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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 3: Cooper 1
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 282
Professor Brian Edwin Cooper stared at the giant bee in his classroom. It buzzed, and jumped, trying to communicate in dance a question about operating systems. Gently, he raised his right hand, and asked the bee floating above its seat in the lecture hall to start over again. Instead, it raced forward, grabbed him, and flew them both through the skylight. They reached higher and higher, and as the air thinned, Brian realized he should stop struggling. No way did he want to fall from this high up. Eagles were below him.
The bee dropped him on a path cut into the mountain side.
His eyes fluttering open, Professor Cooper realized he had been dreaming. The couple at Umak Tek had told him that when one passed from one universe to another, after the first, that bizarre dreams sometimes attended the phenomenon. Considering, to his relief, that no giant bee was floating above him trying to ask him questions about the Apple OS, he found that to be a point in their favor. On the downside, a giant bee looking to learn computer science would have been absolutely fascinating.
Looking about, he breathed in thin mountain air. To his right was an unguarded stone edge of a path and a near sheer drop down five hundred feet of granite. To his left five feet was a rising mountain wall. Carefully rising to his feet, he pulled up the walking stick hanging over the edge by a wrist strap. Looking about, he smiled as he saw green valleys far below him. Naga World had been extremely interesting, but there had been no mountains.
Farther out, he studied the mountains with a sense of rising joy. He had walked the Sierra Nevadas in his home California, but he had never been to his ancestral Germany with their fabled Alps. He recognized Matterhorn. Could he climb it? First, though, he had to retrieve his other stuff.
He considered the possibilities again. Back in California he had been fixing a student’s computer when it shorted. Waking up, he had seen orange grass, a scattering of broken vehicles, and a tall blond man. A whistling noise reached his ear, and the man was blown up along with part of the machine on which he had been working. Cooper had rushed over to him to see if he could help the man, but there had been no body, dead or alive. Later, he had been told at a strange plastic fortress named Umak Tek that ‘versers’ such as he ‘died’ and went to other universes.
He was still uncertain if this theory was true. The possibility of being in a virtual reality like Picard in the Star Trek Next Generation “Inner Light” episode remained–as did being isekai’d like in an anime. The possibility of him being a just-awakened AI in a simulated environment also existed. Still, being in a hospital having a most unlikely dream remained the most likely possibility. This, though, was his third world. Evidence was accumulating in favor of this ‘verser’ theory.
“In whatever case, I am in Sovereign Hands. Help me serve the best I can,” he prayed. Then relaxing, he began to walk down the mountain edge road toward the other items he sensed with the ‘scriff sense’ the couple at Umak Tek had told him of.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #498: Characters Restart. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
