Krakk & victim

The Beijing Olympic Games 2008 is only a month away. I had not heard of any new mascot coming up in the news or market. Could Lu make it on time?

Probably not. Unless he had found the beads... No, not the beads. How can any beads save China rural robotics industry? Gradually I became aware that the whole incident of Lu’s visit was an accident. A joke by accident. A happenstance.

Instead of beads, there was news that terrorists would strike before and during the Games. The military police and secret agents were taking precautions to prevent it. So that was why I got the midnight phone call, I guess. But I hadn't do anything... except the essay. Yes, an essay was enough to run up the expenditure on a suspect. Public security was a sufficient excuse.

The essay came from one of the batches of downloads. You see, owing to the needs of my job, I always need to download articles from the internet. Of course I needed to keep track of the sources. But sometimes the quantity was so big that I was lost in the texting cloud.

I always try to give tags to the source sites, but then they had no structure. Before long I was myself in tag clouds. No kidding. I used special terms like ‘me’, ‘木仔仔’, and ‘hade’ -- the final one came to mean ‘had e’ where ‘e’ could be everything from email to ‘electromise/r’.

Some tags I couldn’t even remember. I thought I can, but not.

Then one of these essays was linked to some unknown but authority source in a certain circle. This dramatis personae with the codename Krakk came to attack me; at worst it could become a powerful cracker, evil at times and demonic for most of the times, turning my webpage into a melting email image, asked why I intruded upon his/her territory. I did not know what I had done to irritate this fellow. Finally I apologized for something I might have done.

Then I learned that it was a joke. I was victimized, being a jokee. I was angry and turned the certain essay in to the police. From then on the essay became a medium in pulling the trigger among the joker/ devil, police and me.

The midnight call was probably the latest alert.

all the strange things before earthquake

I woke up in the morning with a headache. I took some pills and a day off. After breakfast I thought I could do something about my writing and the sequence of strange events. So I started to keep a close eye on my laptop.

Then related events came in.

Somewhere the animals were nervous, either running or, quite the opposite, remaining still. Birds flying at high speed. Dogs barking continuously at some invisible beings. Rooster got itself on the top of scrub. Tigers timid? And the flies as well as mosquitoes disappeared to nowhere, just like bees. Snake awoke in mid of hibernation, and was frozen to death in snow. Cats walked away and disappeared as usual, only for a longer time. But rats were intimidated, waiting to be caught. Fishes ashore.

There was strange noise from underground, with the sky appeared curious colors.

Yeah, one more thing to go before earthquake can be announced -- dry and hot weather.

But monitoring weather was hard for me. My headache came back. I took a nap, ending up with a sleep. When I woke up, I was conscious of something to be happened. I checked the news.

No? Maybe not yet. I waited.

Expectation engaged the threading, and I wanted it to grow powerful. I was waiting for my probable quantum psycho-supernormality to effectuate, making it happen, if ever I could do so.

It was until days later that earthquake stroke near where I was staying, New Zealand. It was nearly 6 by Richter magnitude. It could have caused a lot of damage, but the quake was a hundred kilometers deep down, in result nothing particular happened on earth surface.

Maybe there were some drastic reactions down there.

quantum psychology takes shape

x x x x

I woke up cold at midnight. A tiny light was flashing in my room. It was my notebook. I opened the lid and found a message come in. Just a glance before sleeping on.

A pair of small meteorites measuring less than a kilo in diameter were approaching Earth. Well, it was still more than a quarter of million kilos away. Scientists are observing them closely, just in case they might run off-track and hit us, then we are all doomed.

When would this probable doomsday news be broadcast to common folks? Did they worry about it may arouse the-end-of-the-world melancholia? Few days later, maybe.

And how?

Just as I was going to bed, the voice-over-IP was ringing. I seldom got calls at this time of the night.

‘Hello?’ I answered.

‘Don’t involve yourself with the underground anymore.’ A low and stern voice said.

‘I did? No, I haven’t got involved...’

‘Listen, Lu is insane. And he has contact with terrorists.’

‘Who are you?’

‘You don’t need to know if you don’t know. Take my words.’ Then he hung up.

What a strange call. As I was lying on bed, Lu began to appear in my mind again. I began to relate some strange things happened these days. If the quantum psychology is right, that when you have threaded yourself into a line of correlated events from the mind, which is strong enough to merge into some kind of string, superstring, then you would live that line of history on. Judging from the things and events I recently encountered, I may have that quantum string happening to me.

Yes, I suspected so.

But mere suspicion was unable to convince myself. I had to see more. I am conscious that I am expecting something, and every morning when I wake up, I will consciously make my coming day.

Gaia again, this time as an underworld tribe... moving the tectonic plates?!

From the earthquakes happened so far this year, it reminded me that it was predicted a year of frequent earthquakes. From earthquake to chaos, it seemed the Greeks had it: Gaia, in Greek
mythology, was the daughter of Chaos.

I couldn’t help but plot that an underworld tribe bears the name Gaia. No, again it’s not my original idea. There were so many people who had used the name. This time, I used it for a tribe which has dealt with the crustal chaos for so long that they can... move the tectonic plates?

Wow, if they can, then what gigantic, immense power they have !

What about the theoretical plausibility? ...Well, fluid dynamics. The lava, the liquid metal belongs to fluid. If water is powerful, then imagine lava at least a thousand times more powerful than water. The body of mantle drives the seven major and other small tectonic plates. Gaia can move them because... they live with the plates for millions of years and have developed related technology. Even if they can’t move them, they know well enough about the chaos of the plates -- just like watching a sphere of boiling water, that they can avoid the disastrous impact.

If the Gaia tribe messes with us, we are pissed. So, don’t mess with Gaia.

While Lu might not be searching for the beads anymore, I still was. I don’t know the causal relationship; it doesn’t matter whether the future me told Lu who in turn told me. I was thinking about the lotus beads, no ,lotus seeds. And my infant robot in relation to lotus.

I’m not a buddhist just as my kid sister is. But I always like lotus. It was my wish to use the very flora of spiritual ‘superterran’ to associate with a cold, metallic, mechanical robot. Extremes are brought together to contrast, to cross-flow the mind and the body.

The soul and the physical.

I was content in working with this dichotomy.

Papa is the mother, and mama is Papa ?

Where was Lu?

I tried to reach him by phone, but to no avail. He did leave an email account. I waited after sending a message written in Chinese to him. No, half day had passed but still no reply. He couldn’t access to his email in some rural landscape newly shaped by earthquake, I guessed.

The last resort was a postal address. Are there any people who still write a letter nowadays? As the final resort I wrote one.

Writing still worked. After a week or so I got a call from someone who claimed to be Lu’s family. She told me Lu once called home, but left no correspondence hint as to where to find me again. She said she would tell Lu what I said in my letter if he called home again.

From then on I rang up Lu’s family once in a while to find out what was going on with him. Sometimes it was answered, sometimes not. The same answer was that Lu was still searching. Yes, I could assume Lu heard of my advice. If he went on, it was his business. Gradually I forgot the man.

It was special about Maori god Ruaumoko among natural myths of volcano and earthquake. He is not an animal, but rather, a personified entity. I figured him to be one of the underworld population, a wanderer suffering from chronic, if not forever, nostalgia which was described as a loss of feeding from Papa, mother earth. His rage rebuked the terrestrial ever on.

What an interesting invert. The mother is called ‘papa’ which in many cultures means the father? And Maori gods are nearly all male. Papa is the mother and mama is papa. Where have all the other goddesses gone?

Presumably in other subterranean locales. Just thought of them as another tribe, another world. Underworld.

earthquake and myths

When I had time to do more research, the fact stunned me -- New Zealand has earthquake everyday !

Every year there are around 14000 quakes, 1.6 times hourly. Many are not to be felt. What would have occurred with this frequency? It has been going on for such a long time that it is possible a large quake would strike. Actually it is predicted to happen within fifty years.

I couldn’t escape from earthquake, could I?

Many races have mythology of earthquake, usually about an animal which causes it. Here, the Maori myth says Ruaumoko, the god of volcanoes and quakes, was at rage when his mother dropped him into subterran when she was bending down to breast-feed him. Rage becomes eruption and earthquake. What a pity.

Beads. Crystal, polished gems. Seeds.

Seek the seeds.

Is Lu really searching for those beads, by chance meeting a lotus or two? I realized what I had suggested to the poor man, a Herculean task. Along the cracks on earth, those forced out by immense tectonic force... I needed to call Lu so that he might want to stop searching. At least I have done something to make him rethink whether he should seek the beads in this way or not.

quake quake there, Sichuan, and quake quake here, NZ

‘I’d better hurry.’ Lu said and left a contact address.

I watched him leave, thinking of seeking the beads myself. But I should be busy; I was going to New Zealand. I would try to stay in touch with him. It helped my writing.
x x x x

I didn’t know New Zealand has earthquake. I thought it is safe. But no, there were quakes. The worst one ever recorded was the 1931, grading as 7.8 . And for volcanoes, the Auckland region is active.

Sichuan came to my mind. Quake quake there, quake quake here. A fantasy curled in my thought: what if the earthquakes are related to each other?

I checked and found that there are seven major tectonic plates on Earth. New Zealand seems caught in the subduction zone and spreading zone of the Pacific Plate and Australian Plate. The area affected is mainly South Island where I was staying.

Had anyone used seismological wave to transmit message? What if in a way the tectonic plates know about each other’s activities? Not just touch, but the information, culminated for millions of years and have already reached an equilibrium state so that when vibration gets rough, the others know.

But they were not humans nor creatures, even when... Then suddenly the underworld stroke me. Creature living under the crust, perhaps in the cracks or underground landscape such as a lake? They have to know about the quakes because it endangers their home, their lives, their all !

If the underworld was long enough, they should have the related technology about quakes. What a rich history that would be. They are seismologists everyone.

Yes, but that was only my imagination. The underworld.

The last thing I thought of was the beads Lu mentioned. They were from the underworld.