From: Chris Hassell 
Subject: The ZortylMeister Speaks: and there was some rejoicing.  STTCG.
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 92 15:02:42 MST

Subject: STTCG: Trial By Chaos: New-Improved-Ultra-Modern-All-Wheel-Drive.

This story is now approximately nine months late.  I have reconsidered its plot
and am moving FORWARD on making it work much better.  I'm on a roll for now. 
I should have all the eps out in a week I hope.  This one will not be bogged 
down because this is a (SORTA) light semester.
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	Captain Christopher Croutons, walking, looked around at the
corridor he was passing through.  His hairy face and head were kept down
and sorta low as he stepped forward again and again, but was still somehow
looking up.
	No one noticed him.
	No one seemed to care.  Strange, considering it was his ship, he
thought.  He wanted to go to the bridge.  At least he knew people there who
seemed alive when he last knew them.  His officers were required to have at
least some steady pulse, compared to giddy cadets on one hand and deadened
by-the-bookers on the other.  (Funny how no giddy cadets were around now.)
	No pulses were apparent here though.  Everyone's face was full only 
of duty or of some flickering sadness.  It was as if it was a rainy day all 
throughout the ship, as if it had been for a month or more.
	But, in space?

	The Captain arrived on the bridge, which was also summarily quiet. 
Lieutenant Commander Farah paced back and forth, his hand on the
for-show-but-not-for-show katana at his belt.  The readouts glowed, beeped,
booped, and glorbled.  THEY were normal at least, the captain thought.  The 
crew wasn't.  Oh great, another really wierd plot complication, he thought.

	"Lieutenant Chuang." Croutons stated behind a lax, apathetic and
otherwise unseemly pre-cadet, sorta gazing around the room and consoles.
	"Yes.. sir?" the cadet said, twisting around slowly, oblivious in 
the extreme and gazing aimlessly at the captain.
	"No, not me."  Pause.  "I'm not supposed to be monitored, that mess
is,"  the Captain pointed.  Chuang's display registered a precession of 
their orbit due to their exposure to the solar wind.  It hadn't been 
corrected for a while.
	"Hm? Oh.  Oh yes!  Um.  Yeah.  Sorry."  Instilled confidence
coursed through the captains face.  Not.
	Croutons slumped back in his chair.  My chair, he thought.  Mine mine.
At least that cannot be messed up.  This ship would hold together, but 
people were part of it.  Why such lifelessness?  Had their warranty expired?
	The idea amused him but the lack of anyone likely to chuckle at all 
hit him also.  Ouch.  Farah, the nearest one, pacing behind him, would not be 
amused and was currently sullen or angry or both.  You didn't want to see 
him angry.  The captain didn't either.
	"We are only waiting for their next shipment, aren't we"
	"Yess."
	"They're a little late?"
	"Yess.  LaTe."
	No more questions, for sure.  Wierdness.  He needed some
wierdness and unedgyness.  That made mostly one person pop into mind and ..
	"Boop," the communicator on his chair booped.  "Captainoid, oh Yon
most Fearless Leader."  Bingo.
	"Yes, Zortyl?" a weak-faced but at least more alive captain said.
	"Umm.  Umm.  From the height that MANY have fallen, the deafening
roars of newly-made glossy summer catalogs avalanching."
	Ooh.  This was a tuffy.
	"What kind of catalogs, Zort."
	"Why, art catalogs of course, Captain.  Not art-deco though!  Oh no! 
None of that stuff.  Grossomatic."
	Eeesh.  Wierdness, but how much is too much.  He figured it out,
puzzled at what it meant.  It actually did mean something, he mused.  "K.O."
	Croutons walked into his ready room, confuzzled.

	Croutons walked out of his ready room.  Less confuzzled, more just
fuzzled.
	"Stations! Ghiasi! Jez!"  No Jezness anywhere.  
	"Jez is down on the surface helping them with some mechanical
problems, ssir."  Soraya noted.
	Croutons looked startled that he was called that, then regained his
composure.  "Oh, Okay."  One more time.  "Parker!  I'm making an away
team!  On the double."  He stormed out the door.
	Soraya and Susan looked up at each other, now quite awake and
assuredly more concerned about their world than they were earlier.  The dread
that was on both their faces as they looked at each other, though, didn't 
help their mutual morale much.  For not much reason at the time, though to 
them both sincerely important somehow, they both felt uneasy about any noun or
noun clause that could step in front of them.
	They got up slowly but began striding like good, confident and
freaked-out soldiers because the captains lanky frame was already tapping 
its foot inside the turbolift.  The rest of the bridge either didn't notice or
was looking in dread back at their work.  It was more like a stormy day now, 
with the wind and rain rattling the windows outside.

	Their entry to the transporter room was charged with nothing.  The
attendant, not really noticing anything like people or in fact much any other
thing ran his finger circling out a pattern on the report desk.
	"ENERGIZE!" Croutons loudly croaked-squeaked.
	About twelve hundred volts seemed to pop those fingers onto the
proper keys to get the crew out to the proper place.  His eyes even wide
open at their new recharging.
	The proper place.  The proper place?

	It didn't feel like any proper place had appeared.
	They began to be sure that the proper place in fact hadn't
appeared.  It was more as if it had kinda crystallized in front of their
retinas.  A sort of invasive-procedure kind of vision was what they
experienced, like your eyelids were now showing 1 buck drive-in movies.
	In any case this theatre was showing "Temperate Rainforest
Panorama" of some sort.
	"Looks like the North American Northwest, Captain.  The planet doesn't
have anything like that," susan muttered, her report a little shaky.
	Croutons thought about that, shrugged his shoulders then commanded
an audience with his arms.
	"I want to say that, though I am glad I can sometimes be a real
captain, I know I don't need to normally take that tone of voice with you. 
You are my friends.  I just needed to capture your attention in a big way."
	"Pretty badly, I'd guess." Soraya mused, now surprisingly lightened
in her attitude, in the mossy smell of echoing trees.  Susan was already
wandering aimlessly with a newborn big grin on her face, down a nearby path. 
Croutons followed and Soraya paused, looking at herself and trying to size
up the situation, and, failing to do so adquately, resignedly and
bewilderedly continued after the lanky captain.

	The ground stopped when a large manicured circle section of moss,
or carpet, or moss, or something, left itself nicely on the ground in a 
clearing of the woods.  The misty smells and hollow sound and everything 
left in the trees were things all still there, but a nicely furnished office 
also defiantly put itself upon that carpet-circle in the midst of this 
forest.
	"I know where we are now." Soraya said, now happy that she had a
handle on things.
	"Oh, good.  I'm glad for you Soraya." Susan sorta let out as her
smile dropped a bit into a more shapeless "uhhhh"-looking mouth.
	"Zortyl, you wanna take over from here?" Croutons almost pleaded.
	"Yeah, surification dude!  I.." said the blank air over a nice
mahogany desk.  This desk, after a delay, then went thud three times or so 
with a plastic-sounding tapping.  "Dangatroid."  A few more thuds, a lighter
tap, and then all of a sudden a figure crouched over a small shiny 
controller flickered its image in midair in and out of visibility, with bizarre 
fractaline scanlines zapping on and off in his image.  The
figure, when his face was observable, was staring at a controller
intensely, now opened and disgorging its contents.  Really intensely, if you
saw the look.  The face seemed to look out and smiled weakly when you 
could make out flashes of the fractal scanlines zip over it.
	When the episode was over and the figure had disappeared and reappeared
again, the three federation officers were standing and watching a reclining 
figure with the patterned bluish neo-plaid uniform of the computer engineer: 
cyberspace with a quite strange figure inside it.  The controller which was
being fought with was sitting in apparent disassembled defeat and also in 
midair beside the figure.  It appeared to have a large neon-red mathematically
shaped bobby pin stuck through its center.
	It appeared to be working now, though maybe not for long, and 
probably under the same twisted bizarre and rediculous laws which appeared 
to drive the figure's gaze.  It appeared this fellows brain was attached to 
the wrong wattage plug.  A long time ago.  It had a tall nose and cheekbones 
which met in a pair of online eyes and a very small bridge of the nose.  A 
wierd no-mustache layer of beard sat under this assembly and a mildly 
embarrassed mouth.
	Whereever that plug was attached, Croutons thought, smiling, he knew 
that this strange voltage and frequency gave him a near-reliable miracle-worker 
in this mesh of computer gunk.
	"Okay... I didn't mean to do that.  Honest...," Zortyl admitted as 
if in stating his weather prediction had failed.
	Susan shuffled.  "You and .. um.. Zen.. not working very .."
	Zortyl leaned forward.  "Don't mention `working' and `Zen' in the
same sentence please.  I don't want an NP-complete semantic sentence to
work with along with a SELF REPROGRAMMING AND LINGUISTICALLY REDUCTIONIST
COMPUTER."
	"You're just moping because you lost that hyperchess game," stated
a deep though artistically sensitive, poignant, provocative, slightly
british and, well, quite smug voice that seemed to come from the floor.
	"I didn't hear that either.  Nyahhh!"  Aside to them, as if that
were possible in this world they were in, he said, "I always get him with some
great raw contradictory logic, I say.  Or at least it irritates him a bit."  A
frown, then his face cleared.
	The floor somehow sniffed and harummphed at once.
	Soraya was convulsing quietly while standing and was only, through 
some amazing feat, restrainedly amused, her forehead held by a hand.  
"We ought to get mmmoving here, I think." she sorta squeaked.
	Susan remembered she was warned about computer theoriticians by
someone, especially warned about wierd computer theoriticians.  She wished 
she had remembered more.
	"So, you're really there now at least?" Susan asked.
	"Well, I'm here as much quantifiably as any of you are `here' or 
`there' are somewhere on Belgranta 8.  You are right now `Euclidianized' into
this current reference space.  A rather nice though sometimes humid one.  Plays
havoc with my nice furniture," he said, obviously looking around the sky to see
if it would rain or something like that.
	"We do need to get on with the content of your message, Zort.  It isn't
really pretty," Croutons admitted, now getting down to a more captainlike
efficiency.
	Zortyl nodded, "Very well then.  You start the emotionaligarknitude
stuff.  I can never describe it without waxing major poeticrine."
	Croutons nodded, emptying his buffer for a moment of the things Zort 
had tried to express in some manner, and laid down the scenario.  "The 
reason you are all here is a rather extreme one.  It isn't just for fun to 
be in here.  Its often more disorienting than anything else and Zen can hold 
only a maximum of twenty eight people or so... and that making him very 
slow." 
	"Zen can `Hold' only twenty eight people?  Aren't we just in a
holo-deck, with Zort just holo-ing in?" Susan proffered, somewhat amazed.
	"Umm.  Well, not really.  You right now just don't exist."
	"Oh."  Pause.  "Oh, GOOD.  That explains it perfectly." susan 
blandly admitted, smiling at the absurdity of this conversation.
	"Zen is running you like a program.  You, as humans, can be simulated
in such an accurate manner as to reproduce the chaotic functions that make us
and our minds all work in fizzix-space.  You're all here right now, don't
worry.  This technology has been around for a short while and is sometimes 
well...  The main idea is that you are not being altered in any fashion and 
will resume fizzical existance just as normal when we leave via the
transporter."
	Soraya intoned, "What was that about `is sometimes well..'?"
	"Umm.  You explain this part, Zort."
	A grimace.  "hooboyeski,"  Zort muttered.  Soraya folded her arms, 
watching closely to get some strange and again wierd news.  "The idea is 
that you and I and all that we have chemically in our minds is simply beyond 
analysis.  You all should know of the ancient `brute-force' NP-metric 
theorums.  You know that brute force analysis and simulation of currently 
over 10^25th atoms/quantum-entities takes immense amounts of computation
without a simplified pattern-scoped study.   It takes skyrocketing amounts to
do anything `thoroughly', in fact.  As impossible to make work as would be 
using a garden hose to fill the Grand Canyon.  Brains need that much detail."
	"Yeah, so?"
	"If you work with some of the latest crazy stuff well... you find there
exist equations/reactions that go `boink' just often enough to work very 
very very well.  You can actually search for the chaos that you want to fit 
to your model, like an approximation theory but far more powerful and 
amazing when they work.  Very very poweful stuff and far easier to compute.  
They only go one way, of course, but we've been used to that for a long 
time."
	"You're telling me we're just being simulated by random number
generators!!!"  Soraya said, wide eyes open at her newly bestowed existential 
dicehood.
	"Basically... YES!" Zortylwankoid said with a huge 220 volt grin.  "The 
only problem is when strange purturbations or internal developments send the 
chaos unstable.  Well, of course, it is inHERENTLY unstable, but when it goes 
`exo-structural' and loses its normal attractor or stable mode."  Everyone
kinda soaked that mud in.
	"Then we would go foom?" Soraya said, with appropriate handmotions.
	"More like `SQUOP' I've always theorized.  I like the sound of it 
much better in fact!"
	Croutons pleaded with his face and beard to keep Zortyls voltage 
and detachment a bit more impeded, as two rather startled females continued 
to exist through some uncontrolled and very probable function of existance.  
Somewhat startledly they did, and they did not like it as much.
	"We shouldn't worry about it, really.  Okay, ladies?  He got me with
the same thing a long time ago and I have been in and out of here for a long 
while.  Zortyl here has been living in this world on and off for months," 
Croutons reassured.
	"I've even only crashed myself twice!"
	"ZORTYL!"
	"Ooops.  Sorry.  I did make decent backups of my own simulation and 
a program to explain to myself what happened.  Alpha stage stuff, pretty new
then.  It only happened when I was feeling very strangely and somewhat 
emotional at the time.  I'm much more stable now," Zortyl said, stroking his 
beard wondering if he should amend that very last statement.
	Croutons held his head and wondered if Zortyl ever registered a score
at all on his "people-skills" test.  If he did, it would probably be an 
imaginary or complex number.
	"Okay, I'm sure we CAN deal with this," Soraya said calmly.  "We're 
federation officers, right Susan?  Now, if I may speak freely sir.... WHY 
THE FRACK have you brought us here and tried us as guinea pigs, umm.. sir?"  
Soraya somewhat ungluedly and confusedly put out.
	Croutons gathered himself after being a bit surprised, "Spoken like a
true officer of mine, Lt. Cmdr. Ghiasi.  I had better have a good reason for
this and I do.  You see, you out there are affected by something Zortyl was
sensing in here.  You all out there were, well, turning basically hmhmh...
more and more insane."
	"Great." Susan said, exhaling and somewhat relieved.  "Is that all?  
Another `Land-of-Lillies' plot complication thingy?  I have often thought 
that we could prepare against this, using Zen as a monitor on us.  Really!
How often DOES this ship get infected by some new spores or some entity 
which..."
	"Not, `this ship', Susan.  Try probably the whole Magellanic Cloud."
Croutons amended, more serious now.
	"Or maybe even the main galactic disc actually." Zortyl chimed.
	"You're not helping, Zort.  Could we give it to 'em at my rate." 
Croutons reminded.
	"Ohhhhkay," Zortyl gave up for a while.
	"Oh dear," Susan said.
	"Yes, now it looks like this."  Croutons got up and began walking
around.  "Zortyl has found that there seems to be an encompassing n-spatial 
field which actually somehow registers in it, what was it, `semantic 
content'.   It senses and detects all meaning, basically.  It is very very 
huge and neither euclidian nor simply-self-connected.  Its shaped really wierd.
It seems to be a place where every hidden secret and every communication and 
every significant cause-effect chain and even, very likely, every thought
occurs in and leaves a `splash' of some sort.  Any equations showing up in this 
space are basically always `simplified' and have no other possible 
representation.  Ideas are always expressed somehow in there and minds do their 
thinking in wierd forms in there.  
	"Fizzixspace, our normal world, seems to merely be an arbitrary set of 
rules just percolating within this larger continuum.  This set of rules our
world runs by and for, are probably similar to our latest, most-inclusive 
Theory-of-Everything.  In essence, our entire visible fizzical universe, is 
but one huge `idea' or maybe more accurately a branched-off `word' spoken 
somehow by something with a REALLY IMMENSE bunch of `profound' pull or 
`idea-energy' to it.  I don't understand it.  I won't get into it.  It even 
hurts his brain."
	"`Ouch!'  Just an audio-aid there, cappin.  Keep going," Zortyl said 
with a small grimace from the captain.
	"Tthhhat would begin to explain why science has always been able to go
forward... forward, in what we have thought were a random set of laws and 
primal rules for the universe.  Hmhmhmmhm."  Soraya was enjoying this but a 
bit flustered at its suddenness.
	"Zortyl has not, however, had revealed to him all the secrets of the 
universe or anything..."
	"A dangerous thing that would be, I would worry, cappin."
	Crouton's eyes flared at the thought.  "... but he merely has found 
that he can induce effects in a small section of it and that he has 
registered purturbations from things like Zen and once in a while from 
passing people.  It even seems likely that all clairvoyance can
finally be explained by invoking this as the topmost enclosing theory.  As
usual, though, it produces more questions than answers though."   A sigh.
	"... and... ?" said Soraya, wanting both the significance and the
chance to test some ideas stated here.
	"Oh yes.  And ... well, this field is non-simply connected but it IS 
still connected, throughout all space.  It begins to explain possible events 
of history in which it seems people's minds were dithered with and sensible 
progress was stymied by some sort of rage or depression which seemed to cover a
land."  Croutons tried thinking about it, winced and stopped again.  "You, out
there, were all bearing under a chaotic storm."
	"A WHAT!?" Susan exclaimed.
	"You know, `Auntie Em! Auntie Em!'.  Whole ball of wax." Zortyl
explained to a trio of confused glances.
	"It registered here like an 'quake rumbling out from some 
disturbance but it got worse and worse and now it is more alike to a 
magnetic storm, except it is utterly undetectible with fizzix-oriented 
devices.  You and the rest of the crew were weathering it well, and we are now
utterly safe due to Zen's different implementation of you, but it is killing 
off the effectiveness of the crew.  Soon, I'm worried fights, depression or 
hallucinations would start."
	"THEY'RE OUT THERE STILL IN IT?!  What're we GOING to DO??!"  Soraya 
looked in panic.  "They're going to go `mad at sea' or something, Croutons!"  
Susan was pleading with her expression.  "The ship will be destroyed!!"
	"Zortyl.  You show them."
	"ROIIIGHT!  Zensta kentroplacko minsta Bridge-23lata," Zortyl stated
while getting up and walking forward to the center of the room.   A huge tan
dome with various artfully placed curved windows enclosed the room completely
matching the curve of the carpet.  "Looky there," he said, pointing to the wall
behind his desk.
	They saw a large fish-eye upside-down scanner image.  
	"Zensta, MENTROPLOCKO!"
	"Brankta yoobleep, frankazang," Zen replied from the floor again, 
quite used to this sort of work, it seemed.
	They now saw an undistorted larger upside-up scanner image of the
bridge.  It was still 3-d projected as were all normal scanners, but was 
against the wall like a window.  "Better," Zortyl sighed, "but that's the third
time he's reevaluated his new geometric-terms and replaced them on me!"
	Farah was there in mid-stride, or in mid-glower if you moved to see his
face.  His hand was more solidly on his sword, ready to draw it.  Chuang was 
now curled up on his reclining chair, his hands over his face.  Various 
others of the crew were either missing now, or were even on the floor 
huddled against the wall.  Things were very much coming unglued, it seemed.
The storm was now creaking against the walls.
	"Oh NO!" Soraya said.  "We were going to be like that?!  How old is
this picture Zortyl!!"
	Zortyl turned slowly and leaned back, missed and then leaned back
against his desk.  "InssstannnTANeous," Zortyl smugly, stretchedly said.
	"What?" Susan squeaked.  Soraya raised an eyebrow in a confused frown.
	"Zonktroo blah," Zortyl happily chirped.  A little moving crosshair was
now dancing around the screen in random fashions which darted over and over
again near its previous paths but it never exactly retraced them.  Fractal
patterns.
	"What's that supposed to be, Zort?"  Soraya asked.
	"That's the update cursor."
	Soraya and Susan were wide-eyed as they watched the scan "beam" trace
its happy patterns on the wall, which were more than invisible normally, and 
which were never meant to be seen except by technicians.
	"Did you dilate time, or something, Zort?"  Susan guessed.
	"Yep, you're in the faster of times and they're in normal time.  This
picture you're looking at is the current image of the bridge.  In ten 
minutes or so you might see someone almost have moved."
	"Well, so much for worrying about coming home late!"  Soraya said,
breathing a sigh of relief and throwing up her hands before plopping back in a
recliner to do some serious thinking.   Susan sat down to attempt to do the
same.   Croutons just went thud on the couch, looking up at the image still,
though he knew it was allright, for now.

	The storm winds, utterly impossible to see or visualize, waved
themselves viciously across peoples minds and machines' electronics all 
throughout the Magellanic Cloud.  A ship, unaware of a storm approaching, 
can be doomed.  The rest of the Cloud didn't even know there was a storm.
	Zortyl ran and zipped around the room, it seemed, flipping newly 
made menus and displays in and out of thin air and zooming them around to
different parts of their display.  The others just sat and thought, watching 
the readouts Zortyl had patched in from his latest detection-experiment, and 
the people which were slowly moving on the wall.
	It was as if trees were scraping at the windows.