Amneiger NaNo (Herald of Light) (Finished! =D)

[Amneiger]

SPOILER: Click to show

My dreams have become strange of late.

Perhaps I have been spending too long working on the windows for the cathedral. My family has told me that I have been at the ovens for several hours at a time without a break. I have been spending almost all of my waking hours going over designs and plans for use in creating the windows. I am determined that this glass be the best I have ever created. Nevertheless…

I have been dreaming of another cathedral, with a sharp steeple reaching up towards a stormy sky. It is made completely of glass inlaid with gold. The gold is built like an iron frame, holding up the glass. The glass is cut like gemstones, and the light sparkles as if through rubies and diamonds. The other workers and my family are kneeling on the ground in a circle around it. They are weeping.

I do not know what the dream means, and it disturbs me.

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It was difficult to concentrate today. I found my mind drifting back to the dream again, contemplating the form of the glass.

I have had the dream of the cathedral again. The shapes are in more detail, now. I can almost see the carvings in the glass and the architecture of the gold.

I have also learned why they are weeping. They weep because it is beautiful.

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The dream has reached its final, utmost level of distinctness. I can now examine the glass and the gold in all its minute parts. Already I have memorized a section of wall and windowpane.

It is strange. The style of work makes no sense. The glass seems to be laid in impossible patterns within impossible patterns, and the gold is wrought in a way that should not be able to hold up its own weight.

I suppose it would do no harm for me to try to recreate it tomorrow. Perhaps once I have proved to myself that the dream is impossible, it will leave me.

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It works.

I do not know how, but it works. The gold stood on its own and was able to support the glass unaided. I have also been able to recreate the patterns in the glass. It shone exactly as it had in the dream, with patterns that danced across the walls of the room.

I called over one of the other workers to look at it, but when he was picking up the glass to examine it, the glass seemed to unhinge, somehow. The bottom half of the glass fell and shattered. He apologized a great deal and offered to help me resculpt it. I accepted his help, but the attempts to remake the glass all failed. The gold would collapse, or the glass diamonds would come out of the oven bent out of proportion. After a few hours I was forced to return to my regular work.

I will reproduce the glass tomorrow, and show it to my brother. This time I will take more care to keep it safe.

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I have made another copy of the glass. This time I took the precaution of calling my brother into the room before I started and having him stand in a corner while I worked.

When I showed him the finished glass he seemed somehow disturbed by it. He would stare at it, then seem to start and force himself to look away, then find his gaze moving towards it again. After several minutes of this I asked him what was wrong. He answered with an indistinct mumble, and then ran – ran – out the door.

I am no longer certain about what I am doing.

I have melted the glass and gold back down, as I am beginning to feel that it may be dangerous to keep such a thing around for longer then necessary.

------------

Today while I was working, my brother came in. He seemed agitated and nervous, pacing about the room and glancing about. When I asked him what he wanted, he did not answer immediately, but after a moment said something about wanting to see the glass again. He wanted to help, this time. I was uncertain precisely why he was so concerned with it, but I agreed.

There were none of the mishaps that the last instance of a helper had experienced. Furthermore, he was more enthusiastic for the work then I had seen in years. When we had finished, I put the glass on the table, where it shone as it had before.

He has told me that while all other things seem muddled and hazy, the world becomes coherent and clear in my presence. When I asked why, he could not explain. When I picked up the glass and moved it, his eyes followed it. Something is wrong with my brother, and I think that this glass is the cause.

I should destroy this thing, and forget that I had ever created it. But if I do so while my brother is still in its grip, I may never discover how to free him from it.

And I fear that even if I tried to forget, it would fail. The dreams are still there. I blink, and I see the patterns floating in the air around me. I worry that one day I will wake up to find that I have walked to my ovens in my sleep and built even more of the cathedral.

I need to know more. Tomorrow I will ask some of the other glassblowers for their opinions.

------------

They have laughed at me.

They told me that a simple thing like a glass pane could not possibly be causing what I had seen. They refused to look at the glass, insisting that it was a silly thing and not worth their time to examine.

Whenever I entered a room with more than two people in it, they would hush up their conversation and turn to watch me. These were people I had thought of as my friends, who have in my hour of need turned their backs and whispered about me when I was not looking.

Never mind them. Never mind any of them. I will unravel this on my own, and the devil take them all.

------------

They are threatening to throw me out. The other workers have been saying that I am spending all of my time in the ovens working on windows of my own creation instead of those that have been commissioned. Of course I have been doing so. How else are my experiments into the glass to proceed?

My brother has proven a most willing and able assistant. Soon I will be in need of test subjects in order to further refine my theories. Perhaps he can help me find some.

------------

It has been some time since I have written in this journal. So many things have been happening.

But I understand now.

They said I was mad, but it was their addled, deluded, unclear brains that were mad. I have seen the truth, in true clarity, as if through a pane of perfect glass.

This world has lacked clarity for so long. That was why they refused to hear me. They did not know the import of what I was saying, because their minds were not clear. My brother was the first to reach clarity, and when I understood what had happened my next actions became clear.

Already all of the other people here, after an initial period of resistance, have reached clarity. They have agreed to help build the cathedral I have seen in my dreams, and when it is finished I shall embark on the next step.

When all the world has clarity again everything will be renewed. All will be enlightened. They will know the truths I have discovered. They will make me their ruler, their philosopher-king, as they hunger for the secrets I hold.

Soon they will all understand. Every last one of them.

So this year I decided that instead of an original setting, I’d write some fanfiction of Genius: The Transgression, a tabletop game about mad scientists. It’s surprisingly awesome. (TvTropes link here.) (Yes, I’m aware that the above story might not immediately seem like it has anything to do with mad science. It makes sense in context.)

There are three reasons for this:

(1.) I already have a number of ideas that I can use for the novel.
(2.) It seems like it’ll be fun.
(3.) I couldn’t think of anything else to write about. >_>

The excerpt doesn’t actually have anything to do with the plot I’ll be working on; I just wanted something that took place in the setting without giving away too much of the main plot.


(Also, raise your hand if you saw this coming! )

SPOILER: Click to show

Accidentally creating narm or purple prose or similar. Especially for when characters die. They are probably going to be dying rather slowly and painfully, and it would be bad if readers started laughing at it. I’ll also be spending time describing various mad science inventions and locations, and would rather it not get silly.

Character filibusters. One of the impressions I got from the book is that it’s not just the mad science that matters; it’s the mad scientist’s philosophy and worldview. Why is an individual genius doing what they do? What kind of theories do they use, and why do they use them? What do they think is the purpose (if any) of mad science? Hopefully none of the explanations the characters make will bore people.

Overuse of the word “light.” This also makes sense in context.

I’ve also been wondering how much of the setting I want to explain in the novel and how much I want to leave for the readers to figure out. If I do a good job of writing about things that I don’t explicitly explain, the reader should still be able to figure out what’s going on and have a general sense of a wider world without having to look things up, remember lots and lots of terms, and break immersion in general. If I do it badly, the reader will have to look things up anyway.

[Shadaras]

You are going to have so much fun with this, aren't you? Also, write that cathedral story in full at some point, please. 'tis awesome.

[Amneiger]

I'm planning on having fun ^_^ And I'll see about adding to the cathedral story if I can figure out what happens next xD

[Zylaa]

That does sound fun! Hooray for mad science and glass that drives people insane. =D It makes my love of architecture suddenly seem a lot more sinister. XD

[Amneiger]

I wouldn't worry about architecture. Unless it started to do strange and impossible things, that is. =D

[Amneiger]

It's alive! IT'S ALIVE!

I still haven't forgotten this. =D No continuation on the cathedral story, unfortunately. I have an idea, but it's a bit shaky.

Anyways, I'm going to ramble a bit about the outline I have so far. =D Note that the following will include several bits of incomprehensible jargon that will make no sense. Unless it does, of course. Yes, I'll do my best to describe what's happening and avoid (unexplained) jargon during the novel itself.

First: I still need a title. =D I'd still rather not use the word "light" in it.

Second: Four of my characters. This next bit will be almost completely jargon. =D

SPOILER: Click to show

Grandmother Esmerelda Higgins. Hoffnung Director. Favored Axioms: Epikrato, Exelixi, Metaptropi. Aesthetic: Memetic Visual Patterns / Home Sweet Home.

Dr. Simon Klauser. Grimm Oracle. Favored Axioms: Exelixi, Katastrofi, Skafoi. Aesthetic: Wood and plants.

Dr. Michael Matthews. Neid Progenitor. Favored Axioms: Epikrato, Exelixi, Prostasia. Aesthetic: Worked Flesh.

Victoria. Orphan, Skafoi 3 (rocketship). Integral systems: Exelixi 1 life support system, Prostasia 1 radiation shield. Built using an Oscilloscope aesthetic. Orphan mutations: Person-level intelligence.

Third: A sign that I've been thinking too much about this. Last night I dreamed that I was looking through a textbook on German and found a page listing the Staunen psychological archetype.

Fourth: I'm going to be playing a bit fast and loose with both orphans and unmada fields. Victoria keeps her mutations, and unmada fields are going to be a bit more powerful then they should be.

Finally, I keep going over the ending in my head. xD It seems that I'm worried about properly conveying what's going on.

[Shadaras]

One day you will fully explain why you think you'll overuse 'light'.

Also, this seems so much more awesome after you explain all the terminology. ^_^

[Amneiger]

I should explain the light thing someday, shouldn't I? Or I could simply leave it a surprise for the novel. =D

Mmkay, some of the terminology:

Axioms: Branches of mad science, organized around what the invention does instead of what kind of sane science it would belong under (such as chemistry, biology, etc.)

Wonder: A mad science invention.

Skafoi: To travel. Covers jet boots, faster-then-light starships, and time machines.

Exelixi: To improve. Used for healing, enhancements (which anybody who plays MMORPGs might know better as "buffs") and resurrection.

Prostasia: To protect. Used for things such as tri-titanium armor, deflector shields, and forcefield cages.

Epikrato: To control. Covers a wide variety of things such as telekinesis, weather machines, and mind control. Dr. Horrible's car remote would be an example of a basic Epikrato device.

Metaptropi: To change. Transmuting materials, creating illusions, and making spaces that are bigger on the inside.

Katastrofi: To destroy. Katastrofi is used to build weapons such as death rays, laser swords, and antimatter bombs.

Aesthetic: The look and feel of a wonder. Aesthetics are not only what a genius thinks looks good or finds convenient, but are also a reflection of their ideas and beliefs about science and technology. From the book: "Popular aesthetics change over time, but to geniuses, these aren't just fashion statements: an aesthetic is everything a genius wants to be true and real and good about the wonders she creates."

Hoffnung: German word for hope. A Hoffnung dreams of seeing a world changed by their science (or changed with the help of their science).

Grimm: German word for anger. Grimms are known for their rages.

Neid: German word for jealousy. They're the most likely ones to go, "I'll show them! I'll show them all!"

Director: The Directors foundation studies mad psychology. A Director's power usually lies either in their minions or their mind control devices.

Progenitors: The Progenitors foundation studies mad biology. They traditionally made monsters such as Dr. Frankenstien's monster, although recently they have begun experimenting with transhumanist philosophies.

Oracles: The Oracle baramin believes that humanity went wrong when it began using inductive reasoning, which the Oracles see as an evil system of thought. They sort people into categories of "good" and "evil" without anything in between, and advocate a return to older attitudes of morality.

Orphan: A wonder without an owner becomes an orphan. Orphans gain a basic animal-level intelligence, the ability to move on their own, and one or more mutations that improve their changes to survive. Orphans live off of intellectual energy, either from geniuses or non-geniuses.

[Amneiger]

Hey look, setting info.

SPOILER: Click to show

Mania is mad science fuel; it is what a genius uses when creating wonders or doing other tricks of mad science. Normal people also have Mania, but for them it's bound up in their memories and ideas; geniuses can create and store extra Mania for use. Current research into Mania suggests that it's a combination of logic, scientific knowledge, creativity, madness, and physical energy that can be stored as mental energy in the genius's head.

Manis ia most often used with wonders. Mania is “bound” in the wonder in order to maintain its existence in the world in the world of sane science, and is used to activate wonders. However, there are a few other things you can do with Mania:

Enhance intelligence. Mania is made up of intellectual energy and can be used as such to boost the genius’s brainpower.

Enhance technology. By quickly analyzing a piece of technology, the genius can get an idea of how to use it to its full effectiveness.

Dismantle technology. The genius spends a moment looking for weak points in any technological item, and then uses those weak points to take it apart. Useful if a rival genius is chasing you down in their giant robot and nobody brought the laser rockets.

Power technology. The genius manipulates an electrically-powered piece of mundane (non-mad) technology, increasing the amount of time it can work without an actual power source. Exactly how much longer depends on the complexity of the technology. Room lamps might last for several days, but a jet engine would probably only keep functioning for a minute.

Deep Inspiration. The genius tries to create and use Mania that they don’t have.

(Technology here is defined as any physical thing that has been built or improved by someone for a specific purpose. If you pick up a stick and remove the leaves to make it into a club, the club is technology.)

There a few ways of regaining Mania. Here are two:

Research. A genius can spend up to six hours a day engaging in basic research: building new examples of mundane technology, reading scientific literature they haven’t read before, or working on equations.

Diatribes. Mad scientist supervillain gloating. Find some poor schmuck, stick them in a forcefield cage or hold them at raygunpoint, and spend a minute or so ranting about how your plan is perfect and nobody can stop you.

Certain operations involving Mania are dangerous, as they manipulate Mania in ways human minds aren’t really supposed to handle; unpredictable changes to the genius’s mental state (such as unmada) may occur. These operations include Deep Inspiration, diatribes, and spending too much time per day on research.

SPOILER: Click to show

Maniac storms
I said earlier that for normal people, Mania is used to maintain memory and idea. These include scientific ideas.

Whenever a scientific theory is disproven, sane scientists need to rethink and reform their scientific positions. As they do so, Mania is released into the environment. If enough people working on the same idea do this at the same time, it creates a Maniac Storm. The free Mania is rebuilt in the image of the disproven theory. This is in the form of either bardos, manes, or both.

Bardos
A bardo is a pocket dimension that is created by a Maniac Storm; it exists because it cannot exist. Bardos are hidden from normal people, but can be reached by geniuses who know how. The location of and direction to a bardo are often related to the theory that created it. For example, to reach the Hollow Earth, the genius would have to travel to the North or South pole, locate a certain tunnel network, and then follow it downwards, searching for clues left by previous explorers.

Bardos are created from Mania, and require regular infusions of Mania to survive. This is usually done by the inhabitants ending out someone to gather Mania and bring it back to the bardo.

Sufficiently advanced technology found in bardos is built using Axioms; less advanced technology is built using whatever the ordinary laws of science would be in that bardo.

Examples of bardos:

The Martian Empire
In 1971, the Viking landers reached Mars and finally proved that there was no life on Mars. There were no canals bringing water from the poles to Martian cities. There were no little green men with advanced technology. There was just red dust all around. People were forced to let go of their ideas of life on Mars. About five seconds later, Martians invaded. With War of the World style walkers.

The invasion went a bit like it did in the original novel, except that this time lots of geniuses realized what was going to happen and showed up with Katastrofi guns. There wasn’t too much of the invasion force left by the time they were supposed to die of the common cold.

Nowadays, Mars is still very interested in the land and resources it would gain from conquering Earth. However, the Martians are aware that a military invasion is out of the question and is more interested in trading with Earth. And Mars has a great deal to trade; over the years, science fiction writers have imagined Mars having all manners of wealth and knowledge, and the Martian Empire has riches ranging from seemingless endless stores of gems to libraries full of wisdom humanity has never known before.

The Grid
The earliest conceptions of the Internet were not spread by computer scientists, but by science fiction writers. Movies such as Tron and books such as Neuromancer told us that the Internet would not be some abstract thing separated from us by a computer screen, but a physical place we would be able to enter. It would be a land where memory structures would be shining towers, where websites would be cities filled with neon light, where computer programs would be people walking the streets, where the world stretched brightly towards the horizon that glowed with data and the promise of adventure. When the Internet instead turned into computer terminals that we didn’t need cyberjacks to visit, the Grid was created.

The Grid can be entered from any computer with an Internet connection. It’s unusual in that the Grid is closely linked to the mundane Internet and changes depending on what systems are currently connected to the Internet. Any computer that has a connection can be visited from the Grid. Things such as websites and programs manifest physical in the Grid using the same pattern described above. Forums threads and posts are floating walls of neon, data files are physical objects that can be picked up and interacted with, and security systems are various guards or animals patrolling whatever system they’re guarding.

The Crystal Spheres
One of the oldest models of the universe and the motion of the planets and the stars was the idea of geocentrism and the Crystal Spheres. Our planet and ourselves lived in a universe of clockwork and glass, where the planets revolved around the Earth and were guided in their orbit by angels. This was eventually replaced by a picture of the universe where the Solar System rotated around the Sun by the power of gravity.

The Crystal Spheres are inhabited by the angels (known as the Megas) who were said to have guided the planets. The Megas are beings like great bronze statues with wings of light, and they still maintain and run the machinery that regulates the movement of the planets and the stars. Most are busy with their work, but are happy to talk to visiting geniuses.


Manes
Alternatively, a Maniac Storm may instead create manes: creatures made from and animated by Mania.

Manes require a regular “diet” of Mania to survive as bardos do. Manes have the ability to drain Mania from both geniuses and normal people, and will generally use it if they are in danger of starving to death. Note that manes who are currently in an ideologically compatible environment (such as the Megas in the Crystal Spheres) do not require Mania like this.

Examples of manes:

Paper Goblins
If you’re old enough, you probably remember that with the rise of computers as a consumer technology came pronouncements that we were entering a “paperless society.” No longer would we be using old-fashioned paper and books; from now on everything was going to be advanced electronics and the Internet.

This didn’t happen, of course. Today we still have libraries and files and books, and we spend our time cursing the unreliability of our computer systems. Paper Goblins were made when the idea of the paperless society never came to pass.

Paper Goblins are, as you could probably imagine, goblin-shaped-and-sized creatures who appear to be made of folded paper, and usually gather together in families and clans. Despite any conceptions about goblins that video games may foster, they are as intelligent as humans and other sentient creatures. They are usually willing to help geniuses who help them in turn.

Ubermenschen
There is no need to re-summarize the history of Hitler’s National Socialism here. What it is important to note is that with the fall of Nazi Germany and the widespread knowledge of Hitler’s actions, Nazism permanently lost any and all support it might have found among scientists and political philosophers. With the widespread disbelief in Nazi ideas came the Ubermenschen.

The Ubermenschen are everything Hitler ever dreamed of; they are perfect specimens of Hitler’s master race combined with all the devotion to his ideologies he could have wanted. They hide out on the Moon, in Antarctica, and within the Hollow Earth, and plot to bring their ideas to power once more.

Machine Elves
Machine elves (also known as fractal elves, or as kobaloi by the Lemurians) are manes created by the disproof of incorrect equations. Their population has increased exponentially after the creation of the personal computer, which allowed people who weren’t mathematicians to create disproofs all by themselves by exploding their systems by entering bad commands, stumbling upon bugs, and not reading the instruction manual.

Machine elves are about a foot tall and are made of geometric shapes that bear whatever erroneous mathematics went into their creation. They live in clans near or under whatever computer systems they were created from. Most of them are quite harmless, as they can get all the Mania they need from whatever’s released by the intellectual work of the sane computer science laboratory or office they live in. For the most part, they concern themselves with their own societies instead of the outside world.

[Rikku]

I haven't yet had time to read this, but I really should find some, because, even skim-reading, it sounds interesting. =D

Unrelatedly, accordin' to your NaNo profile you like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? My sister recommended it extremely highly when I was visiting her, and I saw it in a bookshop shortly after, blurb-read and was duly intrigued. Is it is as quirkily interesting as it looks? I'm wondering whether or not I should make a mad dash for the nearest bookshop in the hopes they have it in stock. xD

[Amneiger]

Oct 27, 2009 20:19:56 GMT -5 Rikku said:

I haven't yet had time to read this, but I really should find some, because, even skim-reading, it sounds interesting. =D

Unrelatedly, accordin' to your NaNo profile you like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? My sister recommended it extremely highly when I was visiting her, and I saw it in a bookshop shortly after, blurb-read and was duly intrigued. Is it is as quirkily interesting as it looks? I'm wondering whether or not I should make a mad dash for the nearest bookshop in the hopes they have it in stock. xD

=D Thanks for responding anyway! I'm glad to hear that more people like this.

And you must go out and buy Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norell immediately, because if you wait until November you'll wind up not typing NaNo because you were too busy reading the book.

[Amneiger]

Behold: more setting! I choose to blame Shade for getting me to write this.

SPOILER: Click to show

Jabir
Mad scientists no longer see science, technology, and philosophy in the same as normal people. Furthermore, Mania and Inspiration do strange things to science around a genius; their research results, laboratory procedure, and scientific papers sounds less and less like real science and more and more like the ramblings of someone who’s, well, mad. Jabir occurs whenever a mad scientist tries to explain any kind of science, mad or sane, to someone who’s sane. Explanations and theories that just a moment ago were perfectly clear to the mad scientist quickly devolves into incoherent mumbling, bizarre rants, and the kind of illogic usually ascribed to people who believe that the world of flat. Various personality quirks related to the mad scientist’s catalyst may make themselves known; a Neid might fly into a screaming fit at the slightest sign of disagreement, while a Staunen may suddenly stop in the middle of their lecture to stare closely at a random fruit fly.

A younger and less experienced mad scientist might have theories that match up closely enough to sane science to sound more or less all right. However, more experienced mad scientists find themselves having to come up with more and more convoluted ways to avoid speaking about science so that they don’t get committed to mental institutes. Most drop out of sane science completely; it’s just easier that way.


Faults
Wonders have Faults, drawbacks that reduce their effectiveness. (If this was a movie where the mad scientist was the villain, Faults would be the weak points the hero would use to destroy the mad scientist's machine.) Examples of wonders with faults:

• A solar-powered ray gun that can't fire outside of direct sunlight.
  
• A sonar-based set of scanning goggles that give nonsense results when in areas with high background noise, such as a loud concert, a busy highway, or a large waterfall.
  
• Cybernetic eye implants that glow bright red in the dark, ruining any attempts at stealth on the genius's part.
  
• Giant carnivorous snails that are afraid of salt.
  
• A weather control machine that occasionally causes lightning to strike its user.
  

Havoc
Wonders are vulnerable to Havoc. Works of mad science do very poorly when brought into contact with sane science. Whenever a mortal tries to interact with a wonder (such as by touching it or picking it up), it will somehow go horribly wrong. The most common result is the wonder gaining new faults as the mortal accidentally damages it, but sometimes the wonder goes berserk and begins attacking the mortal or just explodes. It usually takes less then 30 seconds of handling by a mortal to destroy a wonder. It takes even less time for sane scientists, who are the group mostly likely to examine the wonder with a critical eye and thus bring any mad science weirdness to light.

Manes also suffer from Havoc, although instead of gaining faults they simply get more and more “broken” as their internal systems break down. Most manes a person might encounter are those who’ve learned to hide from normal humans; those who don’t tend to go up in puffs of Havoc.

Manes in an ideological area that can sustain their Mania needs (such as an appropriate bardo) will not suffer Havoc.


Infection
Mad science is somehow infectious in that those who see it in action tend to go insane. A portion of any crowd of spectators will still have their sanity after an episode of mad science; however, the rest will turn either into beholden or become new geniuses themselves. (In rare cases where violence was involved, Clockstoppers may be created.) Both the beholden and the new geniuses are unreliable witness, because of the beholden’s strange worldview and the genius’s Jabir. Even those who remain sane tend to forget the incident after a period of time, as people’s inherent weirdness censors and mental anti-insanity defenses take effect.

The general effect of all of these is that mad science goes unrecognized by the world at large. Any attempt by the mad scientist to demonstrate what they’ve found ends with their speech turned into Jabir and their wonders collapsed into piles of unrecognizable components. The witnesses give out contradictory testimony that just confuses any potential investigators. Most mad scientists either give up after few attempts or (having read about their predecessors) never try at all and just focus on their research.

[Amneiger]

So I have my introduction written up and my character spends something like a quarter of it monologuing about his beliefs concerning the supernatural in what may or may not be a boring manner and I'm worried that my talkative loon segment doesn't have enough loon in it and I'm worried about all my characters sounding the same for some reason and yeah. >_>

But! =D I shall post it anyway, and risk derision and scorn if it turns out to be sucky. =D

Oh, and I still don't have a title. =D I'm over 2,000 words now, though.

SPOILER: Click to show

The city’s college had a library. It was a nice library, built out of brick and concrete, but you wouldn’t know from the paint and decorations. It was five stories high, and stood out from the surrounding buildings not just because of its height, but because of it age. Much of the rest of the campus was old, but the library had been built just a few years ago.

Most of the other students had classes at the moment, so the front desk was mostly empty. There was only one librarian on duty. I looked at the plate with her name on it; Miranda Shaw.

She had been writing on an envelope, but looked up as I approached. “How can I help you?”

“I’m looking for your section concerning supernatural beliefs held by pre-modern societies.”

“Do you have any societies in mind?”

“Well…no? I was thinking of it as more a general category…”

She frowned at me, apparently annoyed by my lack of specificity.

“Err…sorry. This is my first week here, and I don’t know how this library works yet.”

“Ah.” The frown seemed to lift somewhat. “I need your student ID so that I know that you’re a student here before I can help you.”

I pulled the card out of my wallet and gave it to her. She waved it under a bar code scanner, and I could clearly see my name written on the card: Tristan Bryant. She looked at the screen of her computer, nodded, and handed the card back to me. “Tell me what kind of information you’re looking for, and I’ll see if I can help.”

“Well, it has to do with something I’ve noticed in what I’ve always heard about in primitive belief systems. They all seem to have common features: gods who controlled everything, spirits who could be spoken to, other worlds than this. I’ve never heard of any society developing a completely secular and atheistic viewpoint on its own, without any element of the supernatural. What I want to do is to look at these common threads and try to see if it doesn’t point towards a kind of common experience for these societies. Or alternatively, something in the way the human mind works.”

“Uh-huh.” She was typing at her computer, not looking at me. “So you don’t believe in the supernatural, then?”

“No, I don’t. I’m more willing to believe in a pattern-matching error in the mind. In the same way we can see eyes, a mouth, and a face in a triangle arrangement of circles, we might see sentience and conspiracies where there are none.”

“Mm-hmm.” She was printing something, a list of some sort. “So what would you define as being true sentience and true conspiracies, then? For all you know, maybe you are seeing something that is there, and simply aren’t recognizing it as such and instead dismiss it as a hallucination.”

“If it were real, I wouldn’t just be seeing or hearing it; I’d be able to touch it, smell it, taste it, and use all my other senses to interact with it. It would be Carl Sagan’s invisible dragon in the garage. The invisible dragon that can be spraypainted and leaves tracks in flour is different from the dragon that exists in your own mind. And of course you’d need to get other people to see it as well, to make sure that you aren’t hallucinating everything, including the spraypaint and the flour.”

She didn’t seem to be listening to my response. “Give me a moment.” She walked off with her list.

I stood there for a minute, looking at the rest of the lobby. The plants seemed real, in that they didn’t look like they had been carved from wax. The ceiling had some water stains on it; I wondered how they had gotten there. The floor was one of those hard tile-like floors you see in institutional places, where they don’t have to spend too much effort cleaning it. The desk looked well kept, though. The wood print on it was in good condition, and it was free of dust.

After several minutes, the librarian still hadn’t come back and I was getting bored with looking at the wallpaper. I turned back towards the desk and looked closer at the desk, on the librarian’s side. Then I reached over the top of the desk, felt around underneath it until I felt my fingers close around a handhold carved into it, and pulled. The slightly-open drawer I had seen slid open. There was a binder inside, open to the middle. The binder seemed to be maybe an inch thick; not too large, something that could be read in a day or two if you were determined.

Something in the text caught me eye; I couldn’t lean over the desk far enough to turn my head to match the binder’s orientation, so instead I picked up the binder and turned it to face me.

“That which is stair is signpost, but it should not be. As light refracts from the words and enters the eyes, so do the feet and wheels turn and giving turning to that around them. It builds up as pressure, Stair and Signpost becoming Movement as Human become Movement and Travel and Purpose. Exchange of idea means spreading of ideas means refinement of and incorporation of idea and essential essence of things means the gaining and losing of archetypes in the forum. Arguments, which are made of idea put together in structure, stands and walks on its own like Human.”

Underneath this was a post-it note:

“What’s this page doing here? I think you’ve accidentally put a passage from the Scholastic’s organon into the new edition of the Navigator’s organon. The Navigators aren’t as focused on pure theory as the Scholastics are. Also, neither foundation focuses on Automata. Rewrite and/or replace this.”

The librarian had left the envelope she had been writing on on the table. I looked from the post-it note to the envelope; the handwriting was the same.

…I had no idea what to make of any of that.

I would have looked at the rest of the pages in the hopes that there would be an explanation somewhere, but I heard footsteps; the librarian was coming back. Hurriedly I put the binder back, eased the drawer back into the position I’d found it in, and went back to idly examining the light fixtures.

The librarian walked back to her desk and sat down without showing any sign that she’d noticed anything out of the ordinary.

“Here.” She handed me a new, longer list. “I’ve organized these by society. Hopefully it should give you enough of an overview of the field to narrow it down, because you really do need to narrow it down. Anthropologists have spent a very long time looking at this, and there’s just too much information to cover. I don’t think you’d get any closer to finding a patter then they have.”

I shrugged and took the list. “I’ll look anyway. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She turned back to her computer.

I looked at the paper. It was a list of book titles and call numbers for them. The first one was on the third floor, and I walked towards the elevators that were past the desk and deeper in the library. As I was leaving the lobby, I looked over my shoulder. The librarian, whose back was to me, had opened the drawer and was reading the binder. As I watched, she took a pen and made some margin notes.

Huh. Odd. Maybe she was editing some sort of dada fiction or something? That was the only explanation I could think of. In any case, I had two hours until my next class, so I wanted to get some of my research done before then. The first book on the list was a comparative study of the Norse, Roman, and Greek pantheons. I found a small, secluded study room, dragged all the books I could find into it, and shut the door. This was at around noon.

At one o’clock, I had finished the first book, taken notes from it, and started on the second one.

At three o’clock, I was reading about the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime.

At six o’clock, I was reading about Jean de Lery’s accounts of his journeys to America, and how the natives he met had both not believed in a benevolent creator god and believed in a devil called Aygnan.

At eight o’clock, I was reading about Chinese ideas of an afterlife ruled by a celestial bureaucracy.

At nine o’clock, I ran out of paper to take notes on, so I began writing on the walls and floor.

At midnight, I was reading about the idea of the aether and how it had appeared in scientific theories up until Einstein’s theory of relativity had disproved Maxwell’s theory of the Luminous Ether, the final theory to include the aether. The library had closed some time ago, and all the lights were off. It didn’t matter. Everything had become light.

[Shadaras]

I think I begin to understand why you worry about overusing the word 'light'. But this sounds entirely epic and awesome so far. Can't wait to see where you go with it. ^_^

[Amneiger]

=D *glomps Shade*

Anyways, update!

I have been abusing the rule of three and parallel sentence structure like I have nothing else, which I don't. =D Or maybe I just feel like I've been abusing them.

Also, this next excerpt is very geeky. =D My protagonist is in a job interview, and he responds to a question by talking about principles of mad science. So basically it's another textwall made up of the protagonist monologuing. =D No (deliberate) technobabble, unfortunately; later events rely on certain concepts being explained clearly, and the best place to do it is here.

SPOILER: Click to show

“Mesmerism, for the most part, except for things instead of people,” she replied. “Try the tea, dear, it’s quite good. Why did you join the Scholastics?”

I sipped the tea; there was something like orange or lemon in it, and sugar. “Partly because it was their focus. The Scholastics are the foundation with the research programs looking into the nature of Inspiration and Mania, which seemed like a natural thing to study to me. Mad science as it is right now is a black box technology, so the next step would be to study how it works so that we can reproduce it.” I took another sip of the tea and continued.

“The second is because of their theory – well, current theory – behind Inspiration. I was looking at the different foundation’s explanations, and I didn’t see any that made sense to me. The Progenitors, for example. They say that Inspiration is a culmination of the sheer force of the impossible within a person's mind. As mad thought and idea builds up in the budding genius's head, it starts to push itself against the rules of this reality. As more mad idea builds up, it pushes harder, until it finally punches a hole in the laws of physics and becomes real. Kind of like a plant seed. Somehow you get a seed of impossible thought planted in your mind, and it gets watered with more impossibility, until the seed sprouts. And the sprout is the impossible made so impossible it becomes possible. That’s what mad science is, something so impossible that it works. It’s just…I don’t think the universe works like that.” I paused for a moment. “Possibly because I know nothing about gardening.”

“But the Scholastic’s explanation made sense to me, because it matches what I’m experiencing. Their theory is based on the Platonic idea of a pure plane of idea somewhere outside this universe. And within this plane of idea is the archetypes of all things that exist. We can see the manifestations of this plane of idea in imperfect forms in this world. The chairs we’re sitting on, for example. There’s the chairs we can see, and then there’s the idea of Chair from the plane of idea, and we can recognize chairs as chairs because we recognize the shadows and copies of Chair. Similarly, we can tell that a car is a car because we subconsciously know what the true Car is supposed to look like, and when we see something similar we know that it’s supposed to be a car. Normally there’s no way to access and manipulate these pure essences of things, but for some people, who bend their minds in just the right way, can become conduits from the plane of idea to the material world. The Axioms are a way of manipulating the flow of idea to useful forms. That’s how it feels; like a current of pure light and idea and intellect flowing through my brain. I can channel it with my mind and the Axioms, but the current is always there. I know that most people don’t really pay attention to their foundation’s theory of Inspiration, but I still think it’s important.”

I'm hoping the context of all that, in addition to the last excerpt I posted, should give you at least a few ideas and guesses as to what the light is. If you'd rather not deal with that, here's a bit of an explanation:

SPOILER: Click to show

“’Only thing was, I could crack the codes, but I couldn't tell anyone why. Couldn't...explain. I was Inspired, you see. I wasn't smart—not like some of those guys—but I was a genius. I shone like the sun. Atomic fire shuddered inside my skull and flew out my eyes to light up the world.’

I remembered being seventeen, and imagining what other minds must be like. I remembered models leaping into my mind, unbidden, like someone had been sending mail to my brain in the middle of the night. It had been horrible, those half-glimpses of a greater truth, that sickly light bubbling up from my own mind, and I shuddered at the memory. I had pushed it away, disgusted. It had been...outside me. It had wanted something. Thought without mind, idea without intellect. Genius, pure and beautiful.”

- From the main Genius book

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A regular person with no touch of the supernatural (also known as a mere mortal) becomes a genius through a process known as a Breakthrough. The Breakthrough usually involves two elements: some strong emotion on the part of the proto-genius, and an important event in the person’s life that set the mortal’s thoughts in the direction of mad science. For the glassmaker in the above story, the important event was his working on the cathedral and subsequent stumbling upon an impossible method of engineering that he chose/was driven to investigate. The emotion that guided his development was the frustration he felt at his discoveries and worries being denied by those around him.

The exact process of the Breakthrough varies a great deal from person to person, but at the other end of it, they possess Inspiration.

Inspiration
Inspiration (also known as the light of genius or the light within) is the source of the genius's ability to do mad science. (Inspiration is why geniuses sometimes refer to themselves as the Inspired.) For the mad scientist, it is as a light had suddenly come on within their heads, and from the light comes the intellectual brilliance and radiant, insane logic that makes up not just Genius, but genius.

No one knows exactly what Inspiration is. One of the earlier theories that it was an angel or spirit, come to rest in the genius's head. What else could give them such unearthly idea and otherworldly truth? What else could shine so brightly? (The angel part of this theory was dropped as research into the psychology of the Illumination proceeded.)

Another theory is that Inspiration is the knowledge of laws of science from other universes. Mad science is the art of taking these laws and applying them to the science and technology of this world, creating things that should not be but are.

A third theory is that Inspiration is learning how to “trick” the universe. Like a stage magician performing a show, you distract the audience’s attention with one hand while doing what really matters with your other hand.

The general consensus, however, is that Inspiration is something outside normal conception and reality; it is not part of this universe and its laws of sane science. That light in your head was put there by something else and draws power from someplace you don't understand.

And finally:

My plan is working! I have an outline and I know what to write and I got 7,000 words in one day which is something that has never happened before and my plan is working! AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!