comment on this method of stating dates. "So, this was not the
reason why she left now."

"Yeah, that's be very unlikely." He agrees. "It might have contributed
though, now that you mention it. You know, one of the straws loaded onto a
camel before its back breaks from adding another one."

You nod. "Can we find out what she was doing before leaving?"

"She sent that message. And before a piece of code. I mean, she made a
commit to the Subversion. We don't know what else she did... Wait. Kpo
reported that a neighbor saw her buying a bottle of some caffeinated soda.
She loved that stuff as long as I can remember. Despite the horrendous taxes
the EU piles onto them."

"The soda is probably not important. But what do you mean by 'commit to the
subversion'?" 

"A subversion is a place, a virtual place where code is put. The techies
have explained to me how it works but I don't know anymore. It can be pixies
or fairies for all I know and care. But she put code there because she was
finished with it."

You make a hand gesture as if you wanted to wipe the technical details away. 
"Has anyone looked at that code?"

"There seems to be nothing particularly bad in it." he replies, seemingly
unsure of what he can tell.

"Anything odd in it? I mean, I know about as much of coding as a cow of
quantum physics, but you guys don't!" you are, allowing him to leave out
anything inappropriate or secret.

"Not much, let me check." he types something and then looks at whatever is
displayed inside of his glasses. "Hmm, she added one... interesting comment.
Let me cite it verbatim: 'I hope that there are no bugs in this code because
I sure as fuck don't want to debug any of this!'"

"Ouch! Someone's been having a bad day." you say needlessly.

"Sounds like it, yeah. She struggled with this task, asked for more time
repeatedly. Apparently her code is not as bad as she made it appear, but it
does look as if she was immensely frustrated by it."

Cautiously you state "Sounds like a motive to throw everything away and
quit."

"It does not tell us what frustrated her and where she is now." 

"It does not, you are right. But it might give us a chance to bring her back
into the organisation." you state and then veer to another topic. "Do we
have any timeframe during which she could have left?"

"What do you mean?" asks Kjat.

"I mean, are we talking about a time of five nights or of one hour in which
she could have left? Or don't we know it at all?" you ask, using your hands
to indicate the length of the periods of time in a relativistic metaphor.

"We are talking about one or one-and-a-half days." he explains.

You notice the slightly off translation of the term and assume that the
upgrade was slightly glitchy. Probably the German Kjat used one term and the
interface was not programmed to take that into account well. You make a
mental note to express the term differently if you ever have to use it in
German. Often these glitches exist in both directions. You know that the
upgrades occasionally show these kind of things but so far, it has been far
better than other languages like Cambodian. This small glitch just served to
drive the point home how well the conversation went so far. "So, which day
or days were this?" you ask.

"It was on the twelveth, the day before yesterday. Kpo went there last
afternoon and found her missing." 

"When was the mail sent?" you enquire in the hope to get an idea of the
time.

"At approximately six am. Apparently, she pulled an all-nighter, since the
code was committedonly a few minutes earlier."

You nod thoughtfully. "I guess that explains the craving for caffeine. It 
kinda implies that she left early. She probably burned the midnight oil on
that programming task, quit, bought some caffeine, maybe packed some stuff
and then got the fuck out."

"Probably. It can very well be that she slept a bit and then left. She
sometimes bought soda just so that she had it when waking up." he mused.

You think for a moment, then you get an idea. "How was she paid?"

"Her pay was over average seeing that we do not only have to buy her work
but also her silence. Why do you ask?"

"I did not mean that. I wanted to know how she got the money, in cash? Via a
money transfer system? Legitimately?" you correct him.

"Oh, she was officially employed by one of our corporate fronts. An
infrastructure company. We even contributed to her retirement fund as usual
here." he says.

"That is most excellent. It probably is not possible to get her via the
typical sources. I am sure that she did think about how we would track her
and took precautions. However, she will spend money and that is how we get
her." you smile while speaking.

"What do you mean?" Kjat asks.

"We need the corporate front to contact the various rating agencies. That
can give us quite a bit of relevant information." you grin.

"No need to search for patterns when we can pay people to do so legally.
When they actually do this already and we can just pay them to tell us what
they found." you say. "Or have it done by another corporate front and make
it appear as if it was a check for a new employee. That's even more
legitimate."

"You're right. I will immediate have it done!" He leaves the kitchen and
lets you alone with your empty plate and your thoughts. You put the plate
and your fork into the dishwasher. Then you have some time to think and
immediately, your thoughts return to Myanmar. Various thoughts related to
the SNAFU there flood you and suddenly, you see clearly that you have to
accent that it will from now on keep haunting you, that your only hope for
peace is to accept that this cannot be changed and to get on with your life.
It is not a pleasant thought. You begin to start pacing through the kitchen,
back and forth in a futile attempt to shut down your head by the repetitive
motion back and forth. Kjat said that this was not as horrendous as you
thought, but you hate to fail. You have to make sure as much as you can that
something like that will never repeat itself. Especially not in this task,
which is on one of the highest priority-levels.

Kjat finds you pacing through the kitchen sometimes throwing your head back
as if to throw an bad thought out of it. "That was a good idea. She paid for
a stay in a hotel in Klagenfurt."

You repeat the strange term: "Klagenfurt?"

"That is a city in Austria."

You know that it normally should sound similar to the term for Australia,
but while the interface translates, it sounds quite different. "Oh. So, I'll
get there and try to find out there whether there are any traces of her?"

"Exactly. Keep IMable and if you need help, ask Hesk or Cal. They are
feeling quite inadequate at the moment since the most they can contribute is
washing the dishes or sweeping the floors."

"Sure!" Suddenly you stop. This is going too smooth for your tastes. "Can it
be possible that she sent me on a snipe hunt?"

"Maybe. But this would require that she has another place to stay. Most
hotels do no longer allow to pay cash. Fome some strange reason I cannot
understand which is most likely related to either anti-terror meassures or
lobbying by credit card companies. Or both."

You did not know that this meassure also existed in the EU. "She might sleep
in a train and pay the tickets in cash. And reserve a room somewhere, she
never intends to stay."

"See, this is why we let someone who knows how to stay hidden from LDC
authorities do this job. I am sure, you will find a way to find certainty."

Chapter 6: Time (Ekatarina)

You just had the worst night in a while and that was only partly due to the fact that the
house was unheated and even the blankets you brought could not keep the
could out of your bed. Your clothing was inadequate for the nights in this
height, but you do not dare to walk to the nearest city and buy new ones
since that transaction could be traced back to you, which would probably
mean that some Jacanes would appear within hours. At least you do not have
to work, you think for yourself and start up your computer and brew coffee.
You never liked coffee that much. The bitter brew, hot enough to burn your
tongue however has the caffeine, you crave (and probably are addicted to)
and can be made in the hut. No carrying of bottles is neccessary and the
lack of sugar makes it cheaper since fewer sin taxes have to be paid. You
suspect that you might be addicted to caffeine, seeing that you even
consider drinking this dark, strange-smelling liquid.

While you eat a sandwich, you think about what to do next. The situation, in
which you happen to be is even crappier than during the last weeks, but at
least it is your crappy situation now, not the situation of the Jja Cane.
You no longer have to care about the code, deadlines, and the secrecy the
position entails. You open an empty file and start writing. It has been a
long time since you have composed a language and you are yearning to do so.
Improving an existing one is one thing, but creating something ex nihilo is
a completely different experience. While you think about it, you suddenly
get an idea for an interesting challenge: The interfaces are always
programmed in natural languages, but what if one made a language which was
designed in a way to be easily programmed into the interfaces and
simultaneously hard to understand for anyone else. You also wonder whether
and if yes, how well various linguistic universals, rules which most
languages adhere to, can be broken with the help of interfaces and thus you
open the descriptions of various so-called exolangs, which are languages
which are not made for human speakers and start working. You name the
project Mopsa. You start smiling while you type furiously.

After a few hours, the general ideas of the language you created have found
the way into the file. It has many points of articulation, but does not
distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants. This means that the fine
differences between the distinct sounds would probably not be noticed by
anyone eavesdropping. However they would consider two possible ways to
pronounce a letter as completely distinct ones. You smile as you think how
confusing it would be for them. Also other differences in pronunciation
(like a difference in aspiration for the stops) made it possible to confuse 
the cops by similar yet distinct sounds. This would of course mean that the
language would have a very low tolerance to noise. As such, you decide on a
number of rules to make words which are tolerant to staticy connections,
noisy environments, gunfire... the vowel system would distinguish between
tones, not only for the language to be confusing but also for it to avoid
too long terms. You laugh about the weirdness of the entire system, as you
take a moment to look at it. It is delightfully weird. You realize that the
sun is getting low and that you spent the entire day working on it, but the
only reaction of you is to turn on the light and open a bag of crisps as a
substitute-supper. You create a few preliminary words and based on them form
a grammar, which is possible but makes the Russian you tried to learn once
appear very easy. It is a delightful way to spend time, which you could not
really enjoy when you had to fear it at one point being used against you.

Your parents always thought that the construction of languages was a futile
thing. Why create a language when no one ever is able to speak it? But it
was an interest, which never left you. To you, it has much more similary to
painting than to creating a tool. It means creating something beautiful out
of sounds, structures, meanings, connotations and sentences. It is the
creation of a complex system of interconnected phonetical, phonological,
syntactical and semantical entities to let a completely different view of
the world emerge. From the clean, somewhat harsh feel of Volapük to
Esperanto, which has the used feel of a trusted tool and irregularized over
the 1.5 conturies of usage slightly, to the harsh Klingon and the stringent
Lojban, every constructed language out there causes a different impression
and association. If you had to explain that to someone, you probably would
choose the metaphor of wine. While to you, wine is all alike, there are
people who are able to smell and taste various nuances of tastes in it. To
them, what to you is almost depressingly uniform has its own dimensions of
perception. Languages, especially constructed ones are to you quite alike.
But then, you hate having to justify for such a hobby at all. Why isn't it
completely acceptable to follow your own kind of weirdness without any
repercussions by society as long as no one is harmed against his will by it?
Why is there the idea that there is a standard to which each and every human
being must conform? You started working for the Jja Cane exactly because
they seemed to have the ideal of an alternative. A world in which the limits
of race, ethnic group and status no longer apply and the new association is
freely, based on criterias which are chosen by the people themselves, not
the tyranny of the circumstances. Of course, reality was different from the
ideals, it was harsh, controlling, paranoid, and sometimes quite quixotic.
You still like the ideals though, despite all these years which happened and
probably will continue to happen. You suspect that like shit on a shoe,
the Jja Cane will stay around and attempt to control you further. And while
you on the one hand hope that their overarching goals will be reached, you
do fear the very same thing. You close your eyes, try not to think about all
of this.

You save the file and respecting the sad state of the computer, you backup
it to a file storage on an encrypted server in Taiwan. You go to bed early 
on this day. You sleep calmly and dream incoherently. A noise wakes you up 
at what seems like only minutes later. You have no idea what that was, in
the first moments, it seems like a vague noise from partying youths in a
city, but then you realize that this was completely out of place in a 
mountain valley in Austria. As soon as you realize that, you are scared 
awake. Your heart races. You do not dare to turn on the light. You try 
neither to move nor to make any sound. You hear the sound again. Now, you 
can parse the noise, someone knocks on the door. You would love to close 
your eyes and be invisible just like you thought it was possible during 
your childhood. You curse mentally in ways, which would not be allowed in 
polite company. Immediately, you feel bad about the mental language. You 
should have disguised yourself better, you should have found means and 
ways to cover your tracks. There must have been better ways to make sure 
that the Jja Cane could not have found you. This will be your end, your 
racing thoughts tell you.

"Katja, you here?" a voice calls. You recognize this voice. Your landlord 
decided to come here despite the early time. Or maybe because of it since
she told you that she also had a job in a grocerz store. You put on payamas 
and open the door.

"Grüß Gott, Ms Schickelgruber" you say. The morning is early and the sun has 
just risen and still hovers over only barely the horizon. "What brought you
here?"

"Grüß Gott, Katja, I just wanted to ask if everything is okay," she asks.

You are immensely relieved. "Yeah, definitely, thanks for asking. I really 
like the view here and the fresh air."

"Great! It is seldom that people are interested in renting the hut at this 
time of the year and the last time people did so, they immediately
complained about the cold." she explains.

"As I mentioned, I used blankets and warm clothes. It is okay and the fact 
that it is removed from everything is just what I need." you explain.

"How is the writing going?" she asks.

At first, it confuses you, but then you remember that your cover story was
that you wanted to start writing your first novel. "It is progressing
slowly," you say, making a gesture of frustration.

"Good luck!" she says. 

Your landlord leaves only a short while later, but since you are awake, you 
decide to watch how the orange of the dawn slowly makes way for a bright,
sunny day. Suddenly, you hear footsteps approaching. You again feel scared 
and have the urge to run away quickly, but realize that you should not feel 
afraid about everything or you would not feel any calm even here. This
probably is just a hiker who is up at far-too-early times, you convince
yourself. However, you do go inside and make another cup of that pretty
awful coffee, which you are now making conscious efforts to like. Just as 
you are pouring the first cup, a voice calls you. "Ekatarina Melnikov?"

Chapter 7: Exit interview (Shkey)

"Ekatarina Melnikov?" you ask. It is far too early for you but you were not 
sure whether the target person would get away if you would have waited too
long. She have sent you on a goose chase through the entire damn country. At 
least, this is what it felt to you. You followed her based on very sparse
clues. CCTV pictures, train tickets, and of course approaching and asking 
people, mimicking a concerned friend. Given the fact that she is not a
 professional, she made it awfully difficult for Cal and you to be found.

The hut is a bad place to you. The hut looks as if it should belong into a 
third world country, not into the first world. It is small and constructed
of wood and other natural material. A few solar cells are outside put there
seemingly carelessly and provide electricity to the inhabitant. The hut is 
tiny. It seems to you as if there is not enough place for a single person to 
permanently live in, thus it seems to be completely adequate for a hideaway.

"What do you want?" asks the voice you recognize from recordings as
Ekatarina's.

"Sjui, Kjat wants to talk to you." you say, using her and Kjat's 
in-organization name. 

"I do not want to talk to you!" she replies. "I want to get out of the org. 
This is not my life anymore. Leave me!"

"You scared the organisation by your absence." you explain. "We want to know 
what happened."

"My contract with Kiratech allows me to quit for whatever reason. Thus let
me!" Kiratech is the corporate front which employed her. 

"Every company hates to lose a good employee and in your case, from what I
have heard, Kjat has another form of interest in you." you say, mainly
trying to get her to talk.

"Kjat still lusts after me‽ That fucking creep!" she shouts at a volume that
might be heard in the valley. Well, at least that explains what exactly
happened between Kjat and her. 

"I don't know about that, but I do know that he is worried for your
well-being." you explain. "And even thoug I have never met you, the story
worried me as well. To me, it did not sound as if you left on your own
devices but if you ran away from something or towards something."

"Well, maybe I did. Maybe, I had enough of it all. Do you have a problem
with that‽" while she sounds as if she wants a confrontation, you hear fear
in her voice. Under her facade of bravado, a current of other feelings runs.

"Yes, I do. An employer has a certain responsibility towards its employees.
Thus, if you left, say due to mobbing or bossing, it sheds a verz bad light
onto ourself." you explain. "Maybe we can talk about it for a bit."

"Why would I want to let you in?" asks the programmer angrily.

"You do not have to, we can sit outside and talk if you prefer." you say,
trying to remain as calm as possible. "If I wanted to do something
illegitimate, I would not have come alone and announced my presence, would
I?"

"How do I know that you are not planning to do something, as you called it
'illegitimate'?" she asks, now the fear is a bit more audible.

"Because you have not been tranquilized and brought to a secret hideout
somewhere in Belarus." you explain with an audible grin. "Or fed to the
crocodiles in the moat of the castle of the big boss while he is watching.
Or because I would not have carried a large bottle of Mountain Dew up this
entire fucking mountain if I was about to kill you!"

The door opens a bit. "You brought Mountain Dew?" Ekatarina asks.

You struggle with your backpack but eventually show a 2 liter bottle of the
strange, neon-green liquid. "I do!"

The door opens. Ekatarina steps out, still carefully. "I am yearning for
this stuff!"

You sit down on a small rock and offer her the bottle. She opens it and
takes a long, thirsty sip. You watch quite amazed and promise to yourself
never to get addicted to something as bad-looking as much. "You like it?"
you ask.

"Yeah! Great stuff! Liquid sapience, as I call it because it turns me into a
sapient being when I have a bad case of morning." she says with a grin.

"I guess," you say with a smile. It is nice to see that you are not the only
one struggling with this. You also plan to use the phrase 'bad case of
morning'.

"So, why have you come all the way from Köln into this nest to talk to me?"
she asks, after another sip from her bottle.

"We want to know what made you leave," you explain, "Well and if it is
possible, we want to know whether you can still consider working with the
tribe."

You consider the fact that she does not immediately throw something at you a
good sign. Instead, she just asks: "Why?"

"Because you are a very skilled and very reliable person and have been an
asset to our group. Your code was, based on what people told me, the best in
this specific area of expertise." you explain.

"You are trying to lure me in with compliments?" she asks with a bit of
mockery in her voice.

"I do not think they would have used someone from Burma for such a task if
it was just empty flattery," you state, slightly tweaking the truth, but not
resorting to an actual lie.

"Well, it still broke my soul. I felt as if I was in a cage there! I had to
get away or I would have gone crazy." she says, and for once, it does not
sound as if she was keeping up a facade of something, anger, mockery,
hostility. You seem to have reached to the real person underneath that all.

That does of course not mean that what she has said makes more sense to you.
"To be honest, I don't understand what you mean by that. From what Kjat told
me, you enjoyed, enjoy quite an amount of trust within the organisation. As
long as there was no indication that you were in danger, or as the annual
talks didn't show any signs of the unusual, you were able to live life as
you chose." Based on Kjat's stories even these annual meetings were not as
painful and embarrassing as they are for you (and you still have to endure
them on a monthly basis), but instead take just minutes and are mainly
composed of questions about whether there was anything odd.

"It seemed that they trusted me as much as they would trust a horse they
want to ride on. The legs have to move, sure but they must not move one step
out of line." she said with seemingly honest frustration. "It was not the
environment in which I felt trusted, it was the kind of environment in which
I felt like a workhorse." 

"What exactly made you feel that way?" you enquire.

"They checked my surf-habits and made sure that the largest time-wasters
were from one day to the other not reachable anymore. They had these
annoying people call me until I disconnected the phone. They made me go into
isolation until my only contacts were the Jja Cane. It was like in a sect.
They paid well, but it was not as if I could do anything with this money.
Even when I went to the amusement park, they had people harrass me! It would
have been laughable if it was not so serious!"

You are puzzled. You never heard that the tribe did anything like that to
current members, former ones who needed it, sure, but for current ones, it
would be highly counterproductive. "What annoying people called and
harrassed you?" you ask.

"There was static in the line and then, suddenly this voice said: 'Legalize
weed, booze and catholicism!'" she said. "Then they hung up. I would get
tons of these calls, hundreds on every day!"

You cannot help but laugh. "That were not we, that was Maraleska. The first
virus which took down internet telephony as a service. For several weeks.
The author of Maraleska was not a member of the tribe, it was a kid who just
wanted to cause trouble. My parents had probems with that one as well. To
the point of disconnecting the phone for a few days."

"It was a virus? You are making things up! I am not, there are lots of
sources from that time which show it. Read online, or, heck, read a history
book about computer virusses. They feature Maraleska in greater detail than
we could make up. And if you are really suspicious, go to the Siberian
states and talk to the hacker in jail."

"And why did all my favorite sites go down before this, simultaneously?" she
asks.

"I have no idea. Maybe an undersea cable SNAFU, maybe a hosting company went
bankrupt and took its sites down, maybe gremlins. I never had problems
getting to my favorite kinds of pornography through the Jja Cane network. If
you really want to know, we can check, but I can assure you that we normally
would not resort to such means. If only because most people are not as
perceptive or easy to dissuade procrastinating."

"You are saying that now... what reason do I have to believe you?"

"Nothing but Occam's razor. Of course, we could have caused a VoIP SNAFU or
harrass you with calls and fake sources to make it appear as if we did, and
cause your sites to go down for seemingly no reason even though that tends
to happen anyways. And people who harrass young, innocently and stunningly
beautifully looking women who look a bit insecure and withlow self-esteem,
who just want to have fun. Well, they are a eurocent a dozen." You imagine
that she used to be a beautiful person at a younger age. She still looks
like that: Her hair is long and in a color between brown and blonde, with
only a few grey hairs, her skin white, seemingly untouched from the sun and
her eyes are in a color somewhere between green and grey. Her shape is slim,
not the slimness from starvation which models still exhibit but the slimness
from having had the dedication to work out over a long time. She does not
look like one of the people who saw their body as something which have to be
conquered and controlled, which needs color and ten different sorts of
creams and lotions and operations. She looks like someone who has accepted
her body as it is and that makes her in your eyes a rarity and a beautiful
person.

"Are you trying to hit on me?" she says suspeciously.

"My boyfriend would never allow me to," you say, the first lie in the
conversation. While you do like men, you are currently single.

"Are you telling me that I am paranoid?" she asks, returning to the original
topic.

"I am not sure whether you possess that quality, but in this case, I am
telling you that you probably should have used your contact, or anyone at
Kiratech about it. I know that it is hard to stay informed when there are
'net downtimes because there are 'net downtimes, but after it ceased, there
could have been ways to read back about it." You pause, hoping that you did
not say it in an offensive way. "Actually, you probably do have the virtue
of paranoia, given the goose chase you sent me and the Hesse chapter of the
tribe on. It took four men a lot of time and a bit of dumb luck to find you
here. But as I said, I consider this a virtue, not a vice."

Chapter 8: Breakfast for tribesmen (Ekatarina)

It was not pleasant to hear how this person tore down the walls, which you
thought trapped you and showed you that they consisted out of cloth and air,
or maybe smoke and mirrors. You are not quite conviced though that it is
true, but he was right with the fact that the isolation was a self-directed
decision. And slowly you admit to yourself that quite a bit of it was
positive. You do hate having to answer the phone constantly and large groups
of people did and still do scare you. Even without these people harrassing
you, you probably would have stayed away from these areas on your own
volition. At least most of the time. 

Maybe you are wrong and have been wrong all the time, maybe this has been
paranoia and the mental trick to see patterns where none exist, to see
intention in coincidences. Maybe, it is time to leave a mistake behind you
and start over. "I think, that I need time to think about it. Lots of time, 
caffeine and an internet connection which I trust."

"We can give you some time, but what are you going to do now?" he asks.

This is something you have not thought about it at all. "I have no idea.
Surfing, reading, writing the things, which yearn to be written, conlanging. 
I am not sure. There are many roads not taken."

"We are afraid that you are not leaving voluntarily, you are aware of this?" 
The foreigner has a strange accent, you notice that it is from a translation
interface but probably from an earlier or later version. It does not sound
quite as grating as the usual version does, though you assume that it will
develop that quality after being exposed to it far too long. It sounds more
believable than the normal translation and the accent could be from a more
remote area of the country, not from a Taiwanese who learned German by a
French over a very static-afflicted connection. You might even be wrong and
confuse a natural accent for some translation-interface oddity.

"I am not aware of what you suspect and what you fear." you say defensively.
This person fortunately did not seem to do the horrible things, which you
fear, but you are not sure whether he was speaking the truth with
everything he said. And you are still not sure how you feel about the Jja
Cane. "After the things, I felt, justified or not, I need a time out and
that is a completely and utterly voluntary decision! I am not making things
up or inventing them to obscure that I am working with the kemets." The term
'kemets' refers to a the police and always is in plural from what you have
experienced of its usage. 

"I still would prefer us to remain in contact. And just in case the kemet
want to bug you, metaphorically or literally, we should have a few
exchanges for comunication. We need a way to discreetly exchange messages.
And I would hope if you were willing to exchange messages with me. If your
motivation is what you state it is, I hope you do not mind stying in contact
with me occasionally."  A certain threat was in his voice, which you do not
like in the least.

"What do you mean by that? Do you want, until I die of old age to annoy me
with messages and thinly-veiled threats about defection?" you say, allowing
your voice to show at least some of the anger you feel.

"No, but in case of a SNAFU or a snowfall, you might want to call someone."
he tells you. "I do not want to threaten you, but I want to remain in
contact with you, because things might happen. The kind of things which no
one wants to happen. The kind of things, which involve the kemet and might
get you permabanned from a nation." The last sentence seems to be
embarrassing to him as soon as he said it.

"Talking from experience?" you ask, zoning in on the weakness.

"It happened to me once, yes. In a place which had no tribal infrastructure.
It does not have to happen to you, but you are going to produce patterns
which the kemet will consider very interesting and suspicious. Even if they
do not guess anything about trade networks they might consider your
behaviour crazy enough to warrant trouble." He seems to be very serious and
completely honest about this, even though you suspect that his occupation
means that he can lie better than your average politician.

"Are you serious about this?" you ask suspiciously.

"I am. They cannot get the Jja Cane by the usual means and so a lot of
anti-trade-network activity are using suspicious patterns of behaviour. As
such, quitting your job, moving to a foreign country and trying a new way of
life does raise a lot of suspicions with a lot of wrong people. In case you
notice that it does by things like moved furniture, strange calls, people
who photograph your... house, unmarked black helicopters or drones, police
visits, please call this user." He gives you a card with a VoIP number
written on it in a very thin writing. No name is written there.

"That's the number I need to call when there's something something strange
in the neighborhood?" you ask, inserting a lame pop culture reference.

"It is." He grins like a chid, rummages through his belongings, finds a
thin, black pen in his backpack, takes the card and writes 'Ghostbusters'
onto it.

You chuckle. 

"I will occasionally check up on you, but not because I suspect you of
anything uncouth, but because the goats and sheep are fierce in this part of
the mountains and it would be a damn shame if they would eat you alive!" 

"I would prefer if this would not happen," you say carefully. "I said so: I
have it with the procedure and thinly veiled threats."

"This is not about it. I mainly... want to know how you are doing, how you
decide. I understand your hesitation at the moment, but I know that the
tribe is willing to forget this incident. And, well, seeing this place, I
fear that one night you freeze to death and even though I did curse you to
hell while I was tracking you down, that would be a bad fate for you. This
is not procedure, this is worry. I have been in pretty bad winters and only
with luck, tech and the tribe survived. I don't want to read about you in
the obits." He hesitates, chews his lip, looks to the sky. "Nature can be 
pretty dangerous here. It is not just birds and bees and bunnies and beauty,
It also has half-meters of snow, mosquitos, cold nights, falls from rocks,
ice, thick enough that your water supply freezes, and the occasional wolf
and bear." 

"I am aware of that. Look at me, I am a nerd, I don't see nature through
rose-tinted glasses!" you explain, gesturing to your thick thighs when
saying 'nerd'. Despite the attempts to stay fit, you feel as if you are a
blimp.

"Can I still come here occasionally to check up on your well-being, I will
again bring Mountain Dew!"

You take a sip from the wonderfull green liquid. You realize that he is
exploiting your perceived lack of willpower, and while you were almost close
to accepting this offer, it suddenly does no longer feel right. "I think
that is a bad idea. I can connect my VoIP ressource if you really want to
call me. But don't overuse this privilege!"

He raises an eyebrow, a gesture which you only know from films and always
thought was created by special effects. "Okay."

For a while, nothing is said. You just occasionally take a sip from the
green liquid, which tastes sweet and awesome. You want to say something, but
lack the words for it. Simultaneously, he apparently does not want to leave,
but does not say anything either. The situation makes you a bit
uncomfortable, but you do rationalize that if he wanted to capture or kill
you, he would have done so already. You both look down into the valley, at
trees which shine in yellow and orange. At the activity at the village below
you, as for as it is apparent to you. You clear your throat after what seems
like eternities but probably is just a minute. "This is outside of
procedure, right?"

"It is, yes. Even though procedure would probably require me to say it even
if it was." he says thoughtfully. "I thought that I would look for a
defector and find a person in a bad state and frightened half to death.
There is no procedure for that, except for that which human decency tells
you to do. I don't think that you are weak or helpless, but I do think that
you might need additional help. The situation, in which you are is taxing, I
believe you understood this as well."

"I do, but I think this is what I need, I need a self-imposed challenge
after the previous ones were imposed onto me." you say and before he can
interrupt and correct, add: "At least that is how it felt for me!"

"I see. What are you going to do now, I mean, not in the future, but today."
he asks.

"I have had so much to do that I forgot to care for my hobbies. I am going
to do that now. I am going to listen to some music and c... write." you
almost said that you'd conlang but corrected that just in time. It is not
something he needs to know.

"I have heard that you are trying to write a novel." he says with a nod.
"What is it about?"

"Oh, about various things. A bit of a scifi about languages." you improvise
badly.

"Languages? You mean like babel-17?" he asks, referring to an old classic.

You are amazed that he knows this one. He did not look like the person to
read scifi to you: "I don't plan to skip over the process of actually
learning an alien language like this person did. And I am taking into
account modern technology like the translation interfaces. I know quite a
bit about how they work, you know."

"That sounds interesting. I lost my copy of Babel-17 in Zimbabwe and never
got to finish it." he admits.

"You are not missing that much, I can see why it is a classic but I
personally cannot recommend it that much." you say. For a while, you talk
about various science fiction novels. You completely forgot how much fun it
can be to geek out with someone. His interest in science fiction is a bit
different, he is more interested in space and not in languages, societies
and dystopias, but you do have a lot to talk about. Especially, once he
admits that one of his interests are stories which deal with the first
contact between humans and aliens. You mention that constructed languages
sometimes try to be truely alien languages, not just somewhat strange
languages used by actors in movies. And you even admit that creating one of 
the languages used in media was your childhood dream. He does not laugh
about it, fortunately. He seems to be interested. He always thought the
language in a certain film you both know was pure gibberish when you have
read the grammar and glanced into the vocabulary. 

"You are quite interested in languages, aren't you?" he asks.

You nod. "Yeah, it is a bit of a hobby for me."

"I am surprised that you are not upgraded then." he states.

"I seriously considered getting upgraded, despite everything which happened,
but so far, well, it would be hard to decide on which 10 languages to
select. There are so many interesting ones." you then make a step into risky
territory and it feels like stepping on a stone not knowing whether it will
hold or make you fall into the water. "Also, I notice that the
implementation is quite shoddily done, in certain cases at least. Sometimes
the wording, the tone and even the grammar is slightly off."

"You mean glitches? I know them," he says. "I guess they are hard to avoid,
but I would love to see them fixed. It is apparently quite a task since that
happens rather late."

"We don't call them glitches but l1s, that's short for Level One Errors."
you tell.

"What are the other levels?" he asks interestedly.

"Bad things. They are normally caught in simulations. Except for L2s which
are confused terms or structures, like using a past tense for a future
event in a language that has two distinct tenses for this. They are also
found easily and early though. Mostly in unit-tests and simulations, not
always. Catching L1s in simulations however is almost impossible. The
simulations are no good enough for that. You need volunteers to test this
and they are hard to get." you stop for a moment, look to the ground and
make a dismissive gesture. "And even if headquarters would put some effort
into that, they also need to put programmers into this. There are too few
people allocated to creating upgrades and they have too little time. What
you get is cut corners at best and crap at worst. It's really stupid. I
have it with this darn deadlines and shoddy QA and stuff! Seriously!"

"I didn't know about that." he says. Apparently slightly taken back by your
bout of temper.

Despite that, you still have to blow steam, there is a lot that you have
never told anyont which is yearning to get out and be said: "I worked for
them and really dislike some parts of it. That is a big grievance I have. 
I hate delivering shoddy work but it seems to me impossible not to do it. I 
would love to, for once feel as if I was able to do something right, not 
something quick and dirty. Can you understand that?"

He nods.

"It is just... I can't feel proud of myself anymore, I can't feel as if I
did something right and always fear that one of the corners which were cut
will at one point be extremely costly. These things keep me up at nights, or
days, depending on how ruined my sleep-cyclus is at the moment. This is
another reason, why I just want to get away from this. I feel as if
everything I produce is just a pile of crap! Garbage! Excrements! It's like
a curse, it's as if everything gets worse sometimes." your voice shakes from
anger, reproach, sadness. "When I ask for more time, I feel as if I was
begging, as if I was in the wrong for caring about quality, as if trying to
approach things in a more structured manner and delivering a high-quality
product was suddenly a bad thing."

"I will relay that to the headquarters." he states earnestly. "I never knew
much about the programming division, but I thought they were doing
reasonably good jobs."

"Well, they probably are. The stuff which the tribe makes does not fall
apart quite as often as a Microshit Winblows OS or a BadApple iCrap.
However, I still am not satisfied with it. In my opinion, it should never
crash or fall apart unless something is seriously wrong, like the hardware
falling apart! I hoped the Jja Cane would care more about these things, than
they actually do."

"I always thought that our systems were pretty good," he objects, "but then,
I have very little to do with them. I worked in areas without much
infrastructure. I worked in the third world, ran, helped setting up local
groups, this sort of thing. For that, the software was a good support."

"Ran?" you echo questioningly.

"Well, yes, transported technology. Not even necessarily illegal technology,
sometimes, I just had to find a good generator for the group, or a water
filter. Once I had to smuggle textbooks into the Arab Emirates which were 
used for the education of members of the local tribe and their children of 
course. The local leaders deemed these books unislamic, thus they couldn't
just use an online shop." he explains. You remark to yourself that it is
rather strange that someone with such a career is sent after a fled
programmer, who never intended to leave the comfort and safety of the first
world, but of course keep silent about this. He probably fouled up in one
way or another and now got this job as a punishment. Or headquarters thought
that you would have fled into some third world shithole. Or headquarters
just decided randomly, like seemingly so very often.

"Sounds like an interesting job. Don't you miss a random place of the world?"
you ask.

"I am in one. And for once having clean water is also nice." He says. "It
was a completely different challenge and that is something good."

"That's good to hear!" you drink a last sip from the Mountain Dew bottle and
hand him the now-empty thing. "Can you bring this down?"

"Sure!" he starts fumbling with his backpack, "I think it's best that I go
down to my hotel, I have not yet eaten breakfast!"

"Stay safe!" you say, as he turns to leave.

"You too!" for him, it seems to be not just a normal greeting but an honest
wish.

Chapter 9: This is not a game (Stanislav)

You look at the city below you and suddenly are stabbed with a bout of 
homesickness. Atlanta is not a place you like, neither is Georgia a place
you like. Well, you like the Georgia, which has the capital city Tblisi 
and is a sovereign nation, but the Georgia, which is a state of the USA has 
become a curse in your vocabulary. It could not be more unbearable unless it 
tried really hard. This is mostly related to the people there. The USA is a 
country of people who have not yet reached adulthood, at least in mental
terms. Each and every one of them seems to be either a child, scared of the 
great father in the sky or a teenager, only interested in short term
pleasure, or in very sad cases, a combination of both. There had been one 
credit card bubble already, but this does not stop the americans from 
spending as if it was going out of style, overeating, watching films,
fleeing into computer worlds and so on. They seem to care only about getting 
laid and making other people think that they are not all about getting laid. 
It is a paradox, and it is one, which you do not understand. Youu are 
religious yourself but feel utterly unable to understand the American dance 
with the devout and the deviant simultaneously. You feel that this strange 
culture is bad for your sanity, but since the fight against the Jacane needs 
you here, this is where you are. Okay, and the other reason was that you 
misunderstood the English  Interpol-internal job offer. You have at least 
thrice tried to get back to the real Georgia, but so far, you had no such
luck and are stuck with colleagues who seem to think that intelligence or at 
least education will hinder them getting laid and make them appear less
devout. You always thought that people who had absolutely zero clue about 
geography outside of their own country were a myth. You sigh, take one last 
look down from the skyscraper Interpol recently moved in onto the dirty city
of white churches and foreclosed houses. Of the city which feeds their
children lies instead of the truth and junkfood (deceptively advertised as 
being especially healthy) instead of fresh fruits. Then you return to work.

The office that you share with two Americans and one African (from Botswana) 
is filled with buzzword-filled memos and office humour of the strangest
kind. If you do not spend half of your life immersed in various TV shows and 
the other half immersed in movies, you have no chance of understanding
anything. Many times Bollywood-movies or Mollywood-movies (movies from
Moscow= are references, but a few do relate to local productions. Kris and 
Chastity, the Americans are already in the office while Mary is still on her 
lunch break. The two Americans are loudly talking about a new movie which
came out yesterday. Apparently both of them already saw it, either yesterday 
in one of the immersion cinemas or earlier via one of the countless
filesharing platforms. You hope that one time they would admit to using 
filesharing so that you can have them fired. You greet them. Uninterestedly,
they greet back.

When Mary returns, the chat goes towards the topic of the new vietnamese 
restaurant nearby. Only slowly the group realizes that they are not in this 
building to exchange restaurant suggestions and begin talking about the issue
at hand. Currently, the issue is that of a certain proliferation scheme,
which the Jacane apparently have worked out and started using. It is a
complex one related to so-called secuhypes, ie the fact that as soon as one 
specific area of security is boosted, another one is neglected. This was 
apparently used to strategically hype investment in harsher controls for 
personal air traffic while the checks for transporting mail were neglected.
Evidence was found that the Jacane, often informally called Yaks, hyped the
risks of terrorism and proliferation of illegal technology in personal air
travel, sometimes by just putting it into the hand luggage so much, that
there were too few personal resources to check the mail that was transported
in any serious manner. And this lack of control was exploited shamelessly by
the yaks and their biggest rival, making the possibility of a cooperation of
the two competing crime syndicates a real and quite scary possibility. There
is no way to find out how many illegal objects where proliferated this way.
Only a few finds were made and these in the most unlikely places: Insbruck,
Niger, Rangoon, Dubai among them. "The one from Myanmar is probably a fake
story. They just caught someone who looked at a portrait of the leader in
the wrong manner." Mary notes. "They often do that so that we and the
national polices make the life of some aid worker, human rights activist or
just unlucky tourist hell on earth. I mean, look at it, Of these who were
expeled or sometimes even 'tried' there for being traders, almost everyone
was in an organisation like that: Human rights, development, animal rights,
et cetera!"

"Animal rights?" you echo with clearly audible disbelief.

"You did not know this? PETA is trying to get the Burmese to give up meat."
Mary states with bemusement in her voice.

"What have they done to deserve this? Poverty, junta-rule, religious
persecution and now PETA." Kris jokes.

"They must have really bad karma," his colleague joins into the mockery. You
are a bit surprised that they have remembered what Myanmar and karma
actually is.

For a while, you talk about the audacity of bringing the concept of animal
rights and animal liberation to a dirt-poor country like this. Then, you put
on your glasses and gloes to interface with the computer and start the hunt
for similarities between the various cases. You think that the graphical and
tactile user interface, which is used for this is distractingly flashy and
shiny but painfully unusable. However, you keep quiet about that in order
not to be even more of an outcast than you already are. Some people are
unable to understand the difference between disagreeing in a matter where
only personal opinions exist anyways and a really bad personal insult.
Unfortunately, they exist everywhere and the only way to get rid of this
annoying species of human (or at least humanoid) would be the complete 
eradication of mankind (and in a few moments, you have to admit to yourself
that this sounds like a very good idea). 

The workday was a disappointment: There were no typical yak-patterns or any
patterns to be found in the movements and communications and the games of
Freecell seemed to be cursed. You barely solved half of them. While you
prepare to leave, Kris approaches you: "What would you do if you ruled the
world?" This question stuns you, metaphorically speaking.

"I am not sure. It would depend on a lot of things, wouldn't it?" you reply
lamely.

"Well, yes, but think of it!" he insists.

"Secure my power, I guess would be a first priority. You know, make sure
that no pesky hero finds my secret artifact of power. This sort of thing. It
is required to do anything further. That includes making sure that my
approval rating does not fall into negative numbers," you say, drawing on
your own dated knowledge of films.

He nods sagely. "The show Ngienda Raiders does this very wrong, doesn't it?
I mean, the Big Bad has no concept of this. Especially not of this latter
part. If you have seen the lastest episode, you get to wonder as to why he
is so oblivious."

You have not seen the latest episode, but you know a bit about the show and
read some of the fan-created material. Thus you know how to reply: "I think
this is because he is not really in charge, he is just a front for another
group, fans call it the cartel. As a sort of distraction to channel the
anger of the people. I have read that on a fan-resource about the show and
to me, it makes the most sense."

He thinks about this: "That does indeed make an awful amount od sense. But
what does that mean about the Ngiendas? They supposedly represent the yaks."
You know that he quotes another insane fan-theory and have to admit to
yourself maybe to have been following the show a bit too closely.

"I don't know. Maybe that one is simply wrong," you guess wildly.

"No, that one makes quite a bit of sense. Have you ever not only looked at
but actually seen the symbols and tactics? And think of the names, they are
like the code names of Jacanes, just with 'Sel' in front of them, which
in-universe stands for 'person'."

You have noticed that a few things do look similar bt thought that this was
just coincidence. Before you can voice that opinion however, Charity, who
seems to have listened closely butts in: "I have never told anyone about
this, but what if the Big Bad does not represent a person or a group but an
idea?" she suddenly looks embarrassed by the disclosure or her courage to
say it.

You look at her, trying not to show via the means of body-language that you
wish that if this conversation had a point, they'd eventually reach it. You
decide to entertain yourself by shooting some holes into her idea: "The
Ngiendas attempt to defeat the Big Bad. How can an idea be defeated?"

"By defeating those who believe in it in some way or another. The second
world war didn't just defeat fascist but fascism. And the USA defeated the
USSR in the resulting cold war by economical means," Kris says.

"By slowly mocing public opinion away from it. I mean, look at gun rights
here in the state. There have been strong 'gun control' movements, which
just slowly lost ground due to continuous lobbying and influencing." Charity
made scare-quotes with hands and voice aroung the term 'gun control'.

Mary looks at the group and matter-of-factly stated: "By replacing it with
an idea which's time has come."

You decide to test more holes in their pointless speculation: "But what
idea would it represent and which idea would it be replaed with?" To your
great but silent amusement, she cannot answer this question.

It was just a stupid discussion of some Ngienda Raiders addicts, and you try
to pay no mind to it. However, when you return home, you decide to look in
various Ngienda Raider forums. If only to have some more insane things to
say when the discussion will return to the topic. Most of it is the usual
crap by the usual spelling-, grammar-, logic- and common sense-impaired
teenagers. You remember that there was a reason not to care about these kind
of resources on the internet. It contains a lot of crap, the yearning of
teenagers for their characters, fanfiction (in the three categories:
horrible, bad and only read to laugh about the sex-scenes), pointless
speculation and the unbearable black hole of stupid that is the general
forum. He wondered why this part existed at all. It was all just trolling
and countertrolling, with a bit of idealism and misusing the site as a blog
thrown in for taste. You shudder, but decide to stay around and just enjoy
the feeling of superiority of not being one of these failures in human
shape. You start looking into the discussions, occasionally reading or
listening to a bit of it. There is nothing there has not been there ages ago
in fifty different instances. Or is there? Apparently someone called
PersonOfLight excused the absense of another participant since 'she will
take a trip for me - to the greatest places of the world'. You are almost
convinced that this is spam since it leads to a blog where this participant
supposedly will post her exploits. You suspect that this is a big viral
marketing campaign and decide to crosscheck where the blog was mentioned,
just to ruin the day of a marketing suit-wearing droid who would as certain
as the sun rises in the east otherwise ruin yours in one way or another.
However, you only find this blog mentioned in only one different internet
ressource. In both, PersonOfLight has a slightly different introduction
text and a high-enough post count to assume that this user is either a
regular or just addicted to these stupid forum games. The user in question,
SelLitsa, is also someone with a high post count. This is becoming weird to
you. You have the feeling that these people are up to something. And most
likely this something is 'no good'. Uninvited, the comparisons between the
Ngienda Raiders and the Jacane invade your mind. You wonder whether
something about that is true. If it was, it could even mean that this very 
forum is used as a basis for exchange about activities of this specific 
syndicate. The few literate people in the forum do stick out like sore
thumbs, so they would have no problems finding each other. If they used some
form of code, they could communicate in the open. 

You breathe in deeply, then exhale slowly. You repeat it again. You have
noticed that you are jumping to premature conclusions and that this is never
a good thing. Maybe this person just made some form of inside joke. Maybe
there is something else behind it, which you cannot understand. And maybe,
just maybe this is what it seems and a German girl will go around the world
and write about it. You decide to read a bit of SelLitsa's fanfiction to
judge her as a writer. As soon as you read the first paragraph, you recoil
in horror. It is in German and you can only hope that the translation
software you used was responsible for mangling the language so badly, but
given that this is a resource full of teenagers, it is just as likely that
she just has no clue at all about how to use language. The little of
material, which she posted in English has a better, but still slightly
glitchy grammar. At least she did pay attention during the grammar lessons
in school, even though when vocabulary was introduced, she apparently played
truant. It is amazing how often she would use 'get'. You were not aware that
this simple verb could be abused that badly. The inevitable sex is not that
implausible, you have to admit that, even though you are not sure whether
all the logistics for sex in weightlessness actually made sense. She at
least tried. You consider it highly implausible that Sel Tsini and Sel Kvi
would find each other, but you assume that the story pretends that certain
moments which made it impossible never happened (as you look at the date,
you also consider it possible that this was written before that specific
episode has aired). Everything considered, her stories would probably fall
into the 'bad' category, not into one of the worse ones. 

You realize that there is still the chance that the account was bought by 
someone, whose goal it is to trick you into buying some overpriced,
overdesigned and underfunctional as well as underdurable product. Marketing
is one of the disciplines you hate and you would not trust anyone in
marketing further than you can spit. The only time you would not piss onto
one of these people who handed in their morals and ethics with the enrolment
form to their marketing colleges would be if he (or she, you do not
discriminate here) was on fire. They are one of the people who spread
confusion and trick others, but in contrast to his 'clients' they do so
quite legally and often are even monetarily compensated for their disservice.
Sometimes, they even recieve awards for it. You cannot understand this.
Advertising has invaded public and private spaces, it has been one factor in
the financial SNAFU in which the USA currently are, it tells people that
they are ugly and caters to their lowest instincts. It would bring you
satisfaction to bring this spreader of lies down. It would feel you with a
sense of malicious joy, Schadenfreude, to see the scheme of this advertising
architect down. You start to find out more about the accounts in question,
quietly humming to yourself as happily. The lyrics are from an old song and
while you do not remember most of them, you do remember the part, which ways
"burn, Hollywood, burn!".

Chapter 10: Pogo in Togo (Lisa)

Your mother sits at the breakfast table without even mentioning anything
about the question. You wonder if it would be rude to ask whether she had
slept about it. Or if only the question whether to hire a callboy to help
her sleep about it with someone as a reply to the inevitable "not yet" reply
would be. You try to swallow the remarks with your sandwich and throw
glances at your mother which are full of expectation and dread. They ask
whether you mother will have the audacity to say no. You know that deep in
her mind, she wants to. You also know that she probably knows how much
trouble it would cause her to do so. You dare to hope that her lazy and
non-confronting side wins over her worried one.

The radio is playing, like always, it is set up to use less bandwidth for
this than it requires and thus the quality suffers badly. You know that
'bandwidth does not grow on trees' as Mum tends to say and that other
household equipment needs it more than the radio, but you also wonder why 
she is bothering with the radio at all. It irritates you never to be able to
listen to music without audible artifacts and occasional skips. Once again,
you wish that you could talk to her without either side understands
everything the other does as an insult or reproach. However, you are not
even sure how to express that to her. 'This is what recursion must feel
like' you think.

Once again the radio skips, and suddenly, without pondering all the pros and
cons you stand up and shut it down. Audible silence, thick as a tangible 
substance fills the kitchen. Your mother raises her glance and looks at you.
"Why have you done that?"

"It annoyed me and made me nervous," you reply honestly.

"You never had a problem with it and suddenly it annoys you and makes you
nervous?" she asks, the last words in an acidic, mocking imitation of how
you said them.

"No, it did so all the years, but so far, I never said anything," you
explain. "I thought it would be one of the things which would lead to an
endless discussion in which no one wins and everyone loses."

"What kind of discussions do you mean?" she asks.

"You know which ones I mean, the ones that leave you angry and me angry and
defeated. Like that one time when you insisted that my green socks are only
good for being thrown away. Do you remember that one? It was not resolved in
any decent form until I grew out of it. I fished them out of the trash five
times. I loved these things. I wore them when you did not look. They remind
me of one of the Ngienda Raiders, Sel Kvi." 

"Ones, in which you refuse to give in?" she asks in an annoyed tone of
voice.

"Ones, in which I refuse to give in because there is too much at stake for
me. You know, sometimes, it appears to me personally as if you are not even
aware of what kind of demands you make. And that is what my problem with
them is. If you would only make demands which make sense, it would be
easier, but instead many ones seem to be completely nonsensical to me, but
at the same time immensly costy. I don't even talk about things like the
room and the chores, I talk about things like when you insist that I should
not say certain things because you do not like them. What would you say if I
told you to stop saying 'is'?"

"That you completely and utterly lost it!" she says and then adds, "but I do
not see how that has anything to do with the topic!"

"You tell me to stop talking about something which interests me much:
Ngienda Raiders. I don't even mention it to you because it bores you but
when you butt in and tell me to stop talking about 'that damn show' when I
am calling a friend. That, to me does sound very similar to regulating
whether the word 'is' can be used." you say annoyedly.

"Ngienda Raiders is just a waste of time, and we have talked about it
already several times." She says.

"Well, so is bowling, so is meeting friends and maintaining friendships, so
is making anything fancy to eat when a meal from the nearest burger place is
available. But we are not machines made for efficiency, we are humans and we
do things for the experience of doing them." you make a point which was made
far too often already. "It is not as if my marks are suffering from this. Au
contraire. Mr Keding has said that I have a big vocabulary in English and
that most likely is because I read many English forums and contribute there."

"You are still neglecting your homework!" she replies.

"I am not neglecting it, I hate the kind of things, which some teachers want
me to do. And thus, I make the conscious decision not to do them. That is
not neglect, that is conscious abandonment. I finish the ones, which make
sense to me. You would not bother to do 5 pages of calculating excercises
which are never checked in class and don't pose any new challenges either,
would you?"

"5 pages of maths excercises?" that seems to have shocked her.

"Yeah, most teacher give a lot of homework and don't check it or answer
questions related to it in any meaningful way. It's not their fault. There
are requirements to give certain amounts of homework crafted by politicians
who seem to have forgotten what school is like. Our teachers thus put a lot
of homework into the system and informally tell us what is actually
important. So not sitting 4 hours each day in front of homework does not
mean that I am lazy."

Your mother chews on her sandwich and looks at you strangely. "This is new
to me that anything like that would happen." 

You struggle with words, "You have... I don't mean that you are old, but you
have been in school... a while ago. And, well, every single state government
has tried to reform education. What you have experienced is not what I
experience."

"I guess you are right, but I do not want you to fail, you know." she
states.

"Well, I am doing well, I am getting mostly ones and twos. And that four in
PE, well, meh! I refuse to care about that subject. The teacher is a jerk!
And a git and a moron and a lot of things which I can't say here." you
explain. You hate sport and the 'physical education' classes are very
boring. A teacher has explained that they used to do many different things
in PE: games for example, but that a combination of lawsuits and lack of
finances means that now, it is mostly aerobic. Just without the music, since
the fees for that would be too high for the schools. But even that could be
fun if the teacher was not a sadist who loves to pick on pupils whom he
considers to be ugly or fat. 

"Yes, but I fear that you won't always do so well, I think that without my
constant support, your grades would drop." she explains, fortunately not
forcing you to open the can of worms that is PE.

"If I would suggest a study where you allow me to learn on my own for one
semester and then we can look at the grades, I would make you angry again,
wouldn't I?" you say.

"Well, I thought you would not go to school anyways in the near future since
you are travelling." she replies with a smirk.

You are shocked, but in a good way: "Does that... Are... are you allowing me
to do that? Do you mea... really mean that‽"

"It was not an easy decision for me, Lisa. I fear that your education will
suffer and that something bad might happen to you. But I think it is
important both for you and for Mira to do it. I talked to Mira's parents 
yesterday and they will give you a communicator so that you are available at
all times."

You sit there, unable to believe what you just heard. The shock wanes just
slowly, but when it does, you get up and hug Mum tightly. You are not able
to say anything but incoherent syllables, but the tone of them probably
conveys enough meaning already. You are so very happy that you mother did
allow this that even the talk of being 'available' does not spoil your mood.
"Thank you, Mum! Thank you so very, very, very much!" you manage to say
eventually.

"It has been a difficult decision, but the Gruenfelds have assured me that
it will be allright. They are so thoughtful people and I was amazed by their
spirituality. I am sure that if they allow it, it can't be too dangerous."
she states.

You remember that the parents are the ones to blame for the state of Mira's
health, at least according to her but decide not to mention that to her.
Instead you settle for a half-truth. "Yeah, they are. Mira told me a lot
about them."

"I really hope that you will enjoy it!" you are not sure whether she sows
some form of anger or actual, serious honesty, but you are not willing to
suspect anything anymore. 

Mum explains that today, you still have to go to school but that she will
come after school to explain to the administration there about the plan. You
are not too sad about that as it means to say goodbye to friends and
bullies. You think that it will be very funny to explain in great detail to
them where you are going, despite not knowing that themselves. You however
do have some ideas: Tel Aviv will be on the list since a lot of the Ngienda 
Raiders films were produced there. Also Myanmar, because you are pretty
likely that the temple which is Mira's desktop background and apparently has
been for years, surely is a place she wants to be reported on in real life.
Maybe she wants you to go to Tblisi since is has been one of the new
economic boomtowns. You are happy that she never subscribed to the strange
idea that the Ngiendas are secretly a metaphor for the trade networks,
because that would mean to go to the areas of Africa where the states
collapsed and the various networks pretty much run everything as private
companies to look for inspirations for the show.

The way to school is again different even though nothing in the world
outside your mind is. However, your happiness colors everything into the
brightest and most light-filled and hapiest colors. Even the rain does not
annoy you in the least anymore: Right now, it seems to be happy as you are
and the puddles on the sidewalk invite you not to curse and attempt to avoid
them, but to jump into them, giggling like a maniac. The classes don't
bother you much either. You don't have PE and most of the other classes are
not that bad. Sure, some teachers make it appear boring, but in that case,
you habitually browse through their textbooks in classes and quite often,
you learn enough to pass exams in that way. Some classmates thought that you
were a 'Streber', which is a nerd who is obsessed with school stuff, but
that is far from the truth. School just seems easy to you and you never had
the intention to be a brown-noser to any teacher. There are teachers, who
you are very nice to but that is because they are in your opinion very nice
teachers. One example here is the biology teacher, who most of the class
just cannot stand, but whom you like for one of these emotional reasons, you
cannot explain. Yes, her classes are not the most exciting ones, but you
feel as if she puts large efforts into trying to fascinate pupils. The fact
that she fails despite that makes her not so much of a failure but as a
tragic figure. She does not just give the class worksheet after worksheet,
all of which copies of copies of copies and in the vague appearance of a
white page with a few isolated specs of fly excrements, which only
occasionally form words or even sentences. You are not sure why people
bother with these things at all, but almost every other class has these
kinds of worksheets. And only in a few cases, they are optional.

Biology passes in a rush. Today, you were fascinated by her explanation of
the discovery of evolution, especially Mendel's experiements. She is good at
telling this kind of stories in a captivating manner. Maths, after that is
also not a big problem. The teacher supposedly got a bad reputation among
his colleagues for straying from the curriculum a few times too often and
today was one of the times when he did and told about functions with two
parameters and how they are derived. Most of the class zoned out, but today,
you seem to find excitement in his teaching. He seems to consider this
genuinely interesting and this resonates with you. During the break, the
poor idiots who wanted to bully you are baffled by your lack of showing any
reaction to them. They say to themselves that 'she is just retarded and gets
good marks because the teachers feel sorry for her', but even that is
something you ignore since you are looking forward to leaving this
insitution far too much. The Information Technology class is one of the low
points of your class. You dislike the teacher with quite a bit of passion,
but not enough to warrant the word 'hate'. He is the one who has the
fewest reasons to call himself a teacher, apart from the PE instrucor of
course, who has absolutely zero reasons for that. The IT teacher has learned
about the programs that he teaches at the time he became a teacher and since
then, technology has marched on but he refuses to adapt. This, and the
always nonexistant finances of the school mean that the systems you work on
are horribly deprecated and what you do very seldomly has any relevance to
what exists now. He even has the audacity to cheat on the state tests by 
writing the replies onto the board. This made him quite popular with some of
the students of the class, but you would prefer him to actually teach them.
Not only because that would make classes less of a chore. The old systems
are not good for teching anything, but they are most excellent for having
fun. Every easter egg and interesting function has been found and documented
already. As have all the bugs. Thus, sometimes triggering one of the worse
ones intentionally and complain about that (and watch the confusion of the
teacher) is one of the sports of the class. And it is one, in which you
excel. Today, however, you just zone out, let the class pass and refuse to
care about it. After this class, the German class is almost like a relief.
Almost because the teacher does not consider science fiction to be real
literature and fan fiction real writing. When he found out that you do both,
he acted as if he found out that you did LSD and tried whatever he could to
move you away from these terrible afflictions. This includes shaming you in
front of the class. Since he started that, you started to actively dislike
him, his class and the language and started to write your fan fictions in
English, even though you are not that fluent in the language. You hope that 
this time however, nothing bad will happen. He started pouncing onto new
victims recently, maybe because he has seen your reaction, realized that he
was utterly unsuccessful and has goven up, or maybe just because he found
out that there are other people who prefer to read books from authors who
are still alive or at least have been in this century. You probably will
never ever understand how he can disqualify everything people read as utter
crap and then complain why noone seems to read anything anymore. Again, a
story by Goethe is discussed. You cannot really understand why. These things
happened so long ago, that it is just depracated. If the IT teacher is
generally ridiculed for only talking about depracated things, then why not
the German teacher. It makes no sense to you. Ngienda Raiders is a show
which expresses the current situation quite well and often contains subtle
comments about the current situation. These kind of things are completely
absent in the stories of the times of old. You will not find any subtle or
even blatant references to anything current in them. When Goethe lived,
feudalism was still practised and in more than one story, there was a
not-too-subtle pro-monarchy stance visible to you and you do not consider
that to be something public schools should teach. While you are not too fond
of conspiracy theories, you do believe that certain publishing houses which
have a near-monopoly on these old books lobby the state-government to
include their books into the German-curriculums. Of course, in theory, every
publishing house could print them, but the schools have this specific
edition, and because they do, they demand that the pupils get the same one
as well, so that the page numbers are congruent. Over the years, that is
quite a steady income without having to pay royalties to anyone at all. And
since the only ones who suffer from this are the pupils who don't have any
lobby anyways, no one makes any attempt to change that. Not even allowing
digital copies is accepted in class, probably because page numbers play a
pivotial role in the lesson plans of the teachers. Plans which you assume
have been passed down from one generation of teachers to another one and
which thus have the same form and (lack of) quality as handouts in class. It
is another class to zone out to, even though here, you have to give at least
the appearance of paying attention to the teacher because he grades
participation. Well, he actually grades brown-nosing and uttering the same
ridiculous 'epileptic trees' (as the fan fiction scene would call
hypotheses, which are lightyears away from being believable) before he does.
While he claims not to grade people who disagree with him lower, he does. He
is also a luddite. Computers and technology is not called the work of the
devil, but it is very clear that he is opposed to it. He even insists that
all homework for his class must be hand-written. You chuckle as you remember
the long argument between him and Gregor, a fellow student, whose fine-motor
control is not exactly stellar and who could not handwrite legibly. He could
type with a special keyboard, as big as a table and projected onto one and
thus had a doctor's note that he should be allowed to hand in typed
homework. The German-teacher would have none of that and always graded that
homework as 6, the worst-possible grade available in the German grade
system. Gregor eventually changed schools due to that fool, because even
involving the director did not help. The teacher would explain that the
quality of the homework, not the form would warrant the bad grade. Everyone
seemed to know that this was an excuse but no one wanted to get rid of this
bad teacher, probably because replacing a bad teacher is quite costy for the
state. Once again, this luddite stops teaching you anything to lament about
how handwriting is a lost art and how no one seems to be able to do
anything without the 'idiot-boxes' (his term for everything technical)
anymore. After another break, the next class is the politics class. That is
another class which you like since the teacher is the exact opposite from
the German-teacher: He loves new technology and embraces it quickly and his
topics are always very relevant. He is one of the few teachers who will
interrupt the mandatory topics to talk about something which happens at the
moment. He also likes discussions and thinks that it is a good thing when
people have opposing viewpoints and argues fairly when arguments in class
happen. Except, of course for that one time when he pretended to be an
authoritarian leader to illustrate the Führerprinzip to the class. The last
class is geography. Geography is one of the subjects, which you do not mind. 
While the teacher is none of your favorites, it is none of those which you 
would love to see fired (preferable with real fire) either. He is still
young and in contrast to most of the other ones still can be fired rather 
easily, thus, he is one of the few to take the ministry of education 
seriously. Or uses the state government as a pretense to cover his own 
sadistic impulses. You are not quite sure. Sometimes, you do think that 
either he or the state government do not care about education at all but 
just hate children and want them to suffer needlessly. His favorite way to 
make pupil cower in fear is a kind of timed test, where one of the children
has to stand up and he fires questions at him rapidly, the time not
sufficing for an answer even if you knew the answer which might not always 
be the case. Everyone who had to do this has so far gotten a really bad mark 
and everyone has to do this torture - at a randomly chosen time. He
sometimes does this at the beginning of lectures, but occasionally, he does 
it in the middle or at the end. So far, you have been lucky, and you guess 
that being lucky just one more day suffices in order not to experience this 
specific kind of hell (as you expect it to be replaced by a different kind
in the next semester). Of course, your luck leaves you in this very moment 
and he stops his lecture about the former soviet republics and their
economic issues and asks you to stand up. Of course, you could just not
care, but you do not want any blemish on your report card on this specific 
day because you (admittedly irrationally) fear that your mother will
re-think her decisin in case you only get a four in it. You discreetly 
look at the wall clock and see that the end of the lesson is near as you 
slowly wake up. While you close your geography book, you say: "I would like 
to take your test but you are aware that I can see the posters which we made 
in the last project week, wouldn't it be fairer to blindfold me?"

You have never seen anyone become so white so quickly. He packs his bag,
takes it with him and leaves the class in a hurry. Your classmates
congratulate you for chasing him off, but a while later, he returns with a 
vaguely glasses-shaped device made out of some kind of cloth, which is held
on the head by a string. You know the thing but never knew how to call it,
but it is something which people who have an automatic car use when they
want to sleep while the car takes them somewhere. You are happy that you are 
not going to smell this since you expect it to come from the car of the
geography teacher. You put it on, slightly disgusted and while you think
that you look like a hostage in one of these videos of one of these 
liberation movements, the giggling from the rest of the class tells you that 
you look incredibly ridiculous. You sigh and suddenly you remember the story 
of the medieval prisoner who was told on a Monday that his execution was
today and who supposedly just said: "This week is starting just great." You 
need some of his calmness. The teacher must have seen your smile and asks 
you to raise your hands and then put them behind your head. After you 
complied, he starts questioning you. It all happens in a blur, and after 
it, you would not remember what exactly happened and what he wanted to know. 
You answer question after question, either with a reply or with 'no idea'. 
Some of the questions are about areas, you looked at yesterday when 
daydreaming where you would land, others are about places in the world, 
which mean nothing to you. He asks about capital cities, adjacent nations, 
populations, GDP per capita and other difficult things. Eventually, he
allows you to lift your 'blindfold'. He smiles at you. "I'd imagine that 
you'd do worse. 3+, but I will make it a 2- due to your honesty."

You are delighted and decide not to be encouraged by this praise of honesty 
to tell that you just wanted the class to end when you asked about the
posters. Or that they were not readable from your desk anyways. Then the 
class and this school day ends. 

You sit down near the school door on a bar which is normally used to fix 
bicycles to it. You wait for your mother to arrive. After a while, you are
worried about the fact that she still has not arrived. You decide to call
her, but her resource is busy. This is something encouraging to you. If 
something bad happened to her, her connection would have dropped. After 
various attempts to call her, the lunch break is over and those who have 
classes in the afternoon hurry to attend them. You again try to call your 
mother, but still only get a busy sign. You curse, loudly. Your paranoid 
mental image is that she has put a denial script onto her resource, which 
makes the connection appear busy even though it is not.  These scripts can 
be specific for certain types or origins of calls or they can outright deny 
everything reaching the resource. You dismiss the thought as being paranoid, 
but then, you are worried and search for a counterscript. You feel like a 
traitor when you dowload the counterscript, but you also feel that you have 
to know. You call again, and again get a busy sign, then you install and
start the counterscript. The line is free and Mum answers it with what
appears a period of hesitation.

"Hi Mum!" you say with forced cheerfulness. "Have you forgotten to pick me
up from school?"

Mum immediately sounds as if she is fighting with a bad conscience. "Oh, I 
think that I just forgot it. I'll come as fast as possible!"

"Well, you wanted to talk to the administration anyways. So better find a 
real parking space while I'll wait inside." By real you of course refer to
the fact that she normally waits in a no-parking zone to pick you up. You 
decide to test her a bit more. "Oh and are you running XBlock? I think you 
have forgotten to whitelist me. I don't want to use EnCounter all the time 
to call you."

Now she sounds really defensive. "What do you mean by that? What is it you 
want to imply?"

"I want to imply that you used XBlock because you were on the list of some 
marketing weasel who called you repeatedly and you forgot to whitlist me 
manually in the settings. I know that program. It can be quite helpful. 
Though I did think that names in the contacts are automatically whitelisted, 
they must have changed that in the newest version."

She knows that you know and you know that she knows that you know, but that 
you might allude to it, but never openly say what your idea is. "Must have 
been that. Yes! It's SpIToon, this it why it has not whitelisted contacts." 
she explains to save her proverbial backside.

She reaches the school in record time and parks her car nearby. Then you
enter school followed by her and you explain to the secretary why you want 
to speak to the director. You hear her murmur something like "Why do I
alwayy get the insane ones", but pretend as if you had not heard it. The 
office of the headmaster is the only room, which does not look utilitarian 
but like an inhabited place with its own character. That is not due to 
expensive furniture or floor tilings, but because a lot of private material 
is located there. The photos show the story of a boy from babyhood to
marriage. You look at the furniture in the room. Both the desk and the
bookshelves look as if they were rather unexpensive and their design and
color dies not even imply that they might have been made of dead trees. The
shelves are full of grey folders, probably containing the kind of material
needed to run the school. A few big legal texts were among the folders.
Teachers, for some odd reason are incredibly fond of paper and printing and
of course of handwriting. You are not sure why that is, but you suspect that
one of the reasons, maybe even the only one is intimidation of the perceived
enemy: the pupils and maybe even the department of education of the state
government because even though it pays the wages of the teachers, it has
this nasty habit of meddling in their affairs. You suspect that at least one
of the folders contains surveillance equipment, either because the
headmaster worries about what happens to the contents in his free time of
because the state government, angered by the defiant teachers, which ignore
their new regulations as much as possible, worries about what happens to the
contents in his work time. The desk is full of paperwork. A computer is
partly covered by it but still recognizable. It does not look as if it has
been used recently. You notice that part of the paperwork is on intelligent
paper, which has a bit of processing power and the ability to change its
contents. For paper-obsessed people, this is probably a good idea despite
the blatant euphemism in the name. If the paper really was intelligent, it
would do the processing it required without bothering the user.

The headmaster looks older than you remember him to do. His hair has
finished turning grey, making the brown color it used to have only a memory.
Almost imperceptible scars next to his eyes imply that he had a vision
correction surgery. You only notice the scars since at that point, the
system of wrinkles on his face has an irregularity. His mouth has the
constant expression of being displeased with something. Even at moments when
there was no reason for it, he shows this expression. It looks to you either
as if he fears that smiling causes wrinkles or as if he was wearing a mask.
He is wearing a suit which looks as if it was bought before you were born
but had been expensive back then.

Your mother and you greet the headmaster, Mr Ian Woon and he replies with 
similar politeness. He, just like Mum look and sound as if they would prefer
to be elsewhere. You clear your throat and then attempt to speak in a polite
and adequately formal tone. "Mr Woon, I want to be excused from school for a
few months due to a prolonged absense." He looks at you as if you lost your
mind, but does not grace you with a reply, thus you explain what you plan to
do. "I want to travel around the world and report to a friend who is on the
brink of death about it. It is her last wish and I think it will help my
education in ways school can't." You summarize the points you already made
to your mother. She suprises you by not only being there at al but helping
you make a certain point when your nerves got the better of you.

After the verbal bombardment, the headmaster looks at you intensely, as if
trying to find out about the sincerity of you without opening his mouth. You
never knew that the metaphor 'piercing glare' made sense before, but nowit
seems perfectly adequate. After a while, he speaks. He is talking slowly as
if thinking hard about every single syllable. "Your request is probably one
of, if not even the most unusual ones in my time at this school. However, I
think that is can be arranged. You need to be aware however, that it can
have bad consequences for your academic carreer." He starts listing things,
which you expected to happen in case of a long absense of a pupil to which
you nod confirmingly.

You do not mind retaking this year. You mind, but do not correct the
euphemism 'academic carreer' however. You are aware that the correct term
would be something like 'passing from one year of pointless classes to
another one, which is just as pointless in order to qualify for something
which can become an academic carreer provided you happen to have the
required money and luck'. Instead you try to alleviate his fears. "It is not
as if I would leave friends behind me if I did. My classmates are just
people I heppen to go to class with."

You realize that this did not have the effect you hoped it would. The look 
of your mother and of Mr Ian Woon are becoming icy. You knew that your
mother still had this strange idea that you need to become friends with the
people you are just randomly assigned with and become the best friends of at
least one of them. You did not know that the headmaster shared this view. It
never worked that way for you anyways. You always got along with your
classmates (with the exception of the sociopaths and the bullies), but your
best friends are people you met outside of the institutions and the
formalized settings, lately of course people who share your obsession with
this specific show. Most people at school who know about it think that it is
at best mediocre and are uncomfortable with your fascination for it. Thus
getting along with them means to hide the things about your life which you
have the most passionate emotions about and while that is okay for
acquaintances, it is not something you want of a friendship. Fortunately,
you do not need to explain that to the headmaster as he has the good sense
to change the topic. 

Talking happens, as do loads of paperwork. Mr Woon calls Mira and her
parents to confirm your story while Mum and you work yourself through a
metaphorical mountain of paper, intelligent and dumb. When you leave, the
sun has already set. Mum drives you home. You realize that there were many
different ways for her to sabotage the endeavour but she used none of them.
Maybe, you were wrong in your view of her, maybe she really was convinced
and the blocking script really was an acident. Or maybe, she just did not
notice these opportunities. Or she did notice them but after that script
happened, thought that any further opposition would make her bahaviour
suspicious.

The fact that you are now, at least temporarily not a pupil anymore begins
to sink in. You have never thought of it before, but now that you did so, it
feels strange. As long as your conscious memories reach back, you always
were associated with an institution and your vague ideas about the future
always included this. You thought that life would be a progression of steps
from one institution to the next one: Kindergarten, primary school,
secondary school, maybe university alternatively a place of vocational 
education, company which employs you (given the retired people you know, you
thought even though the employment ends at one point, the association and
the idea of being a 'former employee' does not), retirement home. Not being
associated to any institution to channel your loyality and  disgust feels 
confusing and more than just a bit strange. Such an institution has so far
always been a part of your identity and while you consciously knew that
hanging between the places was possible, you never took it into account when
having vague thoughts, incoherent feelings and daydreams about the future.
You open a writing program and begin writing down these feelings. No only
because putting them into words might help, but also because you plan to
upload them onto the site Mira created for you. Like in some of your
fanfiction, you write in the second person. Your reasoning is that these
days, text is more often heard than read and thus it might help with
immersion. You are not sure whather there is any merit to this wild guess
which does not even warrant the term explanation, but you know that second
person stories have only become popular in this century.

When you come home you continue writing and start packing, though you don't
do that in this or, well, any order. Instead it is a very chaotic process
where you continue writing when you are out of ideas what to pack and
continue pacing when you are out of ideas what to write. Since Mira has so
far kept quiet about the destinations and even thought that it might be a
good idea not to have a real plan but instead only to know where you are
supposed to go next, packing a suitcase is hard. You have to be prepared for
rain, sun, heat, cold, wind and moderate weather. Even something formal
might be required. Fortunately, new materials like Ikwane are very
versatile, otherwise, one suitcase would be far too little. However, due to
the fact that most of the clothes you bring are made of new materials, you
look odd. Either like someone who desperately tries to show how incredibly
bleeding edge he is or like an time traveller in one of the popular movies.
This is something you rather dislike, but then, there is nothing you can do
about it. Eventually, you have what looks to you like a packed suitcase and
a finished text. You upload the text, put the suitcase in a corner of the
room and go to bed. You have not eaten lunch or dinner, but you are too
excited for that anyways.

Chapter 11: A Language emerges (Ekatarina)

Working on the project has been a great therapy to you. You made some
progrss and even were able to create basic diagrams and schematics about the
implementation. The quite strange grammar was not primarily made for the use
of humans but for the use of translation interfaces made by Jja Cane, that
makes deriving ideas about how to implement it an almost trivial task. It is
not impossible to learn this language for a human being though. Your own
impriving fluency is the best proof for that. It just mans that without the
translation interface, it will be quite tedious to learn the language and
that those who want to learn it by eavesdropping on Jja Canes talking among
themselves, would be almost impossible given its complexity and its quite
intentional traps for these kind of people. You expect that if someone
really used it and if the police listened to that, they'd be bound to come
to wrong conclusions. You hum as you continue working.

Suddenly, you have the distinct feeling of being watched, you turn around
and see that annoying Jja Cane whose name you still do not know approaching
the hut. You step outside, looking peeved. Only when you do, you notice the
slight rain which falls. "Hello, can you tell me what the reason for your
presence is?" your voice sounde about as annoyed as you feel.

"Haven't you noticed that it was raining like crazy last night? I have heard
that there were serious damages to property at nearby huts and just wanted
to make sure that you are alive and well. And I brought you Mountain Dew."
he appeals to your lowest instincts.

Despite your anger, you think that it is sweet how he he cared about you. It
has been a while since you were important enough to anyone to visit you to
ask whether you were alright, let alone walked more than one hour uphill for
that to reach the remote location where you live. "You're completely wet!
Better come in!" you invite him into your modest dwelling and offer him a
cup of coffee. He accepts the warm, dark, foul-smelling liquid happily and
seems to like it. Suddenly, you realize that the projection still shows your
language and you hurry to the system and shut down the projection and the
associated system. The stranger has caught a glimpse despite that. 

"Have you taken up conlanging again?" he asks curiously.

You freeze. You have not mentioned this to him and the projection could be
related to an existing language. You do not remember having mentioned to him
that you conlang, but your memory could deceive you, or he could have
deducted this from something you said. "How do you know that I construct
languages?" you counter his question with another one. Your father always
told you that this was rude when you did it but since you clearly remember
him doing this himself quite often to you, you refuse to feel guilty.

"Oh, you mentioned it and your interest in Scifi languages gave it away
anyways."

"Note to self: Hide your personal interests better!" you say with a
semi-serious tone. "Yeah, it is my new project. A language, I assume to be
great for the Jja Cane to communicate covertly."

He seems to be impressed: "An official project?"

"Nah, just something to do for the sheer sake of it. An interesting
challenge," you admit.

"What do you think is required for such a language?" he asks.

You explain to him all the ideas you had so far. He listened with more
interest than you thought anyone would pay to a description of a constructed
language unless he is part of the subculture. When you mention that it will
be easy to implement a program for a translation interface he seems to be
impressed. "Do you mind if I tell headquarters about it? It might become an
official project after all."

You gasp. So far, no-one you met in real life showed even the least interest
in your constructed languages. The disbelief is quite audible in your voice:
"Do you think that they would be interested?"

"Definitely! Nothing's as suspicious as strong encryption these days. Every
tinpot dictator out there bans it since they have a very justified paranoia.
Something like the Shui of the Ngienda Raiders would allow us to communicate
without anyone eavesdropping without triggering any of the automatic systems
to detect encryption."

"What is Shui?"

"A constructed language from that show Ngienda Raiders," he explains. "It is
never heard on-screen though. If the Ngienda talk and the
viewpoint-character is none of them, Volapük is used. The Imperial Standard
Language is rendered as Lingua de Planeta when it is not understood. Do you
get that?"

"Get what?" you take a sip from the bottle of Mountain Dew he gave you.

"The Ngienda talk in a language which has the name 'language of the people'
while the imperials use the language of the planet, or metaphorically, the
government." He made gestures to make his point.

You cannot help but grin. "It would be a metynymy, not a metaphor."

He grins as well. "Oh, I tried to use a big word one time and I get found
out about not knowing its exact meaning."

"A metynymy is something like using Brussels for the EU or Washington DC for
the United States. A metaphor is using a term which is related to the
original meaning as an analogy." You explain.

"I'll never argue with a linguistics geek!" he jokes.

After a bit of talk in which you even find out that his name in the
organisation is Shkey and after he empties as much as 4 cups of coffee, he
moves down into the valley to inform Hesse, which he correctly identifies as
a metynymy for the regional headquarters he works for. You listen to his
footsteps until they are not audible anymore. You realize that you feel a
bit lonely. He gave you the feeling to be wanted. You know that you pretty
much spoiled your chances of finding a certain someone to love and be loved.
Now you are old and despite everything Shkey said, ugly. It would require a
miracle or winning the jackpot to find someone. You admit to yourself the
crazy hope that Shkey would remain around you. That he even might become
something more than a friend to you, despite the age difference and the
difference in sexual orientation. Maybe he finds out that he is actually
bisexual and you find out that you are not as asexual as you always
perceived yourself to be. You slap yourself for this thought. You should not
hope for the unreachable. And hoping that someone in a happy relationship
breaks up for you is the height of selfishness. You instead bury yourself
deep into your work.

A while later, your work is again disturbed by someone knocking on your
door. You freeze when you see the man in uniform but attempt your very best
to remain calm. There has to be a logical reason for this. You see it as a
good sign that he knocked instead just breaking through the door and that he
seems to be alone. Maybe someone has just fixed a can to the tail of a cat
or something like that. You shut down the computer and go to the door to
answer it. "Hello Mr inspector. How can I help you?"

"Are you Miss Melnikov?" he asks.

You nod. "I am. Do you want to come inside?"

He enters your modest dwellings and looks around critically. You offer him
to sit on the bed and excuse for the lack of space. You also offer to make
coffee for him, pretending to be the perfect host.

He accepts the offer, which is another very good sign in your mind. It means
that he is not suspecting to be poisoned by you. While you use the machine
for a while, he starts a bit smalltalk. He seems to like the weather as
little as you do and also to agree with your assessment of this view to be
one of the best ones which exist. When both of you have a cup of coffee, he
moves to more serious topics: "What is the reason for your presence here?"

"Oh, I want to write a story and I need the calmness of this place for that.
The distractions of the job and of the life in Germany ripped me apart. I
wanted to get away from it all." you state a rehearsed reason.

"I see. Have you considered psychiatric treatment instead?" he asks.

You feel as if you turn either red or white since anger and fear are
fighting in your gut. "Why should I want to do that? I am not hearing things
or seeing things or smelling things which are not there and have not shown
aggressive behaviour that could be considered to be a threat to others."

"You are doing something quite irresponsible to deal with a psychological
crisis." he explains. "And in a psychological crisis, you should contact
your local psychiatrist."

"Crisis is too hard of a word. I am just needing an extended holiday. Some
time away from it all. Some time to get myself together. If you know what
this means." you have an idea where this discussion will go to and do not
like the direction in the least.

"It would be advantageous if your psychological health could be confirmed by
someone. Just to prove that you are not putting yourself at risk
intentionally." He states. There is a bit of a threat in his voice.

"Why are you accusing me of being insane for wanting some peace and quiet?"
you ask.

"Because this place does not look as if it was equipped for the winter yet
you seem to intend on staying here. This clearly puts yourself at risk
needlessly." he explains. You remember that you considered it a good thing
for the police to help potentional suiciders before it is too late and you
are aware that you can no longer hold this opinion anymore.

"I have ordered things for the winter, heated blankets and so on, of course
including the nergy cells to use them. Maybe I should order a winter-suit as
well. And before it's too late I will stock up on canned food. Don't worry
about that. If I wanted to finish this life, I would use a much more drastic
method than waiting to freeze here in a foreign country. I mean, I walked to
the train station here and went over a bridge. If I was suicidal, I could
have just jumped off it. That would have been far easier than a needlessly
complex plot like this, wouldn't it?" 

"I was not aware that you had plans for the winter. Sorry, but I do have to
do this to persuade the irresponsible ones not to remove themselves from the
genetic pool." he explains apologetically.

"Yeah, I do. I was just not sure whether this would be right for me or
whether I would go crazy immediately. That's why I put off this investment.
It would just bug me too much to waste this sort of money if it can be
avoided." you explain while you realize that you really have to order a lot
of stuff for the winter if you want to make it through that season. 

"I see. There is nothing wrong with frugality if it is not reckless." he
admits.

Only a quick while later, he leaves. You take a deep breath and empty the
cup of coffee you poured for yourself when you made one for the policeman as
well. It still tastes bad, but you are getting used to that taste or at
least you hope that. You still have about half of the bottle of the sweet
fizzy liquid Shkey brought, but don't want to drink it all at once like your
did last time. It tasted great but you regretted the entire day not having
any anymore. After you did that, you call a number Shkey wrote down for you.
A strange form of static is heard on the other end of the metaphorical line.
Either the call is being relayed on a very high-level side (so that the VoIP
service does not notice) or the connection is just that crappy, which can
either mean it has insufficient bandwidth, or that the recording equipment
on the other end is something low-cost and low-quality. You do not hear a
human voice, and thus listen to the strange noise for a few seconds. Then, a
voice answers with a simple, one-syllabic noise or maybe a grunt. You reply
with discomfort in your voice and a conscious attempt not to pronounce
English like a strange foreigner: "Hello, I am calling from Austria, and I
was told to call this number in case of problems with the police. I am Sjui."

The static continues and then slowly forms words. You guess more than you
hear that it asks for more information. "What can I say? A cop just came,
and visited the hut, accused me of insanity because I am unprepared for the
winter. I don't think it makes all that much sense either." 

The staticy voice replies something incomprehensible.

"I have no idea what you just said!" you reply.

Suddenly the connection drops. You feel more uncomfortable than you did
before. You have the distinct impression that you just did something wrong.
That you fell into a trap these people prepared for you to fall into. You
curse yourself and the connection and every single Jja Cane who walks the
face of the earth, or is alive but does not walk at this very moment, bu do
so only mentally. You do not want that a hiker who just happens to be nearby
hears bad language. 

Then the phone rings again. You answer the call with just a greeting, even
though in both Germany and Austria it normally is common to use your name
when answering the phone. 

"Hey Sjui, I heard that you were in a SNAFU?" the voice is that of Shkey.

"A cop visited me, and told me that he suspected me to be insane since this
hut is unsuitable for the winter. I told him that uncertainty about my
future and frugality prevented me from doing so for now." 

"Yikes. How do they know where you are?" he asks.

"Well, I did sign a rent contract under my real name so it was kinda easy to
find out," you admit. "That was how you found me as well, didn't you?"

"I actually asked people in the village about your whereabouts. But yeah, it
almost sounds like he heard about a new tenant up there. This might just be
standard procedure for these people. You know, dead tourists give bad
headlines and that means that the Austrian economy would suffer. It is based
on tourism quite a bit, you know." he says, "Welcome to the first world, I
guess. In other areas, people were much more indifferent to me than here."

"You think that I should not worry about this?" you emphasize the 'not' in
the same Level-1-error manner you know from other Jja Cane.

"Yeah! But if you really want to spend the winter there, you should be
prepared for it. But I am sure that you were able to figure that out on your
own by now."

"I am not as naïve as you think I am, so yes, I thought about that already.
Maybe you can give me some advise on what to do. I have a few ideas, but I
guess you know some low-cost methods to keep warm." you say. After you said
the last sentence however, you regret your words.

"Yeah, sure! But I think you should not bother about it anymore. I can't
exactly say much, but a Russian company might want to employ you. Can you in
theory imagine working in Irkutsk or Anadyr?" he asks.

You are confused. "Where is that?"

"Oh, it is in Siberia. You know, they are Russian Winter companies." he
explains.

"What do you mean by that?" you want to know.

"Companies, which didn't want to deal with the oppression of the new Tsars
and fled into the wild and de-jure province, de-facto independent country of
Siberia."

"Oh?" You never heard about the state of Siberia so it is confusing to you.

"Ah, I should have remembered that you missed that SNAFU. Siberia pretty
much told Moscow to go to hell. I am not going to list ll the crap that
happened there, but I thin it was some stupid environmentalist thing which
pissed of the Siberians. At least in the beginning. There were lots of other
reasons which also played a role. Best just read about the Russia-Siberia
conflict. It has the entire thing in all of its misery and despair."

"I will!" you say, even though you are not too sure about this.

"Well, the new quasi-country has become a place everyone who got fed of with
the central government of Russia headed to who could afford to leave. It is
still not really a first-world place, but it is freer than the western parts
of the country." he explains.

"I'm not sure about that. You need to tell me more about that!" you say in
order to buy time.

"I will!" he says in a tone of voice which conveys that to him, this clearly
was a 'yes'. "And I'll bring new Dew for you!"

"You know how to cater to the lower urges of a woman!" you say jokingly and
with unintended innuendo.

"You wish!" he counters with a laugh.

Chapter 12: Back in the former USSR (Lisa)

You were not sure what to expect after sinding the text to Lisa, but the
last thing you did expect was getting a good night's sleep without any
interruption to wake you up. This was however what happened. When you glance
at the clock, it says that the first two classes have already passed in
school. You log on and expect to find out that this all was a giant
practical joke which someone did for nothing but the enjoyment of it.
However, nothing like that is in your mailbox. Instead, there is a mail from
Mira, which describes a museum of computing in Moscow and has a flight
ticket for this night from the airport of Düsseldorf to Moscow. A further
mail, like an afterthought has a train ticket for the way to the airport,
issued for you personally. Your heart starts racing. Suddenly the entire
thing has become far more real than you feared that it would become. You
decide to call Mira and with slightly trembling hands, you establish a
connection to her. 

Mira looks tired and worse than you remember her from the one time you met
face to face. "Mira here? Who's there?" she replies with strained voice and
squinted eyes.

"Hi Mira! Thanks for the ticket! I'll get there and report about it! Just
wanted to talk to you about the awesomeness of this entire situation!"

Mira opens her eyes completely. "Lisa? Great to see that you are about as
excited about this project as I am!" Suddenly shemakes a movement which
reminds you of the strange movement someone does to get a fly to leave which
sat down on your nose while you are carrying something heavy with both arms. 
"I forgot to ask you to come here before you leave! Can you still do it? Or
do you still have to do something else before you can get away?"

"I need to get some rubles, I guess, but not much else. So, yeah, I'll be on
my way!"

You arrive at the Gruenfelds' manison in record time. The belarussian
housekeeper again lets you in and leads you to Mira's lair. Mira looks as if
she had a bad night or was in pain. Probably both. She is not dressed in
any real clothes, just payamas and looks as if she woke up very recently.
Her voice again is strained as she greets you. You have the impression that
she tries very hard to control herself in order not to scream, shout or cry
even though you are not sure why. You feel as if you are invading a private
moment even though she invited you. 

You exchange greetings, then she offers you a seat and again a glass of the
cola you prefer. "It might be the last time in a while until you get it
again!"

She has a good point and so you drink thirstily and enjoy the taste of the
soda. "Thank you, Mira! But can you tell me why you invited me here? You
look as of you need more sleep!"

"Heh! Directly to the goal, eh? You are a bit like Sel Kvi." she says with a
grin. 

"No, I just thought that you look like... death warmed up and thus would
prefer solitude." you try to justify your thoughtless comment.

"Well, yes, but I forgot to give you a few things which you are going to
need for the journey!" she says, then groans, probably about something her
body did to her as she attempts to stand up. She walks to a cupboard with
careful, unsteady movements which look out of place for such a young person.
It reminds you of a person of more than 90 years, not of a person your own
age. She takes a cardboard box which probably used to store shoes and puts 
it down on the table next to you. "These things might be useful for your
journey. Or at least a good replacement for things which would really useful
for it but unfortunately are still only semi-legal."

You raise your eyebrows about this latter comment but since she does not
give any further details, you open the box and look inside. You find an
organizer which is a few generations ahead of the one you normally use. It
is not a full computer but a portable device which almost the same features.
Instead of using a projection per default, it uses an extendable screen. The
screen is on something like a roll of toilet paper (just thinner) and can be
rolled out and in depending on whether it is needed. If it is unextended,
only the cylindrical surface exists for interaction. You gasp. You were
aware that these devices exist but you were not aware that they exist in an
affordable price range. The issue apparently was not so much to make
rollable intelligent paper, but to make a usable version of it which lacks
its shortcommings like the latency and takes full advantage of the rollable
display. "Wow!" you state out of a lack for better words.

"If you need something like immersion on the way, you can use this umbrella."
Mira explains, pointing at another item of the box. It looks like a normal
umbrella, but has a logo of a wireless standard on it. You open it and it
looks a bit rounder and more like a half-sphere than a normal umbrella, and
a set of buttons on the bar in its middle most importnt a switch to turn it
off and on. You toggle it and start the organizer. Immediately, the umbrella
shows the operating system. 

You are amazed. "Wow! That's an impressive system!" 

"It is! It even protects against the rain!" Mira says with a smirk. She
shows you another strange gadget, which you cannot place at all. "This is a
translator. It is not as good as the implants, but it gives you a basic idea
of what is said. But the implants are banned like everywhere I want to go."
she shrugs. "Want to try it?"

"Okay! Do you have some text in a foreign language?" you ask.

"No, but I can try to speak English, which is a preset on this thing." she
then shows you how to turn it on and attempts to say something in English,
apparently from the more 'gangster' type of music which lately re-emerged.
Her English is not bad, but it has a bad very German inflection, which you
immediately notice. The translator shows the text of what she said and the
helpful translation: Speaker tells you in a very clear tone to get lost.
You have to admit that this is quite interesting even though normally you
would recognize that particular sentiment by other clues. "It is especially
interesting that this has the ability to log conversations as text even if
they are in your mother tongue." Mira explains cheerfully. "I used that to
find out what my parents talk about me when I was not present."

Now you actually are impressed about its capabilities. While it is very easy
to record someone and while it is acceptably easy to transform what was said
into text, this alone would not result in a meaningful logging of the
conversation, which would leave out many non-linguistic clues and in the
case of the attempt you made once even the change of the speaker. You ask
how well it does deal with these kind of things and she explains, still very
happy about an exploit which turned out to work well, that it indeed does
support these kind of clues. She even shows a conversation which was logged
like this and contains information like 'Speaker1 sighs' or 'Speaker2 speaks
in an agitated tone'. You suspect that this was a really expensive device,
even if this probably plays no role for the Gruenfeld family, which probably
has more money than Hürth debts.

Mira shows another tool, which looks strange but is used to sterilize and
filter water without having to cook it. You have heard that expeditions use
technolgy like that but never seen it in real life. "Where do you plan to
send me?" you ask with a hint of anxiety in your voice.

"Oh, to many places! But such a thing can even be useful in certain parts of
the EU." 

"You are not going to give me details, are you?"

"I am not. It makes your reports even more interesting to read. Also, Sel
Ngu didn't know her destinations either." she says, smirkingly.

"Sel Ngu was a spy who was send into the imperium." you counter.

"Yeah, he was. Without him, the Tailak crisis would never be resolved." she
says. "Don't worry, I will not task you wil assassination of a political
leader."

You reply in jest: "Okay, if it's only a religious leader that makes a big
difference. I will gladly do that without the slightest moral problems."

She continues: "You like sleeping in on Sunday as well?"

"Definitely! And I think that suffices fully as a reason!" you grin broadly.

She suddenly becomes serious again: "I have also put a few odds and ends
into the box as well. However, one thing, I want you to take care of." She
fishes a small, dirty, threadbare teddy bear out of the box. "Bearlin! He
was one of my favorite plushies when I was a child. I think he would like to
travel with you around the world as well!"

You are a bit amused by the gesture. "I hope Bearlin does not mind a small
penguin called Ping who also wants to see the world."

"I am sure that they will get along sufficiently well!" she says. "If Ping
your childhood memory?"

"Can we say that he's from the extended childhood? I got him rather late,
but I still really like to cuddle him!" you admit. You are not going to
mention why you got this cute penguin and what he means to you. He is to you
more than just a normal plushie though. His black and white fur (while
penguins have feathers, penguin plushies have fur) is full of memories.

"Sure! You can't help growing up but you can remain immature forever!"

You laugh about this.

A while later, you are back on the way home. While Mira seemingly forgot her
illness in your presence, it still was clear that she was not doing too
excellently. You suddenly imagine your roles were switched: That you were
the one about to die and she was the one about to live. This is a scary idea
which so far never really crossed your mind even though you were to a
certain point aware of it: That you are mortal just like she is. You can as
well get sick, get misdiagnosed (even though you are going to beat your own
mother up with all the strength you can muster if she will drag you to an
alternative quack like one of these who made Mira's life much shorter than
it should have been) and die, or get into a traffic accident, maybe even
here in this very metro. There have been deadly accidents of it, so why
should it not happen to you. Or you could not make it home during the trip
around the world. A lot of things out there are probably out to kill you.
From wildlife, over natural disasters to technical malfunctions and
accidents, to illnesses and injuries, to people who want to harm you in any
way, maybe to rape you, maybe to rob you, maybe just out of sadistic
pleasure of it or maybe even with slight disgust but as part of their job.
You are not shocked per se by these ideas, however, of course you are not
elated either. You are a bit anxious, a bit scared, and have the desire to
hide yourself at home and never to face the evil and dangerous world out
there again. You however know that even that is not able to help you. Even
if you lived the best way you could, kept safe, kept healthy, adhered to the
many strange and conflicting rules out there in respect to what should and
what should not get into your body, even then, at one point, you would close
your eyes for the last time eventually. There are drugs which slow down
aging, sure, but even they are not a guarantee and they can have side
effects. You realize for the first time that this might be what Mira tried
to convey to you all the time on a non-verbal level. However, she seemed to
accept this fate. She did not ask death (the character with the robe and the
scythe) to get the fuck out, she asked him whether she could go to Vegas
before he'd take her, well, by proxy at least. Maybe acceptance of the
inevitability is the only way to counter the fear of death. Maybe the only
way is like Mira does by proxy to make the most out of the time which
remains. You are not sure what comes after death. You know what the
religions say, but you also know that none of them says the same things and
are vary of vague speech and incoherent explanations of the inexplainable.
Thus, you have no idea what is behind the last breath, if anything at all.
Maybe that is the end and after that nothing happens. Or maybe there is an
afterlife of some form or another one. You do not know. Your quest for truth
in religion ended when you realized that supporting areligion is a lot like 
supporting a soccer team. You generally support a team near you and
generally for no good reason. It is okay to be cheerfull if Köln relegates
once again because your mother is fan while you care a bit about how Bonn
did. It is as okay to support Köln and be happy if Bonn again loses against
an opponent no Bundesliga team should lose against. But these things are a
very shaky basis for truth and you refuse to treat it as if it was solid
ground. While you are not sure whether there is a higher being, you think
that if there was, he, she or it might value honest questioning more than
the very likely belief in a false god, goddess or pantheon. Maybe you will
know the answer to the final questions at one point, but so far, make most
of the now and here. There might be nothing after the end, or heaven, hell,
or reincarnation. However, you are not going to find it out until then. And
that is a really good and sufficiently deep and optimistic thought to have 
when the metro arrives at your destination.

The weather was, metaphorically speaking, crap. The temperature is
insufficient and the raindrops falling from the sky in an increasing and
accelerating pattern. A fast wind is bloing taking the dirt of the streets
with it around you. Even a quick walk outside has the character of an
expedition now. However, you know that probably a lot of worse is yet to
come and so you brave the weather on the way home.

Mum is already at home when you return and gives you a strange look when you
enter. "I thought you were already on your way to where-ever and did so
without telling me that you did." she says reproachfully.

"You could have seen my suitcase still in my room, or that I left you a
message that Mira asked me to visit." you say in a similar tone. The weather
and her welcome have not put you into the most cheerfull mood ever.

"You left a message?" she asks strangely.

"Have you blocked me again?" you want to know, you are not even angry, just
somehow defeated. You cannot win against the terrible force of nature which
is her technical ineptitude. 

"No, I have not blocked you, just one of these stupid advertisers." Of
course, cold calls are illegal in theory, but in practise they are very
common and marketers use any kind of technical tricks to get hold of people
and capture their attention. The counter-scripts which are available for
free are nothing against the ones they use at their centers of operation in 
some countries with a nonexistant legal system and good networks. It seems
not too strange that they do something to get through blocks including
hacking the phone and faking an unblocked ressource to get through. You
quickly take the phone and instead of the system she uses install another
blocking application which does not work ressource-based but based on the
behaviour of the attempt to access. You have heard a bit about this kind of
thing, but would not be able to explain in detail how it works. Apparently
however, it takes a few characteristics of the call, like the source
location, the settings which are requested, the device which claims to
contact and so on and block only if these appear to belong to something
which you think is illegitimate. Even when a call is faked to appear to be
from a known ressource, the cold calling lowlife will have a different
amount of lag, either much more because they are from a place far away or
much less because it comes from a virus which infected a router nearby. This
makes it possible to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate callers.
Supposedly at least. While this is what you use, you never had a lot of
problem with it anyways.

You put most of the things which Mira gave you into the suitcase except for
the translator. You leave the keys for the house on the nightstand where you
put them normally when you do not need them. Again it feels strange to do
so, even though this is an action you have done repeatedly. It is the
context which changes everything. You will not take them with you tomorrow
to go to school. You are not even sure when you will use them again. You
make a note to write about change on the way to the airport because that
seems to be the only constant in the future for you.

Maybe you can even get some writing done in the airport or on the plane,
even though you know that it will probably be very difficult given the
security precautions. While you never travelled by plane you have heard that
it is supposedly a very stressfull affair. You pack a book out of real paper
and real, printed words so that you have something to read even if you are
not allowed to use technical devices during the flight. The story is not
that special, it is an old science fiction story which looks horribly weird,
dated and 'zee-rusty' by now, even though it seemed impossible when it was
written. Then you pack the two plushies, hers and yours, take your suitcase
and leave the room. 

You drop your stuff and hug Mum as soon as you see her. Of course, you find
her talking to someone on the phone and just bears your hug and by gestures
only, not even by a hushed, verbal cue tells you to wait. You stand there
for a while, unsure about what to do or how to react while she still seems
to carefully listen to the person on the other end while being blissfully
unaware of your discomfort. You consider just going away but that would be a
very sad note to leave on. You decide to stick around, look around and wait,
at least for a while, depending on how long she will continue her call. You
look around in the hallway and try to see it in the same way as someone
would see it if he walked in for the first time. Many pictures of the family
members are on the various walls. The ones with young people show a family:
father, mother and daughter, the ones with older ones, only mother and
daughter. A small, golden bell hangs on a string on one side of the door.
For you, this is a memory which strongly relates to Christmas, for others,
the existance and position of the bell might be strange. The same with so
many other things which are around you in this very moment. You are aware
that in a strange place, other people have similar memories, which like tags
are invisible per se but overlay with reality despite of that. The way
anyone else sees the world around you will be radically different from the
way you see it. Even though it would probably be interesting to see the way
others see the world. You write this thought down and are still at it when
Mum finishes her phonecall, hangs up, lays down her politeness as if it was
a mask and uses some colorful metaphors against the caller. It is sometimes
amazing how some people can be very polite to a person and as soon as they
are out of earshot insult their intelligence, upbringing, looks, and very
personality. But then, it is not as she can say these things to the face of
students or parents or even supervisors, no matter how much she would want
to if she had any interest in keeping her job. You go to her and hug her
again. This time, she returns the hug. "I'll miss you, Mum!"

"I'll miss you too! Definitely! Remember to call often!"

"Remember to unblock me often!" you reply with a smirk. "You might still
have to do it occasionally."

"I will as well! And I will read the reports you put online. Every day!"

"I'll post often! And allow you to comment!" you assure her. "But now I have
to catch the S-Bahn!"

"Don't worry, I'll bring you there!" she says. 

"Now?" you ask suspiciously.

"Yeah, just have to call someone. It won't take that long." she says.

"Sorry, I guess in that case it is easier just to go myself." you say,
knowing that there are international treaties which were composed in less
time than it needs for her to make a simple phone call.

"Well, if you think so..." she seems seriously offended by your statement
even though you did not try to insult her.

"Yes, I think so. This is nothing against you personally, but I know that
calls can take ages, geological ones." A bit of hyperbole seems to be
completely in order to describe her phone habits.

"I hoped that we still had some time together before you leave." she says
with an only slightly disguised reproach in her voice.

"Well, then call later, or during the drive there. I don't have unlimited
time to get there, you see?" you offer a compromise. You do not dare to
suggest to her to take anything she needs for voicecalls and throw it into
the garbage bin even though you seriously want to and have been wanting to
do so for as long as you know what phonecalls are.

"Okay," she still sounds a bit disappointed.

She does exactly what you think she would do: after programming the
destination into the car, she starts calling someone and spends the entire
time to speak with someone who is not present. You feel left out, you have
no idea what she is doing even though she is sitting next to you. It is
something you cannot stand, especially since your mother, in her hypocrisy
does not like you call someone when she wants to talk to you.

Eventually, you arrive at the airport. The car stops and you leave, you
shout a "Good bye, and I will miss you too!" to her, loud enough that her
conversation partner will hear it as well despite the noise cancelling. She
has the good grace to blush, put the organizer away from her ear and shouts
"Good bye! Fare well!" to you.

You step out of the rain and into the airport. Immediately, a cacophony of
noises assaults your ears. It reminds you of a very busy train station, just
without any way to reach the platforms except when going through an
extensive security screening and stripping completely. Merchants and stores
offer their wares, screens display some kind of information, others
advertisements in English and other languages except German. You attempt to
navigate through the crowds to the check-in counter of the correct airline.
The crowds remind you off December the 24th on the biggest shopping streets
of the country, you cannot even breathe freely anymore. The layout of the
thing is really confusing but eventually, you manage to get from an
unorganized crowd which pushes into all directions into an organized queue.
The people in front of you smell of perfume and are wearing thick clothes
for the cold weather in Moscow. They are dressed much more formally than
you, and somehow, they look as if they are either managers or criminals or
both.

After your luggage is checked in by a disinterested looking woman or
humanoid looking robot, you have to pass through the security screening.
Mira told you that this would be the most scary thing during your entire
travels. You know that these people suspect that everyone is a terrorist,
a smuggler and an idiot. The latter might even be true, seeing that you
voluntarily decide to fly despite them. Or decide to go on a journey like
yours despite knowing that it would mean to fly and to go through this.

The queue there is really long, but you spent the time writing, not even for
Mira but on another fanfiction which you suddenly had an idea for while in
the crowd. Eventually you are allowed through a seemingly massive door and
into the actual screening area.

As it closes behind you, you notice a strange smell, it is unpleasant and
even though you cannot place it, you have the feeling that you should stay
clear of its source. The tiny room is completely empty except for a small
slot. on the wall on the opposite side. The light is bright and makes it
easy to see the seemingly ubiquitous dirt. As you look around, a voice calls
from an invisible source. "Please undress here and throw your clothes down
the slot." An arrow pointing down to the slot appears and flashes in a all
colors of the rainbow. You feel extremely uncomfortable doing so since the
light emphasizes every imperfection of your body. 

"Is this really neccessary?" you ask. 

The voice just repeats its command with the same tone and the same
inflection. The fact that it is a recording calms you only a little. You
follow the command with nervous hands and shaing fingers. You constantly
think that you might be watched, observed by something or even someone which
is not benevolent. It feels to you as if the system behind it is really 
malevolent and wants to embarrass you in the strangest way possible.
Eventually, you are completely naked and have put everything you wore and
you had in your hands in the slot. You cover your shame and wait for
whatever happens next. For a while, nothing happens. You hear nothing, you
see nothing and you start to get annoyed about this delay. You shout: "Hey,
what's going on here?" to no one in particular. The voice repeats its
command and the arrow repeats its flashing. "I have!" you shout, followed by
an expletive. The voice repeats its statement and while you cannot do
anything while covering yourself, you have the urge to smash something to
pieces. Preferably the face of whoever came up with this system. You feel as
if the walls were closing in on you, as if this thing trapped you and you
would never get out. Your heart races in a mixture of anger and fear. You
ust want to leave, like a stereotypical comic book monster to smash the
walls to pieces and to run out, leaving a trail of destruction behind you.
The air seems to become thicker, suffocating you. You suddenly feel as if
you would die here. As the voice repeats its command again, you flip. You
turn around and flip the bird to the perceived location of the sound. A
noise from behind you is heard. You turn around with a quick, angry
movement and see that the door opened. You hurry through, your hands barely
covering the parts of your body you want to be covered. Apparently you made
it through this stage of the security check.

The room you enter now, is again brightly lit and small, but it contains a
person in uniform. You almost fail to see her and barely avoid tackling her
and throwing her to the ground. She greets you with an icy voice: "Hello,
Miss Lanikesch. Let me ask a few questions."  

"Can I have something to cover myself?" you ask meekly.

"No, you are not allowed to do that before we have established that you are
not a security risk." she says. You notice that she is overweight, not just
a little but a lot and has a strong smell: cheap perfume mixed with a strong
body odour. Her hair is kept in shape with more hair gel than strictly
necessary.

"Then go ahead!" you almost spit out. Helplessness with anger and a dash of
fear is a bad combination.

She starts to ask you a series of meaningless questions to which no sane
person would say yes. Like whether you are a terrorist, an enemy of the
government, a member of a forbidden political organisation and so on. You
know better than to youke about this, but you do have the strong urge to
tell them that you indeed are an anti-neo-communist terrorist and plan to
blow up the Kreml just to see how this person will react. After what seems
to be an eternity, you are allowed to pass. You are not allowed to cover
yourself just yet. The person does not tell you when you are allowed to do
that. She does not answer any of your questions at all. It is as if you do
not exist in the moments when she is not asking you questions. If it was not
for the body odour, you would be sure that it was a robot in humanoid shape
of the kind which become more and more common in the service sector.