User:JohnB/Fanfiction/The Invaders

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by JohnB

"No subject better illustrates the divide between the two cultures--arts and sciences--than mathematics. To the outsider, mathematics is a strange, abstract world of horrendous technicality, full of weird symbols and complicated procedures, an impenetrable language and a black art. To the scientist, mathematics is the guarantor of precision and objectivity. It is also, astonishingly, the language of nature itself. No one who is closed off from mathematics can ever grasp the full significance of the natural order that is woven so deeply into the fabric of physical reality.

"Imagine a world in which the laws of physics were very different, possibly so different that discrete objects did not exist. Some of the mathematical operations that are computable in our world would not be so in this world... The equivalent of Turing machines might exist in this other world, but their structure and operation would be so completely different that it would be impossible for them to perform, say, basic arithmetic, though it may be able to perform computations in that world which computers in our world could never accomplish (such as solving Fermat's last theorem?)."

Paul Davies, The Mind of God, p. 93, 109.

"that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2." [Wikipedia]

It has since been proven.

"...Does time pass? Yet nothing that we can objectively measure in the world around us has proved that it does. There is no instrument that can record the flow of time, or measure its rate of passage. It is a common misconception that this is precisely the function of a clock. A clock, however, measures intervals of time, not the speed of time, the distinction being analogous to the difference between a rule and a speedometer. The objective world is spacetime, with all events, for all time, included. There is no present, no past, no future."

Paul Davies, Other Worlds, p. 46.

(This is based on The Twilight Zone episode of the same title that I saw on TV on January 27, 1961, with long-suffering Agnes Moorehead bashing and braining two little men who crash-land on her house. I was only seven years old at the time. It had such a profound effect on me that the next day I was still spooked.

In this story, the people from the Guild of Mages are speaking to each other in English, but in fact they are unable to communicate with the little men because they are really speaking Tamrielic.)

The Racket at Night:[edit]

Dura gra-Bol lay in bed having a very good sleep when it began. It started off small but gradually gained in magnitude as to be ear-piercing. Those of you who remember the teacher's squeaking chalk on the blackboard would recognize that sound immediately. But it was persistent as well as annoying. Dura woke and poked her fingers into her ears to try and shut it out, but it was all-pervasive. Then there was a hard thud on her roof, and a bit of plaster fell from the ceiling.

"Ye gods!" she exclaimed and grabbed her axe.

She waited, but nothing happened. She slowly made her way up to the roof where she found a saucer-like construct about the size of a round table parked on her roof. She approached to touch it, but a force field repelled her hand. A door in the lower part lowered like a ramp, and a six-inch tall person descended. As was the custom in Vvardenfell, Dura slept in the buff, so great was his astonishment at seeing a greenish Venus-de-Orc towering over him. He was wearing a space suit to protect him from the elements and made him look like miniature Michelin Man.

Dura was still annoyed at her disturbed sleep, so she kicked him against the ledge, from which he bounced and rolled like a hole-in-one into the open trapdoor. She looked down and found him as if knocked out on the floor. She quickly descended the ladder and put a basket over him and weighed it down with something heavy. Suddenly she felt a piercing pain in her shoulder and looked up to where a second little man had shot her with a burning-lazer gun. She shouted a four-letter word in Orcish and bounded up the ladder again. The second little man had retreated back into the saucer.

"I'll deal with later, you little runt!" she growled then descended locking trap door above her.

The following morning, she headed over to the Guild of Mages to inform them of a very interesting discovery she'd made. Everybody but the guild steward and the guild guide followed her back to her tower home and gathered around the basket. She removed the heavy weight and the basket, and there was the little man sitting cross-legged. He'd removed his helmet, and they gasped in astonishment.

The Intergalactic Language:[edit]

"A mini-Redguard!" Estirdalin exclaimed.

He stood up and backed away when Ajira tried to touch him.

"Don't do that!" Estirdalin told her. "They probably don't have people like us where he comes from. Somebody go fetch Wayn. It would help greatly is he was here."

Galbedir had to push her way through a crowd of people outside Dura's door. Dura wasn't the only one who heard the terrible noise, and word had spread that something amazing came from the sky and landed on Dura's tower.

Galbedir and Wayn pushed their way back into Dura's house.

"Well, I'll be a nix hound's uncle!" Wayn exclaimed to himself as he crouched to get a closer look at the man.

The two flashed broad smiles at each other. The little man raised his hand, and Wayn tapped it with his finger. They say music is the international language. Well, it seems the high-five is the intergalactic language.

The man motioned for them to wait as he activated a wrist-mounted walkie-talkie and presumably inform his fellow astronaut that all was well, and it was safe to come down.

The Spirit of Friendship:[edit]

The two little men were conveyed to the Mage Guild and treated to as much food and drink as they could handle. They'd been living on rationed space food for way too long, so they dug in.

Afterward, the mini-Redguard motioned that he wanted to write, so a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal were brought to him. He then got down on his hands and knees and sketched what looked like a pinwheel with two shapeless blobs nearby. Then he pointed to the X mark on the edge of the pinwheel and made a second sketch of a star surrounded by nine concentric circles. He made an X mark on the third circle. He then pointed at the X mark on the blob and then pointed to the ground. Then he pointed at the X mark on the circle, pointed at himself and his fellow, and pointed at the sky.

"What is he trying to say?" somebody asked.

The benighted people of Tamriel had no idea how their cosmos might look from the outside, but he seemed to be saying that he and his fellow were from somewhere extremely far away in the sky, 160,000 light years away, to be exact. One would think that it would take 160,000 years for an earthling traveling at the speed of light to reach the Magellanic Cloud, but that is actually not so. Our sun is 93 million miles from Earth, and it takes eight minutes for its light to reach Earth. However, a spaceship traveling at 99.9% the speed of light would have to travel only 4 million miles, and it would take only 22 seconds. I know this sounds outrageous, but that's what Relativity is all about. The downside is the spaceship gains mass that requires an astronomical amount of energy to propel (E=mc2, see Paul Davies, Other Worlds: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 40-41), but don't ask me how the Earthlings accomplished this feat.

Furthermore, the Earthlings departed with the understanding that they would return to Earth some time in the 41st century to report their findings to their distant descendants. This is because, traveling 100 mph less than the speed of light, they would be observed from Earth traveling 1,800 times slower than Earth time. At 1 mph less than the speed of light, they would be observed traveling at a hyper-sluggish rate of 18,000 times slower than Earth time (ibid.).

However, surpassing the speed of light, if it were at all possible (and it isn't), would have unexpected consequences:

"There was a young lady named Bright

Whose speed was far faster than light;

She set out one day

In a relative way

And returned on the previous night."

(Anonymous Limerick in Punch magazine, 1923, and quoted by Davies [p. 43].)

Suffice it to say that our own understanding of the universe is also still in its infancy.

The Milky Way galaxy can't be seen from Vvardenfell just as the Lesser Magellanic Cloud can't be seen from our northern hemisphere. Thus, while the specifics were impossible to communicate on the one hand and grasp on the other, one thing was clear, that the people of Tamriel were not alone in the universe.

(Note: I confirmed how the Milky Way would appear from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud using the "Celestia" astronomical program. I traveled to the LMC and turned around to look at the Milky Way. I found myself looking vertically at a large pinwheel, not horizontally as we see it from Earth. It was much larger than the Andromeda Galaxy but not as large as I had anticipated. It could easily be visible only from the southern hemisphere of Nirn.)

As time passed, the one little man who wasn't being feted was doing maintenance work on the saucer while the other entertained the crowd with all manner of Earthlore. Redguards from far and wide came to see the mini-Redguard from beyond the stars. They tried teaching each other words for common things in their own languages, which the visitors duly noted in their notebook computers.

The Mathematical Revolution in Tamriel:[edit]

One person brought an abacus in order to slide the beads in each register and say the Tamrielic number it represented. The other little man, a Japanese, was amazed that the abacus resembled what he'd used in elementary school, but when he showed off the speed calculation he'd been taught, he could see they thought he was merely playing with the beads like an ignorant savage. He took a stick of charcoal and translated the beads into numerals, assigning a "zero" to each empty register then showing how the same calculations could be done on paper.

The people of Tamriel had symbols very much like Roman numerals, which were cumbersome to calculate with. And if that wasn't bad enough, the Tamrielic system of counting was very similar to the Chinese-based system. Our basic three-digit system of 100s, 10s, and 1s are replaced by a four-digit system of 1000s, 100s, 10s, and 1s, so the number 123,456,789 would be written 1,2345,6789 and read as 1 "oku", 2 thousand 3 hundred forty-five "man", 6 thousand 7 hundred eighty-nine. He showed that the three-digit system was a far sight more efficient for calculating on paper.

The people of Balmora were thunderstruck at seeing how easy it was, and they immediately made a gloss of Tamrielic numerals and their Earth equivalents. Some immediately set to work memorizing the new numerals and even tried their hand at simple addition and subtraction on paper referring to the abacus to check their accuracy.

"I Look Up When I Walk":[edit]

One day, the mini-Japanese returned from his maintenance shift with his acoustic guitar and serenaded them with the "Sukiyaki" song. He had to go through several encores because the melody caught fire, and everybody wanted to hum along with the catchy tune. As they hummed along, he thought "Why not?" and began teaching them the Japanese words so they could all sing together. If you turn off the theme music of the game, Morrowind becomes a joyless wasteland of no music. Some people own lutes that they never play, and the girls in the House of Earthly Delights shimmy presumably to music in their heads. Balmora now had a number-one hit, and one enterprising minstrel transcribed and published the song in Tamrielic notation and the words translated from the mini-Japanese's gestures and sketches. It sold and spread like wildfire, and Vvardenfell was singing again.

Master Cyreril Learns a few Things:[edit]

News of the two visitors from beyond the stars finally reached Ald'ruhn, and the famous astronomer, Master Cyreril, traveled by Mage Guild transport to Balmora. He brought a large chart of the heavens that he had made himself in the form of a scroll. None of the constellations were recognizable to the two little men because of the shift of 160,000 light years from their customary vantage point. All the stars we can see from Earth are in the Milky Way. It follows that all the stars than can be seen from Nirn are in the Lesser Megellanic Cloud. However, with close inspection they were finally able to locate the Andromeda Galaxy. One little man made a gesture of enlarging, and the other made a sketch on paper of a pinwheel, which is how it would look if magnified. Master Cyreril was perplexed what this was supposed to mean.

One of the little men then pointed out to the other that the convex window panes would be very useful to illustrate this. The panes were convex to magnify light in a room. The little men had two window panes removed and set up vertically on two tables and parallel to each other on the town square in front of the guild. Their gestures seemed to indicate Cyreril should look through both panes at the Balmora temple in the distance. The image was blurred, so people helped adjust the distance between the tables this way and that until Cyreril could see a fairly clear image of the temple upside down but much closer. Cyreril was fascinated as they made a sketch of a working telescope that he could make himself by grinding the lenses and fitting them onto an adjustable tube. Thus the progress of astronomy in Tamriel was advanced by several hundred years.

Time to Take Leave:[edit]

The saucer was eventually back in mint condition, and as much as the people of Balmora wished they would stay, the two indicated that now was the time for them to leave. Everybody wanted to contribute to their food and drink supplies, but there was far more food than would ever fit into the saucer. The two men went from one dish to the next to make sure that a bit was taken from each, and nobody felt their contribution was rejected. Everything was packed into containers and loaded onto the saucer. Then with crowds of people watching on the streets and rooftops, the saucer lifted off for the return trip to the Milky Way.

Everyone returned home singing the "Sukiyaki" song in unison:

"Happiness lies beyond the clouds.

Happiness lies above the sky."

They were grateful that some of it was left on Nirn.