::BEGIN DOWNLOAD? - Y::

Standing on a shield wall, barrier between two incompatible biomes. Oxybots in my bloodstream make it unnecessary to breath. I mentally flip a coin, make sure my lines are firmly fixed and then begin rappelling down the side of a cliff 1000km high.

Riding a gridditch across a plain larger than a planet. Six legs pumping, the gridditch is holding steady at 30km per hour. They are biocybernetic organisms, engineered for travel over the vast distances that prevail here. Nevertheless it will be three more days before we reach our destination.

Making love to a tigersplice, three meters of striped fur over rock hard muscle, as we freefall down a tree lined shaft a hundred thousand kilometers tall. We wear only parachutes for use at journeys end. It will be ten more days before we hit bottom.

Floating in free space over the inner face of a Vertex. Three great struts of habitation filling the space in front of me and extending off to infinity behind. White of cloud, blue of sea, and ten thousand shades of green/brown from the various biomes spread across the land beneath me. Glorious.

Sitting in a meditation garden in a low gravity zone. In front of me, a circular pool is being fed from above by a bubbling anti-fountain. Great, lazy bubbles of water are teased thru a membrane above and fall gently into the pool below. Each bubble is filled with millions of microorganisms. In the time it takes each bubble to complete its lazy fall, they rush through their tiny lives from cysts at the bottom of each bubble to scintillating, rainbow swimmers rising to the pole, to migrating clusters of humming flyers traveling to the next bubble, to encysted eggs nurtured on the travel exhausted remains of the previous generation.



::HOLD DOWNLOAD::
I'm going to take a break for a while. Reintegrating multiple Copies is always tedious. But when visiting a place like Kepleria, a world that dwarfs solar systems, it's really the only option to truly enjoy even a fraction of the wonders that it contains. A dozen Selves went out on this visit and a dozen memories of the last month came back. Nothing really, against the whole of Kepleria's possible experiences, but more then enough to keep me occupied during the long transport ride to Ergedai.

By Todd Drashner (2008)

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