Series: Vortex Theory

What happens when philosophy is real and it collapses?

Afterimage

Introduction

My 750 words for today, to tide you over until I have a chance to write more.

Main Content

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Vortex Theory

Afterimage

“And…go.” We took off with all the power our tiny thrusters could give us. We barely escaped the gravity well, heh, but that old clunker bounced off a potential barrier and skipped on through.

The well was dark and the fabric here was tight and elastic. You could practically ricochet off gravity/time junctures without having to deal with the squishy math of harmonic decay. Time and gravity in the FarStretch respond with the immediacy of lust. The Stretch craves to be touched and stretched, and yearns to push back. Oh, the resilience of youth!

Meanwhile, in his quarters aboard a FarStretch explorer Captain Howell kicked his war chest and mumbled to himself. The stars drifted by the porthole and Howell watched life and home slide out of view. The stars are clouds floating overhead and disappearing before you realize the pattern. The afterimage, it is said, is a glimpse of the secret order that suffuses natural and human laws. Howell glares out the porthole, as if daring the stars to form a connection, and whispers to himself “Don’t know what a sail-boat has to do with God.”

A flare of light obscures the Captain’s meditation. He leaps to feet and rushes to the bridge. The bridge access control interface announces the Captain’s presence and the first officer hands him a report, “thought you’d be interested.”

The captain scans the report:
A week and a day ago…a heist on IntraCenti…Deliberate Upset of Grand Unified Plan…

“So, a robbery, and they get away by bouncing into the Stretch…how am I doing so far?” asks the captain.

“Straight on.”

“We normally don’t get involved in this kind of thing. But Deliberate Upset is pretty high crime…how exactly does a heist lead to DU commander?”

“Never got your real-estate license captain?”

“Where are you going with this Spock?”

“It’s all about location, sir. IC is a nouveau riche colony on the edge of the skirts. It will eventually be a nucleus of its own, commanding the resources of hundreds of nodes. Thus, it is predicted and commanded by Vortex Theory.”

“OK, so IC is gonna be something someday. How does a single heist threaten the known laws of nature?”

“Vortex Theory is predicated on the presumption that chaos-networks are inherently predictable.”

“Yes, Commander we all are attune to the KnownLaws.”

“VT, Captain, is threatened because the nucleonic calculations that predicted-thus-commanded IC’s eventual raise to prominence were based on the presumption that Empire operates in a steady-state beholden to VT.”

“As so it is commended by the predictions, Spock. Why are we wasting our time.”

“The empire will fall when VT is proven false.”

The Captain jumps to his feet and presses his favorite button. It’s a macro that signals all senior staff for an emergency meeting on the bridge.

“VT is proven false. Our commitments Empire are thereby void. We shall give chase to our emancipators. Vote!”

“Captain, please, wait,” pleads the Medical Services Coordinator, I request more information before I participate in treason or blasphemy. Could you explain why you think VT is broken and how that leads to abandoning Empire?”

“The IC heist toppled an economy that was predicted-thus-commaned to become a nucleus. The prediction was false, thus the commandment is false, thus this side of the net will snap and ooze into an unknown unpredictable conglomeration, thus showing society isn’t beholden to steady-state, thus VT crumbles into chaos. It won’t be long before the news hits distribution centers even in the remotest outposts. When it does, a critical mass of the population will inevitably understand the ramifications and Empire will crumble.”

“I don’t understand says the Chef, surly there’s been other heists?”

“It’s a matter of degree and location.” Spock explains, “The perpetrators were deliberate and precise in their strike. What we will see is that an unplanned for event injected into a miraculously planned network is enough to unravel the whole thing.”

“So…saboteurs that understand BasicAspects in a deeper more profound manner than do Planners. Saboteurs that are willing to risk their own survival in order to debunk KnownUnderstanding. I don’t know who we are we dealing with, but I believe we’d be better off getting to know them.”

A clunker drunkenly ricochets off potential barriers, and stretches through wells. Its bulkheads moan and shriek in the flickering lights of Michelle’s quarters. She traces the shifting shadows that leap into grotesque jokes of themselves. She is chasing one across the back wall when a call comes in.

“What we got?”

“They call themselves the NowBorn and they thank us for unraveling Empire. And request a meeting to learn our philosophy”, Lee blows a low whistle, “I think we got our first groupies.”

” !”,

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Vortex Theory

the worst done is become self-aware

it’s the crackle of fire and the howling winds
that gives us our coordinates
on a night such as this
one being constant another being not

and now your writer shudders with shock
and reckons it for fear
soon it is revealed to be a gasping for breath
and the tentative steps taken to breathe longer and deeper
and the fire of life is constant and warm
and it fills your body becoming

How/why was FarStretch created is the most brilliantly misapprehended of all FAQs. Until recently, until very recently, it was assumed that the FarStretch is a human-engineered construct—isn’t everything. The simple truth is we build into the Stretch. We know this to be true because the FarStretch is more resilient to gravity/time manipulation than are any lands in Empire. The model clearly shows resiliency of Stretch may be determined by the absence of human interference.

“That’s not the way it works,” one says to another.

“So. What do we do with a bunch of groupies?”

Lee glances up, “yeah, I was just thinking the same thing.”

Eventually they’ll decide to use them, because, you know, why not—we ascribe sentience and are thus bound to accept that it was free will that led them to wake our call.

They set up base in a quiet neighborhood, where you can mind your own business, and set about studying the biggest elephant in the room: EMPIRE ENDED, and no one flinched. Except for the Enlightened and the NewBorn no one noticed

NewBorn

“Back in Texas we had acres and acres of fire ants. Stand too long in a spot and you’d be knowing about it. Must’ve been, I’d say, from mound to mound, oh, about…”

“I hope you got a point somewhere up in that twang of yours Scotty.”

Scotty blushes and hates herself for it. “Well, Sir, it’s just, that, Empire is like a mound of fire ant that doesn’t know it’s dead yet. They’ll keep stinging you even if the queen is dead.”

“Well, Scott, if they’re that mindless, then they don’t have a fighting chance at assimilation anyway…this pretty well proves it.”

But they all knew it didn’t, but it got the feeling right. How much like a hapless cricket, this must be, being devoured and pulled underground to feed the last queen of the last generation. It’s all over save for the killing.

Enlightened

“What do we tell them?”

“That they don’t already assume they know?”

Lee wanted to scream, but why bother. Michelle was right, there’s no dealing with irrational minds, not even your allies’.

“You know what bothers me the most?” Lee says, “it’s that the NewBorn like us for all the wrong reasons.”

“You mean, they think of us as visionaries that weren’t blinded by the overriding paradigm of a galactic empire, one which was predicated on weak to false presumptions?”

“Well. If. We. We are as hapless as the grasshopper that ends up wherever its twitching legs takes it. We are criminals, as such we transgress natural/human laws, naturally, it’s our niche. We didn’t choose to cast doubt over a weak paradigm, it just happened as a function of the layout of underlying principles…”

“Predestination?”

“You know better.”

“You are uncomfortable with having responsibility thrust upon you, right, because you are a ‘criminal’. You have never had any overarching plan except for Upset, Deliberate or Otherwise, because you are a ‘criminal’. Yet, you react against the phrase predestination, and speak of knowing your place. I don’t have time to entertain your insecurities.”

Michelle bows and eases out of the cabin and waits for the clunk before she takes a contorted breath and grimaces.

Beyond Mundane: On Delocation of Personhood

Coffee smeared the headline and text from several sheets bled together to form what a poet of a certain calibre and disposition might take as inspiration or insight into the underlying poem of being. But you’ve already guess it’s going to be crumpled up and thrown out with half eaten eclairs and lemon slices. And then it’ll be ignored, no matter where it ends up. The realignment won’t affect it and it can never affect allied souls. It’s a distribution problem—we need to plant coffee smeared newspapers in the paths of fringe poets in order to propagate synthesis.

“They keep saying it’s been done before. But I don’t think they understand.”

The Sequence

Introduction

It is too absurd to stop now

Main Content

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Vortex Theory

“I’m no philosopher, but the way I see it we rose in the wake of global-quantum-suicide-paradise-engineering. On we went, and on we go, and all the while the echo of screaming death drones on in the background.”

Spock squints into the scope with disgust, “you always lead up to the Birth of Tragedy, and Eternal Return… Oh Gay Science how you carry on. Easily as efficient as Zarathustra over extended distances.”

The bridge crew looked away and awkwardly down. Uncertainty rippled through the crew before the captain spoke again. “If the songs melodic, sing it—if not, speak it.”

Over all nothingness, question/problems of reasoned readers, regarding this specificity, significant or not. One’s origin is one’s pain. Reference reason, or reference regard; the moving metaphor is all the same. From nature vice and from human culture, tools all the same. Measures, brass and heavy. Referenced as union or dissonance it’s all just qualia in the Stretch.

“Ain’t it all? No need to qualify it just for Stretch”, one says.

“Unless you consider reality”, another answers.

Reality is comprehended in two camps. For Crafters it is being, for Empire it is doing. Vortex Theory held in play long enough for a melding to occur in the being doing spectrum. But with its dissolution came a resonance which allowed a fracture to take hold. When balance fell individual command/predictions toppled and hypercorrected, leaving a coarsely cut hole through the obedience substructure. Being/Doing or even being versus doing is no longer a valid discipline.

The Collapse then, the Birth of Tragedy, is an awakening awareness in each of us that what we have granted to reality is equally as inadmissible as what we have taken from reality.

At the core of this issue is the nature of FarStretch.

Heresy was unknown prior to Corruption. After the fateful heist and the rise of the NewBorn was a time of accusation and reaction. It seems like a dated concept now, but Prefall Empire was so mired in the VT framework that any stray, however mundane, observation/thought that seemingly deviated from consensus was alarming.

Alarm lead to fear, fear to antagonism, and antagonism to Fall. Many of us didn’t mind, as Fall is/was always a danger. Always inevitable. Stability is no way to measure a system of governance. A billion years or 40, cast against infinity is a vanishingly fragile number. It’s both a blink of an eye and drawn out suffering. An hour or a quarter or a single minute holds within it the majestic and the mundane of all of reality.

Empire was over, all that was left was the dying.

Emergency senior staff meeting, at an ungodly hour for the MSC, and probably for the other department heads as well, but Bones didn’t care about them, “so, you damn Vulcans don’t sleep do you? So this is just like nothing for you. That’s why you haven’t deleted the captain’s macros yet, huh, you just don’t care. You emotionally stunted selfish cunt.”

Spock injects the doctor with a hypospray and the doctor springs to his feet and serenades the Vulcan, “I treat you poorly because I hate you.”

Spock rises an eyebrow and shoots the doctor again. The doctor laughs and goes back to writing his exposition.

“Cartwheels of causality stumble out/off of the substrate. The substrate is a natural underlying principle of enlightened entanglement…” the captain reads over McCoy’s shoulder.

“That’s right captain, Causal re/actions (bundled as being/doing groups) are set into and formed from collinear tracts of Stretch…sir.”

“That’s fine, Bones, fine. You may be wondering why I have summoned you,” the Captain scans the faces of his staff. “We’re kinda floating aimless out here. With Empire gone what’s left to explore or protect? I am entertaining proposals for our next course of action.”

“Let’s just watch it eat itself out of reality and wait for the last dying ember to fade,” shouted Bones.

Spock suggested something scientific. And the chef wanted cook and the chief wanted to repair. And the helmsmen, while allied with the doctor didn’t have his patience, they wanted to destroy what was left of Empire.

“Fire at will!” the Captain shouted and the ship’s main gunports opened a wide volley on the planet below and individual gun ports opened in crew quarters all over the ship. It took three hours to pulverize the colony which popped into being at the wrong juncture of gravity/time and fell prey to a deliberate upset of the FarStretch scout.