Jing and Zo led the errant priest to the data terminal where they had witnessed the hack in progress. The data spool was still in place and hadn’t been re-wound yet. Even with the all the analytical engine mainframes down, electricity still fed into the complex from the windmills and the nearby river, stopped-up by a hydro-electric dam. The terminal couldn’t connect with the engines in its current state, but it could display the data that was recorded onto the spool. Zo pulled down one lever to re-wind the roll of punch paper and pushed it to stop, and then hit a button to play the data.

Ikaya grabbed the cable that connected the monitor to the the keyboard, the telegraph key, and the engine when the day’s data come on. He had Zo fast-forward the roll to the point when the mysterious access happened. He had clearly sensed something before, even if he didn’t say it. When the source with no origin appeared on the screen, it confirmed that there was something more to this than a masked identity. He knew something.

“You’re terrified,” Jing oberved. “That much is clear. Can you tell us what you know?”

“I was about to tell you when you cut me off. Clearly, your hunch was correct. This is the work of psychic. And yes… I know who this is.” Ikaya took a deep breath before continuing. “As I said, we’ve been following this case for some time. There had been a string of engine hacks in some of the major cities – Shusa, Hladdat, Hitonnen, and even Tiago. Your former employer in Tiago was of the companies affected. There have even been people from His Holiness’s office who have been following this rogue for quite some time. And some of them are now dead or have been injured.”

“Couldn’t the gendarmes or some other kind of police apprehend them?”

“We’ve shared as much of our information as we can with the Agency and local police departments. Unfortunately, ordinary people are no match for a Level 7 telepath.”

Ikaya took a few seconds. “Level 7 is the strongest level of psychic power that’s been observed in human beings. Most priests tend to be anywhere from Level 3 to 6. There is unlimited potential in what a Level 7 can do, and those powers must be used responsibly.”

“And what do you know about responsiblity?” Jing asked. It was more a dagger than a question.

“When are you going to let it go? It was seventeen years ago. Mura and I just happened and it works. And how can you kick me when I’m here to help?”

“Just like an Itanese to take whatever he wants,” Zo interjected. “And the priests are no better. I really don’t get you people.”

“Just like a Tanesh to be crass and disrespectful.” Shortly after Ikaya made this remark, Jing grabbed him and pulled him away from the cable. Jing told him, “You can go. I am going to call Shusa and ask for another expert.”

“Someone’s on the way. Probably on a train or dirigible. But they sent me to make the initial assessment.”

“Stick around, go, I don’t care. But I’m calling Shusa. No, I’m not.” Jing paused and told Zo to hook in the telegrapher key’s cable to the outgoing pocket for Shusa. “Please tap out to the Office of His Holiness that I find this agent Ikaya to be unsatisfactory, both in the present and in the past for behavior unbecoming for a priest.”

“You wouldn’t dare! Do you really think they’ll defrock me over something you said?”

“The many faces of the gods! We have a problem here, one that affects many jobs and your precious big city ordinators. As you said, this culprit has cost the lives of some of your colleagues, and all you can think about is saving your own skin. Zo, please tap in what he just said and that nice comment about you. Also, mention that our dear friend Ikaya has harmed me in the past.”

“I’m already on it,” Zo said, tapping out the longs and shorts. The engines were down, but the telegraph system still worked. Jing pointed to her proudly, “That’s someone who knows how to do their job!”

The beeping of the longs and shorts continued for a few minutes more, and then the message was transmitted. The gendarmes were coming soon and Jing still needed to look at the entry and exit logs for the data library. As for Ikaya, Jing hoped that he’d be professional enough to share what he knew with the Agency police and his fellow priests what he knew about the psychic hacker. As for what lie in store for Ikaya’s priesthood, Jing did not know if it would be the cruel face of Compassion or the kind face of Destruction.

to be continued…

Ikaya, the holy man, nervously looked at Jing and his young apprentice. It had been years since Jing last saw him, when he and his fiancee Mura had seen him to discuss officiating the wedding that never happened. Then the last time he heard the priest’s name was when Mura broke off the engagement, saying that she just could not stop the forces of nature. But she had to tell Jing this while he was working, coding away on an important file. His sojourn in Tiago, which he thought would become something permanent, had ended with a phone call. And this man ,who had stolen what could have been his life, arrived shortly after another one. One did not need to be a telepath to grasp that Jing was seething with anger.

“I’m really sorry,” Ikaya said. “I really am.”

“I don’t care about about your sorry apology. I don’t care about you,” Jing said. “If you can’t help us, then think yourself back to where you came from. The gendarmes are coming and perhaps they’ll do some good.”

“You know they have no idea how to investigate this.”

“Yes, but I can call His Holiness’s office. Perhaps they can send someone else. I’m sure someone can jaunt them in if they can’t do it themselves.”

“I’m here and I can help,” Ikaya pleaded. “When I heard that this had happened in Atosa, I volunteered right away.”

“Clearly you’ve never been interested. Why now?” At times, Jing preferred to be around the machines than he did around people. They were complicated and could make life difficult, but they worked if you understood them. People were complicated and often made life difficult, but one could never understand them. Especially when someone had taken vows for the enlightenment of humanity. That said, Jing was no misanthrope. He had trained and mentored many people over the years, watched them grow personally and professionally, and saw them move on to take on more responsibility. He hoped that he would be able to see Zo through all these things. This man in front of him, though, was irresponsible, even now.

In waiting for an answer, Jing had hoped the priest wouldn’t confirm his feeling. He didn’t like the man, but he hated even more that he disliked the priest, that it had caused him to look at all of them with suspicion many years ago. Others, especially some of the local priests, had helped him regain his trust for the House of Wisdom.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry. My wife too told me to convey her regret when I told her I was coming this way. I knew I could help in this situation, but…”

“Oh, the many of faces of the gods, man! You’re just as self absorbed now as you were back then.” Jing sighed. “There are lots of livelihoods at stake here and all you can think about is how sorry you are.”

“Look, the House of Wisdom has been following this for quite some time. We’ve been tracking this case from Shusa to Hitonnen and then to the northern West Coast. We had some idea that Atosa would get hit sooner of later.”

“And somehow, you’ve never found it fit to give us the memo.” Jing wanted to say much more, especially to tell Ikaya what he could do with himself. The Itanese language was colorful in that way, after all. But there was a young woman present who called him her “work dad” and that made him hold back.

“Some security men from His Holiness’s office have died in the process.”

“Can you help us or not?” Jing cut in. “Save your talk for the gendarmes. We need to check the library.”

“You can show me the way,” Ikaya said, deferring to Jing. “But let’s take a look at the terminal first.”

to be continued…

Jing took the phone and put it back into its holder on the wall. He had called the local temple – there were no high level telepaths there, but they told him they would call the School of Wisdom in Shusa. There may be an expert there or they could find someone to dispatch. They didn’t tell him something he already didn’t know. Supposedly, some of them could teleport. He hoped one of them could simply think themselves over and caught whoever broke into the system.

All he knew was that the fez-heads were coming and they’d be utterly useless. Police always were.

The local police never investigated computational crimes. Neither did the Tribal Affairs officers – they only came to the Engine Complex if there was a crime involving a Tanesh on the grounds. Some agents and uniformed policemen from the Agency would come soon. They weren’t equipped to handle psychic crimes, though.

The phone rang again. It was the office of His Holiness, a man who spoke in crisp Shusa standard told him to wait, that someone would be there soon. The nearest qualified expert was in Tiago, and he’d be over shortly. This was somthing Jing wasn’t too happy to hear as he had left that city many years ago.

Jing had a very good idea of how frequently the trains took to get to the town near the engine complex from Tiago. He also knew roughly how long it would take for a dirigible to fly from the same arrival and destination. It would take a few weeks on train, a week and a half by dirigible. However, that crisp voice, that sounded like an announcer on the wireless, assured him that someone would be there soon.

He put his hand in his hip pocket to grab his keys. He needed to check the data storage library, which itself was the size of an industrial lot warehouse. He needed to check the area for any sign of break-in before the police got there and to see what the entry and exit logs read. He didn’t want to be caught not having read the clipboards in front of the police, especially the fez-heads. Many of them deplored that they were posted out in this “wasteland” full of nothing but “rejects and cows.” Jing had long suspected that many of the federal cops were rejects themselves – they either couldn’t get a desirable post (such as in Hitonnen or Shusa) for whatever reason, or they may have had such a post but were such problems that the Agency chose to sweep them out of civilization’s harm. Them and the Tribal Affairs police, who weren’t much better. Jing had to be ready for any of them.

He tried to send Zo home, saying that it might be dangerous. Zo laughed and said Jing might be the one who needed some protection. Besides, she had seen the hack happen as well, so she was needed as a witness in any case.

Right before Jing and Zo headed down the complex to inspect the library, they were hit with a small burst of air followed by two priests materializing in from of them. After they unclasped each other’s forearms, one of them vanished just as quickly. It took a moment for Jing to recognize the one remaining. It was Ikaya, the holy man.

to be continued…

The oldest city on Ourin is Tlon. This is where all civilizations began. Tlon is where the year, the orbit around the yellow sun, and the millennial year around Mintaka was realized. At the center of the city was the Stone of Memory, a twenty odd foot megalith believed to sentient but also the source of human telepathy and gifts. And it was long held that the Stone of Memory drew humanity to it. First they built Tlon around the Stone and then branched out to build other cities and mark spots of power with stones and cairns. Of all the sacred places in the world, the Stone of Memory was the most powerful and pilgrims throughout history constantly came to Tlon to visit it.

For seventeen millennia, Tlon was the center of empires, the source of culture, and the root of religion and philosophy. The cultivation of human gifts centered around it and the School of Wisdom grew in response. Before the School with its emphasis on using knowledge and the gifts as means for enlightenment, the shamans interacted with and interpreted the Stone of Memory. The School absorbed the shamans and then gave the world astronomy, history, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, and much of the early sciences. The earliest known universities on Ourin were affiliated with the School of Wisdom. The Wisdom priests also studied the gifts much more systematically than the shamans ever did, and they refined the practice of the powers. While the shamans were capable of healing illnesses or opening portals to other worlds, the Wisdom priests applied much more focus to the application of these extraordinary acts. Through much practice, they wrote down the hows of psychic healing along with their body of medical science. Frequently going through the doorways to other worlds, the Priests developed a coordinate system which enabled them to travel to the other worlds with the help of the Stone of Memory or the other sacred places. The School of Wisdom would become one of Tlon’s most enduring institutions, operating in one form or another when kingdoms came and went, when Tlon was destroyed and later resurrected, and when the republics rose as modern nations, only to become obsolete themselves.  The School of Wisdom would shape not just the culture of Tlon but those of all the kingdoms, empires, republics, democracies, and even civilizations with systems that defied conventional understanding.

Writing and poetic expression have been a part of Tlon for eighteen millennia before its destruction. The Tlonite writing system became that of the Sutanese Empire, then the Kingdom of Itan, and later the standard written language of the United Republic of Itan and Sutan. The script also spread to other nations, thus becoming known as Universal. The Universal script consisted of thousands of ideograms and characters, much like Chinese, with a few thousand for common and practical use. Alphabets have come and gone with many of cultures on Ourin, but even with its inconvenience, Universal was adopted as the mutually intelligible medium. Many felt there was an elegance and a conciseness to the characters, that meaning was more immediately conveyed than if the word was represented with several phonemes and letters. To read poetry in Universal was to experience its meaning. A traditional art form was the calligram, which takes the lines of poems and arrange the characters in a visual way. One was to arrange the lines to form a picture, while the second variation resembled a crossword puzzle. Poems told stories, expressed thoughts and feelings, and were even composed by some Wisdom priests and practitioners as a form of meditation. Poetry and Universal script, like the School of Wisdom, were also enduring Tlonite institutions.

The Principle of Poetics, an ancient philosophical document from the Third Millenium, influenced epic and narrative poetry, drama, and later the novel. The novel, as an Itanese literary form, was long held in low regard for a few millennia, despite its success with the general public from the mid-19th millennium to the early 21st millennia. Even though the forms of story telling in late 20th millenium cinema and television dramas often operated on the basis of the Principles, they were often viewed with more disdain than the novel. Much of Itan’s cultural innovations were treated with contempt, especially by Itanese culture snobs.

Over 18 millennia (and a few thousand years of unrecorded history), Tlon had evolved from an agricultural village to a rough, Mycenean-like kingdom to to a culture that was just beginning to discover fine engineering on the level of European cities during the Renaissaance. By the late 17th millenium, the printing press was refined and perfected, with printer shops resembling libraries with shelves and shelves of movable type. The Wisdom temples contained gigantic pipe organs where songs were played to aid meditation. While they perfected their centuries-old technology, Tlon and other cities in the Sutanese empire were starting their Industrial revolution with cog-and-wheel mills and factories. And craftsmen built clockwork automata to entertain the Tlonite court. At the height of its cultural and technological development, Tlon would be destroyed. Though some historians would describe Tlon of that period as decadent and in decline.

An event that would lead to Tlon’s destruction was the uprising of the Itanese tribes. General Chanen, a tribal chieftan’s son and a one-time slave of the Sutanese empire, united the tribes and fought back against the oppresion of the Sutanese. As highly developed as the Tlonite culture was in Sutan, the Sutanese and the Tlonites had little regard for the barbarians of the north. The Itanese were primitive tribes that engaged in their petty wars and raids against each other for millennia and only became a bother when they started to raid the frontiers of the Empire. Conquering them and teaching them civilization seemed to be the only reasonable solution. Except that the tribes that once freely roamed the Atosa plains, the northern mountain ranges, and the northeastern coastal area found themselves less than even second-class citizens, slaves and people who needed to be kept in line with racism, division, and the demeaning of their millennia old ways. Though they could hardly tolerate each other, they all found unity under the guidance of General Chanen.

First, Chanen broke down the defenses of the frontier and advanced to the Sutanese vassel kingdoms and prinicpalities, conquering most of Sutan. When he reached Hladdat, the most important kingdom under the Sutanese Empire, he was recognized by the oracle Xochitl as the Great Destroyer-Preserver long prophesied as Harbinger of the Destruction of Tlon and the ultimate preserver of Tlonite culture. Surprised that the oracle did not fear him, Chanen asked her how he can make his empire great, and she said to adopt the Tlonite institutions for Itan, to use the culture of the newly conquered as the basis for his own. Given that he had sent an invasion force to Tlon, he planned to over see the conquest. However, Xochitl counseled him to stay in Hladdat, to assemble the the nobles, the magistrates, and the lawyers, and to work out a treaty and covenants.

The royal family of Tlon, knowing that the barbarians were soon coming, The king and queen sent their children and related nobles out of the city to take their citizens to safety, but they would remain with the soldiers defending their ancient city. But the Stone of Memory had other plans for the young Princess Aresh, one of the most gifted people to ever live. The Stone had her use her powes to blast and level the great city of Tlon, killing everyone – the king, the queen, the Tlonite solidiers, the invading Itanese army, and the few Tlonites who remained in the city. Only the Stone of Memory was left standing. Tlon would not be conquered.

As for Aresh, she vanished. In the year 19962, a girl in early adolescence was found near the ruins of Tlon. She wore people of that era would describe as a medieval caftan and she spoke in an archaic dialect. Some believed she was Aresh of Tlon thrown through time, but there was no way to verify it. She had no memory of how she got there. No one bothered with DNA tests. The remains of Aresh’s older sister, Lady Ynesh, lay in the cold glacial country of Tchon, where she and her company had fled to from the Itanese.

After the destruction of Tlon, the surviving Tlonites would scattered all over the world. Some settled in the former vassal cities of Sutan, others helped build the new cities of Itan, some joined the Ndanthans in their sea trade voyages, and some even went across the vast eastern ocean to Alys and some of its neighboring countries. Xochitl had given Chanen the prophecy that the children of Tlon would some day return to rebuild the city. With that, Chanen had a covenant written, stating that when Tlon would be rebuilt when the Tlonites returned. Naturally, Chanen’s answer was publicly stated when some Sutanese nobles asked if they could rebuild their former capital.

The Tlonites have remained in diaspora up to the late 20th millennium. And Tlon will rise again.

This year, I decided to do Comic-Con right. I was on it when tickets went on sale. I bought the four day pass, and I got to go to Preview Night, which is a perk that only came with tickets like mine, not the one day passes or the ones that were comped. My feeling like I had access to something exclusive was short-lived, as there were lots of holders of passes good from Wednesday to Sunday, like mine. I suddenly found myself a dime a dozen and even occasionally getting pushed and shoved like I would on any other day, especially Saturday, the most busiest day of Comic-Con. The lines for some things, such as experiencing the space travel pods in the Aliens franchise were ridiculously long and the queue management was just as bizarre and confusing. I got to experience the usual oooh’s and aah’s of all the displays and exhibits coupled with sprinklings of people who just did not know how to walk in a crowd. The benefit of this Preview Night was for me to get the exhibitor’s floor out of my system so I can go to the events and enjoy them the rest of the week.

One really positive thing was that I got to meet one of my Twitter friends, James Hicks, who turns out to be a mutual friend of someone I’ve known for a long time. The other Twitter friends I followed on my handy, cell phone service-free iPhone (which is now a glorified iPod with a camera). If you need to switch off your 3G or 4G signals, or if you have a laptop, there are a few WIFI signals that can be freely accessed.

I’ve taken a few pictures. Thursday through Saturday should promise some costumes for sure. For today, I plan to attend some panels, including one with Charlaine Harris, whose books are the basis for True Blood. Also, there’ll be an American sneak peak at the new Doctor Who season finale and the second season premier of Being Human.

Tron is big this Comic-Con, the sequel coming thirty years later.

A replica of the rider and motorcycle in the coming Tron: Legacy.

No Comic-Con is complete without a means to exterminate “members’” bank accounts, like getting people to buy a red Dalek.

Cute overload has insidiously infiltrated Comic-Con over the years.

I’ve never seen someone ride a unicycle around the premises like this. There’s no oooh’s or aaah’s about it. He came close to running some people over.

And this should give some idea of how crowded it was. As for some people, it really wasn’t that necessary to be aggressive.

And for the $1 millon question: Where is SyFy? I didn’t see them at Comic-Con this year.

Coming to the 11th episode in the U.S. broadcast, Steven Moffat’s attempt to present Doctor Who as a dark fairy tale has been very effective. The writing’s been more literate, allowing for moments of classic cheesiness. Gone is the emphasis on modern London and London girls, very Americanized pacing, and a gritty TARDIS. Like the previous interior, the TARDIS looks put together from various parts from different eras, but not with the component’s traditional functions. However, the inside of the TARDIS is a bright, vibrant collage, showing that this is how it prefers to look like. The Daleks too now come in several solid colors, striking me as the Creuset Pots in a long line of the Doctor’s most dangerous enemies. They haven’t been put to much use yet, but they certainly scared me in their return to the genetically purer line of Daleks. In the 10th Doctor series, they devolved to being the comic relief, which meant good riddance when the Doctor’s clone decided to wipe them all out in genocide. While Moffat’s backed away from London as a major setting, he’s stuck to tradition with the companion, but only so much. Amy’s the Scottish girl in an English village, which makes her as much as an outsider as the Doctor. And the complicated temporal drama of River Song should yield some interesting results in the future.

My least favorite concept on the show was the Starship UK (though I enjoyed the episode) and the Atraxi in the first episode were downright silly. The eye was the most effective when it was peering through the crack.

The Doctor is in tonight to solve another mystery of the crack that is definitely whack when it comes to time. The BBC America website promises a view of him in a bath towel. As long as I don’t have to watch him eat toast.

Date: 19.4.150.8

In the early Winter of Year 19, the mainframes of Shusa, Atosa, Hitonen, and Hladdat were attacked. The gigantic warehouse-sized buildings filled with analytical engines, or ordinators, were the pride of the cities, especially of the governments, research institutions, and corporations. Information; processed with an infinite amount of rods, cogs, and wheels along with an army of coders and spools upon spools of data; was not cheap.

Very few people had the tools to access the mainframes by remote. With a keyboard, an elegantly clunky monitor, and a cable attached to the engine lines, a coder could transmit and read sheets of data with ease, though the upload/download speeds would be excruciatingly slow by late Year 20 standards.

The telegraph was a more common way of transmitting data to the engines. Telegraph operators, more ubquitous than coders, were often hired to upload the coder-written data. The executive decision makers of the engines often found it cheaper to outsource to telegraph firms. As a result, some operators became as competent as the best coders.

The heist of data, from time to time, became a serious problem. Telegraph operators were often suspects. Rogue coders or those from competing engines were more truly to blame, though they were more difficult to find.

The honor code of the coders complicated things even more for law enforcement officers who tried to pursue these crimes of the wire. No coder would ever accuse or testify against another, regardless of affiliation.

In Shusa, the mainframes, especially in Downtown and the South-Eastern Quadrant, were used by the Itanese government, military, and banks. In large, metropolitan cities like Hitonen and Hladdat, banks shared them with industry in the industrial districts. Out in the interior plains of Atosa, close the reservations of the non-aligned ‘Tanesh tribes, a compund of ordinators served as a cyberspace factory, provding data for public consumption throughout Itan. One could subscribe to information services and download them from remote access terminals. Also, any person or business who needed to rent engine service could from the Atosa compound.

When the engines were attacked, the operators and the coders were rounded up as it was the most amount of heists to occur as long as ordinators have been in existence, which was half a season or 120 Terran years.

Nothing could be traced back to the telegraph companies. The coders suprisingly cooperated with the investigation, which yielded nothing.

The real culprit was a rogue priest who was once served as the National House of Wisdom’s ordinator specialist and liaison to the mainframes of Shusa. He could code with the best of them, and he was a Level 7 telepath.

He had managed to extract information from his telepathic heists and then disabled the engines afterwards. He visualized a wire that took him right to the ordinators and saw the cogs, wheels, and rods turn with data. The Shusa mainframes were easy—he was familiar with them, afterall. The finance engines of Hirtonen and Hladdat were difficult, but the art of the crime is seductive in any era. The ultimate challenge lie in the great engine compound of Atosa.

Where the official channels failed, the School of Wisdom caught up with their prodigal priest, but with some difficulties in the pursuit. The Evek’s chief of security was badly demolished beyond coherence in Hladdat. One of the Wisdom operatives was crushed to death in a chambered cairn (which was larger on the inside) when the rogue broke the dimensional transcendence that was created 10 Years (or 10 Terran millenia) ago. A Level 7 master finally caught heister at the Atosa compund, barely surviving the conrontation.

The Evek created a dimensionally transcendent sphere the size of a soccer ball and had the apostate imprisoned inside. Inside, all his needs would be provided for as he’d spend the rest of his natural life there. A psychic damper would prevent him from telepathic activity of any kind. His Holiness then gathered the priests in the garden of the National House of Wisdom and they teleported the sphere to orbit the world.

The School of Wisdom covered up the heist from public knowledge, lest anyone should try it again. And the sphere’s orbit decayed in 50 Decades (about 52 Terran years) and crashed into the collapsed cairn, leaving a gigantic crater. The site has been avoided by pilgrims since.

Kumo often focused on something related to the network. Sometimes she would use a wireless signal in a library or café, other times she would touch a computer or hold a network cable. The physical object itself was not enough for her mind to log onto the network and acess information from a computer. She visualized the connection, the safe with the combination, and the listening tools she would use to ascertain the password. Sometimes the password prompt would appear as a sentry and she would somehow read the person’s expression and figure out the password. Othertimes, she would see a lock and create a key from thin air to fit the keyhole. Kumo was very good at mentally matching lock with key.

Once inside, the file directory would often have many different virtual manifestations. Some servers resembled the great ancient libraries of Tlon and accessing a file meant taking a scroll or a codex off the shelf. Some resembled more modern libraries in appearance with books offering the information. Most directories, however, were incredibly boring and all that Kumo would see were infinite numbers of file cabinets with files in manila folders. Some were fine with deep, dark wood cabinets from early Year 20, while a majority of them had cheap, metal ones, sadly institutional in late Year 20. All this was how her  mind chose to see things, but the visualization often reflected the institutional philosophy of the server she would hack into.

The Home Office server had white walls going down the hallway and a military uniformed guard in front of the entrance. For extra security, there was a computer console to scan the hand of whoever requested entrance and run the information against other existing information. A computer within a computer – how imaginative. This is what she would do – disable the guard and hack the console. Actually, she didn’t even have to go that extreme. She would assume the form of the Home Secretary and replicate her handprint. Kumo had found met her once before and shook hands, so she had the pattern of the lines of the Secretary stored in her mind. All she had to do is imagine the lines and they would appear on her hands. She smiled at the guard and placed her hand on the glass. She was cleared to go in.

It was a goldmine. Not literally, but she certainly felt like she had found the vein of gold. There were filing cabinets and bookshelves and magazine racks. With the variety of materials – books, magazines, newspapers, microfilms, microfiche, and manila file folders, everything was neatly organized on gun-metal shelves and cabinets with a military austerity. Information on Itanese military bases foreign and domestic, naval ships and ports, weapons, military contractors, allies, enemies, and even neutral nations and tribes. Even better were the information on personnel, security clearances, politically linked activities, and best of all, spies – who the  Itanese had spying abroad and who was spying on Itan. Many nations, tribes, and foreign political and terrorist cells would all pay handsomely for the information. She did not doubt that, but she was also doing this for the art of it. The Home Office’s server was a difficult target and she got in. Now she had to get out.

In the virtual realm, she found a way to make her handbag dimensionally transcendent – that is, it was larger on the inside than it was on the outside. There have been a few legends of Wisdom priests and a few others who have been able to achieve that effect on containers, buildings, and vessels, and that was her inspiration. Whenever she placed an item in the bag, it downloaded, and she had lots to download. In the space of a minute, she had the entire contents in her bag and she walked out. She teleported out of the hallway and it would be moments when the server itself would register that her entry was not authorized.

She opened her eyes, placed her hand on a data storage device, and visualized her handbag going in, and then saved. She put the storage device in her purse and she was ready to set up a meeting with the highest bidder.

In the Temple of the Muse, which was at the west end of the Mall and faced it in an eastward direction, Kumo had come early in the morning to get inspiration from the Nine-Personed Goddess. It was still dark, a few hours before the tourists, eager with their cameras, would come and crowd the large statue, hoping to get inspiration and a picture with her at the same time. The sun would rise soon and those few hardy souls, when the Temple was at its most beautiful, would be soon come to the Temple when it was bathed in the golden sunlight and reflected the pinkness of the morning sky. Kumo preferred to see the Muse at daybreak, but this was the time when she would have the Goddess to herself, before the devotees and then the tourists would take up her time.

She meditatively walked in a slow pace around the statue, occasionally looking up to one of the Muse’s nine faces. Each face represented a different art, a different aspect of the Muse, but one did not show deference to one countenance or the other when at the Temple. Each was part of the same source of inspiration, so it was only proper to acknowledge each one. One never knew as help could come from the most unexpected aspect or manifestation of the Muse. She just had to be open to hearing any of them.

After pacing nine times around the statue, Kumo sat down on the steps, where she could see the pool, the Mall, and most of Shusa. She took out a wirebound book of calligramme paper from her portfolio bag and then fumbled for a pencil. Once she had the pencil in her hand, she opened up the book and found a blank page. She wrote down the names of institutions and how she would hack their computers, and then she ripped out what she had down. Looking at a blank grid, Kumo looked at it to see which shape or pattern would come to her. After a few minutes of gazing at the paper, Kumo saw a tree and arranged her words as such. She arranged the words in the shape of those white blossomed trees that line the River and closed her book when she was finished. The sun was finally rising and those early morning pilgrims were starting to come in, one by one. Kumo had had her audience with the Muse, now she was going to enjoy the sunrise before getting on with her day and what she had to do.

Hlau was in the Evek’s office when they were going over the intelligence they got from the Agency of Investigation. The Agency had called them because they needed consultants on a string of computer hacks, all of which were virtually untraceable to any device. The Agency’s computer experts had gone over the evidence they had available and they could not find anything that would identify a computer or a particular user. Without any real evidence, the Agency had come to the conclusion that this series of events was of a psychic nature, which is where priests from the School of Wisdom could help.

            The Evek got up from his desk and walked up to a red-stained teak filing cabinet, and placed his hand at the handle of the top drawer for a few seconds and then opened it. He took out a book-sized box and brought it to the desk and sat down. He drew his finger along the line created by the lid and the lower part of the box and opened it. Hlau knew that the Evek had just unlocked a psychic lock on both the cabinet and the box. The Evek then took a folded piece of paper from the box, unfolded it, and said, “I think you’re ready to see this.”

            Hlau took the piece of paper and looked at it. There were many characters on the paper, scrambled beyond intelligibility with numbers, punctuations, and special symbols thrown in throw off any code breaker. Radicals came together to form nonsense words and foundational characters were broken apart from their strokes. They were arranged without any pattern, a chaos only achievable by the most artistic of cryptographers. Hlau creased his brow and asked, “I’m ready to see this?”

            “Allow me,” the Evek said, putting his hand over the paper. The ideograms danced and swirled with radicals breaking away from their old groupings into new ones, and the numbers and symbols flashing and changing shape until the text coalesced into something more recognizable as writing. Hlau recognized the handwriting but not the words. There were names and locations hastily written down in Universal. Also, there were words such as:

PSYCHIC

EXPERIMENT

LEVEL SEVEN

Below the lower half of the paper, in progressively worsening penmanship, he wrote:

SEEK SANCTUARY AT THE SCHOOL OF WISDOM

Right at the bottom of the paper were two characters childishly scrawled in Phonic:

SA NA.

Without the Universal ideograms for the word (or words), sana could mean almost anything in Itanese. Depending on the pronunciation and the characters assigned, sana could mean fish, forest, high sun, sea shore, or twelve other words. The were the meanings of sana native rooted in ancient Itanese and then there were the loan words from Sutanese, Lthana, and Alysian. It was also a common prefix or suffix in many Itanese names. Geographically, there were many places with sana at the beginning or ending of the word such as rivers, fjords, and even some villages and cities. Sana could be anything, anyone, or anywhere.

Hlau looked at the names. There were seven, including his own:

HIGASHI

KUMO

UME

AKIRA

TOKAGE

SHIRO

HLAU

All of the names except his meant nothing to him at the moment. He could only assume at the moment they were people he once knew, decades ago when he was someone else with memories he no longer had. He continued to look up and down at the paper until he saw, right below LEVEL SEVEN:

DEMIURGE

Hlau immediately became nauseous and felt the need to flee. He threw the paper down on the desk and nearly bolted from the door, but heard the Evek calmly ask him to tell him why something brought out a reaction in him.

After taking a few breaths, Hlau said, “I’m not sure. I’ve come across this word many times in studying about religion and history. I don’t understand why the name of a creator deity makes me panic right now.”

“Perhaps seeing it in your handwriting has triggered something,” the Evek offered. “Do you remember anything specific?”

“No, but seeing how I scribbled it does.” Hlau pointed to the DEMIURGE, which was quickly written down like the other words, in the panic of trying to remember something. From what he was able to put together from his sessions with the healer, the moment in which he tried to write all this information down must have been painfully horrifying, knowing that all his memory was being destroyed, not being able to remember anything, and trying to write down information that was important, even when he couldn’t be sure that it mattered. He had no memory of arriving at the National House of Wisdom, only what the healer, the Evek, and a few others told him of the incident. He didn’t even remember anything else of his life before – his time in the Agency, attending Chanen University, or even attending the private school on the House of Wisdom’s grounds. Everything he knew about himself at the moment was from other sources – records, information on the networks, and the recollection of others.

“You and I have talked about this several times before, when you first came here. What happened to you is what we all read about in our studies but hope to never witness.  The healer diagnosed what happened to you as a psychic demolition, that is, someone did this to you. There are many techniques to modify someone’s memory, but this one was brutal. I saw you lose your mind and mentally disintegrate and the whole time you were aware of what was happening.”

“Could the healer have stopped this?”

“Possibly, but there was the risk that he could have contracted the demolition. Kind of like how a computer could contract a virus program from another computer. Or, his intervention could have simply arrested the process and made your condition worse, like abruptly moving a severely injured patient.”

Hlau felt angry for a moment. A healer on a daily basis confronted all kinds of illnesses, major and minor. That the healer wasn’t willing to try to save him from the demolition made Hlau wonder if the wasn’t willing to do anything to stop the suffering. He didn’t remember any of it, so he didn’t know what the healer did to make him comfortable before all his previous life was gone for good. He took a breath and asked, “What if the driver took me to the hospital?”

“There wasn’t much they could do. Most likely, the doctor might have had you sedated while they figured out what was happening to you and you could be comatose as a result. We had to let this ride itself out.” The Evek paused for a few seconds, paced by the bookshelf, and asked, “If you could have things turn out differently, would you?”

Now it was Hlau’s turn to pause before speaking. He had thought of this many times, much more than he was willing to admit in any meeting or spiritual advising session with the Evek. He had often felt as if his previous life was stolen from him. He lost those days, months, decades in the line of duty to Agency and he didn’t even know what for. From what he knew from seeing his service record and talking to a few former colleagues, he was brash and extremely eager to prove himself as a young agent. That he was one of many Shusa-based agents who grew up as a political brat wasn’t too unusual, but it explained how many of his peers and even his superiors viewed him as entitled. His father had long represented Hladdat in Parliament and his mother an influential advisor to the Secretary of State. From what he had been able to gather from his former Agency colleagues and his parents, he often talked about his aspirations to become the Director of the Agency and then the Home Secretary. Whether he would actually go down the career path his younger self laid out, he would never know, but he knew it got cut short somewhere. There was a significant portion of his record he didn’t have access to, at least three decades (or 28 months) worth. Apparently, he got involved in a top secret project he no longer had access to. If he had never lost his memory, would he have ever left his Agecny career and his life of privilege to devote his life to service with the House of Wisdom. That he did not know.

“You don’t need to answer that right now,” the Evek said. “I’ve seen reflection on a lifetime you no longer know in your eyes. You’re not completely mind-mute, you know.”

Hlau knew his mind-deafness, his inability to hear thoughts or pick up a telepathic conversation with others, was a result of what caused his memory loss. He was not able to engage in psychokinesis or do the type of magic he has witnessed other priests do with their minds. If he was gifted towards a certain ability, he did not know. He had long assumed that he wasn’t able to send thoughts or have others read his. This was the first time he heard about this from the Evek. “What are you hearing from me?”

“I am hearing your thoughts, but it’s like a very weak radio signal. Most of the time, I can barely make out what you are thinking, but if I fine tune my mental antenna, I can pick up your broadcast much better. I get a very good idea what you’re thinking, but your actual emotional state is something I get a clearer picture of,” the Evek explained. “Most telepaths would barely hear you, perhaps even dismiss it as their imagination if they did.”

The Evek walked over to a shelf where he kept his calligraphy equipment, grabbed a sheet of grid paper, and returned to his desk. He handed the paper to Hlau and said, “I want you to take this list and make a calligramme out if it. Take the words and arrange them in any pattern you see fit.”

The calligramme was a traditional art form where the poet, artist, or scribe would take a poem and arrange the words or lines into a visual image. Any configuration was possible, the only limit being the calligrapher’s imagination. Quill pens or brushes, and ink were used to make the calligramme in its final form, but one often worked out the design on a grid with a pencil. Many calligrammes found their way into the canon of fine art and were on display in many museums. A poem rendered with a masterful hand became an object of beauty. The juxtaposition of the words and lines and the strokes of the pens or brush greatly contributed to a work’s aesthetic value. In recent times, the calligramme became a very popular creative exercise. Also, priests and counselors used the calligramme as a tool for opening the mind to conceive new possibilities.

Hlau understood the Evek’s intentions, but his practical mind saw it as a waste of his time. There was an investigation he was consultant to and there were the obligations he had to the Evek and the School of Wisdom. He felt there were better uses of his time.

The Evek looked at him and said, “I know what you’re thinking right now. Don’t apologize. However, I do see value in this small assignment I’m giving you. If you are to help with the investigation at hand and solve the mystery of this list, you need to see things in a new way.”

“And making pictures while there’s a dangerous hacker at large is going to help?”

“Definitely. You can’t always catch a psychic criminal with pragmatism alone.” The Evek paused a moment before continuing. “Think of it as a reverse crossword puzzle. You have the words before you, but you need to find the clues that define them.”

Even though Hlau was still reluctant to engage in this this exercise, he knew that only he could solve the puzzle. Every thing on the list was something he tried to remember at that moment, things he thought were crucial. Now he had no clue what these things meant. There were names, but who were they? Places, but why? And where did san na come in? If he had only been able to write this last part down in Universal instead of Phonic, he might have had some idea. He had always trusted the Evek and he would have to trust him on this idea. He took the paper, thanked the Evek for seeing him, and walked out of the Evek’s office, which was larger on the inside than it was on the outside.