|| -------- -- -----  A E R I E   O B L I V I A N A . singular book of text wandertainment by Frank Edward Nora ------------------- ----------- OFFICE COMPLEX--CUP 4--"ILLOGIC-LASSO" <-------  ||  Severe Repair  ||  Office Complex  ||  -------> (Cup SRoc004, Created v2 (6/7/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = "Well," I said, "even though there are always drawbacks, I think that OA is a great opportunity for you. I mean, no matter how much relativism you employ, this sort of existence just blows the conventional away. But leave all idealism at the door, since in Aconck the ugly side of humanity comes into all the sharper of focus. But hey, who knows what direction Aconck will take? I mean, the major watermark is that Aconck doesn't impact the average dweller on any Earth yet. We're still operating undercover, all over. And I hope this continues, but I'm not so sure. And the split in TAG which resulted in OA and U-64 may well occur again in any or all of the three, meaning more and more Bridge Groups, meaning more of an opportunity for extremism." "Hmmm. Well, it sounds like the place for me, since I'm just full of conflict and contradiction myself." Hate said. "Well, what have ya got to lose?" I said. "You're free to leave whenever you want." "Will I be taught how to bridge?" "Um, well that depends on how Greatwall assesses your abilities and aptitudes. To tell you the truth, they've been promising to teach me for a long time, but I'm so busy all the time it just sort of never seems to happen. Injure... That is, my navigator Injure Bodoni tries to explain what he's doing, but without a few months of immersion in Bestroystrawn Theory, not much of it makes sense. But I'm not complaining. I mean, I understand the upshot of it all, but the actual practice of bridging involves a lot of substantive illogic-lasso and reality-address tunings. But everyone in OA is welcome to learn how to bridge." "Hmm." Hate said. "So I guess I should start briefing you in earnest. So let's see. Where should I begin. I guess I'll go back to the birth of Aconck." "Now, Aconck is..." "Aconck is the interconnected set of Earths accessible by bridges and centered on Red Alley Earth, or The Alley. That's where, as I said, about 14 years ago a professor at The Dark of College by the name of Bavler Bestroystraw discovered the practice of bridging after spending much of his life researching centuries-old obscuria. It seems that bridging was in practice many centuries ago, but all records of it suddenly stopped about 450 years ago. And the thing is, according to Bavler himself, the Aconck Earths beside the Alley have no such history of bridging in their past, leading him to conclude that the basic bridging formula he developed was of a different frequency than the Sweptim one, Sweptim being that previous Earth interconnection." "But now Bavler is our enemy?" "Well, not so much enemy, but definitely a rival. I mean, his efforts to claim Earths and ours often come into conflict. I can't say that I have anything personally against the guy. I never really met him, but I had seen him on the campus from time to time, and he was often referred to in my classes on the Mysterious." "So y'know, can you sort of tell me, give me a rough idea, of just how the hell this bridging thing works?" "Well, as I said I'm no expert in the field, but basically, I can tell you this--in essence, a bridge is an area of space which one moves through, and upon exiting that space, one has basically a 50/50 chance of winding up on the opposite Earth to that terrain." "Huh?" "See, a bridger confuses an area of space into not being sure as to where it is, either where it really is or in the equivalent space on the opposite Earth. Because of this, when one is inside the space, it is unclear as to what Earth it is on the outside. So upon exiting, one or the other Earth becomes the one you're on. So if you don't transfer the first time, you can keep passing through the confused space until you get over." "What do you mean by opposite Earths? Are they like negative versions of each other?" "No. The terms is used the same as one might refer to opposite sides of a riverbank. There is nothing diametric in the comparisons between opposite Earths." "And every Earth has one opposite?" "Well no. If that were the case, then Aconck would be made up of only two Earths. The way it works is, that irregularly shaped areas of the surface of each Earth have different opposite Earths. So for example, when we bridge here in Derolbam, and in the surrounding areas, we'll always get to Tether Wraith Earth. But, according to Zillionthi's charts, if we go over to Marwock, for example, and bridge, we'd wind up on a whole nother Earth. So in this way, there's a complex webs of worlds, of which many are still to be discovered, since there are many hard to get to places on every Earth. And also, sometimes there's more than one way to get to one Earth, in some cases approaches are to be found on several different Earths." "How similar are all these worlds?" -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- -----