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Ami Black P. Katt's Page A Teleport too far! London, England 8 May 2000'By Ami Black P. Katt A while back my sister, Amber (that is, Amberzine P., but we usually call her Amber, 'cause she looks like one of those big lumps of amber embedded with Jurassic flies carrying dinosaur blood in their guts) and I were fooling around in the stc [space, time continuum, Ed.] gathering material for our memoirs when something went wrong and she didn't rejoin me in this era. She probably messed up something in figuring out the FitzGerald-Lorentz contractions. I know it wasn't my fault but she will probably claim it was when she gets back to now, or here, or whatever. I miss her and would even own up that it was my fault if she would just come back. The thing is that she thinks she is such a great mathematician and I keep telling her that means nothing if you don't get the right answer because you messed up the arithmetic. I remember Bertie's [Albert Einstein's, Ed.] cat telling us how she divided by zero and it came out that the Universe (the local one, that is) would expand forever instead of being as flat as a board as everybody knows -- now. But I digress. I should tell you that I handle the transport (at least the teleportation part of it, a kind of motor pool sergeant, like Bilko ) and Amber does the time side of our travels. Not just the clock work so we know when we are, but she can actually move us to and fro in time, back to the time of the dinosaurs, or ahead to the Colonial Wars on Beta Centauri Prime. The trouble is since everything about is moving around you have to compute when you want to be as well as where you want to be there. For example, if you move six months ahead you will wind up with London on the other side of the Sun from where it (and you) were when you started. And, of course, London and the rest of Earth have been dragged along with the Sun on its way around the Galaxy, and the Galaxy has moved with respect to the local group and the (local) Universe has expanded somewhat... and so on and on. The calculations are very complicated and prone to error, so Amber has taken to using Computer Aided Time Travel (She calls it CATT. and I call that vanity, 'cause our last name is Katt, spelled with a K of course), using a program she wrote herself. She uses BOGC's (Big Ole Grey Cat's, Ed) computer, which she learned to manipulate almost as soon as we went to live with Bogcie and Marma (short for Marmalade) to run her CATT program. Auntie Truffle, who actually placed us with Bogcie and Marma, taught her how to time travel, and taught me to teleport, but Amber discovered how to get into the computer and get out onto the Internet for herself. She has tried to explain about the CPU and the registers, arithmetic processing unit and the logic gates and all that stuff but all I could take in is that by nudging certain tiny bunches of electrons in certain directions while keyboard is doing input you can make the computer think somebody is typing whatever you want it to think. Voila, you have it under your control. Electrons are very small and easy to nudge, even in fairly sizable bunches. Amber found that by building up a store of them in two small patches of hair just above her eyes (looks like normal grooming to me) and setting them up to oscillate (bounce back and forth in unison) she could use her whiskers as aerials to focus an electric field onto just the right area of the CPU to type in anything she wants. She says Ernie's [Ernest Schrödinger's, Ed] cat taught her do it just before she died, or didn't die. Anyway, it took her weeks to teach me how to do it too. Thank goodness we succeeded before this latest misadventure, else I should have really no way to even try to regain contact with her. That is why I am putting this story on the Web. Maybe Amber will pick it up whenever she is, work out a way to get me a message, and we can work together on joining up again. I am also sending her email to her website (amberzine.co.uk). There is even a chance that someone else will have a solution or something I could try. If you do, you can contact me by using the Amber Search Form.
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