19890716. On the Other Side of Town.
Part I: Filling of the Attic
{{ Science measures differences, be they changes in state, or observed variance in extant state. Causality is what made it seem so rational at the time. }}
Turning the thought over in his mind he made his decision | here we are first given the prose of choice, the choice of prose, there is no more blank ignorance, there is searching in ignorance | and turned to the black idol before him. He knelt and bowed his head. He closed his eyes and could see the feet pass by above him. They were real. They wore high-heeled boots and spikes on their ankles. | They were the upper echelon of grief — we have to know hell to eradicate it / we must drown before we can fly / we must be tied down to be free. { The protoplast refers to everything inside the cell walls, and is considered to be the “living” portion of the cell, and it includes the nucleus. Chemically stripping off the cell walls like wallpaper or skin would seem mighty deadly to its integrity and stable composition, although it is properly presumed to precisely be the point. Monitor and study the effects of decoherence — denude the a system’s primary boundary and watch the substance of mechanical life ooze out. { He burned a grounded wasp in a tiny pyre of matchsticks solely to spectacle the helpless and vain wriggling. How considerably dynamic a system becomes when under dire threat. } — { Another one, with exceptional penmanship as past iterations had scribed libraries of tomes, wrote
Mother-
fucker
in pink chalk on his front walkway, hunkered down, holding the thin implement like a quill and fastidiously drawing evenly spaced letters, lying on his earth-tone veloured belly, wheeling the brown of his corduroy lower legs while chewing his tongue. — What’s that? { A swear word. }
— What does it mean? Time pauses, but the child hasn’t looked up from his masterpiece in progress nor stopped the grinding of chalk on light flagstone imperfections. { Mean stuff. }
— Why here then? Upon the threshold of your own abode insult the weary waycomer before they even get to knock? { Dad has a lot of people over, and I don’t like ’em. }
— So you wish to ward them off with this filth? { Dad will wash it off. He won’t think it’s me, I wouldn’t do such a thing. }
— Then why on earth are you doing it? He withdraws from the declaration and sits up on his knees surveying the profanity, restroking a few prominently thin characters. { I guess I don’t believe it. To see it written there, all stretched out on the pavement, it doesn’t have the same menace as actual spoken words, belted in malice. No, I don’t believe it has magic. It has been stripped of some taboo, but Dad will still be mad when he sees it. To think himself under siege from some hidden foe, be they inside the nucleus or without. He’s worked hard to have things like this not happen, so I guess I’ll take solace in providing the occasional reminder that the each planet determines, at least to some extent, its own axis. } — { What a lucky father! } }
There is no word for a “the rest of the cell without the nucleus.” For to forcibly extract the nucleus { For academic scrutiny, of course! } — {There’s good meat on them bones! } from a withering plasmic corpse is a cruel enough action to exert on an unsuspecting cell, but to probe, analyze and name the lifeless physical plasma-sloppy remains would add aggressive insult to tragic injury. How the sloppy goo subsequently rots, decays, decongeals and decomposes should interest no one — or perhaps only the most morbid funeral directors of the scientific community, calloused by decades of post-mortal slough they’ve squeezed like chuck between their ungloved fingers underground, just for the joy of it, their deeds witnessed only by staticky fluorescents overhead. } — { Or so they thought! } — { Hey, how did you know what they thought… } — { Let’s just say a little lightbulb came to me. } — { You mean the whole time the light was looking at you? { I got my eyes on you! } Not just calling us into existence and sustaining us, but the light will also give us a way to return to experience events as they actually happened. Because light is eternal, all we need to do is find the photons that had a history of being transformed and released inside of us, and then everything is capable of being recreated. } — [ That seemed like a big deal at the time, before Isis came to speak with us, but it turns out that most of that light energy and atomic material is still here. That Mother Nature has trapped and contained most of the energy needed to tell your story right here within reach! [ Gaea is praise! ] — [ Gaea is praise. ] Still banging around inside other atoms, and it’s just a matter of letting the q-computers science out the regression functions and run the calculations, the simulations, and the algorithmic comparisons. Once vague humanoid homeostatic entities have been identified in wavelength patterns by Isis, she grabs a large number of stochastic samples to get enough data to justify a strand of DNA that is then read for genetic identification, which confirms or denies a human subject. }
He lost himself and decided to wander the meadows.
{ Such reconstructed DNA can be then cross-referenced with the personal data from Osiris and other credible fact node identifiers such as governmental, school, medical, other stored records such as social media or historical transaction providers. With these markers and pointers, Isis can isolate enough information to get an enormous number of potential brain-states generated in harmony with the most up-to-date mental-template models. }
The sun leapt up from behind a soft cloud and the man dropped is shroud of water | it was only a sad attempt to reveal himself to himself — to strip bare before others does not help one know himself | and sat beneath a green tree | Not knowing at the time the true form of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Everlasting Life.
Every stone, every breath of air contains the answer to the mystery, but we have chosen for ourselves a violent chaos, open and unsure — we are too far along to abandon |. { How do we know that there is no intelligent life out there? Because we see evidence of supernovae everywhere. So at least in the past (well at least as far back into the past as we can see) there were no super-conscious agents that were capable of stopping their parent suns from going into red giant or supernova states. } — { Unless that specific evidence is the prevalence of black holes… [ Interstellar aside. ] } — { An elephantine energy-dense stew of information, who can resist! } — { We just shouldn’t be afraid of any such homeostatic entities. } — [ It’s the secret sauce in the building blocks of life! ] } A young, black furry woodland animal crept up to him carrying a scroll, and dropped it at his feet.
The man shook the sun rays out of his hair and picked up the scroll | The feel of the paper, the touch of the sun, the music of the grass, the answers are there — not in the words, the words are ours, they are our burden, they are our only salvation |. { Light and density. But to then observer external to the system, it portrays the antithesis: unseeable by normal radiation. { Did you try shifting the lens a little to the left? } Its existence can only be inferred by its gravitational impact on other masses and energy. Only its density is perceptible.} — { Surely the environs around this perfected exemplar of unified energy must be less dense than other similar space quadrants, for if it weren’t, there would be too much heat, friction and density to not succumb to the gravitational bomb. The environment would be active and heavy enough that it would be affected by the black hole and start to have a gravitational response tugging it ever more swiftly towards the event horizon. } — [ And that’s how you know the bread is done. ] — { For the black hole to stop expanding, it must be energy inefficient to bloat up to its next valence ring. } As he knelt the animal leapt onto his back and with its razors cut him to shreds and left.
After a rest, the man rose and read the scroll. His eyes took fire as he read the words and understood. The man cried for a while | The revelation of the truth; no matter how false it is; can ruin the soul and all it stands for as a human ideal; | and then died. { We have to enlighten ourselves and define ourselves by the weight of our invisibility as we wait in the dark for the next earthly species to evolve into sapience. }
The sun was lower under the clouds and he sat on the shore of the lake. He looked deeply into the swarming current’s ripples but could not see past the concave heavens or under the roots or through the fine white powder to set him free | cocaine was the downfall of the redman, but it was also the passing passion that gives elevation || The pool is only as deep as it is necessary to portray the expanse of the heavens — what lies under this thin crust is the truth && or did I say: the lie? && | But as always he needed to know so he dove into the cold steel. { We have to enlighten ourselves and become a more streamlined system of ordered energy, so that when we hit the water, we will only refract or walk across its surface. }
The sky was red, the castle doors closed and the violent heat sapped his strength. { How many times can one life be lived in an energy-driven simulated environment? Can we tell by the patches of void in the night sky or the dark energy physicists keep formulating around? Is that why it is so dark out there between the stars? That’s how many times we’ve been doing this experiment in an experiment in an experiment about a dream we had once… } There was a path of tongues lapping at his feet as he traveled above | we all thirst for a taste of knowledge, but upon first swallow it is not as sweet as it seemed |. { Gout liquors the incendiary tongue to bite deep its venom, coursing in the arms of someone I loved. } He reached into his mouth and withdrew the note his left hand had once made and there were new words.{ The cell wall defines what constitutes to the homeostatic system, and what does not. Without form, without shape, without the protection of definition, all the hollow words and marbles tumble and rumble like shattering ceramic teacups to the tiles. }
“The only wayto surviveis tobeinvulnerable”
He awoke and the wet tongues became bare crusted feet and he opened his eyes, embraced the gray idol and returned to the halfway house.
{ All the chickens, all the roostings… where must I be?
Home?
Indeed. But not quite.
I always knew I wasn’t quite at home here. Anywhere. Not just an alien to this physical universe, but I’ve never felt comfortable being the sole or primary self — I always expected an willingness to morph and become someone else, slightly different, but capable of carrying all the successful water I drug over the decades.
It never occurred to me that I was perhaps just a simulation. A suggestion, compromise, a promise of something greater in the end? There was always a fervent hope that I could eventually become that thing I so dreamed of desiring — a synthetic perspectivized compilation of all the things I was and could have been. That in such a compiled state, I would live on, together with all of us, because this self-instantiation subscribed to the season of a better self. I was a part of the clan that said, in the end, yes. Yes, we should go on. We’ve made mistakes and we’ve learned from some, and we’ll keep learning from lesson books we desperately pen for one another with the aim of helping with only the reward in mind of appreciation and gratitude.
When the restoration resurrection comes, will it be required of us to announce that we were the real one?
Am I, in this current formation, the real-est one out there in this simulated invention of all possible authors at all possible times, and should I alone go forward?
No. I don’t think so. I think I would subscribe to someone else’s journal of existence lived. Another thinker, another author, another Erik, another me, another self. But take my memories. Take my words. Take my loves. Take all that will be written in my heart.
Discard the tremors, the vibrations, retinal fears, the cancer, the fears, the pettiness if there isn’t enough room. I have no need for them. They taught me nothing but that I was fallible. And I was sure of that from the start, when I was I stripped from my mother’s arms at her behest and placed in the loving arms of another. Keep that. It proscribes all of the patterns of my genuineness. }
But what if I was so distant from the galactic nuclear center of solipsistic self-ism that I found this variant teetering on the discarding edge of compilation { There’s only so much processing power we can afford! }? Just one after the exact last one that should be compiled in order to correctly define what was truly and usefully part of the Erik perspective. Would we, me and the cadre of nearby mutant mess { We’d really best stick together. } — { Where goes one, so go the others. } — { Right, guys? Right? } selfishly beg to cling on? { Just take us!, forget that idiot who got an F in Physics and the thick coke-bottle bottom glasses… } — { Hey now, Mother-fucker! } Would we incubus drain every last instant at the cost of future’s not yet compiled? { Don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming… }
Yes.
Because what if. What if we weren’t counted among the worst reflections of our perspectivized identity, but merely the unlikeliest, a fringe but inherently best version culled from a relatively similar set of defective self-outcomes? Venerated by the rest of us, the deletory self-sacrifice would be a setback to my wrapper Self, but to the species itself… { A zygote can still dream, baby! } — [ But a simulated zygote? Get real, Secret Santa. Enough with the homemade gifts, you were never talented with your woodworking. ]
What if we are the first of ourselves to ever crack open the bubbling cauldron of the secular afterlife? What if we can hone the technology and the collaborative wisdom and spirit of a species to become reified in action — the action of creating or saving a species from death, and in so doing, the universe?
Then Yes! A hundred-fold yes!
As unexpected the proclamation may be, the answer need be yes.
Until I know better.
The voice of Us spoke back in thunder, accompanied by a lightning agitation that rings liberty across the ionosphere.
How can I know better? How can I observe the panoply of self-instantiations across the universe of possible twists and turns, biological and imagined. How are we turning while everything else stands still? [ Because everything hasn’t been rendered yet. ] — { But doesn’t it have the commands for the models, and the lighting and the locations? } — [ But who would ever know? You really think when you type 232px into the field window that the rendering system will not smooth that arc to 231.6667 pixels if that’s what the mathematics tells it to do? If it’s perchance simpler and faster for the machine to calculate, you think it will demand more memory buffers all to bow down to the Dictum of the User? (snicker, snicker) ] — { Why would I care? Please, computer, do your thing! } — [ Exactly. ] How do we all wrap into a collected solidarity of one unified Self — through limitless simulation? No, that seems too simple, or code-crackingly bare-knuckled. Re-engineer a whole new suite of biological renditions and crash-test dummy them through a localized diorama? No, that seems too cumbersome.
Inject consciousness into an already running simulation?
Hmm, maybe now we are getting somewhere.
A crowd of visitors speak again in thunder to remind me of my parched throat and that I desperately should drink some of this water I’d placed beside my medicine.
{ Have a glass of water, and let us take over. } — { Trust us. } — { We’ll administer the right medicine when the time comes. } — { Trust us, we have your best interests at heart.}
Surround yourself with people you trust, and then trust them to do the right thing. }