The Mechanical Minion

If you want to remember something one good way is to make a rhyme of it. One secret of the bards is that making a rhythm of it can work even better. It's why some primitive people have a strong oral tradition - in the beginning was the word and then the shaman syncopated it.

My computer problems hadn't made much sense to me, so I'd made a song to remember them by.


( Never Take a Computer Through a Dimensional Portal. )

The "portable" hadn't been doing any of that, though. It isn't really a single machine. There's quite a bulky unit that has some kind of interdimensional interface with the main machine - at least, it would have if it was working. The little laptop and the recorders slip in and out of their own cradles in the unit.

I was using the vocal recorder when we came through, and that's working. The rest of it has seemed dead since we got here. I'd checked it over, but nothing I'd done has even produced the blue-screen-of-that-was-not-a-good-idea.

So much of the machine seems dead that I'd guessed it was because the main computer was destroyed. Most of that was in the UK. It looks as though the Earth went where Sunnydale did - or evil won and it's all changed beyond belief. If that's happened there isn't a thing we can do about it, and it would be impossible to return.

I'd never want to forget what happened yesterday, and the details of even the best memories fade with time, so I unshipped the recorder to make my own personal record, firewalled against the universe. I left the whole unit out, afterwards, so of course Erynne started playing with it, and that led to us learning something that changed everything