Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 175: Cooper 56
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 346
Tommy threw together some hamburgers, frying them in a frying pan they had bought for the house and cooking some onions in the grease. She served them on sliced bread, and boiled a can of green beans on the side. She offered her fork and spoon to their guests, not having supplied the house with tableware.
“So,” Derek said as they sat at the table, “tell us about this world.”
Brian shook his head. “It’s kind of strange--I guess that’s relative, it’s certainly not as strange as Nagaworld. It’s the mid nineteen-fifties, most things are similar to--well, to my home world, at least. There are two glaring differences. We’re in a city called Berkeley, Colorado, which I think doesn’t exist in my world. But I think this must be a national park or forest or something there. I don’t think they have those here--someone we know just took a flight to Yellowstone City and back, and there’s no park there.”
Derek was nodding his head. “You said two things,” he said.
“Yes. This world has a lot of low-power superheroes--no one like Superman, apparently, but a lot of people who either have unusual abilities or have some device or object that gives them abilities. They also have supervillains. Tommy and I, for different reasons, have become superheroes in this world.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you have any special powers?”
“Are you kidding?” Tommy said. “He can change into a sprite and fly, and he’s got a lot of other psionic powers.”
Derek looked a bit embarrassed, and just said, “What she said.”
Vashti spoke up. “He undersells himself. He’s got incredible abilities. Why, just before we were here, the King of Kings chose him to be the protector of New Orleans in a battle against the devil.”
Brian nodded. He wasn’t really comfortable with either the notion that Derek used psionics or with the idea that he was in a battle against the devil to protect a city, but he would come back to that.
“So we frequently go out in our outfits fighting crime.”
“Wow. A crime-fighting superhero pastor,” Derek said.
“Oh--I’m not the pastor. I rent this place, in my secret identity. I also work part-time as their choir director, although my day job--Tommy’s, too--is working in the engineering department of a company trying to beat IBM to the first commercially viable computer. Do you know anything about computers?”
“Does he?” Tommy said. “I’m dying to see his laptop; I hear it’s centuries beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Do you think you could let the guy speak for himself?” Cooper said.
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” Tommy quieted herself.
“Well, three worlds back I taught a bunch of intelligent birds who had gotten as far as steam power and primitive electrical systems to build a Babbage engine. Sometime before that I served in the computer maintenance department of a huge space station, really a giant city in space, where the top of the line was biogenetic processors that used DNA for memory circuits and processing. While I was there I upgraded my laptop to a trinary system, but I have a trinary-to-binary converter in my stuff so I can interface with most more primitive systems.”
The kid said it so casually, and Brian was completely stunned. Most of those were unrealized ideas in his time, some of them thought to be just beyond current technology, some of them still classed as science fiction. He could learn so much from this kid. It was almost embarrassing.
“I can probably get you a job at Berkeley Business Systems,” he said, “--if that’s something you want.”
“I think it sounds better than my last two jobs,” Derek answered.
“Which were?”
“Protecting New Orleans from the Devil, and fighting in gladiator games.”
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 #519: Versers Congregate. 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:
