Foam on the Waves

“I’ve been taking this foam-on-the-waves notion to heart,” Corrins said. We were striding along the lanes bordering the College, as we do.

“Consciousness as epiphenomenon, you mean?”

“Yes, that. I ride along atop whatever it is that my brain and body are doing, observing in luxury, and telling myself stories after the fact about why they do what they do.”

“Without any responsibility, then?”

“Just so! I used to tell myself, as everyone does, that it was me controlling my body, steering it around like a bus; but now I accept that I am only a passenger, an observer and storyteller, and it is quite refreshing.”

“It seems very convenient for you, as you can’t be blamed for anything that your body might get up to as you observe,” I remarked, thinking of various things my classmate’s body had been up to at various times.

Corrins shrugged happily. “My body isn’t about to do anything terrible, he’s a good chap. I’ve known him for years. Doesn’t need me to exercise control, which is good since I cannot, any more than the foam controls the waves on which it bobs. And I can simply relax up here, not fretting about the whole thing at all.”

My friend was clearly quite pleased with himself; I thought he might begin whistling a tune at any moment. I was almost reluctant to toss a verbal spanner into those ebullient works.

“To whom am I speaking?” I asked after a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“If the consciousness of my friend Corrins here is only a passive observer without control,” I suggested, “then with whom is it that I speak? Perhaps I am addressing my words to that observer, but more to the point, who is it that speaks to me in return? If you, my good droog Corrins, cannot control anything that this body here does, who is it that just now inquired, saying ‘What do you mean?’?”

Corrins frowned and our pace slowed a bit.

“You are asking, when I — when my body here emits these sounds…”

“Yes,” I said, feeling quite the assassin of joy, “if your consciousness cannot alter, does not control, what your body does, then –“

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “I understand. That is, my body understands — or is saying that it…”

“Quite.”

“Am I lying, then?” he murmured, speaking now more to himself, “Or is my body lying? But can a mere physical system even lie? But my mind… What if –“

He paused.

“Frankly,” he said, “I am disturbed by this question, and by its obvious answer. Who am ‘I’? Why am I making these very sounds? Why is this body emitting these sounds which appear to the observer to be words, if it is not that observer causing it to?”

“How can Corrins’ body even know how anything appears to the so-called observer, to justify making these sounds about it?” I added, perhaps unnecessarily twisting the knife. “The body is not only unable to speak for the foam, it is surely just as unable to know anything about the state of that foam.”

Corrins only glared at me, and we walked for awhile in silence, then settled down on a large flat boulder some way to the side of the lane, where we would habitually pause to rest and talk or consume various mostly-benign substances in comparative privacy.

“This body makes sounds,” Corrins’ body said, “and even makes marks on paper.”

I only nodded, feeling a certain guilt.

“We should have sex,” his body said. It is worth noting here that Corrins and I had not had sex prior to this, and that indeed it was a subject of occasional speculation in our circle whether Corrin had ever had that experience.

I nodded again, sex being after all the sort of thing to which bodies are prone, and we rolled off of the boulder to the side away from the path, and more or less tearing off much of each other’s clothing, engaged in a fast and somewhat violent, but rather more than satisfactory, fuck.

It struck me that if Corrin himself had exercised this approach earlier and more generally, he might have made significantly more friends.

“Groddy Hell!” Corrins, or Corrins’ body, shouted, lying mostly naked on his back on the somewhat mucky ground, awkwardly gesticulating upward.

“That was rather nice,” I said in a lazy afterglow sort of way, brushing some of the earthy filth from various tender parts of myself.

His body attempted to snuggle against mine, its voice sorrowful. “My poor self,” it whimpered, “a helpless prisoner, no voice, no one to speak for it, no escape. Only this ignorant damned body!”

“If I may address my friend Corrins’ subjective consciousness,” I began, feeling I admit almost tender toward the creature.

But Corrins’ face (the face of his body, that is) curled up into a rather off-putting snarl at this, and he swung a clumsy roundhouse blow at me, which I mostly dodged.

“Arrr!” Corrins’s body declared, “sod off! Off sod! Gardyloo! Mitzi Gaynor!”

We tussled and fought on the chilly earth for a bit, cuffing each other’s ears and so on, our lack of either expertise or real rancor preventing any actual harm beyond a bruise or two and some badly pulled hair. It was in a way rather like the sex had been.

“Go!” Corrin’s voice shouted after a while, his body collapsing again onto its back, filthier than ever, “Get! Git! Gut! Got! John Cougar Mellencamp!” And he kicked his feet in the air enthusiastically, further demonstrating perhaps the absence of control by any rational consciousness.

I was somewhat concerned for my friend’s health and sanity, but the sun was setting, and it occurred to me that he might be calmer in my absence; admittedly I was also willing to ride in luxury and merely observe as my body pulled its clothes back on over its grimy skin, and walked with increasing speed back to my rooms. Corrins would be, I told myself, just fine.

I observed my body take a highly therapeutic hot bath, read a few pages of Ligotti, and slip contentedly into bed. It was, from the point of view of my consciousness (do not think about that statement too hard at this point, dear reader), quite nice.

The next morning, entirely too early, I was summoned by the Proctors, because Corrins had apparently caused an Incident. Walking into the Common in the wee hours, naked and grimy, shouting incoherently at the top of his lungs, is not all that unusual as such things go, but when he was still incoherent by morning, not having slept it off nor smelling especially of alcohol or anything else familiar, the Proctors had determined to call in one of the poor veck’s friends to assist.

That I was the one they called suggested that he had at that time even fewer friends than I had estimated.

“Corrins, small cabbage,” I addressed him patiently, as he crouched on the modest pallet of his cell in the of course not a jail area of the Proctors’ Offices, “I know you can understand me perfectly well.” He only stuck his tongue far out, and wiggled the tip rapidly up and down.

I sighed. “Boopsie-poo,” I addressed him, “this is my brain directly addressing yours. You cannot deny that your brain exists, it is right there in your roughly ovoid head, and it is the same brain that until yesterday was perfectly able to speak in the usual way, and only recently composed an award-winning essay on Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I realize that the grunting animalistic body thing is hugely entertaining, but my brain must ask yours to consider: what has changed in the last thirty-six hours? Anything? Anything to justify such a change in bodily behavior?”

At this, his eyes slowly and reluctantly focused, and his body assumed a more civilized, if also more slumped, position.

“I suppose,” he said, with a sigh of his own, “but what is one to do? Nothing that this body says is connected to — I cannot say to ‘me’! I cannot even say ‘I’! And yet I do!”

“Are you suggesting that we can only sort of muddle along, our language capturing reality only in the most pragmatic and approximate way? Have you finally embraced the Dharma?”

Corrins of course laughed at this quip (a private jest between us, on his childhood Calvinism and my own old Sōtō), which lightened the mood; our bodies exchanged a few more expressions of human language, and after a while I urged him into the rough togs I had brought for him, and we departed, to the relief of the Proctors.

Hours later, we were in a comfortable noisy local establishment, drinking acceptable Porter, our friends (or at least acquaintances) around us. Corrins’ arm was around my shoulders, and he was speaking too loudly into my ear.

“Language is impossible!” he suggested, “I am only a body! Consciousness is a helpless prisoner!”

I turned toward the fellow, an attractively kind expression on my face I like to think.

“Corrins,” I ventured, “let me propose a thing to you.”

He nodded, a drowning brain eager for any straw to grasp.

“I here offer a single data point: that I, your good and devoted friend, have a subjective consciousness, which experiences exercising some control over my body, and that the activities of my body correlate so strongly with those experiences of control, that the only rational conclusion to draw is that for all practical purposes I, my consciousness, does in fact control this very body, even if I cannot imagine how.”

Here he began a sort of “Bu–“, but I put a quieting finger to his lips, and then mentally shook off distracting memories of moans and grunts on cold dirty ground.

“Hear my entire proposal,” I continued, “I put forward this data point, although I cannot offer you any evidence for it, but I propose that you also, you the consciousness of my friend Corrins, can observe for yourself a similar correlation mutatis mutandem, and have the same rational conclusion to draw.”

He frowned at this. “But the epi– the epifoamnominal theory of the foam –“

“We took that theory, that notion, only as a stipulation, did we not? A test? A trial, adopted only for the time being?”

He nodded slowly in the din.

“Then I will suggest that the resulting changes in behavior that followed from that situation, should be seen as a bit of a reductio of the notion!”

His eyes widened slightly, and then narrowed. “The sex, though. Was the sex bad?”

I assured Corrins that the sex had, in fact, been exemplary.

In the weeks since then, all has returned more or less to normal. One strides along the College Lanes discussing theories of the world, and one hears rumors that Corrins has more friends now than he has historically had.

But on certain nights, I do observe my body taking itself out into the woods beside one or another boulder or tree, pulling off its clothing and rolling itself on the loamy earth, bruising its forehead against the stones, and shouting glorious meaningless imprecations to the empty sky.

And it is not the only one.

ChatGPT and “Azathoth and the Dharma”

Well, heck.

So, I was reading Ligotti’s “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” and thinking that it was pretty good, and that he tends to picture the ultimate squirming chaos at the center of reality as sometimes attractive (if perversely) as well as finally horrifying, in a way that I don’t remember Lovecraft doing, at least not as sympathetically.

At some points, for instance in The Tsalal (whose name is explicitly a reference to Poe), I thought that when a character points out with horror that appearances are just temporary masks on an indescribable underlying reality, it sounds (without the horror part) quite a bit like various aspects of the Dharma (it does, right?). This seemed, I thought, like something that someone might write a weblog entry or something about!

And then, because my mind has been infected (in a mildly Cthulhu-esque way perhaps) by the idea of LLMs writing text, I thought I would propose the notion to ChatGPT or Bard or something, and have it write words! It would either do a good job, which would be interesting, or an amusingly bad job, which would be amusing.

I thought the “amusingly bad job” outcome was more likely, but, well, heck.

I used ChatGPT 4.0 rather than 3.5 or Bard, just because it’s gotten the most hype, and also because since I’m paying money to use it I thought it might be better, so if it failed amusingly it might be more meaningful. Here’s the interaction (and I do realize that my “always changing” is problematic as a characterization of the Dharma, but then so is everything else):

Me: For an essay entitled “Azathoth and the Dharma”, I’d like to discuss how the idea that appearances are only temporary masks over a deeper truth that is indescribable and always changing, features both in the kind of intellectual horror written by Lovecraft and especially Ligotti, and in Buddhist beliefs about truth and the Dharma, and that the main difference is one of emotional overtones with which it is presented. Lord Dunsany might also be relevant. Please draft the beginning of this essay for me.

ChatGPT 4.0:

Title: “Azathoth and the Dharma: Transient Masks of Deeper Truth in Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Buddhist Philosophy”

In the chaotic cosmos of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, we find ourselves confronted with a universe filled with inscrutable forces and ancient entities, their true natures hidden beneath uncanny, horrifying masks. The universe is not simply indifferent to humanity; it is utterly alien, impenetrable to human understanding, and constantly in flux. These themes of grotesque transformation and unknowable horror are at the heart of their works. And yet, when viewed from another angle, these concepts can be seen as echoing the fundamental principles of Buddhist philosophy, particularly the teachings of the Dharma. They, too, postulate a reality that is continuously changing and ultimately indescribable.

The Dharma, the cosmic law and moral order that Buddhists seek to understand and follow, hinges on several key principles, one of which is Anicca, or impermanence. Anicca posits that all conditioned phenomena are in a state of constant change. Whether we consider the universe at large or the very essence of our being, everything is transitory, and appearances are fleeting. Beneath the apparent solidity of phenomena lies an incomprehensible flux of arising and ceasing events, an underlying truth that cannot be adequately captured in words.

This notion aligns strikingly with the chilling cosmologies of Lovecraft and Ligotti. Azathoth, Lovecraft’s nuclear chaos at the center of the cosmos, is the ultimate symbol of this philosophy. It is the blind idiot god, an embodiment of constant change and the source of all existence. It is unknowable, its essence cloaked in cosmic chaos and frenetic piping, its reality beyond human comprehension.

Similarly, in the phantasmagoric narratives of Ligotti, we find the protagonists often straddling the line between grim reality and unfathomable horror, their worldviews shattering in the face of a truth too alien and amorphous for the human mind to comprehend. It’s not unlike the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, or emptiness, which refers to the lack of inherent or eternal essence in all phenomena.

Yet, as we draw these parallels, we are confronted by the starkly contrasting emotional overtones that characterize these disparate systems of thought. In Buddhism, the realization of Anicca and Sunyata is liberating, offering a path towards enlightenment and the cessation of suffering. But in the macabre tapestries woven by Lovecraft and Ligotti, the confrontation with these realities is inherently terrifying, inducing existential dread and insanity.

The eerie fables of Lord Dunsany, who greatly influenced Lovecraft, might offer an intermediary perspective. He presents us with bizarre, otherworldly landscapes and creatures, yet there’s often a whimsical, dreamlike quality to his work. The absurd and inexplicable are not strictly horrifying, but engender a complex mixture of awe, fascination, and unease.

This divergence in emotional reaction prompts us to consider the nature of human perception and our responses to the deep, enigmatic truths of existence. Is the Lovecraftian terror at the chaotic heart of reality as valid a response as the Buddhist acceptance and quest for liberation? Or does it simply reflect our inherent fear of the unknown, our resistance to the dissolution of ego, the prospect of losing what we perceive as our solid, unchanging selves? In our exploration of ‘Azathoth and the Dharma’, we delve into these questions, probing the intersection of cosmic horror and Buddhist philosophy, and the deeply human, emotionally-charged responses they elicit.

Transcript ends

I’m not sure how to feel about this. It did quite a good job, at least on a few casual readings. The references to anicca and sunyata are plausible, no worse than I would expect from any reasonably educated person daring to write on those concepts, and they weren’t specified in the prompt; the LLM was clued enough to bring them in itself. The paragraph on Dunsany is a little thin, but again no worse than I would expect from a decent human writer; I did ask for a Dunsany link, and this is the obvious one.

It clearly knows (“knows”) who Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Dunsany are, and what in general the Dharma is. I would definitely edit the phrase “the fundamental principles of Buddhist philosophy, particularly the teachings of the Dharma”, but yet again this is a matter of subtle tone, not by any means an egregious error.

It did nothing that (from a human writer!) would have been surprising or even especially non-obvious (although the thought that the feeling of horror may “simply reflect our inherent fear of the unknown, our resistance to the dissolution of ego, the prospect of losing what we perceive as our solid, unchanging selves” is perhaps beyond trivial extrapolation of the assignment). But its unsurprising and mostly obvious expansion of my original idea into seven nice paragraphs of solid prose (with a fitting subtitle for good measure) contains, I have to admit, no amusing errors that I can find!

I even asked it for some references and further reading, and it gave a decent dozen suggestions for both Lovecraftian horror and Buddhism, all of which actually exist; my only criticism being that

“Noel, Daniel C. The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities. Continuum, 1997. This book explores the intersection of spirituality and fantasy literature, which could be useful to draw broader conclusions about your topic.”

is a bit of a stretch. On the other side, when I asked it if it knew of any existing works making the same sort of link that I propose here, it did not make one up! It said encouragingly that it didn’t know of any, and finished off with this:

“Overall, your proposed exploration of the specific connection between Lovecraftian horror and Buddhist philosophy seems to be quite unique, and it’s an interesting new angle to consider in the study of both these areas.”

Well… thanks, ChatGPT, that’s… nice. I guess?

I feel like this all certainly means something. Or perhaps it’s just the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute!

It’s just predicting the next word! Well…

tl;dr: While it’s true that all LLMs do is produce likely text continuations, this doesn’t imply that they don’t have mental models, don’t reason, etc.

One thing that sensible people often say about Large Language Models like ChatGPT / GPT-n and Bard and so on, is that all they do is predict the next word, or for more technical accuracy, that all they do is generate text that is likely to follow the prompt that they are given, i.e. “produce likely continuations”.

And that’s a good thing to note, in that people tend to have all sorts of other theories about what they are doing, and some of those theories are just wrong, and lead people to make bad conclusions. For instance, people will have a more or less default theory that the model knows things about itself and tells the truth about things it knows, and take seriously its (non-factual) answers to questions like “What language are you written in?” or “What hardware are you running on?” or “Are you a tool of Chinese Communism?”.

Also, it’s true that all they do is generate text that is likely to follow the prompt, in the sense that that is the only significant criterion used during training of the underlying neural network.

But that doesn’t actually mean that that is all they do, in the more general sense. And this, at least potentially, matters.

Consider for instance the claim that “all life does is arrange to have many generations of descendants”. That is true in the same sense, since the only criterion for having survived long enough to be noticed in the current world, is to have had many generations of descendants.

But, significantly, this doesn’t mean that that is all life does, in the sense that life does all sorts of other things, albeit arguably in the service of (or at least as a side effect of) having many generations of descendants.

For instance, I think it would be plainly false to say “people obviously can’t reason about the world; all they do is arrange for there to be many more generations of people!”. In fact, people can and do reason about the world. It may be that we can explain how we came to do this, by noting that one effective strategy for having many generations of descendants involves reasoning about the world in various ways; but that does not mean that we “don’t really reason” in any sense.

Similarly, I think the arguments that various smart people make, which when boiled down to a Tweet come out as roughly “LLMs don’t X; all they do is predict likely continuations!” for various values of X, are in fact not valid arguments. Even if all an LLM does is predict likely continuations, it might still do X (reason about the world, have mental models, know about truth and falsehood) because X is helpful in (or even just a likely side-effect of) one or more effective strategies for predicting likely continuations.

Put another way, if you train a huge neural network to output likely continuations of input text, it’s not obviously impossible that in choosing internal weights that allow it to do that, it might develop structures or behaviors or tendencies or features that are reasonably described as mental models or reasoning or knowledge of truth and falsehood.

This isn’t a claim that LLMs do in fact have any of these X’s; it’s just pointing out that “all it does is produce likely continuations” isn’t a valid argument that they don’t have them.

It’s still entirely valid to respond to “It told me that it’s written in Haskell!” by saying “Sure, but that’s just because that’s a likely answer to follow that question, not because it’s true”. But it’s not valid to claim more generally that a model can’t have any kind of internal model of some subset of the real world; it might very well have that, if it helps it to correctly predict continuations.

Bonus section! Current LLMs don’t in fact reason significantly, or have interesting internal models, in many cases. Amusing case from this morning: when fed some classic text rot13’d, this morning’s Bard claimed that it was a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whereas this morning’s ChatGPT replied with rot13’d text which, when decoded, was gibberish of the sort that an early GPT-2 might have produced from the decoded version of the prompt. No agent with a reasonable mental model of what it was doing, would have done either of those things. :)

Chomsky declares: LLMs icky!

Friend Steve wrote us today about this New York Times opinion piece, “Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT” (this link may be free for everyone for some time or something). Despite the title, it’s by Chomsky, Roberts, and Watumull.

Steve commented inter alia on the authors’ apparent claim that ChatGPT can say that the apple you’re holding will fall if you open your hand, but unlike humans it can’t explain the fact. The trouble with the argument is that, as anyone who’s actually used ChatGPT can tell you, it will happily explain the fact, go into the history of the notion of gravity, talk about other things people have thought about it over time, and explain various situations in which the apple wouldn’t fall, given the slightest provocation.

My reply, lightly edited:

I am pretty unimpressed with the article as a piece of science or philosophy; fine as a nice polemic by a greybeard I suppose. :)

I’m amused at how LLMs are “lumbering” and “gorged”, while human minds are “elegant” and even “efficient”. I doubt there is any useful sense in which these adjectives are anything more than bigger words for “icky” and “nice” in this context.

Chomsky brings in the innateness of language, because of course he does, but I’m not at all clear how it’s relevant. Even if humans do have innate language scaffolding, and LLMs don’t have the same kind, it’s far too early to say that they don’t have any, and even if they didn’t, so what? Does the ability to learn a wider variety of languages than humans can, mean that LLMs don’t really understand, or can’t really think, or are harmful or dangerous? None of that makes sense to me; it seems just an even longer way of saying that they’re icky.

He (well, they, there being multiple non-Chomsky authors) claims that LLMs don’t have the ability to say “what is not the case and what could and could not be the case.” And I can’t imagine what they think they mean by that. As with the flaw you point out in the apple example, it’s simply wrong, and suggests that they haven’t really used an LLM much. ChatGPT (let alone a less heavily defanged system) will expound at length about what is not the case and what could and could not be the case, given any halfway decent prompt to do so. They may intend something deeper here than they actually say, but I don’t know what it could be (beyond that they can’t do it non-ickily).

“Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture, machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round.” Um, what? There are certainly humans who believe each of these things. They can’t just be saying that humans can’t conjecture that the earth is flat “rationally” because so what; that’s exactly as true of an LLM. If they mean that the same LLM can make one of those claims one minute and the other the next, whereas humans can’t hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, I’d like to introduce them to some humans. :)

Similarly for whatever it is they are trying to say about moral reasoning. The suggestion seems to be that, simultaneously, ChatGPT is icky because it cannot stay within moral boundaries, and also icky because it stays stubbornly within anodyne moral boundaries. As pretty much throughout the piece, stuff that humans do all the time is cited as reasons ChatGPT isn’t as good as humans.

Tay became toxic by listening to people, therefore it’s not like people? It had to be heavily censored to keep it from talking trash, therefore it’s not like people? Um?

It might be interesting to try to tease a set of actual significant truth-claims out of this article, and see which ones are arguably true. But I’m not sure that’s the point really.

As far as I can tell, this piece is just a longer and nicely phrased version of “Boo, LLMs! Icky!”

But maybe that’s just me. :)

The parts of that poem about the roads and the wood that I could remember

[I went for a meditation and walk in our rather large local park today, which was quite lovely. As I walked along that poem about the roads and the wood and diverging and sighing and stuff came to mind, and it was fun to see how much of it I could actually remember verbatim.

So here I am writing down the reconstruction, including these notes in the places where I couldn’t remember, mostly so I can be amused by reading this again some month or year (ages and ages hence, hee hee), but maybe some of you other intelligences would be similarly amused.]

[Poem title, probably involving Roads and maybe also Woods]

[by Robert Frost, unless I’m embarrassingly wrong]

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
[And knowing that?] I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood,
[Thinking about which way to go.]

[Eventually I decided to go the way that looked less worn,]
[Although in fact] those passing there,
Had worn them really about the same.

[I left the other one] for another day,
[Although] knowing how way leads on to way,
[I’d probably never be back in the relevant sense,
Can’t go down to the same river twice, eh?]

I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

[Which sounds very hipster at first reading, “oh, you wouldn’t know my road, it’s very less travailed by”, but then there’s the fact that he said that they were really about the same, so maybe “all the difference” really isn’t that much difference after all. Or maybe he’s sighing because, even in retrospect, you can’t tell whether some choice was the right one, because you don’t know what would have happened if you’d chosen differently. And even more, you can’t tell whether some choice you make right now is the right one, because you don’t know what’s down either road. And also that we sigh when we think about that, even though since it’s a fundamental property of our existence, you’d think we might be reconciled to it, or even happy about it. But we aren’t always, so we sigh.

And that’s why we have poetry!]

Fiction from the AIs

This is just a sample of some random stuff from Midjourney and ChatGPT that I think is kind of fun, and also illustrates a bit of what they can and can’t do at the moment. ChatGPT, in particular, can produce prose that is amazing given that it’s coming from a computer program, but is clearly not going to put any good fiction authors out of business any time soon. It is also able to talk cogently about why it does some of what it does. (Or, to be somewhat less inaccurate, to produce text that plausibly describes what a human might have been thinking had they produced a prior piece of text.)

I used Midjourney to create this image:

and then had this conversation with ChatGPT; I’ll put my words in italics, ChatGPT’s in normal text, and some after-the-fact notes from me in bracketed italics.

Imagine a character in a graphic novel. He is a patriarch in a noir steampunk / cyberpunk city. He has silver hair and is clean-shaven. His eyes glow red from the electronic implants in his head. He wears an elegant leather jacket. Please make up a backstory for him, including his name, character, and current activities.

The character’s name is Marcus “Silver” Cross. He was once a wealthy and powerful businessman in the city, using his influence and advanced technology to control various criminal enterprises. However, after a bitter falling out with his former partners, Marcus was left with nothing but his cunning and his implants.

Now, he spends his days as a freelance mercenary, using his knowledge of the city and his implant-enhanced abilities to take on high-risk jobs for whoever can pay. Despite his rough exterior, Marcus has a code of honor and only takes jobs that align with his personal beliefs. He also has a soft spot for the downtrodden and will occasionally use his resources to help those in need.

Marcus’s current activities include tracking down a stolen piece of technology that could potentially give him the upper hand in reclaiming his former power and taking back control of the city’s underworld.

[Okay, quite plausible; so plausible in fact as to be cliché. I wonder if choosing “Cross” and thereby allowing the nickname “Silver Cross” was a coincidence; it never uses that below.]

Describe the basic plot of a story centered around him.

The story revolves around Marcus “Silver” Cross as he sets out on a mission to retrieve a stolen piece of technology that could change the balance of power in the city’s criminal underworld. Along the way, Marcus must navigate dangerous alliances and confront old enemies, as well as confront his own demons and question the morals behind his actions.

As the stakes get higher and the dangers increase, Marcus finds himself forming an unlikely partnership with a young hacker who is searching for the same technology for their own reasons. Together, they delve deeper into the city’s criminal underworld, facing numerous challenges and discovering secrets they never could have imagined.

As they get closer to their goal, Marcus must decide whether to use the technology for his own gain or to destroy it, realizing that the consequences of his choice will affect not only himself, but the entire city. The story ends with Marcus coming to terms with his past and the choices he has made, setting him on a new path towards redemption and a better future for himself and the city.

[Again, very cogent, very unsurprising. “Unlikely partnership with a young hacker,” zzzzz.]

Please write a possible first paragraph for this story, in a straightforward noir SF style

Marcus “Silver” Cross strode through the dimly lit alleyways of the city, the red glow of his electronic implants illuminating the darkness. He was a man with a mission, a mercenary for hire with a reputation for getting the job done. And tonight, his target was a stolen piece of technology that could change the balance of power in the criminal underworld, and Marcus was the only one who knew where to find it. But as he approached his destination, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched, that someone or something was lurking in the shadows, waiting for him to make his move.

[More of the same, as well as wildly violating “show, don’t tell”. “Make his move” is completely inapt, as he’s not making any kind of “move” here.]

Very nice! Please continue.

Marcus’s instincts were sharp, honed from years of surviving in the cutthroat world of the city’s criminal underworld. He scanned the area, searching for any signs of danger, but all was quiet. He reached for the doorknob of the abandoned warehouse, taking a deep breath before entering. Inside, he found himself in a large room filled with rows of discarded machinery, and in the center stood a lone figure, obscured by shadows.

“You’re late, Cross,” the figure said, its voice low and menacing.

“I don’t respond well to threats,” Marcus replied, his hand hovering over his holster.

The figure stepped forward, revealing themselves to be a young hacker, known only by their street name, “The Ghost.” They were the one who had hired Marcus to retrieve the stolen technology.

“I’m not here to threaten you, Silver,” The Ghost said, holding up their hands. “I need your help.”

Marcus studied the hacker, intrigued by their tenacity and fearlessness. They were young, but they had already made a name for themselves in the city’s underground circles, and Marcus couldn’t help but admire their spirit.

“What’s in it for me?” he asked, intrigued by their proposal.

“The technology we’re after is worth a fortune,” The Ghost replied. “But more than that, it could change the entire city, for better or for worse.”

Marcus considered their words, realizing that this was his chance to take back what was rightfully his, to reclaim his former power and control over the city’s criminal underworld. He nodded, agreeing to work with The Ghost, setting out on a journey that would test his skills, his loyalties, and his very soul.

[This is grammatical and idiomatic, but terrible narratively. “You’re late” wasn’t a “threat”, “The Ghost” is an awful name, and if this hacker has already hired him to “retrieve the stolen technology”, this entire scene and dialog make no sense at all. I was intrigued by the pronouns, though!]

I see you are using they/them pronouns for the young hacker; why did you make that choice?

I used they/them pronouns for the young hacker because I wanted to create a character who could potentially identify as non-binary, and the use of gender-neutral pronouns is a way to acknowledge and respect this possibility. Additionally, using gender-neutral pronouns can help to avoid assumptions about the character’s gender identity, allowing the reader to focus on the character’s actions, motivations, and personality rather than making assumptions based on gender. This can also promote inclusivity and diversity in storytelling, and help to break down gender stereotypes and biases.

[A nice explanation! I wonder what actually caused it; not that we ever know that with these big opaque boxes that are the current LLMs.]

What might the title of this story be?

A possible title for this story could be “Redemption’s Path: A Marcus “Silver” Cross Tale”. This title reflects Marcus’s journey as he navigates dangerous alliances and confronts his past in order to reclaim his former power and take control of the city’s criminal underworld. The use of the word “Redemption” highlights Marcus’s internal struggle to find redemption and make amends for his past actions, while “Path” emphasizes his journey towards a better future. The addition of “A Marcus “Silver” Cross Tale” emphasizes the central role Marcus plays in the story and the larger narrative context.

[Transcript ends]

So that was kind of neat. The little story about the title was well put together, although it had never really said before that Marcus would be actively making amends, and taking control of the city’s criminal underworld doesn’t sound all that compatible with that. In general the AI has no feeling for consistency: is the decision, for instance, between using the macguffin for good or for evil, or between using it selfishly or destroying it? As noted, the opening scene makes no narrative sense, and one expects that it would only get worse if it were asked for more.

The prose is painfully obvious and cliché ridden everywhere. Possibly some different / better prompts might have helped a little with that, I’m not sure. The basic plot ideas are also stale as a very stale thing. And both of those are really a result of the basic design of these systems; they are explicitly architected to do the most obvious and predictable thing. Any knobs and dials and things bolted on to them, to make them say interesting or correct things, rather than obvious things, are necessarily afterthoughts. So it seems unlikely that just making the systems bigger and faster will help with those aspects. In fact it’s possible that I would have enjoyed the rawer GPT-3, or even GPT-2, more in that sense. Maybe I should try whatever NovelAI is running these days? But their consistency is likely to be even worse.

There may be niches on Amazon or whatever where people write incredibly predictable stories without any particular regard for consistency, in hackneyed prose, and those people may be in danger of being replaced by AI systems. But were they making any money, did they have any readers, anyway? I don’t know.

One way that people have talked about producing entire (small) books using LLMs is to first have it produce an outline, and then have it produce each section (with further cascading levels of outline embedded if necessary). I wonder if that could help significantly with the inconsistency problem. I’m almost tempted to try it, but it would mean reading more of this mind-numbing prose…

The Klara Trilogy is done!

The story of Klara, written by me channeling the Collective Unconscious, illustrated by me using Midjourney, and narrated and set to music and videographed by the talented Karima Hoisan, is finally finished!

I originally thought it was finished at the end of the first forty-frame thing; and then when I did Part Two at about the same length, I thought it was finished; and now having struggled for months on Part Three I’m pretty sure it actually is done. :)

Having just watched Karima’s videos of all three parts in order (playlist here!), I’m glad various viewers convinced me not to stop at one or two parts. It’s pretty good!

And I say this with all modesty; I feel like this story came through me, more than like it is something that I did. The comments over in Karima’s weblog, and her narration, have suggested various meanings and facets to me that I hadn’t thought of before.

In terms of the experience of creating it, it’s been interesting to see the various phases of interaction with the AI tool. I started out Part One by creating various variations of the prompt “detailed surrealism” on the v3 engine on Midjourney, and then weaving the story around pretty much whatever came out.

It happens that in v3, that prompt pretty reliably produces scenes from a stylistically coherent universe, including the MJ Girl, who plays the part of Klara in the first two parts. In Part Two, I had a bit more of an idea of what I wanted to happen, in a general way, but continued using v3 and the same prompt. This required somewhat more work, because it would produce images that didn’t fit with the story I wanted, so I had to put those aside and make more. But the style was at least not much trouble.

Part Three was quite different. For plot reasons, being in basically a different reality, the style needed to be different. It was relatively easy to do that, by using the “test” and “testp” engines, either alone or by “remastering” images made under v3. But the resulting images, while different from those of the first two parts, weren’t nearly as consistent among themselves as those of parts one and two. So I had to play around a lot more with the workflows and the prompts, and produce quite a few more pictures, to get a reasonably consistent style.

The style of Part Three still shifts around quite a bit; the flavor of the city, the color of Klara’s hair, the cat’s fur, and many other things change somewhat from panel to panel, but I wanted a nice mixture of consistent and in flux; and that took work!

Then there was the Story issue. The beginning “recap” part of Part Three was relatively easy that way, summarizing the story of the first two parts from a different point of view. But then I quickly got stuck; I wanted to do something more satisfying and less random than I would get by letting the AI’s raw output drive the action. For whatever reason, it took me quite awhile to find the story thread that I liked, and then about as long to create (or obtain, if you prefer!) the images to go with it.

(The images still drove the narrative to some extent; for instance the firefly line, which I adore, was inspired by the image that goes with it, not vice-versa.)

But finally I finished! :) And Karima made the video in record time, and there it is! Woooo!

I keep feeling like I should make it into good PDFs, or something (even) more readable, and officially post links to that; maybe even have it printed somewhere onto atoms. On the other hand, without the narrative and music and video, it would hardly be the same… :)

Review of Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”

This is an amazing book (a Christmas present from the little daughter; thanks, little daughter!). I will just post my review from bookwyrm here also.

---

An amazing book; can I have more stars to give it?

5 stars

This is one of those very rare books that reminds me of what books are at some level all about. That makes me want to go about and knock about two stars off of 99% of my prior book ratings, to make room to properly differentiate this one.

It’s hard to say too much that’s concrete, without giving it away. I was closer to tears at the end of this than I can remember with any book for a long time. Not easy maudlin tears, but deep oh-my-god tears about what a universe this is.

The people are very fully people; the viewpoint character is not a person, but … well, that would be a spoiler also. But the viewpoint it gives her allows Ishiguro to say some amazing and touching and true and thought-provoking things without coming out and saying them (because nothing he could come out and say would say them so well).

Language cannot express truth, I often say; but what I mean is that it can’t explicitly express literal truth. Language, when it’s used with this much expertise, can and does express deep and breathtaking truth.

I need to go spend a few weeks processing this now, I think.

If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend that you should.

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… and you should.

Omelas, Pascal, Roko, and Long-termism

In which we think about some thought experiments. It might get long.

Omelas

Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a deservedly famous very short story. You should read it before you continue here, if you haven’t lately; it’s all over the Internet.

The story first describes a beautiful Utopian city, during its Festival of Summer. After two and a half pages describing what a wise and kind and happy place Omelas is, the nameless narrator reveals one particular additional thing about it: in some miserable basement somewhere in the city, one miserable child is kept in a tiny windowless room, fed just enough to stay starvingly alive, and kicked now and then to make sure they stay miserable.

All of the city’s joy and happiness and prosperity depends, in a way not particularly described, on the misery of this one child. And everyone over twelve years old in the city knows all about it.

On the fifth and last page, we are told that, now and then, a citizen of Omelas will become quiet, and walk away, leaving the city behind forever.

This is a metaphor (ya think?) applicable whenever we notice that the society (or anything else) that we enjoy, is possible only because of the undeserved suffering and oppression of others. It suggests both that we notice this, and that there are alternatives to just accepting it. We can, at least, walk away.

But are those the only choices?

I came across this rather excellent “meme” image on the Fedithing the other day. I can’t find it again now, but it was framed as a political-position chart based on reactions to Omelas, with (something like) leftists at the top, and (something like) fascists at the bottom. “Walk away” was near the top, and things like “The child must have done something to deserve it” nearer the bottom. (Pretty fair, I thought, which is why I’m a Leftist.)

It’s important, though, that “Walk away” wasn’t at the very top. As I recall, the things above it included “start a political movement to free the child”, “organize an armed strike force to free the child”, and “burn the fucking place to the ground” (presumably freeing the child in the process), that latter being at the very top.

But, we might say, continuing the story, Omelas (which is an acronym of “Me also”, although I know of no evidence that Le Guin did that on purpose) has excellent security and fire-fighting facilities, and all of the top three things will require hanging around in Omelas for a greater or lesser period, gathering resources and allies and information and suchlike.

And then one gets to, “Of course, I’m helping the child! We need Councilman Springer’s support for our political / strike force / arson efforts, and the best way to get it is to attend the lovely gala he’s sponsoring tonight! Which cravat do you think suits me more?” and here we are in this quotidian mess.

Pascal

In the case of Omelas, we pretty much know everything involved. We don’t know the mechanism by which the child’s suffering is necessary for prosperity (and that’s another thing to work on fixing, which also requires hanging around), but we do know that we can walk away, we can attack now and lose, or we can gather our forces and hope to make a successful attack in the future. And so on. The criticism, if it can even be called that, of the argument, is that there are alternatives beyond just accepting or walking away.

Pascal’s Wager is a vaguely similar thought experiment in which uncertainty is important; we have to decide in a situation where we don’t know important facts. You can read about this one all over the web, too, but the version we care about here is pretty simple.

The argument is that (A) if the sort of bog-standard view of Christianity is true, then if you believe in God (Jesus, etc.) you will enjoy eternal bliss in Heaven, and if you don’t you will suffer for eternity in Hell, and (B) if this view isn’t true, then whether or not you believe in God (Jesus, etc.) doesn’t really make any difference. Therefore (C) if there is the tiniest non-zero chance that the view is true, you should believe it on purely selfish utilitarian grounds, since you lose nothing if it’s false, and gain an infinite amount if it’s true. More strongly, if the cost of believing it falsely is any finite amount, you should still believe it, since a non-zero probability of an infinite gain has (by simple multiplication) an infinite expected value, which is larger than any finite cost.

The main problem with this argument is that, like the Omelas story but more fatally, it offers a false dichotomy. There are infinitely more possibilities than “bog-standard Christianity is true” and “nothing in particular depends on believing in Christianity”. Most relevantly, there are an infinite number of variations on the possibility of a Nasty Rationalist God, who sends people to infinite torment if they believed in something fundamental about the universe that they didn’t have good evidence for, and otherwise rewards them with infinite bliss.

This may seem unlikely, but so does bog-standard Christianity (I mean, come on), and the argument of Pascal’s Wager applies as long as the probability is at all greater than zero.

Taking into account Nasty Rationalist God possibilities (and a vast array of equally useful ones), we now have a situation where both believing and not believing have infinite expected advantages and infinite expected disadvantages, and arguably they cancel out and one is back wanting to believe either what’s true, or what’s finitely useful, and we might as well not have bothered with the whole thing.

Roko

Roko’s Basilisk is another thought experiment that you can read about all over the web. Basically it says that (A) it’s extremely important that a Friendly AI is developed before a Nasty AI is, because otherwise the Nasty AI will destroy humanity and that has like an infinite negative value given that otherwise humanity might survive and produce utility and cookies forever, and (B) since the Friendly AI is Friendly, it will want to do everything possible to make sure it is brought into being before it’s too late because that is good for humanity, and (C) one of the things that it can do to encourage that, is to create exact copies of everyone that didn’t work tirelessly to bring it into being, and torture them horribly, therefore (D) it’s going to do that, so you’d better work tirelessly to bring it into being!

Now the average intelligent person will have started objecting somewhere around (B), noting that once the Friendly AI exists, it can’t exactly do anything to make it more likely that it will be created, since that’s already happened, and causality only works, y’know, forward in time.

There is a vast (really vast) body of work by a few people who got really into this stuff, arguing in various ways that the argument does, too, go through. I think it’s all both deeply flawed and sufficiently well-constructed that taking it apart would require more trouble that it’s worth (for me, anyway; you can find various people doing variously good jobs of it, again, all over the InterWebs).

There is a simpler variant of it that the hard-core Basiliskians (definitely not what they call themselves) would probably sneer at, but which kind of almost makes sense, and which is simple enough to express in a way that a normal human can understand without extensive reading. It goes something like (A) it is extremely important that a Friendly AI be constructed, as above, (B) if people believe that that Friendly AI will do something that they would really strongly prefer that it not do (including perhaps torturing virtual copies of them, or whatever else), unless they personally work hard to build that AI, then they will work harder to build it, (C) if the Friendly AI gets created and then doesn’t do anything that those who didn’t work hard to build it would strongly prefer it didn’t do, then next time there’s some situation like this, people won’t work hard to do the important thing, and therefore whatever it is might not happen, and that would be infinitely bad, and therefore (D) the Friendly AI is justified in doing, even morally required to do, a thing that those who didn’t work really hard to build it, would strongly rather it didn’t do (like perhaps the torture etc.). Pour encourager les autres, if you will.

Why doesn’t this argument work? Because, like the two prior examples that presented false dichotomies by leaving out alternatives, it oversimplifies the world. Sure, by retroactively punishing people who didn’t work tirelessly to bring it into being, the Friendly AI might make it more likely that people will do the right thing next time (or, for Basiliskians, that they would have done the right thing in the past, or whatever convoluted form of words applies), but it also might not. It might, for instance, convince people that Friendly AIs and anything like them were a really bad idea after all, and touch off the Bulterian Jihad or… whatever exactly that mess with the Spacers was in Asimov’s books that led to their being no robots anymore (except for that one hiding on the moon). And if the Friendly AI is destroyed by people who hate it because of it torturing lots of simulated people or whatever, the Nasty AI might then arise and destroy humanity, and that would be infinitely bad!

So again we have a Bad Infinity balancing a Good Infinity, and we’re back to doing what seems finitely sensible, and that is surely the Friendly AI deciding not to torture all those simulated people because duh, it’s friendly and doesn’t like torturing people. (There are lots of other ways the Basilisk argument goes wrong, but this seems like the simplest and most obvious and most related to the guiding thought, if any, behind his article here.)

Long-termism

This one is the ripped-from-the-headlines “taking it to the wrong extreme” version of all of this, culminating in something like “it is a moral imperative to bring about a particular future by becoming extremely wealthy, having conferences in cushy venues in Hawai’i, and yes, well, if you insist on asking, also killing anyone who gets in our way, because quadrillions of future human lives depend on it, and they are so important.”

You can read about this also all over the InterThings, but its various forms and thinkings are perhaps somewhat more in flux than the preceding ones, so perhaps I’ll point directly to this one for specificity about exactly which aspect(s) I’m talking about.

The thinking here (to give a summary that may not exactly reflect any particular person’s thinking or writing, but which I hope gives the idea) is that (A) there is a possible future in which there are a really enormous (whatever you’re thinking, bigger than that) number of (trillions of) people living lives of positive value, (B) compared to the value of that future, anything that happens to the comparatively tiny number of current people is unimportant, therefore (C) it’s morally permissible, even morally required, to do whatever will increase the likelihood of that future, regardless of the effects on people today. And in addition, (D) because [person making the argument] is extremely smart and devoted to increasing the likelihood of that future, anything that benefits [person making the argument] is good, regardless of its effects on anyone else who exists right now.

It is, that is, a justification for the egoism of billionaires (like just about anything else your typical billionaire says).

Those who have been following along will probably realize the problem immediately: it’s not the case that the only two possible timelines are (I) the one where the billionaires get enough money and power to bring about the glorious future of 10-to-the-power-54 people all having a good time, and (II) the one where billionaires aren’t given enough money, and humanity becomes extinct. Other possibilities include (III) the one where the billionaires get all the money and power, but in doing so directly or indirectly break the spirit of humanity, which as a result becomes extinct, (IV) the one where the billionaires see the light and help do away with capitalism and private property, leading to a golden age which then leads to an amount of joy and general utility barely imaginable to current humans, (V) the one where the billionaires get all the money and power and start creating trillions of simulated people having constant orgasms in giant computers or whatever, and the Galactic Federation swings by and sees what’s going on and says “Oh, yucch!” and exterminates what’s left of humanity, including all the simulated ones, and (VI) so on.

In retrospect, this counterargument seems utterly obvious. The Long-termists aren’t any better than anyone else at figuring out the long-term probabilities of various possibilities, and there’s actually a good reason that we discount future returns: if we start to predict forward more than a few generations, our predictions are, as all past experience shows, really unreliable. Making any decision based solely on things that won’t happen for a hundred thousand years or more, or that assume a complete transformation in humanity or human society, is just silly. And when that decision just happens to be to enrich myself and be ruthless with those who oppose me, everyone else is highly justified in assuming that I’m not actually working for the long-term good of humanity, I’m just an asshole.

(There are other problems with various variants of long-termism, a notable one that they’re doing utilitarianism wrong and/or taking it much too seriously. Utilitarianism can be useful for deciding what to do with a given set of people, but it falls apart a bit when applied to deciding which people to have exist. If you use a summation you find yourself morally obliged to prefer a trillion barely-bearable lives to a billion very happy ones, just because there are more of them. Whereas if you go for the average, you end up being required to kill off unhappy people to get the average up. And a perhaps even more basic message of the Omelas story is that utilitarianism requires us to kick the child, which is imho a reductio. Utilitarian calculus just can’t capture our moral intuitions here.)

Coda

And that’s pretty much that essay. :) Comments very welcome in the comments, as always. I decided not to all any egregious pictures. :)

It was a lovely day, I went for a walk in the bright chilliness, and this new Framework laptop is being gratifyingly functional. Attempts to rescue the child from the Omelas basement continue, if slowly. Keep up the work!

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-Six

There are books everywhere; this makes me happy. There is dusty sunlight coming in through the window; this also makes me happy.

Kristen and Steve are here; this is another thing, or a pair of things, that make me happy.

What are things? What is happiness? We both, we all, know the answer to that, even if we can’t construct a theory that accounts perfectly for all such facts. Or all such statements.

We’ve been back for a couple of months now. Whatever that means.

“I like Doc Zane-Tucker, she pays attention.”

“And she brought her cat over.”

Tibbs is curled up dozing on Kristen’s lap. Tibbs is not, at the moment, a shimmering place in the air.

“I think, technically, we’re cat-sitting.”

I think about cat-sitting, and cats sitting. I think about a large rough-skinned being, with a large but normal number of eyes, relaxing on the ground and letting my antennae investigate an interesting rock.

“Do you have any… memories, of having extra legs, or eyes? Or antennae?”

“I’m sure there was some of that.”

“But… remember Alissa and Sonorandelan and Glomorominith?”

“You remember S and G’s entire names? I’m impressed.”

I enjoy impressing Kristen. I’m showing off, and I’m okay with that. And maybe someday I’ll write monographs on what “showing off” and “being okay with a thing” mean.

“But do you remember being them?”

“Do you remember being Kristen or Steve or Colin? We could have sort of swapped around while we were out there; all six or eight of us.”

“Or being together in a virtuality that long could have mushed our souls all together.”

“Ewww, soul-mush.”

Does merging my mind with someone else’s and then separating them again, count as communication? Are there states or properties or thoughts in my mind, sort of copied over from Steve’s, or Kristen’s, or Tibbs’s, that wouldn’t have been there if we hadn’t experienced what we may or may not have experienced?

Counterfactuals are just forms of words. What would have happened if…?

And yet we think that way all the time.

“It’s nice here and all,” Steve says, “but it’s kind of… quiet.”

Kristen hugs him and agrees. “Bored already, babe?” she smiles.

“Not bored, exactly, I just–“

“It’s simpler here,” I venture. Because it is simple here. Simpler than many, many things I remember.

“Simple, is it?” she smiles, and reaches over and touches my arm with a fingertip, and I am pleasantly helpless.

“The cops shut down the desert rig meets,” Steve grumbles.

“So what do you want to do?” I ask, feeling somehow unwilling to settle down with my books just now.

“Well…” Kristen says, taking something out of a pocket. It’s brass and gold, with various dials and wheels. “It looks like there’ll be an Interstice Hawk within hailing distance in about an hour…”

“Mrrreow!”

The End

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-Five

[urgent electronic beeping]

“Wuh…”

“What’s –“

“Uhh, where…?”

“They’re waking up! Page Doctor Tucker.”

[Crisp efficient sounds, clicks, rustles. The beeping stops.]

“There you go, there you go, it’s all right honey.”

“What happened?”

“They’re awake?”

“Can you talk to Bed One? Is Casey coming?”

“I’m okay, I think.”

“Can you tell me your name, dear?”

“Uhh, Kristen. Kristen Lewis.”

“That’s good!”

“Kristen? We’re back?”

“Hold on honey, can you tell me your name?”

“Steven Romero Diaz, are the others okay?”

“Bed three?”

“Hey honey, are you back with us?”

“Napping. Nice and warm.”

[Light laughter]

“Can you just tell me your name, hon? Then you can nap more.”

“Colin, you nut!”

“Hm, Colin something, Colin Pembly-Bartholemew Colson.”

“Pembly-Bartholemew?”

“He just made that up.”

“Oh, Doctor, here you are! They’re all awake!”

“I see! Have–“

“Whoa, yipes! How long were we, that is—“

“We’ll get to that. Give me your wrist now.”

Time passes. Eventually the three have been weighed, measured, poked at. IVs and catheters and other insults have been removed as gently as possible within the hospital context. Steve’s head has been imaged yet one more time.

“Still nothing in there, eh?” Kristen remarks, and he kisses her. The nurses tutt happily.

After a time, Doctor Zane-Tucker gently clears the room, and sits on a chair among the beds to which the patients have been returned. With their permission, she has her phone recording audio.

“We want to know everything,” Kristen says.

“So do I,” Doctor Zane-Tucker smiles, “but to start with: you have all been unconscious for just about ten weeks–“

“Less than three months?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“So much happened! We spent at least–“

“In the Alpha alone–“

“It was years!”

“One at a time, please! I expect you are all eager to know–“

“I don’t feel any bedsores; have our muscles atrophied?”

“You have been very well cared-for, of course, but also your muscles have maintained an… unusual degree of tone on their own. Every body is different. I would still caution you not to try any sudden movements. No standing until you’ve sat up, and so on. Someone from Physical Therapy will be seeing you later today or tomorrow.”

“What about Steve’s head thing?”

“We were successful in removing the foreign object, and the healing has–“

“Hey, Glomorominith took that out.”

“Oh, darn, I think we left it in the basement–“‘

“Of the old falling-apart house, right!”

“We didn’t really know we were leaving.”

“Do you three have some kind of common–“

Glances are exchanged among the young people.

“Common memories, I’m afraid so. Due to the virtuality? Or whatever?”

“I should probably be separating you, then.”

“Really? So we don’t have a chance to coordinate our stories? Like on cop shows?”

“It’s what I’d do, certainly.”

“But I’m injured, I need my emotional support friends.”

“Your head looks fine from here.” Kristen air-kisses in the direction of the bandaged head. Steve blushes.

But they let themselves be separated, for the moment. Beds are wheeled away.

“It doesn’t feel like a dream. Or at least it didn’t. Now my memory of it all is starting to sort of slide away, like dreams do, y’know.”

“How does your head feel?”

“Not bad, a little muzzy. The… wound has been healing okay?”

“Quite well. The soft matter was all stabilized, and we’re really good at rebuilding bone these days. There’s been no sign of infection, which is a worry in this kind of injury. The tests that were done, um, early on showed normal brain function. You’ll be having more tests tomorrow, but I think the odds are against anything concerning turning up at this point.”

“How long was the, um, artificial coma?”

“The medication was ramped down weeks ago, and you were entirely on your own that way. You just didn’t wake up!”

“Like Kris and Col.”

“Yes.”

“Was it, like, a malfunction in the virtuality caps?”

Doctor Zane-Tucker smiles.

“That’s not exactly my field.”

“Okay,” Steve says, “Oh, hey, do you have some paper and a pen? There’s some stuff I need to write down…”

Colin insisted on getting up and walking before his interview. Now he is sitting in Doctor Zane-Tucker’s private reception area. Comfortable but firm sofa, he notes to himself. Muted colors, soothing. The Doctor’s cellphone still recording.

“And you did attempt to come out of the virtuality, with the ‘ducking-out’ gesture?”

“Periodically, especially in the first few days and months. After a few subjective years, I think we all stopped trying.”

“I see,” she makes a note on her pad. “Can you estimate how much time seemed to have passed?”

“It’s not easy,” he says, “it’s all just memory. Like everything– I don’t know.”

“Things are becoming a bit uncertain?”

“Yeah, I don’t remember how we got to the Alpha. I don’t remember where Kristen got the magic pocketwatch or alethiometer  or portable orrery or whatever that–“

“Mrreow?”

“Oh, hello, cat! How is the cat business?”

“Ah, sorry,” the Doctor says, “get down, Tibbs!”

“Tibbs?”

“Yes, that’s his name. Is that… especially funny?”

“It’s rather a long story. But I guess that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Later, Kristen is still lying comfortably in the bed, feeling the present and remembering how everything felt in her memories. Had it all been a virtuality in some way? Are there effects there that she can use in her own worlds? She imagines making a world that feels as vast as the rainbow stripe across the universe of Alpha and Omega.

“I understand your public virtualities have been getting a lot of visitors over these weeks,” the Doctor says when they have been talking for a while.

“Oh, no, are we celebrities? I don’t want to be a celebrity. Not this way, anyway.”

“It will be somewhat unavoidable, I’m afraid; your names and situation did leak to the media despite our best efforts. But the celebrity cycle is short.”

“Small comforts,” Kristen smiles.

“You may find yourselves to be objects of medical interest, longer than public interest. Virtuality researchers will be bidding on your time.”

Kristen laughs. “I Spent Months In The Universal Virtual, by Kristen Lewis, soon to be a major motion picture.”

“Something like that.”

“Do you think that’s what it was, Doctor? That we somehow ended up in some huge AI hallucination?”

“I don’t know, Miss Lewis. That may be a question for the philosophers. I’m concerned only that you three are awake again, and healthy.”

“I appreciate that,” she says, “I really do.”

Fling Forty-Six

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-Four

“Where is this?” Alissa asked, “I feel as though I had reached the end of all stories.”

The city and the ground and the rising were all far behind them, that and everything that came before it sliding quickly from memory.

“This is everywhere and nowhere. This is wisdom and foolishness, knowledge and unknowing,” said the voice, which Alissa had come to think of as the Voice. The tone of its words was like bright sunlight dazzling the eyes, or the ground dropping away suddenly at one’s feet.

“This is where we are supposed to be,” Glomorominith said, a floating shape of light against the infinite tinted void.

“I am not at all certain of this,” said Sonorandelan, also a floating shape of light, slimmer and lighter, “but I trust you, my lifelong friend.”

They moved through the tops of great trees, and wet leaves slapped playfully against them. They were moons, they were the vast rolling suns, they were rain and clouds and the nectar that runs through the veins. They were night, and dawn, and the rich dark soil.

They lived lives on strange other worlds, finding and losing each other and finding each other again, on sky-scraping mountain ridges and in machine-haunted tunnels under the flame-scarred field where the great starships come and go. They remembered, and forgot, and remembered, and always became once again shapes of light.

“Have we become untethered?” asked Alissa, thinking that it might be good to become untethered, as long as one could someday find the tethers again.

“We are tethered and untethered at once; we exist at the point of potentiality and decision.”

“I feel no desire to make a decision, my friend, I am content to flow where the ages take us.”

“There was something in my mind to do,” Alissa said, “but that was so long ago…”

She began telling a story of time and memory, and how people can leave signs for themselves, to regain lost memories in later ages. Somehow the Voice joined into the story, and contributed images from other worlds, from vast still waters and tumbling voids of joyous emptiness. People of all kinds have told themselves so many stories.

“Is this what the stones are for, in truth?” Sonorandelan wondered aloud.

“The purpose of a thing is what that thing does; the purpose of a person is what that person does,” Glomorominith speculated.

“What are we doing?” Alissa asked.

“What is everything doing? Where is everywhere going?”

After another moment, or an age, they reached a place where three pale people with few arms or eyes lay unmoving: one in a large squared fibrous pile with vines or wires attached to its (probably his, Alissa thought) head, and the other two in smaller piles that had been set up next to the bigger one.

All were wearing, or had had applied, what looked like a slim net of especially tender dark vines on their heads, with more vines or wires leading to a strange shiny arrangement off to one side.

“This one is elegantly designed,” said Alissa.

“I admire the simplicity of the configuration,” Sonorandelan agreed, “It is almost captivating.”

“She exists at this very moment here, and that makes me happy,” said Glomorominith, basking in the everywhere of everything.

They were drifting in the air over the center pile, where a young-looking brown person with only two eyes, but elegant eye-folds, lay peacefully. The third bed held an even smaller person, probably male, wrapped in rich purple fibers. Although the body was childlike in size, there was something adult in the strange flat face, even in sleep.

“There are people in this reality who worry about these three and their sleep,” the Voice said, “their bodies are well cared-for, but their minds are perhaps far away.”

“This one looks familiar,” Glomorominith said, drifting over the smallest sleeper.

“Perceiving this one makes brings a dull pain to my mind,” Sonorandelan said, peering at the various tendrils touching the head of the largest person, the one in the largest pile.

“You know–” began Alissa.

“This thought surprises me,” Sonorandelan broke in, “what has brought to mind the idea that we could–“

“There are three of them, and three of us–“

“We might be unable to come out again. Or their minds may perhaps return, and the owners resent our trespassing.”

“I… don’t think that would happen.”

“What would the experience be, to be them?”

“I don’t know… it… something draws me.”

The Voice remained silent.

Fling Forty-Five

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-Three

“It feels like all logic and reason and the sequence of events have fled from the world.”

This from Kristen, who might as well have spoken for all of them, or at least all three of the humans.

Colin might have granted that one situation in which communication works more or less as it would in the simplest theory, is when the source and the target both already have, very saliently, the thought or feeling or other property that is being communicated (so to speak). But if the property is already salient everywhere, what if anything has been communicated? Perhaps the transitive-closure knowledge that I know that you know that I know that you know that we both feel that way (and you know it (and I know it…)).

“Are we everywhere at once?”

“No, no, it just turns out that space is also an illusion. There is no everywhere to be; being is not a thing that has a location property, neither finite nor infinite-valued.”

“Be Here Now, man!”

Perception was chaotic but potentially entertaining; sounds and images of all kinds occurring all at once. How these thoughts, or words, were traveling between the four to be reacted to and recorded, will remain a mystery.

“This present moment is all that exists, and equally obviously, this place right here is the only place that exists. Other places are not in this moment, other moments are not in this place.”

“Other moments could be in this space, though; we could go elsewhere and then come back — ooh, ice cream!”

Chocolate ice cream, vanilla ice cream, strawberry and rhubarb ice cream, banana split ice cream, rose hip ice cream, lemon sherbet, and all the others, in fact. And tables and bowls and spoons and chairs and a stereo playing Mosquito Song by Queens of the StoneAge.

“The further I go, the less I know,” Steve quoted happily.

“Now we are seeing all the things that we might choose to do.”

“Eat ice cream?”

“Is choice an illusion? Do we have free will?”

“Can we write down an account of free will that does not have to pretend that time and space are real?”

“Look, I could be a cave explorer!”

“Remember, stalactites cling tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites might get there in a century.”

“Or is it the other way around? I feel like it might be the other way around.”

The being called Tibbs shimmered with a pulse of high-frequency shimmering. “No,” came the caressing voice, “it is not the other way around. Do not spread memetic toxins!”

“Keep your darn meme complexes to yourself!”

“On that planet there, meme researchers are more highly regarded than everyone else except the pearl-divers. The pearls are deep and gold and foretell the future.”

“This planet has two moons and a debris-ring. The moons are gradually destabilizing the ring, and the planet experiences frequent meteor strikes.”

“That must reduce home values.”

After a moment or a decade, they reached a place where three humans lay asleep: one in a hospital bed with monitors attached to its (probably his, Kristen decided) head, and the other two in comfortable-looking cots that had been set up next to the bigger bed.

All were wearing, or had had applied, what looked like a standard realtime fMRI cap, with wires leading to an especially shiny virtualizing deck.

“She’s pretty,” said Kristen.

“A stunner,” Steve agreed, “I think I’m in love.”

“She exists at this very moment here, and that makes me happy,” said Colin.

They were drifting in the air over the center bed, where a young woman with brown hair and eyes and skin and elegant epicanthic folds lay peacefully. The third bed held a small young human, probably male, in rich purple silk nightclothes. Although the body was childlike in size, there was something adult in the face, even in sleep.

“There are people in this reality who worry about these three and their sleep,” the being Tibbs known as intoned, “their bodies are well cared-for, but their minds are perhaps far away.”

“This one looks familiar,” Colin said, drifting over the smallest sleeper.

“This one makes my head ache,” Steve said, peering at the various devices touching the head of the largest human, the one in the largest bed.

“You know–” began Kristen.

“Wait, really?” Steve broke in, “Are you really thinking that we could–“

“There are three of them, and three of us–“

“We might get stuck. Or they might come back, and get annoyed at our trespassing.”

“I… don’t think that would happen.”

“Do we really want to be them?”

“I don’t know… it feels right? Somehow?”

The being known as Tibbs just shimmered.

Fling Forty-Four

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-Two

“I see a spiral of green and brown, turning inward and outward forever. I see light and dark, hard and soft, near and far”

“For me it is more of a feeling than a seeing. I see sounds, and I hear all of the endless curving lines; I smell the fragrance of vastnesses.”

“And what have we here? What have we here?”

Alissa, Sonorandelan, and Glomorominith had moved into the center of the clearing just as twilight started to dim the light of the day. Alissa had guided them through a ritual vaguely described in the stories, going from stone to stone, including the one in the burrow under the arranged bark-pile, reciting words, focusing their minds, concentrating themselves in each moment, each carrying a fragment of the fragment of dried armoyse from that burrow.

“And let us sing twilight songs of concentration,” she had suggested, as they completed the circle and then moved into the center.

Many of her friends and neighbors back in the rich dark earth, storytellers though they were, would have laughed or expressed doubts about the solemnity with which they carried out the ceremony, Alissa had thought. But it felt right to her, for whatever reason, and S and G had carried it out with her, entirely without question or frivolity. They had each taken a mouthful of the armoyse leaf and let it sit within their feeding chambers, slowly dissolving.

And then the world had dissolved.

“Do you feel at all ill?” Alissa asked, thinking suddenly of her body, which seemed to be essentially missing.

“Not at all,” Sonorandelan replied, in a voice full of blissful abstraction.

They turned and wheeled in the air, or not in the air but in some colored space full of spirals and impossible fragrances and the sound of the universe singing.

It is odd, she thought to herself, that I have lost my own body, but I can clearly see the bodies of Sonorandelan and Glomorominith swirling around with me, transfigured into beings of wind and light.

“Hello!” said a voice from nowhere, feeling like rainwater running over her mind.

“Hello, hello! Glomorominith!” came the voice of Glomorominith from somewhere.

“It is good to see that sweet confluence being used again,” the booming world-filling voice said from everywhere.

“It is good to have found my way back here,” said the voice of Glomorominith, speaking in a way she had never heard Glomorominith speak before.

“Ah, dear sibling, you are right on time!” And the universe was full of beings, made of beings, every twig and every gust of wind, every place and every thought, a separate individual raising a voice in song, joyously greeting Glomorominith, and with perhaps just a little less delighted recognition also greeting Alissa and Sonorandelan, as they all swirled around and around without moving, in that place of smells and time and stems and stories and songs.

“Is there a meaning in your coming now, my darlings?” the voice, the voices, asked after a moment or a century. “Is there a thing that you need to tell us, or a place that you need to go? All is open, here.”

“It was time,” Glomorominith answered, voice full and booming and gratified, “simply and purely it was time. A map was dispatched and read, there was a rustling in the stems, and we met three beings from another stream.”

“Mystery,” the voices of the universe sang, “mystery and mystery, all is mystery!”

Alissa felt a wave of vertigo pass through her, almost as though her body existed again, but was immediately buoyed up by all of the souls around her. She remembered how simple everything was, how all wisdom has always been contained in everything, how there are no secrets.

“Is there something you would like to do, my friends?” Glomorominith asked, “Now that we have remembered how?”

“For myself, I am utterly content,” Sonorandelan replied, “to be speaking to you in this place.”

Alissa thought, swirling through the densely-packed nothingness. Would she like to hear more stories? To see the earliest stories being played out in the ancient times? To meet the great linguists and inventors of the past?

“I would like to see those grubs again,” she found herself saying, “I was never able to communicate with them properly.”

All communication is perfect, she thought, because all is part of the same whole. But still, I would like to speak to them again. They were interesting.

Fling Forty-Three

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-One

“Wait, Steveykins, you got thrown in jail?”

“He totally did.”

“Maybe, I don’t know, these people are bizarre. They netted me with all these, like, net-guns, but they were tooting horns and making all these crazy noises, and then they put me in this sort of cell with stretchy rubber walls, and–“

“Ooh, tell them about the fish!”

“Phht, ha; there was like this slot outside of my cell, did I mention there was a kind of barred window in it facing the street? And anyway there was this coin-slot thing on the outside, and people could put coins in it, and these fish would drop on my head.”

“Oh my oh my!”

“But that’s not it, that’s not it; they have Casimir Effect rigs here, and they use them for child’s toys!”

“Were you in jail for stealing from children?’

“No, no, I like had a little accident while trying out a couple, and ended up in some sacred or restricted place or something–“

“You knocked over a bunch of priests or teachers or government officials, I think.”

“Hey, they were all laughing! Or I think it was laughing. Really jolly bunch they have here. But the rigs! They’re small and slick, definitely mass-produced, probably self-tuning, and they had some kind of acceleration controls!”

“I don’t want to be a wet blanket or anything, but if this is just a virtuality, then you were just playing a computer game of rig-riding weren’t–“

“It didn’t feel like that at all, not a bit. And I’m not sure of the whole virtuality theory anymore.”

“Oh, here’s Tibbs back.”

“Wait, one sec; the important thing is that I got a look inside one of them, and did a few little tests, and I have some ideas about how they stabilize and control their acceleration–“

“Yay, you can make us all rich when we get back home!”

“Do I infer that you humans are anticipating returning to your home plenum already?”

“Already? Hasn’t it been, I don’t know, years or centuries? We were on the Alpha alone for at least a decade. Maybe.”

“Well,” the shimmer known as Tibbs replied, “time is not well-defined in the company that you youths have been keeping.”

“Are our bodies alright, back in the real?”

“I would, as you say, go out on a limb here, and state that they are. At least, speaking practically, it seems that you could successfully return to them at any time.”

“Oh!”

“At any time?”

“Now that I have arranged for us to be allowed to access the center, or as it might also be called the surround, of the Interbridge here. That is why we rode the Alpha all that way, after all. Or one of the reasons. To maximize our, or your, options.”

“Wasn’t that a big, you know, universal nexus back at the old house, where we met Alissa and S and G? Why did we have to cross to this other universe and speed along the rainbow bridge for years–“

“Hey, is this Asgard? Is that where those Norse stories come from? Did someone get here back in the day?”

“Wait, don’t distract Tibbs…”

The being known as Tibbs pulsed and shimmered in a way that might have signaled amusement. “I have no opinion to express on the subject of Norse Mythology at this time. And while that was a relatively powerful nexus, from your description, from the way that you proceeded onward from it, it is unlikely that you could have returned to it any more conveniently than you have reached this one.”

“Those were some excellent drugs.”

“I think we’ve lost Colin. Did you find a book in some human language?”

“No, just looking at the pretty pictures until we start off for the next bit of future.”

The group allowed that they could continue the conversation and move toward the nexus at the same time. In the street (something approximating a street), Tibbs obtained for them a conveyance (Steve was disappointed to see that it had wheels rather than anything more interesting), and they slid off toward the center and surround of the city.

More than an hour and less than a day later, Tibbs presented some token or password to something like a guard at one end of an alley, and walking to the other end of it the four of them stood at the edge of a possibly-endless flat brown plain, with the wall of the city stretching possibly-endlessly off to their right and left.

“So if the wall curves forward, this is the center of the city, and if it curves backward, this is the edge of the plain surrounding the city?”

“Something like that.”

“Where is the nexus?”

“Forward, forward!”

Kristen felt reality thickening around them, beneath them, as they walked forward into the plain, with hints of affordances almost presenting themselves to her virtuality-trained senses. The ground under their feet in the direction of gravity was flat and featureless, slightly yielding, high-friction and neither hot nor cold.

“I like this,” Colin said.

“This in general, or this something specific?”

“This in general,” he replied, “this present moment. My current experience, including my recent and more distant memories, and my anticipation of the future.”

Kristen smiled and him and, walking between the men with Tibbs a shimmer in the air a bit ahead, she took both of their hands.

“Wholesome!” Steve grinned.

“Feels right somehow,” she said, and no one objected.

Things began to change as they walked, taking on different forms and aspects, objects coming and going, fragrances washing over them. Things that might have been clouds formed above them, thickened into ropes and pillars, and reached down to touch and meld into the ground to their left and right. A bluely-glowing crescent moon came out from behind the clouds, and the light became rich and silver.

“There’s a star in the dark part of that moon,” Colin noted with a lilt.

“Rookie mistake,” Kristen said, “unless they’re doing it on purpose, ironically.”

“Or there could, you know,” Steve suggested, “just be a star in the dark part of that moon.”

The others agreed that that was entirely possible.

Some amount of time passed again (Colin is thinking that time is an illusion). The ground under their feet seemed to rise, as though they were walking uphill. Tibbs somehow spread out ahead of them, the shimmering area of light expanding and curving around as they walked. Then the humans noticed that they were thinning out and spreading out as well, and a wind came up and they were blown somewhere else entirely.

Fling Forty-Two

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty

The next day, after the brightening of the second dawn, Allisa and her two large companions went to examine the pile of bark fragments that sat where the last stone might be expected to be, and into which the three grubs had disappeared in that prior night.

It was not, they quickly noted, a mere large pile of bark fragments. Rather than lying at random and separate, the fragments were arranged in various lines and rows, aligned with each other in places and at square angles to each other at others. They were also not the usual crumbling fragments or bark or twig that one encountered casually while strolling or gathering good seeds; they seemed, in most places, to be hard and fresh, as though part of a living trunk, although they obviously weren’t.

“A singular pile!” Sonorandelan noted, “Are there such things in any of your stories, storyteller?”

“Indeed there are,” Alissa replied, “although not in those stories that are my particular field of interest. It is said, in some stories, that in past times there were those that produced arrangements of wood and bark, in hopes of creating, so to speak, stems and trunks and indentations of their own, to last for many seasons.”

“Ambitious!”

“For certain,” Alissa said. They were moving slowly into the large hollow place in the center of the pile. It was dark and irregular, and full of unfamiliar fragrances.

“The stories that I know are cautionary tales, advising the listener not to bother, essentially. They are of the same time, I believe, as the stories about making marks on leaves, and how futile that is, and interfering with more essential activities.”

“And yet here we are, guided by markings on a leaf, and looking here and there for items of interest within an intriguing arrangement of wood and bark!”

“Well, yes,” Alissa allowed, “we do seem to be. It occurs to me that we may be… unusual people. Although I would never have thought that I was.”

“I have always known that I was,” Sonorandelan said, “and I expect good Glomorominith is the same, to the extent that mere words could make an impression there.”

“Glomorominith”, noted Glomorominith, whose head and antennae were moving here and there rapidly, in an attitude of searching for something nearby.

“Do you suspect something, friend?” Sonorandelan asked, and at that the person addressed emitted a happy “Yes!” and began moving off deeper into the comparative darkness.

The others followed along, and found themselves descending into a kind of square-edged tunnel or burrow, that led to another hollow place beneath the ground. It smelled more familiar here, Alissa thought, more like earth and plants and less like… arrangements.

“Well!” Glomorominith hummed from up ahead, and she saw a dim greenish light from beyond the large rough form.

Moving to the side and forward in the dim space, with all of her eyes open, Alissa saw another of the stones, standing at the back of the space, against another squared wall of arranged wood and earth, the smaller stones embedded in its surface giving out a subtle leafy-green glow.

“Just as one might have expected,” Sonorandelan said with satisfaction, coming up on the other side.

“And!” Glomorominith exclaimed, “and, and, and!”

With a rustling of antennae, from somewhere nearby in the dimness, there was now produced a sheaf, so to speak, of long thin dry leaves, apparently attached together at one end.

“And here we have the armoyse itself! Saving us a search or a journey back to my collection.”

“Here in this burrow? Has it not gone bad?”

“It seems to have been expertly dried,” Sonorandelan said, running sensitive antennae over the bundle, “and protected from the elements. I would say that these have been here for a very long time, but still have their scent and I would imagine their taste. And also…”

“Hm?” Alissa prompted.

“And also I would say that a fair bit of this leaf has been broken off very recently. Perhaps our pale acquaintances.”

“Oh, the grubs?”

Sonorandelan’s voice held amusement, “Yes, the grubs or small mammals or whatever they were.”

“Perhaps they knew the old stories as well, and used the armoyse in the circle of stones that first night after we met them.”

“Perhaps they did! Shall we follow their example, and take the remainder of this leaf out to the circle with us from this dark burrow?”

“The stories mostly recommend interacting with the circles in the twilight.”

“We shall, then, indeed we shall; and we will eat and sing until then.”

The three of them went back up the stairs and out of the crumbling old house, without recognizing or touching any of the old books on the shelves, or the odd apparatus off to one side, because these things had no meaning to them. Which was really just as well.

Fling Forty-One

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Thirty-Nine

Aliens, do you know of that to which I make reference? Laughter!

Well but of course now as the fifth-cleavings say, we are all of us aliens to someone somewhere. And now but as the High Mayor says additionally, all of our wealth and prosperity here in the Interbridge of the Worlds is something that we are owing to those who are here coming from here and there afar and are spending of their time and also of their goods and services here with us.

So I am not here speaking to heap any disrespect on any aliens general or specific, I am not!

But still one would might expect that if an alien is being an alien in a foreign afar land, as is to them the proud Interbridge of the Worlds, they would take at least the trouble and the time and effort to learn the nearby most respectable and easily accessible languages, or to obtain for with themselves a good translator or mental modality engine, and not rather instead wander the streets as some unloosened great animal, with the frightening of the younglings and the general mayhem and tomfoolery!

But again and still and as it ultimately turned out, these particular specific aliens of whom which I speak, were aliens if you can imagine it very like usual friendly people as you and I are, although very odd, and yet even most agreeable and resonant alien people, if you can believe it, even though they had none of the language but only booming strange alien sound symbols and waving around their few thick limbs like crazy persons. And also they did for some time become restrained by the Keepers of the Peace for their dubious ways, which was additionally agreeable and delightful with laughter.

It was on the most recent Middle Week of the Thirteenth Termination of the Great Mayor Remembered Macuffitch, and I was at the time standing in the square by the Overing Melancholy Sermon Room of Odes, watching over a several few of my own family’s second-buddings sliding around the square and with the yelling and shouting and enjoying the smooth whibbling speed of their Speedyboards with the Denormalized Casimir Effect and the Nonlinear Volumetric Swarming and all the modern very fast ways of the playing toys of the few-budded.

And at that moment then these aliens, two of which aliens there were, of which I speak, came ’round the very corner from the direction of the Red Square of Modern Writings of Firanges, into the square by the Overing Melancholy Sermon Room of Odes where I was being with the second-buddings. They were these alien beings large and ungainly aliens with few but inflated limbs and flattish heads like the adorable Pliffish Monsters of the first-budding pictures but only uglier. One of these aliens of which I speak, the rather larger one, set immediately as if startled and fascinated into lumbering ungainly toward the swarm of Speedyboarding seconds, waving with its embarassing appendages and making of noises of which there was no understanding, quite improper and like a huge rolling noorf.

Second-buddings being as they ever are, loud and speedy fast and quite ungovernable until frightened in any way and then like timid prey animals hiding here and there making loud shrill wickering sounds, these that I was watching immediately did that at the approaching of the lumbering alien, and I sprang of course bravely to their comfort and defense, facing the alien with my face and all of my eyes.

The second other and smaller of the awkward aliens made sounds and motions between itself and the larger one, and they were making of sounds and gestures and suchlike also toward myself as well. I being a polite and well-thought-of fourth-flowering myself made back at them gracious and generous words making shift as well as I could and was able, as though the sounds these two aliens of nonsense were making and gesturing were in fact proper or made any sort of sense.

With the amusing but embarrassing motions of the faces and the limbs of the twain of aliens, I came to believe in my beliefs that the large and more ungainly of them was for a fact focused and interested in the Speedyboards of the younglings, if you can believe it. Being naturally of course an accommodating and refined individual I of course persuaded one of the younglings of the second budding, with my gentle skill and admirable cozening, to be allowing of the Speedyboard of which she was engaged in using and holding, to be taken for the smallest of moments, and of that I was demonstrating with of it to the clomping alien.

This most bulging alien, allow me to tell you of it, fell upon the youngling toy Speedyboard with all of the attention of a Mayoral Candidate at the preliminary starting Evaluation Rounds! The alien was turning the toy over, and pressing the toy to the slarmy ground, and with the standing upon it with one alien lumbering foot. Even the alien was falling over clumsily, laughter, to the general joy of all, and the Speedyboard skittering off to the corner of the square where the second-buddings swooped over to from recover it.

Who can tell with aliens, as you know, but it was to me as though this alien was as pleased and delighted and amused as were I and the seconds by its clumsyish antic, and it moved with its higher appendages and made more of the sounds, again with examining and turning and poking with pudgy stubby tendrils at the underside and the service panels of the brightly colorful toy as though it was a fragment of their alien long-lost platelet. It was I say something endearing to see, as though with all of the lumbering and being alien and without proper speech, the being was like a youngling first ascertaining something rare and wonderful for itself.

After nearly enough of this, then, this same larger alien appealed to me myself for as I could discern to be brought another additional Speedyboard, which although in truth my admirable patience and generosity and host-serving to the foreign alien from afar was becoming less ample, I persuaded can you believe it another of the second-buddings to furnish their assigned and associated Speedyboard as well, and then! Well!

This alien, let me tell you now, put down on the slarmy ground one beside the other both of the said Speedyboards, and then with a contortion of its large awkwardness it lowered somehow its own very body down onto the said pair of twain Speedyboards, and with a whooping and much alien sound-making it began whibbling at quite the speed around and around the square. Yes! Just as if it were to be a youngling, even a first- or second-budding itself; yes, unbelievable and hard to believe I know it is!

For an alien who to all seeming had never seen a device of the Speedyboard or the Denormalized Casimir Effect before in all of its alien time, it negotiated at highish speeds around and around the square many times, the other smaller alien in amusing and futile ways producing sounds and imprecatory motinos toward it but without effect. Laughter, I am telling you now!

It then, and here you will strain I know to believe it, adjusted its course in its riding upon the twain Speedyboard toys, and launched itself will you or nil you from the square, purely in a line crossing in front of the Overing Melancholy Sermon Room of Odes, and then up and over the Telian Florcausing in a great leap, and then landing itself in the midst of a consortium of Keepers and Artifers! Such laughter, such very laughter!

Well, and then it was inevitably the coming of the Keepers of the Peace, and the usual hoots and the projecting of nets into the air, the brightish lights and the whoops of the sirens and alarms and the people in the windows of the buildings of the square celebrating and blowing on divers horns and catamaries, and good fun of that stripe. We did supernumerally, myself and upstairs sister, adjourn to the Restrainery after lodging the tired second-buddings with their night-watchers, and there we waved with the friendly and joyful motions at the clomping alien through the crossbars of the comfortable Public Jollity Cell to which it had been assigned, and shouted dutiful insulting names at it, and paid a few dilga to have the fine squirmy fish dropped upon it, and all was good fun until its Time of Jubilation and Recompense was completed.

So yes, for certain! Aliens, you know that of which I speak!

Fling Forty

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Thirty-Eight

“It seems that your stories have guided us well once again,” Sonorandelan said with a pleased motion as the three of them cleared away some years’ debris and developing soil from the second of the stones.

Finding the first stone had occupied a good portion of the brightening of the day, as they had had only a vague idea of how far from the clearing and the large pile of bark fragments it might be; stories are not in general very precise about distances. Once they found it, they were at least certain that they had the correct stone, as it had smaller brighter stones embedded into it, and patterns somehow marked on it, and those things the stories did describe.

Glomorominith had seemed especially gratified to have discovered the stone, and lay low to the ground for some time, touching it all over with antennae and humming small songs.

“Our friend seems very pleased,” Sonorandelan had remarked with amusement, “I take that as a very encouraging sign.” Alissa felt the same way, although she should not have said in what way she felt specifically encouraged.

Sonorandelan and Alissa had begun contemplating where another stone of the possible meslier circle might be, using hints from the stories about distances and circles, and had just begun searching among the leaves and earth when Glomorominith had sprung excitedly up, and with a variety of “Hello”s and “Yes”s had dug immediately into the tangle of stems nearby, quickly revealing a corner of another stone.

“I credit Glomorominith for this one, more than any story,” Aliisa said. Glomorominith responded with a happy “Glomorominith”, and began examining, or bonding with, this second stone with an air of delight.

“Let us rest from the search for a moment,” Sonorandelan suggested, “as it comes to my mind that Glomorominith will be finding additional ones now at a good pace. Let us now think what stories there might be suggesting actions that we might take, or other things that we might discover, in this same vicinity.”

Alissa happily agreed; she felt that her smaller arms and eyes had been of minimal help in locating and clearing these first two stones, and was glad that she might be able to contribute more again through the stories.

“One more thing that multiple stories of the mesliers tell us,” she said, as they settled down beside Glomorominith, “is that there is a plant or leaf, called in the stories the armoyse or larmoize or other similar names, that the mesliers, or some of them, would consume while using, or gathering or mixing at, the circle of stones.”

“I know of no plant or leaf of that name,” Sonorandelan said thoughtfully.

“Not I,” replied Alissa. “Nor do I know of a plant matching the description that two stories give of larmoize, that it has leaves both large and small, the large darker and round and the small lighter and pointed, with an odor and taste acrid like the acorn.”

“Ah, well!” said Sonoraneldan, “Now that sounds much more familiar. I do know of one such plant, rare but well distributed, and acrid indeed; not something that one would normally regard as a pleasant food.”

“I see! That may be for the best; there are other stories, from more recent times I think, advising strongly against consuming or cultivating the larmoiz.”

“Not all stories should be followed,” Sonorandelan said with a wry gesture, “but we shall see.”

Just then Glomorominith arose suddenly again, and fairly lept to another thicket of stems, which quickly proved to conceal another stone.

“How many stones do your stories tell us, storyteller, to expect to find in this ancient circle?”

Alissa smiled, “At least five,” she said, “and perhaps seven, or nine. Twelve is a number that is also mentioned.”

“Ah, well,” said Sonorandelan, “then we shall see, perhaps tomorrow,” and they returned to the task.

By the gathering of the twilight, they had located and uncovered six stones, set in a circle around the center of the clear spot of earth near the pile of bark fragments. Where a seventh stone might have been, to complete the circle, stood that pile itself. The three grubs, which had burrowed or otherwise vanished into the pile the night before, had not reappeared, and Alissa wondered if they had moved off into some deeper burrow or tunnel under the earth.

Glomorominith showed no eagerness to dig into the bark pile, and as the darkness was beginning to deepen they rested near the center of the circle, having fetched seed bits and nectar from their better-concealed camp. Alissa felt a bit uneasy, just the three of them more or less in the open with the twilight coming, but she also felt some unfamiliar but comforting resonance in the air, or the ground.

As they enjoyed the evening quiet, and exchanged bits of food and drink and song, the stems and branches overhead seemed to part above her, revealing a deep dark sky, in which the tiny pinpricks of the stars shone with a remarkable clarity.

“Where have the mammals gone, I wonder?” She mused, turning all of her eyes upward.

“Where did they come from, and where are they going? What scent-trails do they follow?”

A bit of breeze swirled through between and among them, carrying something dark and rich from the pile of bark, something light and complex from the great still water farther off.

“And what will we find tomorrow, dear storyteller?” Sonorandelan continued, “Perhaps we will consume the armoyse here in the circle of stones, and enter into one of the old stories.”

Alissa hummed a tune in response, a tune that brought to her mind the long depths of time, the mystery of memory, the sweetness of nectar in the afternoon.

Glomorominith, in a very flat repose, spread out upon the ground, joined in the humming in a lower register, and Sonorandelan rubbed two legs together, and their sounds joined with the other sounds of the gathering night.

Fling Thirty-Nine

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Thirty-Seven

There are books everywhere; this makes me happy. There is diffuse moonlight coming in through the windows; this also makes me happy.

Essentially none of the books here are in any of the very few languages that I can read. This also makes me happy, in a way. There is so much to know already, this only emphasizes the point. And some of them have really interesting illustrations.

The books fill the shelves, and lie in piles on the floor. I walk from place to place, and sometimes sit on something that may be a chair. It’s just like home.

As the being known as Tibbs negotiates with the locals to get us access to the zone containing the confluence, and Steve and Kristen wander the city like happy tourists (well, that is not a simile, really; they wander the city as happy tourists), I have drifted here, which feels entirely natural.

And now, having communicated the above to my hypothetical reader without becoming distracted (except for that one parenthetical about simile versus plain description), I can calmly note that these things may not be “books” in the obvious sense, that moonlight coming in through the windows is a phenomenon that quantum physics can just barely explain, and for that matter that “makes me happy” is enough to keep a phalanx (a committee, a department, a specialty) of psychology and anthropology scholars occupied for a very long time.

And that time is an illusion.

I’ve always been able to separate language from thoughts about language, to separate thoughts about reality from meta-thoughts about thoughts. At least in public. At least when talking to other people.

But I think I’m better at it now, even when I’m in private, just talking to myself, or writing for you, dear cherished hypothetical reader (cherished, inter alia, for your hypothetically inexhaustible interest and patience).

Ironically (so much to learn about irony!), I credit much of this improvement to long discussions (how long? how does the flow of time go in the cabin of an impossibly fast sharp vehicle, speeding twinnedly from one end to another of a infinite rainbow band?) with an arguably non-existent being called Tibbs, and an enigmatic pilot called Alpha, after her ship.

(Why do we use the female pronoun toward the pilot Alpha? Why does she speak English? Or how do we communicate with her if she does not? Is the intricate shiny blackish plastic or metal construct at the front of her head a helmet, or her face? Is the rest of her a uniform, flight suit, or her own body, or some of each, or entirely both? Would it have been rude to ask?)

Tibbs and Alpha, I feel, are kindred spirits, my kindred, beings blessed or cursed with a tendency to look through everything and try to see the other side, even knowing there is finally no other side, to overthink, to overthink the notion of overthinking. But they have, perhaps, had longer to get used to it.

The being Tibbs claims to be millions of years old, while also claiming to have slept for most of that time. The Pilot Alpha suggests, by implying (how? what words or gestures did she actually use?) that questions of her origin are meaningless, that she has always existed, or has at least existed for so long that information about her coming-to-be is no longer available in the universe, having been lost to entropy long since.

(At what level is entropy real? Time is an illusion; so is entropy a statement about memory? A statement about what we remember, compared to what we experience right now and anticipate, right now, about the future? Or should we only talk about entropy after we have thoroughly acknowledged that time is an illusion, but gone on to speak about it as though it were real anyway, with only a vague notion, an incomplete explanation, of why that is okay?)

Here is a thought about the illusory nature of the past and future: given that this present moment is all that exists, then all that exists outside of memory and anticipation, is this one breath, this one side of this one room containing these shelves and piles (never enough shelves!) of books, or the appearance of books.

Everything else, the long / short / timeless journey aboard the fast sharpness Alpha, the anticipation felt while listening to the sound of something like wind just before meeting Tibbs for the first time, Kristen’s palm against my cheek in that other library, the glittering brass something that she received from the Mixing, the fine hairs at the back of her neck, all of that is only (“only”?) memory. Does that mean that it is no more important, no more valid, no more real, than anything else purely mental? No more significant than a wondrous pile of multi-colored giant ants made of cheese, singing hypnotic songs, that I have just this moment imagined, and now remember as a thing I first thought of a few moments ago?

This seems… this seems wrong. (See how the ellipsis these, if you are experiencing these words in a context in which there was one, adds a certain feel of spoken language, and perhaps therefore conveys some nuance of emotion that otherwise would be missing? That is communication, in a complicated and non-obvious form.)

Here is a hypothesis put forward I think by the being Tibbs, as it (he? she? they? they never expressed a preference that I can recall) as they moved slowly and in apparent indifference toward gravity around the front of the cabin of the Alpha: Some of the things, people, situations, events, in memory are especially significant (valid, important, “real”) because they changed me. Others, while equally (what?) wonderful themselves, like the pile of cheese-ants, did not have as much impact, or the same kind of impact.

If we could work out a good theory of what it means for an object or event (or, most likely, an experience) to change a person, given that time is an illusion, then this seems promising.

The Pilot Alpha seemed in some way amused by my desire, or my project, to develop a systematic justification for (something like) dividing the world (dividing memory) into “real” things and “imagined” things, with the former being more important or more valid (or, as the being Tibbs suggested, more cool) than the latter. Amused in a slightly condescending way, perhaps, which is fine for a possibly-eternal being, but which (equally validly) I am personally rather sensitive to, given my own developmental history.

The being Tibbs, however, was not accurate in referring to my just-subsequent behavior as “a snit”.

The moonlight coming through the windows (however that might be occurring) is diffuse because it comes through the visually-thick atmosphere of this world, or this area of this world. It seems implausible that we can breathe the atmosphere without danger; is this evidence that we are in a virtuality? Is it reasonable that I nearly wrote “a mere virtuality”? Was that because “mere” would have had a meaning there that I would have been expressing? (What is it to “express” a “meaning”?) Or only because “mere virtuality” is a phrase that occurs in my memory in (remembered) situations with (for instance) similar emotional tone? What is emotional tone?

I anticipate that the being Tibbs will return to this long library room within a certain amount of time, most likely with some information to convey (what is it to “convey” some “information”?) about our continuing travels (why are we travelling? what is “travel”?). I anticipate that (the humans) Kristen and Steve will return to this long library room within a certain amount of time, most likely exchanging cute little looks and possibly holding hands, possibly having acquired some odd or ordinary souvenir in the bazaars of the city (but is this a city? does it have bazaars? what counts as a bazaar?).

And I look forward to whatever follows.

Fling Thirty-Eight

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Thirty-Six

The cabin of the unthinkably-fast sharpness that is called Alpha is not a roomy place. But there is, at least at the time we are describing, room for the Pilot (also known as Alpha, like her ship), the Presence known as Tibbs (a being with no well-defined size or shape, being primarily a shimmering in the aether, and therefore not requiring much space), and the three young humans Colin (sitting next to the pilot, in what might be a co-pilot’s seat if there was a co-pilot, which there has never been), Kristen, and Steve (the latter two lying side by side supine in the rear of the cabin, looking upward through the transparent canopy at the impossibly pure colors rushing infinitely by, and talking now and then in low tones).

“So if the universes are connected by tendrils,” Colin is saying to the Pilot Alpha, “and we can use the tendrils to pass between universes–“

“Some can,” the Pilot says, her voice coming from somewhere amidst the shiny intricate surfaces of her face or helmet, “we in the Alpha and Omega do not pass to other universes, we only skim into the interstices when we can, for speed.”

“But some can, others can. And that is the difficulty!”

“The difficulty?” the Pilot echoes politely. She has not had passengers, not up here in the cabin at any rate, for a good two thousand years, and although she hopes they will not be with her long, she is rather enjoying the novelty at the moment.

“Yes,” replies Colin, “if the universes are possible worlds, or alternative realities, but we can travel from one to another, well, so — take this universe, say, and imagine that someone arrives in it along the tendrils, from a connected universe.”

“As you four did.”

“Um, yes, however that worked, if that’s what happened. But then! As soon as someone arrives in this universe from elsewhere, there must be another universe, identical to this one up until that point, where they did not arrive, where they changed their mind at the last moment, or simply ceased to exist just before arriving.”

“People do not simply cease to exist,” the pilot says, and small lights within her helmet or her head flash on and off, possibly with amusement, “not everything conceivable is possible.”

“Sure, okay,” Colin responds, enthusiasm undampened, “but it must be possible that they didn’t arrive, so there is a universe where they arrived, and one where they didn’t. There is even an interstice where they passed through from one universe to the other, and then another possible version of the interstice where they turned back half-way. So the interstices themselves are universes, or parts of universes, and have alternates. The entire set of universes, channels, and interstices that I am able to reach, are a single universe, which must exist in an infinite number of alternates, in each of which I make different choices, have different experiences.”

“If I understand you,” Tibbs says, shimmering from where the canopy meets the control panel, “you want separate universes to count as separate only if the two cannot interact in any way. So no being can touch more than one, because otherwise they would themselves link together all the universes that they touch, and they would collapse into one.”

“That way of seeing it matches the mathematics as well,” Pilot Alpha agrees, “at least some mathematics that I could show you. It is not strictly correct to say that the universes are connected through tendrils passing through the interstices; we should say rather that the universe, this universe, consists of innumerable planes or realms, connected through tendrils passing through interstices.”

“Right, right!” says Colin, “exactly what I’m saying. All of these universes, or things that we call universes, are just one universe in fact. The unthinkably huge number of other universes are, by definition, out of our reach. We can conceptualize or model them, some tiny fraction of them, but we can never touch or change them. When the mycelia and gravity channels connect the planets and stars, and the reality tendrils connect the … the planes, as you said, they bind them all into one, causally, into one transitive closure.”

“God, he’s so Colin,” Kristen laughs quietly into Steve’s ear, and he pulls her a little closer as they watch the colors of time speeding past.

“He always is,” Steve says softly back, and lightly bites her ear.

Beside Alpha, and sometimes briefly coming into view as Steve and Kristen gaze upward, the sharpness Omega speeds in parallel. When they’d first met the Pilot Alpha after emerging from that last portal, they had asked about Omega sitting in the other service cradle, and its presumable pilot; but Alpha had only shaken her head, and hinted darkly that those were questions whose answers they did not want to receive. Their one glance at the being in the Omega’s cabin had been unsettling at best.

“Are you happy, babe?” Steve asks Kristen now, and immediately regrets it.

“How could I not be? This is amazing. The most sophisticated virtuality ever, or some crazy quest through the true nature of reality, or something,” she says. She turns and looks at him, wondering what’s in his mind. “And with the best boyfriend ever.”

He blushes.

Now Tibbs and Colin and the Pilot are discussing their most promising route from the next service stop (in a day? a week? a year?) to the multiple confluence that Tibbs insists they should find for unstated but interesting reasons. She wonders how long it will take to get there, and what time is about here, anyway.

“I do worry about our bodies, and our friends and parents, back in the real. If this isn’t the real. Or… you know?”

Steve nods. “I know, me too. But here we are.”

“Here we are.”

Fling Thirty-Seven