Garbotalk: Have you represented the Callibration Society on other worlds? If so, what was the outcome? If not, how were you chosen to represent them for this assignment? You’ve said how you decided on us (the monk’s thread). How did they decide on you?

Reptiliandude: This is tempting…

I have been with the Society for quite some time.

And I’ve accomplished a few things…

But since few know that I’m here or who I am through this Wall of Reeds, I’d rather not tip my hand if you don’t mind.

As for my introduction to the Society, permit me to set the scene…

Imagine that you’re someone whose entire life has been dedicated to higher mathematics.

Insomuch, that fractals are your protractors, and your workspace a multidimensional fortress.

At considerable cost, you are given the task of plotting out a rather complicated course through several star systems including an inexplicable journey around two systems containing neutron stars.

You’ve done the math, and checked your numbers and you run your equations through the system.

Remember, these are your numbers…

As the course is plotting, out of nowhere, in your secure, proprietary system, you read a directive in the details…

Curiously, you adjust for this peculiarity and discover that unwittingly, your calculations have provided the missing pieces to a cryptic message placed into the data like a note in a bottle cast into the sea of time-space.

I was told that the calibrator who discovered it just kept on running the sequence over and over until he was interrupted by another who asked him what he was smiling at.

He only said one word, “Sublime.”

That’s the best translation into English, I can come up with anyways.

Of course, that wasn’t what our generals had to say when the Society made an impromptu visit to my world to meet the little white dragon who had managed to get close enough to scratch at their door.

What I had done was technically a “criminal offense.”

Although calibrator’s are from different species, you could probably best understand them if I referred to them as creatures who are committed to something akin to your H+ or transhumanist movement.

They are quite literally priests of mathematics, which they consider the language of a living universe.

They are the finest mathematical minds every Ael species and every Ael world has to offer and they are augmented to the point where they are surrounded by an entirely different reality than what you or I would be accustomed to.

Their universe is fractals of data bubbling forth from a singularity that cannot be seen save through the mind itself.

They don’t just “examine” a blade of grass, they fall through the genes all the way down through the subatomic strata, till they locate its closest cousin in real time on another world, or its inverted alter running alongside this one.

They answer directly to the Assembly in a mathematical language that is beyond the comprehension of those who are not augmented to speak it.

So, to be able to slip a note to one of them is considered a very, very, big deal.

And, when they arrive in numbers on a world unannounced, it usually portends something horrible, as in a type of embargo, or withdrawal of standardized time.

The matronly calibrator who met me had earned many “eyes” and many “rings.”

She was quite kind and understanding, but also quite insistent that due to the circumstances, I would be leaving with them.

When I explained that I was not a mathematician, she simply said, “I know. It was sloppy, and contained an unforgivable amount of errors. But, we’ll keep that amongst ourselves. Suffice it to say, it served your purpose. I trust you’ve already gathered your things?”

I fell in love with her immediately.

The secret message took me three years to make, and its entirety looped in under a minute.

On the way there, she sat next to me and gave me quite the compliment.

She looked at me and said, “You know… In the history of the Society, not one creature has ever thought to use the signatures of gas giants as cellos.

Or, for that matter, compelled our proprietary navigational software into using layered trajectories and vectors to model three dimensional language characters…

You went through quite a bit of trouble to escape your golden cage. I hope you don’t come to regret your decision.”

Whenever I feel regret, I remember her words, and that had I not made that decision, I would not have evolved as I have.

///Revised translation/// “Cellos” and “software” are approximations*