linuxmafia.com 2016/linuxmafia.com.tar/linuxmafia.com/pub/jordan/Humor/FoH-fall.txt

Text File | 1995-04-27 | 23KB | 441 lines

[Bill "too much time on his hands" Garrett wrote this genuinely funny
account of rasfwrj happenings]


I. THROUGH A DARKENING LENS

A young man looks up from the large computer screen in front of him
where he had been working on radiative heat transfer and anisotropic
reflection models.  He cries out in anguish, "They've broken my Bond!
They've taken away the one thing that held any meaning for me!"
    His hands clench and relax on the Escher wristpad in front of the
keyboard as a muscle in his cheek starts twitching involuntarily.
Dark expressions pass across his troubled face like heavy storm clouds
driven by high winds.  Eyes stare like daggers at the far wall, their
color changing from a light blue to gray back to blue and darker.
Darker, until they become deep pools of blackness.
    Mental machinery whirs, producing ideas that flickered across
his mind, each idea darker than the one before it.  Darker, darker.
One came that he settled upon, a final course of action.  "They'll
pay!" he shouts with ominous enthusiasm, "they'll all pay for what
has happened to me!"  But it wasn't just recompense he had in mind;
it was revenge.
    He slid back his chair and rose from his desk, but turned and
sat back down after a momentary pause.  "No, I can do it from here,"
he said to himself.  "They all touch the 'Net, though most are unaware
of the dangers.  I can reach them all!"  He cackled with a harsh barking
sound that soon turned into a monstrous laugh.
    Fingers agile from years of fine exercise flew across the
keyboard, caressing it as if it were an old and familiar lover.  Eyes
glazed over as they stared with rapt attention at the screen.  The
time of transferrence was almost at hand; he had but to open his mind
(and IP connection) to embrace the power.
    He could smell, feel it, sense it in every fiber of his being.
There was a new ter'angreal floating somewhere in his purview, a
tool more powerful than any before, perhaps the strongest of all...
when it was completed.
    "Don't use that!" cried a bodyless voice from local cyberspace.
"We're not done with the rendering control yet.  There's no guarantee
you'll be able to control it!"
    But he was willing to take chances.  People who've lost everything
always are.  Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
    Power, more power.  Limitless power.  The power to create, or
destroy.  Now it was his; the login was complete.  "I'll need some
wheels for my trip along the Information Superhighway...."


To be continued...
II. HELL ON WHEELS

The 1965 black Cadillac Fleetwood speeds along the empty road like a
sleek black bullet shot from a gun.  Passing scenery is mirrored in
the chromework on the bumpers, grille, doors, and trunk.  "Ah, I
just love it when environment mapping works so well," the driver
says in a rumbling but contented voice.  "It's cheesey computer
graphics, but it runs fast and makes beautiful images.
    "Need some traveling music," he hisses to no one in particular.
As if of its own volition, the radio flickers to life, its knobs
turning to select a station.  A rim-tap cadence pounds out through
the speakers as a male voice croons:

    "Uptown got it's hustlers
    The bowery got it's bums
    Forty-second Street got Big Jim Walker
    He a bull-shooting sun of a gun..."

    "Jim Walker was a wuss," rasps the driver.  "He'll never mess
with me again.  But that song's too upbeat for me."  The radio dial
flicks again.

    "Silver devils in his holsters
    Stars strapped to his heels
    Fire in his eyes, you could see
    He was dressed to kill..."

    "No," rasps the man, "it's not sundown yet.  Although there are a
few people who, in a short while, will never see the light of day
again!"  A chuckle rises from deep within his throat.
    "Something more dark and powerfully foreboding," he muses in a
voice that matched his musical desires.

    "Daaa dum da daaaa daaa
    Dum deee dee de daaaa"

    "Ah, Schubert's Eight, the Unfinished.  Too bad the folks reading
from home can't appreciate it in this form."  He erupts with rumbling
laughter as the car speeds onward down the abandoned backroads of the
Information Superhighway.  He has several visits to make, and he doesn't
intend to miss any of them.  Not for the world.


To be continued...

III. AN OLD FRIEND, FOR THE LAST TIME

The scene: a large, ornately decorated room with a blazing fire in the
fireplace against the far wall.  A tall man dressed in sumptuous
clothing (if you consider Levis and a sweatshirt to be sumptuous)
stares into the fire as he sips from a large stein.
    A man in a voluminous dark cape appears opposite the fireplace and
walks across the room.  He glides silently across the floor his cloak
billowing out behind him.  Ten feet short of the tall man he stops
with a scrape of his boot heel against the floor.  He moves as quickly
and quietly as a hawk swooping down on upon its prey when he wants to,
but this time he wants to draw his host's attention to his presence.
The man at the fireplace whirls around in surprise.
    "Ahh," he says with a pause, "it's you, my _old friend_."  These
last two words he speaks with a twist of his lips.  "Perhaps you've
come to stand at my side again, now that you've... been relieved of
your other obligations?"
    "Nay, _old friend_, I have not come to rejoin you.  We stood together
once, you and I, but that was before you changed to the man you now
are.  I started to change with you, before I realized what we were
becoming.  I would have none of it, so I left and sought the Light.
You were ever angry at me for leaving, I suppose, so you sabotauged
the one thing I cared about.  No, old friend, I haven't come to rejoin
you; I've come to kill you."  This last he spoke with a genuinely
morose voice.
    "Fool!" Ba'alzamon shouted as the fires in his eyes flared.  "You
would seek to pit your puny powers against the Great Lord of the
Dark!?!"  Fire engulfed the man in the dark cloak, spreading quickly
around his form, until nothing was left but a pile of ashes.
    "Interesting effect," said the cloaked man, reappearing as
unblemished as before, as if he hadn't just been burnt to the ground.
"That was a pretty convincing fire, but too bad for you it was just
the same iterative simulation used to do the computer graphics F/X in
that old Star Trek movie about the Genesis Planet.  It was good 10
years ago, but I had honestly expected more from you now.
    "But I digress."  His blue eyes sharpened to pinpoints.  "You hurt
the one person I care about in this whole world, and that has hurt me.
Worse yet, you've caused her to forsake me for fear of you.  This I
cannot abide."  He raised his hands and began a complicated incantation.
Ishamael looked on in horror as he saw his own self start to change
shape, small creases forming all over his clothes and body.  The
change continued as the pitch of the incantation climaxed, until his
form was all hard planes and angles.  Then, at a clap of the newcomer's
hands, he fell into a million tiny bits on the floor.
    "Tesselated and rasterized!" said the cloaked man with noticeable
pleasure.  "THAT should teach him not to mess with a computer graphics
expert."  He snorted.  With a swirl of his cloak, he turned to leave
the now-empty room.


To be continued...
IV. A BOND NOT GIVEN

    Two shadowy figures appeared before him before he could exit
the room.  That only their apparations appeared told him that they
were not well-traveled in the ways of the world of Tel'en'net.
    "We hold your bond now," said the first.
    "Hawk Sedai passed it to us," added the second.  "You must stop
what you are doing."
    "We will compel you with your bond if necessary," concluded the
first.
    "Fools!" hissed the cloaked man.  "I am stronger than bonds you
think to hold me with.  You tie a small leash around a s'redit and
expect that to keep it from moving when and where it pleases.
    "Crawl back to your dingy lair, Shaido dog; crawl back under your
rock of obscurity, Betrayer of the Borderlands.  My bond will not be
held by the miserables likes of you."  With a snap of his fingers he
disappeared from their midsts, leaving them to wonder where he had
gone and how.


To be continued...
V.  ROADKILL ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

    Roy stood in the middle of the road.  "On behalf of the male
population of America," he said, addressing the young Scandanavian
woman standing near him, "I would like to welcome all you luscious
blue-eyed, blond-haired, large-breasted Swedish women to
rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan.  I'm sure everyone agrees with
me about how excited we are to have you join us."
    The hurtling cadillac squashed him flat.


To be continued...

VI. THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA

Scene: a porticoed veranda in a warm southern clime.  A middle-aged
woman sits at a low, broad desk, shuffling papers back and forth.
"Heh, that's _three_ people who think Melissa Horn looks like
Bela," she says to herself.  The dark man appears in the middle
of the courtyard and stalks toward her.
    "You told her to do it, didn't you?" he accused her.
    "Who, me? what?" she said absent-mindedly.  "Now where did I put
that page?"
    "I ought to kill you right now, you foul darkfriend."
    "Me, a darkfriend?  No, you must be mistaken, sir, I drink my
coffee with milk and sugar.  It's very brown.  See?"  She offered him
a cup.
    "Save you act of innocence for your Great Lord; I'll be sending
you home to meet him shortly."
    "You'll do no such thing!" challenged a third person.
    The cloaked man turned to see an Aielman crossing the courtyard.
He was dressed in the typical cadin'sor with a shoufa draped around
his neck.  Spears and a horned bow poked up over his shoulders from
behind his back.
    "I'll give my life to take yours before I let you hurt her!"
    The cloaked man held out an empty palm.  A fiddle suddenly appeared
in it.  "I'll let you play for your life," he said condescendingly.
    "I am Aiel," Viren said firmly.  "We only sing battle marches and
dirges for those slain in combat."
    "Both are appropriate right now," the man said with in his eerily
smooth voice.  He handed the fiddle to the Aielman, who took it
unwittingly, and cradled his arms just as a flamenco guitar appeared
in them.
    "Do you play?" he asked as he strummed out a perfect five-fingered
chord on the instrument.
    "This is ridiculuous," stated Viren.  "I am Aiel.  I shall dance
the spears with you; nothing else."
    "Very well, then, tonight you dance with Death."  His eyes blazed
an iridescent blue, hinting of a thousand dangers and a thousand ways
to die.
    The Aielman drew his shoufa over his face and hoisted a double-
bladed spear as the dark man whisked his sword out of his sheath.  The
white ivory grip was encrusted with brilliant orange jacinth that
reflected the light in a thousand tiny points.  Atop the hilt was a
gently curved blade crafted of a dark slate-grey metal that shone in
the light.  Fine silver etchings traced their way across the blade,
giving it a slightly mottled appearance.  For all that it was a work
of art, its edge was razor sharp.
    A quartet of musicians appeared on the opposite side of the
courtyard.  "Perhaps we shall dance, after all," mocked the dark man.
    The synthesizer sang out a mellow chord while the guitar and bass
began carefully exploring a counterpointed rhythym.  The two men stared
silently at each other and began circling as the music steadied itself
into a melody.
    The music picked up as the two men began exchanging attacks.
Nothing definite; just tentative, testing one another.  The guitar
and synth exchanged the lead several times.
    "You have good taste in music," said the Aielman, swining his
spear between his hands.
    "Thank you.  Al DiMeola always has been my favoite Fusion artist.
    "Watch out," he cautioned, "time change in about three bars."
    The music shifted suddenly, getting faster, and with all the
instruments apparently jockeying for the lead.  The men moved quickly:
swinging, thrusting, parrying, dodging.  No hits connected yet;
consummate warriors such as these were more concerned about control of
space.  Advance, retreat; retreat, advance; circle.
    The music continued to increase in tempo, the keyboard and guitar
falling into synchronization as they raced toward dizzying heights.
Again, the combat mirrored the music.  Both men were exerting their
full energies now, and each bore marks of where one his opponent's
attacks had passed through his defenses.
    The musician now played at breakneck speed, the guitar pulling
ahead of the synth.  In the battle, Viren was beginning to tire.
    "You silly Aiel," taunted the dark man.  "You can walk a horse
into the ground, but when someone asks you to dance you can't go for
more than five minutes."  Catching his opponent off guard and winded,
he ran him through with his sword.
    "And the Tarheels are going to stomp the Wrecks in tomorrow's game,"
he gloated.


To be continued...

VII.  THE TEMPEST AND THE TEAPOT

    "So," quoth the dark man in his unsettlingly smooth voice, "you
are the one who calls himself Darkelf."
    His quarry, back still turned, sat bolt upright in his chair.
    "Funny, you don't look particularly dark or particularly elvish.
I had expected better from you."
    The Darkelf That Was Not a Darkelf had turned around to face his
unexpected visitor.  Shivers of fear ran through his body, but he
schooled his terror enough to speak.
    "L-Leave m-me alone, F-Fain, or Bill, or whatever you call yourself.
I've been around l-longer than you have.  Judy's s-survey said so!"
    "And you take that as the bible, do you?  Fool.  I've been around
longer than you suspect."
    "Oh yeah?" he challenged.  "Well, um, uh, I'm a computer scientist
you know.  And I've, like, heard about what you've been doing tonight,
yeah.  I know about you and all those stupid computer graphics jokes
because, um, because I read about it on the 'Net.  Yeah, and I know
about graphics, too, so you can't just push me around like you did
to all those other people."
    "Really?  Let me see what you're made of, child."
    "Look at _this_," Darkelf said, producing a blue plastic-looking
teapot.  "It's Phong shaded and everything."
    The dark man laughed.  "Phong _shaded_?  Ha, you don't even know
what you're talking about, much less what you're doing.  You can't
even call a primitive algorithm by its correct name.  Watch _this_!"
    He held out his hand and a teapot appeared in it.  It appeared to
be made of hammered copper, covered slightly with corrosion at the base
of the spout, lights reflecting off the sides with a warm color-shifted
glow.
    Darkelf stood in silent amazement.
    "It's the same model as the one you used, but with a real shading
function applied to it."
    "How? what?  It looks so real."
    "It's in the FAQ.  Blinn, SIGGRAPH 1977, improvement upon Torrance/
Sparrow lighting model including geometric attenuation and Fresnel
reflection; Cook and Torrance, SIGGRAPH 1981, expanding Blinn's work
with Beckmann microfacet distribution; Greg Ward, SIGGRAPH 1992,
anisotropic reflection; Kajiya, SIGGRAPH 1985, anisotropic reflection
models and frame mapping (that's how I made the hammered metal appearance
and the corrosion... nifty, isn't it?).
    "Ya got all that?"
    "Buffer overload.  System halting."
    "Glad I could help.  I'll bet you didn't even know that this model
came from a real person's teapot, except that the real one was 50%
taller.  Jim Blinn was demo'ing his rendering system to DARPA, and the
doddies decided they liked it better squished in the Y dimension.
Poor chap who owned the teapot eventually had to get another because
everyone wanted to make models with his first one."  He dropped the
teapot on Darkelf's now-lifeless body and walked away.  Perhaps one of
Darkelf's classmates would chance upon it and learn something about
graphics.  Or perhaps not.



To be continued...
VIII.  A SMALL ROOM IN CHICAGO

    The dark man was back in his car, hurtling across the little-know
byways of the Internet.  His gaze wandered about the expansive cabin
of the vehicle, stopping upon the instrument cluster on the dashboard.
One gauge was marked "MIPS" and was calibrated all the way to 20,000.
The needle pointed to about 12,000.  "Gods below, I love this machine,"
rumbled the driver.  "Real-time radiosity scene calculations, watch out."
He pressed the foot pedal and accelerated toward his penultimate
destination.

Scene: a windy city by the Blight that's always too cold in winter and
too hot in summer.  A young woman sits in a small room at a small desk
piled high with physics books.  A lone oil lamp provides the only
illumination in her cramped abode.  Boxes of Raman Pride noodles and
store-brand rice cakes fill a nearby shelf.  It's obvious she's saving
her money for an important expenditure...
    She hears a knock at her door and rises to answer it.  Opening the
door, she sees a large man of indeterminate age but youthful appearance.
A voluminous cloak covers him up to his chin, leaving only his finely-
chiseled face framed by a trimmed jawline beard.
    "Hellloooo, Nurse!  Hey, big boy.  Got a nice sword for me?"
    The man smirks.  "Yes, I do," he answers in a voice whose deep
rumbling sounds like two mill wheels grinding against each other.
He draws his cloak aside with a flourish, revealing the bejewelled
sword sheathed at his side.
    "Care to take it out and show it to me?" she asks, trying to
catch him with his own desires.
    "If you wish.  I've come to settle a score with you.  You have
cost me something -- nay, the one thing -- that I treasured deeply.
You, more than anyone else, are responsible.
    "Hawk, with tears in her eyes, told me that she had to pass
my bond because of harassment from people like you.  My bond, that
was the one thing that meant anything to me, and now it's gone."
    "So what are you going to do?" she asked.  "Kill me?  I don't
think you could.  You know that hurting women is against the values
you have, buried deeply in your cultural baggage."
    She was wrong, but the dark man saw no need to tell her that.
"I shall not kill you myself; another will do it for me!"  And with
that, a snarling Tyrannosaurus Rex ripped its way through the roof
of her apartment.
    "Cool," Pam said.  "This will be an _awesome_ excuse for not
taking the Physics GRE tomorrow.  'I'm sorry, but a T-Rex ate my
homework.'"
    "What, you _like_ this?"
    "Oh, sure, can you show me something else?"
    The dark man grumbled from deep within his throat.  Whether it
was lust or anger, Pam could not tell.  "Very well then, I'll give
you a whole flaming herd of dinosaurs."  And a herd appeared
running across the lamp-lit park behind him.
    "Wow, those dinosaurs look so real, even better than the same
scene in Jurassic Park!"
    "Of course they did.  The Jurassic Park folks messed up here
because they didn't match the lighting of the computer-generated
dinosaurs to the lighting of the real-world background they were
rendering them onto.  I don't make such mistakes."
    "Hey, is that a triceratops grazing by the park bench?  I could
get _beaucoup_ points in the next UofC Scavenger Hunt for bringing
in a triceratops..."
    The T-Rex ate her.
    "Never mess with a computer graphics expert," the man chuckled.
The dinosaurs disappeared into nothingness as he walked away.



To be continued...
IX.  BLOOD AND THORNS

    The cloaked man appeared in front of a museum on E Street NW in
Washington, DC.  "One last stop to make," he rumbled, this time with a
decidedly pleasant tone in his voice.  He walked across the empty
street (streets were always like that in this ether world) and headed
toward a nearby White Tower.  He drew up short as his old warder's
senses alerted him to shadowspawn in the area.
    He tensed, hand going automatically for the sword at his left
side.  He scanned the street up and down, spotting the thing whose
evil aura had already announced itself to him: a darkhound.  It
was galloping down the street in a path directly toward him.
    He knew his sword wouldn't do any good against this creature, so
he reached for a weapon that would.  His right hand dropped to his
side and unlimbered the gun that sat there.  He raised and levelled
the .454 caliber Magnum ACP at the approaching monster, bracing it
with two hands now, and sighting down its 8-inch nickle plated barrel.
    The creature halved the distance as he cocked the hammer back.
Closer came the dog as the man's index finger curled in toward his
palm, setting small levers in motion.  With a violent whipcrack the
gun fired, kicking hard enough to raise the man's arms over his head.
    "Nice puppy," he sneered at the sack of bloody rags that used
to be a fearsome darkhound standing 3 feet high at the shoulder.  Of
course, he couldn't hear his own words.  He noted with pleasure, though,
that the retort from the gun had shattered a few windows in a neighboring
building.  He knew there was a reason why he preferred the unvented
barrel.

    Without another glance at the dead shadowspawn he turned and
approached his final destination.  Walls, doors, and locks could not
stop him in this world.  He climbed the stairs, taking them two and
three at a time, arriving quickly at the third floor.  Down the
hallway he tread upon silent feet, coming at last to a door set
opposite the kitchen.
    "'Mistress of the Kitchens' they were going to make her," he rumbled
angrily.  "Ah, but those fools have paid for their folly."  Turning
away from the kitchen, he passed through the door and into the small
room beyond.
    On a narrow bed lay the person who meant the most to him in the
entire world, a person for whom he had literally fought, and killed,
to protect.  He looked down at his hands for something to give her.
His rough hands, dark and awash in blood this night; those were
nothing to give her.  He stared again at his hands, furrowing his brow
in concentration.  A small, black rose appeared in them.
    "My love, this is the best I can do in these darkest of times," he
whispered as he gently placed the rose atop her slumbering form.  A
few drops of blood fell from his finger where one of the rose's thorns
had poked him.
    "Love, the road we must travel is paved with aught but trouble and
strife.  I know I have strayed from it several times.  It is not an
easy road to follow, for people seek to mislead and waylay us at every
bend.  We pay a great price for passage, but there is one price I
cannot pay.  Do not send me away."
    He paused, half expecting a reply, half expecting none.  His ears
beheld nothing but a moment of silence broken only by the quiet
susurrations of his love's breath.  He bowed reverently and turned to
go, a tear welling in his eye.



The End?