From: gujn@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Jeremy Nelson)
Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
Subject: [Z] Travails.
Date: 13 Sep 1992 22:46:00 +0800
Organization: The University of Westrn Australia
NNTP-Posting-Host: uniwa.uwa.edu.au

ADMIN:  This is a lead up for Zia's death watch... sort off.  When Zia
	last appeared she was close to death then funny things happened
	and well,.. it got postponed.  This is what happened, and is
	happening... 
	And when Sage, and Raelf and Kadrys are free (All of whom are
	busy, RL or Inn) this gets wrapped up.  Meanwhile.


Kotetsu arched her back carefully and listened to the gentle cracking
sounds of her stiff back.  Around her the office was silent except for
the eternal hum of the air conditioning and everlasting drone of the
wind outside.

In front of her the screen dimmed at her mental command... she didn't
use it anyway, but people would disturb her, even this late at night, if
they didn't have some form of indication she was working.  Besides which,
she quite enjoyed generating abstract patterns and then seriously
exaplaining how it represented the Companies group earnings through sale
of canteen equipment to subsidiary corporations.

Of course sometimes it was true.

Very gently she disengaged herself from the computer.  The metal strip
of contacts which ran down her back were tough, but it served to be
careful, they where her income and lifeline.  That done she lifted
herself across to her wheelchair and steered it over to a window.

Outside a small protion of the mining operation could be seen.  Even at
this late hour, automated machinery still worked to clear the mine face.
Above the huge trucks and equipmentshe could see the occasional sign of
the energy beams lancing down through the atmosphere.  Not safe, or even
terrible viable on heavily populated planets, but here on this barren
planet they were an economical way to run heavy equipment.

Kotetsu remebered reading somewhere that they were banned on life
bearing planets because many of the gliding avian populations tried to
use the heat beams as thermals and were instantly vapourized...

Kotetsu smiled in the dark and stretched again.  Not much more work and
she would be finished with this mine site, and this was the last stop
before summarising and final presentation.  Briefly she
wondered what her next job would be... hopefully something in space.
She had heard on the grapevine that Xerox Space was due for an overhaul.
After this job she figured that she might be able to push for that...

---

Later that night as she slept she dreamt...

Below her spreads a vast map of interconnecting lines and symbols,
bright and glowing like a movie scene but something else, something
sinister is behind it.  She knows that it has trapped her, and to escape
she must understand it but the complexity...  it stretches to infinity,
glowing lines, triangles and circles...

How can she understand this?  Even as she thinks this she notices a
pattern, there and there, repeated, wait, repeated all the way to
infinity!  And here, a generalized pattern which, in a digital network
would be a simple gate, but in this context it is...

In ever increasing circles she remembers how she understands, how simple,
how elegant, how to answer the question...

---

With a start she awakes and looks around in panic.  She hasn't dreamt
like that in so long, why now?

In the dark, still groggy from her dreams, in a confused fog the air
seems to be thick and the darkness a smothering pillow.  Fright and
confusion, panting and hot the blankets weigh her down and with no legs
she can't kick them off as the water closes over her head, and weights
pull her down and she can't swim Oh God!  she can't swim Why did she go
in the water if she can't swim?  in this hot stinking water that gathers
round her head and into her lugs as she drowns in the smothering dark.

Red light flashes and reality comes back.

Kotetsu sits up in the dark as the red lights on the door lock flash.
Her head is still groggy but now she is awake.  The air IS thick, the
air conditioning is not working properly and she is not nrreathing
enough oxygen... she slides to the side of her bed and lowers herself to
the floor breathing off the colder but only slightly fresher air at floor
level.

Quickly she pulls herslef to the door and punches the controls, but no
response.  Already the walls seem to be closing in and her throat
choking the dark pushing down her neck... she reaches for the lights but
they do not repsond to her increasingly desperate attempts to turn them
on.

'Be rational Koti, be rational.', the sound helps she realizes, it makes
her realize she is awake.  Kotetsu laughs and the darkness retreats to
fantasy.

Thinking quickly, almost desperately relieved to be awake, finally, she
pushes at the door... but it will not budge.  Regulations for all
hostile atmospeheres require sleeping quarters to have fail safe doors
which will preserve the internal atmoshpere... Hmm, has the complex been
breached?  No surely not, no sounds woke her, no alarms... then what has
happened?  

Deliberate?  Murder?  Perhaps.  No doubt many have something
to fear when she compiles her final report to the company.  It is hard
to hide from a Computer Investigation, and most especially by someone
like her... a computer jockey of the new age.  Someone who can interface
so closely with computers that using supercomputers to do an audit is
only logical...  shuffling data as natural as catching a ball.

It doesn't matter how fast your computer, how good it's connections, but
if the user can't tell it what to do then it is useless.  So a
connection like hers is only logical.  But so difficult!  Why only ten,
maybe twelve people of all the billions...

And in the darkness she has slumped forward.  With little oxygen to
support her she is half awake, half asleep... 

Outside the airconditioning hums and the wind drones on.
-- 
Jem.  Jeremy Nelson.  gujn@uniwa.uwa.edu.au       :\  =>  :) 
I fear two things: 
That I am not one of the most interesting people in the world... and that I am.