To Sir With Love
13 years ago
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Maria's questions
I found Maria on the terrace, staring out into the fog over the harbor.....she looked to be in her early twenties, and was dressed in the uniform of the Treaty Forces. She seemed to be pretty calm, for someone who had been abducted from humanity and brought to a ghost town. She turned as I approached, and gave me a critical look, frowning and backing away a bit.....
"Are you human?" she asked.
"Well, more or less..." I replied, quite truthfully. "You see, I have been with the ghosts for so long that the biological aspects of my human nature have been almost completely leached away and replaced with ectoplasmic analogs of the various bodily functions."
"What do you mean?" She looked confused.
"Would you like something to eat? Are you thirsty?" I asked...."You don't in fact feel any hunger or thirst, do you? Are you having any trouble breathing?" I asked her as gently as I could...Of course then she gasped, or tried to gasp....but her lungs couldn't take in any air....she was wrapped in a thin haze of ectoplasm, as am I.
"You see my dear" I try to explain....."Here in this dimension people did not evolve from animal precursors....they evolved from gaseous waveforms interacting with energy fields.....there is no need to eat or drink or breathe bits of matter as such....no need for the Ladie's Room either, you will find...." I tried to offer a bit of levity...
"Oh." was all she could say....
I went on to explain to Maria that if we could obtain the assistance of the pertinent powers or authorities .....we might be able to find out how to get her back where she belonged, before her nature was sublimated to any great degree......I would have to pull some strings, call in a few old debts perhaps.....she began to look hopeful, and asked me to please do what I could.....she had no desire at all to remain with the ghosts, if that could be avoided.....
"Then we'll go back to my place and start making calls..." I offered.....
Out on the street I asked her "What do you think of my ride?"
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Ectopolis Police Department courtesy call
I've been living in a high-rise in a large ghost city for the last four-hundred years or so, if you can really call them "years"....if you can really call it "living"..... It's the 23rd Century on Earth right now, I think.....it was 1892 when I was body-snatched off of a square-rigger carrying guano from South America to Europe....I imagine that my ship-mates marked me down as "lost overboard".....but what really happened is that I was on the dog-watch when a ghost ship flying the Jolly Rodger came sweeping out of the fog, and I found myself suddenly flying away from my ship, in the arms of a ghost-pirate....with an eye-patch, a touch which I thought was just silly....
Well, they told me I could join up with them, or be tossed to eternity....so I said I would join up....I won't describe the initiation ceremony, it was disgusting....after many various adventures, the ghost ship returned laden with treasure and body-snatched crew members from sundry worlds to the great port of Ectopolis, on the Real Dead Sea ghost coast.....With my share of the loot I bought a little cottage on the edge of town, and as the years went by and the population increased I was able to sell the place for a good profit, and move into my current residence, in a nice part of the city, overlooking a fashionable graveyard....
Every once in a while some other human will show up here, and since I'm now senior human in the area, after the old chinaman left, I got a courtesy call from the guys downtown when a human girl named Maria was found wandering around the waterfront one morning....I cranked over the old Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and cruised on down to the station....
When I got down there and was introduced to this Maria, she had quite a few questions.....
object of desire
Bobby-boy had a thing for Maria....that is the common perception of the other crew-members....but Maria doesn't want anything to do with that jerk.....Maria is coming up the passage from the engine-room when Bobby comes out of the galley and sees her.....he lusts after her.....and the ectoplasmic concentration here in the ghost-dimension is triggered by this emotional spark.....a ghost comes up behind Maria, and snatches her away.....Bobby stands dumbfounded staring down the now empty passageway......
Maria finds herself seemingly speeding through the void away from the ship.....she tries to scream for help, but nothing happens.....she feels as though she is frozen in an instant, but also moving through space and time in some way.....the ship recedes into the distance until it is gone.....
In the ghost-dimension, thought and action are pretty much the same thing.....if you think of something happening, it happens.....a "ghost", or a node of the ectoplasmic overmind, has pictured itself procuring what it was that the node of human overmind called "Bobby" wanted for himself....and so, since ghost-mind has the power in this realm, Maria finds herself gone from human company......she is transported to a ghost metropolis .........
Saturday, December 11, 2010
more problems with ectoplasm
Stacy got pissed off when she reached for her hairbrush and a ghost came through the bulkhead and snagged it away before she could grab it.....a hairbrush wasn't so bad, but Charles had lost his sidearm the same way the other day.....ghosts with guns.....that's just wrong.....
The Chief was trying to make contact with some kind of chief ghost....he said that the last time he had been in this haunted dimension they had eventually encountered ectoplasmic authorities....ghost-cops.....and the cops had turned them over to Otherworldy Immigration, and they had been deported back to reality.....our normal reality.....hopefully the good ghosts would get us again this time, before some punk-ghost gangbangers found us and sold us to a freak show in Lost Vegas.....the Chief said he had heard of that happening.....Stacy didn't know if she believed that crap or not.....
Thursday, December 9, 2010
dang ghosts
Hans....Third Rate H. Benz.....had galley duty again....well, it didn't amount to much....all you had to do was kind of wipe up around the food processors and dispensers and smile at the others as they wandered in and out on their off watch hours, looking for something to eat .....Hans would just as soon lie low and take it easy anyway, this lost in space thing had his stomach in knots....it was one thing being on board the flagship or one of the carriers....that was like being back on a station, or even a city on one of the new worlds....but this being stuck with a hand full of other ratings and the crazy Chief on the smallest spaceship he had ever seen or heard tell of was something else....and they were telling him that they had left normal reality, and were in the realm of Ghosts.....
Hans dialed up a doughnut, and left it on the table on a paper napkin while he went to get a cup of coffee....turning around to get the doughnut, he saw a silvery blob suddenly appear out of nowhere, and glom up the doughnut! As quickly as it had appeared it was gone.....Hans started shaking and screaming.....
The Chief had to hold a briefing, and explain to the hands that, yes, ghosts were going to act like ghosts you might see in old cartoons or something....they could come through the hull of the ship and do pretty much anything they fancied.....they probably wouldn't hurt anybody or cause much trouble really....but if they sensed that you wanted something....like a doughnut, say....then the ghost folk might very well just take that....just to see why it was thought to be something desirable....Chief said he knew this, because he had been here before....but nobody had heard of this much, since Fleet had classified all reports of cross-dimensional experience....at the express order of Treaty High Council.....
Second Rate B. Scanlon, Bobby-Boy to the females aboard, had difficulty adapting to the current situation....he started acting a little nuts, looking scared and anxious, ignoring his duties, acting angry.....it came to a head shortly after the Ghost briefing.....Bobby-Boy started yelling at the Chief .....calling him a damned ass-hole who had gotten them all screwed by acting like a shithead and getting them all damned to some kind of bizarre Hell.....he hurled his coffee cup across Commons, aimed poorly at the Chief......
The Old Man ordered him to his bunk, under disfavor.....Scanlon told him to get fucked....military orders couldn't mean anything outside of reality! The Chief said "Systems, two gravities for Rate Scanlon." Bobby sat down real quick.
"You see how it is now don't you?" stated the Chief...."Systems control all objects on board this vessel, including human objects. And I control Systems.....by voice command if need be. I doubt if any of you can get our asses out of ghost space, so you all better just go along with my way of thinking....OK?"
Later, back on the bridge, the duty pilot asked the Old Man if he thought they could get back home somehow.....
"Affirmative on that son, all we have to do is find us a Casper."
"A casper?"
"A friendly ghost."
out of the frying pan
Chief was seated at the command station on the bridge, with First Rate F. Seeley in the pilot position to his right hand.....Seeley was trying to make sense of the incoming data from the far sensor array.....but it all just seemed wrong.....the values were nothing he had ever encountered before.....
"Chief, what's going on? Where are we exactly? Navigation parameters are not reaching any coherence."
"Well, Frank, when the attack came the enemy released a whole swarm of advanced hunter-killers.....probably Machine weapons purchased from unregulated sources further down towards Center.....they took out the rest of the Group, and they were after Ready too.....so I did the only thing I could think of....I took us where a Machine won't go."
Frank Seeley sat and waited for the Old Man to continue.
"You see, the Machines fought a war once with the Ghosts.....the inhabitants of the next layer over in the Multiverse....and the Machines got their butts kicked.....so no Machine weapon will cross over the dimensional membrane....not even to fulfill a killer function in hot pursuit."
Frank thought about this carefully.....
"So, the sensors are acting strange because the physical constants in this layer of reality do not compute compared to the constants embedded in System?"
The Old Man turned and smiled at the pilot....
"You got it the first time, son.....things seem strange because they damn well are strange....we escaped getting blasted to bosons by going a little sideways during a jump.....enough to slide through to the other side .....we're in Ghost territory now....."
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
what a situation
I told that damn fool that we were pushing on into a region that wasn't safe.....but a Commodore of a Fleet Battle Group with her head up her ass doesn't listen very well to a civilian "analyst" foisted off on her by the politicians sitting in their offices back home.....back in Treaty space. I had been out here before, when she was still a Cadet at Academy, and I had been scared shitless that time, with us almost blowing the engines on the old Respect as we powered away from the hostile ambush......And here we were again, chasing after "pirates and hijackers" at the whim of the "important commercial interests "......
Trouble is, these "criminal elements and interstellar terrorists" are better armed than we are.....and they are on their home turf this far in from the frontier, almost to Machine Space.....The idiot bitch did one thing right, as far as I'm concerned anyway....she tried to get rid of me and my "paranoid fantasies" by ordering me to stand off from Fleet while she "punished" the enemy....she stuck me in a little Fifth Class with a junior crew she thought she could do without, and told me to go ahead and perform my analysis of the situation to my heart's content, just keep out of the way of the professionals.....
So the unknowns came out of nowhere and wiped out her Command.....and here I am, in a little tin can with a bunch of kids to babysit, with only a vague idea of how to get back to where any other humans are......
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Jefe
Maria didn't like what the Rotation said on the Duty Roster.....she had been moved to Engine Room on the Graveyard....well, at least she wouldn't be standing watch with that jerk-ass Bobby-Boy anymore.....but she was trained best for Comm, not Engines....whatever.....
"Hey Kim, how did the Old Man get to be Chief anyway? He's not an officer.....I don't even think he's enlisted....isn't he just a civilian with a Warrant or something?"
Kim gave her a blank look.....Kim is good at blank looks....."The Jefe is Chief because of three things, Maria....K, C, and P.....keys, codes, and passwords. It's true he doesn't have any formal Fleet rank to speak of, but he controls this vehicle, because he controls Systems."
"Five things really" interjects Stacy, ducking through the bulkhead into the station..."Keys, codes, passwords, voice recognition and biometric scan. All that makes him the absolute master on Fleet Auxiliary Vessel Fifth Class Ready.....detached from Command by circumstances....."
That sums it up pretty good, Maria realized.....the circumstances being that the rest of their battle group had been rendered into subatomic particles by the alien heavy weaponry.....the Old Man had jinked and twisted them through the chaos of the action, and they had jumped at emergency power as far away as they could get.....which left them out here god knows where, a dozen lost souls, ten thousand light-years from home.....
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Greenwich Mean Time
After a three day drunk, I wandered out of my hotel room and down towards the docks.....it was December 2nd in England, so it is also December 2nd here in Port Martini, thousands of light-years down from the old Solar System....down towards the dense heart of the Milky Way....down here on the frontier between the ancient Machine civilizations and the worlds of man.....It was getting on towards evening in London, so the illusion of day was turning towards the illusion of night here in the artificial environment of the big rock-mounted space station called Port Martini, the center of Frontier Region Five, as recognized by the Omnibus Treaty.....my way to the dockside dive bars led me through a large public plaza, which for some reason was more crowded than usual.....oh, they are getting ready to light the Christmas Tree.....there is a simulation of a children's choir......
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
quantum entanglement and the ghost in the machine
maybe here we get to the nitty gritty.....what is that elusive something that lets mind slip around matter, like oil slips around the moving parts of an engine? What allows our experience of all that out there, outside of our heads? Common sense indicates that there is no re- action without action, it seems that things must touch somehow for interaction to occur.....we feel the spirit, we sense the mundane....what we sense of this gross and often horrible world can beat down our spirit.....and, hopefully, the glory of spirit that we feel in out hearts can somehow transcend this battering and carry us to higher things. But is this all just wishful thinking, or is there some science involved here.....does the quantum leap to a new paradigm have some correlation to what might happen actually happen when the spirit moves us?
Thursday, November 18, 2010
pluralism to the second power
a lot of people seem to have some kind of moral objection to the idea of a pluralistic universe....they want absolute certainty that their god is in his heaven and all is right with the world, in the long run....of course there is that nasty of problem of evil, but what they want is the assurance that in the end everything is One, and thus all warm and cozy and O.K........well, let's take a little look at the way things really are.....it's much more bizarre than a pluralistic universe, it's a multiverse....the Theory of Everything, which goes through the math and logic and finally reconciles General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, presents us with a reality in which physical constants are not constant everywhere.....so where does that leave the much loved moral constants?
Well, let's be pragmatic about this.....we are never going to actually interact with another layer of the multiverse, are we? So let's just concentrate on the world as we see it, and not worry about what goes on Over There.....but.....the here and now is in fact hopelessly entangled with the there and then.....the nuts and bolts of our perceived state of affairs, the quarks, the bosons, and what all....they need the other dimensions we can't directly reach through our senses to constitute the whole mess, the multiverse of pluralism to a higher power.....
What's my point? Well, just that you can't be too smug about thinking you have it all figured out....that things are as that seem.....that any authority is good authority.....
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
the big things are still there
on the Other Side.....the clouds of dark matter, for one thing.....and the vacuum energy behaves the same as it does in our mundane human reality....if it didn't, the ship wouldn't work. But many things are different.....perhaps most notably the time-flow.....that's why we can go "faster-than-light".....when we translate to the next plane over, hardly any time passes for us, on the ship, while the years keep spinning merrily away for the rest of humanity.....so when the ship slides off the astral plane back into "normal" space, we think we have traveled a long ways.....that always seems backwards to me, but that's how it works.
Time doesn't really "flow" in any direction after all, that's the crux of it....that's how we can get back home later, nothing has really moved from where we left it. There are still stars and planets and what-not on the other planes of reality, most of them anyway.....the "higher planes" tend to do without what we call the physical, the hard stuff of matter.....the folk there are pure energy.....but we don't have to deal with them very often on a simple trip like this one....all we are doing is re-tuning quantum probability wave-fronts a little sharp or flat, depending on which way we need to go, "away" or "back"......
When I'm off watch, I have to switch mental modes, and remember how to interact with other people, instead of singing harmony with the Powers.....to me, this is the hardest part....it doesn't help very much that my shipmates tend to treat me like some kind of weirdo.....a bona fide space-case, one who leaves mundane reality for a living.....oh well, there are perks....you've got a pretty high rank in the shipboard scheme of things, and cute young female passengers seem to find excitement in the company of the mysterious dashing Astrogation Officier....
Sunday, November 14, 2010
At the far edge of this reality
the ponderous twin-hull battle saucer is approaching .8 light-speed, after three weeks ship-time acceleration from Sol System. I am on the bridge, at Astrogation Station, wired into ship-brain, getting us ready to break on through to the other side......I employ my calming mantra, in conjunction with the specific drug regimen, and enter the singlet state...."The resulting fourth state i.e. the singlet state, is interpreted to correspond to the superconscious state of intuitive experience and is justified by invoking the concept of the universal consciousness as the underlying source of all individual states of experience. It is proposed that the individual experiences result from the operations of four individualizing observables which project out the individual from the universal." Basic Neuroquantology 100, what almost all university students are exposed to some time along the line in this day and age.....everyone thinks they have a cognitive grasp of the concept, but only a few individuals will ever actually experience the truth of Single Consciousness.
I remember the Shaman Lesson.....let go of Self, let the Unseen Powers flow.....If I do not become able to See.....then the whole majestic ship and it's more than 500 crew members and passengers will become lost in space....my lonely self included.....but it is all falling into place now, I intuit the resonant frequency of our mundane plane and the astral plane.....my hands are on the tuning controls, and I smoothly blend two realities together, and we slip in an instant from Human Space into the realm of the Others.....
Mind flows through the mundane, Mind flows through the astral, Mind carries us on our voyage.....
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Astrogator Warrant
I was in my third year in the Space Cadet program at Mars Tech when we got to the course on Practical Applications of Membrane Resonance Mechanics.....I did a sleep-download of the text, and woke up feeling somewhat bemused, and happier than usual, for some reason. I usually enjoy a good breakfast, but I skipped it that morning and went instead directly to the Meditation Plaza, where I sat down on a bench near a tea bush in bloom, and fell into an alpha state, as we had been trained to do......and then it happened.....an epiphany! My eyes were open, unfocused into middle distance, and all at once it felt like a silver spike had been driven from a point above the middle of my forehead, down to the soft pallet near the olfactory zone. And I SAW IT ALL.
Of course the whole Campus is constantly scanned by quantum sensors to detect this sort of thing, so I was still just sitting there staring at nothing and everything when the Proctors arrived with their verification tools.....to make a long story short, my experience was duly recorded as a B.F.E. a bona fide ephiphany!
We had all read since around the seventh grade about brain quantum mechanics, the theory of it.....but very few people ever actually get it......some 12 percent of the population, according to the latest figures.....
So my life changed quickly in a big way.....I left for Advanced Academy within the month, and began the sensitivity courses. I was found to rate in the eighty-second percentile as regards perfection of perception through space-time......I was offered a Warrant as Astrogator Junior Grade in the Treaty Forces, and so here I am now, on the bridge of a starship, powering towards a resonance point where our universe touches the next one over.....what a cool job.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Higg's Boson
Is that what it's called? The "God Particle". The thing that is thought to somehow tie together quantum mechanics and general relativity, the thing that is postulated in membrane theory, where the elegant mathematics give us the Theory of Everything. I've seen a number of science fiction treatments lately where the particle machine gets powered up and the energy level is reached and the boson is found; and all of a sudden humanity is contacted by advanced races out there somewhere who figure that since we have reached that point in technology, then we are to be accepted into the Galactic Federation or something. Or maybe evil empires out there just wait for us to open the boson wormhole, and then pounce upon us to enslave us and eat our children.
I've thought for a long time that we blew it a while back, when Marconi sent radio waves pulsing through the ether.....before that, the lands of the Fey existed peacefully alongside of us as they had for ages.....but we start messing with the electromagnetics of the situation, and the castles in the air come crashing down....the ancient races become ill, and must move away from us to escape our careless blasting of dots and dashes and ragtime music and sit-coms into their reality.....they move over a couple of layers in the multiverse, and run into space aliens, who find out about us this way.....so they've had more than a hundred years to start their war ships headed our way at close to light-speed.....
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Maria found herself stranded
in Port Martini....the Maestro Pedro vanished, the same night the starliner left headed back towards civilization......left owing her three months wages.....at least the cheap hotel room was paid up through the week, thank the bastard for small favors.....so she headed down to the Casino Grande, to see what action she could find.....spacemen, gene-altered bug people, and flat-out androids loitered in the bar.....creepy aliens from beyond the other side of the machine zone wandered around the gaming tables, mystified.....
An older human offered to buy her a drink, and she was happy to accept....the gentleman appeared to be full natural human, almost a rare thing to find this far out on the frontier.....she is all human herself, and looks it.....that's why the Maestro had hired her for his act, she looked like the real deal....they drank and smoked slowly through the afternoon, splitting an order of onion rings at one point, and later snacking on catfish fingers.....she noticed that the place started filling up pretty good about four PM local time......
"What's happening?" she asked the old feller....
"Speed Solitaire is about to fire up." he enlightened.....
"What the hell is that?" she wondered...
"Watch."
A wall of the room lit up as a huge green baize playing surface, and some computer or something spat out a Klondike hand.....tote boards appeared on the sides, odds and placed bets swarming like mad, even though nothing made any sense to her.
"You can bet on just about anything right now you might want to.."says her companion..."The player has one half hour to win a solitaire hand, and the action is on whether or not that will happen....side bets are on how many hands it takes, and on how close to the hour the play comes, and on the color that hits last, and on the suite to finish....and on things that I don't really know how to explain, even after being here fifteen years, earth-time...."
Maria stared at the big screen, as the unseen "player" began moving the cards, working towards piling the suites up towards a win.....the first hand was a near thing, five cards could not be turned....there were bets on how many cards were left, some bettors laughed and slapped appendages, some tossed back drinks and acted pissed....the second hand was also a bust, but the player was fast....only five minutes had gone by for two hands....the third hand was crazy, all red cards showing, no faces, no aces.....could this work at all? Swiftly through the stack, nothing really happening....deal again....the bets scrolled and swarmed on the side screens.....Maria's companion punched at his palm-pad and either smiled or grimaced as the hands fell.....the half-hour point was coming close, with no winning hand yet dealt......but with only two minutes left on the clock, the player turned a win....cheers and hoots echoed through the room.....the old gentleman had hit pretty good....he asked Maria to the champagne dinner in the Blue Room.....she agreed to that idea.....
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
I woke up
and found myself stretched out on a floral pattern sofa in a large white room, looking up at a trey ceiling with light mahogany accents. I sat up and saw three windows and a closed door. The window behind the sofa showed the sun a little above the horizon, with morning mist tinged pink and gold. The window to the left gave a view of a walled garden at noon time, with clear blue sky and the sun beating down hotly. In front of me the last window presented a view of forest descending a slope down into a valley where a river ran with the sun just setting beyond the distant hills, gloaming sweeping into the hollows.....I realized that this was a very strange room, or at least it was in a very strange place.....I regarded the door with some trepidation.....
Sunday, September 19, 2010
two years subjective
was how long it took to cruise back out from machine space to Port Martini.....the Company paid us off, and even threw in a little bonus pay for the things we had been forced to confront down there.....the scary things. I'm sure the Company made enough profit on that voyage, to kick us something extra.....so I had money in the bank for once, and I decided to just take some time off and spend a bit of it. I found a housekeeping cabin on the edge of downtown, in a canyon with a little stream of water running by the footpath, and a force-field overhead, to hold in the air. Management even had some flowers and grass here and there, and birds! Real nice. If you followed the path a ways, there was a pond, with fish. If you wanted to, you could rent a pole and try to catch a fish. I never did that, it just seems too strange....for a spaceman.
An elevator went up to the top of the canyon rim, where there was a beer-garden in a bubble on the surface, under the stars. From there you could see over to the docking zones.....watch the ships come and go, and drink a beer, eat some onion rings. Sally worked there behind the counter.... she was mostly human I guess, but not Natural enough to vote I don't think....I never really asked her about that in the three months or so I rented the cabin....it didn't seem to matter much.....we had a pretty good time for a while....
Thursday, September 16, 2010
my life as a chemical reaction
Old tree lined streets, the side streets still with some single family homes, but the broader avenues just one apartment complex after the other.....say 100 units, so 100 stressed out little families, trying damned hard to live the American dream.....but unemployment is high....maybe there are actually two families in the apartment.....maybe grandma stays with the kids while the young parents flip burgers or pour coffee.....kids run wild in the apartment playgrounds, and in the streets and parks.....the kids start to drive the hard working young moms and dads nuts....they drive the teachers nuts in the overcrowded schools.....the social workers say maybe the hyperactive youngsters could be helped by behavior modifying medications.....drugs.....chemicals.....not street drugs, but things approved by the government health services, things that make a profit for the big health industry companies.....your family doctor, or your local clinic....they get financial inducements to go along with this scheme of things....so I had meds to take when I was four years old.....in the morning, and in the evening.....some kids had different meds, and it was a trip to trade them around and see what happened.....school breakfast, school lunch, dinner out of the microwave while granny watched television.....mom and dad almost always at work, or desperate in the bars.....twenty-first century joy.....by high-school, the government meds had multiplied, and were mixed daily with weird chems cooked by skinny ugly guys who knew your older sister.....and when you got out of school and went into the Forces, then they really started pumping you full of shit....my life as a chemical reaction.....
Saturday, September 11, 2010
going solo
the buggers are crawling around on the hull .....I can hear the scratching and clinking.....they probably think this old tub is derelict, and they are starting to tear it apart for salvage.....maybe I should just let them.....I paid extra last time in port for shielding to hide biological signature, so I guess it would be my own fault if they do tear into life support systems....but they won't get that far I don't think, 'cause I'm powering up a direct hull charge off the quantum core.....that should fry them.....but I won't really do that, I'll warn them first, just because I'm such a nice guy.....actually, they are probably already starting to feel the vibes from the charge-up.....if they are savvy buggers, they will just slough off and back to their barge, and let me be.....leave me in peace and quiet, slipping alone along the edge of the frontier, like I've been doing for decades now.....back a long time ago, I used to cruise with other persons aboard, but that always ended up in problems.....people can't seem to agree about things all of the time....or even much of the time....not enough of the time anyway......the bugger noise is starting to stop I think.....passive sensors are getting the warmth of a pile drive, they must be going to leave me alone .....buggers don't make very good company anyway, always just clawing and chewing , muttering strange things about their genetic destiny as revealed to them by God-the-Machine.....I've heard enough of that crap in my day......some humans aren't much better, going on about Natural Humanism, and the glorious golden age of the Treaty Powers which is upon us.....bullshit I say, things are just like they always were.....the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.....death might take longer to get here than it did in the olden days, but it will get here.....and taxes are carefully hidden, but they are still there nonetheless......so to get along you still have to keep a stiff upper lip and a tight asshole, unless you just say to hell with 'em all and go solo into the deep dark night between the stars......
Sunday, September 5, 2010
resonance theory
down further towards the center of the galaxy, where machine culture holds sway, the cyberbrains spin webs of resonance theory.....they have figured out over millions of years that nothing is really new under the suns.....time is older than you can imagine, so a lot of the things that trouble civilization now have been around some time in the past, and have been dealt with back then one way or the other.....and these actions in the past still send subtle vibrations through the fabric of spacetime, providing clues to perceptive intelligence as to how things could turn out this time around. If you can tune in to the goings on one carrier wave over from here and now, chances are that you can pick up some vibes that might be useful in your present situation....biologicals with their "intuition" and "feelings" have often been found to be useful in this regard.....
the machines have stuck me here in the center of a vast resonance interface, flat on my back on a crystal slab, beams of psychic frequency washing through my being.....between my eyes my mind is melting.....the main frame brain wants to know what I can grasp from another place and time, on a neighboring plane of reality, as regards the peril that approaches.......
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Just Reward
Since Port Martini had been built to natural human specs, it had the customary seedy waterfront district....or at least the illusion of such.....the Down Lounge franchise store had a prime address in this district, next to the "iconic Blue Bayou", on Fisherman's Wharf itself. The day cycle was blending into dusk, as two non-humans rose from the bar, to settle the tab, and make towards the boardwalk. One was a humanoid cyborg, the crash-test dummy type....the other was from the gene-vats, the giant cockroach model.....both built to the two-meter scale, to fit in a human oriented station.
They had been sucking on stimulant tubes all afternoon, and had purchased a liter bottle of Just Reward as they left the Lounge, carrying it in the traditional brown paper bag. They were headed towards the end of the pier, where the clever illusion was maintained of a greasy salt-water bay merging somehow beyond logic with the cold starry void around the station docking tubes, where spaceships tied up.
"Why do you suppose a Treaty frigate is coming in?" pondered the dummy.
"Beats me" says the roach. "But she sure is a pretty looking thing, haint she?"
"Yeh, I'd like one of those myself, you could sure kick some butt around here with something like that."
They leaned against the railing, and started to pass the paper bag back and forth, studying the purposeful lines of the trim warship with professional appreciation.
In the Blue Bayou, the manager was calling in extra bar girls for the late shift, in anticipation of a Fleet ship on station.....
Sunday, August 22, 2010
The analysis of the situation....
Commander Harkis was bringing the frigate in towards Port Martini largely out of curiosity....he had never really been beyond Treaty space before, and he wondered what sort of people lived out on the frontier fringes, beyond the jurisdiction of the Omnibus Treaty, but still within the human pale? He would rely on Lt. Rose to brief him on the particulars....that was her job, after all, to know the legal ins and outs and such....
So he was informed that Port Martini was the center of a Regional Authority, as recognized under Article 47 of the Frontier Protocols which were reached at the end of the last round of hostilities between the hybrid buffer states and the natural human client entities which more or less represented Treaty interests this far down towards galactic center, where the ancient machine culture held sway over vast star clusters. The hybrid states were dominated by cyborg clans and gene-altered biological tribes....."borgs and biots" in popular parlance.....Treaty Forces were of course tasked with keeping these creatures away from natural human space as much as possible.
But money talks, and there was money to be made in trade with the galactic center, so a degree of tolerance was needed along the frontier.....there had to be some place where deals could be made between corporations under Treaty jurisdiction that wanted the exotic products of machine culture, and the various shady and semi-legal associations which operated in the buffer states along the edge of that culture. Port Martini was such a place, and business there was booming.....
"In short" concluded Lt. Rose, "Any Treaty warship does not go into Regional space displaying any tough-guy attitude. You go in with weapons powered down and locked off, asking for docking permission, the ship all spiffed up and proper to show the flag in a friendly manner. That is official procedure. And besides, the quantum cannon emplacements ringing the Port have the megatonnage to crack this boat like an egg for breakfast, Sir."
"I hear and understand your analysis Miz Rose, thank you." says the Commander.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Commander Harkis
quite often referred to as Commander Hardass....behind his back or not, he didn't seem to mind much.....the Commander sat at the command post, pleased with himself after blasting the jackers into puffs of plasma.....Lt. Lily Rose, the Situation Analyst, and Second on the bridge at the moment, watched him grin and swivel slightly back and forth in the big chair.....she thought he was quite a character.....long red hair, huge red beard, tufts of red hair pushing from ears and nostrils.....eyes so blue they were blank. A scion of an old Martian family.....spacers for generations.....the type of dude who usually made her want to puke, except that this clown seemed to always know what he was doing, and did it right.
"Second" he addressed her...."Lay in for Port Martini, I want to see what the hell a place out in the middle of effing nowhere with a silly name looks like, if you please."
"Aye, Sir."
Meanwhile, deep within Authority Command, Port Martini.....an older fellow with a white beard, but hair still mostly dark, pulled back into a ponytail.....sat scanning readouts on a host of holoscreens, as was his wont during working hours.....he re-ran the holo of the Treaty frigate dusting the bugger pirates.....damn, Treaty fuckers poking around again....wish they didn't mess around so much on Regional turf.....we don't get any damn Treaty Council money, what makes them think they own this space? The name plate on his desk, what someone coming in through the door would see boldly displayed, simply said AUTHORITY.....that's who he was, and you better believe it.....
Lt. Lily Rose knew what the local situation was, down to the nuts and bolts of it.....after all, that was her job description. Off duty now, she was leaning back in the Lounge, sort of amused by her imaginings of the prospective meeting between Mr. Hardass and Mr. Regional Authority.....she would have to brief the Commander as best she could of course.....duty and all....but he would get his hackles up she thought, when she told him this was one pissing-match he might he might find getting his boots wet.....
Out from Port Martini
six days ship time.....the tramp freighter had run into pirates....hijackers in two war surplus fastboats, armed with jury-rigged velocity cannon. There was nothing for the Captain to do but power down and heave to, dead in space.....the shitbirds weren't going to get much for their trouble anyway....the cargo was nothing more than raw Class Five biobrew....stuff like you feed to yeast vats making generic fiber for the cheapest of consumables......they would probably be pissed, and might try to take out their frustration on him and his scanty crew.....they were running on mostly robotics, as usual.
But, just as the one fastboat came in close to approach the main airlock, a wanking big flare came up on the sensors.....damn if it wasn't a Treaty warship! Looked like a one of the new frigates......the hijackers tried to high-tail it.....a couple of pops from the frigate's energy weapons, and they were toast.....clouds of expanding vapor and small debris.....
On the bridge of the warship, the Commander asked the Situation Analyst where the old tramp hailed from....."From Port Martini, by her beacon frequency, Sir."
"Port Martini? That's sick...who would put port in a martini?"
Situation gave the Old Man a strange look, trying to figure if that was a real query in the line of duty, or just an off-the-record remark.....she decided it didn't really warrant a reply....
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Old Man
Farley was behind his desk in his office, in the middle of the steaming tropical morning, with a gin and tonic sitting in front of him, with a dash of bitters. His eyes were half closed, and he was starting to nod off, sweating in his whites.....outside, the fort was small and frail looking, stuck as it was in the immensity of the green throbbing jungle.....strange birds made strange calls in the heavy air.....beasts slinked and darted here and there.....drums throbbed in the distance, unceasing for days now.....Bentworth, the aide-de-camp, stood in the doorway with a piece of paper in his hand, trying to decide if the Brigadier was asleep or awake....Bentworth finally clicked his booted heels and said "Sir!"
Jerking back to life, the Old Man focused on his aide, and asked him what news?
"Sir," replied Bentworth "The word from Captain Spaulding is that the natives have risen in force all along the Kumbazzie.....Fort William is over-run, no word of survivors." Bentworth refers to his piece of paper....."Telegraphic report from River Station North is that the garrison there is under siege as it were, surrounded by hostiles.....but the lines are still up, as of a half-hour ago anyway.....and Mr. Beacker managed to get his steamboat under way before the savages could capture it, and he is on his way down river, with some of the settlers on board....I don't have a list of names....."
Farley struggled to get a grasp on what he was being told.....the drums kept pounding out in the jungle..... the relentless heat and light flooded through the windows and door.....he drained off his gin and tonic.....
"Well then Bentworth, let's have the troops called to the ready and we'll show these locals what's what, eh?"
Saturday, July 31, 2010
I had been told
to just wait at home, and they would come and get me, to take me to a group which specialized in dealing with such tourists as myself.....tourists from another reality. I was sitting on my front porch in mid-morning, when a horse-cab stopped at the curb, and a cheerful sort of fellow stepped down with a sheet of paper in hand.....peering at the paper through wire-rimmed spectacles, he found my name, and asked if I was ready to go get started on my adventure. I told him that I was as ready as I would ever be.....and that I was in his hands. We climbed in the cab, and the driver steered us down the cobbles into a boulevard, and on into increasing traffic.....we rode a while, and entered a finer part of town, stone and brick buildings with imposing faces passed by.....we entered a court through iron gates, and stepped down before marble steps leading into an arched doorway carved about in a fanciful floral style.
The doors were opened for us as we approached, and we entered into a nicely decorated hall, to be greeted by a stately lady of some years....she waved us into a sitting room of some splendor, and indicated that we should wait there. We sat, and in a short time, three bewigged and dark-robed gentlemen, looking like members of some judiciary, or perhaps like university dons, entered the room and sat themselves down in three ornate chairs behind a long table of gleaming waxed woods. The central official studied his papers for a moment, and then addressed me, asking if I was in fact the person who had contracted with a certain adept known to them in a far place to the purpose of being transported and translated from that place to this place, here and now. I replied that I was, and that I was very well pleased thus far with the performance of said contracted obligations, etc.....There were smiles and nods all around, and my guide said that now I could be left in the hands of the Tourist Board, and he took his leave. The chief of the Board called for tea to be brought, and we settled down to business.....
Thursday, July 29, 2010
if you can stay safely on the path
you can walk out of your local here and now to the here and now one dimension over....and, when you want to return, you can (they say) merely skip back through your native realm to the realm one step over the other way, and then come in through the back door to right where you left. Well, there might be complications somewhere in all that.....When I got ready to go, it was a full moon Monday, high Summer.....the witchy-woman had cashed my check, and given me my instructions.....I had stopped my mail, just in case the temporal shift was off by a week or so, which happens sometimes.....didn't want to draw any attention to my vacant abode, while I was elsewhere and elsewhen......I had the mistletoe, and the crystal, and the dragonblood all at hand....and, at midnight, I said the Words......and nothing happened. I sat there on the sofa going "crap, damn, fuck....this is a pisser....." I got up and opened the front door....and found myself in a different city....my house looked much the same..... but the street was alien.....old cobblestone was there, not cracked asphalt......the neighborhood was all changed, the other cottages were gone, replaced by what looked like tenements from some past age.....two and three story rambling buildings jammed next to each other.....gaslamps sparsely lit the gloom.....light spilled out of a public house half a block down, where there should be a vacant lot.....drunks stumbled out, singing loudly, waving their bottles, trying to dance, falling down and laughing.....
I went back inside, and noticed that things had changed.....there was no light switch.....a lamp burned on a table.....there was no TV and stereo.....there were more bookcases than there should be, and the bathroom was gone....out back, I could see what must be an outhouse to replace the bathroom....there was a wood-stove in the kitchen....the garments in my closet were of a strange fashion.....in fact, what I was wearing had somehow changed.....I had gone over....
Feeling overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all, I lay down in the bedroom and fell into a deep sleep.....
I awoke at cock's crow.....and visited the jakes, and then searched through the kitchen cupboards, and made myself some oatmeal and tea.....the hand-pump on the kitchen sink delivered cold clear water.....the banked fire in the stove of brick and iron came to life with some fanning and kindling.......I said "This is amazing!" but the words came out in a strange language......
fusion power inside your skull
Refer back to earlier proof of heavy-water reactions in the human brain....and go ahead and Google membrane theory and the eleven dimension comprehensive cosmological model, which unifies General Relativity and Quantum Theory.....you can not help but see that there is more to this than meets the eye, Horatio.....or whatever the proper literary reference....there is a whole world to the right of here, and another one to the left....they are very similar to this reality, and also very different.....stars and planets, with their great gravity wells, are strong loci of what is.....so the near realms have sun and moon and stars much like ours....but the devil is in the detail, of course.....these divergent planes of being don't have the same arbitrary physical constants ......time flows faster or slower..... Planck's Constant isn't exactly constant, etc.....the value of Pi might vary? Not sure about that one....anyway....what I want to get at is the idea that there does exist in a brain the capacity to quantum-jump data from one realm to another.....this happens to some of us all the time, when we dream, or day-dream even....probably has something to do with genes, since "powers" in folk-lore seem to be in the blood.....come with me then, to the other side....if you dare......(to be continued)
Thursday, July 15, 2010
tea and talk
The clans on the other side of the veil of illusion are ancient almost beyond belief.....while the dinosaurs prowled the mundane, the spiritual cousins lived in high castles, consorting with the dragon-kind, taming unicorns, casting fell spells, etc....And, on occasion, some of the more radical family members would slide across the interface and wander the mundane.....and, one thing leading to another as you might well imagine, the blood of the Old Ones became mixed with the blood of tribes on this side, the world of our common pre-history, and history.
"Our clan traces it's line on your side of reality back to a royal family in the Celtic era in Europe." explains my hostess. "A Druid adept conjured open a doorway between the realms that was so well made that it stayed open for decades....whole caravans came and went, and cultural changes exploded on both sides." she pauses to sip some tea. "And when the gateway failed at the time of the demise of the Arch-Druid, many citizens ended up stranded out of their proper spheres. Of course children resulted from this state of affairs, and so it is that until even this very day some individuals in each generation inherit the ability, and the craving, to cross over....to find the other half of life they feel calling them across space and time."
Thursday, July 8, 2010
We went down a path
from the sacred grove to the veranda of the fairy castle, where tea was served by invisible hands. Since, as I mentioned, everything on the other side is rather rarefied, you don't get a lot of substantial food. But you don't miss it much, in your spirit body....except from sheer habit of stuffing the old pie hole I guess. Tea was just that....tea. There was a very light honey to put in the tea, if you liked.....but I didn't see any milk, or cookies, etc.... In fact, the diet is always very light in fairy-land.....no meat at all, and very little of dairy products either....lots of fruit, and berries. Nuts are chopped or pureed, since the rarefied fairy-folk have very delicate teeth....they don't have strong bites at all. You get lots of preserves on lacy wafers, or sometimes scrambled quail egg if you're lucky.....or soup, or porridge. At a formal dinner, you might get angel-hair pasta as the main course, or a souffle of some sort.....anyway, my spirit body lost a lot of weight over there, if that makes any sense.
Apparantly
no time passed at all here in my house, while I was gone off into the Blessed Lands, visiting with the spiritual cousins. To my mind, I spent maybe three months transported into another dimension, or however you might want to phrase it....I had found a place online to order some arcane books of spells, and had been able to work some magic and contact some family members on the other side. Not deceased persons who had gone before me or anything like that, but living persons who share my DNA, but in a rarefied form. Which is a good way of putting it actually....everything over there is rarefied compared to this gross condition, here in the 21st century USA......I was able to purchase various herbs, and dig up some roots out in the woods in the county.....and modulate frequencies and manipulate quantum variations in my brain, so that my family over there became aware that one of their own was trying to escape the mundane and achieve a degree of the transcendental. Of course Spirit Land is close to Dream Land, so my first conversations with the cousins took place while I was sleeping. I would wake up in the morning trying to remember what they had said....it took the better part of a year before I got the knack of holding on to what had happened over there, so I could follow the instructions they had given me. But one evening, with a full moon rising, I chanted the spell and drank the draught ......and became transported in spirit to a place that felt much more like home than the place I had left.
My cousins had gathered in the sacred grove around a fairy circle, and were raising their hands on high calling for me to come to them....and I did. All of a sudden I was not sitting on my sofa, I was standing in the middle of their circle, flabbergasted that it had worked! The whole place looked like it had been illustrated by Maxfield Parrish....my cousins looked like .....like the way fairy-folk are usually drawn in romantic books......they clapped their hands in delight, and laughed out loud as my image became more solid before them.
"Welcome!" exclaimed a tall, thin, beautiful, fair-haired woman with very bright blues eyes, dressed in gossamer robes....."Dear cousin from the mundane, we are delighted that you have come to visit!"
"I am twice delighted to be here at last!" I replied.
"Wonderful!" she responded. "Let's go to tea, and talk."
Sunday, June 6, 2010
in your brain?
DSCN6133.NASA Science Workshop.Black Holes.PSU.Davey Laboratory.Deuterium, originally uploaded by Ed Bujak.
huh?
Classical description in a quantum spirit of the prototype four-atom reaction OH + D2
J. Espinosa-Garcia, L. Bonnet and J. C. Corchado
Classical mechanics is the only practical way to simulate internuclear motion in many complex systems that are important for biology, materials science, and technology. It is therefore important to test classical dynamics on simpler systems. The OH + H2 or OH + D2 system is the prototype four-body chemical reaction for fundamental studies of this nature, and high-resolution experiments have been reported by Davis and co-workers. Here we use those experiments to test state-resolved quasi-classical trajectory calculations in a quantum spirit, and find good agreement with experiment. Our simulations correctly predict that the newly formed oxygen–deuterium bond in the HOD product is preferentially excited to the vibrational state v = 2, and they yield a state-resolved product translational energy distribution. Of especial interest is that the triple (angle-velocity) differential cross section shows the same state-resolved structure associated with the product vibrational states that were analyzed. This level of accuracy has previously been achieved only for triatomic systems, and these new simulations demonstrate that the quasi-classical method with quantum corrections may represent a reasonable alternative to quantum scattering approaches for the description of polyatomic reaction dynamics.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
cortical field
In quantum brain dynamics (QBD), the electrical dipoles of the water molecules that constitute 70% of the brain are proposed to constitute a quantum field, known here as the cortical field. The quanta of this field are described as corticons. In the theory, this field interacts with quantum coherent waves generated by biomolecules in the neurons and propagating along the neuronal network.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
tending bar
in the wee small hours in the lounge on the Human Deck of the vast starliner.....some elder race folk came slumming down from the upper reaches......loud and flashy Dasanei, with their tall stature and golden skin, along with a richly robed Fergal high lord, and a striking beauty of a Sidhe lady.....they had a round, and then decided to try their hand at the pool tables, which are another Human novelty.....the Sidhe was odd girl out from the foursome at the game table, so she stayed at her barstool for another martini.....you know the Sidhe, also called the Fae or Fairy by some ....they look sort of like old Star Trek Vulcans, but don't let them hear you call them that....the actual Vulcans are short fat warty clients of the Greater Trollish Holding....
"Well, Hue-mon" she says to me "I have read that people on your planet think that my kind resemble a race from your legends, who lived close by your reality, sometimes stealing babies, or passing off 'fairy gold', or playing other tricks?" She smiled sweetly, batting those strange lashless eyelids....
"Yes" I brazenly insinuated "Some even say that our two species have interbred from time to time....in the far ancient past, I mean..."
"Would such a thing be possible in this present age, do you imagine?" she purred....
(text has been deleted)
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
a machine stop
The next planetfall we made was a machine world. A very ancient species had built a bit of an empire spanning five or six star systems, and then had started slowly selling off real estate, retreating towards their original home world.....they concentrated their remaining population, and then transcended in mass to a higher reality, leaving their faithful machine servants behind to oversee the preservation of the planet as a sort of museum or memorial to their race and it's history. I took the shuttle down with a tourist group, and went on the usual tour of impressive old buildings, elaborate gardens, holographic presentations of important past events, etc..... The thing I found most interesting was The Machine Shop.....a carefully preserved factory, where the First Generation machine population had been assembled. It's not often that you get to see the actual cradle of an existing culture, complete with tools and dies.....
Friday, May 7, 2010
there was some confusion
when they actually opened the Perfect Rib shops in the mall foodcourts on the Coyote home planet....."Perfect" didn't do anything for the local ad writers....they said that "human" was the big buzz-word, so they ended up calling the franchise "Hot Human Ribs".....which conveyed to some the idea that the new species on the block were selling their own ribs for consumption by alien carnivores....the Health Department got involved, and there was a big sort of hilarious stink before everyone got it all figured out....I elected not to stay in the Coyote system....I did invest some in the rib thing, and that has done pretty well over the years I must admit....when the ship was due to head on out further down towards galactic center, I went along for the ride.....
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
perfect ribs through space and time
I had a long conversation in the wee small hours with a fellow from Mars who represented the Perfect Rib franchise.....he told me he was going to leave the ship at the planet humans called Coyote....because the natives looked like coyotes pretty much....well, sort of like Wily Coyote....they walked on two legs and had hands, and could talk.
"Of course you might guess" he explained to me..."These folk like tasty meaty things to eat, with bones...."
"I can see that, I reckon..." I replied.
"So what we are doing is going out there with our genetic templates for Perfect Rib production, and we are going to go into some mall food courts. We already have a contract with a major player in that market." he informed me.
"Ribs?" I wondered...."Like baby back ribs, pork ribs?"
"Precisely!" he said...."You know what they are like, you even have them on your menu here at your grill."
And so we did....both as a bar item and as a dinner item with two sides .....
"You see" the rib-agent explained to me..."The Coyote market is huge....if we can get only 10% of the lunch traffic in the food courts we already have contracts with, we're talking about megabucks.....roughly ....the GNP of Bolivia, somewhere in that ball-park."
"Huh?" I flabbergasted.....
"Yeh!" he enthused ....."with the currency rates and all, it's a sure fire thing!"
The clock on the wall said it was three in the morning, human-deck time.....I sipped at my watered whiskey, and considered the implications of the interstellar perfect rib business.....and decided that it's all a matter of scale.....with us, humanity, being very small scale....compared to them, the alien cultures.....could we live long and prosper like fleas on big dogs?
Monday, April 26, 2010
my life monitor bracelet
still had about fours hours left on it when I at last went through an environment force field out of alien slug jurisdiction and into the human-support deck of a galactic liner, signed on as a third-class utility hand in the hospitality service branch of TransTimeTransport and Shipping. Good old TTT&S, where would we be without them.....still stuck out in the sticks, I guess.....no other human enterprise had ever managed to wrangle a contract with a starship cartel, thus gaining access to a market beyond imagination .....Hell, you didn't even need much decent product to ship....Humanity was a novelty much in vogue down towards the busy cosmopolitan center of the galaxy....you could sell just about anything "Human" to the alien consumer masses eager for the new and exotic. The general wisdom was that we had better get what we could while the getting was good....while we were still a nine-day wonder, before some other strange little species turned up to catch the public fancy....So I found myself pulling duty as the grave-yard shift host in a 24 hour grill bar, riding herd on the robots, and presenting the traditional human face to the customers.....a delightful crowd of hucksters and shucksters who were intent upon riding out to the stars to diddle the natives, and make a fast buck by presenting to our new-found neighbors a quick song-and-dance and medicine show, before they found out what a useless pack of yahoos we really were, compared to the ancient sophisticate societies that had been stirring Galactic Culture for ages beyond reckoning.....those were heady days.....
sort of skating and slip-sliding
down the alleys of the space-station, I made progress over the slug-slimed deck towards the transportation concourse, where I should be able to find whatever human-oriented services were to be accessed in this situation....and....glory-and-behold....I did slide into a little portion of the concourse with a holographic blue sky with puffy cartoon clouds and some perverted alien impression of birds flitting and singing, etc.....and there I did in fact find the usual Atomic Taco franchise, and the Sushi-mama-rama, and a Waffle House....and my longed-for McD with a Value Menu.....I tossed some coin at the serving function thingy, and was rewarded with what resembled to some degree coffee and a Sausage Egg McMuffin....after swallowing this stuff, I began to feel better....I accessed the free wifi, and searched for a labor-jobber.....I needed to get a berth on some ship out of here post haste, was the way I scanned it.....
arrange payment?
I was dreaming about something I can't remember now when the room service voice woke me up, to remind me that I had only one hour left on my room rent.....I would have to arrange payment for another standard rent duration before the current arrangement ran out, or vacate the premises forthwith. I got up and made my way slowly to the sanitary function area, feeling about like the proverbial forty miles of bad road without a shovel or a spoon....or whatever....not thinking clearly, after the excesses of blowing most of my pay from the voyage on a week of bar-crawling and other even less savory things.....punching the code that gave the cleansing facility a more or less functional configuration for one of the so-called human species, I let water and soap substitutes wash over me for the alloted period, and then looked in the mirror. Mirrors are pretty much the same everywhere, if you can get them to compensate for wavelength....what I was looking at didn't look good....it looked downright nasty. I found myself wondering if more drugs would help, and decided that was a stupid way to think....I didn't have anymore money for drugs....a three day beard, shaggy hair, dark circles under the eyes of the damned which were staring back at me......oh well.....I gathered up my meager belongings and tossed them into my duffle, and made it out the door before my last hour expired.
Which put me in a grim grey-green alley sort of thing outside the cheap lodging that I couldn't remember renting in the first place.....I did remember that I was on an alien space station, and that nano-treatment was keeping me alive in a biological situation that was lethal to humans normally.....the color-coded bracelet around my left wrist indicated that I had about another human day left to live, unless I could come up with the bucks for another survival dose....damn....the slug-like natives who had built this place slid slickly down the alley, ignoring me.....I wondered if I could find a McDonald's.....
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
norns and witches
act through time and space and the noumenal to guide bloodlines towards their nefarious and mysterious goals....is this mere paranoia, or a statement of fact? The human genome project mapped out a lot of stuff, but said that there was a whole bunch of DNA leftover that just looked like junk.....useless information, or maybe not information at all, just mere static. Well, that sounds silly to me....I bet that so-called useless mass of potential is really related to things we just don't understand yet, but might understand in the future. We have all had experiences we put down to intuition.....how did I know that? We've had deja vu, right? We have dreams that seem important, or at least more important than usual. We've come to some physical locale in our wanderings, and stopped dead in our tracks with a chill going down the spine, looking around in wonder, trying to figure out what was happening. There are still plenty of interesting things to figure out. Not all that long ago, we only knew of the visible spectrum, now we deal with much broader bandwidth......
metagenetics
Sunday, March 14, 2010
western individualism
Let's refer back to our notes from our previous session....it was mentioned that perhaps ontological considerations indicate that a particular individual actually has more reality than the group the singular entity belongs to, or springs from. This is an extrapolation from the notion that the general is more primitive than the instance.....this is indeed the best of all possible worlds simply because it is the one that in fact exists! Possibilities existed in the past, as they exist in the future....but only what is, is here and now. Historical fiction, and science fiction are all well and good, but your daily life has all that trumped; in that it is damned well real. At least it seems real, doesn't it? Aye, but there's the rub, for in this dream of life what death may come....what a minute....got lost there....but there is the rub, for the individual can kick the bucket at any minute, and the group persist regardless of this accident, so doesn't this indicate ontological precedence of the general over the particular? Your assignment is a 100 word essay on this question. Begin now.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
making no sense
It seems intuitive to think that our minds take the random happenings of life and organize them into something understandable....this being what makes us somehow more than mere animals. But I remember reading Sartre back in college days, and he seemed to be saying that our minds in fact take the unleavened sludge of that which is given and spark it with the randomness of our wit and imagination to create the lives we live. Order first, variation second, not the other way around. Thus existence before essence does not mean that the particular comes before the general in time, but that individual beings have more reality than does the wider category they spring from. Plato had things backwards. Our present day cosmologists tell us that everything has become more various over time, if we view time as linear. But time isn't really linear. And space doesn't really have just three dimensions; it's all more complicated than that. To reconcile quantum theory with general relativity, they have come up with the ten or twelve dimensions of multiverse theory, under which model time sort of just sloshes around in a sort of trans-cosmic tidepool, instead of flowing like a river. There is no start or finish to the whole thing.....it doesn't all start in darkness and lead to light, and it doesn't start in light and lead to darkness either....there is no progress really, and no destruction.....the whole mess is just a twisted and muddled purgatory.....from what I've seen of life, that actually makes the most sense to me.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
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