I hear there's also snow and ice, and ice and snow... and Quebec. ^^
Good catch, Inquisitive Raven! Me-the-character had already been to UAW #87 earlier; I guess I got them mixed up. Fixed it in the .rtf.
**********
Looks like the tech is mostly the same. What a relief.
Twenty minutes (ten for travel, two to change out my 'Freddie' jacket for a T-shirt and jeans, and the rest spent in a currency exchange) later, I was catching up on the differences between home and the local Earth.
On the whole, things weren't
too painfully different. It was raining in the Pacific Northwest, for one thing. This United States had developed along the same lines as my home reality, right down to the signs on the roads and the faces on the bills I'd picked up. Given all of that, walking into the closest Apollos and ordering a Huelgaccino only elicited a weirded-out twitch or two.
Once I got my drink (which was a good bit higher-quality than what I was used to, if a bit oddly spiced), I curled up in a surprisingly comfy chair, plugged my laptop into the wall, and fired it up. A couple seconds later-
man, I love that SSD in there!- I plugged in one of my lesser USB keys (already zeroed, just for this), and opened a mental connection to Malleus.
[I'm beginning a transfer now. One file, MP3 format audio. Ready for it?]
[SENSORS READY AND TARGETED.]
Smiling, I copied one file to the USB key.
[DIFFERENCES DETECTED. FILE ISOLATED. FORMAT ANALYSIS UNDERWAY- PROVIDE ADDITIONAL SAMPLES.]
I copied over another file.
[COMMON ELEMENTS DETECTED. CONTINUE COPYING.]
This time, I copied three files.
[THREE NEW FILES DETECTED. FORMAT REGISTERED. PROCEEDING TO CONVERSION PHASE.]
I deleted four of the files from the USB drive, fired up Winamp, and queued up the one file off the drive at an extremely low volume.
[FILTERING OUT BACKGROUND NOISE. ERROR- TARGET SOUND INDISTINCT. INCREASE VOLUME OR DECREASE DISTANCE.]
[Sorry.]
I pulled my arm- the one wearing Malleus' watch form- back down in front of the laptop, resting the watch face right between the speakers. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable position, but it was one I could bear for some time. With my other hand, I ticked up the volume about a percent.
That should be good.[VOLUME SUFFICIENT. BACKGROUND NOISE FILTER IN PLACE. RESTART RECORDING.]
Once I did that, Mal sat, silent, until the song ended. [DECODER ENGINEERING UNDERWAY- PROVIDE ADDITIONAL SAMPLES.]
I cleared the song that was there, copied over a different one, and started it playing. Five minutes and eighteen seconds (I was keeping track at the time- I was THAT bored) after that song ended, Malleus finally gave me another update.
[PRELIMINARY DECODER CREATED. PROVIDE ADDITIONAL SAMPLE FOR TESTING.]
Sounds like we're nearly there. What do I want to hear most?
...yeah, that'll do.Smiling at the thought-
it's been FAR too long!- I copied the song over to the USB key, and waited. Shortly after that, Mal responded.
[FILE COPIED. TESTING DECODER THREE SECONDS AFTER MARK. MARK.]
Precisely three seconds later, a burst of garbled, electronic nonsense came over the telepathic connection, followed by... I'm still not sure how to describe it. The result of running a badly-dubbed tape through a glitched out player, backwards, while juggling electromagnets next to it, maybe?
I could hear the beat I was expecting, though it never quite managed- even at its best!- to sound right. The 'song' couldn't seem to stick to a consistent tempo, nor could it hold a key; almost more jarring was the fact that one would change independently of the other. On top of all that, the instruments themselves sounded off, and short bursts of electronic static occurred at what seemed like random intervals.
It was, to put it briefly, a disaster.
[Mal, ol' buddy? We've got a LOT of work to do.]
My
Unitarian Jihad Name is:
Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate.
Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.