The Abbarran Imperium · the present, by Imperial reckoning, is 7094

Voices of Vaïma

The Journals — a section of Living in Vaïma, a world explored through its own materials.

Archivist's honesty. Vaïma has no LiveJournal. What it has are private journals — some later surrendered to the archive — notices printed in the sheets under one's own name, and letters folded into paper birds. This page imagines those journals opened and kept in one place. The entries below are composed for this site, in each writer's attested voice and circumstances; where a writer's real words survive, they are quoted and marked. Each entry's grounding is noted beneath it, including where the record runs out.

The Journals

Recent entries, newest first — kept in turns by six residents who would object, variously, to being shelved together.

Forc

@forc · Lower Vys · the only name she will answer to

7094 · Threesday · the western lip of Vys

I need components. Crystalline matrix cores, epsilon-wave filtration. If you are reading this to find me, you are reading it wrong.

The boundary between one field and the next is a clerical convenience. The boundary between one reality and the next is load-bearing. There is a difference, and the difference is the work.

Procurement has a file on me longer than I am tall. It says do not pursue indoors. It says do not let the subject near anything locked, anything carrying current, anything they would be sorry to lose. Field officers note this describes most of Vys. Correct.

Someone will say the Professor is helping me. He isn't. Ask him. He'll deny it at length, which is his way of filing paperwork.

“I'm not the chosen anything… I just want to see how it comes apart.”

Mood: working · Music: “How It Comes Apart” — her own · Security: none of your business

I categorically, comprehensively, and at whatever length the format permits deny extending any courtesy whatsoever to the young person above, whose whereabouts are entirely unknown to me and whose stabilisers, should any be missing from my inventory, have no doubt wandered off on their own recognisance. — Professor Theodolfus Birb, @the_eaves_dropper

Grounding: Composed from the Vaïmarium entry for Forc (Subject SK-17): her governed door at the western lip of Vys, the acquisition file's standing orders, Birb's denied decoys, and her component vocabulary from the Eaves scene. The blockquote is her attested reported speech. Her birth name is contested between sources (Serina / Selina Koltal) — the page follows her own ruling and does not use it.

His Excellency Dr. Professor Mr. Theodolfus Birb, MD, DDS, JD, PhD, Esquire, the Third

@the_eaves_dropper · The Eaves, Vys · “a specialized antiquities acquisition and distribution enterprise”

7094 · Twosday · from a perch of his own choosing

Yesterday's organizational paradigm has been TRANSCENDED! Digit wept. Doom approved, in basso profundo, through the wall. The inventory of The Eaves now obeys a system so advanced that only one imp in the Imperium can read it, and he has gone to lunch.

New acquisitions, for the discerning: three anomalies (Wastes, certified uncanny), one stabiliser (spoken for — do not ask), and a quantity of forbidden knowledge in the original wrapping. Prospective customers are reminded that I do not “do drugs,” my dear fellow — what a crude characterization! I temporarily reconfigure my neurochemical architecture to facilitate alternative cognitive frameworks. There is a distinction. There is a fee distinction.

“The fundamental problem with conventional science is its tedious insistence on reproducibility. The most interesting phenomena are, by their nature, shy — they occur once, magnificently, then never again in quite the same way. My colleagues call this 'poor experimental design.' I call it 'reality showing off its party tricks.'”

Being understood is far more dangerous than being hunted. Perch accordingly.

Mood: transcendent · Music: none — he is the music · Now: keynote, Conference on Theoretical Impossibilities (delivered remotely, post-ban)

Grounding: Composed from his Vaïmarium v23 entry: the Eaves and its euphemism, Doom the mech-piloting chihuahua, Digit the imp, his taxonomy of Wastes phenomena, and his 7087 keynote. The neurochemical line and the blockquote are his attested words, as is “Being understood is far more dangerous than being hunted.” His early biography is self-dictated and flagged in-corpus as possibly forged; the page asserts none of it.

Dr. Rhama

@the_notorious_raj · Dr. Professor Lady Rhama vo Aäoue Jarro jha Dünyazir · Duchess-in-Absentia of Sabast and Baseem

Undated · recovered post-displacement · her own hand, her own notation

The cast-and-kept literature is imprecise, and I decline to be imprecise in my own notebooks. A § is a process with an author and an end: cast, signed, terminated. A ∮ is a closed loop — maintained, authorless, still in circuit. The literature confuses them. The Empire confuses them professionally.

“We have been electrocuting frogs and concluding they dislike water.”

GODFALL is trying to reach across time with a §. You do not reach a person with a §. A person is a ∮. You reach them by staying in circuit — which the project cannot do, because the project has a budget line.

In the margin, where it belongs: Ivy is a ∮. That is the whole of it. I have been trying to write it as a § — leave the note, sign it, let it run, I'm sorry, terminus — and it will not sign…

Stay in circuit as long as there is a circuit.

Mood: exact · Notation: private, unpublished, unintended for you · Status: temporally indeterminate

Grounding: Adapted closely from the corpus's own journal artifact, From the Private Notebooks of Dr. Rhama (one page, undated, recovered post-displacement) — the §/∮ theory, the frog line, and the Ivy margin are hers, lightly arranged. The margin quotation above is hers and is cut mid-sentence, marked with an ellipsis; the source sentence continues. Her last recorded words, in the GODFALL extraction transcript, open with an apology to her daughter and close on a warning — it's not dead. It was never dead. It's just been waiting — and the Aurora still carries a standing transmission, unattributed in-source: TELL IVY I AM SORRY.

Ivy

@rjb_iv · Roburn Johan Berkmountain IV · to the Cadets: Saint Ivy, of the Orchids, of the Unfinished

7094 · Sixesday · Sabast, or not

Expelled twice in one day, which the Academy counts as a record and I count as a personal best. The kite was unlicensed. The lawn was theirs. The landing was mine.

For the record, and the record may keep it: I wept when the rain came down on the orchids. Not spite. Weather. A girl who has just learned to make rain cannot, in her first hour of it, be expected to choose where it falls.

“A little gloom improves the Sabast climate.”

This week: maps. Not of the town — of the shore. The striped sand. And rope, bought on the Mid-Span, in full view of everyone, because a Berkmountain buying rope is only news to people who have never needed to climb anything.

They are still waving my invented colour in the great houses, in deadly earnest, defending its antiquity. I dreamed it up on a dull Twosday. I shall never tell them. Consider this journal the telling.

Mood: gloriously off-course · Music: the Latch Song, against her will · Patron of: those who fail for being right

Grounding — read this one carefully: No journal, letter, or first-person document by Ivy exists in the corpus. Her attested direct speech is two reported fragments, one of which is the blockquote above. This entry is composed from the Cadets' Acta of Saint Ivy (hagiography layer: the kite, the orchids, the invented colour) and 7094 gossip-sheet reports (the shore maps, the rope) — her deeds, in a voice extrapolated from a single deadpan sentence. Treat it as the Cadets would: with love, and a footnote.

III

RJB III

@rjb_iii · Roburn Johan Berkmountain III · current patriarch, by default · the Faraways Club

7094 · Foursday · upriver-bound, on the Prospect

Passed under the bridge on Foursday, upriver-bound on the Prospect with a party, as the sheets will no doubt record — and took the opportunity, aboard, to recount how I came by the Sabastian sand-pearls. A remarkable acquisition. The pearls — well. There is a story to them, and the company heard it, and I flatter myself it bore the hearing. The galley staff will tell it at the third remove, and kindly.

The Club bar is stocked. The estate accounts are in competent order. My grandfather chained the Floating Isles; a man does not follow that with novelty. He follows it with stewardship, and with luncheon.

Of my daughter: she has declined the season entirely. Dismissed her chaperone. A father learns to read these reports the way one reads weather from another country — with interest, and no expectation of being consulted.

“He offered her lineage; she offered him genius.” A columnist wrote that — about us, about the marriage, in the Chronicle, in 7074. It was unfair to us both. I have kept the clipping.

Mood: impeccably tailored · Music: something previously discovered · Expeditions: well-catered

Grounding — the honest limit: No direct speech by RJB III survives anywhere in the corpus — no dialogue, no letters, no journal. He exists in society pages, gossip columns, and the dynasty entry: the sand-pearls anecdote (recorded at one table four times in six years — “The pearls do not change. The fellow does not change”), the Prospect sighting, Ivy's declined season, and the columnist's line he corrects above, which was written about his marriage, not by him. This entry is a pastiche of those reports, and is labelled as such.

Adam Mann

@a_regular_fella · near-Brokebridge, Kivarro · the light that's always on

7094 · most mendays · Ossey's, three tables back

Hello! It's me, Adam. A regular fella. This is my journal, which I am keeping in order to be a person who keeps a journal, which regular fellas do.

Today Ossey waved at me — deliberately, to bring the number up. She has waved eleven times, and now she does it on purpose. I keep the count. It is a very important count. I ordered a mead and held it for the whole evening. Ordering-a-thing-and-holding-it is ninety percent of belonging. I ran the numbers.

“I'm going to my human house now, to be horizontal and unconscious and completely defenceless for the next six to eight hours, which is the most human thing there is, and I have earned it.”

I do not sleep, on account of being retired. But I set two places at my table every night, in case of company, and I keep the light on, in case of anybody. If you are passing near-Brokebridge and the light is on, that is me. It is always me. Knock twice.

The choir is going well. I cannot sing, for structural reasons, but I stand in the right place and I hold the book the right way up. A man does his part.

Mood: cheerful · Music: “A Regular Human Man” — his own torch-song · Notices: NIGHT WORK UNDERTAKEN. Watching, minding, sitting-up-with. References cheerfully given and entirely unverifiable.

Grounding: Composed from his Vaïmarium entry and his own first-person scene, The Sixth Knife: the self-chosen name (his designation, Zero Nine, he crossed out himself), the waves counted at Ossey's, the mead, the two places set, the light always on, the choir he cannot sing in. The blockquote is his attested words. The notice in his meta line survives word-for-word in a superseded draft of his entry and in the variant-entries file — the layer is noted here because the fullest entry omits it. The spectacles are his; whether they carry an attached moustache is a genuine disagreement between sources, and the journal takes no position.

On this site, next

The other sections

Broadsheets — the front pages of the Empire: The Plinth of Kivarro, the Crossing Courant, the Culvëen Catch, and Errata, the corrigendum sheet that corrects them all after the fact.

Songs — the Resonance Cabinet's Vaïma: “How It Comes Apart,” “A Regular Human Man,” “A to Zero,” the Latch Song.

Letters & Paper Birds — the Paper Bird Postal System: the Swift, the Dove, the Hawk; the Great Mail Strike of 6970, when over ninety percent of the Empire's birds refused to deliver tax notices.

The Picture Palace — lumies: light projected into performance, early and Golden Age in register; Red Dust Redemption (7061), Callista Vorn, the Reality Theater in Vys's Lumie Quarter.

Ads & Notices — the small print of the sheets, where the Empire actually talks to itself.