The Verse:
Not the first time, nor the last.
The Vision:
An impenetrable cloud descends. Wynne is carrying a flashlight. As the vapor disperses, I see General Panic wearing a green ra’aabit costume. As I awaken, I can’t stop laughing.
Commentary by Archbishop Co’oal Venesti:
The first of the blue amrita prophecies, included for collection simply because it is the first. The vision itself is of an insignificant nature, but serves to demonstrate the accuracy of Her Eminence’s skills. What seems to be an absurd and symbolic vision turns out to be absolutely literal.
Commentary by Elma, High Prophetess of Skarsia:
You fools don’t realize the import of this, do you?
Commentary by Archbishop Seth:
In the future, I think it will be wise to limit ourselves to a simple commentary by one emanation only.
Commentary by Prince Driscoll Garrett (with meta-commentary by a cast of thousands):
Of course, I was asked to make the arrangements for the grand opening. When it comes to a fete like this, my skills are legendary. I would say that Tommy wanted to start his new club with a bang – but that didn’t work out so well for Thomas, which is why the opening of Everybody Goes to Tommy’s took place months before the reopening of Tom O’Bedlam’s, which wasn’t at all what we’d planned. But then again, the entire year of 3610 had gone pear-shaped. I refused to let it ruffle my composure. One mark of superlative party-planning is the ability to roll with whatever happens. When life goes pear-shaped, make perry.
I like pears, says Tommy. They’ve got booty.
But they’re funny, says Davy. Most fruit is either round or ovoid. Why do they bulge out like that?
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask one? Anyway, besides the gala affair, my new gallery was opening. Originally, I’d kept my own space, adjacent to my artist’s loft, but it had become entirely too small for the amount of traffic it was getting, and I’d taken to showing my works at the Clover Apollinaire. It was high time for me to have my own gallery again, especially since I’d been awarded the Duchamp Prize. Additionally, it would allow me to host other artists, championing the works of unknowns who might otherwise not be brought into the public eye. The first exhibition in the Discovery Room was to be of an extremely talented artist named Raoul Fitzroy who made small and intricate pencil sketches. Graphite pencil is quite underestimated as a medium compared to charcoal or Conté sticks, but it can achieve a delicacy of line and shading which is unparalleled.
I don’t think my son, princeling of the realm, quite qualifies as an unknown who might not otherwise be brought into the public eye, says Patrick. The words shameless nepotism and publicity-grabbing stunt come to mind.
Be that as it may, the lad has talent. I would never exhibit the works of an artist beneath my exacting standards. So exacting were my standards that I spent days agonizing over what to name the gallery. At first, I thought that I should simply call it Gallerie Extraordinaire. But Ancient French has been so done. I needed something fresh. Well, freshly antiquarian, at least, since it always helps to have that patina of classicalism. For a while, I contemplated calling it Jashtëzakonshëm, the Ancient Albanian word for extraordinary. But then I realized that with two umlauts, it looked like a science project. I was excited about the prospect of Ancient Catalan, but disappointed to find out that the proper word was merely Extraordinari. A nine year old girl could’ve come up with that! The Ancient Norwegian Ekstraordinære was similarly rejected, although the digraph had class. The Ancient Italian Straordinaria sounded too much like a frozen dessert. I rejected out-of-hand any names longer than one word such as Txawv tshaj plaw (Ancient Hmong), Luar biasa (Ancient Indonesian), Srengenge katon padhang (Ancient Javanese) and Phi thường (Ancient Vietnamese – regretfully – I loved the typography): I wanted to make a simple, bold statement. Buitengewone (Ancient Afrikaans), Urghnách (Ancient Irish), Niezwykły (Ancient Polish), Izvanredan (Ancient Croatian) and Neparasts (Ancient Latvian) were rejected for lacking a certain sonorous value – the name should resonate, sliding easily off the tongue. I sincerely considered Eithriadol (Ancient Welsh) until Chase pointed out that it would make a great name for a sedative. I loved Erakordne (Ancient Estonian) – there was something of Greek drama about it – and Ajabu (Ancient Swahili) – probably the most melodic of the choices. I almost went with Kapansin-pansin (Ancient Filipino) – what fun! But I realized it was a tad too trendy, and I was looking for something timeless. I finally settled on the Ancient Czech word Mimořádný. It was stately, elegant, and had three accents.
You should’ve just called it Fucking Pretentious Gallery and gotten it over with, says Cillian.
Cillian, no matter how much literary criticism you read, you’ll never understand art.
I understand it well enough to know the difference between brilliance and bullshit, he replies. And your works come in at about 50/50.
You just don’t like that painting I did of you in the toxic waste dump, I sniff.
Actually, I do. Your paintings are 90% brilliance. What comes out of your mouth is 90% bullshit.
Um, guys, says Mickey, I thought Driscoll was supposed to be writing a commentary on Tara’s prophecy? Which was really about Wynne and General Panic.
I’m setting the scene. Vivid writing, like party planning, is about getting the details right.
Don’t forget the curfling match, says Tommy. It’s an important part of the story.
I wish I could forget the curfling match, but it is an important part of the story. I think, however, that Mickey would say we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Now where was I before Cillian’s unnecessary interruption? Ah yes, the opening of Mimořádný. I must admit, the architectural design of the building is magnificent. And we had to contract out for that – we don’t have an in-house architect.
Yggdrasil will, said Davy. What do you think of these? He places several oddly shaped fruits on the coffee table.
They’re very geometric, I reply, examining them. They have flat surfaces.
Yggdrasil again? says Evan. Aren’t there enough of us?
Anyway, I got to thinking about fruit design, says Davy. And it seems that fruit is pretty much round, which means that it always rolls off the table. I know there was some old genework done with tomatoes and stuff to make them cubic, which made it easier for packing, too. But a cubic fruit is so…square. So I tried these – icosohedrons and dodecahedrons.
I don’t care for the flat surfaces, I say, but there are other ways to keep the fruit from rolling. Try a great cubicuboctahedron.
Oh, how about a small stellated dodecahedron? I could call it a star fruit.
Davy hands me a prototype.
I like the concept, but the name has been done. Maybe you could try it in Ancient Basque.
The Basque word for “star” is “star,” says Dermot.
If you’re not going to tell the story, says Mickey, maybe we’d better let Wynne tell it.
Please understand – I’m trying to establish my lack of culpability for the disaster that followed.
What disaster? says Tommy. The club was a hit from the get-go.
Be that as it may, the opening was a letdown. Several hours before the gala began, I was making my rounds. The plan was that I would check the decorations and catering, Wynne would do a final check of the casino, and then I’d do one last run-through the entertainment schedule before Tommy took over. Tommy was, of course, the master of ceremonies, but I would need to put in an appearance later in the gallery. At least, that was how it was supposed to happen.
The crew was just finishing work on the ice sculptures. I insisted they use ancient methods, chainsaws and blowtorches, instead of laser fabrication. If I wanted to go for artifice, I could have just made the sculptures through alchemy, but authenticity is vital in art. I prefer the work of one’s hands. The pièce de résistance was a copy of my statue of Daphne in ice. Of course, it wasn’t kinetic like the original, but the object was to catch a moment in its evanescence, an evanescence to be demonstrated literally as the ice melted.
Jump to the part where the Panic-droid malfunctioned, says Mickey.
I want to discuss the hors d’oeuvres.
Driscoll was in the kitchen when the Panic-droid malfunctioned, says Mickey. It started to throw betting chips across the room.
I was savoring an escargot and kasmilkase canapé. Of course, during the gala they would be freshly broiled and served butler-style, but Chef Yuric made advanced samples for me to try.
I was worried that managing both the restaurant and the café in the palace gardens was going to stretch Yuric a little thin, says Tommy, but he did wonderfully.
I knew he would. The café practically ran itself, and its peak hours were lunch and tiffin. The casino’s restaurant was strictly an evening affair.
The only people who go to that restaurant are posers, says Wynne. Serious gamblers can’t be bothered about food.
Well, we do have an NBIA franchise providing pastry and sandwiches during the day, says Ross. We expanded our line to accommodate the eat-on-the-go gamer.
The restaurant is more for the people who come to the lounge for the music, says Tommy. Dinner and dancing.
But the gallery traffic starts in mid-afternoon. That’s why I had Yuric open up a petit brasserie in the atrium. NBIA was just a bit too low-rent for my clientele.
OK, says Mickey, this is a simple story. The Panic-droid malfunctions. Wynne gets called in to deal with it. Driscoll gets all bent out of shape about the schedule. We can’t figure out why the droid is malfunctioning, so we consider pulling them from the floor and hiring humans to run the tables at the last minute.
Which would have been a shame, I insert, grabbing back my narrative from the unwelcome interloper. We had installed General Panic’s Continued Personality Simulator into a variety of highly attractive pleasure-droids, each one lovingly adorned with holome cosplay outfits fabricated to the most exacting standards. I did quite a bit of research on holome. I didn’t want to choose characters that were too banally popular, or even trendy. I wanted a selection which would impress even the most hardcore otaku with its sophistication and attention to detail. For example, Major Regrettes from Haploid Transport Eruption needed a style of jacket-button I had to import from the Fomalhaut Corridor…
Holome is compost, Cillian interrupts. You’re supposed to appreciate the artifice of 2-D. Holome defeats the purpose. Holome is for the kind of person who puts gravy on his sushi.
Major Regrettes has really big tits, though, says Tommy. That whole series had a lot of fanservice.
Kill me now, says Mickey.
Commentary by Prince Wynne Rafferty:
Prince Wynne? I’m not too comfortable with that. It’s a little too much like you’d call some old fellow who’d been riding the starline transports in the hold his whole life, busking his way with a beat-up saxophone to earn change for the next card game.
Driscoll made a lot of fuss, but I really needed to have a look at those droids. Of course they had the standard violence-suppressors built into the AI. Obviously, we didn’t want General Panic able to plot against us, but we had tried to preserve her charmingly viscous personality. The idea was to have these loli-girls in cute little maid outfits or whatever…
There was only one maid, says Driscoll. And she was an undercover neoninja – Sapphire Blade Jukko from the Darknebula Underschool Trilogy.
…that made the unsuspecting duffers feel superior, or horny, whichever comes first, and then lose a lot of money to a really sophisticated AI.
You know, says Tommy, doesn’t General Panic sound like a character from a holome anyway? I mean, why would she call herself that?
She obviously had a screw loose, which had a definite impact on her programming. The chip-throwing thing was problematic – it was hostile, but was it really violent? It was on the borderline of acceptable.
But not in a classy casino, says Tommy. It would freak out the customers.
It was just one of the droids, though, and so I made the decision to pull that one off the floor. The problem might not have been with the CPS at all. It could’ve been a bad sector in the memcube. I let the other ones go, but something was telling me that it wasn’t the right decision. You see, I had never actually met General Panic face-to-face before. And I couldn’t help but feel that there was something a little off-kilter.
That’s an understatement, says Ross.
Well, yes, but I meant I terms of probability. I started to think about it. On four separate occasions, she’d gotten the drop on us: Mickey’s death, Ross’ ambush, the second android facing Ailann, and the fourth android on Dumati. Of those experiences, Ross was really green, and Constantine had never been battle-tried. But Ailann? Ailann sees at least thirty seconds out at all times. And Mickey – even if Mickey didn’t see it coming, he should’ve been able to react to it fast enough. I started to wonder if she could mess with probability, too. It certainly wasn’t an excess of good luck, like mine, or bad luck, like Rivers’. But it was something.
Or maybe it was more like this: something about her was randomly skewing the normal probability of events, which made prophecy impossible. And yet, everything she’d ever done was predictable, almost disappointingly so. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that she shouldn’t have been so successful as a military strategist. The probability skew had to be happening on a subatomic level, and perhaps in a way that the quantum fluctuations were cancelling each other out. But the end result was to cause a sort of blur in the nau’gsh ability to perceive time.
What? says Tommy.
Oh, I get it, says Cüinn. I and I can sense a countably infinite number of values, which means we’re looking at a discrete probability distribution. But in reality, the number of events in the multiverse isn’t countable – or we don’t really know whether it is or not since we don’t know enough about some of the really bonkers universes out there. So the distribution should be probably be continuous. But you can’t predict anything without a good estimate of the Hamiltonian, which means you have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Or probably a hypercube.
What? says Tommy.
I decided that rather than worry about it, I’d call in the troops. It was a job for PLOT/Twist.
I explained my theory to Marty. Joey and Ricky were assigned to Dalgherdia, so Marty recruited a few more agents – Sally, Brian and Stevo. Then I decided to let the bet ride. It was about time for Tommy to take over the show.
Driscoll was really freaking out, says Tommy, because he hadn’t had time to double-check the entertainment schedule. I thought everything would be fine.
Stick to singing, says Driscoll. A huge affair like this will not run itself.
It was easy, Tommy replies. A meet and greet starting at nineteen, curfling at twenty, I would take the stage at twenty-one thirty, and Two of Jacks would play at twenty-three.
But we were serving cocktails in the gallery from twenty until midnight, says Driscoll, and I had a variety of performance artists on the bill.
They were supposed to interact with the guests spontaneously, says Tommy.
But it takes a lot of coordination to run a spontaneous happening! You just can’t turn a pack of fusion painters, taxidermists and spackle-mimes loose on an unsuspecting crowd.
I don’t even want to think about the de Broglie equations, says Cüinn. The kinetic energy of a spackle-mime is impossible to calculate.
Are we supposed to be taking him seriously? asks Owen. I’m never actually sure.
In all likelihood, says Mickey, the instability in General Panic’s CPS was caused by a virus specifically designed for the occasion, and exploiting a wormhole in her primesys. In other words, CenGov wanted to be able to initiate a self-destruct in case she was interrogated – which is exactly what happened. But during the interrogation, she was protected by Roger’s event horizon. The droids in the casino only had the standard chip condoms.
But there was something seriously wrong with the probabilities, I insist. Sally noticed it. The effect got worse as the evening went on. The first major problem came up at the curfling. The rocks weren’t behaving at all like expected.
Yeah, it was impossible to synch the dance moves with the music and still get the stones into the house, says Tommy. They were doing the Charleston to Schubert, and Swing-pogo to a cha cha beat.
It’s entirely possible the stones were behaving like particles in a wavefunction, says Cüinn. Just honking big ones.
The curfling thing was just a coincidence says Mickey. Strange things happen at sports matches every day. The casino machines were a little off, but they probably picked up the virus too.
The spinette table was also a little bit off, and it didn’t catch a virus, I reply. A little off, by the way, is around two percent, which is close to the profit margin of a large casino. Fortunately, while we were losing our roots, leaves and bark at the spinette table, we were making a fortune at blackjack. That’s exactly the effect I was describing – overall, we made as much money as predicted, but the individual cases were highly anomalous.
The curfling certainly was anomalous, says Tommy. But the gigs made up for it.
While every aspect of life involves a certain amount of chance, vocal performances don’t depend upon it in the way that sporting and gaming events do. So it makes sense that the Panic-effect was more noticeable in the casino than the lounge.
Daphne didn’t melt, says Driscoll.
I know, says Tommy. It was amazing. Everybody commented on it.
It was supposed to melt. My concept was ruined.
Um, I think that was my fault. I mean, Daphne is basically a statue of Tara. How could you allow a statue of Tara to melt? The rest of the ice was collateral damage.
Philistine, says Driscoll frostily.
It’s not like I have conscious control over it. My luck just skews things.
It wasn’t a total loss, though, says Tommy. The nau’gsh and Seville orange profiteroles were an especially big hit. Chef Yuric decided to put them on the regular menu at the café. And Lord Sadricos commissioned a portrait sketch from Raoul.
Do you remember what the reviewer from GalMedi said? asked Driscoll.
GalMedi hasn’t had a good thing to say about us for years, says Cillian. That’s because they’re pissed off that we offered Bobert Crandon that job with Vega Vids. It fucked up their lineup on Plasma Topics.
Driscoll quotes: “The opening lacked the style, the flair of the K’ntasari Admission Celebration on Restoration Day. It was an evening of serviceable diversion, topped off with a rare performance by Two of Jacks, yet one wonders if Garrett is running out of ideas.”
Your concepts were just over the heads of your audience, says Whirljack. They didn’t get that the spackle-mimes were supposed to be ironic. Me, I just stick to verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. It pushes media.
I dunno, says Tommy. People seemed to like the weirdness. Especially when the Panic-droids started doing karaoke. And when the mime-troop ended up skinny-dipping with the Governor of Cybae in the atrium fountain.
Major Regrettes would never do karaoke, snaps Driscoll. Clearly you don’t understand the character.
Tara had fun, says Ari. Why does anything else matter?
Come to think of it, says Dermot, the problem with this story is that Tara isn’t in it. That’s why it completely lacks focus, and we keep getting distracted by details.
Here’s focus, says Mickey. There was a virus in the CPS. Roger found it, fixed it, and the problem never reoccurred.
I beg to differ. Sally and Marty definitely said that the particles were in a weirdly excited state around the droids. I’m telling you, there’s something strange about General Panic that we still don’t understand. And now that AI is everywhere. It’s flipping burgers and giving swim lessons.
A lot of people were in a weirdly excited state around the droids, says Tommy. That’s what cosplay will do to you.
Commentary by Michael Riley, Director of Skarsian Secret Operations:
At 18 hours, 24 minutes and 32 seconds on the First Beachday of Second Novemberoon, 3610, a croupier-droid powered by the Alara Panichini Continued Personality Simulator and costumed as the character Sweetsweet Sugah Bunneh from the popular holovid Wormhole Hollow began to malfunction, throwing gaming chips across the casino and into the lounge of the Everybody Goes to Tommy’s complex.
At 18 hours, 37 minutes and 14 seconds the droid was removed from service by Prince Wynne Rafferty.
Examination by the Artificial Intelligence located at RootRiot-2 Laboratories (AKA “Roger”) determined that the CPS had been infected by a virus of Terran manufacture. It was speculated that this virus had been specifically devised as a self-destruct mechanism for the Panichini CPS.
Later in the evening, a number of the hologames also malfunctioned, awarding jackpots of an amount and frequency out of accordance with their programming. It was determined that the croupier had spread the virus to them.
The unusual behavior of the curfling stone and spinette table, along with the anomalous melting curve of all frozen items in the casino and restaurant was determined to be the result of random coincidence. The unusual behavior of the spackle-mimes and Governor Stolos of Cybae was determined to be the result of too many Chalkolo Juleps.
The only open question is why these relatively insignificant occurrences provoked a blue amrita vision in the prophetess. However, spiritual matters are beyond the ability of SSOps to investigate.
Case closed.