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Draft2Digital
draft2digital
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: draft2digital
Pages: 130
Copyright: Feb 2026
ISBN-13: 9798233177316
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
The Rampagers were active light years before in a corner of the galaxy, their rampaging brought to a temporary halt by a global intelligence. The students' task, their research, is to bring together a few partially recovered recordings, already decoded and translated. The greater part of material available to them however is the book-like testimony, We Us Our, the singular publication of that global intelligence.
All the animals and humans are approximations.
It took a global intelligence to bring even a temporary halt to The Rampagers. Why would the creatures who comprised that global intelligence have allowed themselves to be driven from existence? Or opting for battle, use every cunning ploy and device at their disposal? We Us Our relates their resistance.
Excerpt
1) Presentation 1
Both actual and virtual I am here depicted in a college lecture hall, student seats rising before me. The students, both actual and virtual, sit or sprawl in various degrees of attention.
This day I am actual. As are let me count five of the students.
I can only surmise the actual listening presence of the five by the just about discernible increased density of their appearance. Hello.
Not that their being here or not matters. A matter of preference.
I could deliver this lecture as easily from my home study. I prefer though some colleagues view it as an eccentricity, which is no bad thing for any academic to come to the actual lecture theatre.
Doubt the students are any the wiser, the Dean had looked me virtually up and down. But then he is a cost-cutting proponent of the synthetic.
I can give all sorts of reasons for my coming here. Some of them just about educationally / eccentrically valid. Why I actually come is for the actual walk through the actual college grounds.
Although out-of-doors exercise is supposedly good for one's well-being, there is unfortunately an irritable edge to these walks through the college grounds. The uniform green and grass height of all the lawns for instance, the grass blades kept that height by the robot mowers.
In these lawns, pre-robot days, according to the season there used to be crocii and narcissi. Now those heralds of warmer days don't get a chance. Soon as they sprout they are mown flat.
So I try not to dwell on the carpet-like lawns. I raise my eyes to the trees. The trees are a Dean-battle won.
He had his lumber robots lopping every tree to its desired text-book shape. Such uniformity however does not exist in the natural world. No matter the tree's genus the soil in which it has grown, where it grows, what is growing near it, the amount of light and the quality of the nutrient it requires, all will affect its character. And character, I suspect, is what our Dean is lacking.
The unshaped trees now own their own individual character.
The trees are a battle won; and not due solely to my campaigning efforts. The expense allied to the unpredictability of the robot tree-loppers, their over-rigorous and unseasonable branch-cutting having killed one tree and reduced another to its trunk, had more than one faculty member aghast.
Regardless of the weather because even rain can be stimulating, its patterns enclosing one, silver drops glowing along and under gleaming black twigs I will arrive refreshed at the rostrum, take my place inside virtual me, my arrival having stimulated the activation of the students both virtual and this day the five actual; with those not attending fading away.
Always a few gaps this early in the course, student confusion over where to go, what's important to do, to be seen to do.
My semi-jocular preamble over I look slowly from the bottom to the top tier, and I begin...
This is an evidence-based presentation, everything recorded, so no need to take notes...
*
I say evidence as if that evidence is hard and fast fact. Most however is based on questionable testimony and archaeological assumptions.
The testimony is questionable because it has been decoded from solely digital sources into a supposed language which has been translated into one of ours. Leaving us with valid doubts over accurate nomenclature as well as appropriate syntactical delivery. How much meaning may have been lost we can only surmise. Likewise how our own view of the cosmos may have revalued the intention of its original authors.
First though let us look back at what members of our own academy believe they have found.
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