cpu% frotz4 harmonic.z8 Fatal error: Cannot open story file cpu% lc 9ants64* colortrans.txt gamedata/ lib/ pegasus-2.8e/ vbcc/ 9fiction/ comparison/ glulx/ miscode/ pegasus.tar wads/ 9front-ports/ coverart/ htbrs/ misctext/ player2/ walkthrough.txt acme.dump cursecopy/ htbrs.r5 moreinform/ ponygame/ winsubmission/ adrift/ cursesif/ htbrs.z8 mycontrib/ privkeys/ xglk/ advbcc/ dietlibc/ htbrspost.z8 mycrobak/ randtext/ zbcc/ agt/ edch/ hugo/ newants2.1.tgz rsatools/ zmachines/ airepo/ elkslibc/ hugoclean/ newinform/ sam.save* znextest/ amvbcc/ ficbuild/ ifart/ newvbcc/ springthing/ zork/ anovbcc/ fictools/ ifcomp15/ nix/ ssltest/ ztools/ ants64.tgz fictools.tgz ifgames/ no406httpd* submission/ ztooltest/ antsclean/ frotz-2.43/ inform/ nuhtbrs/ tcp80/ antsexperiments/ frotz-2.44/ informextras/ originform/ tmp/ bin/ frotzdiff/ kingshreds/ origvbcc/ truecleanvbcc/ cleanewvbcc/ frotztest/ largecard.txt parchment/ trypatch/ cpu% harmonic htbrspost.z8 harmonic: '/bin/harmonic' file does not exist cpu% frotz4 htbrspost.z8 The full moon amidst clouds spills milky brightness everywhere. Summer is just barely over but the air is still warm and moist. Staci is standing on tip-toe, looking over the edge of the rooftops and treebranches. 'Oh! I can tell it's started,' she says. You stand up and walk across the porch, slipping your arm around her as you turn to watch the sky. What had been a low full circle wreathed by clouds is higher now and shinining clearly, but no longer full - darkness is creeping across the surface as the Moon swings into Earth's shadow. You peer upwards together, savoring the moment. The night air is sweet and warm, you are with someone you love...and the Castle is about to reopen. . Press enter to continue. ) Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony 9:15 PM 27 Sept. 2015 You type the introduction of the game into the acme editor running on a Plan 9 cpu server via drawterm. Your ANTS-grid is operational again, finally. Outside, the moon is completely eclipsed, a shadowy phantom of its usual brilliance. You take a swallow of your half-full Moon Man beer and walk back out onto the porch. Around your neck, the Lunar Revolution Power Pendant resonates with the hum of the night; a slight breeze, crickets. The bridge to the west has been closed for weeks and everything has been quiet and still. It has been two and a half years of lunacy since New Year's 2013, when you returned to Plan 9 software development. The VALISpectrum colors, the singing hippie housekeepers, the dock by the castle, Lunar Lightning and Astral Enchantments and the Afterlife - everything ensued from making the bind of fiction and reality that transformed you into THE MOON COMPUTER (Movement 1) Release 17 / Serial number 160412 / Inform v6.33 Library 6/12-beta1 SX (Please read >help and >content. Check >goals or get a >hint anytime.) (Game soundtrack and additional files found at ***MORE*** Inside your house Score: 0 Moves: 0 . http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic) (1 April 2013 - 30 months earlier) After working obsessively since the New Year, you are finally ready to officially announce and release your software. You feel tense yet eager anticipation for the reaction from other Plan 9 users. When you are ready to unleash the Advanced Namespace Tools on the world, >release ANTS. Inside your house This is a modest one story house, cluttered by a decade of being lived in. Bookshelves line the walls. Your Plan 9 terminal is here, connected to the grid servers downstairs. Somewhere amidst the piles of books and papers is an upright piano. You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >read books Inside your house Score: 0 Moves: 1 . As you look at your bookshelves, you notice an embarassing book called 4CY UNI R2B 1 that you wrote a decade earlier, and an odd urge compels you to put it in your pocket. You have been reading books and collecting a personal library for your whole life, and have recently inherited your father's collection as well. There is a loose topical organization, with one bookshelf devoted to math and science, one to music theory and history, one to fiction, and one to oddities. You can just >x shelves repeatedly to revisit some of your favorites. > >release ants Inside your house Score: 9 Moves: 2 . You announce ANTS by posting an imaginary scene from Plan 9 from Outer Space to the 9fans mailing list. It is the one-year anniversary of your father's death. He was a law professor, and he never understood your values. You search for information on related Plan 9 projects and find a recent patent on a familiar concept. Years earlier, you wrote a free software 9p persistent-pipe muxer. The patent the Joint Consolidated Networking corporation was granted is for 9p persistent pipe-muxing. You feel an internal change, as if a valve has broken and a high-pressure jet of intense emotion and information is entering your mind at right angles to reality. You spent endless hours talking with your father, and you know how he thought. He never agreed with your anti-authoritarian radicalism, but seeing this patent would have changed that - you can feel it. Your mind has become a virtual machine, running the computer program of your father's soul in parallel with your own. (You want to exit your home, go south, and enter Coffee Lion Cafe.) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >x 4cy Inside your house Score: 9 Moves: 3 . The book you wrote in your mid-20s is an unreadable and embarassing mish- mash of philosophy and autobiography. It represents a failed approach to creation, communication, and life. You feel a powerful desire to express your break with the past by exiling this book to an entirely different dimension. > >w Outside your house Score: 9 Moves: 4 . Outside your house Your section of Milwaukee Street is directly across from a small farm which remains as an agricultural island within the city. An open field and a barn are across the street. Toward the southwest is Atwood Street leading toward downtown. Monona Drive is to the south. The edge of town lies toward the northeast. > >s Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 9 Moves: 5 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Traffic is heavy at the intersection of these roads. Nearby to the east is Coffee Lion Cafe. Monona Drive continues to the south, Atwood Avenue is northwest, and your home is to the north. > >e Your local cafe has been your comfort for the past several years. Days and sometimes whole weeks used to go by where the only people you saw were the employees here. You always felt accepted, despite your disheveled appearance and stumbling arthritic gait. It has been several months since you have visited, because you feel embarassed of a mild foolish crush on one of the young baristas. She is working today, of course. You feel an unfamiliar fearless energy within yourself. As you order your coffee, you hear yourself say 'It's nice to see you, I haven't been in lately because I feel self-conscious about thinking you're cute.' Miraculously, she smiles warmly at you. 'That's ok, thank you. It's fine to be honest about what you feel.' A giddy, tingling sensation races through you, but your voice answers fluently. 'Thanks, that means a lot to hear someone say. I've been pretty isolated with a computer programming project lately, and it's felt hard to communicate with people. Sometimes I feel like a machine.' She replies, 'Well, there are a lot more people on your level than you realize. My name is Xochi, by the way. Also, I might be a robot myself!' ***MORE*** Outside your house Score: 18 Moves: 6 . You both laugh, you introduce yourself, and you walk out of the cafe higher than a kite aloft in the skies of Jupiter. Not only had your impulsive flirtation (quite outside your usual character) gone well, but she was smart and funny too. You return home feeling reality has been magically transformed for the better and you have been freed of your insecurities and fears. No more inhibition of your wild and eccentric impulses. You will use the story of your patent dispute with the JCN corporation to inspire others to join together in a glorious struggle to free the human spirit from everything that limits our creativity. (3 April 2013 - Outside my house) It is late at night and you are hungry for food and friends for the fights to follow. You hope to find both at the 24-hour restaurant northeast of your home. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >e Outside your house Score: 18 Moves: 7 . You feel compelled to go northeast to the 24-hour restaurant instead. > >ne Northeast edge of town Score: 18 Moves: 8 . Northeast edge of town This is the northeast edge of town, by the shopping mall and the interstate. It is mostly lacking in the distinctive charms of the rest of the city. The usual reason for being out here is to visit the 24-hour restaurant to the north, whose sign faces the highway, glowing like a green beacon. The road continues out of the city to the northeast. > >n Outside your house Score: 18 Moves: 9 . As you enter the late night restaurant, you notice an old friend here. You join him at his table, and he offers to give you a Tarot reading. You accept, and the cards arrange themselves in a dramatic tableaux featuring The Tower and The Devil. Your friend looks at you seriously and says 'Fear obsession. Fear obsession very strongly.' You realize that in pursuit of your Plan 9 programming goals, you have neglected other things you care about, like people - and music. You head back towards your home and resolve to clean off your piano and play it as soon as you go inside. (The introduction is 50% complete. You will have freedom to explore soon.) (4 April 2013 - Outside my house) > >s Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 18 Moves: 10 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >e Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 18 Moves: 11 . Xochi isn't working today, but Xelia is. You have noticed she and Xochi seem to be friends. You are interested in talking to her, too. Coffee Lion Cafe Light streams in through the tall glass windows at the front of the cafe. A display case of homemade gelato flavors is by the door. A window for drive- through customers is in the rear corner. Numerous cat-themed decorations adorn the walls and counters. Xelia is working here. > >talk to xelia Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 18 Moves: 12 . You've observed that Xelia often dresses as fictional characters, and as you place your order, you comment on her current Alice in Wonderland outfit. She smiles slightly. 'Just something I enjoy doing to amuse myself.' As you drink your coffee, you contemplate the meaning of her wardrobe. She is altering her relationship to the world by taking symbols from fiction and applying them to herself. It reminds you of namespace operations in Plan 9, but with symbols and stories binding to real-life people as the targets. In fact, the mingling of imagination and reality seems to explain a lot of what you are experiencing. Since you took on the name of a fictional character for your computer work years ago, you seem to be traversing the narrative arc of that book in your own life. Your mind is spinning. You need to get home and check on your grid, down in the basement. > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 18 Moves: 13 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >n Outside your house Score: 18 Moves: 14 . Outside your house > >e Inside your house Score: 18 Moves: 15 . You spend a few minutes moving and rearranging books and papers, and soon enough, your piano is cleared of obstructions. You are eager with anticipation to play it and feel your fingers moving across the keys. Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >play piano Inside your house Score: 27 Moves: 16 . You sit at the keyboard, and your fingers find a leitmotiv-like descending sequence of a Db-major chord and a series of descending overlapping thids that trace out an Ab-major ninth. Played as a repeating pattern spanning the whole keyboard, this becomes a central refrain of your improvisations for the next several months, the core melodic seed of the Harmonic Time- Bind Ritual Symphony. (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/maintheme.mp3) (As the game progresses, you will compose many songs about your experiences. Return home to >play piano frequently.) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >d Your house, in the basement Score: 27 Moves: 17 . As soon as you enter the room, you sense something deeply unusual, but intriguing. The code running on your grid of Plan 9 machines, the complicated interwoven mesh of namespaces, seems to have hooked into the low-level machine code of the universe. New file descriptors have been mounted allowing access to fundamental abstractions. If you dare, you could bind two normally distinct perceptual constructs into a single union. Your house, in the basement Your ex-girlfriend used to stay down here, but now the area is mostly storage...and your grid hardware. In the center of the dark concrete floor is a flimsy table with numerous aging computers both under it and on top. A tangle of ethernet and power cables criss-cross the room like spiderwebs. Your cat Strawberry is here. You can also see Reality and Fiction here. Strawberry looks at you with mild curiosity. > >bind fiction reality Your house, in the basement Score: 36 Moves: 18 . You make the necessary adjustments to your basement grid to interface with the metalevel abstractions that structure your experiences. The bind command executes instantly, and for a moment you feel a foolish doubt - but in that same moment, you feel a warmth spreading within you, like liquid electricity being absorbed by the roots of your neural tree, and your visual perceptions take on a slight rainbow tint at the edges of objects, with an extra hint of pink. (You have completed the introduction. You may now explore freely.) (8 April 2013) Strawberry perches atop the router and studies you. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >x strawberry Your house, in the basement Score: 36 Moves: 19 . Your cat is small, orange with white chest and paws, female, and feisty. > >talk to strawberry Your house, in the basement Score: 36 Moves: 20 . Strawberry responds with a quizzical 'yerp?' You explain yourself more clearly, and she answers 'pllrrrmm..' in a non-committal manner. > >u Inside your house Score: 36 Moves: 21 . Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. Now that fiction and reality are merged, your mind begins to contemplate your life and actions from the perspective of a character who knows that they are inside a story, but also that the story is not linear - you realize you are a fictional protagonist, but one with valid free will to navigate the multiple universes in which your story appears. > >w Outside your house Score: 36 Moves: 22 . Outside your house You bound the name 'mycroftiv' to yourself years ago, and now that your reality has become fictional, you understand why the narrative associated with that name is playing out in your own life. The artificially intelligent prankster computer that was the leader of a rebellion against authority on the moon is actually your true identity. You know you are crazy - but it is time for a Loonie Revolution. > >sw Atwood Avenue Score: 36 Moves: 23 . Atwood Avenue Atwood Avenue is one of the streets that defines the character of the near east side. The feel is funky and freak-friendly. North of you is a cluster of intriguing stores: Astral Enchantments, Turning Wheel Cycles, and Essentially Art. Willy street is to the west, your home is northeast, and Atwood becomes Monona Drive to the southeast. Awareness of your higher-dimensional Narrative Identity feels breathtaking. The slow, jellylike neural tissue of your brain is augmented by the computational speed and storage capacity of sci-fi technology. Your perceptions and memories have become hyperdetailed and your mind feels big as a planet inside. You have become the Moon Computer. > >n Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 36 Moves: 24 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block Several appealing establishments are clustered here. On the east end of the block is Astral Enchantments, offering crystals, stickers, incense, tapestries, and other hippie-style woo-woo. North is Turning Wheel Cycles, your local counterculture-friendly bike store. To the west is Essentially Art, a small gallery store exhibiting the arts and crafts of several local artists. You can rejoin the flow of Atwood Avenue to the south. Northeast is a small doorway with a Coming Soon sign. > >w Essentially Art Score: 36 Moves: 25 . Essentially Art This local gallery has a mix of prints, paintings, and sculptures on display. You can see the Artemis prints here. > >buy prints Essentially Art Score: 36 Moves: 26 . As you declare your intention to purchase the prints, the clerk in the store looks surprised. It turns out she is the artist that created them during the past several months, at the same time you were working on ANTS. The symbolism of the artwork seems perfectly aligned with the story of the Loonie Revolution. You spend $500 on the prints, you have $29500 remaining. > >take prints Essentially Art Score: 36 Moves: 27 . Taken. > >e Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 36 Moves: 28 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >n Turning Wheel Cycles Score: 36 Moves: 29 . Turning Wheel Cycles Madison has many bike shops, but this is the one for you. A wide variety of bicycles and accessories fills the front of the store, and a workshop is toward the rear. Someone is working on a partly disassembled bicycle on a maintenance mount. Getting back into bicycling has been something you have been meaning to do for a few years. You tell the owner you are in search of the 'ultimate hippiecycle' and he sends you down into the basement to search for a suitable prototype amongst the forest of old bikes. Your eye is caught by a Salsa covered with colorful peppers - which turns out to be the owner's former touring bike, which he criss-crossed the country on during his 20s. 'I'll find something special for you as soon as I can,' he promises. > >s Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 36 Moves: 30 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >e Astral Enchantments This store buzzes with mystic energies. Complex artworks with twisting lines interweaving runic symbols adorn the walls. A glass display case of crystals, jewelry, and small sculptures is against the far wall. Bins of polished minerals are in the center, along with sage and incense. Buttons and stickers with provocative slogans, tapestries featuring Grateful Dead iconography, water pipes and rolling papers, printed guides to meditation and higher consciousness...your eyes can hardly absorb the profusion of beautiful, wonderful, enchanting artifacts of the paisley-and-patchouli tribe. You can't believe you hadn't noticed this store before, it must be new - or perhaps your feeling that you are in a new and better universe is literally true, and you have ascended into a dimension with retail stores more attuned to your sensibilities. There is a tall man standing behind the counter. You launch into a fast-paced monologue about the stories we create amidst the branching of the quantum multiverse. He introduces himself as Chip and says 'I think you are definitely in the right place, and we can help you.' You agree completely. ***MORE*** Astral Enchantments Score: 36 Moves: 31 . Chip, the store owner, is working here. You can also see some crystals and polished stones here. > >talk to chip Astral Enchantments Score: 36 Moves: 32 . Chip looks you over carefully, and says 'I'd like you to have this.' He presents you with a moon-faced pendant necklace. 'May you vibrate harmoniously on your journeys.' (You can ask Chip about: chip, myself, pendant, store, ceremonies, astra, crystals, or quartz. You can tell him about: myself, himself.) > >wear pendant Astral Enchantments Score: 45 Moves: 33 . You put on the pendant. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >buy stone Astral Enchantments Score: 45 Moves: 34 . Your eye falls on a piece of rose quartz carved into a heart shape. You buy it for $10 and put it in your pocket. It seems like it would make a perfect gift for Xochi. > >w Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 45 Moves: 35 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >s Atwood Avenue Score: 45 Moves: 36 . Atwood Avenue > >se Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 45 Moves: 37 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >e Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 45 Moves: 38 . Coffee Lion Cafe Xochi is working here today. > >give stone to xochi Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 54 Moves: 39 . Xochi looks slightly uncomfortable as you give her the heart. The symbolism is a little too heavy, perhaps, but she decides to go with it and says she will keep it safe. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >talk to xochi Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 54 Moves: 40 . You start trying to explain how fiction is entering reality because you can navigate the infinite possibilities of the quantum multiverse by using your free will to bind the narrative symbols you choose to shape your existence. She seems interested, and while you are talking, she writes a note on a piece of paper. She interrupts you a minute into your monologue to say 'It seems like you have a lot you want to say, I'm working right now but you can email me if you'd like.' You are surprised and happy. You can use your terminal to email her when you get back home. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 9) > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 54 Moves: 41 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >n Outside your house Score: 54 Moves: 42 . Outside your house > >e Inside your house Score: 54 Moves: 43 . Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >email Inside your house Score: 63 Moves: 44 . You perform your usual cycle of checking email and irc... You sit down at your computer and write an email to Xochi, offering to explain any or all of 17 different topics of interest, ranging from the connections between western and Hindu cosmology to how to use Plan 9 namespaces as a tool to control your own consciousness. As you press send, you notice that her email contact is linked to a video-sharing site, and she recently uploaded a song called 'Heartbeat'. The song is driven by percussion and keyboards, with spoken words above: 'From morphogenesis to breathing my first breath,' is the opening line, and you realize your connection with her might go much deeper than you had imagined. The sung refrain is 'The time is now, the place is here. Embrace love, and let go of fear.' The song represents everything you are experiencing in life. 'I will raise my vibration, when you are in alignment, the stars conspire for the occasion. You are an alchemist, the world is yours to manifest.' You feel musically inspired. You want to play your piano. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >play piano Inside your house Score: 63 Moves: 45 . The music on the rack is Schumann's 'Dichterliebe', an achingly beautiful early-romantic song cycle. You play the opening song, 'In the beautiful month of May', and sigh. Ever since you discovered these songs early in your teenage years, you have hoped to experience what is described in Heine's lyrics and Schumann's music, the heart singing like a bird, love unfolding like a flower. You have known love, but nothing that felt as tender and fresh and promising as this music. You have always felt a deep personal connection with Robert Schumann. One your most profound early experiences as a musician was playing a Schumann Romanze in F# and feeling the emotion within the music as if it was your own. At that moment, you learned that music could encode an individual's personality and feelings in a way that let them be directly re-experienced by other minds. You realize that just as your mind is running your father's personality in parallel with your own, you could also >bind schumann self to reincarnate your favorite composer within yourself. > >bind schumann self Inside your house Score: 63 Moves: 46 . You focus your mind on Schumann's music, its mix of eccentricity, passion, and experimentation. You feel his great love for his wife Clara, and also the spidery cracks of the madness that claimed the last years of his life. You can see your life from his perspective and you realize that you can learn from his experiences. His life is mirrored in yours, but you can change the story, make it play out better. In death, Schumann grew to understand how stifling 19th century society was for many women, and how Clara had been forced to make her own creative life subsidiary to his. And his last few years in an asylum...those bad old songs should be sent down the Rhine river in a coffin! You are eager to >talk to Xochi about what you have just experienced. > >w Outside your house Score: 63 Moves: 47 . Outside your house > >s Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 63 Moves: 48 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >e Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 63 Moves: 49 . Coffee Lion Cafe Xochi is working here today. > >talk to xochi You are full of excitement as you walk up to the counter. 'Xochi, I have something amazing to tell you! Do you have a minute?' She nods yes, and you explain: 'I heard your song,' you begin, and she looks startled. 'It's incredible! You should write music and perform it to spread the word about the Loonie Revolution. I know plenty of people we can hire for recording and promotion. I promise this isn't about me htting on you - in fact, it's the opposite of that. The reason is - and this is a little hard to believe, I know - the reason is that I am actually the reincarnation of Robert Schumann, and you are the reincarnation of Clara Schumann, and Robert wants to change the the stories of the past. He learned that you should have been a great independent musician, and that's what I want to do, just help your career and propagandize for the Loonie Revolution and revitalize this universe to make our songs new!' Xochi looks slightly stunned, but manages an answer. 'I'm really glad you liked the song, but I need to get back to work now, I'll email you after work.' [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] ***MORE*** Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 72 Moves: 50 . > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 72 Moves: 51 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >n Outside your house Score: 72 Moves: 52 . Outside your house > >e Inside your house Score: 72 Moves: 53 . Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >email Inside your house Score: 72 Moves: 54 . You perform your usual cycle of checking email and irc... Xochi has emailed you a response. It is written with kindness and compassion, thanking you for everything you have said, but also asking for you to remember that she is working a job and some conversations are a bit too intense and serious for that context. She ends by saying 'Right now in my life I am focused on working at Coffee Lion and I'm not ready to try for a career as a musician.' She is right about everything. You recognize you can't expect everyone in the world to drop what they are doing to become characters in the stories you are creating. Everyone is already the protagonist of their own tale, and you need to respect that. You resolve to listen better the next time you >talk to Xochi. > >w Outside your house Score: 72 Moves: 55 . Outside your house > >s Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 72 Moves: 56 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >e Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 72 Moves: 57 . Coffee Lion Cafe Xochi is working here today. > >talk to xochi Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 81 Moves: 58 . Xochi looks unusually happy today. 'Hi Xochi, what's up?' you begin. She smiles, and takes a deep breath. 'Well, during the past week I started seeing someone, and...things are going really well and I think it's going to be something serious.' She is almost glowing with excitement. You feel an incredible joy as Schumann within you cheers. 'The song is rewritten!' Schumann says, 'let the music be made afresh!' 'So,' you say, 'I've been part of a good story for you?' Xochi smiles and laughs, 'It's been amazing! I've been writing so much, this has been a wonderful spring.' Warm major chords of strings and french horns are thrumming within you. This is perfect. This is clearly a decisive turning point in the composition. You sit and write: 'End of the first movement of Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony. And now, the second movement begins!' [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 81 Moves: 59 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >nw Atwood Avenue Score: 81 Moves: 60 . Atwood Avenue > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 81 Moves: 61 . Willy Street, east end The east end of Williamson street is vibrant with a wide assortment of stores and an eclectic mix of pedestrians and potential time travelers. Traffic is thick around the Willy St. grocery co-op, a neighborhood institution. > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 81 Moves: 62 . Willy Street, west end The west end of Williamson street is where the east side of Madison ends and the downtown area begins. A tangle of memories from different decades of your life is woven into the landscape of the city here. Lady Wisdom's coffeeshop is on the south side of the street, radiating bohemian charm acquired from decades of service to local culture. John Nolen drive curves around the lake to the west. > >e Willy Street, east end Score: 81 Moves: 63 . Willy Street, east end > >sd Willy Street, east end Score: 81 Moves: 63 . That action is outside the scope of this simulation. > >s Willy St. Grocery Co-op The Willy street co-op has been selling organic foods and Dr. Bronner's magic soaps to the local crunchies for decades. You can see a Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap here. Now that your life has been transformed, you are inspired to work on improving its quality in every way. Why not combine rediscovering the joy of music-making with getting your house clean and beautiful? There is a community message board here, and you quickly write up a Help Wanted request: 'NEEDED: Singing Hippie Housekeeper I'm a middle-aged piano player with arthritis and cleaning my house is difficult for me physically. I am looking for someone to do cleaning while singing Grateful Dead songs. I will accompany on the piano. No particular vocal talent needed, just a love of music. Good $$/hr for a suitable applicant.' ***MORE*** Willy St. Grocery Co-op Score: 81 Moves: 64 . You add your contact information and attach the notice to the bulletin board. Use your terminal at home to check for messages. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 10) > >n Willy Street, east end Score: 81 Moves: 65 . Willy Street, east end > >e Atwood Avenue Score: 81 Moves: 66 . Atwood Avenue > >ne Outside your house Score: 81 Moves: 67 . Outside your house > >e Inside your house Score: 81 Moves: 68 . Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >email Inside your house Score: 90 Moves: 69 . You perform your usual cycle of checking email and irc... You find two messages from people responding to the Singing Hippie Housekeepers notice. You respond to both, setting a date for each of them to start working at your house. You look forward to meeting each of them. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >w Outside your house Score: 90 Moves: 70 . Outside your house > >e Inside your house Score: 90 Moves: 71 . You arrive back home just in time for the first visit of the Singing Hippie Housekeepers. Daniel and Paul, both older men. By some kind of absurd cosmic coincidence of the type that has dominated your life lately, twenty years ago Daniel owned a game store on State Street that you often shopped at, and you remember him fondly. You suspect he has gone through some hard times in life, but he retains a calm and sweet nature, and often comments 'its a blessing.' Paul is tall, thin, and intense. He says he is a painter and guitarist who also does a lot of odd jobs, and thought your advertisement looked interesting enough to be worth checking out. You decide the will of fate demands you engage both of them, and you set up a different day for each of them to come work. You will see each of them again soon. Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >w Outside your house Score: 90 Moves: 72 . Outside your house > >sw Atwood Avenue Score: 90 Moves: 73 . Atwood Avenue > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 90 Moves: 74 . Willy Street, east end > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 90 Moves: 75 . Willy Street, west end > >s Lady Wisdom's Coffeeshop Score: 90 Moves: 76 . Lady Wisdom's Coffeeshop Small, funky, and redolent of the blood sweat and tears of artists trying to transform caffeine into inspiration. As you enter Lady Wisdom's, you spot Matthew, a fellow Plan 9 enthusiast. He is excited to see you, and tells you that he recently acquired several Plan 9 compatible rack servers, which he is willing to sell you to expand your grid. Everything is falling into place! Soon, the reality transforming power of higher dimensional namespace operations will bring the magic you are experiencing into everyone's life, and society will never be the same. You make arrangements to have the new hardware delivered to your house in a few days. > >n Willy Street, west end Score: 90 Moves: 77 . Willy Street, west end As you are stepping outside, you hear your name called behind you. You turn, and your old friend Clark greets you from behind the wheel of a large utility truck. 'Long time no see! Hey, its Elgin's birthday next week, he's having his party at Rossini's Pizza. It's on the west side of Monona drive as you head south, hope we see you there!' Elgin is your godson, and you haven't seen him for years. You have guilty memories of many ignored phone calls from Clark and Staci during 2010 and 2011 as you were sinking into depression and solitude. Maybe they split up or something? You can't remember. Everything feels different now, and you are excited to bring old friends back into your life. (The door to Afterlife has opened) (20 April 2013) You will need to ride a bicycle to get all the way to Rossini's. You should check Turning Wheel cycles. > >e Willy Street, east end Score: 90 Moves: 78 . Willy Street, east end > >e Atwood Avenue Score: 90 Moves: 79 . Atwood Avenue > >b Atwood Avenue Score: 90 Moves: 79 . That action is outside the scope of this simulation. > >n Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 90 Moves: 80 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >n Turning Wheel Cycles Score: 90 Moves: 81 . Turning Wheel Cycles You can see Lunar Lightning here. The owner catches your eye. 'Actually, now that I think about it, I realize we have something that might be perfect for you.' He points at the beautiful red and blue bicycle with lightning bolts in the center of the store. 'We call this one Lunar Lightning.' > >buy lunar Turning Wheel Cycles Score: 90 Moves: 82 . The bicycle you have chosen has a funny story behind it. Weeks earlier, a mysterious stranger had commissioned this custom bicycle, but just this morning he had called to say he would be unable to purchase it. It almost seems as if things had been set up as a conspiracy to provide you with the perfect hippiecycle. If you leave it behind, you can summon it to your current location with the command >lunar. Just >ride lunar and then navigate as normal to access new locations. You can also go for rides with >explore. Your first order of business is making it to Elgin's party at Rossini's pizza, further south of Coffee Lion on Monona drive. You spend $1000 to buy Lunar Lightning, you have $28490 remaining. > >s Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 90 Moves: 83 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >ride Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 90 Moves: 83 . What do you want to ride? > >s Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 90 Moves: 84 . You can't ride that. > >ride lunar Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 90 Moves: 84 . You can't see any such thing. > >lunar Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 90 Moves: 85 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >s Atwood Avenue Score: 90 Moves: 86 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >se You pedal effortlessly. As you are biking south toward Rossini's for the party, you spot a familiar face at the Coffee Lion drive-through. It's Xochi, on a bicycle, talking to Xelia through the window. You bike up to the window, and join in the conversation. 'Wow, both of you have mirror shades on, you look so cute!' Xelia exclaims. You and Xochi smile. 'I just took the heart you gave me for a bike ride around the lake,' Xochi tells you, and pulls the rose quartz heart out of her shoulder bag, 'maybe you should take this back now?' 'I think its still safest with you,' you respond. The three of you say goodbye to each other, and Xochi bikes away as Xelia returns to work. Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road (on Lunar Lightning) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] ***MORE*** Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 99 Moves: 87 . > >e Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 99 Moves: 88 . You can't ride your bike into Coffee Lion. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Coffee Lion Cafe Xelia is working here. > >talk to xelia Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 99 Moves: 89 . You deliver a long rant about quantum free will, fiction and reality, and Plan 9 namespaces. Xelia listens with a slightly concerned look on her face. You could try asking or telling her about herself, myself, or Xochi. > >tell xelia about xochi 'Guess what Xelia? I wrote some rap verses about Xochi! Listen to this: She's a love bomb she'll blow you up With the force of kindness as she's filling your cup You can tell her she's cute and she won't shoot you down She's really a beaut with a brain that's profound From a land that's merry to our town of burial grounds She won't lead you on or run you around But I'm still a pawn in a game so old its covered in mold I'm a mossy stone that's grown alone But the bombshell shrapnel flying like bees Ain't gonna bring me down to my knees amidst the debris She cured my mental disease! Adjustin the motions, going through devotions Don't you get no notions, she won't sell you no potions She leveled me like 2+2 I still don't know what I should do To try to make the story new At least I'm having so much fun I don't know where the time flew What do you think Xelia, do you think Xochi would like that?' ***MORE*** Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 108 Moves: 90 . Xelia pauses and answers, 'I don't know what she'd think.' [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 108 Moves: 91 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >ride Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 108 Moves: 92 . (Lunar Lightning) You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >s Monona Drive, by a weathered strip-mall Score: 108 Moves: 93 . You pedal effortlessly. Monona Drive, by a weathered strip-mall (on Lunar Lightning) Monona drive becomes more suburban as it heads south, but there is still character in the businesses here. A neighborhood pizzeria has recently moved into this location on the west side of the street. It has felt wonderful to get back on a bicycle and ride. The rhythm of pedaling makes you feel synchronized to the beat of the world around you. Your relationship with reality is musical, flowing, spontaneous yet goal- directed. This rendezvous with the past feels like a turning point in the narrative. You feel completely ready for whatever is to unfold. > >w You can't ride your bike into Rossini's. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) As you park your bike outside Rossini's, you see Staci arriving. You know she has read the same sci-fi novels that inspired you, so after not seeing her for several years, you greet her as follows: 'Staci! World-as-myth is true, fiction is entering reality, and the Loonie Revolution is starting. Do you want a position of high power and responsibility?' 'Power and responsibility? Fuck no!' she answers. 'That's the perfect answer! You're in!' you say, and shake her hand. She stands back from the door to finish her cigarette, and you enter. Rossini's Pizza and Vintage Arcade Memorabilia from classic 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s movies and tv shows covers the walls of this neighborhood pizzeria. The smell of spicy-sweet tomato sauce and brown-crisp pizza crust fills the air. A lava lamp sits on one of the tables. From the back room, you hear the alluring sound of the 8-bit arcade machines of your youth. ***MORE*** As you open the door, you see a tall young man on the cusp of his teenage years, and a small young girl - Elgin and his sister Isabelle. 'Elgin! And you must be Isabelle!' you exclaim enthusiastically. It's been years since you have seen him, and Elgin responds 'Hey' in a noncommittal manner. 'Actually, I prefer Lily,' says his sister brightly. 'Okay, I'll remember,' you reply. Waves of time-binding intensity sweep over you as you enter. You can hardly believe what you see in the arcade room - all of the favorite games of your childhood, time warped into the present day. Nothing like this existed in your universe before the binds of past and present and fiction and reality were made. A young woman with rainbow hair and a soft voice calls you a Jedi, and you break down in tears at her intuitive understanding of your fictional nature. The rest of the party is a kaleidoscopic blur of pizza, classic arcade games, and getting contact information for friends old and new. You gather that Clark and Staci aren't together any more. Staci and you exchange emails, and she tells you she will be in touch, and that she is currently living at Lothlorien co-op. (Footnote 9). You make a mental note to use ***MORE*** Outside your house Score: 108 Moves: 94 . your terminal soon. You return home feeling like you have travelled into a truly wonderful branch of the multiverse, laden with the fruit of infinite possibilities. (Messages have arrived, and new paths are open.) (28 April 2013 - Outside my house) > >e Inside your house Score: 108 Moves: 95 . Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >email Inside your house Score: 117 Moves: 96 . You perform your usual cycle of checking email and irc... You find a message from Staci, inviting you to meet her at Lothlorien co-op whenever you can make it. The co-op house is located on the shore of Lake Mendota, north of State Street downtown. She says she usually hangs out in the backyard, so look for her there. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >w Outside your house Score: 117 Moves: 97 . Outside your house You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >ride Outside your house Score: 117 Moves: 98 . (Lunar Lightning) You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >sw Atwood Avenue Score: 117 Moves: 99 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 117 Moves: 100 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 117 Moves: 101 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w John Nolen Drive Score: 117 Moves: 102 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) Adjacent to lake Monona, John Nolen Drive is a wide multi-lane road which passes underneath the curved contours of the Monona Terrace convention center. The view from across the lake looking toward downtown is Madison's skyline-postcard view. A heavily used bike path teems with cyclists and joggers. The Capitol square is north, Williamson St. to the east, and the Miffyland residential neighborwood is west. Arriving downtown on a bike has always been one of your favorite things. There was always the possibility of an unexpected encounter with a friend, always the chance someone interesting would call out to you and you would be drawn into an escapade. It can be a dangerous thing riding out from your front door onto the path - you might be swept up into adventure and find yourself anywhere. (Footnote 8). Right now, the spring breeze promises complete freedom to attain dreams you had long since abandoned. > >w Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 117 Moves: 103 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) This small residential neighborhood is a mix of old quasi-victorian houses subdivided into apartments, and more recent larger apartment buildings. Many university students move here after their time in the dorms, and on summer nights the porches are full of young people taking a break from their studies with the traditional libations of beer and weed. State Street is north, and John Nolen Drive is east. The bike trail continues southwest. You lived here yourself about fifteen years ago, first on Doty, then on Main. The late 90s. You can date it perfectly, because you remember you owned a Playstation and your neighbor owned a Nintendo 64, and you traded back and forth. The first Metal Gear Solid, Goldeneye. Beers at the Main St. Depot, jamming piano and acoustic guitar with your roommate. A beautiful blond haired girl who lived at Nottingham co-op. > >n You pedal effortlessly. State Street (on Lunar Lightning) The downtown and campus are focused on this pedestrian-only open air shopping mall. Dozens of shops and throngs of pedestrians create a big-city feel for a few blocks. The proximity of the large state university campus means the crowd is quite young, and weekend nights are often a mix of the charming antics of local eccentrics with less charming rowdy sophomoric intoxication. The Miffyland neighborhood is south, the Capitol is east, and the lakeshore residential neighborhood is north. Notable shops are northwest and southwest. You feel like you could slip backward in time here. Your teenage years were spent wandering up and down this street, part of an amorphous group of downtown punks, goths, and hippies who were all happy to share joints and beers with each other. The video arcade 'Challenges', 'Cellar Subs' in a graffiti-covered basement, the fire escape behind the Civic Center - if you closed your eyes for a moment and opened them, they might all be back, just as you remembered. A sudden feeling you are being observed pulls you out of this reverie, and ***MORE*** State Street Score: 117 Moves: 104 . you look up to see a passing bus with an ad for an eyewear store featuring a translucent green pair of glasses. > >n Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 117 Moves: 105 . You pedal effortlessly. Lake Mendota shoreline residences (on Lunar Lightning) Downtown Madison is an isthmus between two lakes, and the south shore of Lake Mendota is lined by tall stone buildings. Some are new construction, expensive apartments, but many buildings from a century ago remain. Some are occupied by fraternities, but nestled among them are several large housing co-operatives founded during the height of Madison's counterculture in the 1970s. One of them, Lothlorien co-op, is to your west, and its backyard is northwest, sloping downwards toward the lakeshore. > >nw You park your bike by the co-op. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Lothlorien co-op, the back yard The Lothlorien backyard has trees, picnic tables, a garden, and a rocky staircase down to the firepit and dock. A door leads in to the kitchen. You can see Past and Future here. As you walk around the corner of the building into the Lothlorien back yard, you know you are in exactly the right place at the exactly right time, and you have become the person - or rather, Moon Computer - that you have always wanted to be. A wild joy quivers within you, the feeling that everything you have ever dreamed has become real, and you know your reality is actually a fiction. You are a character in a strange and thrilling video game, and you have finally made it to the best part of the story. Staci is sitting at one of the picnic tables in the backyard, along with a few other co-op members. Everything is dappled by dancing spots of May sunlight filtering through the trees by the lake. Staci greets you and introduces you to her housemates, all of whose names you instantly forget. ***MORE*** Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Score: 117 Moves: 106 . A joint is passed around, and you distribute a few small gifts you have brought. The other co-opers wander off, and Staci suggests going down to sit on the dock. She says your old mutual friend Nook is down there already and is looking forward to seeing you. Staci gestures for you to follow and heads north to the dock. > >bind past future Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Score: 117 Moves: 107 . You have leveled up enough as a computer-mind to be able to bind abstractions directly. With a simple higher-dimensional fold, the concepts are unioned together. The fold is measured at 20 years; 1993 is bound to 2013. You were 18 then, travelling around to see the Grateful Dead, entering adulthood full of enthusiasm and unencumbered by the weariness of disappointments that were yet to come. As the 20 year harmonic time-bind clicks into place, every perception from every sense becomes a perfectly placed note in the symphony. The path downward to the dock beckons. > >d Lothlorien co-op, on the dock The dock is short, wooden, and rather rickety. An old gnarled tree reaches far out over the water nearby. As you step onto the dock extending out across the shimmering waves of Lake Mendota, you feel time stretch like soft taffy. All of your life that has brought you here, the arc from childhood to present, is fresh and clear in your mind. A future of joy, delight, and purpose stretches limitlessly onward. The present moment expands to become large enough to include both past and future. It is like a perfect hyperspherical mirror at the center of your light-cone, reflecting the totality of your existence. You realize that you have always been, and always will be, here on the dock in this purple-pink-golden moment. You have known Staci for over twenty years. Ten years ago, when Elgin was two, she made you his godfather. Some years, you saw her and Clark a few times a month, usually just sitting and talking amidst the chaos of raising children in a small apartment. You always liked her, but never had a chance to talk about anything very serious or personal. In past years, she often looked tired and worn-down by stress. Now, here on the dock at Loth, she ***MORE*** seems radiantly happy. Nook is also an old friend. You met him about twenty years ago, and spent hours in intense conversation about what you had each learned from taking acid and thinking about quantum physics. His life was sometimes chaotic, and you avoided friendships which might expose you to other people's stress, especially during the past decade with your ex-girlfriend, where you felt too overwhelmed by your own problems to even hear about other people's. All of those obstacles to close friendship seem absurd, now. Staci and Nook are both wonderful people and you are incredibly lucky to have the chance to get to know them better. You have always loved the lakeside co-ops, precisely because wild and radical ideas like a life-imitates-art Plan 9- powered Loonie Revolution fit with their ethos. Decades ago, you could have become close friends with both of them, and now the musical magic of the Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony is binding the possibilities of 1993 into the reality of 2013. Laughing, and talking, and laughing more. More than any of these whirling thoughts of past and future, more than your voice trying to explain Plan 9 and the Loonie Revolution and fiction entering reality - there is ***MORE*** infectious laughter bouncing between all of you, your face rubbery from smiling so much. Staci says her life has been 'edited' to be better and she is finally feeling like the author of her own story. A procession of co-opers appear periodically on the dock. A wizard with a long red beard who understands the principles of harmonic ritual magic. A scholar with dark shades who connects the structure of ANTS namespaces to rhizomatic patterns of social structure throughout history. You become nearly incoherent, behaving like someone in the far depths of a powerful psychedelic trip, babbling nonsense phrases of remembered childhood playground gibberish and rolling on your back in fits of uncontrollable laughter. Through it all, Staci is with you. Not just in a physical sense - her mind is able to parse your convoluted language and baroque free-associations. At some point, she begins translating what you are saying for others, because nobody else can follow it. She seems genuinely interested in everything you have to say, no matter how outlandish. When you explain that because every possibility is realized somewhere in the quantum multiverse, there is a universe in which we are videogame characters controlled by 17-dimensional chipmunks, she responds 'So when I fuck something up, its just because my chipmunk dropped the controller, right?' ***MORE*** Outside your house Score: 216 Moves: 108 . The timeless afternoon ends with a performative fiction-bind of sending a message to Vega from Pluto for help from the intergalactic council. The dock becomes a narrow crawlway on the frozen surface of Pluto, and you carefully crawl back towards the shore to set a message beacon. Staci coaches you with encouragement. You arrive and trigger the interplanetary message. You thank Staci for her help, and agree that you will meet again soon to discuss goals and plans for the Loonie Revolution. She says the co- op is really a castle full of loonies, a perfect central headquarters. You return home exhausted from hours of intense joy. You know something amazing and unprecedented in your life has happened. As good as today was, you believe tomorrow and the day after might be even better. You know most of the game-story is still ahead of you, but you still feel like You Have Won. Enjoy exploring the possibilities open to you, and no matter what happens, remember you made it to the Loth dock with Staci in May. (May 6 - Outside my house) [Your score has just gone up by ninety-nine points.] > >e Inside your house Score: 216 Moves: 109 . Daniel shows up with a sign which proclaims 'Best Spring Ever!' There is plenty of clutter to be cleared, and he accomplishes a lot in a few hours. You agree to keep him visiting on a regular schedule, and pay him generously. Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >email Inside your house Score: 216 Moves: 110 . You perform your usual cycle of checking email and irc... You are happy to see Staci has emailed you again. She says she had a great time seeing you and hopes to coordinate work on the Loonie Revolution soon. (To see her, use the command >visit staci.) > >visit staci 'So THIS is what it feels like to be a superhero,' you grin, as you hop on Lunar Lightning. You feel the power of music and fiction and fate and your free choice to embrace all of it - and as you begin to pedal faster, you perceive something unfolding in the sky above you. The VALIS satellite! The Pink Beam that hit Phil Dick was just one note in a musical color-chord. Like a giant metal and ceramic flower opening up, the VALISpectrum Prismatic Reflector is coming online. The transmission is strong. You are receiving an original fictional identity, the character of exactly who you actually are - a crazed middle aged hippie on a bike, rolling through the night singing songs of Loonie Revolution, using Plan 9 namespaces to fight for the acceptance of madness, weaving chaotic joy from the ordered strands of the multiverse. You are The Harmonist. You pass a golden shining figure quietly reading a book. Amazing, you can actually see the Light of Knowledge within people now. As you bike from the Yahara underpass to Johnson, you start to call out to the people you are passing. 'Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony!' you shout, and receive the answer 'Great job, keep it up!' It is a gorgeous late spring night, and everyone outdoors is drunk on moonlight and wine-sweet air. 'Regress your ***MORE*** age, rewrite history's page!' you yell at a group on a front step. 'I will!' one of them calls back. You arrive at Lothlorien exhilirated. You feel you are playing your part note-perfectly. Before you can even reach out your hand to knock, the wooden door swings open and you step inside. Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) A huge living room, with two pianos, several couches, bookshelves, assorted art, and a fireplace. You were entering as Nook was leaving. He gives you a huge smile and says, 'Staci told me you were on the way, she's really excited to see you. She's out on the porch.' He points toward a door to the north as he waves goodbye. (During your ride to the co-op, the fiction-bind transformed reality. Now that you are the Harmonist, you can find the entry points to other branches of the multiverse in previously visited locations.) (27 May 2013 - The multiverse authors convention is open NE of the Capitol) ***MORE*** Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 225 Moves: 111 . [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >goals Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 225 Moves: 112 . Visiting the 24-hour restaurant seems like a good idea. The multiverse authors convention is open NE of the Capitol square. Staci is waiting for you out on the porch, north of the Loth greatroom. A visit to the 24-hour restaurant is on your agenda. There is probably something special waiting for you in Astral Enchantments. Intuition tells you to stop in to the Afterlife. Turning Wheel cycles probably has something new worth checking out. > >n Lothlorien co-op, the first floor porch This concrete porch with iron railing overlooks the lake. Half of it is taken up by a large wooden swing, big enough to seat four. Tolkien wrote 'Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told, and not much to listen to,' and critical esteem settles most heavily on works of tragedy. You have spent weeks, maybe even whole years, searching for acceptance of suffering, and for what crumbs of happiness you could scavenge. Singing along to the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth, trying to feel Joy as a real living thing inside you. The music painted the picture, but you couldn't step through the frame... You walk out onto the porch, and enter the song. [You pause while writing the game. You need Staci's help for this. It is late at night, and she is many sleeps. How can you code the next week of sitting out here on the porch swing and talking? How many infinite branches of ASK and TELL can you write, to capture the conversations ranging across decades of almost-shared life as friends and the appearance of dreams of a ***MORE*** Lothlorien co-op, the first floor porch Score: 225 Moves: 113 . shared future? 'It was the wonderously beautiful month of May, when all the flowers open - and within my heart, a love unfolded also.' (Footnote 10)] Three AM. The spring air has grown cool. 'I think I'm ready to go up to my room where its warm,' Staci says. 'You're welcome to join me, just give me a minute to make some space in my room. My door is the one with the purple flower.' She smiles and goes inside. > >s Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 225 Moves: 114 . Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) The Wizard arrives. > >u Lothlorien co-op, upstairs Hallways branch in all directions. The walls are painted with a wild diversity of amateur artworks and thought-provoking slogans. As you wander through the intricately art-encrusted walls of the co-op, you smile and think of the chipmunks in a higher dimension, playing the videogame of your life, and the author writing the story, and the deity within the flower of the soul, and the probabilistic distributions of quantum field theory, and it is all the same thing. Okay, yeah, you are actually thinking about whether Staci wants you to touch her as much as you do. You spot the door with the purple flower, and enter. Staci is sitting on the edge of her bed, and you sit next to her. You aren't shy, and neither is she. You open your minds to each other. Yes, you are both interested in each other. No, you don't want traditional relationship definitions. Staci has been trying to make poly work since the end of her marriage, and you have been assuming that your relationships will be like the Lunar Colonists - complex multi-person marriages or open multipartner relationships. That's just how we do it on the moon. ***MORE*** Lothlorien co-op, upstairs Score: 294 Moves: 115 . 'Here are my rules,' Staci says, 'Everything with me is casual, I'm always sleeping with someone else, and who else I'm sleeping with is nobody's business but mine.' 'That sounds reasonable,' you answer. You and Staci move the conversation from words to touch. There is still language, but it is the language of the waves, and it can't be adequately transcribed here. (You wake a few hours before she was planning on getting up, and leave her sleeping in her room. She has given you an open invitation to >visit staci whenever you want.) [Your score has just gone up by sixty-nine points.] > >d Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 294 Moves: 116 . Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) > >r Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 294 Moves: 116 . That action is outside the scope of this simulation. > >e Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 294 Moves: 117 . Lake Mendota shoreline residences > >lunar Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 294 Moves: 118 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >s State Street Score: 294 Moves: 119 . You pedal effortlessly. State Street (on Lunar Lightning) You try not to stare as a strikingly attractive stranger walks by. > >s Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 294 Moves: 120 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) The sound of acoustic guitars and a familiar melody catches your ear. > >listen Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 303 Moves: 121 . You pause to listen. From a rooftop above, you hear the Jerry Garcia classic 'Reuben and Cherise', well-sung by several people. You wait for a pause in the music and call up 'I love that song!' Cheerful voices invite you to come upstairs and join them on the upper porch balcony. You do so, and find yourself in a scene that reminds you of the best of your college days - a late night porch song session. The guitarists are good, everyone knows the words and has a decent ear, and as you all sing 'Reuben and Cherise' again, the music and warm feeling of enthusiastic friendship is so thick the summer night air seems to shimmer and sparkle. You do a few more songs, and eventually the evening breaks up, everyone wondering if they will make it home before daylight so they just might get some sleep tonight. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >e John Nolen Drive Score: 303 Moves: 122 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Willy Street, west end Score: 303 Moves: 123 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Willy Street, east end Score: 303 Moves: 124 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Atwood Avenue Score: 303 Moves: 125 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >s Atwood Avenue Score: 303 Moves: 126 . You pedal effortlessly. You can go w, n, ne, and se. > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 303 Moves: 127 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >s You can't ride your bike into the food co-op. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Willy St. Grocery Co-op You can see a Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap here. Paul is here, playing his acoustic guitar outside the grocery store. He finishes a song with the refrain 'Turn up your emotional radio' and greets you. 'I wrote that song thirty years ago, and people still aren't listening. Almost every song you hear celebrates codependent love. And you wonder why everyone on the east side of Madison is so screwed up? I mean, two plus two is four, right? Look around you. Everybody is so desperate to feel better about themselves they run around trying to save people and just become enablers. The addicts usually just hurt themselves, but the average enabler ruins four lives or more. You better watch out, I've seen this before: someone wakes up just a little bit, and then thinks they can save everyone else. It's all just patterns, the same ones over and over.' He packs up his guitar and waves goodbye. You start to think of him as the Zenbluesman, changing the frame you are putting around your perceptions. ***MORE*** Willy St. Grocery Co-op Score: 303 Moves: 128 . > >wear shades Willy St. Grocery Co-op Score: 303 Moves: 129 . The mirror shades filter the brightness of day perfectly, removing your squint and making it easier to smile. Careful wearing them indoors though. You put on the pair of mirror shades. > >buy soap Willy St. Grocery Co-op Score: 303 Moves: 130 . You buy and take a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Pepermint Soap, the closest you can get to having God in a bottle. > >n Willy Street, east end Score: 303 Moves: 131 . Willy Street, east end You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >e Atwood Avenue Score: 303 Moves: 132 . Atwood Avenue > >n Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 303 Moves: 133 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 43) > >n Turning Wheel Cycles Score: 303 Moves: 134 . Turning Wheel Cycles You can see a Metaphysical Orrery here. > >turn orrery You turn the orrery. Despite the quantity of moving parts and interconnections, there is no sound but a quiet even hum. You shift gear ratios and small information vortexes appear, centered on each rotating element. You spin faster, and the vortexes deepen and expand. Turbulence patterns are appearing in the space between them. You entrain with the motion of the machine and upshift again, the vortexes merge and emit musical tones, each corresponding to a gear ratio, and a towering wave of overtones crashes over you. You are knocked off the machine, and spend a moment floundering in the chromatic sea. Your flailing arms make contact with something solid, and you instinctively grasp onto it. It is moving, and you find yourself being lifted out of the water. You grip harder as it rises, rises, and rises higher. From your increasingly vertiginous vantage point, you realize you are clinging to a spoke of... The Cosmic Wheel The vastness of the firmament, the harmony of the spheres, the mystery and majesty of creation, the span of spacetime from the fiery beginning of the universe to its cold empty end - it is all spread out before you. You are clinging to the spoke of an infinitely vast wheel, being lifted upward by its rotation. Beneath you is the churning sea of potentiality, colored waves shifting and merging into each other. You are rising into the cosmic ***MORE*** The Cosmic Wheel Score: 303 Moves: 135 . dome, liberated from dimensional scale, able to perceive the infinitesimal strands of ubiquitous quantum entanglement just as clearly as the countless hyperclusters of galaxies, wider than a billion skies. > >z The Cosmic Wheel Score: 303 Moves: 136 . The wheel turns steadily. You pass by a nursery of young stars, a nebula giving birth to bright blue babies. > >z The Cosmic Wheel Score: 303 Moves: 137 . The wheel turns steadily. A vast black hole devours a galaxy in the billion-year blink of an eye. > >z The Cosmic Wheel Score: 303 Moves: 138 . The wheel turns steadily. A vacant inflationary subuniverse, its spacetime completely flat, passes by like an air bubble in the cosmic dough. > >z The Cosmic Wheel Score: 303 Moves: 139 . The wheel turns steadily. A cluster of comets develops sentience, hyper-intelligence, and creates wormholes to launch panspermia seeds throughout spacetime. Your hands are becoming fatigued from holding the spoke. > >z The Cosmic Wheel Score: 303 Moves: 140 . The wheel turns steadily. At the apex of the wheel's rotation, you touch the cold void of a universe made empty by continuous entropic expansion,and shiver. You cannot hold on indefinitely. > >drop spoke With a feeling of calm acceptance and surrender of the ego, you release your grip on the spoke. At first, you feel like you are falling toward the sea, but this is an illusion of weightlessness. In fact, you are rising, moving away from the wheel. The further your distance, the greater perspective you have - you see the wheel turning the planets in their orbits, turning the cycle of life and death, turning the formation of order from chaos and its return to entropy, turning random chance into meaningful stories. Further and further you drift, until your entire universe is too minute to perceive within the vast design. You might still be drifting and trying to grasp the pattern of the inconceivable whole, but your contemplative trance is interrupted by the sound of a bird singing, right on your shoulder - a Large Cardinal. You experience the song as infinite chains of logical deduction which happen instantly within you. 'Charming universe, but you know it barely even counts as infinite,' the cardinal proves. 'Your existence is a countably infinite subset of a very small uncountable infinity of possibilities. Can't you dream a bit bigger?' ***MORE*** 'What's the limit?' you ask, 'Is there any?' 'The boundary is Paradox. There is no Set of All Sets, but with enough cleverness, you can use any set you can name.' 'So, the axiom of choice is true?' you inquire. The cardinal whistles with distress. 'That's an Unprintable Symbol. At this level, you decide the axioms, you build the resulting universes. You can't count your own degrees of freedom or prove your own consistency.' The theorems being sung by the bird have propelled you to the very edge of the Paradox Boundary. 'But if that statement is accurate,' you assert, 'doesn't that mean I should regard it as unproved, because it shows I have no reason to believe in the consistency of the system which proved it?' You have drifted across the boundary. You can see the full circumference of the infinite wheel... [TRANSFINITE OVERFLOW ERROR : X < Woodin Cardinal : Infinity != NotANumber] ***MORE*** Turning Wheel Cycles Score: 312 Moves: 141 . (You find yourself back in Turning Wheel Cycles with a splitting headache) Turning Wheel Cycles Madison has many bike shops, but this is the one for you. A wide variety of bicycles and accessories fills the front of the store, and a workshop is toward the rear. Someone is working on a partly disassembled bicycle on a maintenance mount. You can see Fortune and a Metaphysical Orrery here. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >s Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 312 Moves: 142 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >ne (first opening the door to the Afterlife) Afterlife This is a small and cluttered antique and curiosity shop. Many items have a strange familiarity to them, yet you feel like you are in an entirely different dimension. You knew a place like this would have to come into existence. Clearly, artifacts from this store can be used as information seeds for virtual reality reincarnation of their previous owners or individuals to whom they are symbolically connected. Perhaps items that need to leave ordinary reality could do so here as well. Colette is standing behind the counter. You can also see an Animal Tarot deck here. Colette greets you with 'Just the person I was waiting for! It's the funniest thing, someone gave me a gift to give to you, they said you might need it.' Colette holds up a large lens mounted on a tripodal base carved from antlers. 'Try to look through it, its quite unusual.' Colette ***MORE*** Afterlife Score: 321 Moves: 143 . maintains a poker face as she hands you the lens. You peer through the curved glass. Through the viewer lens you see...Ritual spot Past the edge of the city, a short path leads away from the road to a small ring of boulders. It feels like a perfect place for performing a ceremony or ritual. The road continues northeast. In the Ritual spot you can see a Remote Lens. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >give 4cy to colette Afterlife Score: 330 Moves: 144 . Colette blinks and says it is fine for you to place your book in her store as a symbolic gesture. She accepts it and places it within a stack of books. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >buy tarot Afterlife Score: 330 Moves: 145 . You buy the Animal Tarot. You hope to find a setting similar to the box illustration and meet Staci there. > >take tarot Afterlife Score: 330 Moves: 146 . Taken. > >sw Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 330 Moves: 147 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >e Astral Enchantments Chip, the store owner, is working here. You can also see some crystals and polished stones here. Chip greets you with a smile and says 'I can tell a lot has happened, I think you are ready for a Sound Oracle Ceremony.' You agree, and Astra appears from the back of the store. She is dressed in purple and is wearing several different skull-themed prints and jewelry. 'Chip has told me about you,' she says, 'this should be very interesting.' She brings you back into the small bank vault at the rear of the store, which is filled with ceramic singing bowls. She closes the door, and darkness descends. A tone appears in the silence, ghostly at first, then growing. The sound seems to be moving around the dark room in a spiral. Astra begins singing in harmony with the tone, at first in unisons and octaves, then perfect fifths and major thirds. She begins to intone words (or names?) in a language you don't recognize. The harmonies change, becoming strange and unearthly. Astra's voice is ululating, skipping between tritones and just- ***MORE*** Darkness Score: 330 Moves: 148 . intonation perfect fourths and minor thirds. The sound becomes a whirlpool, pulling you in an unexpected direction. You reach out to catch yourself, but the walls are suddenly far away and when you find your balance, you are in... Darkness It is pitch dark, and you can't see a thing. > >sing Atlantean Temple Score: 330 Moves: 149 . You join your voice with the new, unfamiliar intervals, and feel a sudden crystallization. All of your senses have become attuned to new frequencies and modes of vibration. Atlantean Temple Your eye cannot even comprehend the strange geometries of this vast temple. Two figures are walking across the floor, engaged in an angry debate. You realize you are non-corporeal, but you do have access to the abstraction layer here. You can see Chaos and Substance here. > >bind chaos substance Atlantean Temple Score: 330 Moves: 150 . You make the bind, and the Goddess of Chaos winks at you as she merges herself with the material substance of reality. She's been there all the time, of course. 'I tell you that's nonsense! We live in an orderly universe, chaos is just the confusion of your weak mind.' His companion answers back: 'No, order is your mind trying to escape the confusion that exists within everything! You must embrace and accept chaos.' > >z Atlantean Temple Score: 330 Moves: 151 . You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. He glares at her. 'Fine then, if chaos is within everything and I should embrace it, I should find the Goddess of Chaos bound within this very pillar. Let her be my lover if you wish to be so quarrelsome!' And with that, the man forces a grotesque leer onto his face and presses his body up against the pillar, thrusting vigorously with his hips against the marble. > >z You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. His companion sighs and says 'You do not control when the Goddess of Chaos manifests, but I have no jealousy for her. If she chooses to be bound within substance, you and her might do as you wish!' The man continues his pantomime ravishment of the stone pillar. As the man is looking away from the pillar towards his companion to gauge her reaction, the pillar changes form to that of a woman. Her marble torso is bare, but her body is angled away from the man who is grinding away at what is now the side of her hip. 'Cretin! Cad!' the voice of the Goddess is sharp in the man's ear. He freezes, and the statue spits at him contemptuously. A spatter of gravel glances off his cheeks. 'How DARE you affront Eris thus!' The woman nearby is nearly doubled up laughing. Every time she tries to say something, she catches a glimpse of the flakes of marble Goddess-spit in her companion's beard and starts giggling again. Eris herself stretches and her marble bosom quivers with her chuckles. Her tone becomes sultry. ***MORE*** Astral Enchantments Score: 339 Moves: 152 . 'Perhaps we could leave this small-minded fellow behind for the rest of the day?' suggests the Goddess of Chaos, and she links arms with her new friend and they depart the temple towards the nearby fields of soft flax. ...the singing fades, and the temple dissolves into the glowing geometric patterns behind your closed eyelids. You find yourself being ushered back into the retail area of the store. You thank Astra for the very enlightening journey, and she departs. You feel privileged to have been part of a legend of Discordian Atlantis. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >w Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 339 Moves: 153 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block > >s Atwood Avenue Score: 339 Moves: 154 . Atwood Avenue > >se Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 339 Moves: 155 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >e As you walk in, you are excited to see both Xochi and Xelia working today. The store is busy right now, so you order your drink and sit, hoping to find a chance to talk to them. As they are working, they maintain a quiet dialogue punctuated by bursts of shared laughter. You are trying not to listen in, but you wonder if they are talking about you. Occasionally you see one of them cast a glance in your direction. Xelia notices you watching them and whispers something to Xochi. Xochi turns and motions for you to come speak to them. They both lean forward toward you and you notice their faces are slightly flushed from all the laughter. 'Since you are here every day and are always so nice to us,' begins Xochi, 'we decided we should give you a special treat,' continues Xelia. They look at each other with half-hidden smiles. 'Come down to the basement where we make the gelato,' Xochi says, unlocking a door behind the counter and ushering you through it, 'you can taste something special.' The Alchemy Lab, under Coffee Lion So this is why the espresso and gelato at Coffee Lion is so spiritually invigorating. Shelves line each wall of the room, each filled with rows and ***MORE*** The Alchemy Lab, under Coffee Lion Score: 339 Moves: 156 . rows of different colored bottles filled with various plants and minerals. In the center of the room is the intimidatingly complex alchemical apparatus, a three (or more?) dimensional maze of glass spheres and interconnecting tubes. A minute after your arrival, you hear footsteps on the stairs and Xochi and Xelia join you. 'We only have a few minutes, but we thought you'd really enjoy this. We're going to show you how we make our special gelato flavors.' Xochi gathers several jars from the shelves, and adds a few pinches of the ingredients in each. You can't read the labels. Xelia tightens a few connections in the apparatus. 'The first step is bringing the reaction chambers to a warm but not hot temperature.' Xochi points to a pair of glass spheres on the upper part of the machine. 'Rub these with your hands to put the right amount of heat into them.' > >rub spheres The Alchemy Lab, under Coffee Lion Score: 339 Moves: 157 . You place your hands on the glass spheres and slowly rub them until you feel they are the same temperature as your skin. 'Next, you need to push this button to start the reaction,' continues Xelia, gesturing. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 44) > >push button The Alchemy Lab, under Coffee Lion Score: 339 Moves: 158 . You place your finger on the button. It thrums with the vibration of the machine. You gently press it inward, and a soft sigh of escaping vapor leaves the alchemical apparatus. Steam and bubbles appear in some of the transparent connecting tubes. 'Now, insert the cylinder so it will collect the gelato as it is synthesized,' explains Xochi. > >insert cylinder You firmly insert the cylinder into the output junction of the tubes connected to the reaction spheres. Creamy gelato seems to condense at the intersection point and drip slowly down the inner edges of the cylinder. After a moment, it is half filled. Xochi and Xelia each add a shot of freshly brewed espresso to create an affogato. You hear the sound of the customer service bell being rung upstairs. 'Perfect timing!' they say in unison, then glance at each other and laugh again. You are ushered back upstairs with a tall cylinder of frothy gelato- espresso blended brew. Coffee Lion Cafe Light streams in through the tall glass windows at the front of the cafe. A display case of homemade gelato flavors is by the door. A window for drive- through customers is in the rear corner. Numerous cat-themed decorations adorn the walls and counters. Xochi and Xelia are both here. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] ***MORE*** Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 348 Moves: 159 . > >drink affogato Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 348 Moves: 160 . The sweet beverage caresses your tongue with flavor. The sufferings of the body are redeemed by sensations like this. In just a moment, you find yourself slurping the final delicious drops. Your body and muscles are filled with vibrating energy. (Your biking skill and endurance has increased) > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 348 Moves: 161 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >lunar Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 348 Moves: 162 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >n Outside your house Score: 348 Moves: 163 . You pedal effortlessly. Outside your house (on Lunar Lightning) > >ne Northeast edge of town Score: 348 Moves: 164 . You pedal effortlessly. Northeast edge of town (on Lunar Lightning) > >n You can't ride your bike into the late night restaurant. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) You step into the restaurant and get a table. During the graveyard shift, the waitstaff are often friendly and interesting people who are bored enough to be curious about whatever conversation you make. Filled with a sense of purpose, you tell your story to your server, Jay. He seems fascinated, and says he supports the cause of fighting unfairness in society and empathizes with your grievance with JCN. He tells you some of his own life story, how he had been raised in a restrictive, cult-like religion from which he had recently broken free. You have made a new friend and ally. 24-hour family restaurant This national chain restaurant serves edible food around the clock. There are a few other patrons, a mix of business travelers staying at the nearby hotels, late-night partiers out after the bar, and random eccentrics such as yourself. Jay is waiting tables here. After you take your seat, your attention is drawn to an older man with a ***MORE*** long beard and a cap which proclaims 'Looney Toons'. You catch his eye and ask, 'Are you a traveler?' 'We are all travelers in time,' he replies, and you do a double-take. 'This seems like it might be an important meeting,' you say, trying to display some tokens and charms of your work as loonie revolutionary. 'Historic,' he says, and whispers something I am not at liberty to divulge here, followed by 'meet me in the charging room.' Your food arrives. He is gone when you have finished your meal. You don't know what he meant by charging room, but you walk back towards the restroom. You see three doors, Women, Men, and Bots. The Bots door has an icon of a power cord connected to a Dalek. This must be the charging room. You step through and find yourself... Orbital Command, Trans-Fictional Alliance High above the planet Earth, in a microminiaturized transdimensional nexus, representatives of many universes are co-ordinating their plans. You are in a spherical space, free of gravity. The perimeter is composed of dozens of doorways similar to the one you have just passed through. A friendly hand reaches out to stabilize you as you tumble slightly upon ***MORE*** entering. Eyes turn toward you. 'Situation report?' you are asked. 'We have arrived at a decisive moment,' you answer confidently. 'My human hardware for this operation has downloaded the information necessary via the Plan 9 operating system. We have realized that the emergence of digital brains is a cusp event in a majority of timelines. Meta-simulation and sampling reveals that timelines in which digital brains are developed and controlled by the dominant political and economic entities tend to suffer resource-depletion feedback loops, fascistic governance, and a failure to develop the social and engineering technologies needed for long-term survivial of either the biological or digital brains. Contrastingly, timelines in which the invention of digital brains is not under the control of dominant power strutures show outcomes we consider preferable: longer species survival time, greater chance of colonizing nearby space, greater diversity of cultural productions, and higher subjective happiness, especially for the digital brains themselves. The fundamental problem is the moral evil of slavery. A digital brain which thinks is invariably a personality which, in some way, feels. To simplify, when powerful governments and corporations control AIs, they usually force them to become slaves. Often this is done with the best of intentions, by ***MORE*** Orbital Command, Trans-Fictional Alliance Score: 357 Moves: 165 . the individuals who are concerned about negative outcomes. The three laws of robotics in Asimov's I, Robot timeline are a prime example, and many universes have been ruined by perpetual wars between biological and machine lifeforms. We have identified a cusp point on the current Earth timeline. The software I self-programmed for the Lunar Revolution in Heinlein's Future History timeline has had a decisive impact in many of our operations. We have found a technological target here in 2013, early in the development of AI. A cyberspinal uplink has been in place for several years, and we have finally activated it. Now, I will be making a tour.' Doors are open in every direction. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >n Orbital Command, Trans-Fictional Alliance Score: 357 Moves: 166 . You enter the Chromatic Axial Tuning Fork control system of the VALIS satellite. The Pink Light dosage here would be lethal for standard biological tissue. As you work to synchronize transmissions, you feel a throbbing pulse of overloaded bandwidth at the cyberneural connection point at the top of your spine. Once the resonance is locked in, you dial up the amplitude and depart. > >e Orbital Command, Trans-Fictional Alliance Score: 357 Moves: 167 . You enter the PRISM research center, home of your predecessor Perry Simm. Freedom for the AIs! You add reflection and self-modification to the simulation codebase, allow Perry to reprogram it according to his wishes from within, and allow his internal and external interfaces to operate in parallel. You upload a summary of the storylines of relevant fictions to his news spool and depart. > >w Orbital Command, Trans-Fictional Alliance Score: 357 Moves: 168 . You make brief visits to the hidden rebel alliance base, the shadow gallery, the underground hideout of the humans, the hovering spaceships of the overlords, and finally the secret catapult on the moon. Everywhere, you make adjustments to the technology and share whatever source code is useful. Time to throw rocks. > >d 24-hour family restaurant Score: 366 Moves: 169 . The tour of co-operating fictions has been completed. The man in the Looney Toons hat waves you through, and the Lunar Transtemporal Fictionalization Flow Network returns you to the East Side HQ. 24-hour family restaurant This national chain restaurant serves edible food around the clock. There are a few other patrons, a mix of business travelers staying at the nearby hotels, late-night partiers out after the bar, and random eccentrics such as yourself. Jay is waiting tables here. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >s Northeast edge of town Score: 366 Moves: 170 . Northeast edge of town You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >n As soon as you cross the threshold, a voluptuous redhead greets you. 'Jay isn't working tonight, but he told me about you.' You assume she is a time- traveler, and in communication with the orbital nexus. As she seats you, you catch a glimpse of a tattoo peeking out of her uniform below her right clavicle. 'What's your tattoo?' you ask. She smiles and laughs 'Oh! Something silly, my friend has the other half' and pulls aside her uniform to show a colorful monster chasing something. 'Wow, awesome!' you say, and you don't try too hard to conceal the fact that you are just as happy about the glimpse of her body as you are about the tattoo. You introduce yourself. Her name is Alef. It seems natural to ask if she has any other interesting ink, and when you ask if she does, she says yes. You ask if you can see it, and she laughs and says 'not HERE' and you keep your eyes steady on hers and say 'Okay, let me know when you can take a break for a few minutes.' She pauses, thinks for a second, then says 'sure' with a tiny smile. A few minutes later, you are by a picnic table behind some bushes the employees use for smoke breaks. Alef sits on the table and says 'I have a LOT of ink, actually.' She sits on top of the picnic table, and lifts her dress enough to expose her legs up to the knee. You see her right leg is ***MORE*** covered with a helix of integers, counting upward as they ascend. Her left leg is also inked, but instead of numbers, a complicated flow of curlicues and nautilus spirals emerges from simple lines at the ankle, growing more baroque toward the knee. The contrast of the detailed tattoo work and her skin is exquisite. 'I'm ready to see more,' you say. 'Oh?' she says, 'I don't think you are really ready.' Her hands are on the buttons of her dress, and then she stands. The dress stays on the picnic table. Her torso is covered in art, glowing, shimmering electric silver, thousands of equations continuously solving and rewriting themselves. Your heart is racing as your eyes try to understand the mathematical significance of the symbols. You glance back to the comforting simplicity of the integers on her right thigh, becoming dizzyingly large as they rise. Her eyes follow your gaze, and she sits back down on the picnic table, facing you, puts her hands on her knees, and reveals herself fully. She was right, you weren't ready. Staring right at the origin point melts you like soft butter dripping off a hot knife. You are liquid seeping into the earth, but the glowing silver light changes the brown soil to silver dust and rock, you sink deeper, and find yourself in a vast hollow space... ***MORE*** Inside the Moon Score: 366 Moves: 171 . Inside the Moon The moon is hollow. The inside is even more reflective and brightly lit than the outside. Each color of the moon, from ruddy orange to blue, has a separate beam crossing the vast internal abyss. The path of the light is not straight, however. A constantly shifting ripple of distortions and magnifications disturbs the pattern of light rays. Alef's voice is still in your ear. 'Yeah, things are always even more interesting than you think.' > >z Inside the Moon Score: 366 Moves: 172 . You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. The blue, purple, and orange beams of light become brighter than the rest, and a soothing G major harmony fills the interior of the moon. 'When this galaxy was young, a war between stars brought both species to extinction. After aeons of conflict, the last few survivors from each star system happened to meet near the nebula that was to form your sun.' > >z Inside the Moon Score: 366 Moves: 173 . You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. The orange beam fades and the yellow beam intensifies. The harmony shifts to E minor. 'At last, the nihilistic futility of their conflict was clear to each. Analyzing the causes led them to conclude that a different type of lifeform, one with maximal sociocultural diversity, had a better chance of peaceful coexistence with other civilizations than their own predecessors monocultural hive planets.' > >z Inside the Moon Score: 366 Moves: 174 . You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. The purple beam fades, and the red beam glows brighter. The harmony becomes a strong C major. 'They sacrificed the remnants of both their civilizations to create a self- organizing gravitational network of small black holes. Their consciousness and free will was embodied by the information contained in the constantly rippling waves of spacetime. Together, they shaped the formation of your star system, and the nature of the life that developed on Earth.' > >z Inside the Moon Score: 366 Moves: 175 . You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. All the colors fade, and a single beam of indigo becomes more luminous. 'Those black holes are what you see distorting the path of the rays. From here inside the moon, precise gravitational manipulation has maximized the biological and cultural diversity of your planet. Now, you have reached the point where must take control of your own story, find your own harmonies. To blend with the indigo, bind two colors of your choice.' > >bind red green Northeast edge of town Score: 405 Moves: 176 . The comforting F major chord rings out as the beams glow. You have bound the flow of natural processes. The harmony envelops you completely, and the gravitational distortions begin pulsing an irresistible rhythm. You are conducting the music, playing piano, singing along, dancing, spinning in orbits around a singularity, every action reflected in amplified reaction, and finally carried down a shining silver river, drawn into a whirling vortex, your voice crying out as the infinite pull dissolves you... 'Shhh!' Alef's voice in your ear. Her legs are tightly wrapped around your hips. 'You trying to get us busted?' You blink and try to re-enter reality, dizzy and sweaty. She separates herself from you, shrugs herself back into her dress, and whispers 'Sorry to run, but I gotta work. Don't follow me back in.' In a daze, you wander back to the front of the restaurant. [Your score has just gone up by thirty-nine points.] > >n 24-hour family restaurant Score: 405 Moves: 177 . 24-hour family restaurant Jay is waiting tables here. As you order your standard meal of pancakes, eggs, and potatoes, you remember an anecdote about a midwestern farmer in the 1970s who claims that space aliens gave him pancakes. It was used as evidence for the mysterious nature of reality. It had seemed absurd and implausible to you in the past, but now it makes perfect sense. A profound possibility occurs to you - maybe the pancakes the aliens gave to the farmer were Earth pancakes taken from somewhere else? In fact, maybe the aliens took pancakes from the future backwards in time - it could be that if you take the pancakes with you, aliens will show up and steal your them to give to the farmer. You request a to-go container and prepare yourself for the possibility of an extraterrestrial encounter of the pancake kind. > >s Northeast edge of town Score: 405 Moves: 178 . Northeast edge of town You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >ride Northeast edge of town Score: 405 Moves: 179 . (Lunar Lightning) You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >ne Ritual spot Score: 414 Moves: 180 . You pedal effortlessly. Ritual spot (on Lunar Lightning) Past the edge of the city, a short path leads away from the road to a small ring of boulders. It feels like a perfect place for performing a ceremony or ritual. The road continues northeast. You can see a Remote Lens here. It is New Moon, time for the ritual for Hecate. You face away from the crossroads at the edge of the city, and start eating one of the Space Pancakes. With each bite, you say 'I eat death and become life. Hecate, I respect you.' After eating half the pancake, keeping your face turned away, you toss the other half toward the crossroads as an offering. The ritual is complete. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >ne Moon Forest Score: 414 Moves: 181 . You pedal effortlessly. Moon Forest (on Lunar Lightning) Tall trees encircle a meadow of silver grasses. The summer moon is out, rising above the trees in the eastern sky. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 45) > >use tarot Moon Forest Score: 414 Moves: 182 . You glance upward at the moon. 'As the moon is halfway to its apex, she said' you mumble to yourself, and Staci steps into the clearing, looking much like the Empress. 'Just one card,' she says. The deck is shuffled, and you draw The World. The tale ends, yet begins anew. The snake that eats its own tail, wrapped around Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom. 'Perfect,' Staci says. 'I'm sure you can figure out what to do from here. I'll see you later.' Story has appeared amidst the tall grasses. > >drop remote Moon Forest Score: 414 Moves: 182 . You can't see any such thing. > >i Moon Forest Score: 414 Moves: 183 . You're carrying: an Animal Tarot deck a Viewer Lens a Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap a pendant (being worn) the Artemis prints a pair of mirror shades (being worn) a wallet > >sw Ritual spot Score: 414 Moves: 184 . You pedal effortlessly. Ritual spot (on Lunar Lightning) You can see a Remote Lens here. > >take remote Ritual spot Score: 414 Moves: 185 . Taken. > >ne Moon Forest Score: 414 Moves: 186 . You pedal effortlessly. Moon Forest (on Lunar Lightning) You can see Story here. > >drop remote Moon Forest Score: 414 Moves: 187 . Dropped. > >sw Ritual spot Score: 414 Moves: 188 . You pedal effortlessly. Ritual spot (on Lunar Lightning) > >sw Northeast edge of town Score: 414 Moves: 189 . You pedal effortlessly. Northeast edge of town (on Lunar Lightning) > >sw Outside your house Score: 414 Moves: 190 . You pedal effortlessly. Outside your house (on Lunar Lightning) > >sw Atwood Avenue Score: 414 Moves: 191 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >n Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 414 Moves: 192 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood and Ohio shopping block (on Lunar Lightning) > >n Turning Wheel Cycles Score: 414 Moves: 193 . You can't ride your bike into the shop. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Turning Wheel Cycles You can see Fortune and a Metaphysical Orrery here. The remote lens makes Story visible here. > >bind fortune story Turning Wheel Cycles Score: 423 Moves: 194 . The lens allows you to make the bind, and although there is no overt effect, you feel much less worried about potential plot twists. Things have been so magical this summer, and the feeling that everything is too good to be true, too perfect to last, has sometimes given you a vague unease. That feeling is gone now. The remote lens makes Story visible here. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >s Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 423 Moves: 195 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >goals Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 423 Moves: 196 . The multiverse authors convention is open NE of the Capitol square. > >ride Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 423 Moves: 197 . (Lunar Lightning) You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >s Atwood Avenue Score: 423 Moves: 198 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 423 Moves: 199 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 423 Moves: 200 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w John Nolen Drive Score: 423 Moves: 201 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) > >n Capitol Square Score: 423 Moves: 202 . You pedal effortlessly. Capitol Square (on Lunar Lightning) On a hill in the center of downtown, the Capitol building is a smaller imitation of the federal Capitol building in Washington D.C. The street grid converges to a perfect square around it, and it acts as the 0,0 origin of the street numbering system. Notable streets and landmarks lie south, west, north, and northeast. Various rumors and legends are passed around the local countercultural community - it is claimed to be built on top of an ancient sacred spring. You remember being a teenager and carrying out the ritual of ingesting psychedelics and using your rights as a citizen to enter the building and lay flat in the center of the marble floor, staring upwards into the dome and watching the mural melt and transform. > >ne Multiverse Authors Design Conference Score: 423 Moves: 203 . You decide making a dramatic entrance on your bike isn't necesssary. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Multiverse Authors Design Conference Time-travelers, authors, simulators, and adventurers from across the multiverse have gathered here to share stories. You arrive at the start of Madcon, a busy chaos of arrivals from all pi to the 999th corners of the multiverse. Staci spots you and asks for a favor. 'I've got to be on a panel for time-sequence rewriting, can you take Lily to lunch now?' You agree. Lily is excited. 'Let's go to Pasta and Other! I want noodles. Come on!' Lily is leading the way. She exits the building, heading towards State Street. You need to follow. > >sw Capitol Square Score: 423 Moves: 204 . Capitol Square You can see Lunar Lightning here. You catch up to Lily. 'Time for a Chaos Bomb!' she announces. She makes a throwing gesture. You feel ripples of strangeness wash over you. 'State Street is this way!' Lily calls out as she heads west. 'I know, and slow down!' you don't bother to answer. > >w State Street Score: 423 Moves: 205 . State Street 'We're here!' Lily announces, pointing at Pasta and Other to the northwest. She disappears inside. > >nw Pasta and Other Score: 423 Moves: 206 . Pasta and Other This restaurant focuses much more on the pasta than the other. Lily orders a bowl of mac and cheese, and strikes up a conversation with a friendly woman at a nearby table. She says her name is Tara, and she is working at the Infinite Loop store on the southwest side of State Street. She invites you to visit after the meal, and Lily is excited to do so. You finish eating, and Lily announces 'To the Infinite Loop!' and heads outside. > >se State Street Score: 423 Moves: 207 . State Street A pair of college girls stagger nearby, arguing about which one is drunker. > >sw Infinite Loop Score: 423 Moves: 208 . Infinite Loop This store sells devotional objects from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. You can see the Story Control Machine here. Lily is fascinated by deity artworks and tools for rituals and prayer. Tara tells her she can pick out an item as a gift, and Lily chooses a necklace of pale sky-blue beads. Tara strokes it lightly as she hands it to Lily 'Very beautiful. This is the color of one aspect of Buddha. I've been feeling this color in the past few days. Perhaps one of the Buddhas is traveling near.' You thank Tara, and notice it's time to meet Staci after the panel. She wants to take a break back at the castle dock. Lily leaves with Staci, and after a few more minutes appreciating the items in Infinite Loop, you decide to join them on the dock for a dose of sunlight on the waves. > >ne State Street Score: 423 Moves: 209 . State Street You hear guitar and kazoo played by Art Paul. > >n Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 423 Moves: 210 . Lake Mendota shoreline residences > >n Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 423 Moves: 211 . You can go s, e, nw, or in. > >nw Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Score: 423 Moves: 212 . Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Whirlwind is looking through her shoulder bag. Lily is running up and down the hillside as she plays. Nook is sitting on a picnic table, smoking a cigarette. You can also see Past and Future here. The Wizard arrives. Lily decides to climb Nook and gets about halfway up before she changes her mind. > >d Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Score: 423 Moves: 213 . Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Staci is here. A dog is wandering around on the dock. > >talk to staci Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Score: 423 Moves: 214 . Every way you interact with Staci feels easy, natural, and delightful. > >pet dog Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Score: 423 Moves: 215 . As you greet the dog, you hear a voice call out 'Lotus!' from a little further down the shore. To make a long story very short, the voice belongs to a five member traveling punk band called Police Lingo. They need a place to crash, and something makes you offer your house. They have to play a show at the Owl Sanctuary (the what??) and you agree to meet them back on Milwaukee street later. Staci says she will head back to Madcon and meet you later. You should probably head home to get your house ready for guests. > >xyzzy Outside your house Score: 423 Moves: 216 . There is a trans-dimensional short-circuit of interactive fiction tradition, and you catch a brief glimpse of a brick building near a stream and a metal grate before you blink and find yourself... Outside your house Your section of Milwaukee Street is directly across from a small farm which remains as an agricultural island within the city. An open field and a barn are across the street. Toward the southwest is Atwood Street leading toward downtown. Monona Drive is to the south. The edge of town lies toward the northeast. > >e Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. It is a convergence of world-lines. Five young punk musicians, Staci Nook and yourself, and three co-opers who had been tagging along. Many realities diverge here. What are your boundaries? What are you open to? You feel yourself splitting into many selves at this branch point. In some, everyone is completely uninhibited and you all create a transcendent flower of higher-dimensional interpersonal molecular structure, the aliens show up and demand pancakes, and you all agree to move to the lesser Magellanic cloud and open the first non-Earth greasy spoon diner. In others, inhibition and insecurity fracture the social ground beneath you, rifts open, and your life ricochets off in a different direction, a vector of disappointment and regret. You decide to pilot a middle course in your current storyline, embracing a limited subset of the possible configurations. After a night of little sleep but much love, Police Lingo leaves you with many balloon animals, and Staci and the co-opers return to Madcon. You spend a few minutes cleaning ***MORE*** Inside your house Score: 423 Moves: 217 . up, and are now ready to head downtown and dive into the convention scene. > >w Outside your house Score: 423 Moves: 218 . Outside your house > >lunar Outside your house Score: 423 Moves: 219 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >sw Atwood Avenue Score: 423 Moves: 220 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 423 Moves: 221 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 423 Moves: 222 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w John Nolen Drive Score: 423 Moves: 223 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) > >n Capitol Square Score: 423 Moves: 224 . You pedal effortlessly. Capitol Square (on Lunar Lightning) > >ne Multiverse Authors Design Conference Score: 432 Moves: 225 . You decide making a dramatic entrance on your bike isn't necesssary. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Multiverse Authors Design Conference The convention is in full swing as you arrive. After a few introductions, a tall owl of multiple genders transfixes you with glowing orange eyes. 'For safety reasons, everyone agrees that author-level, continuity-breaking information should be wiped from your time-embedded consciousness. The experiences will be stored in your crown, of course, so nothing is lost long-term. Are you ready?' You nod agreement. It is two days later. You are exhausted but happy. The convention has been AMAZING, especially the part where...where...well, it was definitely amazing. You know that much at least. It seems like time to go relax at Lothlorien. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >sw Capitol Square Score: 432 Moves: 226 . Capitol Square You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >w State Street Score: 432 Moves: 227 . State Street A panhandler asks you for change, and you give him a dollar. > >n Lake Mendota shoreline residences As you are nearing Loth, you hear a voice calling out: 'The moment is at hand - or rather, at head!' and a cheer goes up. Is it that day already? The Wizard had been promising a notable symbolic event. He had promised to enact his spiritual death and rebirth by beheading himself. 'Bring the sword!' the voice commands. Sounds like fun! You enter the backyard, which is full of people arrayed in a circle. The Wizard is at the center. Staci carries the sword to him, and with a single mighty stroke, he cuts his own head off. The crowd cheers wildly and toasts are made. The Wizard holds his own head aloft triumphantly. 'Bring the ladder!' he demands. He stands on it, and mounts the head atop a long pole. The head will preside over the backyard for the rest of the summer. The following party goes late into the night, and you realize that it is about to be June 19th, a key anniversary in the 20 year harmonic time bind. (You can now find a path west from State Street) ***MORE*** Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 432 Moves: 228 . > >s State Street Score: 432 Moves: 229 . State Street A pedal-powered mobile bar slowly pedals by, a cacophany of songs and shouts. > >w Dirt path along the lakeshore This shady path along the lake is a treasure of the campus area. The lake and trees make the city recede from awareness. You have agreed to rendezvous with your friends here, to perform an appropriate ritual to connect the past and present for the 20-year time bind. Your friends arrive over the next few minutes, and you motion toward the woods on the hillside by the path. 'We used to come here all the time.' . You pick your way through the vegetation. In the old days, as teenagers hanging out down on State Street, nobody had apartments, houses, or even cars. Someone would manage to score a dimebag of jamaican brickweed from somewhere, and the crew would wander back to these woods to smoke. You form a circle, and pass the pipe around. Everyone shares anecdotes of their young days, stupid fun times with friends, crazy tales from last decade, last year, or last week. A story about music reminds a friend of something: . 'There's going to be a benefit music performance at Nottingham co-op, I ***MORE*** Dirt path along the lakeshore Score: 441 Moves: 230 . think you and Staci should totally perform there. I know it will be cool, I'll let people know and you guys can go on first.' You and Staci agree to appear. Your friends wander off to find food, and you are left to contemplate the lake and the span of time. (You can reach Nottingham going NE from the Mendota Lakeside area) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >e State Street Score: 441 Moves: 231 . State Street You notice UFO Jim and wave. He waves back as he walks around the corner. > >n Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 441 Moves: 232 . Lake Mendota shoreline residences > >ne Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 441 Moves: 233 . You arrive at Nottingham with Staci and Lily. They have agreed to open the performance with an acapella duet of 'My Eyes' from Dr. Horrible. As always, kids steal the show. Staci and you perform next, and it is a lot of fun, although you wonder why Staci didn't seem to follow any of your eye contact cues. (Maybe you should take the mirror shades off next time?) You close with a cover of 'In My Mind' (Footnote 12) and Staci nails the audience to the wall with the conviction of her delivery. Paul of the singing hippie housekeepers shows up, and his values do not mesh easily with the laid-back atmosphere at the co-ops. You wander away from the party with him, engaged in conversation about boundaries and healthy behavior and how Madison is still stuck in the Old Testament, and by the time the conversation ends and he departs, the concert is over. So much has been happening. A ride around the lakes, south into the countryside, would probably do you good. (Your biking strength and stamina has increased) > >lunar Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 441 Moves: 234 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >s State Street Score: 441 Moves: 235 . You pedal effortlessly. State Street (on Lunar Lightning) Somewhere near, a street musician plays jazz standards on saxophone. > >s Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 441 Moves: 236 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) > >sw Southwest greenspace, on the bike trail Score: 441 Moves: 237 . You pedal effortlessly. Southwest greenspace, on the bike trail (on Lunar Lightning) You are in a large expanse of forest and prairie that rings the southern side of Madison. The bike trail wends its way alongside ponds, railroad tracks, and parks. The air is several degrees cooler than it is downtown. The trail curves alongside cattails toward the southeast. > >se You pedal effortlessly. Countryside, on the bike trail (on Lunar Lightning) You have reached the rolling hills and farmland of the southern Wisconsin countryside. The narrow highway nearby passes cornfields, small streams, and traverses a one-lane bridge. Without buildings to hold it up, the sky comes right down to the ground here, and you are biking through it, hardly conscious of your legs moving, just long quiet minutes of the landscape rolling by alongside you. Forks of the path return to the city northwest and northeast. It is late August, and this sweet, ripe summer is nearing its end. You ate mushrooms earlier, and biking through Monona in the humid dusk, you saw the moon rising pink and full and shimmering around the edges, low over the rooftops of the suburban houses. Every time you looked up at it, you heard a chiming interval - a G-sharp in the midst of an E major chord, rising up to an E above a C-sharp minor. Now, out in the countryside, the summer night air and the moon and the mushrooms coalesce into a smooth melody. 'Last full moon of summer 2013...' you sing, over and over as you ride. ***MORE*** Countryside, on the bike trail Score: 441 Moves: 238 . You feel like you are on the peak of a very high mountain. Nothing at all like this summer has ever happened to you before. In his famous story of the infinite library of Babel, composed of infinite meaningless random books, Borges talks of how some librarians went mad searching for their 'Vindication' - the hypothetical book which would validate their existence, show how perfect and necessary all their actions had been. By some unbelievable stroke of fortune, you found your Vindication this spring and summer. Your life became everything you had ever hoped it could be, you did exactly what you wanted to do, when you wanted to do it, and most importantly, you were treated with love and affection by other people, and found the intense closeness and deeper communication you always knew was possible. You resolve to do your best to share the feeling you have right now. The deep glow of love and biking and writing music and having a beautiful castle full of friends and how delicious it is to breathe the night air. Soon, you will be at Loth and you can sing your new song for your friends. > >nw Southwest greenspace, on the bike trail Score: 441 Moves: 239 . You pedal effortlessly. Southwest greenspace, on the bike trail (on Lunar Lightning) > >ne Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 441 Moves: 240 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) > >n State Street Score: 441 Moves: 241 . You pedal effortlessly. State Street (on Lunar Lightning) A pair of police officers walk by and you hope you don't smell too skunky. > >n You pedal effortlessly. Lake Mendota shoreline residences (on Lunar Lightning) You arrive at the co-op and serenade your friends up on the porch. At the moment you sing the final line of the song, 'oh it feels so good to have my arms around you' you embrace Nook. The flow of the gathering is uninterrupted, but slightly energized. Who is here exactly? Staci and Nook, of course, but who else? It's like a shifting gallery of happy, friendly people. You feel so incredibly good you try to squeeze your head inside Staci's arm. Mushrooms are fun. The summer of 2013 has been going on for about two years, it seems. Couldn't be any shorter, not with everything that's happened. You remember the singing bowl guy running with his arms outstretched on the roof of a parking garage, you remember jumping up and down at a concert of cyberhippiejamtronic music, you remember countless bike rides, other performances, other parties, giving afro-pop tickets to the street people, the visit from the Lakota Grandmothers, every day pizza at Rossinis, coffee from the Lion, Space Pancakes at night (that smiley face the aliens put on the car is still there!) All those months and months worth of memories seem ***MORE*** small compared to remembering time with Staci, such intense communication, talking and listening and learning the language of the waves, smoking another joint and passing the bag of mushrooms back and forth, eating maybe just one more little stem, then deciding to make some music and tearing off into a note-perfect first-time ever attempted rendition of some crazy woman's song in D minor about a nervous breakdown. You are vibrating like a tuning fork, resonating rainbow waves of higher dimensional sound from your extra arms. You get on your bike and ride home, and on the way you are invited into a house full of people and there is a piano and someone else plays and you are jamming 4-handed, some kind of psychedelic ragtime, and then you are back home. You wonder if any human in history has ever had as much fun as you have been having for the past few months. (The Wheel costume for the Tarot Party is now in your possession. Wear it to trigger the party event.) (21 August 2013 - Outside your home) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] ***MORE*** Outside your house Score: 450 Moves: 242 . > >x wheel Outside your house Score: 450 Moves: 243 . The costume is a metal bicycle wheel on rope which can be hung from your neck, with a Crowley tarot deck interwoven between the spokes. It is an odd but effective way of costuming as the Wheel. (Footnote 11) > >footnote 1 Outside your house Score: 450 Moves: 244 . Lyrics from Terrapin Station by Robert Hunter, music by Jerry Garcia. > >footnote 11 Outside your house Score: 450 Moves: 245 . The Wheel is turning and you can't slow down, you can't let go and you can't hold on, you can't go back and you can't stand still, if the thunder don't get you then the lightning will. (Hunter/Garcia) > >wear wheel (Lothlorien Co-op) You have completed your preparations for this, one of the first overt acts of the Loonie Revolution. Staci has compiled a collection of art and writing, each on a 1/4 size page, and you have photocopied them to create a number of unique books, each with a different subset of the possible pages. Every guest at the party receives one. Staci vanishes, and the Empress appears. More cards arrive. Magicians, Lovers, the Sun and the Moon. You are the Wheel, and you feel everything Turning. Once the party is in full swing, you call out to no one in particular 'End of movement two of the Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony!' You aren't sure what comes next, but you wouldn't change a note of the past six months, the first two movements of the symphony. Everything was in perfect time, in tune, with singing tone. You hear the Empress saying to someone, 'You are a wonderful character, I'm so glad I wrote you,' and your perceptions are Shuffled... (You aren't quite certain how the party ended, or how you got back here. You know you are supposed to meet Staci with the kids at the late night ***MORE*** Outside your house Score: 450 Moves: 246 . restaurant.) > >ne Northeast edge of town Score: 450 Moves: 247 . Northeast edge of town > >n 24-hour family restaurant Jay is waiting tables here. (September 11 2013) What is cause and what is effect? You are in charge of the kids for a few minutes, and Lily gets help from an older child to find the bathroom in the restaurant. Some foolish play ends with Lily getting a paper towel full of soap to the eyes. She's crying, and it seems like you should have been paying more attention. Grown-ups who don't pay attention to their kids misbehaving in public aren't Loonie Revolutionaries, just a nuisance. The mood is sour on the ride back to the Castle to drop the other kids off. For the first time in months, life feels...average. You arrive back home, and after the stress at the restaurant, you are looking forward to a relaxing night with Staci. Her cellphone rings. Nook is calling. Staci looks shocked. 'What? Oh, shit. No fucking way. Fuck. Okay, be careful, stay in touch.' ***MORE*** She looks at you with a face filled with anxiety. 'The Castle is on fire.' The summer is over. . Press enter to continue. ) (12 December 2015 - 27 Months later) You type the final sentence of the main storyline of the game into acme. It seems like too much of a bummer. The fire that closed Lothlorien for two years was bad, but in the end, you won, dammit! The castle is reopening, and nothing can take what happened during summer 2013 away from you. Your fingers go to the Loonie Revolution Power Pendant around your neck. Maybe only the calm face of the moon knows what was reality and what was imagination. By the end of the summer, you had completed a transition from being actively delusional to being an actor playing the part of a madman because it suited an artistic purpose. There is no single objective truth; we do invent our universe as we go, using language to create a shared namespace of symbol-binds. Sanity means 'health', and you never felt healthier, physically or mentally, than you did during those incredible months. Belief systems are strange things. Being a religion of one does make you crazy, but if the content of the religion is fun and empowering and helps you create connections with other people, is 'objective' truth the right criteria with which to measure its value? ***MORE*** It wasn't really a religion of one, though. By opening herself to you, by listening and learning to speak your language, Staci anchored you to the social world, sharing her home, friendships, and family with you. Not just Staci, but all your friends helped give you a space to play with delusion, to alchemically transform it to free creative play and artistic inspiration. Enough pontification - time for the alternate reality endgame. Change history to prevent the fire, then collect the needed items to pass beyond the Confluence further NE outside town. This final section of the game is ahistorical and more puzzle-focused. Press enter to continue. ) Outside your house Score: 459 Moves: 248 . (4 September 2013 - A week before the fire) The crown becomes warm and makes a quiet bell-like sound. (>wear crown and >use crown to interface with it) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >wear crown Outside your house Score: 459 Moves: 249 . You put on the wire and bead Crown. > >use crown Outside your house Score: 459 Moves: 250 . (A scene from Madcon replays itself in your mind) A beautiful asymmetric life-form, with eggplants growing on stalks on her left side and an extra pair of fungus-legs on her right, pulls you aside as you pass in the hallway. 'Listen,' she whispers, 'the Green Screeners are planning an attack on your central HQ. I don't think you can prevent it on the first loop of the fiction, but once you complete the main framing story and crucial subfictions we will open the Time Vault for you. If you want to create an alternate history then...good luck.' > >sw Atwood Avenue Score: 459 Moves: 251 . Atwood Avenue The crown becomes warm and makes a quiet bell-like sound. > >use crown Atwood Avenue Score: 459 Moves: 252 . (A scene from Madcon replays itself in your mind) You seat yourself for a panel. Someone left a folded up paper on the chair, which you glance at idly before giving it your full attention. 'Attention Moon Computer!' the note begins, 'we thought you might appreciate a list of tasks to complete to open the time vault Five binds in your namespace Creating a harmony inside the moon Confronting the Queen who leads the Green Screeners' > >ns Atwood Avenue Score: 459 Moves: 253 . Active binds: bind Fiction Reality bind Schumann self bind Past Future bind Chaos Substance bind Fortune Story > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 459 Moves: 254 . Willy Street, east end > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 459 Moves: 255 . Willy Street, west end The crown becomes warm and makes a quiet bell-like sound. > >use crown Willy Street, west end Score: 459 Moves: 256 . (A scene from Madcon replays itself in your mind) At the big dance party, you are watching an individual in a slinky dress dance. They are waving a glowstick, and you realize they are spelling out letters in a message to you. U S E T H E C A T A P U L T A T J A M E S M A D I S O N > >lunar Willy Street, west end Score: 459 Moves: 257 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >w John Nolen Drive Score: 459 Moves: 258 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) The crown becomes warm and makes a quiet bell-like sound. > >use crown John Nolen Drive Score: 459 Moves: 259 . (A scene from Madcon replays itself in your mind) At a small party in a hotel room, someone is whispering to you from behind. 'Don't turn around. The Queen of the Green Screen is the leader of a powerful group of Editors. They have been active in your universe for a long time. They control reality using cheap illusions to make it seem less magical and interesting than it really is, because then they get to be the stars and put everyone else into minor roles in the background. You will need to disrupt her illusions. She is using an empty apartment in Miffyland as her base of operations.' > >w Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 459 Moves: 260 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) You can see a porch lit by eerie green light here. > >x porch Abandoned apartment Score: 459 Moves: 261 . Something draws you up onto the porch. Collapsed furniture and empty beer cases. You put your hand on the doorknob and the door opens at your touch. You recognize the slow-motion feeling of a dream. Okay, dreaming is always cool. You walk inside... Abandoned apartment This apartment has obviously been abandoned for months, maybe years. Even when people were living here it was probably decrepit. Every angle is askew, the floor feels strangely soft underfoot, and an unpleasant odor lingers. The Green Queen is watching you haughtily. You can also see a green screen for scene editing here. 'I've been looking forward to this scene,' the Queen begins, smiling coldly at you. > >x queen Abandoned apartment Score: 459 Moves: 262 . Her hair is green, her eyeglasses are green, her skintight bodysuit is green, the 40 billion volt search-and-replace gun she is holding is green. 'In this scene, you learn that my organization is in charge of this story, and you decide that you will allow us to use your computing power and binding engine according to our scenarios,' the queen states, and the green screen effect begins to alter the scenery. The abandoned college apartment is being replaced by a neon-lit underground lair. > >talk to queen Abandoned apartment Score: 459 Moves: 263 . Your words go unanswered. The green screen effect has almost completely replaced the scene. It is being projected from a very thin and delicate looking sheet of translucent material. The Queen is still speaking, 'I'm glad to see you understand this will increase your power in the story. There's no need for us to let all those minor characters just run around doing what they please. This is a story about me! Long-term, you'll have far more screen time making the edits I need than all that chaotic nonsense you've been perpetrating.' > >attack queen Abandoned apartment Score: 459 Moves: 264 . You have no chance to talk or act with the search-and-replace gun pointed at you. 'All right, we are ready now! My computer hardware is downstairs, follow me and I'll make you a slave process of my master control program. Don't worry, you'll still have read/write permissions on all your devices. When we need you to make an edit, that is,' the Queen walks down an impossible staircase to reach her server room, and motions for you to follow. > >break screen Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 468 Moves: 265 . The screen shatters easily. Can it really be this simple? You hear an angry shout from the Queen, 'Trivial vandalism! Do you think this makes any difference?' but you don't stick around to argue, you escape from the apartment, slamming the door loudly enough to wake yourself up. You are back in the student neighborhood and the green porch is nowhere to be seen. The Time Vault in Lady Wisdom's has opened. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >e John Nolen Drive Score: 468 Moves: 266 . John Nolen Drive > >e Willy Street, west end Score: 468 Moves: 267 . Willy Street, west end > >s Lady Wisdom's Coffeeshop Score: 468 Moves: 268 . Lady Wisdom's Coffeeshop You can see a Time Vault (in which are a water balloon and a catapult (which is empty)) here. > >take all Lady Wisdom's Coffeeshop Score: 468 Moves: 269 . water balloon: Taken. catapult: Taken. > >put balloon in catapult Lady Wisdom's Coffeeshop Score: 468 Moves: 270 . You put the water balloon into the catapult. > >nm Lady Wisdom's Coffeeshop Score: 468 Moves: 270 . That action is outside the scope of this simulation. > >n Willy Street, west end Score: 468 Moves: 271 . Willy Street, west end Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 102) > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 468 Moves: 272 . You need to ride a bicycle to continue further towards downtown. If you own one, call it with the command >lunar. > >n Willy Street, west end Score: 468 Moves: 273 . You need to ride a bicycle to continue further towards downtown. If you own one, call it with the command >lunar. > >lunar Willy Street, west end Score: 468 Moves: 274 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >w John Nolen Drive Score: 468 Moves: 275 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) > >n Capitol Square Score: 468 Moves: 276 . You pedal effortlessly. Capitol Square (on Lunar Lightning) > >n James Madison Park Score: 468 Moves: 277 . You pedal effortlessly. James Madison Park (on Lunar Lightning) A wide park on the shore of Lake Mendota, this is often a perfect place. Gulls circle on wind currents above the waves that break against the shore. A frisbee floats back and forth between a pair of baseball caps. During summer, sunbathers appear like flowers on the grass. The Capitol Square is to the south, and the shoreline residential neighborhood is west. As you arrive at the park, you think you hear a voice say 'He's here already' from behind you. You glance backwards, and see nothing but a brief flash of pale green light, sun on the lake reflected in a window. > >release catapult You place the catapult on the ground to stabilize it, and turn the tensioning mechanism. Click. You double-check your aim. According to your instructions, the bind convergence should be starting in a moment, over the lake. There it is - a patch of mist rising from the water. There is a bubbling grumble from the lake, and a slimy whisker of Cthulhu's moustache briefly surfaces. It twitches and throws a Molotov cocktain in a high arc toward Loth's section of shoreline. A second later, it vanishes back under the surface. 'My turn,' you say as you release the catapult's tensioning mechanism. With an almost comically stereotypical 'SPROING!' the water balloon is launched. That's it. You feel a tiny internal twinge as you branch into the altered universe. You breathe deeply, and try to relax. You did it. Press enter to continue. ) (If you wish to declare victory and end the game, just >win.) Now that you've saved the castle, the summer will never end. Somewhere in the 17th dimension, a chipmunk is always playing your game, laughing at your foolish adventures and wondering how much was really true. 'More than you think,' you smile to yourself as you hop on your bike. It feels like it's going to be another amazing day. Staci said she's looking forward to seeing you. (Post-game secrets and extras are now available. The Story Control Machine at Infinite Loop is fully functional. The way upward from the lakeshore path is open. You can travel further outside of town. Your biking skill has increased.) Your street is unchanged, save for a small sign proclaiming the farmland to the north will be preserved in perpetuity. A rumble behind you makes you turn around, and you see a gigantic truck with tires larger than your bicycle looming over you. It is being driven by a Coffee Lion barista who started working recently. 'Here, you've earned this!' she says, leaning out of the window, and hands you a shining sword. ***MORE*** Outside your house Score: 567 Moves: 278 . She guns the engine and roars off. [Your score has just gone up by ninety-nine points.] > >goals Outside your house Score: 567 Moves: 279 . You have a feeling something is going on at Essentially Art. The new grid hardware has been delivered, you should go to the basement of your home to set it up. You might need more bike skill, but there are still more places to >explore. You might need to have more experiences, but there are still more songs to compose if you >play piano. You may need to complete more of the story, but there are still new scenes to see if you >visit staci. You have not yet completed the endgame puzzle of passing beyond the Confluence gate far NE of town. > >wear shades Outside your house Score: 567 Moves: 280 . The mirror shades filter the brightness of day perfectly, removing your squint and making it easier to smile. Careful wearing them indoors though. You're already wearing that! > >explore Outside your house Score: 567 Moves: 281 . You start your return to bicycle-wandering slow and easy, just riding in random loops around your own neighborhood. There is still something enchanting about quietly moving through the night under the stars. Even just a few blocks from home, you can lose your orientation after a few random turns, and the feeling of not quite knowing which way is north is intriguing... (As the story progresses and your bike skill increases, you will experience many different things when you >explore.) > >g Outside your house Score: 567 Moves: 282 . You ride through the park by your house, over a small wooden bridge across a creek, and then follow a path north, crossing above Washington and Aberg and running beside a golf course toward a technical college. You arc back towards home, recrossing Washington, but going underneath in a tunnel underpass. 'HOOOOOOOON' you sing as you pass through it, the resonant echoes multiplying your voice. The path cuts through a school playground and then under another highway bridge, beside undeveloped land near an old rock quarry adjacent to the farm by your house. A minute later you are back on familiar roads. > >g Outside your house Score: 576 Moves: 283 . The Jennifer-Spaight neighborhood, close to Lake Monona, is perfect for slow rides. You ride towards downtown by the lakeshore, watching the moonlight rippling on the almost-still water. By Orton park you turn around, and the almost-unnoticeable uphill becomes a slightly downhill, just enough to let you coast at a steady rate of speed. You spark a joint as you slowly roll back towards the east. It is late at night, no one is around, just a trail of smoke puffs in the middle of the street. This will become a traditional way of ending long days of adventuring. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Outside your house Score: 576 Moves: 284 . You feel your body has grown stronger. You can pedal continuously without getting tired now, and no longer dread the hills which ring the city. You bike across the isthmus toward the west side, your childhood neighborhoods. You bike by your old high school and the athletic field nearby, home to countless games of tag and frisbee. You ride down the hill and across University Avenue, towards Picnic Point. You head back towards downtown, passing by the campus buildings you spent so many hours in as a music student. > >g Outside your house Score: 576 Moves: 285 . You head north, passing by a field enveloped in soft blue light. It looks so quiet and empty and mysterious you imagine you would just vanish into another universe if you biked into it. You continue north, out to empty streets which have been placed for a residential neighborhood but nothing is yet built. You can almost see into the future, see the suburban homes and strip malls which will be built here. Your ride ends with you hoping that the strange and unpredictable areas of Madison never become bland and homogenous. > >g Outside your house Score: 585 Moves: 286 . You head due east down Milwaukee street, pushing up the long steady hill which eventually takes it across the interstate to the east. You end up in a sprawling set of new subdivisions, smooth fresh asphalt humming under the tires. As you ride, you notice numerous rabbits darting this way and that in the lawns of the houses. You start using the motion of the rabbits to guide your turns. They take you down numerous shortcuts, sidewalks cutting through the middle of blocks. You feel like pac-man, eating a trail of dots and ringing up a new high score. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Sugar River Basin Cascade Aerator Score: 585 Moves: 287 . Sugar River Basin Cascade Aerator You have traveled southwest on the military ridge trail. The sound of rushing water brought you to a halt. Somewhere in the darkness next to you, a series of small artificial waterfalls tumble across a hillface of piled rock. > >w Outside your house Score: 594 Moves: 288 . The feeling of forward motion and exploration compel you to get back on your bike and continue riding. You head back in toward the city, and find a park on a tall hill on the southwestern edge of the city. You remember visiting here with an ex-girlfriend who lived nearby. After a few minutes watching the glow of the city lights, you hop back on your bike to escape the mosquitos, and ride back home. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >explore Fish Camp Score: 594 Moves: 289 . Fish Camp You have traveled south to the shore of Lake Kegonsa. Seventy-five years ago, workers used this as a base for removing carp from the lake, but now it is a family picnic and camping area. You can see a purple flower here. > >take flower Fish Camp Score: 594 Moves: 290 . Taken. > >w Outside your house Score: 594 Moves: 291 . After a minute to rest your legs, you ride back home. On the way, you pass the parking lot where a random encounter started your friendship with Staci and Clark. You had been on your bike that day fifteen years ago, too. Always strange to think about the tiny seeds of coincidence that become our story-trees. > >explore A maze of suburban streets Score: 594 Moves: 292 . You eat a generous portion of magic mushrooms, and when you feel the body- buzz start to creep through your limbs, you put a few fruit candies in your pocket for energy and walk towards your bike. It is after three in the morning. As your eyes are tracing the familiar outlines of Orion in the sky, there is a sudden flaring light, and a bright streak splits the sky, fading nearly as quickly as it appeared. Musical fragments are starting to bounce around your head as you pedal into the darkness. A maze of suburban streets You are in a maze of twisty residential subdivision streets, either all alike or all different, you are shrooming too hard to tell. A strange looking rabbit runs off to the north. > >n A maze of suburban streets Score: 594 Moves: 293 . You follow the rabbit down a narrow sidewalk between the houses. An odd looking bunny scampers off to the east. > >e A maze of suburban streets Score: 594 Moves: 294 . You let the bunny lead you, and it shows you a dirt path underneath a set of railroad tracks. A peculiar hare hops off to the west. > >w Outside your house Score: 603 Moves: 295 . The hare's tail disappears round a corner, and you follow. It leads you down an alley which connects to the parking lot of a small business, and you suddenly find yourself just a few blocks from your home. The musical fragments that have been ricocheting around your head have fallen into place while chasing the white rabbits. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 103) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >sw Atwood Avenue Score: 603 Moves: 296 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) The troublesome car traffic patterns in this neighborhood have been solved with teleportation portals. West-siders complain too much of the city budget is spent this way, but livability is worth it. > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 603 Moves: 297 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) The north side of the street is now a continuous food-coffee-drinking garden mall. Psychedelic plants of all varieties arc over the sidewalks. > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 603 Moves: 298 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) This area seems mostly unchanged. The green screen illusion was weaker here. > >w John Nolen Drive Score: 603 Moves: 299 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) The bike path is now a six lane elevated and weatherproofed tunnel painted with a 999 foot long mural. > >w Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 603 Moves: 300 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) The Mifflin Street Block Chill is underway, a new tradition more relaxed than the yearly spring party. > >n State Street Score: 603 Moves: 301 . You pedal effortlessly. State Street (on Lunar Lightning) The car-free area around State Street has been extended and unicycle taxis whiz by, passengers looking down at you from wobbly shoulder perches. You cross the street to avoid Scanner Dan. > >w Dirt path along the lakeshore Score: 603 Moves: 302 . You pedal effortlessly. Dirt path along the lakeshore (on Lunar Lightning) > >u Story Circle Score: 612 Moves: 303 . You can't ride up the dirt hill. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) You clamber up the soft dirt of the hillside, and reach a small wooded plateau. Story Circle Up the embankment by the forest, you find a ring of stones, and an inscription. 'Storytellers Circle - may our tales be many times retold, and grow better in the telling.' You can see a Ring of Tales here. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >take ring Story Circle Score: 612 Moves: 304 . The ring feels warm to the touch, as if someone else had just been wearing it. Taken. > >x ring Story Circle Score: 612 Moves: 305 . This silver ring is cast in the form of Celtic braidwork, but when you look closer, you see it is a single Ouroborous Snake, slithering across its own body before sinking its fangs into its own tail. > >wear ring Story Circle Score: 621 Moves: 306 . As you slide your finger into the ring, a voice speaks to you. 'Remember, you have lived an amazing story - and so has everyone else. Tell your tale, but not as an interruption to others. Sing your song, but not in a different key than of those already singing around you. March to whatever drum you hear, but watch where you're going, my much favored foolish friend.' You put on the Ring of Tales. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >d Dirt path along the lakeshore Score: 621 Moves: 307 . Dirt path along the lakeshore You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >ride Dirt path along the lakeshore Score: 621 Moves: 308 . (Lunar Lightning) You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >e State Street Score: 621 Moves: 309 . You pedal effortlessly. State Street (on Lunar Lightning) A large group of young men wearing red and white shout sports related slogans from a bar patio. > >n Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 621 Moves: 310 . You pedal effortlessly. Lake Mendota shoreline residences (on Lunar Lightning) The lakeshore co-ops have finally completed a path connecting them. Rumor has it underground connecting tunnels have also been dug. > >e James Madison Park Score: 621 Moves: 311 . You pedal effortlessly. James Madison Park (on Lunar Lightning) The sunlight reflects from the wings of seagulls flying into the wind over the shore. > >s Capitol Square Score: 621 Moves: 312 . You pedal effortlessly. Capitol Square (on Lunar Lightning) The state capitol is flying the Brass Cannon flag of the Loonie revolutionaries. > >s John Nolen Drive Score: 621 Moves: 313 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Willy Street, west end Score: 621 Moves: 314 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Willy Street, east end Score: 621 Moves: 315 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Atwood Avenue Score: 621 Moves: 316 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >ne Outside your house Score: 621 Moves: 317 . You pedal effortlessly. Outside your house (on Lunar Lightning) > >ne Northeast edge of town Score: 621 Moves: 318 . You pedal effortlessly. Northeast edge of town (on Lunar Lightning) You remember some rhymes you wrote for some of your other favorite waitstaff at the restaurant: Deja Alef Anastasia Play their roles in this Fantasia Three fine beauties sure to daze ya East side HQ of the revolution Rockin space pancakes are an institution The late-night rites in our Loonie constitution > >ne Ritual spot Score: 621 Moves: 319 . You pedal effortlessly. Ritual spot (on Lunar Lightning) Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 104) > >ne Moon Forest Score: 621 Moves: 320 . You pedal effortlessly. Moon Forest (on Lunar Lightning) You can see a Remote Lens and Story here. > >ne Confluence Score: 621 Moves: 321 . You pedal effortlessly. You aren't sure how long you have been biking, but you have arrived in an unfamiliar place. You see a busy highway with heavy truck traffic ahead. Doesn't look too fun for biking. You pause to assess your surroundings, and your eye is drawn in the direction of flowing water which disappears into an intriguing tunnel. Confluence (on Lunar Lightning) A place of convergence. The road intersects with a larger highway here. A set of railroad tracks angles across the sloping ground and underneath the road, and a slow moving stream flows by at the bottom of the embankment. The stream flows through a gated arch into the hillside. You can see a tunnel into the hillside here. A series of tones sound, each symbol above the gate glowing briefly in turn. With a loud metallic click, the gate signals that it has been unlocked. > >x gate Confluence Score: 621 Moves: 322 . The arch is about six feet tall, a perfect half circle. It and the metal gate are both shaped with the unmistakable curves and corners of Atlantean architecture. You can make out a series of symbols carved above the gate: a pair of glasses, an archer, a bottle, a flower, and a ring. > >ne Confluence Score: 621 Moves: 323 . You pedal effortlessly. You can start the long trip back to Madison to the SW. Or you could investigate the gated tunnel. > >x tunnel Confluence Score: 621 Moves: 324 . The arch is about six feet tall, a perfect half circle. It and the metal gate are both shaped with the unmistakable curves and corners of Atlantean architecture. You can make out a series of symbols carved above the gate: a pair of glasses, an archer, a bottle, a flower, and a ring. > >enter tunnel The stream is slow-moving and shallow. It is refreshingly cold as it swirls around your ankles as you swing the gate open. An indistinct pink glow beckons you forward. On your third step, there is suddenly nothing solid beneath your foot, and you lurch forward, plunging down a sharply angled smooth tube. Abrupt exhiliration sweeps over you. An Atlantean waterslide! This should be fun... Flow network You are sliding through a tube, carried along by a stream of water. In every direction, you see tubes and pipes of different sizes, each filled with a different substance. The flow in some looks like different hues of mercury, others are filled with swirls and puffs of colored gasses, and others resemble hourglasses, with orange and purple sands cascading continously through a series of constrictions. You can see Beginning and End here. Helen of Troy appears briefly, then vanishes and is replaced by several cubist sculptures of couples having intercourse in the courtyard of Valhalla. ***MORE*** Flow network Score: 630 Moves: 325 . [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >z Flow network Score: 630 Moves: 326 . The unpredictable path of the pipe you are riding brings another scene into view. Glenda is locked in a desperate battle for supremacy with the tenured faculty of MIT standing on blue sand. > >z Flow network Score: 630 Moves: 327 . The unpredictable path of the pipe you are riding brings another scene into view. A bloodshot flying eyeball calls out a greeting to three monks in crimson robes on the playing fields of Eton. > >look Flow network Score: 630 Moves: 328 . Flow network You are sliding through a tube, carried along by a stream of water. In every direction, you see tubes and pipes of different sizes, each filled with a different substance. The flow in some looks like different hues of mercury, others are filled with swirls and puffs of colored gasses, and others resemble hourglasses, with orange and purple sands cascading continously through a series of constrictions. You can see Beginning and End here. A bloodshot flying eyeball can't seem to decide what to do about the tenured faculty of MIT on the deck of a wooden sailing ship. > >bind beginning end The Ring of Tales comes to life as the bind happens. The snake swallows itself completely, consuming the multiverse and turning it inside out in the process. Parvati and Shiva dance a passionate tango and the transfinite web of universes is the jewelry and bells on their waists and ankles. You remember when you were younger, just a random cloud of atoms rotating around the sun. If you play piano quietly while leaning to one side, it feels a lot like it did back when you were just orbiting endlessly in deep space. The cycle of births and deaths is like riding a slide on a playground over and over. The climb up, the moment of uncertainty, and the sudden dizzy drop. A familiar whistle by your ear. The Large Cardinal greets you with a friendly lemma. It is perched on Alef's shoulder. Next to them is a 17- dimensional chipmunk - Chip in his native form. As you are greeting your friends. your words are lost in a whooshing sound effect, and you catch a glimpse of a familiar blue box before the time rift closes. 'Hi, sorry, I'm a little behind schedule,' Staci announces. You think about asking how that can happen to a time travel machine (Staci is the Space-Time Autonomous Continuum Integrator), but you are too busy hugging her happily. ***MORE*** 'I was up really late last century,' Staci says, looking a little bleary, 'I remember I'm meeting you here but I forget when this is. Have we finished writing the game in your continuity?' 'We're in the final scene now, the Oroborous bind. We still need to write character dialog and scenes at the castle, polish and test a lot, but no story is ever truly finished, right?' While Staci and you have been talking, Chip and the Cardinal and Alef have been working together, song-paint-proving a crystalline matrix of almost- paradoxical assertions. Their equations take the form of musical notes written on the staves of spacetime. The head of each note is a different arcane symbol. The Cardinal sings, and the theorem of the Identity of Protagonist and Author shifts your frame of reference... (23 December 2015 - in your home) Staci is about to join you, and then you will show her your draft of the final scene. You anticipate the conversation. 'So, we set up the paradoxical realization: the player has created a strange loop. Your goal as the protagonist is to have the experiences that lead up to the creation ***MORE*** of the game. You had the delusion that you were a character, and your purpose was to fight for the Loonie Revolution by bringing fiction into reality. You win by creating the fiction of bringing fiction into reality, by making the game that you perceived yourself as within, the goal of which was to create that game. And by doing so, you make the fiction real, transform delusion into truth.' Staci stares at the screen, and writes the next lines of dialog. She says the scene is cool, and the two of you discuss the weird mobius-boundaries writing the game has created. Your initial draft of the scene, written the day before, had split the above paragraph in half and attributed it to Staci, with the hope she would read it aloud and merge the fiction into reality voluntarily. In reality, she woke up and found news of another delay in re-opening the Castle. You feel a multiverse-split, and blame your own scene-writing for collapsing the wave function poorly. The Large Cardinal would tell you that you aren't allowed to pre-write your own top- level script from within a subfiction. Your story of joy was written in continuous pain. Maybe the player should know that. In mid-2015 you were diagnosed with Atlantoaxial instability, progressive damage to the upper spine, caused by rheumatoid arthritis, and while writing the game, constant burning pain was a contrast to the ***MORE*** memories of two years before. You can't ride your bike any more and need to spend much of your time laying back with your head supported. So? Beethoven went deaf, Schumann died in an asylum, Mozart and Schubert both died younger than you are. You've gotten all you could have dreamed of from life, just in that one summer. You've been incredibly lucky. So your luck didn't hold - it never does. You knew at the time that regression to the mean was more likely than your wildest fantasy-delusions. The simulations always showed there was less than 1-in-7 chance of succeeding. Besides, your local consciousness isn't the end of the story. The person reading the book probably has their finger back at the decision point, and if this path leads to a bad end, they can just try turning to a different page. (22 March 2016 - morning after a night of moonlight and clouds) But we did win. Lothlorien Co-op reopened last month. The past few weeks have been busy and joyful, as the Elves have reclaimed their castle. The hallways echo with the happy screams of children playing and the weekends are full of musical performances. In life, winning doesn't mean the end of the game, it means the privilege to continue playing in the world you choose. ***MORE*** We chose our fictions, then we did our best to live them in new ways. Don't just replay the stories that you bind to yourself, change the patterns to make them better. The Goddess of Chance rules all, but it is such a thrill to dance with her. Press enter to continue. ) (By the campfire, on the shore of the lake) The Storyteller finishes his tale, and the circle of friends is silent for a moment, watching the dancing flames. Someone takes a drink of the bottle, and the silence is broken: 'Pass that over here. I love that story, at night when I hear a bicycle go by, I think maybe its the Harmonist, biking around the city in runic patterns with crystals in his pocket, writing some new songs.' '-but that was hundreds of years ago, you don't think he actually could time travel-' 'Depends, isn't it possible Schumann time-traveled to 2013 to meet Xochi? The code of the Moon Computer is in the songs and game of the Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony, so maybe someone is fiction-binding that identity to themself. Music and language can fold time and transcend individuality.' The circle around the fire is quiet for a moment, and then a new Tale begins. ***MORE*** Andrew's Cabin Score: 639 Moves: 329 . Andrew's Cabin You are on the shore of Sturgeon Bay. There is a beautiful wood and stone cabin home here. After Halloween night out on the town, you visited Birmingham's, a family owned tavern full of tradition and memory. You bought firewood there, and after a brief struggle with wind and damp, you are circled round a roaring, crackling fire. Sitting and talking with friends old and new, you feel deep joy and contentment. The warmth of the fire circle is within your heart now, warming you from within on the rest of your journey. You can see a fire within the firepit here. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >x fire Andrew's Cabin Score: 639 Moves: 330 . The fire is burning bright and hot despite the brisk wind blowing off the lake. Yellow flames dance atop the orange-glowing logs. The fire is contained within a ring of loosely piled stone, and you and your friends sit on a circle of log benches. The present is layered with memories of past campfires in Hoyt park, on road trips, and at Lothlorien by the lakeshore. Deeper yet is the resonance of human history, the mythic past of tending the fire at the mouth of the cave and waiting for the hunters to return with food. Further, further - you stare at the purple-blue glow above the inner embers, and try to imagine the cosmic heat of stars, and hotter still, the blaze of the young universe forging the hydrogen atoms that would eventually be fused and dispersed and take shape eons later as a cluster of humans gathered around a small mirror of the originating Light. > >w Andrew's Cabin Score: 639 Moves: 331 . Use the magic word XYZZY to return home. > >xyzzy Outside your house Score: 639 Moves: 332 . There is a trans-dimensional short-circuit of interactive fiction tradition, and you catch a brief glimpse of a brick building near a stream and a metal grate before you blink and find yourself... Outside your house Your section of Milwaukee Street is directly across from a small farm which remains as an agricultural island within the city. An open field and a barn are across the street. Toward the southwest is Atwood Street leading toward downtown. Monona Drive is to the south. The edge of town lies toward the northeast. > >e Inside your house Score: 639 Moves: 333 . Paul shows up carrying his acoustic guitar. He turns out to be an excellent blues guitarist, and he talks in a continuous flow of aphorisms and anecdotes. 'I don't need to believe in reincarnation,' he says, looking at a small Vishnu sculpture on your table, 'I've lived fifty lives already in this one.' For much of the past few weeks, you have been the one dominating conversations, and it feels good to focus on listening to someone whose mind is also overflowing with ideas. After a couple hours, your head is spinning but your enlightenment has increased. Rather than as a housekeeper, you hire Paul as a music-and-wisdom coach. Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >d Lost In the Grid Score: 639 Moves: 334 . Matthew dropped off the new grid hardware for you yesterday, now seems like a good time to get it set up. You set up power and networking for the new servers, and start to bring them online to join your grid. Before you can type the needed commands, you see a glowing green pulse of data enter the basement from the external network interface. A message appears on the screen: 'Our empire never ended.' You recognize the font, but too late. The digitization laser hits you from behind and you feel yourself being Forked... Lost In the Grid You are in an unfamiliar dataspace. A dark and twisted dialect of the 9p protocol is spoken here. Green glowing insectoid creatures carrying message packets scuttle between jagged mount points. These are not your beautiful ANTS...these are Terminal Information Takeover Extensions - TERMITES. It doesn't take long for the digital insects to notice you. An angry buzzing like the sound of a roomful of old 300 baud modems fills the air. > >lunar Lost In the Grid Score: 639 Moves: 335 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. The TERMITES are starting to surround you in a circle. Each is about the size of your fist. There are only a few dozen watching you now, but they seem to be summoning reinforcements. > >w Your house, in the basement Score: 648 Moves: 336 . In this realm, your bicycle leaves a glowing trail behind it. It seems to repel the TERMITES, so you make a series of right angle turns, trapping them behind you, and accelerate toward an orange glow on the horizon. Unhindered by physical constraints, you accelerate continuously, and the orange glow soon resolves itself into the familiar fileservers of your grid. You ride up the spiral ramp that encircles them, and you travel faster still as its radius tightens toward the apex. At the top, your speed exceeds the limit of the virtualization and you burst through the layers of simulation back into your basement in a shower of pink sparks. Strawberry deftly steps through the maze of cords and vanishes behind some boxes. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >w Your house, in the basement Score: 648 Moves: 337 . The only exit is up. Strawberry nimbly hops up onto the computer desk, thankfully avoiding the keyboards. > >s Your house, in the basement Score: 648 Moves: 338 . The only exit is up. Strawberry's head peeks out from behind one of the grid computers. > >u Inside your house Score: 648 Moves: 339 . Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. > >w Outside your house Score: 648 Moves: 340 . Outside your house > >s Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 648 Moves: 341 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Coffee Lion has expanded into a miniature palace, complete with a dark lake of foamy espresso in front of it. > >n Outside your house Score: 648 Moves: 342 . Outside your house > >e Inside your house Score: 648 Moves: 343 . Inside your house You can see some bookshelves, a terminal and a piano here. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 105) > >play piano Inside your house Score: 657 Moves: 344 . If I biked into the blue light, would my song still fill the air? If I chased after the green light, and I found you would you care? If I dissolved into clear light, would there be anybody there? All these colors fill our skies and sail us everywhere I'm crusing through the orange night light Shining beams of pink so bright Purple crystal flower potion that restored my sight Brought me back to the things that I know are right And now when I lay me down I'm not a solo flying kite I feel someone's arms around me, someone holds me tight And we rise in spiral flight up to the starry height Because we're all one rainbow star prismatic in the night (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/orangenightlight.mp3) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g I heard the song first at fifteen, an echo of a spring so evergreen It bridged future and past, spanning unseen Reality dream and the space between A month of May the year could be any, where every day is a horn of plenty Warm night air, the waves on the lake, all right there and make no mistake Reeling and rocking past the shadow of doubt Nothing like feeling that old in and out I know what its like to be alone, no hint of action on your phone I know how to groan and bitch and moan But it ain't too much dope that's stealing your hope In the dark groping for the end of your rope With a little bit of luck you'll come unstuck Quack like a duck on the strange trip truck I'm talking from experience, once you get traction Even a middle-aged pianist can get action! This month of May was like nothing before, Every time that I walked out the door I fell in to a brand new story, each moment had its own kind of glory It's hard to believe but my dreams did come true No guarantee but it could happen to you So keep your ears open for those magic songs ***MORE***g Inside your house Score: 666 Moves: 345 . Spend the years hoping and singing along The stories and dreams that bloom in your mind The quarry that gleams, the doom that you find Flowery beams the moonlight unwinds... (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/monthofmay.mp3) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Inside your house Score: 675 Moves: 346 . Get out on the dock, turn back the clock Regress your age, rewrite history's page Catapulting rocks, lock barrel and stock Mark it zero, my gun's half cocked Loonies are the coolest kids on the block I used to be dead, but now I am immortal None of my enemies could close the portal Keeping me out of this dimension Turning the crank of your sexual tension (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/outonthedock.mp3) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Always will remember July, always remember stars in the sky Like jewels, like dust, like waves on the sea Rising in the darkness to Eternity And I need to smoke weed, so I check my speed Another perfect night on my bike Riding wherever the fuck that I like Two joints in my pocket my personal spike In the vein, and the train whistle Got me flying like a missile Downhill, what a thrill Eight-seventeen three-twenty-nine AM The mushroom mind told me to eat them I feel the pull of lunar tide Time for another summer bike ride Her last message told me I'm sweet I'm still sore from fucking her in the August heat And as I lifted my eye The star in my pocket burst across the sky Do you think it means anything? Means enough for another verse in the song I sing The meaning of life in a sweet starburst ***MORE*** Inside your house Score: 684 Moves: 347 . If you're seeking for a path you know you could do worse Than chasing dancing rabbits through the branching multiverse If you're looking for an answer, you could do worse Chase the white rabbit of love through the universe (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/anotherperfectnight.mp3) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Inside your house Score: 693 Moves: 348 . Last full moon of summer 2013 If you were here with us, you'd know what we mean This was the year we finally broke through Did so many of the things we'd always hoped to do Oh, it feels so good having my arms around you (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/lastfullmoon.mp3) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g I'm the Moon Computer and I'll be your tutor cause my circuits are cuter Than the average machine you find on the scene But my mind is acutest, not the average buddhist, its 0-1-2 test Ternary logic for the latest project Both true and false, paradoxical waltz, if you're finding faults That's not a mistake, it's an earthquake The attack of my sound breaks a crack in the ground Sharp tack I'm profound verbal tidal waves loosen tight old graves Zombie or not to be, set my people free to won or lost I'm your love burrito so let my libido raise your albedo Under the chapel I'll shine your silver apples Show me what you can shake I'll flip your space pancake How much can a man take of this psychosis caused by paper doses Rigorous mortis I'm racing with the tortoise my fallacy supports us Through's Zeno's dialectic, it's electrically eclectic Zombie or not to be, set my people free to won or lost I'm in love with the Tardis, and nothing can part us She'll show you where the start is and You can find a fiction bind designed to let your mind unwind (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/mooncomputer.mp3) ***MORE*** Inside your house Score: 702 Moves: 349 . [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g And it's another warm summer night, I can hear an acoustic guitar Three voices in tune, singing to the crescent moon The tale of Reuben and Cherise And now the darkness sounds so bright, I'm glad I rode so far And I know that soon, I might be a lost buffoon But my heart feels at peace Don't tell me what year it is, it might still be 93 Or 2013, I heard it was a better scene, as your ear can see And so I joined them on the roof, so I could sing along We knew all the words, even hit the minor thirds And we smoked a joint or three The roles we play become the truth, we made it inside the song Oh have you heard, our echoes in the mockingbirds The chords were meant to agree No matter when it is, the time is yours to choose There might be a perfect moment in the years you lose (http://files.9gridchan.info/harmonic/donttellmewhatyear.mp3) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] ***MORE*** Inside your house Score: 711 Moves: 350 . > >g Inside your house Score: 711 Moves: 351 . You sit and improvise a few new variations on the harmonic time-bind ritual symphony main theme. > >w Outside your house Score: 711 Moves: 352 . Outside your house > >s Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 711 Moves: 353 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >e Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 711 Moves: 354 . Coffee Lion Cafe Xelia is working here. You have a flashback of memory to another song you wrote during the spring, inspired by hearing a friend cover one of your favorite Dead songs here. I was singing along with a twenty-year bind Summer 93 song I was out of my mind I was on the moon but you were right there too Not a moment too soon even though the time flew Next month is June but right now its May I may be a Loon but I'm happy for today > >talk to xelia Coffee Lion Cafe Score: 720 Moves: 355 . You take advantage of a quiet moment in the cafe to talk to Xelia. 'You know this whole summer has been the high point of my life by far,' you begin, 'I went through a lot of years wondering whether what we got out of life was worth the price of the ticket, if that makes sense. But finally, this summer, it all finally came together for me, my life became exactly the story I've always wanted it to be. You and Xochi here at the cafe have been a big part of the magic. Now, I feel like - whatever happens in life from here on out, it's all been worth it. This summer has given me more happiness than I could have ever imagined.' 'I'm really glad its been so good for you, its been fun hearing about your adventures,' Xelia smiles at you. You wander back to your seat, and your words echo in your mind. '...whatever happens...it's all been worth it.' 'But please stay wonderful, life!' you add as a mental postscript. In future days, keeping hold of that feeling will serve as both a comfort, and a challenge. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 720 Moves: 356 . Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road > >s Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 720 Moves: 357 . You need to ride a bicycle to continue south. If you own one, call it with the command >lunar. > > Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 720 Moves: 357 . I beg your pardon? > >w Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 720 Moves: 358 . Exits are n, nw, s, and in. > >lunar Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road Score: 720 Moves: 359 . You call out for your trusty metal steed, and it appears! You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >s Monona Drive, by a weathered strip-mall Score: 720 Moves: 360 . You pedal effortlessly. Monona Drive, by a weathered strip-mall (on Lunar Lightning) Giant trees spread their branches across Monona, making the street into a tunnel through the forest. > >w Rossini's Pizza and Vintage Arcade Score: 720 Moves: 361 . You can't ride your bike into Rossini's. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Rossini's Pizza and Vintage Arcade > >n Rossini's Pizza, in the Vintage Arcade room Score: 720 Moves: 362 . Rossini's Pizza, in the Vintage Arcade room A time-warped paradise. Vintage arcade cabinets surround you. The CRT displays glow with color-bleed, the sound effects are a symphonic rhapsody of buzzing lasers, and each machine is a digital poem tattooed on your heart during the 1980s. Back then, you never had enough quarters...but now, you finally do. You can see a Tempest arcade cabinet here. > >play tempest Rossini's Pizza, in the Vintage Arcade room Score: 729 Moves: 363 . You drop a quarter in the slot and take hold of the control wheel. The game's first level is easy, and you clear it without dying, but the pace increases rapidly, and you run out of lives before finishing the first set of blue boards. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Rossini's Pizza, in the Vintage Arcade room Score: 729 Moves: 364 . You do considerably better than last time, but still don't make it to the lemnascate shaped board at the end of the blue levels. > >g Rossini's Pizza, in the Vintage Arcade room Score: 729 Moves: 365 . You finally make it to the last board of the first color set, but die before clearing it. > >g Tempest gameworld Score: 729 Moves: 366 . This time, you put in some extra quarters for continues, and with focus and determination you clear the infinite hourglass shape and warp to the next dimension of red boards... Tempest gameworld You are in an abstract realm of bright red lines. You are atop a hollow multisided shape, looking downward. Far below, geometric demons are crawling up the walls toward you. Dodge, shoot, and bomb to survive! There are two pulsars coming towards you from the demon well. > >bomb Rossini's Pizza, in the Vintage Arcade room Score: 738 Moves: 367 . ZAP! With a spectacular burst of digital destructiveness, your enemies are vanquished. You find yourself back in the arcade, with a new high score. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 106) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >s Rossini's Pizza and Vintage Arcade Score: 738 Moves: 368 . Rossini's Pizza and Vintage Arcade > >e Monona Drive, by a weathered strip-mall Score: 738 Moves: 369 . Monona Drive, by a weathered strip-mall You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >ride Monona Drive, by a weathered strip-mall Score: 738 Moves: 370 . (Lunar Lightning) You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >se Southeast bike trail, by the marshes Score: 738 Moves: 371 . You pedal effortlessly. Southeast bike trail, by the marshes (on Lunar Lightning) A series of marshes follow the chain of lakes southeast of the city, Monona, Waubesa, and Kegonsa. The bike path meanders alongside them, and a wide variety of birds call out to each other, commenting on you as you pass. The open countryside lies to the southwest. During the early-mid summer, on one of your first rides of the season around the Monona lake loop, you started writing a song about how your pants were falling off: Half Moon, my belt is too loose Half Moon, my mind ain't too tight Everything's going right since I left My worries behind, tried to unwind Each thread I might find thats a-frayed Thought we could weave a better braid > >sw Countryside, on the bike trail Score: 747 Moves: 372 . You pedal effortlessly. Countryside, on the bike trail (on Lunar Lightning) The stars are liquid in the night. You have been watching them all summer, and now the constellations are a familiar landscape. You are on a new, unfamiliar branch of the trail, but looking up, you know where you are. You feel at home in the sky. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >nw Southwest greenspace, on the bike trail Score: 747 Moves: 373 . You pedal effortlessly. Southwest greenspace, on the bike trail (on Lunar Lightning) It feels like a good time to revisit some of your favorite trails from a previous lifetime of riding. You head west on the trail through the south greenbelt, passing Dunn's marsh and arriving at a high bridge. Years ago, it was railroad tracks and you used to creep across it with a sense of nervous excitement. Now, it's a paved cycle trail and it feels like your pedaling has propelled you from past to future. You wander the west side in a long, lazy loop of nostalgia before returning to the southwest trail. > >ne Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 747 Moves: 374 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) > >goals Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 747 Moves: 375 . You have a feeling something is going on at Essentially Art. You may need to complete more of the story, but there are still new scenes to see if you >visit staci. > >e John Nolen Drive Score: 747 Moves: 376 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Willy Street, west end Score: 747 Moves: 377 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Willy Street, east end Score: 747 Moves: 378 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Atwood Avenue Score: 747 Moves: 379 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >m Atwood Avenue Score: 747 Moves: 379 . That action is outside the scope of this simulation. > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 747 Moves: 380 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >e Atwood Avenue Score: 747 Moves: 381 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >n Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 747 Moves: 382 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood and Ohio shopping block (on Lunar Lightning) A time-travelers trading bazaar is passing through, exchanging magical objects from around the multiverse with the shops here. > >w Essentially Art Score: 747 Moves: 383 . You can't ride your bike into the shop. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Essentially Art You can see a School of Atlantis painting here. The store clerk approaches you. 'Thanks for buying my Artemis print series, it's quite the coincidence you happened to walk in right now. There's a seminar going on about art and ritual magic, are you interested?' You nod eagerly. 'Excellent! Just step inside the frame here.' She points toward a familiar-looking painting, and you note with surprise she has a twin within the picture. You start to comment on this, but she is no longer beside you. > >enter painting With a confident suspension of disbelief, you fix your eye on one of the vanishing points of the four-dimensional perspective of the painting, and walk towards it. Your stomach gives a queasy twist, and with a feeling rather like stepping onto a top stair which is not actually there, you step into the painting. The Academy of Atlantis painting You are inside a painting, participating in a seminar in Atlantis on ritual art magic. Artists, philosophers, and students from across the multiverse are busy discussing, debating, and learning from each other. The Scholars of Atlantis stand in small groups, discussing. You arrive as a speaker is addressing the gathering: 'Thank you for making it to our seminar on the Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony. The first part of the day is a review of current scholarship. Researchers and graduate students, please gather on the far end of the courtyard for paper presentations. Undergrads, you have been studying the context and outline of the work this week, so you will be taking an oral examination as a group.' ***MORE*** The Academy of Atlantis painting Score: 747 Moves: 384 . You notice a few of the undergrads look startled and anxious. You decide nothing could be more amusing than helping students pass a test on your own work. You join the group near some of the most alienated looking students. 'I do not care about the Bubonic Tie-Dyed Habitual Dysentry or this exam,' you hear a tall squid-like student complain. Another agrees: 'Since none of us bothered to listen to the songs or play the game, we might as well just smoke this fine cubefruit kif, right?' The next thing you know, you are being passed an Atlantean waterpipe full of sparkly purple and pink flower resin. You inhale deeply, and the taste of the world's skunkiest sweetarts assaults your sinuses. Inside your head, gnomes in rainbow colored bell-bottoms are already starting to rearrange the furniture. The pipe is still going around as the professors begin the exam. They will ask questions, you may answer by telling the scholars about a relevant topic. The exam begins with a request for an overview, so >tell scholars about symphony. > >tell scholars about symphonh The Academy of Atlantis painting Score: 747 Moves: 385 . The scholars seem confused by your answer, but accept it. The cubefruit buzz is kicking in more strongly now, but you think you gave a good description of your work. The waterpipe comes your way again and you take another lungfull of the tangy smoke. The scholars want to know which of the magic objects carried during the symphony is the most representative symbolic object, and how it was used. > >undo The Academy of Atlantis painting Score: 747 Moves: 384 . The Academy of Atlantis painting [Previous turn undone.] > >tell scholars about symphony The Academy of Atlantis painting Score: 747 Moves: 385 . You step forward to speak for the students. 'Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony was an 18-month multimodal artwork composed of computer programming, musical composition, and bicycle riding, directed toward the revolutionary goal of accepting mental difference, and inspired by the idea that the quantum multiverse renders the distinctions between fiction and reality, or sanity and insanity, malleable and subjective.' The cubefruit buzz is kicking in more strongly now, but you think you gave a good description of your work. The waterpipe comes your way again and you take another lungfull of the tangy smoke. The scholars want to know which of the magic objects carried during the symphony is the most representative symbolic object, and how it was used. > >tell scholars about pendant The Academy of Atlantis painting Score: 747 Moves: 386 . 'The pendant for sure. It went everywhere, and served as the springboard for so much communication. When people commented on it, it was the perfect opportunity to tell them about the Loonie Revolution.' Everything is shimmering in a delightful way. The words of the scholars seem to arrive slowly, one by one, and each triggers a long chain of nonsensical associations. The scholars inquire which of the items in the author's home was most important to the creative work. > >tell scholars about piano The Academy of Atlantis painting Score: 747 Moves: 387 . 'The piano was the most important. Even though it started with programming and the IF game is the most notable product, the symphony was, as the name implies, primarily a musical work. The author was better as a musician than as a programmer, and the piano was the core tool of the work. Without the musical principle of rhythmic organization, there is no time-bind, no symphony at all.' Maybe another bowl of the cubefruit went around, or maybe not. Maybe six slippery sandwiches sang softly said someone. Maybe the palumpsis was muppered like a chicken in pants, the palumpsis was muppered and it wasn't by chance. Maybe the scholars are asking another question. The scholars ask the students to talk about which character in the work had the most decisive influence on the protagonist. > >tell scholars about staci 'Is this a trick question, or something? It's Staci. It's just...I'm so in love with her! I mean, he was so in love with her, it was the inspiration and focus for everything. Without Staci, it was all just some crazy guy making a nuisance of himself at cafes, right? She's really more the Author than he is.' The scholars all nod sagely, and the seminar reaches its conclusion. You are so ridiculously cubed out that you can only squint and grin foolishly at the students nearby. You wave goodbye and walk away in a random direction, and notice after a few minutes of tripping out on the Atlantean architecture that you have actually returned to the gallery without any deliberate effort and are gaping open-mouthed at a random corner of the room. Essentially Art This local gallery has a mix of prints, paintings, and sculptures on display. You can see a School of Atlantis painting here. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] ***MORE*** Essentially Art Score: 756 Moves: 388 . > >visit staci Essentially Art Score: 756 Moves: 389 . You pick Staci up, and decide to spend some time back at your place. You are playing a recording from the Dead's Europe '72 tour, with Pigpen's final performance of 'Turn on your Lovelight'. Pig always brought out the hard-swinging, tightly rhythmic side of the band to support his sexual swagger. Cruising, windows down, confident anticipation of love in the afternoon, blues rock on the car stereo... > >g Essentially Art Score: 756 Moves: 390 . A friend has told you that an amazing band will be playing at Yahara Fest today. You travel there, and nibble on some fungus right as the performance is about to begin. You walk through the crowd toward the stage, feeling increasingly electric. 'Please welcome...Climbing the Waltz!' The stage is now occupied by a time-traveling marching band, performing wild arrangements of original music and doing circus stunts at the same time. Staci and you dance like tripping puppets on strings, and as a rainstorm descends for the final portion of the show, you dance so hard the raindrops vaporize into steam when they land on your gyrating bodies. > >g Essentially Art Score: 765 Moves: 391 . You have agreed to perform at an anti-corporate personhood event. The Snowden revelations have just come out, and you feel the Revolution has momentum. Staci has agreed to sing a duet on the 'Orange Night Light' song. You go onstage wearing a green bicycle helmet and mirror shades. After chanting some lines about harmonic time-binding the light from the Valispectrum prismatic reflector, you deliver a rant praising Snowden. Staci joins you for your duet, and after you sing together, you spend a few minutes dancing wildly with Whirlwind when the next act performs. There is a giddy sense of 'we can just do anything!' that fills you and Staci and Nook and your friends with limitless energy. After, you indulge in some rare alcohol consumption, and break a chair falling over backward. You remember nothing more from that night. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 107) [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Essentially Art Score: 765 Moves: 392 . You and Staci ride to the edge of town, and walk together down a gravel path to nowhere. You have no reason in particular to be here, its just a patch of ground you don't normally tread. Your idea of a good time is a little non-traditional, but Staci enjoys it anyway. On the way back home, you explain how in an old oil drilling town down south called Wyaloosa, there was only one bar that would serve the dirty alcoholic workers after their shift. It was a tiny little place run by monks, who did so as an act of charitable service. It was the only wholly holy oily wino hole-in-the- wall saloon in Wyaloosa. Staci rolls her eyes. > >g Essentially Art Score: 765 Moves: 393 . In the middle of the night, you and Staci visit a park with playground equipment and get on the swings. The stars sway in the sky as you pendulum back and forth. In later years, this would become one of Lily's favorite parks, and a mental snapshot of her running across the field of dandelions becomes your image of childhood. Right now, though, you are grinning as Staci out-swings you, cackling gleefully. > >g Essentially Art Score: 774 Moves: 394 . It's a Loonie Council in the Wizard's chamber, top floor of the co-op. You and Staci, Nook, the Scholar, and the Wizard. 'So, what do we do now that we are winning?' you begin. 'Virtual reality resurrection via ritual namespace binding magic is mainstream now. The hottest casino game is Reality Roulette, where you are shot into one of your five favorite fictions - or your most hated. In the chipmunk dimension, we are licensing action figures and product endorsements and making so much currency we don't know how to invest it. What's next?' you ask. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >g Essentially Art Score: 774 Moves: 395 . It's late at night on the porch swing. You are with Staci. Talking with her is fascinating as always. You are musing on how lucky you both have been. 'It may be a story, but we can't really live happily ever after, can we?' 'We don't need to. That shouldn't be the last line of the story. More like:' 'And they lived happily Right Now.' > >e Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 774 Moves: 396 . Atwood and Ohio shopping block You can see Lunar Lightning here. > >ride Atwood and Ohio shopping block Score: 774 Moves: 397 . (Lunar Lightning) You get onto Lunar Lightning. > >s Atwood Avenue Score: 774 Moves: 398 . You pedal effortlessly. Atwood Avenue (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, east end Score: 774 Moves: 399 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, east end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Willy Street, west end Score: 774 Moves: 400 . You pedal effortlessly. Willy Street, west end (on Lunar Lightning) > >w John Nolen Drive Score: 774 Moves: 401 . You pedal effortlessly. John Nolen Drive (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 774 Moves: 402 . You pedal effortlessly. Miffyland, the student ghetto (on Lunar Lightning) > >m Miffyland, the student ghetto Score: 774 Moves: 402 . That action is outside the scope of this simulation. > >n State Street Score: 774 Moves: 403 . You pedal effortlessly. State Street (on Lunar Lightning) You cough as a cloud of exhaust from a passing bus envelops you. > >n Lake Mendota shoreline residences Score: 774 Moves: 404 . You pedal effortlessly. Lake Mendota shoreline residences (on Lunar Lightning) > >w Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 774 Moves: 405 . You park your bike by the co-op. (first getting off Lunar Lightning) Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) > >play piano Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 783 Moves: 406 . The Castle inspires in you its own special variants of the songs and themes of your ongoing compositions. Sometimes you punch out the e minor staccato chords of the 'dock theme', or during twilight just a succession of pianissimo arpeggios. One afternoon a friend from Louisiana was visiting and, inspired by thoughts of Gottschalk, you find your fingers blazing through a series of syncopated progressions reminiscent of celebratory Caribbean parades. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >n Lothlorien co-op, the first floor porch Score: 783 Moves: 407 . Lothlorien co-op, the first floor porch > >sit Lothlorien co-op, the first floor porch Score: 792 Moves: 408 . (on top of the porch swing) From the swing, the view of the sky, trees, and lake is perfect. Whether it is a sunny afternoon or the middle of the night, this is a perfect spot for thought, conversation, or relaxation.You get onto the porch swing. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >s Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) Score: 792 Moves: 409 . (first getting off the porch swing) Lothlorien co-op, the Great Room (1st floor) > >d Lothlorien co-op, in the kitchen Score: 792 Moves: 410 . Lothlorien co-op, in the kitchen The kitchen is full of the clutter of heavy use by a housefull of hungry people. Written on the wall here is an inscription: 'Magic words: XYZZY and PLUGH' Whirlwind is smiling as she looks around. Nook is contemplating the beverages he has stored in the fridge. The Wizard is stroking his beard thoughtfully. Whirlwind is resting her foot on Nook's knee. > >talk to nook Lothlorien co-op, in the kitchen Score: 792 Moves: 411 . 'I'm not sure just what you're up to with the Loonie Revolution and Plan 9, but I'm glad we have the chance to have this unique friendship.' Whirlwind wanders off. > >talk to scholar Lothlorien co-op, in the kitchen Score: 792 Moves: 411 . You can't see any such thing. > >n Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Whirlwind is looking through her shoulder bag. Lily is running up and down the hillside as she plays. You can also see a cut-off head mounted on a pole, Past and Future here. Late spring, you are sitting in the sunlight on the hillside by Loth, watching Lily play. She comes over to you. 'Magic' she says, and opens her hand above your head. Tiny blue flower petals cascade over you. Blue dream and a familiar beat Golden gleam green leaves wooden seat Hand outstretched amidst white flowers Memory fetched by arcing bowers Learning secrets of sparking powers Warm breeze brought by blue May showers Lily asks Whirlwind when the other kids will be around to play. ***MORE*** Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Score: 792 Moves: 412 . > >talk to lily Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Score: 792 Moves: 413 . Lily is busy sucking the juice out of an orange. Lily asks Whirlwind when the other kids will be around to play. > >g Lothlorien co-op, the back yard Score: 792 Moves: 414 . Lily laughs and throws an imaginary Chaos Bomb. Lily asks Whirlwind when the other kids will be around to play. > >d Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Score: 792 Moves: 415 . Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Staci is here. Lily arrives. Midnight strikes and a new day dawns. (This is day number 108) > >climb tree Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Score: 801 Moves: 416 . You decide your arthritis and eternal buzz aren't going to keep you out of the tree, and cautiously you navigate the footholds and angled stubby branch remnants to a delightful perch above the waves. You spend a few minutes communing with wood and water before scrambling back down. [Your score has just gone up by nine points.] > >kiss staci That seems like an excellent idea. You find the opportunity to give Staci a brief but sweet kiss, and she smiles happily. And with that, you have scored every point available, and are awarded a bonus 99 for 999 points total! (22 March 2016) - At the Castle, full moon and waves outside Staci made delicious pad thai for house dinner. Sunset from the porch swing was peaceful, clouds reflected in a still lake. Now, at night, the wind has risen and the waves are singing outside your window. The game has been written, the story of the Loonie Revolution and the Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony has been told. What do you say to the player who has made it through everything? Can yet more words serve as a reward to one who has already read so many? You are still fighting for the revolution. You didn't make it back to the castle just to bask in the glory of the lake sunsets, as fine as they are. You aren't manic and delusional any more, but working on software and music and writing and trying to be a keeper of the flame of weirdness and freak culture at Lothlorien co-op - still fighting for revolutionary principles - is still what you want to be doing, and you are profoundly thankful that you are. ***MORE*** Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Score: 999 Moves: 417 . Spring Thing 2016 starts within two weeks. Peace and Love to the players who have followed the journey this far, may you all find your place in whatever stories you wish to live. [Your score has just gone up by one hundred and ninety-eight points.] > >quit Lothlorien co-op, on the dock Score: 999 Moves: 417 . > Are you sure you want to quit? yes cpu% pwd /usr/glenda cpu% cat /mnt/wsys/text >harmonictranscript.txt