Amirhan desert mission, day 334
Since it is a Saturday, in the morning I was preparing to take a day off the work, and have a cleaning day, like every Saturday. Neither of us felt like doing anything special for our mission anniversary, and we figured some routine would do some good, with the mission getting messed up with Ndali and Enembe in different time line (which we have now concluded - if they were here, they would have been back by now) and no way to neither communicate with them nor get to them.
This, however, turned out to be an even weirder Saturday than I was expecting. I decided to bake bread this morning, since it has been a while since I last baked, and to be honest I did feel like doing something nice for Ismen and me. It was Ismen that noticed something weird first. When the microwave oven beeped to signal the bread was ready, he was there first. Only he discovered there was nothing in the oven. I discovered the same thing coming into the kitchen about half a minute after he had started scratching his head over the bread that was not there. We pondered over it for a moment, but there didn't seem to be much to do about it. It was Amirhan. This was not quite Amirhan's usual kind of weird, but it was also not quite as unusual weird as the other resent events. So we decided to clean up the hub, attempt our best to go check the solar panels and get some more sap from the mata'ir, and after all that was to be done today bake another bread, to reward ourselves for a good day's job.
Since getting something to drink was a priority for us, we got to work on that first. It did not take us long, when we put our minds to it, to come up with a solution to our problem. The ground is still covered with the ice that could not be ice, so what we did was tie a rope (that we luckily had in the hub instead of having to figure out how to get to the barn first) around Ismen, who then carefully sat outside, on the slippery ground. I then gave him a push in the right direction, not hard enough for him to hurt himself when he hit something, since that would be the only way from him to stop aside from being jerked to a stop by the rope we had tied right next to the hub door. It took a few tries (and was quite a lot of fun, which is not a thing I write down lightly, since it is not important), but I finally managed to push him in exactly the correct direction to hit the mata'ir. It was also lucky most of our canisters were in the hub instead of stored in the barn, where we often store the empty ones out of the way. So in about an hour we got tall the canisters full again. I was nervous before we got to the mata'ir it may have finally frozen over, it has been below freezing for over a week now, but it seems my worries about it freezing are pointless.
We filled the canisters, cleaned the solar panels and the hub. From the two of us it took most of the day.
We found a bread in the microwave oven when we began to prepare dinner. Not the bread I had baked, though Ismen tried to argue with me about it. But it did not look like a bread I would bake. It was clearly too raw in places and burned in others. When we cut into the bread (which we first argued about doing. If it was not my bread, it must have come from nowhere, in which case it may not be safe to eat it. We soon agreed, though, that cutting does not require eating, and that cutting it might give us more information about it. However, we did the initial cutting carefully), we found a note inside it. This whole separate time lines thing was weird as it is, but with that note it got even weirder. The note was from Enebe, Ndali and the Ismen with them. They said a bread, my bread, had appeared in their microwave this morning. They had even known it was my bread, had recognized it from the taste and texture. They thought they would try out baking a bread of their own, to see if it disappeared and appeared in our oven. Their alternative hypotheses were that the bread did not exist, or that someone not a part of our mission had come in and baked the bread. The microwave oven working as a means of communication between the time lines seemed far fetched, but why not try, if there was a non-zero probability of it working, which there should not have been. This, again, is weird even for Amirhan, although I can see a certain recognizable amirhaninan logic under it all.
We baked another bread, to see if we can send a message back, to explain our situation. A much smaller bread, this time, since we had not had the new supplies from town as the others had in their time line. We were due a supply run in a few days, and we did not know if we could make it. We could not waste our baking supplies. Either way, the bread did disappear the moment it was supposed to be done. We are in wonder and have no idea how this is working. We do not even know, in fact, whether the message inside the bread and the bread itself were from Ndali and Enembe, or if the desert is playing its tricks on us. It would not be the first time, though it would be the first time on a scale like this.
For the last thing about today I do want to turn my thoughts to our mission for a moment. We have been out here for a year now. We came out here to make sense of how Amirhan worked, how the weirdness, the desert and the things living here interact and affect each other. We came to study the Floating Rocks, the Parallel Streams and other seemingly unnatural structures and places here, the flora and fauna, how to grow things here that didn't grow here naturally and see how they are affected by this place. After a year here, trying to understand the logic of how this place functions, I have become certain that everything that grows here, that lives here for long enough a time, will be affected, and will never be the same, even if they some time left. I have learned to see Amirhan's logic in the world, even though I can not put it into words, or numbers. I have also learned that what seemed unnatural when we first came here, is in fact not unnatural. All of it, even if it is not natural to the rest of the world, is as natural as anything can be to the Amirhan, more natural even than the things we have learned to see as natural in the rest of the world.
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Your topic for tomorrow is Flash.
~matu
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