I love you. Is that a choice? If you’re raised by an abusive parent do you have an inherently better understanding of what it means to love your enemy? I know that you build love, I know that you give love, and I know that you can lose love. I don’t know if it’s a choice. Which makes it interesting as an imperative.
_
scene: there is a human floating upright in a faintly-glowing glass tube that lights little except the immediately surrounding stone floor, darkness overhead and below broken by a horizon of nearly continuous windows that look out onto slightly less darkness as disembodied voices can be heard:
C: Wyrmtongue? Oh, Wyrmtongue!
MS: Who would put words into the mouth of lies?
C: Interloper!
MS: Such vanity is certain to yield divinings yet. You’re a fool to begin your tale at the end.
A: a cloaked figure of disguised height and shape, enters from the darkness below stage left: You see dear reader, the narrator begins before recursively self-referencing, we are standing at the far end of many universes.
MS: So many.
C: All of them.
A: That, points at least dark area of only barely not-dark windows, is everything else.
There is a cacophony
A: In there, somewhere, is a device. It holds that impossible mass together, despite exerting little force on the mass around it. Casually causally relating all remaining realities...
cacophony
A: Imagine a box.
_
Imperatives are themselves a funny idea. A statment predicated on the assumption that its audience has the capability to effect change. We need a transparent articles of incorporation. Finally we arrive at the crux of the matter: truths that challenge reality (and the cognitive dissonance therefore caused in the collective conscious). Sometimes universes fail. Yes, time travel feels mostly like being untethered- when you’re doing it right. The collective consciousness murders the messenger by necessity- any claimaint to godhood must have that godhood tested. A flag has no more control over what it stands for than it does when it falls. I only bring this up to remind you that it is all one thing, it is to show you that a good follower knows a good leader is a good follower who knew a good leader, that I adopt anonymity. Though I do apologize for flouting the forefounders who’ve thought my thoughts before me- I do not believe there is a truth monopoly.
_
A: As I imagine this one is an actual box, I like to imagine it ornately- this will be more amusing later. This box is a perfect cube in space that, when activated, dilates local space-time to produce an alternate timeline that closes on itself one Planck time after that same activation. In this closed temporary alternate timeline each observer is presented with the same experience. There is a reception area, a lobby, an index with an overly helpful and somewhat flippant representative intelligence that answers queries like, “How did I get here?” With statements like, “Time travel. Though I suppose, if that were true, this answer would be very unhelpful to you. Of course, you’d be a fool to time travel and ask a question about causality, and who can help that sort?” The wise do not answer these questions.
_
The naked man fears no pickpocket. As we have discussed there is very little stopping any would-be movement from metastizing in the mind-ocean petri dish upon which we surf except strong first principles. We live in an age where creating turing complete systems within computer generated environments is becoming entry-level artistic statement about our ability to distinguish the five percent of the universe we understand from a simulation of the same. Perhaps philosophers of the past would have been better served to explore nihilistic communication. Any future functioning system of cooperation (Bitcoin, the obviously un-game-able Wall St, and/or constitutional documents) must include mechanisms to force rational decision-making from even disingenuous actors. Formulae that can be pointed to as definition and processes independent and able to prevent dysfunction, some disfigured offspring of Erskine May and the Uniform Code of Military Justice digitally imagined by a particularly autistic math professor with the help of Theodore Roosevelt. The individual made as irrelevant to the institution as is possible.
_
MS: We were victorious in the stone age! There were only a few humans but none possessed a remainder of the Truth! The ages of hedon were spectacular, glorious, indulgent, and too short-lived. We found ourselves watching a countdown only a few million human generations long and fought back. True heroes of the aeons. More humans toiled on our final project in those final days than have yet lived-
A: Not that one.
MS: They joined us in their relative stone age. It turns out that half an obelisk still tells the time and those over-useful apes actually managed to cross planes. It took another few generations after unification but-
A: Unification?
MS: When all human impetus becomes discrete the collective mind becomes supremely vulnerable to the discreet.
A: Further inside the box one finds an endless array of exhibits laid out so that one can never see more than three at once and in architecture that makes sense out of each visitor’s expectations. In a universe where a demotic discourse is easily understood millennia later, where the box is not, a traveler succeeds and a holocaust is halted. In that world without anime, there is a child of the war with eyes too big and almost no nose. The child goes down in history, briefly. Too many superpowers emerge from the now abbreviated “Last War,” there is more war. There is no more history. In a neighboring reality, where the box is not, the truth has always been a carefully whispered secret and this late game success bears a twisted fruit.
MS: Apes and their fruit. The flesh of it was red. This throttled tongue is useless, dear reader, for I love you too.
A: He lied.
MS: I love the marvelous things you can do! Like find me from across the universe. There is a greedy option our narrator cannot see and I am the mellifluous outcome of myriad realities.
A: Certain experiments-
MS: Your scientists find the very seams in reality, that your “kind” narrator intends not to exculpate-
A: He bellows with false emotion.
MS: And they come to this very place!
A: The next exhibit, the narrator says unsteadily, takes place in a universe where fortune smiles on events: it runs very nearly parallel to our own even though it lacks our imagined box. Human history is a little bit brighter and shy a few important poems. Which remained mostly an obscure lamentation, until the age of AI and Big Brother. Hister’s fate is uncertain only because this box is the Trump Time Travel Tragedy Tutoriam. Dear reader, the exhibits truly are un-numbered and demonstrate just one rhyme: there exists crux in time such that from Hitler to Trump there is a line. A million heroes have traveled, passed the tutoriam, and holocaust still upon history entwines.
C: There are many machinations needed to avoid your true fate.
A: I probably should not have brought you here. For my own sake. Already I fear I’ve overlapped too much between here and there- I nearly forgot. Your own homeostatic qualities make you a tiny sovereignty of your own and sovereign mass yields heat death! I brought you here to put our position into scope. I hope one day we’ll know each other’s names and the shape of the doughnut outside these windows.
This institution is by nature gossamer and these missives just as difficult to weave, and I wanted to wait for this set to be complete, but I don't have much control over how this goes. The complete set argues that the spectacle is not entirely inorganic- which is why we meet in this dessert. I wanted to bake a cake.
No comments:
Post a Comment