The Perfect Scrambled Cyber-Eggs

You know, people often ask me, ‘Bruce, how do you maintain your Energy Levels while blasting around in the Flyknife Comics Mobile HQ, with your cool and handsome friends, breathing new life into old intellectual property and beating up the Cops?’ And my answer is always the same: “Eat laser, pig!” This is a common way for the cops to try to get your trade secrets. Don’t fall for it!

But it’s a fair question, and one that’s safe to answer here, since if cops read this site they get hit by the intrusion countermeasures, overloading their PC and anulling whatever marriage they may have. The answer is as simple as it is delicious- the humble egg! I eat a lot of eggs, because they’re delicious and good for you. They keep my hair silky smooth, my teeth white, my vision clear, and my digestion… well, turbulent, but that’s a story for another day. But I know what you’re thinking (obviously): where do you get all these eggs when the Binary Order has confiscated all birds? Surely you don’t eat monotreme eggs like some kind of monster! First of all, there are no monotremes endemic to Halifax_1, though if there were, I would eat their eggs in defiance of human, natural and maritime law. But no, I get my eggs from the same place I get all my food and pirated video games: I download them off the internet-

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–simple rule for staying alive in space, and it’s the same rule as everywhere else: don’t be there. To this end, I suggest the following: don’t go to space at all. There are many benefits to planetary life, including ready access to oxygen and liquid water, comestibles that haven’t been dehydrated or freeze-dried, and healthy bone density. Space is, on many axes, just not worth it. If, however, you are like the thousands of our fellows who have been seduced by the lure of space, but are not able to acquire a licensed starship, there are fallbacks available to you.

Following the traditional hierarchy, if you’ve failed at “don’t be there”, the next step is “don’t be seen.” Years of starship engineering has gone towards solving this problem. To understand the solution, though, we require a cursory understanding of how one is seen. Modern starship sensor suites incorporate a vast range of profiling tools, but two stand head and shoulders above the rest as the twin terrors of anyone trying not to die in space: LIDAR (LIght Detection and Ranging) and thermal imaging. If you are seen in space, it will almost certainly be one of these that-

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-e people get all fussy about downloaded eggs. They get all ‘ooh, affront to god’ and ‘wahh, not as nature intended’. Buddy, I wake up in the morning and spend dawn till dusk kicking critters made of raw, corrupted data back into the GRIDD. God and nature have both abandoned me. Now some people like to add milk to their scrambled eggs. I’m against it, but if you have to, make sure to download the milk separately-

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-the preferred pigment, owing to its almost supernatural ability to absorb light. Black-9 is available at most hardware stores and often comes in a mix with more traditional stealth paints, which will defeat RADAR as well (though these present their own problems). That takes care of LIDAR, as well as the ‘coat’ part of the ‘coat and cool’ strategy. On, then, to ‘cool’.

Space, as previously noted, is cold. The background temperature hovers at just a little below 3 degrees from absolute zero. Any amount of heat, let alone the amount of heat thrown off by a starship reactor, will stick out like a sore thumb. How, then, do we navigate this problem? The traditional method is to supercool the hull of your ship, bringing the exterior close enough to the background level that you are less likely to be seen. Most ships have these systems; the only ones that don’t are the ones so big that they wouldn’t help- like Tsar-class battleships, which eclipse so many light sources that trying to hide it is like trying to sneak a Saint Solace feast into a theater-

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-at’s not a scrambled egg, that’s carbonara. I don’t know what you think you’re doing-

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-resulting in catastrophic vacuum shock.

Now that we understand how a hull is cooled, we should at least touch on the two most popular configurations. The first and by far most common is the ‘smoker’ configuration. Picture a ship- any ship, the configuration is notoriously versatile- with an umbrella on one end that can be opened or closed, extended or retracted. When the smoker needs to hide, the umbrella is opened. The umbrella is then cooled while the ship’s helm ensures that the open umbrella is always between the ship and anyone who might be looking for it. Since the umbrella is designed to have enough circumference to completely obscure the ship, the enemy scanners will only be able to see the supercooled umbrella, which- painted with Black-9- will look like any other piece of space floating harmlessly through the void. Meanwhile, the warmed coolant is drawn back towards the main ship body and the heat is vented out the rear of the ship, away from the side facing the enemy. Hence, the name- ‘smoker’, owing to the ship’s resemblance to a cigarette smoldering at one end.

Less popular but still seen in specialized applications is the ‘steamer’-

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-do not like this, I do not support this, I will not use eggs for this purpose. No cop deserves eggs, least of all eggs that were acquired DRM-free from the very blogs these cops seek to shut down. I won’t even egg the Binary Order’s outposts. I’m not going to risk that they steal one of those eggs and fry them! Neither should you! Make like a real disobedient civilian and use rocks- rocks are everywhere, or so I’m told (Christian’s always going to the rock store, so I think they’re probably more expensive than eggs… maybe you can download rocks too? I should follow up on that).

Finally- and I can’t stress this enough- do NOT-

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-benefit being that it is not directional, unlike the smoker, which can easily be seen from behind its umbrella. However, steamers have been known to boil their crews alive if the venting system fails, so know the risks.

There are two other ways you can be seen, and both of them are somewhat out of your control. The first is that you may eclipse a light source and trip your enemy’s optical sensors. There is no easy way around this. It requires top-notch astrogation and a healthy dose of luck. Your best chance in this case is not to panic, and instead hope that you are mistaken for passing debris. Ordnance on starships is limited, after all, and many captains will not fire on incidental debris. Smarter captains will not fire the first shot at all, gambling that even though you may be a pirate ship, you are not worth wasting the ammunition and they should hold out for a bigger- or at least, higher priority- target. However, since ship captains are invariably of noble-birth, and the aristocracy is the most insecure, irascible collection of ill-tempered bullies ever to blight the stars, we should perhaps not rely on their intelligence or goodwill.

The second way pertains to the issues with stealth paint to which I have alluded, and is called ‘soaking’. This-

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-and there you have it! Eggs: where to get them, how to cook them, and how they can be a useful tool in your ideological arsenal. I hope you learned something today- I didn’t, but I was the one doing the teaching, so I feel like that’s OK. I do feel like we got to know each other a little better as people, though. Reaching out back into the past like this, I have to wonder- do you even download eggs in your timestream? Do you still live in the hallowed, prelapsarian time where you could just take eggs straight from the chicken and didn’t have to implement digital workarounds to circumvent the Binary Order’s iron-fisted fists?

It makes me sad to think of those times- but it makes me proud that you still have a chance to avert the coming apocalypse. And with what you learned here, I think you might just have a shot. Stay frosty, kiddo!

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–Excerpted from ‘A Condensed Guide To Staying Alive On The Wrong Side Of The Law: Space Edition’, by Victor Verlaine. Self-published, first edition, 17 CSC.

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Rock and roll,
Bruce