Wave Pools

In 2092 a gifted systician named Jonatha Sumner published her first paper on Novelty Calculation and two years later a man named Gordon Wilder first suggested the notion of a wave pool. Who was Gordon Wilder? This had become a question with which J had been obsessed. Following in his father’s footsteps he had become a talented retriever, gifted as he was at Field manipulation. His abilities had been widely recognized and had left him with a myriad of specialty options, something few in J’s generation enjoyed. But information about this man Wilder had not been forthcoming, even as he figured more and more prominently in the story of J’s life and the mystery which had come to hang about him like a black storm-cloud.

Wilder’s elusive storyline is in part what drove our man into this heap, drooling, shivering, uncontrollable, unconscious, the total calculated worth of a jellyfish. It was almost as if any knowledge of the man’s existence was some kind of mistake. Someone’s oversight. A chink in the steely armor of history protecting as it does our true past except for those tiny cracks. And through one such crack drifted this man’s name, like a leaf blowing about connected no longer to any known tree of events, no branches, no roots.

Some say he was a binary or bio systician. Some evidence points to his having been a mortician in a hospital morgue, Queens, NY.

Regardless of who devised it, it should be noted that the wave-pool concept came to under-gird the struggling economy and became the basis for many of the events in this story.

Shallow

She was not really shallow like so many in her community thought. From very early on, evoking any conceivable mind state with ease was something for which she lacked no talent, and as a result became a natural resource to which she would turn on occasion. The facility with which she would change herself so thoroughly from situation to situation astounded the folks that knew her so that the image of who she truly was was obscure to them. In fact, none felt that they really knew her at all so that while she had placed many of them into her confidence, none had ever taken her into theirs.

This was a tremendous anxiety for her. For community was valued in a way difficult to understand, for the Field had collapsed individual life. Imploded it. The information age was coming to a close and the specialized, fragmented world of the Western Mind had once again become one great grassy plain. Too void to take in at a glance. Full of predators and hidden danger. To be alone was to be forsaken. To be alone was to be devoured. So she leaned on the others and even on their children. But the rhythm of mutual support, the alternation of give and take always eluded her. It became a haunting sound that echoed all around but never within. Within there was only silence, as if the void of the Field was taking slow possession of her and would not, she knew, ever let her go.

Pedopedia

We had been running so fast for so long, and I had been so concentrating to place my feet in the right spots so as to not fall and embarrass myself that my whole mind had become a pattern of feet on ground. A constant output of foot information. It had been hard to keep up, but eventually we stopped short. He waited a beat for me and then gestured in the new direction we would be heading.

“Ready?”

We had been skirting the edge of a ridge and now I quickly looked around to see how he knew we had arrived. Off in the distance was a great white gate glowing brightly in the moonlight.

We turned off the path and began following a pattern of colored wooden pegs. He was only walking on blue ones and so I followed his lead.

“Careful”, he said.

Suddenly words began appearing and I began to hear him reading.

“It’s a kind of book”, I said.

“It’s a Pedopedia.” he replied, and as we tapped out the pattern, my pumping heart, my intense concentration and the words which began to flow to my mind all joined together as I learned the history of old science.

Diluculus leukopteros

The Daybreak White-winged Bat (Diluculus leukopteros), or Great Diurne, appeared somewhere in the latter half of the twenty-first century. First discovered in Spain and thought to be related to Nyctalus lasiopterus, this white predatory bat spread quickly across the northern hemisphere establishing itself throughout Europe and North America in less than fifty years. Apart from its pure white appearance, size and diurnal feeding habits, leukoptertos is identical to its nocturnal cousin Nyctalus lasiopterus, and has therefore been classified as belonging to the family of Vesper Bats Vespertilionidae despite its being the only known day-faring bat in existence.

In 2077, people by the thousands began making pilgrimages to a group of caves in Concan, South Texas to witness the millions of white bats that would flood from the caves at dawn. Despite the pseudo-religious nature of these pilgrimages no organized "white-bat cult" ever emerged from these gatherings and the phenomenon was relegated to rural populations throughout most of the second Civil Conflict and into the early years of the Field State. However, by around 2090 it was discovered that many D. Leukopteros were migrating into urban areas, causing many to fear that a resurgence of the sentiment would penetrate Federal centers.

The Daybreak White Wing, also called the Great White Bat was previously thought to feed exclusively on migratory birds (a trait extremely rare in bats, although found in its European cousin) but by the turn of the century roosts consisting of millions of bats existed in countless cities and were feeding on pigeons, gulls, rats, mice and passerines found in populated centers.

The suddenness of this urban migration reinforced in some the belief that the creatures were of a sacred nature bringing a message of hope while others saw them as a menace and a threat to urban life and worked to eradicate them from populated areas.

Shotgun Squad

“Communications are almost always a kind of seduction.”

“But the public isn’t aware… Why?”

“Because we are made to think of them as trivial. We have better things to think about. We worship in a shallow manner.“

“I’ve been spending more and more of my time offline… It’s strange really. Never really been one to do that sort of thing, But for some reason it’s been appealing to me.”

“Why are you telling me this? I'm not gonna help you because I don’t give a damn about you. But if you know about yourself what you know about me than you know what you need without me.”

Going offline is like dipping down below the surface of an upside down lake. No one really spends much time offline unless they’re sleeping or having sex. Whenever folks actually talk to each other, it’s as if they’re leaving a preferable world in order to transact some kind of business they both would rather resolve quickly. Faces dead. Voices curt and short. And then, back into the world where the emotional weight of experience is carried for you. Where fragile, emotional bodies are buoyed by the heavy salt waters of the Dead Sea.

J for some reason was never quite comfortable there. He was not one of the strange folk but he didn’t spend as much time online as he could have. Sometimes he would go off and just sit staring at the real around him. Not that there was much to look at. Things in the real over the course of decades had become quite plain. But there was something he had discovered one day when he was young. His mother had taken him to the seashore and as they were walking along the boardwalk a bomb had exploded in a nearby market. J had gotten knocked down by the blast and for six hours they had sat along the boardwalk while the military secured the island. It turned out to be a shotgun squad from the lower pine barrens and for a period of three hours Field transmissions were halted to and from the island. Such a thing would never happen nowadays, but they were only first beginning to rise up and the government was not prepared to handle them. J sat there listening to the angry, frenetic language of the military vehicles corralling the people on the streets, screeching and bleeping to each other in hostile, marine-language tones, back and forth and to other vehicles on the roads. And all the while, the sound of the sea enveloped them with the vastness of its gentle murmur. It was something he would never forget…

Excerpts from: A Lexicon of Basic Terms (2085 - Fletcher, Khorana)

"Hyperbodies are constellations of hyperworld objects. A nucleus generates satellites in order to interact with other bodies in hyperspace. One kind of hyperbody satellite is a command query. Your thoughts produce queries which immediately go into orbit around your nucleus at a particular frequency and angle of rotation. The total number, type and frequency of each command query at any given moment constitutes altogether your signature spectrum also called a satellite spectrum. Your signature spectrum is a pattern of energy generated by the action of the command queries in rotation around your nucleus. A command query is triggered by your thought and goes into rotation in order to amplify points relevant to that thought. It works by getting into rotation with matching queries also in rotation around other hyperbodies. The query will persist in rotation with all matching hyperworld satellites for as long as the thought persists.

All thought queries begin in generic form and get into rotation with millions of matching satellites. As the thought intensifies because of conscious persistence, the query loses its generic form and begins to differentiate. Thus the number of matching satellites decreases and its number of encounter rotations also decreases. This continues for as long as the thought is dwelt upon or until the query achieves an individuated state. When individuation is achieved, encounter rotation may begin between hyperbodies. Individuation is the condition of complete or significant emergence from the generic form to a sufficient degree so as to make congruent matching possible. Once query individuation has sufficiently taken place, one may begin exploring query matches." (Fletcher, Khorana 1180-81)

"This is more or less a description of the way one's thoughts generate correlative material in the Field. In the beginning, it was thought that navigating the experience would persist as an interminable exercise in multitasking—simultaneous immersion in two related but exclusive spheres. It has now been proposed however that for those exposed in early childhood, the two realms will seem to join, eventually becoming so congruous that the thought itself becomes the query, the former melding with its own representation, in the shape of the latter. Hyperbodies then become the primary 'self image'. They are the visual embodiment of our thought processes." - Dr. Subrahmanyan Khorana

"So what we have emerging then is a three-dimensional, ideogramic, visual-spatial language. Thoughts immediately represent themselves in our mind's eye as queries of various shapes, emerging from generic to individual. While at the same time they are racing through the Field seeking matches. I'm thinking here of proteins and molecules that have the ability to bond only with certain shapes. This is an automatic process." - Charles Fletcher

Note: Previous to novelty consignment (the practice of granting use of one's signature pattern to a wave pool corporation), the Field was a cumbersome environment in which only simple information could be withdrawn. This was primarily due to the inherent difficulty in maintaining a thought while manipulating the Field. With novelty consignment, the thinking process itself became the way to navigate the Field and the primary impediment to popular acceptance was dissolved.

The Charmed Circle

An alice (pronounced a’ luh see) is a perfect circle. It has no beginning, middle or end. It lives a life on the order of a dream but with no need of night or sleeping, it lurks between the conscious and the rest, sticking its feet into first one and then the other. The mind first exposed to an alice finds itself charmed in a fundamental way, recesses of itself previously unknown at all, now occupied--- stirring. It now possesses a new kind of middle-consciousness, one that informs the sequential second, but strides always in the wide-open space of the moment.

The story of the alice begins essentially toward the end of the twenty-first century with the development of the first sensory compression languages. When tastes, scents, sights and smells all broke free of the measured-second and into the moment. No longer did a person have to wait for an experience to end before having another because more than could be previously tasted or heard in a single moment could now be consumed in an explosive experience called an Inclusive Compressed Event (ICE).

Although the Field was in the East decades before the West, the ICE was invented by an American and was first employed as an advertisement for Coca Cola in 2072. By 2080 most arenas of information exchange were dominated by the ice (pronounced "eye see" or "I see").

It has been observed with some irony that the alacrity with which advertisers embraced the ice as a means of boosting the commodities market, led in the end to the demise of the market itself. For within a short time of their introduction, the value of the ice was found to exceed the value of the commodities they were being used to sell. This led summarily to the First World Depression (2082-2086) and the subsequent end of the Information Age.

The impact of the ice would soon prove negligible however compared to that of its successor, the alice (All Inclusive Compressed Event), the exact origins of which remained unknown for quite some time. But in the days before the shock, the excitement was infectious. It spread like a sickness in a tropical heat. It flew on nimble insect-wings. It could get to everyone. And so it became the basis for the new economy. It dictated a new kind of social order. And eventually became the basis of language itself, a language of icons and individual selves which opened humankind to the great change and closed a circle of knowledge that was as ancient as the origins of language itself...