Outtake
Hi.
Yeah, I know. Last person you wanted to see alive. If it’s any consolation, I might not be by now. Maybe I’m dead, maybe payback arrived and you just slept through it.
Doesn’t matter. Put your hatred aside for a moment. You want to hear this.
We’ve picked up a—a hitchhiker. Says it’s Human, says it’s what we turned into a few million years after we shipped out, but there’s no fucking way. I saw it—pieces of it, anyway— over on Araneus. (Oh right, we ran into Araneus the other day. What’s left of her, anyway. What are the odds?) The recorder data’s severely degraded—which is suspicious in its own right, she’s been derelict for less than two million years as far as we can tell— but it shows something coming out of the last gate she built, something that reached for Araneus like a falling man grasping at a branch. It shows something else too, coming out behind it, stretching and snapping back like a rubber band stretched too far.
We tried to leave the fucking thing behind, but it followed us home. Rode the shuttle bareback. Chimp won’t let us hurt it. Chimp thinks it’s just another member of the crew— maybe even the most important because it’s more—I dunno, recent. It melted before we even got out of the shuttle: all those joints, all those limbs and slits, all those eyes. Encysted into some kind of chrysalis. It’s down in Med5 right now, turning into—
Well, we don’t know yet.
But I’m pretty sure it won’t be emerging as a butterfly. I think, once metamorphosis is complete, our degrees of freedom go to zero. I mean, it’s still just a puddle of organic soup and it’s already got Chimp in its pocket. When it hatches, who knows? Maybe we’ll be lemurs and it’ll be God and there’s nothing we’ll be able to plan or say or even goddamn think that it won’t know before we do.
So I’m bringing you back now, while there’s still some ghost of a chance that no one else knows what I’m doing. I’m using back doors and secret tunnels from the old days. I’m using Lian’s bypasses so Chimp won’t know you’ve been moved.
I know what you’re thinking. I did what I did. I’d do it again. But it was a broad-strokes deal, it’s not like I told Chimp about every stitch and seam in the revolution. There’s a lot he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know we can do this, for one thing. He doesn’t know you’re down here in the Black Forest and not snoozing away in C4B. So long as he doesn’t start missing his favorite pet enough to try bringing you back for old times’ sake, we should be okay. And yes, that’s a risk—but you two didn’t part on the best of terms. I’m betting—I’m hoping Chimp doesn’t need the grief.
So now you’re wondering why take that chance? Why me, out of all these thousands? But I don’t know how many thousands there are any more. Every thinking being within ten thousand lightyears is right here, buried in this fucking rock, and after sixty-seven million years I’ve still only met a fraction of them. I trust barely a fraction of those. Most of them would probably be just as happy to see me tossed out an airlock. You’d be first in line.
But that’s the point. I know you. I know the purity of your hatred. It burns pretense to ash. You’re the last person I’d ever trust with my life, but this isn’t about my life. It’s about everyone else’s. It’s about Eriophora. You’ll pick up this baton for the exact same reason you’d kill me if you got half a chance.
So I’m sorry, but you’re drafted: someone behind the scenes, someone Chimp thinks is safely out of play, someone this abomination, this parasite doesn’t know about. And I pray to whatever Gods may prevail over that one that, when it hatches, it won’t be able to read my mind back to this moment and see what I’m doing now, because if it can then all hope is truly lost.
I’m not saying it’s a foolproof plan, or even a good one. It’s probably a terrible plan. But it’s the best I can come up with on short notice. And I’m already beyond forgiveness; I’ve got nothing to lose by conscripting you. So wake up, wild card. Wake up, hidden variable. Watch from the shadows. Fight back against a god that hopefully doesn’t know you exist. Be the blind spot in omniscience.
Gods help us, Sunday, I think we’ve got a gremlin on board.
Nice. I’m in.
Oh wow! Now the wait.
Fun! Reading occasional snippets from the Freeze-frame-verse is like waking up out of cold sleep to see what’s new once in a while.
yup, Lian was right from the very beginning
Blind Spot in Omniscience.. You have my attention.
Oh, lol, I knew this sounded like something sort of familiar but I completely failed to see it until I read your comment. Like there was an area in my consciousness where I was unable to perceive objects.
Nobody bother Peter for a while so he writes more of this, faster
God this is such a tease, can’t wait for more
I love him.
I want to see the end of the universe too.
Every so often we get a snippet that reminds me why our host is my favourite author of all time, and then it is back to starving.
More. MORE.
Yeah, I’m contracted for another one. But there’s a reason this is called “Outtake”. I don’t know if I can bring Sunday into this episode without breaking canon.
Still. You can get a sense.
So, the narrator doesn’t wake up Sunday? We get to see someone’s great (to the nth) grandchild have free reign?
There could be multiple vessels. Multiple copies of the same crew. Each of which thinks they’re original…
Anyway. It’s really good!
You are not allowed to tease us like this if you do not have a publication date!
Oh. Okay then.
I promise I won’t post any more fiblets.
For what it’s worth, I enjoy the fiblets. But then, I grew up in part on fanfiction, where you’ve got to live with the idea that your favorite stories are going to be dripped out piecemeal and might die without any warning (and then, just as unexpectedly, get a new chapter, five years after you’d given up hope).
I hope you are not planning on reading Pat Rothfuss books then. I am waiting 13 years for Book 3… While I am waiting almost the same amount of time for his Book 3 I see Peter as still on our side, still not have made millions that could cloud his mind 😉 Martin and Pat gave up on us long ago. Latest Witcher was written after 30 years(sic!)
nooooooooooooooooo
It’s always great to get news from the Sunflower setting, and I look forward to when Araneus, or whatever its title ends up being, is published!
FFS just go on kickstarter or any other money demanding site and demand money for more stories. Most of us will be only too happy to empty our bank accounts to get more from your narrative universes!!
ждем эти отрывки как праздник какой-то
My Brunner folder shows 40 files… I will try to read some this year. Reading the synospis of his novels and have a feeling B. is deep-freezed in Watts. Blindsight, Echo and Omni are like an Echo of what I gathered from those short descriptions:
In Children of the Thunder, Brunner creates another near-contemporary vision of a world gone awry and proposes a peculiarly disturbing and frightening solution. Starting separately, a small number of very smart and uniquely talented children, none more than fourteen years old, create lucrative designer drugs, kill a Marine commando in unarmed combat, run a sex-ring of chilling depravity. None of them are even punished for their crimes. Combine powers of mental control and irresistible suggestion with creative and completely amoral intelligence and you have the recipe for a super-race of world-savers—or for the subjugation of all humanity to a new form of collective evil.
In Age of Miracles Brunner confronts his characters with an alien transportation system produced by unknown creatures clearly superior in knowledge & application of science. While human characters do learn to make some limited use of the system, their position at the end is comparable to that of rats on a sea-going ship, &, as the characters themselves indicate, their future use of the network is predicated on just how annoying these human rats become to the aliens:
The Stone
The world is awash in civic decay, military coups and revolutionary governments, bands of believers (‘Godheads’) roaming the streets and turning plastic crosses into assault weapons. One scientist has discovered a new kind of viral drug, VC, which has the power to drastically alter the human mind. It could save civilization but at what cost? And who has the right to make a decision about whether or not to use it?
Eternity
For he must travel thousands of years into the future to join in a galactic Time War where alien beings are poised to eradicate humanity in a conflict that never ends. For there is also another presence at play whom the humans know as the Being, and the Enemy label the Beast. It will take all of the time travelers, across many different eras of humanity, working together to uncover this mysterious entity’s goal, to make right a time torn asunder so they can forge a future for the human race.
Polymath
When a ship filled with refugees from a cosmic catastrophe crash-landed on such an unmapped world, their outlook was precarious. Their ship was lost, salvage had been minor, and everything came to depend on one bright young man accidentally among them. He was a trainee planet-builder. It would have been his job to foresee all the problems necessary to set up a safe home for humanity. But the problem was that he was a mere student – and he had been studying the wrong planet.
Asconel
He remembered the day ten years ago when his older brother had been made a Warden of Asconel, a prosperous and happy planet, and he and his other brothers had left in the interests of their people.
Now they returned to a world where a fanatical cult had usurped the Warden’s chair, and men and women were offering themselves up as human sacrifices to Belizuek – whoever or whatever that being from beyond the galaxy was . . . I’ll find out, he told himself grimly, when I enter these doors . . .
The Squares
This novel explores the idea of subliminal messages as political tools, and it is notable for having the structure of a famous 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin.
The Infinitive of Go
Code name Poster… The first practical matter transmitter was a success, co-inventers of the device, counted on it to revolutionize civilization. But the first long distance field test with a human being – a diplomatic courier carrying a vital message – somehow misfired when the courier killed himself on arrival at his destination. To prove his faith in his invention Justin had himself “posted”. He same through unchanged. It was the world that was somehow different…
The Whole Man
Gerald Howson didn’t look powerful. His body was deformed at birth, leaving him with a face so ugly people didn’t want to look at him, and crippled legs that would never let him be as other men. But his mind was one in a billion – gifted with the ability to send and receive thoughts more powerfully than any other person on the face of the globe.
Science fiction-noveller.Contains three separate stories about military domination and about deliberate suppression of initiative within oppressed populations.
Lung Fish: A spaceship’s crew learns the limitations of psychological manipulation.
Host Age: How do you defeat an extra-terrestrial Terminator?
Strangely, I haven’t even heard of some of those titles. I’ve only read one of them (The Stone That Never Came Down, whioch for some reason is shortened to The Stone. Also, The Squares of the City has been shortened to The Squares). The Brunners that I have read include Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit, The Stone that Never Came Down, The Shockwave Rider (which predicted computer viruses back in the seventies), The Wrong End of Time, and a couple of others I can’t remember except they involved a guy dressing up in a crab suit.
These titles have influenced me to a greater or lesser extent. Suffice to say that Brunner is one of the few authors I’ve been trying to write like my whole life.
I AM re-watching your interviews few times a year and that is why I started collecting his books as well as Delaney. I used shortened names of novels to indicate not to enumerate 🙂 Your Brunner fav books are on my short list sińce Moid interview. The novels I have described herę had such weird and different stories I morę wanted to share them with you and others and less to imply those are the exact pillars you were building on 🙂 If I ever sound on your comment section like claiming I know what have guided you it will be obviously wrong and at best I will be shareing with all my ruminations.
I wonder who other writers are?
Speaking of hitchhikers. From 2023 although I just saw it today.
https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/wnl.0000000000201578?fbclid=IwY2xjawIEkgJleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHV2a5WpaO4H5PFfO5HJPvZXQUnmN_eq8wFkGkeFL6-FCOr1m4llZznVxFQ_aem_hdpB4DaMLl-ARsCJXOjOUQ
Ewwww.
Stephen King played with that Idea in The Dark Half, as I recall? But this thing is huge…
THE DARK HALF involved teratoma tumors, if I remember correctly. Bits of semi developed teeth, fingers/nails, stray eyeball (in the movie anyway). This appears to be the entree to the appetizer. It also strongly reminds me of Giger’s A L I E N.
Wow. That is fucking gnarly.
This is such an interesting world – looking forward to more stories.
He stares into the godless, blank, speckled void of the the LCD monitor. It’s flat and matte, like his expression.
“782 word?”
“Non-cannonical..?!”
He sighs.
“Chimp, put me back under. Wake me up when the next update comes down the wire. Or when the black holes start evaporating..”
But… Black holes are continuously evaporating. It’s what they do! You know that!
“…Wake me up when the average net flux out of the observable galactic core blackholes reverses”
That’s… Actually both accurate and highbrow enough for this place.
(Yes, I did need five fukken days to research what this actually means.)
Чёрт!
Питер, люди уже изнемогают от нетерпения и некоторые, похоже, уже начинают терять самообладание.
Yesterday I wrote two lines, as it turned out, I did it in the only language available to me, that is, in Russian, but today I didn’t find this comment in place, apparently, it didn’t fit into the language format.
I’m writing now as a check.
I’m testing my guesses about local rules.))
I found them. They were in my spam folder (I take it you sent from two different addresses?)
It might be a local rule I didn’t even know about. Comments from first-time posters should get sent to Moderation, not Spam. Don’t know what happened there. Maybe WordPress automatically spam-files posts not written in the language of the blog or something, although that does seem kind of presumptuous on WordPress’s part.
Anyway, they’re up now.
Oh, hey, you’re better!
Wow, I’m loving this story. What a treat.
PS Re: The Island. I really think it would have added something if the Chimp had called out through the PA system, ‘Citizens, your attention please. We are building a hyper spatial express route through your system and regrettably DHF 428 is on the schedule for demolition.’
I was just rereading the eighth notes with no luck, still “under construction”, and still that same statement in the end. Then I saw this post, holy shit I can’t wait another ten-thousand-year frame to read more about this.
You won’t have to. I’ve got an actual deadline now.
A deadline?!?
Yes.
A contractual one.
ETA until publication? ???!
That’s for the publisher to decide. All I know is that it’s due by the end of the year and I hope to hand it in sooner (I only pushed the deadline back that far because I have a lot of things on my dance card this year, and I don’t know how long it’ll take to get through them all.)
Well, since you brought your dancing card up, I’ll feel less of an asshole groupie while asking this. Do you have any plans on public speaking again? I doubt at any point in time had I the honor of being on the same continent as you, but life had dropped me in the Balkans, as life does, and you are known to have done some public outreach in this neighborhood. As local population may not have access to some necessities, like hearing a certain marine-biologist-gone-sci-fi-writer in person.
It’s not really my call, is the thing. It’s not like I go on tour and book tiny rooms in the local Best Western. Someone approaches me, offers to fly me wherever, and I say Sure, how much does it pay? If you want to bask in my actual presence, you’re SOL unless someone in your neck of the woods asks me over.
Although these days, I don’t know what I could say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times. Doesn’t seem to make much difference.
A different continuity, but here’s some Scrambler action for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHN4sWAuBVc
Yup. That’s what I based ’em on.
Look at that footage and you’ll understand that I have no imagination at all. And also that I don’t need any.
How can I love your books when your comment section is the worst kind of echo chamber of dyed in the wool Marxists and cunt hat wearing green zealots? Makes no sense. Anyway, let the avalanche of mindless hate commence.
Hey, just because your comment is mindless doesn’t mean any ensuing hate will be.
I suspect you might have to look elsewhere in your quest for punishment, though. As the maitre d’, it’s kind of incumbent on me to at least acknowledge your presence. Don’t see why anyone else would bother.
Hey Dr. Watts. I reread the Island recently and I have a serious question for you. Are the frustrations Sunday possesses towards the Chimp (being horrendously out of date, with limited imagination, being tied to bureaucratic rules determined by faceless higher ups a long time ago) a reflection of your own experiences? Did you have frustrating previous jobs or research experiences in grad school?
I have, in fact, had a wide range of frustrating experiences, legal, academic, religious, political, and corporate. Which is to say, with people.
But that’s not why I made Chimp such a moron. I made him dumb because if he was too smart, there’d be no need to send Humans on a mission with a slated lifespan in the millions of years. And while I’m certain there’s someone out there skillful enough to tell a compelling epic with zero living characters and one AI, I am not that person.