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On this, the week of 5-8-20 on In Synthesis with Infinite Is, we take a synthesized musical journey the first hour with Infinite Is where strange and wondrous sounds suggest a glimpse into a psychedelic, future multiverse. Then a song entitled “Wrong Program” rises from the back catalog and seeps into the collective consciousness. After a few local area announcements, the Is closes the show with hectic, tense improvised bit of knob twiddling and screen swiping. Many keys were tickled, many filters were filtered and many LFO’s were tweaked and much fun was had by all.
Lucin of Earth laid back, closed her eyes and peered through the eyes of one of her copies. Gliding into the only runway available, tucked into the blue hills of Lotchilia the last engine sputters out, starved for fuel. Lucin pops her fingers against the auto pilot switch and assumes control over the last few hundred meters. Silently easing down, the tires chirp against the icy runway and the craft lumbers to a stop. The lights are all on, but the place looks just as empty as she had feared from the total lack of radio signals, with the exception of the landing beacon, emanating from this snowball of a planet. She shot a burst of Gravitol into her shoulder and braced herself against the doorway as the hatch folded out into stairs. Nobody came out to greet her ship so she made her way down the tarmac toward the hangar and was relieved that a pushback tractor was fully operational. The Spaceport appeared to be well provisioned despite it’s apparent lack of personnel. She was uneasy, a sense of impending doom was making her feel like an ant under a looking glass. What had happened here, where is everyone and what is that metalic taste in the air? Had she known that her quick refueling stop would turn into a stranding she would have chosen her next moves very differently. Then her communicator came to life, it was interplanetary radio traffic, she had left the ships comms on.
A damp Chickadee fluffs the freezing rain off of it’s feathers, singing hopefully into the white snowy void of Lotchilia’s vast enchanting wilderness. That was the moment that it chose to change it’s tune. When a hand suddenly thrusts up through the deep drift that had collected against the tops of a small group of pines that grew shouldered up against the rock face that rises hundreds of meters up toward the dim sky. Frantically pushing snow away from the ever enlarging hole, a naked shivering Biovatar claws out onto the surface spreading out face down to keep from sinking back into the drift. This was the right spacetime coordinates, but the program meant to inhabit this meatbag was corrupted in transit, giving rise to this sinister killing machine. Instead of failing safe like it was supposed to, the malfunctioning vesicle failed deadly
All he had was Albert, an electric sheep, a black electric sheep. He had cost Shayland thousands of credits and at least two intimate relationships. That and a box of empathy were his only personal possessions. Gone to ground among the frozen radioactive hellscapes of Lotchilia he activates his prerecorded air traffic conversation and crouches in the backseat of the pushback tractor. This bounty would be enough to buy a real sheep and a flat high above the regular slobs. A rooftop garden with a white fence and showy perennials, trees bearing fruit and nuts and plenty of sweet clover for his sheep to eat. Shaylands mind drifted back to the task at hand. Had he known that this encounter would be his last in that Biovatar, he would have chosen his next step much more carefully. This is how it went for him, running a blade, sharp and narrow, sometimes we fall on our own sword.
