Tribeč

The messenger closed the door and set off on her last bikepacking tour before dawn, heading southeast from Bratislava, along the left bank of the Danube River, through five centimetres of snow that had fallen during the night, almost two centuries before I have hands to write with.

The sky brightened a bit beyond Kopáč, and a few minutes later the strong northwestern wind pushed into her back like an endorsement.

Near Šamorín, the messenger widened the tires to 4.2 inches, providing a larger contact patch with the ground, spreading the weight and helping the bicycle float on top of snow rather than sinking in.

She engaged the bicycle’s battery and started to speed up, moving up to fifty after Kyselica, hands hidden in pogies, deep warm shells against the cold.

When the clouds parted and the sun poked through, she tried out her voice by talking with her drone companion Averkije Skila  — about the behavior of the bicycle and optimal distribution of load and commenting on riding position, on breathing, weather vs clothing, and its layering. 

The messenger loved this ritual, the transition into the attention of a wanderer, calibrating her body and the structure she rode. 

The drone suggested lowering the tire pressure down to 4 psi, improving traction and stability, everything else just fine.

Every metre felt like her first touring days.

The body moving through the landscape, the body dragging them all forward, her and the bicycle and the mass distributed along its frame — spare parts, tools, camping gear and food enough to battle dark models of transcontinental expeditions — heavy rains in the mountains, multi day temperatures below zero, crashes and broken structures.

She had always dreamed of such a challenge, but this trip was different. Today the messenger packed for the certainty that she would not return. That it was impossible to return.

So it was mostly food she carried, more than her weight, dried and packed as best she could.

Just before ten o'clock, the messenger reached Komárno and finished what she considered the fastest part of the journey.

She picked me up from Donnager, a tiny semisubmarine that brought me from Belgrade with a few other personality constructs.

She hurried to catch the ship, because it was allowed to stay in the harbour for seventy minutes only — then returning back to The Black Sea, cutting the stream at three hundred.

There were other constructs already waiting. They’d arrived/were brought some days earlier, in tiny vehicles carrying them along the river from the southeast, mostly.

Actually, there were more constructs than the messenger and her bicycle could carry and she had to decline a few.

The food was more important.

Despite reduction, the rest of the constructs had to slow down all processes to zero, thus shrinking the substrate mass running their consciousness into the smallest volume possible.

Me, I did not need to. I came already packed, small and hard as stone. It has been a while since I’d been up and running in warm jelly speeds.

At noon, February 24, 2084, the messenger continued north into what used to be Slovakia, along the river Váh and then Nitra, passing three checkpoints before arriving into Great Moravia proper.

It was just as well that the constructs were all dormant, non-active and packed like food. The sentinels made it clear this was a permitted, but barely tolerated visit.

The river route lead straight into the capital city of Nitra, where she checked herself with the Tribeč Border Guards. 

The messenger presented admission papers and in return, received both a jar of rembirin and dupačky, the outfit for entering the mountains. 

Last, during a consultation with a senior Guards officer — an old, tired man, yet still younger than her — she was presented a construct as part of The Terms and Conditions For Admission and Visit,

• proposing and urging The Admitted Visitor and Tour Manager (hereinafter “the visitor”) 
• to accept and accomodate
• an expert personality construct Ziller 
• to be uploaded into/accomodated within the visitor’s cargo bike
• to be connected to its sensors,
• in a technical consultant role.

A cop, the messenger thought at first, but felt good about it somehow and agreed to all, did not mind and installed the construct’s heart/core on the bicycle, giving him eyes and ears, curious what his voice was like. 

It was already dark when she checked out of the The Guards building, left the city and entered the foothills of Tribeč mountains.

She did not venture further that day, but camped when the lights of Nitra were still visible below.

Quick and quiet dinner of lyophilized nettle curry with coconut milk, pumpkin, sugar peas, cucumber, carrots, broccoli and green beans. The good stuff. 

In the morning the messenger melted some snow and warmed it in the camping shower.

She saw and touched her body for the last time in her life, cleaning herself with a tiny lump of dark blue soap.

She lotioned herself with rembirin, multiple times in succession, until her skin began to take on a beige, seemingly intact surface and then put on dupačky, stretchy soft overalls, hugging her body like a baby, even her head covered. 

The messenger continued northeast, climbing up to Tribeč mountain itself and explored the ridge from there — Malý Tribeč, Medvedí vrch, Mišov vrch, Javorový vrch, Rakytka.

Throughout the day she drank from a bottle full of yoghurt like material and kept leaving a sip in her mouth for minutes at a time, until it soaked into her skull.

She started to burp softly, her ears popped once and hearing wastly improved. 

In the afternoon the messenger left the bike a few times and ventured on foot, looking for clues in relief or just staring intently at a few square centimetres of the ground.

When it was getting dark she arrived at a small dimple in relief.

The messenger lost her voice/ability to talk by then, built a tent close to this terrain bowl and lit a fire, feeding it with oak branches late into the night.

There was no breakfast, only last drops from the bottle and thinking, before entering the sea a river trembles in fear. 

But there is no other way. The river cannot go back.

She checked with the drone and determined the most useful approach point to enter the perimeter, got on the bike and started cycling towards the circular depression, some twenty metres ahead.

She made the first ten before noticing the trees to rise, get bigger and further from each other.

And then, the longer she rode, the more the estimated time of arrival increased. 

So riding was all she could do now, ride and hope that a sufficient quantity of the active interface particles entered/noticed her body while the lotion and the yoghurt were strongest in her flesh.

Many more hours passed until she started to feel a negligible decrease. 

Moving became easier, the breaks could be taken further apart. 

Snow vanished and the surface turned into short, bright grass and there were leaves on sparse trees she passed.

Every forty or seventy kilometres the messenger inflated and expanded a tent around her and let the silence lull her to short sleep.

The hours became days, although there was no way of telling precisely, since the day above in the base reality was getting slower and the daylight has changed its color as much as few hours.

Also hunger and all pain in the joints and muscles subsided — only the urgency to move remained, to traverse as much terrain/distance as possible.

Then all the electronics the bike was equipped died, together with the companion drone’s chassis and Averkije Skila had to board the bicycle and share its tiny substrate infrastructure with Ziller’s construct, the only technology working.

The whole expedition was irrefutably inside the active interface.

Very soon the microscopic particles of several substrate styles caught on the bike while manipulating with/packing the constructs back in Komárom started to bloom into diamond or flower shapes, making the bike heavier, more difficult to operate.

The brakes started giving in and the bike became not enough, however cargo and heavy duty it was built. 

She could not proceed alone.

Ainei Aniemi (*2024 - †2079) was the first construct the messenger contacted and unpacked from the cargo space. She used to be a vehicular architect/designer.

She assembled herself a body and helped the messenger build a four-wheel cart. Simple at first, for two bodies, cargo and the first renderable items that had to be packed/carried.

Ziller and Averkije had more space, but evidently learned and worked together to help with building simple machinery and sensors, rendering parts out of any available matter basically, any lump of soil.

They gained speed and the messenger quietly enjoyed the ride, because not able to talk yet, her body in the process of restructuring/transmuting into substrate of the active interface, too.

Not much later, however, Ainei suggested they need a better driver to go even faster, so the messenger contacted/woke up a former pilot Syandre Lotvi (*2052 - †2081). He became the third member of the crew and took over the wheel, because handle bars were not useful anymore.

Ainei Aniemi with Syandre iterated the vehicle every twenty hours, tweaking the frame, brakes, wheels, the cabin or the cargo space. 

The speed they were able to reach now! One hundred became three hundred klicks per day, but that was the safe limit — even with heavily versioned downhil vehicle the terrain was too difficult. 

The vehicle needed a better surface, but there were no roads — so after a mutual discussion, approved by the messenger, the crew invited the fourth person into the interface reality — a construct of a trail builder called Popol (*2029 - †2073).

His chosen assembled body shape still resembled a human, as agreed in the team contract, but adjusted for sculpting and heavy lifting.

He asked the small crew to stop, to break the descent.

So they built a camp, where Popol started assembling a storm cloud and huge dog/deer/bear creatures. They roamed and practised around the camp, a few dozens in the end — Ainei, Syandre with the messenger helping Popol to keep them organized.

After all were properly set, the creatures rushed away through untouched forests below, dragging the storm cloud behind, its torrential rain washing away trees and rocks, with thick layers of soil and leaves, and further clearing the corridor trampled by those quadrupedal creatures.

When the camp quiteted, the crew redesigned the downhill vehicle, so it could rush without undue braking down the gigantic slope.

Imagine them, in a cramped, but extremely cozy cabin of a vehicle continuosly reconstructed.

Syandre at the controls, the messenger next to the pilot and Ainei Aniemi behind, with all the other constructs, databanks and cargo. In the back, Popol with his huge trunk and hands, navigating the stomping creatures, via sensors Averkije Skila and Ziller operated. 

After seventen thousand kilometres, the forest biome turned into even, grassy terrain and the track faded, ended.

No sign of the dog/deer/bear creatures either, only the parked storm cloud.

The light outside in base reality of Tribeč mountains, eternally high above, turned to late afternoon glow by then.

Down on, the terrain consisted of ever so wider wave of ridges and valleys. The vehicle utilized their walls for braking, jumping or generally navigating and changing lanes when useful or neccessary.

These were beautiful and scary times, the messenger told me later. 

It should have taken approximately ninety to ninety five days to reach the lowest point of the terrain bowl in the mountains of Tribeč. Assuming you're moving for twenty hours per day, at a speed of four hundred kilometers per hour.

But after one hundred and twenty days (2 900 hours), the expedition arrived nowhere near the bottom and it became clear that the ride down the slope is not going to take seven hundred thousand kilometres. Not even nine hundred.

Ziller the rector and Averkije Skila both announced that more like thirty million, based on their current/possible measurements. Maybe even fifty million kilometres more. 

Another ten or fifteen years of traveling, if the crew kept jumping and riding down around the same subsonic speed, with breaks once a day or week.

The messenger’s food supplies didn’t worry her, even though calculated for two hundred days only — she could already eat and digest the active interface mass.

It was whether to stop eating them for good and lose the last remnants of human or any biology — which implied Miller could assert a legal claim to participate in how to proceed.

The messenger knew they needed some ideas what to do and Ziller’s made sense, she just did not trust him nor his offers to help. 

In the end it was Popol and Averkije, who persuaded her to give Miller a chance at the wheel. To come up with a plan. Both.

Thus Miller the rector left the vehicle infrastructure and its sensors and moved into a body, finally a person, the only one with all the details of real skin and his chest rising and falling as if breathing.

He rendered a guy around fifty, bald and tall, in loose dark pants and shirt. 

He proposed to wake all the constructs still dormant and assemble them into various teams for a design sprint, a timeboxed and taskboxed process to define a problem, design and test a prototype — with her visiting each group and deciding at important points.

The sprint took forty two hours and brought following findings and learnings:

• The crew needed some kind of drive, faster than the pull of gravity could provide,
• they might be able to build jet/propulsion engine, but were not able to create fuel in sufficient quantities,
• the local physical laws enabled sound to travel almost four times faster than in the base reality, 
• so the most promising idea of the design sprint turned out to be utilizing sound frequencies, 
• since there was methodology and process and precedence by the players the Glass Bead Game,
• to activate and move and even restructure the interface bedrock with audio,
• to force the interface bedrock to react and produce low end frequency bursts the vehicle could absorb as a sail catches the wind.

The success metrics:

• Reaching up to five thousand kilometres per hour, 
• traveling forty thousand kilometers per day,
• sustainably for thirty or even fifty million kilometres, if needed.

I did not take part in the design sprint — was woken up and offered a form only after the decision and project kick off.

So when the downhill vehicle was about to become a mountain I poured into a body. 

As if something in some distance could suddenly be discerned, my thoughts appeared. At first only a sensation, of going from one place to another. 

When I could open my eyes the room seemed as big as a hall, but it was me who was tiny.

Mostly I just slept, feeling the gravity through my small skeleton and what felt/worked like muscles, gaining mass.

Inbetween slumber I recalled there was no other immediate expectation or a task to perform, only to get used to my body and the self image within.

To keep that self-image stable.

I was left alone for the first few days.

Until the messenger started sending me shapes and written notes — testing my coherence perhaps — and she must have been satisified, because asked if she may visit my coupé, the small space where I left the core case with substrate mass running me and poured into a body, a small one at first, like a child.

I agreed and that’s when I saw her for the first time, crawling into my safe space.

She said, welcome on board, Mira Melko. I’m Diziet Sma. Would you like to go for a walk?

I nodded, gave her my hand and she took me up on the roof. 

I remember I perceived no sharp distinction between foreground and background in those first moments outside, the mega landscape was not a backdrop, and everything that happened was a part of the scenery.

If you’d paid attention as I did, it still seemed like a small dimple in relief we were descending and I asked to play there on the top of the vehicle for a while, reluctant to talk and Dizi did not push me either.

Then I asked her to bring me back into my space and let me sleep, but promise to take me for a walk the next day, too.

Every time I woke up we walked a bit further to the back of the vehicle and watch Ainei Aniemi and her constructors there, extracting slabs of landscape/interface and turn it into frame components, remodelling the vehicle into a many times larger entity.

They collaborated with a multicouple of vocateurs calling themselves The Hysteron Proteron Crew.

They were installing sonic projectors, acoustic radiators and covering huge openings with surfaces that moved back and forth in response to signals from the crew members, creating air pressure changes that produced sound waves and tones.

I grew fond of the sound system builders, and insisted that I wanted, no, I needed to stay outside, to listen to the vehicle making sound and wait for the answer of landscape when it arrives and Dizi agreed, seemed almost happy and took me all the way up the hull, covered by soft, long hair carpet material here.

Together with a few of ancillaries, she helped me to create a cosy nook with a view, like a nest embedded in the ground.

I remember when I was left alone out there, some sounds lulling me to sleep and others trigerring tingles and sweet shivers, the flight-or-fight reflex and what being in the womb might be like at the same time.

The bass, so instantly and obviously physical.

I remember waiting for the phase culmination, when the lowest frequencies washed over the landscape, then falling asleep.

The next time I woke up I asked Dizi if I could have a pen and paper.

So I started to write, but not to get things down or out in some mark of finality but to think through ideas first.

The pen helped me, compelled lucidity, as it has always done. 

As it helped you, dear Mira.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, that was almost too much to bear for you.

You were preoccupied with absence, the value of things left behind. You dedicated so much energy to creating a record of you and what life was to you. 

Contributing one more layer, like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world.

Is that who I am?

An accessory, a frame of reference, an external memory?

Maybe at first, but you have always liked stories within stories, doublings and self referencing. 

I feel I need to take this story as seriously as I can.

I spend most of the time in my priehlbinka, hidden in the soft surface and I listen to the beats and waves trying to wake the landscape and I write. 

It is very difficult for me to weave a linear, readable text. For hours I struggle to describe a single idea or scene I see the first seven minutes after I wake up, until utter exhaustion.

But that is the only way I can concentrate and write something down. Even though I know it shortens my lifespan. My service life.

I write and raise my head once in a while, to watch the bottom area, still millions of kilometers further down and it feels like the best time of your life again.

Reflection

Nejaký text…

Chapter 2: The Quiet Room

Druhý testovací text…