Tease Olive Journey to the Llama's Joke

All dates mentioned in this article (4017) by prof. Enn Moratamba are Universal Time Standard unless otherwise stated.

The 4 Horsemen 2115-2172 were a quartet of viruses (two that were biologically conventional and two hideously malignant software viruses) that on their own should and could have been managed, contained and destroyed individually without the excessive loss of life that occurred. The 4 Horsemen came to prominence, however, in the second and third decades of the 22nd Century CE at a time when the social, political and economic infrastructures of the entire planet were dominated by The Conglomeracies. While these ultra-wealthy and supremely-powerful organisations depended on a zero tolerance of any threat to their trade networks, they frequently broke their own rules and created the transportation conditions that led to The Horsemen mixing into a lethal cocktail.

The Horsemen were the making of the United Nations. The pandemic was getting into its stride when it became obvious that an off-world exodus was the only way to save what was recognised then as The Human Race. The Assembly was given the mandate to break the power of the Conglomeracies and to organise and lead the Diaspora as the exodus came to be known into space. The success of the exodus was in the main due to an innovative form of space-drive known simply as the Ngine that was unveiled in 2094 by the Brandon Conglomerate. When hostilities ceased at the end of The Conglomeracy War, Brandon traded in the patent for their space-drive for the organisation's continued existence in a slimmed down version and a change of name to Mandess. (This, as the article explains, was a misjudgement that would in due course kill more people than The Horsemen.)

The short term effect of The 4 Horsemen was twofold: the pandemic killed 95% of the global population and succeeded in driving some 600 million men, women and children into space. The long term effect that The Horsemen had on TO social behaviour is limited to our Tease Olive obsession with inoculations against all known viruses. This is nothing compared to the effect that the Arvrasindahl had on Tease Olive behaviour. It is one thing to admit that in a continuum as large as space there has to be a probability for the existence of another, albeit alien, sentient species. The discoveries in 2166 of the first 'tear' and in 2171 of the empty but operable space ships nearby that the media quickly dubbed Flat World platforms on account of their immense dimensions, brought this largely private admission into public reality. There was a huge collective sigh of relief once it was determined that the builders of the gargantuan space vessels had been extinct for more than 200 millennia.

The exploration of space beyond our own star system did not occur for another 27 years. During that period approximately quarter of a million automated probes were sent through the Saturn 'tear'. Less than a thousand returned. They were, however, enough for the massed ranks of physicists and mathmeticians to theorise how to navigate through it. The year 2192 saw the first 'manned' probe return through the 'tear' and from then on the rate of exploration and colonisation of habitable planets was exponential.
Although empty the FW platforms yielded up a bounty of largely indecipherable (at the time) archival material. The builders who, by virtue of being 'extinct' long before any of the extant races journeyed into space, have never been identified, are known as Flat Worlders, had documented their own knowledge. Thus, before we ventured through the Saturn 'tear' we knew a little of the existence of the YOMA, the Ferranti, the Akkaidiiz, and the Molnabei. There were also entries in a labyrinthine code for FW experiments with Flauvain bio-chemicals. But all these records were older than our oldest civilisations so it was deemed unlikely that we would ever meet any of them.

Over the next 100 years our knowledge of the continuum of space grew rapidly. Ten planets were colonised over the next 50 years and a further 40 over the next five decades. The alliance of Terran peoples under the control of the UN was, by the middle of the 23rd Century CE, beginning to fragment at an alarming rate.

It was in 2254 that the UN Council of Members metamorphosed almost overnight from a democratic body of government that supported free market economies into the Space Federation Council (SFC) an authoritative body with a central command council (CCC) and a command economy. The command economy was only made possible by the emergence of Jonti and the Challis Dynasty from the wilderness (2431) and the Challis offer to provide Izezentil at minimal cost per megatonne. This was in light of events two hundred years in the future a wise move, although at the time almost 30% of the population of SFC rebelled against the decision.

Exploration continued unabated. There were many astonishing discoveries that indicated that the space-faring species of the past possessed qualities that we could not match. The foremost was the ability to control and manipulate energy budgets beyond our imaginations. The earliest examples of our experience were the 'maze cities' which are found on all the TO colonised planets and also on planets that could never have and will never support life-forms.

They are, on the habitable planets, little more than ruins. But on Jonti there survives an almost intact example that has served as the Challis estate since the planet was first colonised. There is just one entrance to the Challis Estate, up a 200m wide flight of steps that is fully 50m above ground level at the top. The maze is indented into each of the twelve levels, each 50 metres high, which decrease in area till the summit is gained. None of the usual debris that can be associated with city ruins have ever been found on Jonti's levels. It is either a work of art or a play park. But if the maze cities stupefied TO sensibilities, the stars of the Spiral and those known as The Veil have left us permanently dazed and dazzled.

Quite what either the Established Churches or CCC thought would happen when we met another sentient race for the first time is, judging by the reaction of both, open to question. On Christmas Day, 2299, First Contact occurred when five SFC Naval vessels entering a 'tear' homebound met six unknown vessels of an alien design coming out of the same 'tear'. All eleven vessels suffered serious damage and by the time that SFC Navy had sorted themselves out the Admiral discovered that he had lost a ship but gained an alien one. The alien corpses' physiology was frighteningly similar to ours. In fact the scientific academies were adamant that the aliens and ourselves were from the same genetic tree. They were taller and had developed a lighter skeleton (a result we were to learn from the lower gravity of their homeworld). This shocked the Established Churches which had long argued that we were the 'chosen children' of God. The aspect that shocked everyone else was that this very 'human' race was technologically far in advance of us. The exploration and claiming of new systems in the name of the Commonwealth of SFC ground to a halt.

In fact much like tortoises withdrawing their heads into the safety of their carapaces when facing danger, our society withdrew into the safety of the known worlds. The Period of Introspection lasted for almost 150 years. It had begun with our first Contact with another sentient race and it ended with the Second. By then CCC had discovered that the alien humanoids of First Contact, the Arvrasindahls (as they called themselves) were reacting to the meeting in the way that ostriches bury their heads in the sand. CCC began to gather a delegation to open a formal diplomatic dialogue in 2448. However, on the Glorious First of June 2447, a fourteen strong mining fleet of armed FW platforms belonging to the Diarmid-Perez clan was ambushed and almost annihilated by just one small but totally alien vessel. The sole surviving Diarmid-Perez platform limped out of a tear into Arvrasindahl space where the pursuing alien vessel succumbed to the attentions of an automated guard vessel. The CCC with alacrity accepted the Arvrasindahl suggestion of an alliance with them (and subsequently with their allies the Dzunoeskei) against this common foe, the predatory Akkaidiiz.

The Akkaidiiz are a race that seem to possess neither the sense of compassion nor the ability to forget. They are also, despite strong denials by both Church and Government - our relatives, for they too belong to same tree as the Arvrasindahl and ourselves. The Alliance was effective till the last decades of the millennia. By then the Alliance's shield against expansionist forays by the Akkaidiiz was almost complete. The cost was hugely expensive to the Alliance in terms of the materiel and personnel needed to maintain the multi-layered defence strategy. While the shield was a deterrent against Akkaidiizic intrusions into the Alliance's regions of space, it seemed to be having no effect whatsoever on their desire to expand their territory. I dare say that there will always be Akkaidiiz in some forgotten corner of the great unknown still trying to expand their sphere of influence.

While it could be argued that alliance and acquaintanceships with the Arvresindahl and the Dzunoeskei had improved our knowledge of the extinct and the extant space-faring races, the unanswered questions were beginning to pile up. Why and how, for example, had The Flat Worlders committed mass suicide on a scale that defied belief? Why had the YOMA who possessed the ability to control vast budgets of energy left absolutely no trace of themselves anywhere but for the 'maze cities', the Spiral Stars and the The Veil? They seemed to be the most artistic because their global and star system transformations and galactic movements resulted in creations that had no meaning just sheer beauty coupled with a statement of sheer power.

The youngest of these three were the Flat Worlders from whose living environments, the complexity of the controls and the size of their machinery (in a control room with just one sling / couch it is necessary for twelve adult TOs to manipulate the controls) and their art seem to indicate that they were a race of exoskeletal beings with multiple whip-like limbs. The living races were ourselves, the Arvrasindahl, the Dzunoeskei, the Akkaidiiz, the stellar su'do', and possibly the most enigmatic of the lot, the legendary Molnabei.

The Dzunoeskei are the smallest of the arvra (1.47m is very tall for them), the most fecund and the most actively inquisitive. They work hard, they play hard, and they are the dearest of friends and the most appalling enemies. They are pugnacious, fearless and numerous. It should be of interest to those attempting to unravel, to decode, the complexities of eidetic memory that the Akkaidiiz have absolutely no memories of their smallest relations. This is plainly impossible. I would venture that confrontations with the Dzunoeskei proved to be so frequently negative that the Ke guardians of the Akkaidiiz eidetic memory, censored out the information.

Once a race has begun to travel through the tears, and record as a matter of course the background noises of space, elemental patterns begin to emerge. In this manner every species reaching out into space begins to collect trace signals of the oldest extant race, the suhdoh. A young Communications officer spent the decade of the 2150s transposing the background noises of space into a musical composition. Imre Sergei Melnikov initially composed the work as a panegyr of Regina Imperator Britannica and given the title of 'The Royal Hunt of the Sun' unaware that a drama script of the same name existed from the 20th Century. The sequence that denotes the barking of the hunting hounds has earned the composition officially known as Melnikov's 2nd Symphony, the soubriquet of The Su'Do'Symphony. The background noises that Melnikov took to be irrelevant were, as we now know, a key sequence in the 'Formal Greeting and Welcome to Existence from Twilight to Morning Star'. (N.B! Morning Star is a 'split' of the su'do' TGR2. TGR2 was to befriend Manitoba. Manitoba was to lay the fearful ghosts of the bio-chemical Flauvain to rest).

Brandon, you may remember was the Conglomerate which gave its Ngine patent to the UN in return for immunity from prosecution. Brandon's Board of Directors was never able to shake off old habits. The right time to reveal that their claim to have invented the Ngine propulsion system was false, passed during the period of the Diaspora. The Board should have divulged that they had, way back in 2094, purchased a space wreck for $200 million from a Chinese mining crew, returning from a Mars mission, out to make a fast buck without Beijing knowing. The wreck was the drive section of a Flat World platform complete with workshops and research laboratories taken from a storage park of thirty three vessels. Brandon bought both the wreck and the park location and arranged for the Chinese crew to disappear into the unknown. Brandon lost a lot of its lustre in 2171 on the discovery by Carl Perez (of the family whose fleet was to be destroyed at the Second Contact), of a second storage park brimful with FW platforms. There were nine hundred and sixty-three of them. Brandon had never revealed that in the laboratories of their original platform was a complete study for a FW devised experiment concerning bio-chemical Flauvains. It apparently took Brandon just 50 years to decipher the codes and to translate the study into Anglish but a further 150 years to recreate the experiment and a further 200 years to develop the 'product'. The risks were very high. The potential rewards justified every expense and the maintenace of secrecy was paramount. Brandon's Board set up a secret facility on the the smaller of the two planets in the twin system that was known in TO terms as H-K-M. There were sound business reasons for doing so: H-K-M was, depending on the viewpoint, the pinnacle of free-market systems or the cess-pit. Dirty money and criminals flowed into and out of H-K-M without investigation. Although possessing few natural resources the colony managed to be the biggest producer of manufactured goods on account of it's immense and very cheap labour force. The combined populations of a polyglot of the alliance races on H-K-M were estimated in the census of 2500 to be close to 200 billion. The prototype vessel was called 'BrandonNM515'. This was shortened to Nemesis.

Nemesis was a new type of command and communication module incorporated into an FW platform. It should be remembered that, to date, none of the Arvrasindahl related species, all of whom use the platforms, have ever managed to prise open the drive compartment of a FW platform. We still do not know the mechanics or the fuel used. Nemesis began 'live' trials in 2575. On April 1st 2579 Nemesis, it is believed, exited from a 'tear' inside the larger star of H-K-M's binary. There were, fortunately, sufficient former employees who had retired to other colonies to point the finger of blame at Brandon and the experimental command and communication module for the catastrophe. At precisely 2579.4.1.16.12.24 the twin stars and the fourteen planets, moons and satellites of H-K-M flared into the brilliance of a super-nova and winked out of existence.

The UN Council of Members which became the Space Federation Council and the Central Command Council (the Praesidium) and then the Commonwealth Central Council, a change in name in a bid to gain popularity (as the authoritaive style of government was wearing thin) all shared the problem of finding a solution to the most divisive factor in the unity of the SFC colonies: The siting of the Government. The decade that SFC was persuaded to locate on New America almost caused a civil war. The colonies accepted the need to subsidise a centralised government that managed disputes, decided on foreign policies and controlled the armed forces. They did not however want a return to the pre-Diaspora era when one race sought to dominate and impose its way of life on all the others. SFC solved the argument by hopping from one colony to another. This wasn't an entirely satisfactory solution. The Central Command Council and the five hundred plus affiliated agencies (the number always increases) operated from a fleet of five FW 15 series platforms. The impracticality of this solution was revealed when the five platforms became separated during a 'jump' through a 'tear'. It took the five platforms almost two years to reform. The obvious answer was for the Government to have a platform big enough to accommodate all the organisations that were critical to its existence.

CCC began to seek a platform bigger than the 15 series. The largest platform known to the Alliance is Xertius. This immense (there is no word to aptly describe its size) twenty-one thousand one hundred and sixty kilometre long platform, that defies any supposition for its original purpose, is in the possession of the Arvrasindahl. Since the obliteration of their home-planet they use Xertius as their home-world. Ferksei and Dzantzei, in the possession of the Dzunoeskei, are of equal size to each other and both smaller than Xertius by the relatively small measurement of fifty-four kilometres. This small difference in length was however longer than the largest platforms, a dozen 36 series, in SFC possession. This did not sit well with CCC. A search was launched with the aim of seeking out the existence of any platform that was larger. This search did not go unnoticed and caused a good deal of consternation among the owners and the nomadic clans, especially those among the mining communities who were the most numerous owners of the size of platform CCC was seeking. There were indeed about a hundred platforms in excess of 50km, a handful longer than 200km and two that were 700 series. Their owners did not want to have their homes compulsorily expropriated by Central Government. As a result either their dimensions considerably shrank or they were deemed too costly to renovate by richly bribed auditors. CCC was beginning to suspect it was at the centre of a vast conspiracy of subterfuge when an unlikely and unsourced rumour suggested that one of the minor thorns in the side of CCC wanted to return to their spriritual home. The Tibetans.

There were during the Diaspora a few minor arguments that remained unsettled. One of these was the continuing refusal by the people of Tibet to recognise the dominion of centralised government of any colour, shape or form that did not in turn recognise their spiritual needs. Nevertheless the UNO Mandate permitted access to the Diaspora to any group wishing to join regardless of colour, ethnicity or belief. Some 300,000 Tibetans did so. When UN CoM shared out the contents of the park of platforms the Tibetans were given sole possession of a 1.5 series. When that platform 'jumped' through the Saturn 'tear' there was little expectation that it or the Tibetans would ever be seen again. They had now plainly reappeared but no one quite knew where.

When the Alliance was agreed in 2447, CCC had introduced the Rules of Expropriation under the guise of the Platform Tax. SFC needed platforms for the armed forces. Owners had the choice of paying an extortionate level of regular tax to keep possession or they could hand the platforms over for temporary use by CCC for the duration of the expected conflict. Once the threat posed by the Akkaidiiz was fully understood both taxes and platforms flowed into CCC control. Those organisations that did not 'play the game' were faced with military enforcement that was usually effective. There was, however, one platform that through a policy of passive resistance avoided both the paying of the Platform Tax or the compliance with the Expropriation Rules. This was a uniquely tubular 9000 series platform that moved sedately through SFC domain at a steady but fluctuating 22km per second plus or minus ten per cent. There had never been any communication with it and any attempt at Expropriation was rendered meaningless by the sheer mass of the platform at that velocity and the lateral spin of its outer casing. It was as Expropriation teams explained quite possible to match velocities but how did one effect access to an airtight lock on a housing that was moving revolving at 60 revolutions per minute plus or minus fifty per cent? The failure of the Expropriation teams determined the official belief that since the teams could not gain access, no one had, which meant that the platform was quite literally ghosting through space.

The moment that I.E.I. stated that through their investigations they had learnt that the Tibetans were aboard the 9000 series, CCC blasted the platform with communication signals. The elicited response was singular, brief, to the point and quite unequivocal. Free, safe passage home to the Himalayas on Earth, on a non-CCC platform was required in return for which the 9000 series would be parked at a given location to be Expropriated in the 'condition in which it was found, is and always will be'. Four years later CCC accepted that the wording would not be altered and accepted the conditions. The location chosen for the Expropriation was Cygnet VII a planet protected by the Hamrilcar Protocol whose inhabitants were willing to trade basic raw materials for technological knowledge.

There are two remarkable aspects to the habitat compartments on this unique 9000 series. Where the Expropriation teams expected to find the usual 200 metre high compartmented levels, they found just the one compartment and just the one level. They found a mountainous landscape filling three quarters of the habitat from the stern end towering over a hot, but humid, wetlands at the bow end. The creation of a bio-sphere within a platform had long been a dream of platform owners which the Tibetans had somehow realised. The second remarkable aspect was a severe shock which has had an enduring effect. Try as they might the Expropriation teams could not find the means to control the temperatures at either end. The highly productive wetlands were a permament ninety degrees Celsius while the airflows at the other end never rose above minus sixty Celsius. CCC is the only known government that operates in a permafrost.

"The condition in which it was found, is and always will be."
Wise heads on the CCC have prevailed in their argument that any attempt to force the Tibetans, in particular the Dalai Lama, to reveal the whereabouts of the Platform's Temperature Control System would be extremely divisive. The finding of a name for this remarkable platform was a Gordian Knot which no amount of dialogue between CCC and the colonies seemed able to solve. During one of these interminable consultation sessions, being recorded live and unedited for local broadcast, an unnamed Executive of the Upper Tier forgot to switch off his microphone when he turned to make a comment to a colleague:
"The Dalai Lama wrote the conditional clause. We signed it. We know the Dalai Lama knows ... how to operate the temperature control; the Dalai Lama knows we know. We're huffing and puffing, the Lama's all but laughing out loud. We should call it the Lama's Joke."
The colonials loved it and the name stuck.
The source of the name Tease Olive in reference to us is almost certainly the Arvasindahl. After First Contact, we had generally accepted that a change in name was due. We could not be "The Human Race" when another humanoid race existed. The ultimate choice, almost as convoluted a process as choosing the name for CCC's 9000 series FW platform, was to revert to a Latin-language based toponym - 'Terran' meaning 'from Terra' or 'from earth'. Sometime around during the sixth decade of the 25th Century, some eight to ten years after we joined in alliance with the Arvrasindahl, the phrase 'tease olives' began to appear in translated documents when the Arvrasindahl were referring to us Terrans. The initial feeling of indignation at the perceived affront, the standard frock coat/shirt of CCC personnel was an olive hue, was only mitigated by the programmers who had developed the translation software and the growing understanding of the Arvrasindahl and their language.
The programmers had used the generally accepted and more widely used standard programming language Old English in their word-processor as opposed to the phoneticism of Anglish - the common communication tool of SFC. The phrase 'tease olives' comes from the sound sequence: tiizolivz and could just as easily have been spelt 'tees olives'.
'Arvrasindahl' in the language of that race means 'the people (sindahl) of the tree (arvra)'. This was so close to the tree-like concept of geneology that we never developed another name for them. Indeed in due time we have, as they are the older species, taken to distinguishing ourselves as Terran Arvra as opposed to the even older race the Dzunoesk Arvra. The Dzunoeskei, interestingly means the 'the people from the sky', openly admit that they could not care less what they are called so long as they are not called enemies.
The Arvrasindahl, by contrast, had developed a name for us. They referred to us as 'the ones who lived on the fourth planet of *.*' (which denotes a complex set of symbols locating Earth's sun in the Milky Way). This sentence in their language does not easily convert into an easily remembered and apt acronym. The breakthrough apparently came when a pair of translators, one from each race, were doodling on touch screens. The Terran translator wrote 'the people who live on the fourth planet of Earths' sun' and then wrote 'Terrans are the people who came from Sol IV'.
Not really understanding the words sol and iv, the Arvrasindahl loved it because the acronym was, to their way of thinking and speaking absolutely perfect: 'T(errans are the people who came from) Sol IV = TSolIV = Tiizolivz.
Oh indeed! Wise Heads were again called upon to prevail over the Hot Heads in the Upper Tier of CCC. The colonials liked the tongue-in-cheek snideness of the name as much as they disliked the smug superiority of CCC personnel.