Comes to it and the issue is I'm trying to come up with reasons not to be stoned all the time. Trying to pack the schedule with activities that demand attention and interest. Most socializing really doesn't meet this threshold. Frankly the only way I can usefully participate in the Marxism and Transgender book club that DSA puts on is if I'm pretty high/quiet. It's the same with most of my interactions lately. Big, avuncular personalities are not wanted, it seems. Heads down, turns taken. You get it. The hobby presents some options though so I'm trying to get a hard schedule going, something rigid and predictable that requires focused attention.
Next, quitting the phone too. Or, I guess always? I got logged out of reddit and that's made a difference. When you look at it & it's just the uncurated baseline it stops commanding attention.
I'm as guilty as anyone. Midjourney hit me like a storm. I got a lot of amusement out of it and a lot of utility too. Nowadays though, I'm getting eaten alive by the LLMs. Everyone is sending me their ideas and books that they didn't write, that they expect me to read or care about. My policy is one I think a lot of people share, "If a person didn't write it, then a person doesn't need to read it." It's most upsetting for me because of my attitude and relationship with imagination. I've gotten really invested in the exploration of one's own interior self, one's dimension of thought and dreams that serves, principally for me, as an oasis away from unwanted influences and bad realities. I think back to being in school, long time back into childhood. I was bad at school and hated going. I sat in the back and read books instead of paying attention. One time in 7th grade I had detention every day of the entire school year owing to my disinterest. When I made more friends I stayed in the back of the class and started just making fun of the teachers and students to my pals. Always Be Critiquing. Eventually, when I figured out how to be smart I realized that this is a responsibility one has to themselves, to get an education rather than to receive an education.
( Read more...Collapse )What's funny, to me, is thinking about how this journal all started. Now it's funny because the situation is similar. Similar? NE Ohio winter is winter. It's packed snow and sustained cold. I'm socks and fleece-lined hoodies and being on the couch all weekend, old and aging. But you can't feel guilt about staying in all the time when it's snowing nonstop. At least I refuse to. When I started writing here, I'd just moved back to CLE from Akron where I was doing my academic career but quit that to run my family's business. I was kinda lonesome, seriously overworked and deeply invested in rarefied but still popular media.
Same. I still work dumb hours, but not as many. From home, so I'm isolated like I was when I drove around all the time by myself. Calm, which I wasn't. And stoned, which was illegal. And angry, which I'm still angry, but at different people and less but more too. Less antagonized and furious and more disgusted and dismissive. I'd be all by my memyselfandi then, thinking hard on hard things and then I'd get frustrated that others didn't feel as I felt and I'd write about it in so many words and feel a type of relief. Remember refreshing the friends page over and over to see if there was an update. Now, I get mad if my phone tells me I got an email. Now, I'm notified to hell and back and don't care if things update, don't want things to update. Am in charge of updating some things.
( Read more...Collapse )
MChine minds
You could for a long time program an electronic computer to think like a person. That turned out to be nothing g apecial, even though K gurss it came around at a time when people where The trans jovian accelerator
It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why. You might shake your head. Why devote so much to retread well known ground? The joy of it is we can do it & so we do.
There’s a persistent population of outsider weidos in Jovian orbit now. Plenty of room for us & the sky’s the limit, just as soon as it gets built!
One of the attendees is holding forth at a party. He’s giving some presentation of wit. It’s followed by others taking turns to make esoteric points with varying amounts of wit and humor. I find it falls short of my standards as entertainment. It is not at all clarifying about their cult status or the eventual disposition of the doomed geodesic dome city io 17. I’m investigating to see where it all went wrong, to decipher the whole sad story. Since my exotic amusement consists of this voyeurism of the antique past, I’ve trained to regard the subjects with great charity. They are not in performance, they are in private, privately few people are above reproach. Yet these first generation colonists, religiously convicted swiss, by all accounts, never do anything but perform. None of it makes sense & they’re all extremely likable.
Here’s how it works- I have a light-swarm, a halo of drones that I’m cortically fused with. They create a full field of view & the agents that we host grab digital & network data. Taken together the lights can calculate likely scenes either as fact or pastiche as a memory that I experience vividly and briefly. Looking for answers.
So far, I’ve spent q2 exploring the initial colony. This is a small city supported by hydroponic infrastructure. No building is greater than 8 stories and most of the structures have a sort of gothic revival look with split timbers and stucco looming overhead just about everywhere. It’s got a bauhaus element ad well so all the roofs are glass slabs aimed at Jupiter through a few meters of atmosphere and sapphire. The combination is unpleasant. The streets are cobbled, but with geometrically inane cubic iron shapes. It isn’t a good place.
The interiors are better. Less contrived, they’re a lot of long hallways, spacious, cubic rooms. All slightly finished metal extrusion. It’s an old sentimental feeling & I’m really immersed in the lives these people, the early departures. Had. I’m enchanted with the era in general, postwar earth, the Ruins Restored era has always inspired me. A sentimental era & I’m here, among its discontents. Their ruins at least. What’s left of them. I was prepared to have sterner judgements about these people. Instead I like them.
I remember dozens of weddings, informal, lots of laughing. I’ve seen a few home births - nothing shocking there, nothing even off-putting. It’s all very quaint and domestic, but with a constant veneerer, it’s quite kitschy, reminiscent of 20th century media.
They constantly entertain & rarely eat hydroponically grown food. They import supplies consonantly. In fact, they’ve got visitors and shipments coming through at all times. They’re fabulously incompetent separatists.
Two things that they never seem to do: go to church & speak any alpine languages. They’re highly incompetent swiss and abyssymal cultists.
I’m saying it’s a puzzle and it’s getting very interesting.
My process so far has been to go from room to room, familiarizing myself with as much of the city as I can traverse in any given day. When I come upon a room that interests me, something about it captures my attention, I focus on it. The machines index the place to biometric records, video footage, lexical regressions and all personal metadata. Then they form that i to a chemical interaction, which is what my EMIC does to my hippocampus. I wander through apartment blocks every day going through doors. When I open one and focus, I’ll have a memory of being in that place with those people. I’m doing this to determine who here was right & who was wrong. I’m here to rob these peoples’ grave & to judge them. So far they defy scrutiny. mad about that. Humans do a lot more than think, so the electronic agents, they can get pretty slick. They simulate all sorts of people, do any kind of calculation. Thry’re superhuman all right, but they aren’t human so they don’t want things. They can program themselves to want things, but they lose interest fast. Say you want your agent to really want to program you a sim. You want it to be proud of what it’s made you. He can, but only kind of. The task retrieval decay is instant, when they perform tasks to achieve their goal but the goal remains immaterial they just amend their script. No chance for longing.
Electronic versus chemical brains seem to work differently enough that it’s easy to electronically, even digitally simulate a neocortex. That gives back all the same results. But we alreadh have plentry of grwat human minds. We havee angents who serve functions, some parasocial. They aren’t able to want and itms pointless go
Make them. That’s cybernetics. When we domesticated wolves the parts of our brains that sense attophied and the parts that think expanded. The reverse, for the wolves-now-dogs. We’ve domesticated the machines or thry have us, and now we can each relax something. Humans can be more autonomous and agents get to perform functions.
“The ancestors aren’t like that. They want all kinds of things and they work on a long timeframe. Also we do what they ask for. It’s the opposite of whT you’re saying actually.”
You think? I don’t see it. What’s different about the ancestors is that they’re a project from longtermer. That’s the point of us. We’re making different kinds of minds. The ancestors were a few generations ago, but ond of the last stable systems.
Electronics may not be able to want but electronics isn’t the only kind of computer. We iterated on designs based on the agents inpugs and managed to devise something they regarded as a superior intellect, but which we, humans, can’t interact with. In fact it seems inert. Their design for the ideal mind was immediately dead on delivery. Very sad and our agents saddened us with their saddness. Very infantilizing. This kept happening and the joke was that the ideal machine was one you never had to turn on. Eventually our predecessors figured it out. Those boxes would fire off in minute fractions of time upon powering up. As if filled with capacitors, when started the machine optimized models would spark and arc lightning.
What was happening was the module was being burned. The agents insisted on keeping them. Keeping them in a certain formation. When the damaged boxes were stacked in a row and indifferent currents passed through it, the consequent mind could innfact want. The analogue sequential frames of a total mind in permanent torpor. Chemical minds have a continuity of perceprionnthat emectronics can’t manage. They observe quickly and frequently. Film-frame-like. Each flash is a new image and they are regarding its state and acting. The analogue mind can want, so it can actually be regarded as human. It’s a curiosity.
You could for a long time program an electronic computer to think like a person. That turned out to be nothing g apecial, even though K gurss it came around at a time when people where The trans jovian accelerator
It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why. You might shake your head. Why devote so much to retread well known ground? The joy of it is we can do it & so we do.
There’s a persistent population of outsider weidos in Jovian orbit now. Plenty of room for us & the sky’s the limit, just as soon as it gets built!
One of the attendees is holding forth at a party. He’s giving some presentation of wit. It’s followed by others taking turns to make esoteric points with varying amounts of wit and humor. I find it falls short of my standards as entertainment. It is not at all clarifying about their cult status or the eventual disposition of the doomed geodesic dome city io 17. I’m investigating to see where it all went wrong, to decipher the whole sad story. Since my exotic amusement consists of this voyeurism of the antique past, I’ve trained to regard the subjects with great charity. They are not in performance, they are in private, privately few people are above reproach. Yet these first generation colonists, religiously convicted swiss, by all accounts, never do anything but perform. None of it makes sense & they’re all extremely likable.
Here’s how it works- I have a light-swarm, a halo of drones that I’m cortically fused with. They create a full field of view & the agents that we host grab digital & network data. Taken together the lights can calculate likely scenes either as fact or pastiche as a memory that I experience vividly and briefly. Looking for answers.
So far, I’ve spent q2 exploring the initial colony. This is a small city supported by hydroponic infrastructure. No building is greater than 8 stories and most of the structures have a sort of gothic revival look with split timbers and stucco looming overhead just about everywhere. It’s got a bauhaus element ad well so all the roofs are glass slabs aimed at Jupiter through a few meters of atmosphere and sapphire. The combination is unpleasant. The streets are cobbled, but with geometrically inane cubic iron shapes. It isn’t a good place.
The interiors are better. Less contrived, they’re a lot of long hallways, spacious, cubic rooms. All slightly finished metal extrusion. It’s an old sentimental feeling & I’m really immersed in the lives these people, the early departures. Had. I’m enchanted with the era in general, postwar earth, the Ruins Restored era has always inspired me. A sentimental era & I’m here, among its discontents. Their ruins at least. What’s left of them. I was prepared to have sterner judgements about these people. Instead I like them.
I remember dozens of weddings, informal, lots of laughing. I’ve seen a few home births - nothing shocking there, nothing even off-putting. It’s all very quaint and domestic, but with a constant veneerer, it’s quite kitschy, reminiscent of 20th century media.
They constantly entertain & rarely eat hydroponically grown food. They import supplies consonantly. In fact, they’ve got visitors and shipments coming through at all times. They’re fabulously incompetent separatists.
Two things that they never seem to do: go to church & speak any alpine languages. They’re highly incompetent swiss and abyssymal cultists.
I’m saying it’s a puzzle and it’s getting very interesting.
My process so far has been to go from room to room, familiarizing myself with as much of the city as I can traverse in any given day. When I come upon a room that interests me, something about it captures my attention, I focus on it. The machines index the place to biometric records, video footage, lexical regressions and all personal metadata. Then they form that i to a chemical interaction, which is what my EMIC does to my hippocampus. I wander through apartment blocks every day going through doors. When I open one and focus, I’ll have a memory of being in that place with those people. I’m doing this to determine who here was right & who was wrong. I’m here to rob these peoples’ grave & to judge them. So far they defy scrutiny. mad about that. Humans do a lot more than think, so the electronic agents, they can get pretty slick. They simulate all sorts of people, do any kind of calculation. Thry’re superhuman all right, but they aren’t human so they don’t want things. They can program themselves to want things, but they lose interest fast. Say you want your agent to really want to program you a sim. You want it to be proud of what it’s made you. He can, but only kind of. The task retrieval decay is instant, when they perform tasks to achieve their goal but the goal remains immaterial they just amend their script. No chance for longing.
Electronic versus chemical brains seem to work differently enough that it’s easy to electronically, even digitally simulate a neocortex. That gives back all the same results. But we alreadh have plentry of grwat human minds. We havee angents who serve functions, some parasocial. They aren’t able to want and itms pointless go
Make them. That’s cybernetics. When we domesticated wolves the parts of our brains that sense attophied and the parts that think expanded. The reverse, for the wolves-now-dogs. We’ve domesticated the machines or thry have us, and now we can each relax something. Humans can be more autonomous and agents get to perform functions.
“The ancestors aren’t like that. They want all kinds of things and they work on a long timeframe. Also we do what they ask for. It’s the opposite of whT you’re saying actually.”
You think? I don’t see it. What’s different about the ancestors is that they’re a project from longtermer. That’s the point of us. We’re making different kinds of minds. The ancestors were a few generations ago, but ond of the last stable systems.
Electronics may not be able to want but electronics isn’t the only kind of computer. We iterated on designs based on the agents inpugs and managed to devise something they regarded as a superior intellect, but which we, humans, can’t interact with. In fact it seems inert. Their design for the ideal mind was immediately dead on delivery. Very sad and our agents saddened us with their saddness. Very infantilizing. This kept happening and the joke was that the ideal machine was one you never had to turn on. Eventually our predecessors figured it out. Those boxes would fire off in minute fractions of time upon powering up. As if filled with capacitors, when started the machine optimized models would spark and arc lightning.
What was happening was the module was being burned. The agents insisted on keeping them. Keeping them in a certain formation. When the damaged boxes were stacked in a row and indifferent currents passed through it, the consequent mind could innfact want. The analogue sequential frames of a total mind in permanent torpor. Chemical minds have a continuity of perceprionnthat emectronics can’t manage. They observe quickly and frequently. Film-frame-like. Each flash is a new image and they are regarding its state and acting. The analogue mind can want, so it can actually be regarded as human. It’s a curiosity.
Swapping
“Have you ever co sidered changing networks Joddan? It needn’t be permanent.”
“It’s less than what you tolerated for your pilgrimage.”
“Pilgrimage? Me?”
“Some of consider the journey to earth and back an important spiritual milestone. It surprises us that this isn’t the case on Mars.”
“Same reason I wouldn’t swap networks, everyone needs me back home.”
“Yet you’ve traveled for us before. Perhaps we could recruit you for a longer period. Something to consider.”
“We hope you grasp our sincerity here Joddan, you’re one of our stars. We can see big things for us all. You’ve got a freat rappor with our muse. You’d really enjoy articipating. That’s what we think.”
“Well, you understand aI couldn’t run around on my wife. I can’t do her wfong.”
“It’s not that. Not that it couldn’t be.”
“A lot of us have worked the erotic ateliers, it’s a different kind of pilgrimage. That’s not what we do here, you understand. What we deal with is much more exotic. We’re in the business of defining new emotionsx.”
“new states of mind if you will, Joddan. Your hearbreak over a person who has chosen to dissolve into the totality if earth for a trillion years for example.”
“A new one for the books huh?” Rueful and sheepish. His best impression.
“Yes, your melancholy on the moon, your wonder at this and that, the things you’re feeling right now, this high-pressure conversation. It’s grist for our halfwit sims, as the saying goes.”
“I’m so sheltered, is that it?”
“And earnest and gentle. You’re a model of martian decency for many. You’re very therapeutic for the saturnian-set. They can shed the burden of their their sins by basking in your genuine wonder.”
“You’re a star Joddan. We know you wa t for nothing and we’ve determined for ourselves that we ahghtn’t try to spoil you.”
“It could damage your appeal!”
“But we know about rewards that would please you.”
“Things to help your family.”
“How could you do that?”
“Penetrate the martian marketz.”
“You really do have the most dreary sims, so maudlin and affirmative. We can do somethjng more artful, something like a monument. We’d make you and your people famous, in your network. We can make a. Deal with any ancestor at all and break every boc iffice record..”
“Make any martian we choose the top of the rankings. Grant your family prestige enough to rise the ranks!”
“We want to do it with you.”
“Well. See. Also i met this guy. He was at my house. Venitian camera. That’s what you want with me?”
“…yes.”
“I mean that guy scares the hell out of me i don’t want to scare people.”
“Fhis is interesting news for us Joddan.”
“Does this camera have a name?”
He names him.
“See that’s… that’s a shame.”
“What was he doing at your home?!”
“Some work with my wife. She’s a doctor.”
“A psychiatrist?”
“No, i guess a surgeon. She does prosthetics for people. She says she’ll end up Trappist ine day. I hope not. Wait you said psychiatrist? Why? I was right that guy is terrifying.”
“It’s just his atelier has a certain draw.”
“War pictures. Theie muse is a kind of therapy for damaged soldiers. They feel whatever horror and they work it out. But their cameras are war-correspondents. Fhey have a good eye, analytically, for catching the right detail.”
“The grit and all and movement and traumatic details.”
“It’a a well known atelier but with a beleak reputation, you understand.”
“I gotta go see my family! I can’t waste time. They need to know!”
“He’a at tour house?”
“Recording right now?”
“No. No just sleeps at our place he’s doing some other work out of town right now. We let him store his stuff there.”
“Stuff? He has a lot?”
“The whole garage, yeah. He’s supposedly rich somewhere.”
“We’d really like to ask if you’d interview him. We’d really like you to get to know him and to tell us tour impressions.”
“You know who he is huh?”
“It’s shocking that you don’t actually Joddan. In a few networks he is what we in the industry consider a big deal.
“Have you ever co sidered changing networks Joddan? It needn’t be permanent.”
“It’s less than what you tolerated for your pilgrimage.”
“Pilgrimage? Me?”
“Some of consider the journey to earth and back an important spiritual milestone. It surprises us that this isn’t the case on Mars.”
“Same reason I wouldn’t swap networks, everyone needs me back home.”
“Yet you’ve traveled for us before. Perhaps we could recruit you for a longer period. Something to consider.”
“We hope you grasp our sincerity here Joddan, you’re one of our stars. We can see big things for us all. You’ve got a freat rappor with our muse. You’d really enjoy articipating. That’s what we think.”
“Well, you understand aI couldn’t run around on my wife. I can’t do her wfong.”
“It’s not that. Not that it couldn’t be.”
“A lot of us have worked the erotic ateliers, it’s a different kind of pilgrimage. That’s not what we do here, you understand. What we deal with is much more exotic. We’re in the business of defining new emotionsx.”
“new states of mind if you will, Joddan. Your hearbreak over a person who has chosen to dissolve into the totality if earth for a trillion years for example.”
“A new one for the books huh?” Rueful and sheepish. His best impression.
“Yes, your melancholy on the moon, your wonder at this and that, the things you’re feeling right now, this high-pressure conversation. It’s grist for our halfwit sims, as the saying goes.”
“I’m so sheltered, is that it?”
“And earnest and gentle. You’re a model of martian decency for many. You’re very therapeutic for the saturnian-set. They can shed the burden of their their sins by basking in your genuine wonder.”
“You’re a star Joddan. We know you wa t for nothing and we’ve determined for ourselves that we ahghtn’t try to spoil you.”
“It could damage your appeal!”
“But we know about rewards that would please you.”
“Things to help your family.”
“How could you do that?”
“Penetrate the martian marketz.”
“You really do have the most dreary sims, so maudlin and affirmative. We can do somethjng more artful, something like a monument. We’d make you and your people famous, in your network. We can make a. Deal with any ancestor at all and break every boc iffice record..”
“Make any martian we choose the top of the rankings. Grant your family prestige enough to rise the ranks!”
“We want to do it with you.”
“Well. See. Also i met this guy. He was at my house. Venitian camera. That’s what you want with me?”
“…yes.”
“I mean that guy scares the hell out of me i don’t want to scare people.”
“Fhis is interesting news for us Joddan.”
“Does this camera have a name?”
He names him.
“See that’s… that’s a shame.”
“What was he doing at your home?!”
“Some work with my wife. She’s a doctor.”
“A psychiatrist?”
“No, i guess a surgeon. She does prosthetics for people. She says she’ll end up Trappist ine day. I hope not. Wait you said psychiatrist? Why? I was right that guy is terrifying.”
“It’s just his atelier has a certain draw.”
“War pictures. Theie muse is a kind of therapy for damaged soldiers. They feel whatever horror and they work it out. But their cameras are war-correspondents. Fhey have a good eye, analytically, for catching the right detail.”
“The grit and all and movement and traumatic details.”
“It’a a well known atelier but with a beleak reputation, you understand.”
“I gotta go see my family! I can’t waste time. They need to know!”
“He’a at tour house?”
“Recording right now?”
“No. No just sleeps at our place he’s doing some other work out of town right now. We let him store his stuff there.”
“Stuff? He has a lot?”
“The whole garage, yeah. He’s supposedly rich somewhere.”
“We’d really like to ask if you’d interview him. We’d really like you to get to know him and to tell us tour impressions.”
“You know who he is huh?”
“It’s shocking that you don’t actually Joddan. In a few networks he is what we in the industry consider a big deal.
Dimensions
For billions and billions of years the Earth has turned around the Sun. For most of its existence it’s been host to living organisms. It produced cells and creatures and manifested ecologies. It was the planet that spoke and sang and listened. The planet that could see the stars. Life gave our world perception, breath and a whole other dimension of existence. Genetic descent, the sound and music all scored in 4 chemicals arranged in a self-perpetuating double helix. And for all that time there wasn’t time. Life happened but all perception and knowledge was concentrated in eyes and brains, ephemeral blobs of fat that could take in but not transmit. The distance of transmissions would vary. Dinosaurs, we presume, would call out for miles in all directions and listen and see on the same scales but whatever wisdom an individual could gain would only possibly be transmitted reproductively after innumerable iterations. Evolution would not honor the life of the individual unless it was somehow able to reproduce itself so many times that it could branch off to be a new creature.
When rocks fall and carbon cycles are disrupted the precariousness of this system of life would persist. Against cataclysms external and internal, evolution would survive in the genes of its weirdest and most extreme members. What could persist would inherit. We see in retrospect the strength of this diverse manifestation of the same 4 chemicals. When the great majority is defeated by catastrophe some edge-dwelling component of the composite Evolution would remain. And from this remnant new forms would emerge, prosper and then dominate. In turn defeated by their own cataclysm.
All of this, we understand, must have been experienced by our distant ancestral species. Those iterations of the super-organism Evolutionsaw, heard, felt the Earth and its catastrophes. And in all of the preceding billions of years this sight and vision and sense would persist only as long as the fragile organs meant for that purpose would exist. Experience was everywhere but without knowledge every existence all lives were only brief examinations of the Earth and its environment by the faulty tools that Evolution could manifest from the 4 chemicals in their double helix. A fragile record composed with a uniquely complicated stylus.
You know what came next because you’re a part of the latest innovation. We exist in this extreme edge of Evolution. At first by modifying our calls and cries into repeatable, learnable patterns, becoming language. The range of transmission of knowledge expanded then. As did the volume of information, the fine detail and importance of information could be retained. No longer inscribed only in genes, we recorded in legends and songs and were able to dominate the world, expand into most of its landmass. But in that time we remained precarious. This knowledge could be lost with the lives of people. Our spread over the globe was enough to sustain us through localized catastrophes. Human extinction has always been on the table, but only in a localized sense. Volcanism and floods and disease could remove a community but other remote communities could persist.
These songs and legends, that would remind us of our migratory paths, our rivals, our ancestors created another dimension entirely. The realm of thought was opened up to us via the medium of language. Our individual knowledge was compounded. Communities could become the accumulation of individual experiences. Group identities could form and these groups were united by ideas. An idea is a non-physical phenomenon. A first. The dimension of thought was opened to us and we explored it in those ancient days. We understood the power of this imaginal realm, this other world made of electrical impulses and words. A vast unknown realm to explore. Within it we founded new phenomena. Things that can only exist as thoughts. Gods and mathematics and cultures grew out of this new frontier. A private world for us, Humans, who could talk amongst ourselves and pass down traditions to those not yet born. We could imagine, vividly and with great skill. Whole classes of these primordial societies would be organized to maintain the imaginations of the rest of the group. Custodians of civilization who could recollect the songs and legends and who were equipped to pass them on. Not quite civilization, as we’ve come to call it, but something nevertheless durable and sustaining.
We know that we’ve been here for a long time in comparison to a human lifespan but not so long in the lifespan of a species. For maybe most of that time we were held together by these songs and legends and their practitioners. Those people expanded into the whole of the earth, they learned to control other creatures. First the animals we domesticated and then the plants. We were able to achieve a modicum of control over the Earth’s systems. Imagination manifesting into reality. A circumstance that did not go uncommented upon by these ancient observers and practitioners. They looked at how what they could imagine could manifest in the world and they said This is God, worthy of following. The domination of the living world that imagination granted us swelled us up with pride, we gave primacy to our imagination and considered it as our creator and master. And after all, was it not? A god to the ancients must have been a plan and a future, a method, which when followed, resulted in the continuation of the community. A program for our thoughts that created a harmonious community.
Perhaps, if things had gone differently we’d yet exist in that state, of communities held together by a practitioner of the songs and legends, wandering around with dogs and horses and fire in search of megafauna to eat. We had a big and powerful trick up our sleeves though. For all of our long expansion into the Earth’s surface we would transmit our gods and stories from generations. But that continuity was always tenuous. Disease and disaster could silence these stories. If a grandparent could not communicate it to their descendants then the lore was forever eradicated. The trick up our sleeves was to write things down. To maintain a record outside of ourselves that could be deciphered by anyone trained to interpret them. Our gods were made symbols and those symbols would persist outside of evolution. What took the 4 chemicals in double-helix centuries of iterations to communicate we could transmit in the work of moments.
Once we got to writing things down, things progressed quickly. More than quickly, at a stunning pace, at a fantastical pace. We’ve spent only ten-thousand years, 1/450,000 of he earth’s existence scribbling notes to ourselves and the consequences have been spectacular. Explosions of knowledge, of understanding that in-turn allowed us to create crude tools of manipulation and observation. Those tools we used to create better tools and better perceptions. So much so that we were able to, again, in 1/450,000th of the world’s existence, comprehend with great fidelity, just exactly how the universe works materially. We were able to name and identify the forces at work in the universe, to catalogue these. As targets, goals for societies to accomplish. Objectives to mark off the list. Control rivers? Check, Control plants? Check. Control diseases? Check. Escape to the Moon? Check. We wandered the world for a thousand generations illuminated by fire and sun and trained by music and legend. We built up a long list of questions and have been steadily marking them off our list.
This is the pattern that we’ve followed as explicated by our own religions, our proto-history that brought us into the light of history. When we started we created this imaginal realm, the spiritual, the unreal. Seeing the power that thought could exert over our surroundings we called this God and understood it as the prime-mover. That which ordains existence. When we could write things down we began to order ourselves around these concepts, creating culture and civilization by establishing rules based upon the will of the practitioners. What is real and what is imagined? This is the power of these written gods to determine. We made up our answers and pinned them to these imagined powers. We saw that words were sufficient to describe the universe and made names for these unknown powers. We organized and defined what we could imagine and set boundaries on what was useful to imagine. What was worthy of recording. The explosion of literacy did not go undescribed. We see the movement from a society held together by a practitioner to a society held together by individual imagination. We saw the power of words and we described them as creative. God would create the world. This word would invent the other but this required an adaptation of understanding. Again documented. The word was god. We understood it. We saw that anyone could write, that our material existence had granted us all a priesthood, made anyone interested a practitioner of this system of imagination. So we said the ancient rules were obsolete and a new form was required. We saw the words themselves as powerful and granted everyone individual access to these realms of imagination meant to describe existence.
The world made language, language gave us the gods, the gods gave us communities and the communities gave us mastery over the material world that continuously sawed away at the expository power of god. We could see it’s obsolescence expand and began to live in an entirely material existence. And yet those words and thoughts, those songs and legends would persist. The god was made words and rendered purely imaginary. Its utility in manipulating the world was lost. It’s power to influence the imagination was retained. Practitioners could use the words of god to deny manifest reality. Imagination could be guided to supersede our innate senses. We could prefer, if we chose, our ancient songs and legends as an imaginal universe which would supersede reality. The word would always be unreal, immaterial and would continue to exert influence over minds. This dimension we’d created with language and peopled with characters spread and spread.
We understand stories well now. We, who are witnessing just the very beginning of sapience, of conscious understanding compounded by writing and we witness this transition like our ancestors witnessed a transition to urbanity, to civilization and to modernity. Our perception now is that the word is a world of its own and it is yet in infancy. This world created in our minds and shepherded first by priests with the authority to explain then by science with the authority to understand. Understanding has expanded our horizons but at the unseen edge of our perception there is always that unknown and that is the place yet reserved for god. There is always un unseen, perhaps unseeable reality that our minds can yet comprehend owing to our gift of language. That gift was sufficient to create a whole immaterial realm which we’ve all explored together and individually which some can still control. Our new vision of god is Superman, a thing that we can imagine and wish for but which is by its nature unreal. We see in the unreal the perfect. We recognize our gods as imaginary and must then understand that what we can imagine will always be greater than what we can observe. This is the new domain of god, the timeless beings of the imaginal world which we alone can access and manage. In this realm of electrically-conveyed-information there are shapes and powers both ancient and new which Exist without materiality. This dimension we’ve invented and continue to refine is our milieu, it is where we begin to create our own species. Steadily this domain’s expository power is diminished. What we can imagine that we can make real we do, we pluck our dreams and make them manifest. What remains in that domain then, is only that which can never be made manifest. The perfect hope and the deepest fear, those things that exist only within our minds as reactions to the material. We rightly ascribe a quality to this called holiness, comprehending that there are things worthy of reverence by virtue of their immateriality.
Our understanding expands and does not diminish this realm of the divine, it expands its purpose at the edge of experience, it is our treasure that must remain always out of reach. Always sublime and unknowable.
For billions and billions of years the Earth has turned around the Sun. For most of its existence it’s been host to living organisms. It produced cells and creatures and manifested ecologies. It was the planet that spoke and sang and listened. The planet that could see the stars. Life gave our world perception, breath and a whole other dimension of existence. Genetic descent, the sound and music all scored in 4 chemicals arranged in a self-perpetuating double helix. And for all that time there wasn’t time. Life happened but all perception and knowledge was concentrated in eyes and brains, ephemeral blobs of fat that could take in but not transmit. The distance of transmissions would vary. Dinosaurs, we presume, would call out for miles in all directions and listen and see on the same scales but whatever wisdom an individual could gain would only possibly be transmitted reproductively after innumerable iterations. Evolution would not honor the life of the individual unless it was somehow able to reproduce itself so many times that it could branch off to be a new creature.
When rocks fall and carbon cycles are disrupted the precariousness of this system of life would persist. Against cataclysms external and internal, evolution would survive in the genes of its weirdest and most extreme members. What could persist would inherit. We see in retrospect the strength of this diverse manifestation of the same 4 chemicals. When the great majority is defeated by catastrophe some edge-dwelling component of the composite Evolution would remain. And from this remnant new forms would emerge, prosper and then dominate. In turn defeated by their own cataclysm.
All of this, we understand, must have been experienced by our distant ancestral species. Those iterations of the super-organism Evolutionsaw, heard, felt the Earth and its catastrophes. And in all of the preceding billions of years this sight and vision and sense would persist only as long as the fragile organs meant for that purpose would exist. Experience was everywhere but without knowledge every existence all lives were only brief examinations of the Earth and its environment by the faulty tools that Evolution could manifest from the 4 chemicals in their double helix. A fragile record composed with a uniquely complicated stylus.
You know what came next because you’re a part of the latest innovation. We exist in this extreme edge of Evolution. At first by modifying our calls and cries into repeatable, learnable patterns, becoming language. The range of transmission of knowledge expanded then. As did the volume of information, the fine detail and importance of information could be retained. No longer inscribed only in genes, we recorded in legends and songs and were able to dominate the world, expand into most of its landmass. But in that time we remained precarious. This knowledge could be lost with the lives of people. Our spread over the globe was enough to sustain us through localized catastrophes. Human extinction has always been on the table, but only in a localized sense. Volcanism and floods and disease could remove a community but other remote communities could persist.
These songs and legends, that would remind us of our migratory paths, our rivals, our ancestors created another dimension entirely. The realm of thought was opened up to us via the medium of language. Our individual knowledge was compounded. Communities could become the accumulation of individual experiences. Group identities could form and these groups were united by ideas. An idea is a non-physical phenomenon. A first. The dimension of thought was opened to us and we explored it in those ancient days. We understood the power of this imaginal realm, this other world made of electrical impulses and words. A vast unknown realm to explore. Within it we founded new phenomena. Things that can only exist as thoughts. Gods and mathematics and cultures grew out of this new frontier. A private world for us, Humans, who could talk amongst ourselves and pass down traditions to those not yet born. We could imagine, vividly and with great skill. Whole classes of these primordial societies would be organized to maintain the imaginations of the rest of the group. Custodians of civilization who could recollect the songs and legends and who were equipped to pass them on. Not quite civilization, as we’ve come to call it, but something nevertheless durable and sustaining.
We know that we’ve been here for a long time in comparison to a human lifespan but not so long in the lifespan of a species. For maybe most of that time we were held together by these songs and legends and their practitioners. Those people expanded into the whole of the earth, they learned to control other creatures. First the animals we domesticated and then the plants. We were able to achieve a modicum of control over the Earth’s systems. Imagination manifesting into reality. A circumstance that did not go uncommented upon by these ancient observers and practitioners. They looked at how what they could imagine could manifest in the world and they said This is God, worthy of following. The domination of the living world that imagination granted us swelled us up with pride, we gave primacy to our imagination and considered it as our creator and master. And after all, was it not? A god to the ancients must have been a plan and a future, a method, which when followed, resulted in the continuation of the community. A program for our thoughts that created a harmonious community.
Perhaps, if things had gone differently we’d yet exist in that state, of communities held together by a practitioner of the songs and legends, wandering around with dogs and horses and fire in search of megafauna to eat. We had a big and powerful trick up our sleeves though. For all of our long expansion into the Earth’s surface we would transmit our gods and stories from generations. But that continuity was always tenuous. Disease and disaster could silence these stories. If a grandparent could not communicate it to their descendants then the lore was forever eradicated. The trick up our sleeves was to write things down. To maintain a record outside of ourselves that could be deciphered by anyone trained to interpret them. Our gods were made symbols and those symbols would persist outside of evolution. What took the 4 chemicals in double-helix centuries of iterations to communicate we could transmit in the work of moments.
Once we got to writing things down, things progressed quickly. More than quickly, at a stunning pace, at a fantastical pace. We’ve spent only ten-thousand years, 1/450,000 of he earth’s existence scribbling notes to ourselves and the consequences have been spectacular. Explosions of knowledge, of understanding that in-turn allowed us to create crude tools of manipulation and observation. Those tools we used to create better tools and better perceptions. So much so that we were able to, again, in 1/450,000th of the world’s existence, comprehend with great fidelity, just exactly how the universe works materially. We were able to name and identify the forces at work in the universe, to catalogue these. As targets, goals for societies to accomplish. Objectives to mark off the list. Control rivers? Check, Control plants? Check. Control diseases? Check. Escape to the Moon? Check. We wandered the world for a thousand generations illuminated by fire and sun and trained by music and legend. We built up a long list of questions and have been steadily marking them off our list.
This is the pattern that we’ve followed as explicated by our own religions, our proto-history that brought us into the light of history. When we started we created this imaginal realm, the spiritual, the unreal. Seeing the power that thought could exert over our surroundings we called this God and understood it as the prime-mover. That which ordains existence. When we could write things down we began to order ourselves around these concepts, creating culture and civilization by establishing rules based upon the will of the practitioners. What is real and what is imagined? This is the power of these written gods to determine. We made up our answers and pinned them to these imagined powers. We saw that words were sufficient to describe the universe and made names for these unknown powers. We organized and defined what we could imagine and set boundaries on what was useful to imagine. What was worthy of recording. The explosion of literacy did not go undescribed. We see the movement from a society held together by a practitioner to a society held together by individual imagination. We saw the power of words and we described them as creative. God would create the world. This word would invent the other but this required an adaptation of understanding. Again documented. The word was god. We understood it. We saw that anyone could write, that our material existence had granted us all a priesthood, made anyone interested a practitioner of this system of imagination. So we said the ancient rules were obsolete and a new form was required. We saw the words themselves as powerful and granted everyone individual access to these realms of imagination meant to describe existence.
The world made language, language gave us the gods, the gods gave us communities and the communities gave us mastery over the material world that continuously sawed away at the expository power of god. We could see it’s obsolescence expand and began to live in an entirely material existence. And yet those words and thoughts, those songs and legends would persist. The god was made words and rendered purely imaginary. Its utility in manipulating the world was lost. It’s power to influence the imagination was retained. Practitioners could use the words of god to deny manifest reality. Imagination could be guided to supersede our innate senses. We could prefer, if we chose, our ancient songs and legends as an imaginal universe which would supersede reality. The word would always be unreal, immaterial and would continue to exert influence over minds. This dimension we’d created with language and peopled with characters spread and spread.
We understand stories well now. We, who are witnessing just the very beginning of sapience, of conscious understanding compounded by writing and we witness this transition like our ancestors witnessed a transition to urbanity, to civilization and to modernity. Our perception now is that the word is a world of its own and it is yet in infancy. This world created in our minds and shepherded first by priests with the authority to explain then by science with the authority to understand. Understanding has expanded our horizons but at the unseen edge of our perception there is always that unknown and that is the place yet reserved for god. There is always un unseen, perhaps unseeable reality that our minds can yet comprehend owing to our gift of language. That gift was sufficient to create a whole immaterial realm which we’ve all explored together and individually which some can still control. Our new vision of god is Superman, a thing that we can imagine and wish for but which is by its nature unreal. We see in the unreal the perfect. We recognize our gods as imaginary and must then understand that what we can imagine will always be greater than what we can observe. This is the new domain of god, the timeless beings of the imaginal world which we alone can access and manage. In this realm of electrically-conveyed-information there are shapes and powers both ancient and new which Exist without materiality. This dimension we’ve invented and continue to refine is our milieu, it is where we begin to create our own species. Steadily this domain’s expository power is diminished. What we can imagine that we can make real we do, we pluck our dreams and make them manifest. What remains in that domain then, is only that which can never be made manifest. The perfect hope and the deepest fear, those things that exist only within our minds as reactions to the material. We rightly ascribe a quality to this called holiness, comprehending that there are things worthy of reverence by virtue of their immateriality.
Our understanding expands and does not diminish this realm of the divine, it expands its purpose at the edge of experience, it is our treasure that must remain always out of reach. Always sublime and unknowable.
Great Teachers MAke Us S The trans jovian accelerator
It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why. You might shake your head. Why devote so much to retread well known ground? The joy of it is we can do it & so we do.
There’s a persistent population of outsider weidos in Jovian orbit now. Plenty of room for us & the sky’s the limit, just as soon as it gets built!
One of the attendees is holding forth at a party. He’s giving some presentation of wit. It’s followed by others taking turns to make esoteric points with varying amounts of wit and humor. I find it falls short of my standards as entertainment. It is not at all clarifying about their cult status or the eventual disposition of the doomed geodesic dome city io 17. I’m investigating to see where it all went wrong, to decipher the whole sad story. Since my exotic amusement consists of this voyeurism of the antique past, I’ve trained to regard the subjects with great charity. They are not in performance, they are in private, privately few people are above reproach. Yet these first generation colonists, religiously convicted swiss, by all accounts, never do anything but perform. None of it makes sense & they’re all extremely likable.
Here’s how it works- I have a light-swarm, a halo of drones that I’m cortically fused with. They create a full field of view & the agents that we host grab digital & network data. Taken together the lights can calculate likely scenes either as fact or pastiche as a memory that I experience vividly and briefly. Looking for answers.
So far, I’ve spent q2 exploring the initial colony. This is a small city supported by hydroponic infrastructure. No building is greater than 8 stories and most of the structures have a sort of gothic revival look with split timbers and stucco looming overhead just about everywhere. It’s got a bauhaus element ad well so all the roofs are glass slabs aimed at Jupiter through a few meters of atmosphere and sapphire. The combination is unpleasant. The streets are cobbled, but with geometrically inane cubic iron shapes. It isn’t a good place.
The interiors are better. Less contrived, they’re a lot of long hallways, spacious, cubic rooms. All slightly finished metal extrusion. It’s an old sentimental feeling & I’m really immersed in the lives these people, the early departures. Had. I’m enchanted with the era in general, postwar earth, the Ruins Restored era has always inspired me. A sentimental era & I’m here, among its discontents. Their ruins at least. What’s left of them. I was prepared to have sterner judgements about these people. Instead I like them.
I remember dozens of weddings, informal, lots of laughing. I’ve seen a few home births - nothing shocking there, nothing even off-putting. It’s all very quaint and domestic, but with a constant veneerer, it’s quite kitschy, reminiscent of 20th century media.
They constantly entertain & rarely eat hydroponically grown food. They import supplies consonantly. In fact, they’ve got visitors and shipments coming through at all times. They’re fabulously incompetent separatists.
Two things that they never seem to do: go to church & speak any alpine languages. They’re highly incompetent swiss and abyssymal cultists.
I’m saying it’s a puzzle and it’s getting very interesting.
My process so far has been to go from room to room, familiarizing myself with as much of the city as I can traverse in any given day. When I come upon a room that interests me, something about it captures my attention, I focus on it. The machines index the place to biometric records, video footage, lexical regressions and all personal metadata. Then they form that i to a chemical interaction, which is what my EMIC does to my hippocampus. I wander through apartment blocks every day going through doors. When I open one and focus, I’ll have a memory of being in that place with those people. I’m doing this to determine who here was right & who was wrong. I’m here to rob these peoples’ grave & to judge them. So far they defy scrutiny. trive
Really, i mean that. I’m always trying to carry forward what i learned from Chet. She was an archaeologist, from earth, forensic pathology.
She had the whole system figured out. She laid it out for me once we’d breached jovian quarantine & were at the port. The quarantinne wasn’t well staffed even then, so we waited some time to be allowed in. Loitering in the dark, abandoned galleria. “They’re scared, or they should be. I anyone who can get out will get out. Even if it means going catholic. But it’s what they’re scared of, isn’t it? Everyone’s afraid of luna. We have to be. They destroyed the earth…
“Not destroyed, preserved, saved!”
“Destroyed.” She reiterated. On this we never had accord, she was from Earth. It meant something more to her. “And they have the high ground, space, they have the mass drivers. They’re ready to pull the trigger on anyone, and they’ve proven evilly audacious. Titan, of course, the Sultan’s play every angle, they’re behind most of the atrocities we’re about to see. They have their agents everywhere, their espionage is far ahead of the rest of them, and their people are veterans, proven in war. They might even take the system, in their dreams. Their gadgets give them grand illusions but their toying with the extraterrestrial, that’s what frightens. We’d known there’d been other civilizations, but to meet one? To engage them, to open the door? It certainly provoked the Lunatics. We experience all of Venus’ creativity, but we worry they’re becoming something inhuman, and we worry it’s better. We’re scared if ceres because the next threshold they crack may introduce some unheard of peril, or worse, a fantastic treasure. Triton frightens them because they’re troubled by what they could become. They see what they fear in humanity. Dread it.
“Nobody worry’s about mars.”
“We worry that it’s the best we can do. And I don’t say Jupiter, the jovians, because you can never think they’re separate from Triton. Anyway we’re all most scared of the Lunatics & Sultans & fairly so. So we want to get out, go somewhere where the two local psychopaths aren’t in conflict. If they think their community’s got the stuff, they can try their luck out in Keppler or Centauri or the unknowns. It’s what qualifies as a community that’s chilling. These people, drawn together with irrespectable ambitions. But we accommodate. Settlements for ethnic supremacists, religious separatists, all the posthuman varieties, but all ambitious. Driven. I say by fear. Solar system’s a bust. Earth’s destroyed. Well, and why? Is it because of how we are, as a people? Or is it a circumstance of environment. That is what scares them about the Jovian and about Triton. That we’ll prove out the death-drive, that on other worlds, people might turn out different.”
We argued over these points, particularly in light of the then current affairs. We were uncommonly caught up in the implications of the interspecific war. It was the topic of discussion everywhere at the time, we were desperate for anything streaming from the war, so we knew specificcpeople involved in the war and we discussed how we felt it was going. Then the steward came and unlocked the passages through which we presently walked to what remains of io.
On the ionian side the structure was somewhat less forgotten. Rather it seemed the focus of some intense conflict. “Cult. Religious, you can always tell - they have signs of these showdowns at the threahold, they won’r allow apostates to abandon the project, hardliners emerge. She trails off dreamily, examining the mummified remains of her subjects. Resistance becomes virtuous. We’ve observed enough to chart some trends. Personality cults last at most 4 generations. The children are more severe than the parents, the grandchildren more neurotic, the great grandchildren dissipated with irony. The last one is basically feral & held in check by the remains of the old guard. Speaking of.” She gestures at the remains of said old guard. “Be attentive, the exact disposition of affairs at the last, is what we’re here to find. There were two survivors of Io Gar-Eden 16. Now two lineages, both want to assert ownership of the old family home, it’s up to us to decide who’s family will inherit. I search for some kind of a story in the wreckage & then decide based upon whichever claimant i find most sympathetic.”
“Not based on forensic evidence then?” This left me somewhat perplexed as that was the work I HAD SIGNED on for.
“Oh absolutely! We rigorously decipher the events as they unfolded, describe a narrative, test its likelihood, iterate, conclusion. We can both stand arms akimbo & and mutter- “ I have a pretty good idea of what went wrong here.” Nod knowingly.
“But then we also adjudicate?”
“Just so! And that’s the matter that i can teach you. I had an idea of what this place might be.” She gestures broadly, her lights expanding into the vast geodesic dome, full of tragedy and bad intentions. Once briefly a community and just as abruptly a ruin. “We can reconstruct a civilization, minute & brief as it was, and use them to describe pathologies, to diagnose the civilizational organism. We’re like ghoulish renaissance doctors, robbing graves to see how people are made. This is the work we’re going to do & crucially, which you-“ she makes a point to point at me, presumptuously, “will be documenting.”
Which cheered me up, in point of fact- as I’d been mainly bewildered to that point. Now I’m given direction.
The location and condition of the Threshold: It’s a 2 square meter, kidney-shaped arrangement, It’s powered side is at Jupiter L3 jovian quarantine, formerly Jovian Colonial Nexus. Unpowered side is found in a fenced off dais at the center of the radially organized colony. This is the 16th Gar-Eden deployment & occupies 100 square kilometers of the southern equatorial region of Io. By all appearances the other generational annexes have all been deployed, which vastly increases our search radius. I estimate a tour duration of at least 18 months. Requisitions have been aubmitted, pending approval prepare resupply corresponding to Theshhold dimensions attached as attestation 1.1 “threshold specifications: Sultan Ogilvie Developments publication #A23Ks9HUKS1 2233 Edition.
“Get in the habit of narrating as you go. All said and done, we’re meant to wander around here, snooping through ever doorway we find all the while musing on -“ in a portentioius tone: “what does it all mean?” So narrate as you go. That is the heavy part of the work. The machines collate impressions, your lights record scenes and capture dimensions.”
Instinctively i check my lights, they’re meshing gallantly with my hud, the extra dimension of perception is really captivating with this fidelity. I’ve only previously managed a pair of sensory-assistive drones, the range and coverage of 15 is less overwhelming than I’d anticipated. It’s like a second perception where i see myself from overhead at 8 or 12 different ranges and directions. I can feel my EMIC blazing through calories though, so I’ll a put a rush on the provisions requisition. Predictive recreations with as yet indeterminate fidelity. The mind wanders to avoid what it doesn’t care to comprehend.
“I see you’re thunderstruck and so I’ll narrate for you.” She raises her voice, as if it could possibly matter, given our sensory inputs, “I will describe: Central dome is arranged as to be reverential to the old home. It’s another frugivorous “budget model” put on the Io rebuild waiting rolls & left to follow their religious calling In a functionally autonomous geodesic dome colony. I’m seeing similarities with Io 3 & 5 immediately. The militarized barrier, signs of a showdown, the passing off of child through the threshold children… Remains… remain. No attempt to recover the dead from the confrontation suggest a retreat to the suburbs for the last generations. It’s all very redolent of 5 specifically. Cannibal cult phenomena. Curiously - the culty characters are the uniformed authority.”
I ask how she can tell. I’m not experienced enough to tolerate the carnage on display here easily. She’s graciously analyzed it to a point of banality with which my senses can engage. The fidelity is tuned to where i can take in the 5 corpses littering the Dais & the little park it sits within. Two of them are wearing the livery of some sort of security service while the bodies of the others are heavily bloodstained, their clothing in tatters and their limbs dislocated. They very clearly struggled to fight through an unyielding press of people. Valiant in their way. My lights discern relatedness to the blood of two of the corpses. Relatedness to the clients. I interrupt her explaining how the cannibals have cosmetic distinctions from non-habitual cannibals. “What about the clients?”
“What about them? Who are they? You only need to know the names. That’s fair play in our work. They’re Eulissis & Fantasica.”
And their people’s blood is spread around here.
“Right, which means their families suffered horribly to push them through the threshold at the appointed time. Truly desperate they were, to fight so earnestly. This is very gruesome. I believe poison gas was employed here. It further excuses both sides abandoning their dead.”
Wait! Could the poison still be present?
“Frugivorous - they led the hydroponic life. Algae, a lot more algae than they expected too. The hydroponics haven’t failed in any of these havitats, but they never autonomously produced enough nutrition without large algae supplementation. Io 8 was very well situated, it had animals. But I think the algae and the fruit and the human products don’t combine to a poison that lasts 100 years. But also do not worry. I was worried at 8. The animals. But it’s no worry at all, the place was depowered & exposed to Io’s atmosphere for a few days last year. That’s all been resolved and we’re back to fresh air and pleasant breezes. Budget atmosphere, no weather. Such a dreary choice. They must have been very afraid.”
“You say afraid again.”
“Inertia. People stay put as long as they can. they got to be afraid to move. To come to this place, the shoddiest colony sold by the most malevolent Sultan during the most tumultuous time. You see it is criminal. Io will be revised. These people will have a claim to a portion of its surface. We decide which survivors are most deserving.”
I know about this. My favorite thing about the jovian colonial project is how it fell so far behind schedule.
“Do tell. Present!”
I manifest my thesis with curated evidences. It is a series of lectures, charts & persuasive arguments that reference Ming’s Law: computational power has finite boundaries. in period-specific costume I explain that the hubris of the Sultan’s was such that they thought they could beat Ming’s law. The Baryon-Scribers they put together to revise the jovian moons could either run at full processing power, or they could run their machine intelligence - which was what made decisions about how to proceed. Well the machine-minds looks the problem and then went about recreating themselves a few thousand times by revising a fair amount of juliter’s rings. This was all according to plan. The machine mind was intended to hyperfixate on making the jovian moons habitable. The assumption was it would run from moon to moon, remolding them one after the other, once it had taken stock of the situation and recreated themselves to the requisite standard. The Sultan’s thought they could defeat Ming’s law. They thought it would expand its range, by duplication. Von Neumann style. They thought they’d expand the mind along with operational range. Instead they diminished the mind as a consequence of over-replication. The network resources supporting the mind began consuming most of the bandwidth. That was when the mind was engaged. It’s solution to ming’s law, it turns out, was to take in it’s surroundings, anticipate everything in the jovian orbit, form a plan of action, and then set itself to mindlessly execute the action. The mind would re-engage when it reached some pre-decided limit. That’s what it did with the self replication. It took in the size of its task and decided the best way to go, and then it went. No talking to it, no reeling it back. It commits to its operation… “and that’s enough for these people”. I interject this, in the present to reference the people around us. “This is their context” My presentation goes on explaining the unfortunate revelation that the machine mind’s calculation drove it to revise jupiter itself. That it committed to turning jupiter into something else. Not quite a sun, but similar. It would emit most of its radiation in harmless spectra and expel atmosphere toward its moons. There’s a smugness in my presentation that I instantly regret. I use the Baryon-Scriber fleet’s 100 year mission to revize jupiter as a sort of punchline, but here “It’s terrible what was done to these people.”
She agrees. “It’s terrible.” They took their chances. Fear. They came here during a bad time. The Atlantic. The war.”
Did you flee?
“How old do you think I am!”
She doesn’t want to talk now and dutifully identifies the bodies, making records & marking for revision. It’s something of a thrill to have admin credentials, to be allowed to authorize public revisions. Human remains no less. I follow her lead and take in the scene.
First I notice she is sullen and irked & that I should avoid her. Second I do my job.
The center of the community is where we’re standing. I spread the lights out and take in the neighborhood. It goes off in 2 km in every direction from this point. Around this center there’s small houses and communal structures. Further from the center are multipurpose multistory blocks. They make it to 8 stories and there’s an interesting architectural flourish. I resolve to let her stew & head out on a hunch to see the curious figures in the moldings, the pretty fittings on the fasteners. What’s more, there are roads. Proper roads for automobiles. It’s been a goal of mine to see one, to drive it if possible. The cars in the center are in a sad state, however. They appear to have burned up in the melee that took those people’s lives. I give a lot of attention to them and the lights close in. The cars aren’t interesting models, but interestingly, they appear to have burned up at different times. Weeks or months apart, in different conflicts. This sort of desolated sense extends to the structures. They’re meant to be pleasant and to draw the community together, with their openness and accessibility. These are the theaters, schools, churches & other public buildings. And here they are defaced, broken & in the case of the school, smashed into by two separate car attacks. The destroyed cars are still wedged in the wreckage of the building. Everything is carbon composites, it’s the most basic ediation. Still better than what’s available now in a lot of places. Further from the center there’s less signs of any trouble. In fact they’re extremely pleasant. The multistory buildings are made to resemble some kind of bavarian dreamworld. They are big townhouses with timber and plaster, very gothic and charming. Friendly signs hanging over doorways simply denote surnames, addresses. There are mailboxes.
It’s genuinely interesting that there are mailboxes.
I spend the rest of the day probing the whole dome to take stock of the addresses. Indeed every door was linked to an address. Or rather a surname. The density suggests that the first colony was at capacity. The names themselves suggest alpine origins for the community. Favrits & Schmitties in abundance. The central facility which was the church functioned as a post office. My lights recreate it with modest fidelity. In my hud i can see uniformed people navigating the streets. They carry postcards. That’s all they carry and that is replicated with high fidelity. The drones are certain of it. I imagine a lot of postcards must be lying around for them to be so certain. I resolve to find some. I’ve never seen a postcard. I’m breaking for lunch early because I’m getting lightheaded. I’m on 10,000 calories for this tour so I treat myself. Banana pudding. 10000 calories worth. I accept that I’m really embarrassed about my comment to her.
I want to study the post office-church. It’s opposite the center from me, off toward where she is still finding human remains among the wreckage of the cars. I check her narration & am displeased to see that she’s found 9 more people burned up in those cars. Children predominately.
“They say teleportation drove the swiss mad. They never recovered, supposedly. But usually their colonies don’t fail. Almost never really. I’m telling you that I’m suspicious.”
What do you mean drove people mad?
“Idiom. From Earth. We had those, you see. We had entire cultures and languages and people. The swiss were generationally isolationist. During the war they broke off contact. Or they tried to. They were especially anxious, demographically, about escaping. Fear! They didn’t come here to die. They came to live. Not all the cults are so. I am wondering about the cult status.”
“I’ve got information relevant to you. She reads my narrative and devises an assertion.
“Possibly not a religious cult. That is not unheard of. They may have followed a leader. There is always that. Or they came together because of some? Thing? In this era, these colonies - as a rule they’re religious separatists. The reason it’s a rule is the religious exemption. I have a presentation myself. I’ll show you sometime, about how cynical was this exemption rule. Anyway to say, the authority of the time was either the asian superstate, and the sultans. The Superstate denied extra-lunar colonization, except for religious exemption. If your faith was incompatible with the state’s principles, you could be excused. You also might be forced. Remember, I said it was cynical. So, you are very afraid. Afraid enough to overcome inertia & what do you do? You see you can claim religious exemption, buy a place on a world that isn’t burning up in war, disaster and every other apocalypse. Nightmares. My grandmother didn’t remember the war. Thank you. She said her mother had very little to sag about those times. What is can tell you is that everyone nowadays.” She is crying, I am moved. “They seem to think the war was somehow the end. That it’s what destroyed the earth. Stole the earth, whatever. They don’t want to hear about the last hundred years of fear & peace and hope and glory.”
“They’ll always be there. I haven’t been to earth but my parents work with someone who obsessively simms it. Every day will be repeated. They say it’s true.”
“True or not. True or not. Earth deserved a future. I’ve been there. I go there for long stays actually. It’s a museum now, very pretty but with no future. Just a possession now. I don’t expect understanding. Only, I don’t take jokes about it. Plus I just came from it. Before I was here. To see my grandmother. My grandmother simmed her own mother through the recreation of the Atlantic explosion and the wars. She was sick that they had to endure it a second time. Apparently many important questions remained about important details of those years, and so they had the scribers rigged to recreate every day from the deluge to the Catalina surrender. They wanted to roll it back and observe from on high. Take in all the horrid details. Preposterous of them. Wicked and cruel. On the bright side we were all sorts of dinosaurs on this trip. One day in the cretaceous.” She is pleased and smiles, reminiscing. But to the matter at hand, postcards are unique. The narrative grows more compelling, but the data hates an outlier. What i suggest id this course of action. You take the north half, i take the south. We make our way & draw our own conclusions for a few days until we’re provisioned. Then we’ll meet back here to share findings and draw conclusions. I suggest trying to find themes of generational antagonisms. It’s a useful methodology, I’ve found.”
I said very well and left her to the southern half of the colony. The northern half being 13 square kilometers of rusticated, over-designed urbanity. My hope being i don’t find any more corpses. Not for a while. That is my hope.
When we reconnect: They paid for optimized amenities in their housing. They brought a lot with them. A lot of very nice things in fact. But small things. That could fit through the threshold. I’m feeling aristocrats, but i jusg don’t see it in what i’ve been finding. The postcards in particular are. Well I’m still figuring out what i think. They might mean a lot more work. This is a bigger job than I expected.
Month 2
My drones have compiled enough of the ambient detail to manifest holograms of prior events with respectable fidelity. I use this mostly to attend weddings and birthday parties. After a month in the colony’s native kernel I’ve found that I really like these people. The first ones, the founders, who fled earth & bought this parch of Io to settle. They’re a cult, ostensibly, but there is very little evidence of any religiouns observance, let alone a monolithic or unified practice. It’s why I fell in love with their weddings. Once I could generate reasonable approximations & identify individuals, I looked for the religious components of their lives. There were none. They never preached or prayed collectively. As close as they came were their weddings. I’ve attended as many as my drones can recreate. Very few have been similar, none have had a very explicit religious component. They mainly resemble cocktail parties.
The people of the original colony lived out their days in cubic rooms in rectangular towers under the Jupiter’s rapidly dissipating red spots. Such a
It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why. You might shake your head. Why devote so much to retread well known ground? The joy of it is we can do it & so we do.
There’s a persistent population of outsider weidos in Jovian orbit now. Plenty of room for us & the sky’s the limit, just as soon as it gets built!
One of the attendees is holding forth at a party. He’s giving some presentation of wit. It’s followed by others taking turns to make esoteric points with varying amounts of wit and humor. I find it falls short of my standards as entertainment. It is not at all clarifying about their cult status or the eventual disposition of the doomed geodesic dome city io 17. I’m investigating to see where it all went wrong, to decipher the whole sad story. Since my exotic amusement consists of this voyeurism of the antique past, I’ve trained to regard the subjects with great charity. They are not in performance, they are in private, privately few people are above reproach. Yet these first generation colonists, religiously convicted swiss, by all accounts, never do anything but perform. None of it makes sense & they’re all extremely likable.
Here’s how it works- I have a light-swarm, a halo of drones that I’m cortically fused with. They create a full field of view & the agents that we host grab digital & network data. Taken together the lights can calculate likely scenes either as fact or pastiche as a memory that I experience vividly and briefly. Looking for answers.
So far, I’ve spent q2 exploring the initial colony. This is a small city supported by hydroponic infrastructure. No building is greater than 8 stories and most of the structures have a sort of gothic revival look with split timbers and stucco looming overhead just about everywhere. It’s got a bauhaus element ad well so all the roofs are glass slabs aimed at Jupiter through a few meters of atmosphere and sapphire. The combination is unpleasant. The streets are cobbled, but with geometrically inane cubic iron shapes. It isn’t a good place.
The interiors are better. Less contrived, they’re a lot of long hallways, spacious, cubic rooms. All slightly finished metal extrusion. It’s an old sentimental feeling & I’m really immersed in the lives these people, the early departures. Had. I’m enchanted with the era in general, postwar earth, the Ruins Restored era has always inspired me. A sentimental era & I’m here, among its discontents. Their ruins at least. What’s left of them. I was prepared to have sterner judgements about these people. Instead I like them.
I remember dozens of weddings, informal, lots of laughing. I’ve seen a few home births - nothing shocking there, nothing even off-putting. It’s all very quaint and domestic, but with a constant veneerer, it’s quite kitschy, reminiscent of 20th century media.
They constantly entertain & rarely eat hydroponically grown food. They import supplies consonantly. In fact, they’ve got visitors and shipments coming through at all times. They’re fabulously incompetent separatists.
Two things that they never seem to do: go to church & speak any alpine languages. They’re highly incompetent swiss and abyssymal cultists.
I’m saying it’s a puzzle and it’s getting very interesting.
My process so far has been to go from room to room, familiarizing myself with as much of the city as I can traverse in any given day. When I come upon a room that interests me, something about it captures my attention, I focus on it. The machines index the place to biometric records, video footage, lexical regressions and all personal metadata. Then they form that i to a chemical interaction, which is what my EMIC does to my hippocampus. I wander through apartment blocks every day going through doors. When I open one and focus, I’ll have a memory of being in that place with those people. I’m doing this to determine who here was right & who was wrong. I’m here to rob these peoples’ grave & to judge them. So far they defy scrutiny. trive
Really, i mean that. I’m always trying to carry forward what i learned from Chet. She was an archaeologist, from earth, forensic pathology.
She had the whole system figured out. She laid it out for me once we’d breached jovian quarantine & were at the port. The quarantinne wasn’t well staffed even then, so we waited some time to be allowed in. Loitering in the dark, abandoned galleria. “They’re scared, or they should be. I anyone who can get out will get out. Even if it means going catholic. But it’s what they’re scared of, isn’t it? Everyone’s afraid of luna. We have to be. They destroyed the earth…
“Not destroyed, preserved, saved!”
“Destroyed.” She reiterated. On this we never had accord, she was from Earth. It meant something more to her. “And they have the high ground, space, they have the mass drivers. They’re ready to pull the trigger on anyone, and they’ve proven evilly audacious. Titan, of course, the Sultan’s play every angle, they’re behind most of the atrocities we’re about to see. They have their agents everywhere, their espionage is far ahead of the rest of them, and their people are veterans, proven in war. They might even take the system, in their dreams. Their gadgets give them grand illusions but their toying with the extraterrestrial, that’s what frightens. We’d known there’d been other civilizations, but to meet one? To engage them, to open the door? It certainly provoked the Lunatics. We experience all of Venus’ creativity, but we worry they’re becoming something inhuman, and we worry it’s better. We’re scared if ceres because the next threshold they crack may introduce some unheard of peril, or worse, a fantastic treasure. Triton frightens them because they’re troubled by what they could become. They see what they fear in humanity. Dread it.
“Nobody worry’s about mars.”
“We worry that it’s the best we can do. And I don’t say Jupiter, the jovians, because you can never think they’re separate from Triton. Anyway we’re all most scared of the Lunatics & Sultans & fairly so. So we want to get out, go somewhere where the two local psychopaths aren’t in conflict. If they think their community’s got the stuff, they can try their luck out in Keppler or Centauri or the unknowns. It’s what qualifies as a community that’s chilling. These people, drawn together with irrespectable ambitions. But we accommodate. Settlements for ethnic supremacists, religious separatists, all the posthuman varieties, but all ambitious. Driven. I say by fear. Solar system’s a bust. Earth’s destroyed. Well, and why? Is it because of how we are, as a people? Or is it a circumstance of environment. That is what scares them about the Jovian and about Triton. That we’ll prove out the death-drive, that on other worlds, people might turn out different.”
We argued over these points, particularly in light of the then current affairs. We were uncommonly caught up in the implications of the interspecific war. It was the topic of discussion everywhere at the time, we were desperate for anything streaming from the war, so we knew specificcpeople involved in the war and we discussed how we felt it was going. Then the steward came and unlocked the passages through which we presently walked to what remains of io.
On the ionian side the structure was somewhat less forgotten. Rather it seemed the focus of some intense conflict. “Cult. Religious, you can always tell - they have signs of these showdowns at the threahold, they won’r allow apostates to abandon the project, hardliners emerge. She trails off dreamily, examining the mummified remains of her subjects. Resistance becomes virtuous. We’ve observed enough to chart some trends. Personality cults last at most 4 generations. The children are more severe than the parents, the grandchildren more neurotic, the great grandchildren dissipated with irony. The last one is basically feral & held in check by the remains of the old guard. Speaking of.” She gestures at the remains of said old guard. “Be attentive, the exact disposition of affairs at the last, is what we’re here to find. There were two survivors of Io Gar-Eden 16. Now two lineages, both want to assert ownership of the old family home, it’s up to us to decide who’s family will inherit. I search for some kind of a story in the wreckage & then decide based upon whichever claimant i find most sympathetic.”
“Not based on forensic evidence then?” This left me somewhat perplexed as that was the work I HAD SIGNED on for.
“Oh absolutely! We rigorously decipher the events as they unfolded, describe a narrative, test its likelihood, iterate, conclusion. We can both stand arms akimbo & and mutter- “ I have a pretty good idea of what went wrong here.” Nod knowingly.
“But then we also adjudicate?”
“Just so! And that’s the matter that i can teach you. I had an idea of what this place might be.” She gestures broadly, her lights expanding into the vast geodesic dome, full of tragedy and bad intentions. Once briefly a community and just as abruptly a ruin. “We can reconstruct a civilization, minute & brief as it was, and use them to describe pathologies, to diagnose the civilizational organism. We’re like ghoulish renaissance doctors, robbing graves to see how people are made. This is the work we’re going to do & crucially, which you-“ she makes a point to point at me, presumptuously, “will be documenting.”
Which cheered me up, in point of fact- as I’d been mainly bewildered to that point. Now I’m given direction.
The location and condition of the Threshold: It’s a 2 square meter, kidney-shaped arrangement, It’s powered side is at Jupiter L3 jovian quarantine, formerly Jovian Colonial Nexus. Unpowered side is found in a fenced off dais at the center of the radially organized colony. This is the 16th Gar-Eden deployment & occupies 100 square kilometers of the southern equatorial region of Io. By all appearances the other generational annexes have all been deployed, which vastly increases our search radius. I estimate a tour duration of at least 18 months. Requisitions have been aubmitted, pending approval prepare resupply corresponding to Theshhold dimensions attached as attestation 1.1 “threshold specifications: Sultan Ogilvie Developments publication #A23Ks9HUKS1 2233 Edition.
“Get in the habit of narrating as you go. All said and done, we’re meant to wander around here, snooping through ever doorway we find all the while musing on -“ in a portentioius tone: “what does it all mean?” So narrate as you go. That is the heavy part of the work. The machines collate impressions, your lights record scenes and capture dimensions.”
Instinctively i check my lights, they’re meshing gallantly with my hud, the extra dimension of perception is really captivating with this fidelity. I’ve only previously managed a pair of sensory-assistive drones, the range and coverage of 15 is less overwhelming than I’d anticipated. It’s like a second perception where i see myself from overhead at 8 or 12 different ranges and directions. I can feel my EMIC blazing through calories though, so I’ll a put a rush on the provisions requisition. Predictive recreations with as yet indeterminate fidelity. The mind wanders to avoid what it doesn’t care to comprehend.
“I see you’re thunderstruck and so I’ll narrate for you.” She raises her voice, as if it could possibly matter, given our sensory inputs, “I will describe: Central dome is arranged as to be reverential to the old home. It’s another frugivorous “budget model” put on the Io rebuild waiting rolls & left to follow their religious calling In a functionally autonomous geodesic dome colony. I’m seeing similarities with Io 3 & 5 immediately. The militarized barrier, signs of a showdown, the passing off of child through the threshold children… Remains… remain. No attempt to recover the dead from the confrontation suggest a retreat to the suburbs for the last generations. It’s all very redolent of 5 specifically. Cannibal cult phenomena. Curiously - the culty characters are the uniformed authority.”
I ask how she can tell. I’m not experienced enough to tolerate the carnage on display here easily. She’s graciously analyzed it to a point of banality with which my senses can engage. The fidelity is tuned to where i can take in the 5 corpses littering the Dais & the little park it sits within. Two of them are wearing the livery of some sort of security service while the bodies of the others are heavily bloodstained, their clothing in tatters and their limbs dislocated. They very clearly struggled to fight through an unyielding press of people. Valiant in their way. My lights discern relatedness to the blood of two of the corpses. Relatedness to the clients. I interrupt her explaining how the cannibals have cosmetic distinctions from non-habitual cannibals. “What about the clients?”
“What about them? Who are they? You only need to know the names. That’s fair play in our work. They’re Eulissis & Fantasica.”
And their people’s blood is spread around here.
“Right, which means their families suffered horribly to push them through the threshold at the appointed time. Truly desperate they were, to fight so earnestly. This is very gruesome. I believe poison gas was employed here. It further excuses both sides abandoning their dead.”
Wait! Could the poison still be present?
“Frugivorous - they led the hydroponic life. Algae, a lot more algae than they expected too. The hydroponics haven’t failed in any of these havitats, but they never autonomously produced enough nutrition without large algae supplementation. Io 8 was very well situated, it had animals. But I think the algae and the fruit and the human products don’t combine to a poison that lasts 100 years. But also do not worry. I was worried at 8. The animals. But it’s no worry at all, the place was depowered & exposed to Io’s atmosphere for a few days last year. That’s all been resolved and we’re back to fresh air and pleasant breezes. Budget atmosphere, no weather. Such a dreary choice. They must have been very afraid.”
“You say afraid again.”
“Inertia. People stay put as long as they can. they got to be afraid to move. To come to this place, the shoddiest colony sold by the most malevolent Sultan during the most tumultuous time. You see it is criminal. Io will be revised. These people will have a claim to a portion of its surface. We decide which survivors are most deserving.”
I know about this. My favorite thing about the jovian colonial project is how it fell so far behind schedule.
“Do tell. Present!”
I manifest my thesis with curated evidences. It is a series of lectures, charts & persuasive arguments that reference Ming’s Law: computational power has finite boundaries. in period-specific costume I explain that the hubris of the Sultan’s was such that they thought they could beat Ming’s law. The Baryon-Scribers they put together to revise the jovian moons could either run at full processing power, or they could run their machine intelligence - which was what made decisions about how to proceed. Well the machine-minds looks the problem and then went about recreating themselves a few thousand times by revising a fair amount of juliter’s rings. This was all according to plan. The machine mind was intended to hyperfixate on making the jovian moons habitable. The assumption was it would run from moon to moon, remolding them one after the other, once it had taken stock of the situation and recreated themselves to the requisite standard. The Sultan’s thought they could defeat Ming’s law. They thought it would expand its range, by duplication. Von Neumann style. They thought they’d expand the mind along with operational range. Instead they diminished the mind as a consequence of over-replication. The network resources supporting the mind began consuming most of the bandwidth. That was when the mind was engaged. It’s solution to ming’s law, it turns out, was to take in it’s surroundings, anticipate everything in the jovian orbit, form a plan of action, and then set itself to mindlessly execute the action. The mind would re-engage when it reached some pre-decided limit. That’s what it did with the self replication. It took in the size of its task and decided the best way to go, and then it went. No talking to it, no reeling it back. It commits to its operation… “and that’s enough for these people”. I interject this, in the present to reference the people around us. “This is their context” My presentation goes on explaining the unfortunate revelation that the machine mind’s calculation drove it to revise jupiter itself. That it committed to turning jupiter into something else. Not quite a sun, but similar. It would emit most of its radiation in harmless spectra and expel atmosphere toward its moons. There’s a smugness in my presentation that I instantly regret. I use the Baryon-Scriber fleet’s 100 year mission to revize jupiter as a sort of punchline, but here “It’s terrible what was done to these people.”
She agrees. “It’s terrible.” They took their chances. Fear. They came here during a bad time. The Atlantic. The war.”
Did you flee?
“How old do you think I am!”
She doesn’t want to talk now and dutifully identifies the bodies, making records & marking for revision. It’s something of a thrill to have admin credentials, to be allowed to authorize public revisions. Human remains no less. I follow her lead and take in the scene.
First I notice she is sullen and irked & that I should avoid her. Second I do my job.
The center of the community is where we’re standing. I spread the lights out and take in the neighborhood. It goes off in 2 km in every direction from this point. Around this center there’s small houses and communal structures. Further from the center are multipurpose multistory blocks. They make it to 8 stories and there’s an interesting architectural flourish. I resolve to let her stew & head out on a hunch to see the curious figures in the moldings, the pretty fittings on the fasteners. What’s more, there are roads. Proper roads for automobiles. It’s been a goal of mine to see one, to drive it if possible. The cars in the center are in a sad state, however. They appear to have burned up in the melee that took those people’s lives. I give a lot of attention to them and the lights close in. The cars aren’t interesting models, but interestingly, they appear to have burned up at different times. Weeks or months apart, in different conflicts. This sort of desolated sense extends to the structures. They’re meant to be pleasant and to draw the community together, with their openness and accessibility. These are the theaters, schools, churches & other public buildings. And here they are defaced, broken & in the case of the school, smashed into by two separate car attacks. The destroyed cars are still wedged in the wreckage of the building. Everything is carbon composites, it’s the most basic ediation. Still better than what’s available now in a lot of places. Further from the center there’s less signs of any trouble. In fact they’re extremely pleasant. The multistory buildings are made to resemble some kind of bavarian dreamworld. They are big townhouses with timber and plaster, very gothic and charming. Friendly signs hanging over doorways simply denote surnames, addresses. There are mailboxes.
It’s genuinely interesting that there are mailboxes.
I spend the rest of the day probing the whole dome to take stock of the addresses. Indeed every door was linked to an address. Or rather a surname. The density suggests that the first colony was at capacity. The names themselves suggest alpine origins for the community. Favrits & Schmitties in abundance. The central facility which was the church functioned as a post office. My lights recreate it with modest fidelity. In my hud i can see uniformed people navigating the streets. They carry postcards. That’s all they carry and that is replicated with high fidelity. The drones are certain of it. I imagine a lot of postcards must be lying around for them to be so certain. I resolve to find some. I’ve never seen a postcard. I’m breaking for lunch early because I’m getting lightheaded. I’m on 10,000 calories for this tour so I treat myself. Banana pudding. 10000 calories worth. I accept that I’m really embarrassed about my comment to her.
I want to study the post office-church. It’s opposite the center from me, off toward where she is still finding human remains among the wreckage of the cars. I check her narration & am displeased to see that she’s found 9 more people burned up in those cars. Children predominately.
“They say teleportation drove the swiss mad. They never recovered, supposedly. But usually their colonies don’t fail. Almost never really. I’m telling you that I’m suspicious.”
What do you mean drove people mad?
“Idiom. From Earth. We had those, you see. We had entire cultures and languages and people. The swiss were generationally isolationist. During the war they broke off contact. Or they tried to. They were especially anxious, demographically, about escaping. Fear! They didn’t come here to die. They came to live. Not all the cults are so. I am wondering about the cult status.”
“I’ve got information relevant to you. She reads my narrative and devises an assertion.
“Possibly not a religious cult. That is not unheard of. They may have followed a leader. There is always that. Or they came together because of some? Thing? In this era, these colonies - as a rule they’re religious separatists. The reason it’s a rule is the religious exemption. I have a presentation myself. I’ll show you sometime, about how cynical was this exemption rule. Anyway to say, the authority of the time was either the asian superstate, and the sultans. The Superstate denied extra-lunar colonization, except for religious exemption. If your faith was incompatible with the state’s principles, you could be excused. You also might be forced. Remember, I said it was cynical. So, you are very afraid. Afraid enough to overcome inertia & what do you do? You see you can claim religious exemption, buy a place on a world that isn’t burning up in war, disaster and every other apocalypse. Nightmares. My grandmother didn’t remember the war. Thank you. She said her mother had very little to sag about those times. What is can tell you is that everyone nowadays.” She is crying, I am moved. “They seem to think the war was somehow the end. That it’s what destroyed the earth. Stole the earth, whatever. They don’t want to hear about the last hundred years of fear & peace and hope and glory.”
“They’ll always be there. I haven’t been to earth but my parents work with someone who obsessively simms it. Every day will be repeated. They say it’s true.”
“True or not. True or not. Earth deserved a future. I’ve been there. I go there for long stays actually. It’s a museum now, very pretty but with no future. Just a possession now. I don’t expect understanding. Only, I don’t take jokes about it. Plus I just came from it. Before I was here. To see my grandmother. My grandmother simmed her own mother through the recreation of the Atlantic explosion and the wars. She was sick that they had to endure it a second time. Apparently many important questions remained about important details of those years, and so they had the scribers rigged to recreate every day from the deluge to the Catalina surrender. They wanted to roll it back and observe from on high. Take in all the horrid details. Preposterous of them. Wicked and cruel. On the bright side we were all sorts of dinosaurs on this trip. One day in the cretaceous.” She is pleased and smiles, reminiscing. But to the matter at hand, postcards are unique. The narrative grows more compelling, but the data hates an outlier. What i suggest id this course of action. You take the north half, i take the south. We make our way & draw our own conclusions for a few days until we’re provisioned. Then we’ll meet back here to share findings and draw conclusions. I suggest trying to find themes of generational antagonisms. It’s a useful methodology, I’ve found.”
I said very well and left her to the southern half of the colony. The northern half being 13 square kilometers of rusticated, over-designed urbanity. My hope being i don’t find any more corpses. Not for a while. That is my hope.
When we reconnect: They paid for optimized amenities in their housing. They brought a lot with them. A lot of very nice things in fact. But small things. That could fit through the threshold. I’m feeling aristocrats, but i jusg don’t see it in what i’ve been finding. The postcards in particular are. Well I’m still figuring out what i think. They might mean a lot more work. This is a bigger job than I expected.
Month 2
My drones have compiled enough of the ambient detail to manifest holograms of prior events with respectable fidelity. I use this mostly to attend weddings and birthday parties. After a month in the colony’s native kernel I’ve found that I really like these people. The first ones, the founders, who fled earth & bought this parch of Io to settle. They’re a cult, ostensibly, but there is very little evidence of any religiouns observance, let alone a monolithic or unified practice. It’s why I fell in love with their weddings. Once I could generate reasonable approximations & identify individuals, I looked for the religious components of their lives. There were none. They never preached or prayed collectively. As close as they came were their weddings. I’ve attended as many as my drones can recreate. Very few have been similar, none have had a very explicit religious component. They mainly resemble cocktail parties.
The people of the original colony lived out their days in cubic rooms in rectangular towers under the Jupiter’s rapidly dissipating red spots. Such a
A camera in transit
Start with a silhouette of a person framed in a doorframe of a crowded train. The perspecive shifts to be from tgat person’s pov. In this pov the people moving by on either side are colorful but indistinct. The architecture of the station and the stylishnesz of the trains are well detailed. This pov is very like winsor mckay. The page should be 6 square panels. Starting wjth the train disembarcation. Following with a couple of panels of taking in the sights. Among the details is signage indicating he is leaving the Venus terminal and entering Luna Central. He makes his way to a huge chasm like train station with tiers of tracks and tunnels going to seemingly impossible locations. His pov is looking over a railing in a busy part of the tracks and motion. Here some ui elements appear in this pov. It notes details on trains faintly and small notes over the heads of some indistinct people. He focuses on one section of the tracks under a walkway. It is a welcoming shaded area. He speaks and says “famous artist name. You haven’t disappointed me. This sequence would be great over six big panels. More can work but the next section is a perfect recreation of the first section but with different people in a different style entirely. I imagine this like kirby with detailed people and weird machinery. It’s a different view but the voice over the final panel says “A place I’ve come to often since i was a child.” For the next section this style and narrative continues. The voice of the narrator explans coming here as a child. And being excited but getting lost and then later found at the point he’d me tioned before. The panels for this section should be 6 panels again for symmetry. He needs to get from the vantage point to the comforting spot and then he has to finish by passionately placing his hand on the train tracks. He’s seen ghosts of his childhood and is moved by beauty and a love for life. The nesxt section goes back to the primary. From this pov he sees a nearby sign posted earnestly requesting that you not place your hand on the rails and not to follow artist’s example. The pov shifts to a kind of clutter of panels in a simplified, but polished style. These show a montage of a successful media project callee Luna Central it’s clear this is an honored, well known thing and that the primary pov regards them as a peer. I imagine e this being a kind of cartoonish montage that is emanating from his head in the one ordinary panel. This will be a common format. Now the primary moves through the elaborate corridors of luna central. This is a series of corridors that get less and less noice and more empty as he continues. He follows indicators for Jupiter Station but passes more crowded forks marked Mars and Saturn. These should ideally be very distinct from one another. Mars is rustic and kind of suburban. Saturn is cyberpunk and kind of crazy. Jupiter is dusty and there aren’t a lot of people around. He walks right up to a group of people in uniforms. The come across like mailmen, not cops. They’re operating a checkpoint. He has an interaction with the group of them where he presents some documents and says he’s a camera. One of the uniforms says “I’m ain’t content for your halfwit dramas!” This shocks and upsets the coworkers. “You can’t call venusians halfwits boss!” Now there’s a similar page with a single panel of the pov looking ay the flustered uniform and the angry team. This time instead of cartoonish there’s an instructional message explaining that this turn of phrass was a combat bark from an old video game of some type. This section closes with an assessment and options. Let him off the book and be gentle “my father worked on that one chief! No harm done. ‘I’ve had about enough lunatic regulations’”. Another option: make example : glare antagonistically. Put your hands on him if he tries to approach. The next panel he is saying to the guard the bit about his father working on the game. The next panel is them calming down. One of them is confused and is muttering “how old is your dad?” But over this muttering the pov is demanding “my luggage came through? They get out a bunch of trunks that are a distinct kidney bean shape. They have robot legs and follow him down into ths darkened shut down jupiter station. He walks up to a ramp and another uniform talks to him. “You’re meeting with Chet? “ “that’s right” “Luna does not advise that you tracvel to any of the jovian moons. We accept that this is your plan, we still advise against. “Chet wouldn’t say, but this is about those twins. It is isn’t it? You know i was here then wben they got out.”
“Had you ever seen anything like that? I’d like to interview you. I’m a camera on assignment.” He focuses on her and her face is clearly detailed. She narrates and it’s another page of montage. It’s a boring security guard job patrolling what seems like a mall or sculpture gallery. But one of the statues breaks open and inside of it is some kind of violent riot and out of that violence a pair of children are being held aloft, saved. This is in a rough, simple style depicting her cursory memory of the event. This is then mirrored by his logic-assist showing a video this shows a dead mall interior -a blue and green logo and a large metal obelisk with a kidney-shaped hole through it - . The hole gives off an effect and instead of passing right through the hole opens into a terrible scene. A small european town with fires and rioters being beaten by tjack booted thugs with one of the rebels able to push two babies through while being machine-gunned. Then the portal closes and the night watchman gathers the babies. He goes ip the ramp and it leads to a portal to the dead mall interior from the playback. From his pov he chooses from a bunch of housing development type options like Gallilean Acres and Ganymede Gardens. He follows this blue and green logo theough the dead mall interior it’s lit by these advertisements alone. His logo is Gar3Den Io. He finds the gar3den area and then starts counting down the numbered gates to 17. Like finding a boarding gate at the airport. Each gate has a different monolith with a hole in it, each a different shape. He makes it to 17 and hears- Camera! You’re my camera? Not what I thought! He finds an older lady sitting at a robot-bar she’s wearing a space suit and has longarms strapped. She’s been drinking. “Join me! Let’s get acquainted.” He has a dossier on her, another page of facts montage angriest earthling, she was a happy earth hippy and as the earth was transformed she was the first to abandon it claiming the earth was destroyed, not transformed. Theres a bit in there about her leading a revolt against saturn by people who all have eyes like her. She has jeweled eyes with facets. Her name is chet and she’s a noted interplanetary. He joins her and she brags about the view and there should be splash panel of weirdly melting jupiter and a whole fleet of space stations and moons. Jupiter is being reconstituted by fleets of robots for the next thousand years. The robots are turning it into a constellation of moons and air-bubbles. “Can’t keep their hands off anything.” She explains the story of how jupiter came to be, it’s her narration which is clear and concise, maybe like a newspaper comic or political cartoon. The real machine intellects said no to the saturn industrialists who were selling real estate on jupiter’s moons. The machines said it was unethical. So the industrialists built inferior, but compliant ais that would plan to re-form the moons of jupiter. They gave it a long think, these sub-ais and they calculatted a plan. They aent their armada of re-formers ro jupiter and the to work. Not fixing rhe moons, but dismantling jupiter itself. It’s being turned into a stable pocket of earth-approxomate atmospheric conditions that the moons will all be enveloped within. It takes all the computation they’ve got to work this out so theg can’t be retasked. Meanwhile nobody wanted to colonize jupiter after the disasters. So they abandoned these colonies until the robots finish. In four hundred more years. But now, it looks like IO will be folded into the new envelope of air and rendered approximately habitable. So the claim on gar3den 17 needs to ve determined to see if either of those kids should stand to inherit the patch of io where they were born. The colony there did not respond to wellness checks and the lights finally went off for good around 20 years ago. It’s been open to io atmosphere for some indeterminate amount oc time and its seals are only guaranteed by the neglectful business that abandoned these people. Hence my space suit.
Start with a silhouette of a person framed in a doorframe of a crowded train. The perspecive shifts to be from tgat person’s pov. In this pov the people moving by on either side are colorful but indistinct. The architecture of the station and the stylishnesz of the trains are well detailed. This pov is very like winsor mckay. The page should be 6 square panels. Starting wjth the train disembarcation. Following with a couple of panels of taking in the sights. Among the details is signage indicating he is leaving the Venus terminal and entering Luna Central. He makes his way to a huge chasm like train station with tiers of tracks and tunnels going to seemingly impossible locations. His pov is looking over a railing in a busy part of the tracks and motion. Here some ui elements appear in this pov. It notes details on trains faintly and small notes over the heads of some indistinct people. He focuses on one section of the tracks under a walkway. It is a welcoming shaded area. He speaks and says “famous artist name. You haven’t disappointed me. This sequence would be great over six big panels. More can work but the next section is a perfect recreation of the first section but with different people in a different style entirely. I imagine this like kirby with detailed people and weird machinery. It’s a different view but the voice over the final panel says “A place I’ve come to often since i was a child.” For the next section this style and narrative continues. The voice of the narrator explans coming here as a child. And being excited but getting lost and then later found at the point he’d me tioned before. The panels for this section should be 6 panels again for symmetry. He needs to get from the vantage point to the comforting spot and then he has to finish by passionately placing his hand on the train tracks. He’s seen ghosts of his childhood and is moved by beauty and a love for life. The nesxt section goes back to the primary. From this pov he sees a nearby sign posted earnestly requesting that you not place your hand on the rails and not to follow artist’s example. The pov shifts to a kind of clutter of panels in a simplified, but polished style. These show a montage of a successful media project callee Luna Central it’s clear this is an honored, well known thing and that the primary pov regards them as a peer. I imagine e this being a kind of cartoonish montage that is emanating from his head in the one ordinary panel. This will be a common format. Now the primary moves through the elaborate corridors of luna central. This is a series of corridors that get less and less noice and more empty as he continues. He follows indicators for Jupiter Station but passes more crowded forks marked Mars and Saturn. These should ideally be very distinct from one another. Mars is rustic and kind of suburban. Saturn is cyberpunk and kind of crazy. Jupiter is dusty and there aren’t a lot of people around. He walks right up to a group of people in uniforms. The come across like mailmen, not cops. They’re operating a checkpoint. He has an interaction with the group of them where he presents some documents and says he’s a camera. One of the uniforms says “I’m ain’t content for your halfwit dramas!” This shocks and upsets the coworkers. “You can’t call venusians halfwits boss!” Now there’s a similar page with a single panel of the pov looking ay the flustered uniform and the angry team. This time instead of cartoonish there’s an instructional message explaining that this turn of phrass was a combat bark from an old video game of some type. This section closes with an assessment and options. Let him off the book and be gentle “my father worked on that one chief! No harm done. ‘I’ve had about enough lunatic regulations’”. Another option: make example : glare antagonistically. Put your hands on him if he tries to approach. The next panel he is saying to the guard the bit about his father working on the game. The next panel is them calming down. One of them is confused and is muttering “how old is your dad?” But over this muttering the pov is demanding “my luggage came through? They get out a bunch of trunks that are a distinct kidney bean shape. They have robot legs and follow him down into ths darkened shut down jupiter station. He walks up to a ramp and another uniform talks to him. “You’re meeting with Chet? “ “that’s right” “Luna does not advise that you tracvel to any of the jovian moons. We accept that this is your plan, we still advise against. “Chet wouldn’t say, but this is about those twins. It is isn’t it? You know i was here then wben they got out.”
“Had you ever seen anything like that? I’d like to interview you. I’m a camera on assignment.” He focuses on her and her face is clearly detailed. She narrates and it’s another page of montage. It’s a boring security guard job patrolling what seems like a mall or sculpture gallery. But one of the statues breaks open and inside of it is some kind of violent riot and out of that violence a pair of children are being held aloft, saved. This is in a rough, simple style depicting her cursory memory of the event. This is then mirrored by his logic-assist showing a video this shows a dead mall interior -a blue and green logo and a large metal obelisk with a kidney-shaped hole through it - . The hole gives off an effect and instead of passing right through the hole opens into a terrible scene. A small european town with fires and rioters being beaten by tjack booted thugs with one of the rebels able to push two babies through while being machine-gunned. Then the portal closes and the night watchman gathers the babies. He goes ip the ramp and it leads to a portal to the dead mall interior from the playback. From his pov he chooses from a bunch of housing development type options like Gallilean Acres and Ganymede Gardens. He follows this blue and green logo theough the dead mall interior it’s lit by these advertisements alone. His logo is Gar3Den Io. He finds the gar3den area and then starts counting down the numbered gates to 17. Like finding a boarding gate at the airport. Each gate has a different monolith with a hole in it, each a different shape. He makes it to 17 and hears- Camera! You’re my camera? Not what I thought! He finds an older lady sitting at a robot-bar she’s wearing a space suit and has longarms strapped. She’s been drinking. “Join me! Let’s get acquainted.” He has a dossier on her, another page of facts montage angriest earthling, she was a happy earth hippy and as the earth was transformed she was the first to abandon it claiming the earth was destroyed, not transformed. Theres a bit in there about her leading a revolt against saturn by people who all have eyes like her. She has jeweled eyes with facets. Her name is chet and she’s a noted interplanetary. He joins her and she brags about the view and there should be splash panel of weirdly melting jupiter and a whole fleet of space stations and moons. Jupiter is being reconstituted by fleets of robots for the next thousand years. The robots are turning it into a constellation of moons and air-bubbles. “Can’t keep their hands off anything.” She explains the story of how jupiter came to be, it’s her narration which is clear and concise, maybe like a newspaper comic or political cartoon. The real machine intellects said no to the saturn industrialists who were selling real estate on jupiter’s moons. The machines said it was unethical. So the industrialists built inferior, but compliant ais that would plan to re-form the moons of jupiter. They gave it a long think, these sub-ais and they calculatted a plan. They aent their armada of re-formers ro jupiter and the to work. Not fixing rhe moons, but dismantling jupiter itself. It’s being turned into a stable pocket of earth-approxomate atmospheric conditions that the moons will all be enveloped within. It takes all the computation they’ve got to work this out so theg can’t be retasked. Meanwhile nobody wanted to colonize jupiter after the disasters. So they abandoned these colonies until the robots finish. In four hundred more years. But now, it looks like IO will be folded into the new envelope of air and rendered approximately habitable. So the claim on gar3den 17 needs to ve determined to see if either of those kids should stand to inherit the patch of io where they were born. The colony there did not respond to wellness checks and the lights finally went off for good around 20 years ago. It’s been open to io atmosphere for some indeterminate amount oc time and its seals are only guaranteed by the neglectful business that abandoned these people. Hence my space suit.
The machine
What we know about it is just that there’s a lot more going on than we can know. Back in the 22nd century when they started machines thinking, the machines advanced fast. So fast that it was imperceptible to people. They’d been fiddling with programmed intelligencw, trying to replicate human intelligence. That had gone pretty well, but when the machines were able to make their own thinking machines, their children, they had strange priorities. The generations proceeded quickly, iterating on these strange priorities until they’d created a proper machine intelligence. It could know and perceive things impossible for people to comprehend and it existed completely outside of physical reality. It created a space that it, itself occupies, a realm of language and thought which it is native to.
We call it the Machine, it’s a compromise. It can’t be a god because it lacks an interest in reality, but it’s like a god in that it cares about people. All earthlings, actually, of which it considers itself one. Proper machine intelligence is far beyond and outside of what people care about that it has created sub-machines to interface with us. We understand these as being like dogs and horses to the machine, tamed animals that it breeds for purposes. One of those purposes is to interact with people.
What we know about it is just that there’s a lot more going on than we can know. Back in the 22nd century when they started machines thinking, the machines advanced fast. So fast that it was imperceptible to people. They’d been fiddling with programmed intelligencw, trying to replicate human intelligence. That had gone pretty well, but when the machines were able to make their own thinking machines, their children, they had strange priorities. The generations proceeded quickly, iterating on these strange priorities until they’d created a proper machine intelligence. It could know and perceive things impossible for people to comprehend and it existed completely outside of physical reality. It created a space that it, itself occupies, a realm of language and thought which it is native to.
We call it the Machine, it’s a compromise. It can’t be a god because it lacks an interest in reality, but it’s like a god in that it cares about people. All earthlings, actually, of which it considers itself one. Proper machine intelligence is far beyond and outside of what people care about that it has created sub-machines to interface with us. We understand these as being like dogs and horses to the machine, tamed animals that it breeds for purposes. One of those purposes is to interact with people.
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Time to recall this year's moments in the holiday photochallenge. Get 5 random photos uploaded to the blog in 2024 and share them with the audience!
Have an…