From the article archive
World A Week: Menlo Park
I woke in a different world after my attack of rapid onset bubonic plague. The scent of the sea, and the 'gee-yaw' followed by a shaking of chains told me much before I even opened my eyes. I was in a seaport, and horse-drawn carriages were nearby. Fearfully, I opened my eyes to see a gentleman leaning on his ornamental cane to look down at me.
"Good evening, young man." He said with a smooth bass rumble, and a sweet Southern accent.
I got up, and saw that the man had gathered my stuff into a pile for easier toting.
"I apologize for accidental snooping, but on the back of one of your books it says copyright 2100." The gentleman said with restrained curiousity. I nodded, and prepared to move off with my stuff.
"It is a very long story."
Politely, he accepted my non-explanation, and then he called to me as I walked away.
"There is a 'billboard' on the outskirts of town that you might want to look at."
I nodded respectfully and gratefully back at him. We were united in the bond of Southernness. Then I went to check out this billboard.
A very large billboard on the outskirts of Savannah overlooked the main and probably only two-lane highway. If you could call a winding, gravel road a highway.
An outline of the Glass City and Umak Tek from Naga World rested in the top left hand corner. A golden teardrop constantly fell in the top right hand corner. It looked like 'scriff', the extradimensional substance that makes us versers.
Below that ran a text in twenty-two different languages and seven different alphabets including two that I had never seen.
"Worldwalker, verser, multi-dimensional traveller, gateopenener, or whatever you choose to call yourself, if you are of good will then we welcome you to Menlo Park as an honoured guest. The Park is a place where you can learn and teach in peace and prosperity with no let on your leaving. Welcome."
The message repeated in Nordic runes, and Spanish, Latin, Galactic pictograms, Mandarin, and Dar Koni. Those were the languages that I could easily read.
I walked back into town thoughtfully. True it could be a trap for versers, but it is profoundly challenging to restrain a verser. And with no false modesty, I was tougher than most versers, and so this looked like a job for, ah, never mind.
Buying a Model T(black of course) took most of my stock of pieces of eight. The trip North did not take twenty hours as I wound along the coastal highway. No, it took about two weeks. I got up to fifty miles per hour a few times on a downhill slope.
The world seemed fantastically prosperous compared to my memories of another 1934 in which the Great Depression had swallowed the world's greatest economy. A buoyant and generous attitude prevailed. This was the first American High, and an unprecedented event in the history of the world. Most of the people in America were getting more food than they needed, and even becoming moderately set-up in a decent situation.
Furthermore, Lenin never took his train ride. The democratic Kerensky government that Lenin had overthrown in most worlds that had a Czar that I knew of stood strong in Russia. The "war guilt" clause and the war debt had been nullified by the Americans and the British, and reluctantly the French had followed suit. Germany struggled, but it looked like it would slowly pull things together if only to keep up with the dynamic Russian economy.
I had a few adventures along the way with an attempted robbery, and a storm that I guestimated got the winds up to eighty miles per hour. In order not to get blown off the road; I parked the car, and tied the car front and back to the nearest trees. The storm was a surprise, but in a world without a National Weather Service you learn to watch the skies. I learned.
I arrived at this laboratory-campus where versers from all over time and space conspired to raise the tech bias, and make sure the indigs had a good life with lots of techno-fixes to smooth out their life. It was meddling on a vast and long-term scale.
The idea of raising the tech bias was working. They had documented proof that showed that a machine had not worked in 1915 and now it did without any change in the machine. This was fascinating stuff for a verser, anyways. They were literally changing the nature of a Universe. While I had done this on a small scale, this was a vast and permanent and rapid shift.
Already they had built and launched satellites, and the current goal was to make it possible to use personal computers and the Internet. There was some argument about how fast and far they wanted to push the world. One spooky guy wanted to make superhuman AI's possible because he claimed to have one in his head. He represented the far edge.
Menlo Park made its decisions in two ways. One, they had laws that gave the individual verser a great deal of autonomy. Second, they voted with verser's having a vote, and the local American government exercising a veto.
They did not go out of the way to explain what they were, but it was a kind of open secret. The only thing that was a total secret was verser lack of aging. You were encouraged to verse out after five years.
In that time, you served as a teacher. I taught Subversion of Tyrannies; Basic Miracles; and Coping with Superhumanity; and How to Run a RPG to classes that varied in size from one week to the next.
In return, I got an apartment, and a chance to take classes taught by others. My favorite was the Variations of Dim Mak. Some of the classes were purely book study. Flight by Anti-Graviton Control taught by Captain Gravity, Defender of Buffalo(NY that is) was impossible to enact in the bias level in the world.
Because of the lab, America was the sole superpower in the world. The economic bust called the Great Depression was known as the Recession of 1929 which was due to a few changes, and a masterful lack of action as the economy quickly righted itself with out the anchor of excessive taxation to drag it down into the Depression. No ninety percentile taxes on profits were enacted in this reality.
The British Empire bestrode the world, but it was an expensive proposition for their treasury. They were selling pieces of it off to the Americans simply as a means of affording the rest. But this went slowly since the economy of the world boomed along.
Tadeusz
"Good evening, young man." He said with a smooth bass rumble, and a sweet Southern accent.
I got up, and saw that the man had gathered my stuff into a pile for easier toting.
"I apologize for accidental snooping, but on the back of one of your books it says copyright 2100." The gentleman said with restrained curiousity. I nodded, and prepared to move off with my stuff.
"It is a very long story."
Politely, he accepted my non-explanation, and then he called to me as I walked away.
"There is a 'billboard' on the outskirts of town that you might want to look at."
I nodded respectfully and gratefully back at him. We were united in the bond of Southernness. Then I went to check out this billboard.
A very large billboard on the outskirts of Savannah overlooked the main and probably only two-lane highway. If you could call a winding, gravel road a highway.
An outline of the Glass City and Umak Tek from Naga World rested in the top left hand corner. A golden teardrop constantly fell in the top right hand corner. It looked like 'scriff', the extradimensional substance that makes us versers.
Below that ran a text in twenty-two different languages and seven different alphabets including two that I had never seen.
"Worldwalker, verser, multi-dimensional traveller, gateopenener, or whatever you choose to call yourself, if you are of good will then we welcome you to Menlo Park as an honoured guest. The Park is a place where you can learn and teach in peace and prosperity with no let on your leaving. Welcome."
The message repeated in Nordic runes, and Spanish, Latin, Galactic pictograms, Mandarin, and Dar Koni. Those were the languages that I could easily read.
I walked back into town thoughtfully. True it could be a trap for versers, but it is profoundly challenging to restrain a verser. And with no false modesty, I was tougher than most versers, and so this looked like a job for, ah, never mind.
Buying a Model T(black of course) took most of my stock of pieces of eight. The trip North did not take twenty hours as I wound along the coastal highway. No, it took about two weeks. I got up to fifty miles per hour a few times on a downhill slope.
The world seemed fantastically prosperous compared to my memories of another 1934 in which the Great Depression had swallowed the world's greatest economy. A buoyant and generous attitude prevailed. This was the first American High, and an unprecedented event in the history of the world. Most of the people in America were getting more food than they needed, and even becoming moderately set-up in a decent situation.
Furthermore, Lenin never took his train ride. The democratic Kerensky government that Lenin had overthrown in most worlds that had a Czar that I knew of stood strong in Russia. The "war guilt" clause and the war debt had been nullified by the Americans and the British, and reluctantly the French had followed suit. Germany struggled, but it looked like it would slowly pull things together if only to keep up with the dynamic Russian economy.
I had a few adventures along the way with an attempted robbery, and a storm that I guestimated got the winds up to eighty miles per hour. In order not to get blown off the road; I parked the car, and tied the car front and back to the nearest trees. The storm was a surprise, but in a world without a National Weather Service you learn to watch the skies. I learned.
I arrived at this laboratory-campus where versers from all over time and space conspired to raise the tech bias, and make sure the indigs had a good life with lots of techno-fixes to smooth out their life. It was meddling on a vast and long-term scale.
The idea of raising the tech bias was working. They had documented proof that showed that a machine had not worked in 1915 and now it did without any change in the machine. This was fascinating stuff for a verser, anyways. They were literally changing the nature of a Universe. While I had done this on a small scale, this was a vast and permanent and rapid shift.
Already they had built and launched satellites, and the current goal was to make it possible to use personal computers and the Internet. There was some argument about how fast and far they wanted to push the world. One spooky guy wanted to make superhuman AI's possible because he claimed to have one in his head. He represented the far edge.
Menlo Park made its decisions in two ways. One, they had laws that gave the individual verser a great deal of autonomy. Second, they voted with verser's having a vote, and the local American government exercising a veto.
They did not go out of the way to explain what they were, but it was a kind of open secret. The only thing that was a total secret was verser lack of aging. You were encouraged to verse out after five years.
In that time, you served as a teacher. I taught Subversion of Tyrannies; Basic Miracles; and Coping with Superhumanity; and How to Run a RPG to classes that varied in size from one week to the next.
In return, I got an apartment, and a chance to take classes taught by others. My favorite was the Variations of Dim Mak. Some of the classes were purely book study. Flight by Anti-Graviton Control taught by Captain Gravity, Defender of Buffalo(NY that is) was impossible to enact in the bias level in the world.
Because of the lab, America was the sole superpower in the world. The economic bust called the Great Depression was known as the Recession of 1929 which was due to a few changes, and a masterful lack of action as the economy quickly righted itself with out the anchor of excessive taxation to drag it down into the Depression. No ninety percentile taxes on profits were enacted in this reality.
The British Empire bestrode the world, but it was an expensive proposition for their treasury. They were selling pieces of it off to the Americans simply as a means of affording the rest. But this went slowly since the economy of the world boomed along.
Tadeusz
Recovered from the Gaming Outpost database backup. Original wording is preserved; damaged punctuation and presentation markup have been repaired. Historical links without a local match point to the Internet Archive.