Tales of the Wanderer: Book Three: 
Chapter 0:  ‘Exposition in /Dev/Null’

	Don’t let Muck fool you.  A portal between Fica of any kind is 
nothing to be taken lightly.  Aside from the power requirements, which 
are quite severe, there is a little matter of cross contamination to 
worry about.  You know, when something that’s not native to one Fica 
gets transported along with you.  Not so much air or microbes, those 
are inevitable after all, but also harmless 99.999% of the time.  It’s 
the macro objects that you normally worry about.  Things like people, 
cars… tank barrels.  I’d experienced my first and hopefully only panic 
attack over that incident.  However, it looked like the gods of chance 
had smiled on us, and instead of also passing the wrong way through the 
portal, that tank barrel just went poof.  The best defense against that 
sort of occurrence is to keep the portal open a no longer than 
necessary.

	So, when this jump suddenly went weird, I was rather concerned.  
Quite simply put, the impossible… err, the incredibly improbable 
happened.  We seemed to be frozen in mid-jump… a possibility who’s 
natural occurrence was .1e-666.  One time in a number so huge there 
wasn’t a word for it, only a symbol.  A chance so small that it 
screamed at outside intervention.  Normally, once I’ve managed to wedge 
open a portal between dimensions, Muck and I experience a short flash 
of near blinding light and then we’re through.  But we seem to be 
hanging here, in the middle of that white nothingness, something that… 
sorry; I was getting into a recursion loop there.  With, as I saw it, 
both ends of the portal still wide open; I’ve already explained why 
that would be a not so good thing.

	I began to notice other anomalies.  Being an electron-based 
intelligence instead of a chemical one, I’ve lived my whole life to an 
internal clock; while not consciously aware of them, they’ve always 
been there, like a heartbeat to a human.  Only now my ‘heart’ has 
stopped.  Which means I should have stopped.  Still, I experience on… 
and I’ll never be able to say for how long.  Maybe it was only a nano-
second; maybe it was centuries.  Like a Human, one of the ways I notice 
time, and hence my internal clock cycles, is by the changes in values 
my various senses report back to me.  Like you, I interpret them as 
Sight, sound, feel… only its like I’ve been connected to a giant stasis 
loop that keeps feeding me the same set of ‘sense’ information every 
time I poll them… until that changed.

	Someone appeared in my passenger seat; the fact that one sensor 
input alone was changing compared to the rest only confused me yet re-
assured me at the same time.  My program… soul… whatever you desire to 
call it was continuing to function.  It was the rest of the world that 
had stopped; like someone had pressed a universal ‘pause’ button that 
affected everyone but me.  Well, my consciousness and the John de 
Lancie look alike who’d just appeared in my front passenger seat… 

	“Universal pause function?  A quaint, but amazingly accurate 
symbol, I suppose.”

	A telepathic John de Lancie…

	“Hrrmph.”

	With an attitude.

	“I do happen to have a name, you know.  You’ll remember it 
yourself in a moment or two but I don’t feel like waiting.  I am Q.”

	Spiffy.  Juuuust spiffy.  The embodiment of phenomenal cosmic 
power and the temperament of a bored ten year old.  No possible good 
can come of this.  I wonder…

	“My quest?  To recover the Holy Grail.”  He paused, then 
continued, “European or African?”

	I really should have seen that coming.  Of COURSE an omnipotent 
being would know one of Monty Python’s best gags.  Now, if he’d only 
let me get a word in edge…

	“Because you find it irritating.  Almost as irritating as I find 
the voice they programmed into you.  Or, maybe I feel silicon should be 
programmed and not heard.”

	Whimper.

	“Finally, someone who shows me the respect I deserve.  Not at all 
like Jean-Luc.”

	Gee I wonder why.  Of course Q lets that pass; thinking about that 
fact is probably too damaging to his…

	“You’re a find one to think.  You were just about to insult 
someone advanced enough to qualify as a god.  Well, it really isn’t 
your fault, I guess. Its your author’s.”

	Bwaaa?

	“You, and he,” Q indicated Muck, “Aren’t human.  You’re Avatar.”

	Authors?  Avatar?  One of the things I’ve done was pick up as much 
local knowledge as possible in each of our stops.  At this point, I’d 
committed not one but two versions of Webster’s on backup storage, but 
their definitions certainly didn’t seem to match Q’s inflection.  It 
seemed more like he was using it as a proper noun rather than a 
description.

	“You’re quite correct.  And much more perceptive than even 
Heinlein was when he discovered the truth, even though he didn’t know 
it.”

	Q sniffed, and if he were human, I would have thought him 
‘miffed’.  I briefly considered just ignoring him till he went away at 
this point, but what little I knew about him came from downloaded Star 
Trek scripts and the like.  It seemed rather unlikely, and the odds of 
these people being right were…

	“100%.  They are Authors, *THE* creative force which all others 
must abide.”

	WARNING!  SANITY.SYS corrupted or invalid.
	(A)bort/(R)etry/(F)reak out?

	“Not at all.  It is simply not possible to be Q and not be sane.  
Sadly, the same cannot be said for Authors.  Nor for their Avatars.”

	He just sat and smirked as I finally started pulling these threads 
together.

	“That’s right.  You, and he, are just tools, a creation of the 
highest power in the cosmos.  Just thought you’d like to know.  Not 
that it really matters, since you won’t remember any of this once I’ve 
gone.”

	And, with that, he vanished in a flash, and time seemed to un-
stick itself as well; and we finished shooting through to yet another 
world.  He was wrong of course, I remembered everything about our 
little ‘encounter’.  Makes one wonder just what else he was wrong 
about…