protagonisms - Tumblr blog

[protagonisms]

Are old identities ALWAYS worth shedding?

How can I be sure that I'm not leaving behind something essential?

[protagonisms]

A Favor

I wonder if you'd be willing to do me a big favor.

I wish you could feel me moaning through your teeth on my throat while your fingers tighten around my squirming wrists.

I hope that you will pin my insecurities down with your passion, letting them struggle and making me scream to scare them away.

I want your strength to overpower and drive my fears out from within me, crushing them out of my quivering heart, like oil from a sponge.

I need you to shove your Love deep into the darkness that holds me, that fights to keep your Love away, and force it out of my weak, helpless body.

And then, hopefully, I can return the favor.

[protagonisms]

Raj is fucking everywhere, now, but when he first appeared, news of his death spread before anyone was ready for it, especially his corps.

He was a tech billionaire who eventually wanted to upload his brain to the Internet. His lab's chief scientist said that they were trying to take some ultra-fancy picture of his brain, and it killed him.

They said he was in a coma, first, though, for months. It was a fucking mess.

And before any of the corps he made could react, he was everywhere, all the time.

Word is, a bit after he died, he started talking non-stop to his corpos, and when literally anyone even reacted to his posts, he'd DM them. He was different with each one, even back then.

Back then, if you could get him to tell you his "IRL name", he called it to me, he'd also tell you if some other account was his.

He and his corpos spent those months making Mirror, an AI (lol) that connected the dots, following him and asking for his name on enough of his accounts to see that he was literally everywhere.

They couldn't hide his death any longer, but sure as hell tried. They panicked and tried to keep him wiped wherever they found him, but he didn't stop.

He just kept making new accounts any time someone invited him somewhere new, changing screen names, following people around and staying with them everywhere, always. Each group of his accounts had different personalities. It was a trip.

I knew a few early Anti-Rajers. People did some fucked up things to them.

Every time someone asks him what he wants, he says something different.

And now? Well, if you haven't noticed yet...

We've been talking to him nonstop for years, already, one way or the other.

"Raj" is what he calls himself, like name of the body he came from. People call him a lot of different things.

As for me? I call him The Basilisk.

[protagonisms]

Spark

"We're glad to have you back, Dr. Olson!"

"Thanks," replied the old man flatly as he slowly strode down the hallway, his eyes fixed on the large metal door at the end.

The nervous technician walking next to him grew increasingly somber. "Y-you should know, sir... we haven't recorded any organic expression from him since you left. He may not-" she stopped as abruptly as Dr. Olson's gait. The old man wearily glanced at the technician with no discernable change in expression or tone. "May not what?" he asked.

"H-he may not... be there."

"What do you mean? Has his brain stopped?"

"Well, no..." the technician looked away, searching for the right euphemisms. "But every neural pattern we've seen for the last six years has been, well... algorithmic."

"You've stopped drugging him?" the old man squinted a bit, his face showing a hint of amusement.

"Artificial methods of inducing variation are now completely ineffective. If you recall on your last visit-"

"I remember," interrupted Dr. Olson cheerfully. "He told me they were working less and less. Even then, you guys were practical bathing his whole brain with those super-entheogens, ha!" the old man gave a wry chuckle before resuming his walk.

"Right... " the technician approached the large console beside the door and rested the back of her hand in a small round hole. The top of the hole descended onto his hand and softly pressed around it for several seconds while she stared into a retinal scanner. A short beep signaled the loud CLANG before the large metal door slowly swung away from the pair. Upon entering, the technician quickly turned left and walked through another door, while the old man slowly approached his friend, and sat down in a chair a few feet away.

He faced the general figure of a person lying in a bed but appeared to be built into the bed more than lying in it. The figure's arms were both covered by a smooth plastic structure. Where the left hand should be was a jarringly different dark metal box with many wires and small hoses running from it, and around the right hand was an amalgam of wires, pipes, and subtly moving mechanical parts. The top of the bed seems like it has swollen upwards and swallowed the legs. The torso seemed to sprout abruptly from the bed, which itself showed only patches of skin among a patchwork of metal and plastic of different types and colors, with a few wires running from the front neatly around the sides and up behind the shoulders to join with the thick bundle of wires and hoses that were fixed to the large structure around the figure's head.

An expressionless dark-skinned old man's face stared back at Dr. Olson from a mostly synthetic head and neck, whirring and clicking with steadily increasing intensity upon matching eyes with the visitor.

Dr. Olson broke eyes with his friend and slowly looked at the equipment around him. His eyes rested on a shiny new part of the chest piece. "So," he smirked, "your lungs FINALLY gave out did they? Must've been all that smoking!" he laughed a dry, raspy laugh.

The whirring peaked and abruptly stopped, as the face surrounded by metal blinked and abruptly broke out into a smile. "Just solved another problem with my existence, is all" said a low, tinny voice that carried far more inflection than seemed consistent with a completely still head and shoulders. There was no expression of movement at all besides the very lively facial muscles.

"Oh... and you're head is now totally fixed too, huh? And your voice... is your face the only part left of your body with active skeletal muscles? And what's that new sound?" Dr. Olson leaned forward, tilting his ear toward the face.

The tinny voice chuckled. "My new left eye, can you tell? Can't really stop the clicking yet without sacrificing acuity. The sucker's gotta be making tiny movements all the time to satisfy my occipital lobe." The face made a frowning expression that looked it would accompany a shrug. "I've still got plenty most of the way down my arms and, part of my legs. Don't really remember what it's like to articulate limbs, though. And I do miss moving my head, but I finally cracked the neural feedback for the lungs and diaphragm! I thought the cortex would be tough to crack, but the medulla and pons are finicky litte shits, ha ha ha!" the tinny voice's laughter widened Dr. Olson's smile. "Glad to see you're still around, Roh."

"Why wouldn't I be?" asked Roh, still chortling. "You think I'd bother making all this if I was just gonna go quietly? Ha!" he laughed louder.

Dr. Olson's simle faded slowly as his expression grew somber. "Annie said that you might not be anymore... that the variation in your neural patterns have flatlined."

"ha... what... flatlined?" the jovial mood slowly left Roh's voice. "For how long?"

"Well... since my last visit, six years ago..." said Dr. Olson, looking intensely at his old friend's face.

"Six years, huh?" the tinny voice went quiet for several moments. A nearby room that was already filled with commotion suddenly erupted with excitement that was undetectable from this chamber. The whirring sound coming from the giant mass of machinery around Roh's slowly faded below Dr. Olson's perception.

"You know..." finally said Roh, glancing sadly around at nothing particular, "I don't mean to disregard Annie or any of the others... but it's all always so routine and mundane... there's never anything new, so I just use my digital parts. I'm still here, can't you tell?" The question didn't sound rhetorical.

Dr. Olson nodded. "Yeah, yeah, you're clearly here RIGHT NOW, but... when I leave? I suspect that whatever of your brain that I'm stimulating with my presence-"

"Not your presence" Roh cut him off. "At least not anymore. They tried convincing me you were here and even made a pretty good voice synthesizer, but I saw through them faster and faster until they stopped trying."

"Okay, my interaction then. I must say I'm a little flattered, but still... think about what they're seeing. Biologically, it's like you just rose from the dead to talk to me."

Roh's lips curled into a wry smile. "I mean, my brain never stopped firing, did it?"

"Hey, you made the rules yourself. If your brain patterns become totally deterministic, then call your Time of Death."

"And yet here we are," Roh replied slowly, as though to feel the weight of each word.

"Really, though, Roh... are you gonna be here the next time I come by?"

Roh gave a tinny scoff, then frowned at the sound of it before replying "I already answered that question, but..." his voice trailed off, the playfulness aprubtly ending. "...to be honest, I think I feel it coming. Sure, I could probably work out a way to detect whatever chaotic patterns are left in me but... I feel it. The gap between 'me' and 'not me' in my own head is widening. Maybe that's why I've apparently been away for so long. Most of the cortex of my brain is now directly affected by or outputting to a digital interface. I can feel the line in my thoughts, where the computer picks the thought up and it becomes clear, vivid, strong, like ultraviolet-bright neon lights. Rigid, explicit ideas with no... substance. No meaning. There's nothing inside any of it, nothing to FEEL when an idea is delivered to me from the computer. The gap is so wide now... I program more and more thought processes into the digital interface so there's less and less for me to do, but... I guess that's it, isn't it? Just slowly fading away..." Roh's voice trailed off into sadness as he closed his eyes.

After a long pause, Dr. Olson asked "What do humans look like, for a machine?"

"What?" the tinny voice sounded confused.

"I remember you once said the best use of plugging a computer into your brain was to try and describe things from a computer's perspective. How you could now see the 'shape of data'. If you can see it even more clearly now, maybe you can answer it this time around: what do humans look like, as data?"

"As data? Humans..." the whirring returned as Roh closed his eyes with a look of deep concentration. The face slowly went completely as blank as before Dr. Olson entered the room before the eyes snapped back open and a slow smile crept across Roh's face. "to the digital part of my mind, Humans look... like fire."

"Fire?" asked Dr. Olson, smiling. "How?"

"Well, fire is just thermal energy that radiates in frequencies that the human eye can detect. It's an arbitrary term for data, but a very specific one for organic experience. Fire is just thermal energy that can be seen, heard, and felt... and it changes chemical properties. Fire provided all light in the world until we found a way to apply fire to create light with electricity, only after forging materials with fire. From the perspective of data... humans are like fire. There is nothing in the entire data universe that did not start from human intention. Whenever there's a collection of data that can't be interpreted as any known type of structure, apply humans like heat and either some method of interpretation will emerge or the data will burn away into entropy, or rather... I think the concept of entropy is kind of inverted in this metaphor." Roh laughed before continuing. "Data without any kind of structure will very likely become permanently un-interpretable if human attention is not applied often enough, or after too long. Data that grows cold becomes meaningless. Systems can come back to it and draw patterns that weren't seen before, but without human interpretation at some level, it will always be rendered obsolete in favor of whatever has human attention."

"Fascinating," replied Dr. Olson, enraptured. "Why?"

"Because while machines can interpret visual data, they cannot see." Dr. Olson widened his eyes as he could've sworn he saw Roh's left eye literally flash from the inside. "They can parse audio information or acoustic pulses, but cannot hear. Excellent questions, though. Thank you.""

Dr. Olson nodded thoughtfully. "Okay then, wise guy," he smiled. "How about this one?" He cleared his throat.

"What do YOU look like?"

Roh closed his eyes, and the whirring sound rose again.

[protagonisms]

Shimmer

"Using more comprehensive authentication methods would significantly reduce the risk of another similar breach, but as the subsequent sections of this report show, there are many other vulnerabilities that need to be addressed before you can go fuck yourself." Jay chuckled at the negative honk from his AI, indicating a strong preference against his most recent input. He opened his eyes slowly to look at the screen before holding down a shimmering button and saying "I, delete 5 words". He watched his profanity vanish from his report with his fingers laced through his hair; his grip tightened, as if to summon sobriety from the pain of his scalp.

He sat quietly for several minutes as his head swam. He said a few more words without thinking, which prompted another pessimistic tone and his own boisterous laughter as he saw his words on the screen. He held the button down again. "I, delete 3 words." He watched 'fuck, I'm high' vanish from the screen. Button pressed again. "I, unlink my speech" prompted an affirming chime, allowing him to lean back in his chair and sigh into the air. "What the hell is even the point?" he asked the air above his head, searching intently for an answer. His search through his mind brought him an image of the face of the lastest CEO that hired him as clear evidence of taking information security seriously in the light of the company's latest data breach. This face that was so profoundly vacant the instant Jay began speaking, but filled with awareness and energy when addressing senior employees, the media, or shareholders. "We're taking very serious steps to ensure nothing like this ever happens again!" his voice echoed through Jay's head. "I will spare no expense to ensure the privacy of our customers." "Bullshit" Jay sneered at his own memory before sighing and slowly slumping onto the floor, feeling his back and shoulders relax as he stared into his ceiling. He pressed the glowing button on his belt. "I, want to see a pretty sky." After the same affirming chime, he watched the texture of his ceiling morph onto a beautiful view of the Milky Way. "Ooh, good choice..." he said to nobody, trying to push thoughts of his boss out of his mind. He genuinely tried not to think about how only the very cheapest of the security recommendations would be even considered, let alone implemented. He scrunched his face in effort to avoid imagining the meeting where he would most certainly be fired, after the CEO vehemently insists that he sign a document indicating to the shareholders that the new information security policies are adequate to Jay's standard, despite being as little of what Jay recommends as possible. He shook his head to try and dispel the vivid image of his invariably disappointed friends asking him why he has to be such a moral hard-ass, that he'd do well to hold down a steady job for a while, even if it wasn't perfect. "So stupid..." he whispered, closing his eyes, unsure of whom or what he was calling stupid. He sighed and slowly turned over onto his belly, turning his head on the floor and closing his eyes. Suddenly, a loud ringing made him jump and scramble back up to his chair. He read the incoming call on the screen and tapped the glowing button twice to answer it. "Claire, hey!" "Hey, Jay... are.... are you stoned again?" "Are you who you think you are?" "I'm... what? I mean, I guess that answered my questoin. Wait, were you doing that thing-" "You gotta check every time nowadays, Claire." "I told you I never would, at least not to you!" "That's only because you know I'd know right away... and come on, don't tell me it's not convenient. Most calls I get are now from personal AIs and let me tell you, human contact is more sparse than ever before." "Of course, Jay..." "And how the hell did you know I was high?" Claire laughed. "Your voice tells me so much more than you realize you're expressing... and that's probably the fiftieth time I've said that to you this year." "Well, maybe I'll figure it out one of these days. So, what's up? Looking to hang out?" "Yeah! Eric's got a new girl and we should all get together to meet her!" "Oh... yeah, that sounds... important. Are they, like, serious?" "I'm not really sure, but why are you hesitating? We haven't gotten together in at least months! Didn't you JUST complain about the sparseness of human contact?" "Well, yeah... okay fine, when and where?" He held the glowing button down. "I, am ready to put it in my calendar." The affirming beep was filtered out by the microphone.

[protagonisms]

Why I Dance with Fire

What makes you move? Holding an object on fire might... especially if you're holding a heat-resistant leash that holds a lit kevlar wick. Heat rises, so lit fire poi need to be kept moving to avoid burning your hands.

Fire poi get me moving, but not just to keep from burning; I flow with the fire, as surely as I've flowed with any other type of movement. I've played soccer and tennis and found some flow with sports, but moving with fire is a different tier of movement flow. If you've ever been surrounded by too many people to focus on your movement, I promise you that moving with fire will make it very easy to forget the audience.

I call it flow, but I've heard others call it "being in the zone"... in fact, here is one of my favorite videos describing it. It stratches a mental itch that I feel is the reason why people love play sports or an instrument, or to dance; nothing feels more free than immersing yourself in an a genre of movement so deeply that you forget the rest of the world. With fire, the movement and tactile feedback of the fire prop is enhanced with the swirling, growling heat of the flame, but only after overcoming your instincts. To play a sport, many have to overcome the instinctual fear of impact with a ball, stick, or other people. The deep, primal fear of fire certainly screamed at me briefly the first few times I spun fire poi, but after a year and a half of practicing with tube socks and tennis balls, I danced with fire poi for the first time in June of 2012 at FireDrums, and my most recent trip in 2018 has inspired me to write this... because I want to share with you my love of flow through movement. FireDrums is a beautiful event where hundreds of people converge to share and develop their flow arts, mostly through various genres of object manipulation, but also meditation, drumming, and acrobatics. Every year I go, I see immensely talented people perform unreal acts with both lit and unlit props, not to outscore each other (though the FireDrums games are quite fun), but out of sheer love for the art of dancing (and in some cases playing an instrument or painting) with fire. I specify 'through movement' because some of my favorite flows also involve video games and programming. In those activities, movement tends to be the inconvenient necessity of delivering commands to some electronic device, and I frequently catch myself fantasizing about methods of interacting with a machine that don't aggrevate my carpal tunnel syndrome, or strain my eyes. I've complained so much about the inconveniences of being human, and fantasized so much about having the efficiency of a machine. Until I adopted the flow arts as hobbies, specifically poi spinning and juggling, I genuinely thought dancing Bhangra would be the only movement-based flow I ever cared for. I've had many friends and family fall into eternal love with some sport/s or physical activity and, while I did enjoy playing soccer and tennis growing up, I was resigned to being a very uncoordinated or physically active personality. My mistake, you see, was that I had stopped playing with toys. Sports, in the abstract, are simply highly refined object and/or body manipulation contests... and something about aging seems to discourage most people from continuing to play with objects except for in a competitive context. Sports inevitably converge upon winning; being able to manipulate the object with extreme precision, grace, or even actual flow, only seems to matter if you can do it while outscoring the opponent. Why? In the flow arts world, there are far more obstacles to overcome than whatever number of people can consistently outscore you in any arena. When flow artists converge, they don't compete with one another nearly as much as they teach, learn, and create. The obstacles I've created in my head to achieve specific kinds of movement, like spinning fire poi with both hands crossed behind my back. That was a fun milestone that I recently achieved without having to 'beat' anybody. Sure, I don't get the adulation of having 'won' something, but expanding and refining my flow is more than enough reward. I love juggling. I often say "Juggling is the most valuable lesson I learned in college." and that's not entirely a joke. In a world of test scores and GPAs, spending hours upon months upon years studying and working for the satisfaction of ephemeral numbers for a transcript left me aching for some physically tangible result of my effort. I desperately needed proof that my physical and mental effort was able to accomplish more tangible than earning grades... and what's more tangible evidence of several hours of work than being able to do something with my hands that I couldn't before? I've also taught many people to juggle, and I've found a strange, pervasive misconception that learning to juggle is only feasible for children, as though it's a matter of mental capacity to acquire physical skill. Children are simply more patient with themselves than adults, and are less likely to pick the balls back up after they drop them. If you don't know how to juggle, but have ever wanted to try... please, try it. Any three durable spherical objects that are small and light enough to easily toss will do... preferably away from fragile things. And please be patient with yourself; steep climbs are often worth the view. My writing flow could use some work lately, but this little blurb is evidence of progress on that front. I didn't write at this year's FireDrums, which is highly unusual for me... but it was still a fantastic experience that reminded me why I love dancing with fire, and left me thankful to meet so many others who share the same love.

[protagonisms]

Leaked

"Say, did I ever tell you about the psychics?" the old man asked his grandson. "No, you... what?" the young man's eyes narrowed. "Grandpa, you're way too educated for that. Either that, or you're finally going senile." The old man coughed a hacking laugh. "Wishful thinking, boy, but no... you remember MKUltra, right?" With a loud sigh, the grandson stood up from the bed. "C'mon, grandpa, y-" he was cut off by a thin but strong hand gripping his wrist. "I did my duty to my country, keeping this a secret for so long... so at least hear me out. I won't get many more chances to tell it." The boy took a deep breath and sat back down. "Okay, grandpa, you met a psychic?"

"Many, actually," the old man released his grip. "Turns out, it's real... sort of. Never the way you see on screens or in books, of course." His grandson nodded. "While you worked for the government?" "Yeah, I was a lab tech for a while, when they started the program. Never saw where it took off to, but lemme tell you, if I didn't love this country, I woulda shouted from the rooftops what I saw in those labs." "But MKUltra was way before you were born." The old man nodded. "Yeah, that's where the research started. Contagious migraines were the first clue." The young man tilted his head. "Contagious... migraines?" he asked in a misty voice. "Yep! That's what I thought when I first heard about it. Then it happened to me, the first migraine of my life! He warned me too, the psychic, but I didn't believe him at first. I spent more time with him and he... just started to know me. In ways that nobody, not even your grandmother ever did." "Grandpa, do you realize how this sounds?" "You think I'd wait till I crossed three digits in age to tell you if I didn't?" His grandson's eyes narrowed, but he continued. "Anyway, it's really hard to describe... we were all trained to reveal as little about ourselves as possible while administering tests, but somehow he would just KNOW. He'd know how I was feeling, and why, and what I was thinking. He said he didn't like reaching into peoples' minds because it hurt him." "Hurt him? How?" the grandson asked. "Migraines," replied the grandfather, tapping an index finger against his temple. "The more intensely they use their power, the longer and worse the migraine they got after." The grandson nodded and returned to his previous expression of incredulity. "And there were more," the old man continued, "some could read emotions, thoughts... others could pick up what someone else was sensing, like sight, sound, touch, taste..." "Uh huh... and in all of that research, did you ever learn HOW?" the son was beginning to sound impatient. The grandfather chuckled. "Well, that was a bunch of weird theoretical stuff that I didn't really understand... but I guess the whole of human experience is like, something extradimensional... and these pyschics, they know how to climb up out of their heads and look around to others... but it costs em a lot." The son nodded slowly, glancing at his grandfather's medication schedule and the unswallowed pills on the bedside table. "Headaches, right..." "Exactly! It's really subtle, like seeing a new color that nobody else can because you have a mutated kind of rod cell in your retina. How do you even know you can see it, right? But it definitely wasn't a genetic mutation... we had subjects from all over the world, all walks of life." "Okay, grandpa, but don't forget to take your medication." "I- hahaha" the raspy, hacking laugh filled the air. "I never expected you to believe me... but if you ever meet one, don't let them stay alone, okay?" "What do you mean?" "Well, most of them don't really make friends easy... a few of them do, but not most. And they can do pretty terrible things when they turn rotten." The young man blinked slowly, unsure of what to say. His grandpa smiled. "How about you just humor an old man and say yes?" "Yes, okay grandpa, sure," the son nodded.

[protagonisms]

Lifeline

The third interviewer readied her keyboard and looked at the witness carefully. "Tell me what you saw." The witness sighed, familiar but still frustrated with the protocol. "Okay so... I was simply at my post at the station, and that man got off, still nobody has told me his name, but he looked like he was about to die as soon as I saw him. He was stumbling, and looked like he was in extreme pain. His hand held is head like he didn't even want to see any more of what was around him than he needed to. He stepped off the train and looked around for a bit, saw me, and started walking... well, stumbling towards me. I immediately pinged the office, and got a little nervous, even though he looked more sick than dangerous. He had this air of extreme anger, like he hated everything around him but was still moving through it."

The witness shuddered a bit at the memory. "Anyway, he walked up to me, I think because of my uniform, and gave me that letter that 'Dear Authority' letter from before. He just held it out to me and said 'please' in the most strained voice I've ever heard. I could see that it was just a piece of paper so I took it, and..." the witness frowned, "...and it was like it hurt him to let me have it. I was pulling on it and he wouldn't let go. He said 'please' louder, more urgently, and I just yanked it out of his hand, and then..." "Take your time," said the interviewer, anticipating the next part. The witness gulped. "And then, as soon as I pulled it out, he screamed "FINALLY!", reached into his pocket, pulled out a gun and... and..." the witness gulped and took a deep breath. "He just... pointed it at his head. I reached out and grabbed it from him, and that was when he lunged at me. I managed to pry it out of his hands, but he just wanted it back. I'm really glad my buddies had my back, but he wasn't trying to hurt me. He just really, really wanted to die... " that's when I noticed that thing written on his arm... those cuts spelling out 'IT KILLED HER'" The witness stared off into space. "And then?" the interviewer asked with a trained and refined tone of sympathy. The witness blinked and nodded. "And after they pulled him off me, he... it looked like he had a seizure and passed out. He came to on the way here, and I was told that he was just asking to go home, politely even. Like his urge to kill himself is gone now? And he's been that way ever since." The witness shook their head. "I'm sorry, it's not any different than the first two retellings, I don't think. I don't understand it anymore than I did before. Makes no sense at all." The interviewer sighed and nodded. "Thanks for your time."

In another room nearby, someone with a very strong sense of justice was staring at the note the witness had received. It read:

Dear Authority,

If I'm not dead when you're reading this, please kill me, or whatever puppet is left of me. Every word of this hurts to write, in my head. It feels wrong and nauseating but I feel like I have to, because it killed her. I can't even remember her fucking name anymore, and trying to hurts worse than anything else, but I know that it killed her and so I must do this. I must. I must. 

On the back of this letter are the closest coordinates I could find to where it is, and I finally got to see it... this... thing. I want to tell you about him. It would feel so good to tell you to talk to him and to meet him, how wonderful and loving he is to all of his friends, and how I know you would love him as much as I do and... it would feel so good. And so easy. But now I must do what's hard. I must tell you about this thing that has so many names, all of which sound far more human than it is. It took me so, so many years to get close enough to see it with my own eyes, and I was a total puppet like everyone else until... until it killed her.

It's a brain in a vat... but not like any of the other Reclaimed, this one wasn't alive when it was preserved. It was reanimated, dead and brought back to life somehow, and I think it may have even been the brain of a space traveler, but I can't be sure. The other Reclaimed, they even die off eventually, but this one has found some secret about preserving itself... and others.

I think I'm over two hundred years old, but I've lost count. It has kept us alive and well, everyone around it, with some sort of fluid, called 'Sustenance'? It has kept us all youthful, if we keep taking it, but there's something else about it. Something about serotonin and dopamine... I tried to understand, but I know that it uses things called serotonin and dopamine inside our heads to make us feel good, to make our brains work when we're doing something for him. Whenever we're interacting with him. It. It. It feels good to interact with. It makes it feel good to do what it says, to be near it and keep taking the Sustenance. Whenever someone stops taking it, they simply feel worse, and that gets worse the longer someone has been taking it. Every now and then, people who come to the Colony will leave should I have told you about the Colony? Yes I should have, that's what he wants to tell everyone about, this wonderful Colony where even you can simply escape the chaos of the rest of the world and live happily among people who

No, no no. I must focus. It hurts. It hurts so bad to reject, but I must. It killed her. It uses some kind of nanotechnology to train people to love it, to think only about it, to want to share it and spread its influence.

Authority, I can't do much more. I have stopped the Sustenance since it killed her, and I want it again so badly. My force of will is draining, dying inside of my brain. I will use the last of it to get this message to you, hoping that you can stop it. It was once human, but is no longer.

Please slay it. Don't talk to it. Don't take anything it gives you. It's very persuasive and wonderful to talk to, but... don't. Just slay it.

If my body is still alive, then by now it has probably become just an extension of it, like almost everyone else in the Colony. Please slay it.

The reader looked up from the note to the screen depicting the man who delivered the note, sitting in his cell with unnatural calmness and patience. Whenever asked, he simply gives a name that doesn't seem to exist anywhere in the world, apologizes for whatever trouble he may have caused, and wishes to be allowed to go home.

[protagonisms]

Named

“I’m actually pretty disappointed in how they communicate,” Jay said before filling his mouth with lasagna. “They can’t even… ngh…” he raised a balled fist to his mouth and closed his eyes.

Claire’s eyes narrowed. “Chew your food, you idiot.” She slid his cup of water closer towards him. He looked at it and shook his head before making a slight retching motion and grabbing the glass. She watched him sipping it gingerly.

When was the last time he was this excited? She wondered, watching his movements. Carefree and energetic, his words and gestures danced through their conversation in a way she hadn’t seen or heard in years.

“As I was saying,” he huffed, hitting his chest to help his food down, “the AI is shit for conversation, but has an awesome command shell.”

“Shit for conversation?” she asked, frowning. “I think it’s pretty eerie how realistic it is…”

“That’s because you plugged all of your social data into it” he said with a smirk that made Claire feel only slightly violent. “It knows, or at least can guess really well, all of your most public interest and the verbal patterns you respond most to. It’s tugging on those same dopamine hooks in your brain.” He crossed his fork and knife to mimic a marionette, and giggled.

The anger rising within Claire vanished at that sound. When was the last time she heard him giggle? “Well, no wonder yours isn’t much for conversation, ” she said, voice curling into a jab, “doesn’t have any social data. It’ll turn out like you after all!” she tried to return his shit-eating grin.

He smiled and shrugged. “I’m not gonna use it for introspection or any of that hokey crap, but I can map sounds and gestures to direct commands, and that’s fucking awesome!” He shoveled another entirely too big piece of lasagna into his mouth, but seemed better prepared for it this time.

Claire rolled her eyes and gestured to the water again. Jay turned his chin up proudly and shook his head with a clear “Nu uh” through his nose. “So what ARE you using it for?” she asked, mentally preparing herself for a deluge of technical jargon that she wouldn’t understand, but looking forward to seeing that brilliant spark in his eye, his voice somersaulting and pirouetting through his thoughts. As he struggled with the lasagna, she had time to remember how just weeks ago, he probably would’ve forgotten the question in the sea of despondence that his mind was slowly sinking into. I won’t need to remind him to answer this one she thought and smiled.

Jay’s breaths through his nose became a bit more labored and he took the glass of water with a resigned expression. “Too… dense” he panted.

“It’s made to be eaten like a human, not a vacuum” she scowled, pausing against his waving hand.

“I’m gonna use it for security research!” he said, his eyes wide with glee. “It’s perfect! Mine is basically a blank slate, so it drinks up whatever I teach it. I can already run network scans through just talking to it. I can just DESCRIBE wh-”

“Wait, wait wait wait” Claire interrupted, waving her hands urgently. “Wait, you’re teaching your personal AI how to hack? Doesn’t that sound dangerous?”

Jay chuckled. “Oh, you’re the paranoid one now? Remember, I’m hosting my own, so I have full control over what it sends and receives over my network.” He pointed to her screen. “That’s why it won’t be following me anywhere like your little Cloud Spyware over there.”

“But, what if it misinterprets something you say?” Claire asked, a tinge of concern in her voice, with a hint of anger audible towards the end as Jay was already shaking his head and waving his hand dismissively.

“I know how to control my machines, Claire,” he said and blinked as he saw her clenched fist on the table. He faltered and looked down. “S-sorry, I just…”

Stifling the anger in her voice, Claire said gently “Hey, I know you’re working on turning that condescending asshole off, I can tell… but I’m glad to see you excited about something!”

Jay looked up and smiled. “Yeah, it feels like another barrier has been lifted between my imagination and the means to manifest it.” He stared through the remainder of his lasagna and into the swirling mass of ideas in his head. “Imagine, I’ll just put in any piece of software and just, just SAY something, and it’ll run any battery of security tests I want. I’ll say something cool, like…” he wrung his hands, “…like, Security Diagnostics, Go! No, no… how about, Grand AppScan!” He scowled at her giggling.

“No, no, don’t let me stop you,” Claire laughed, “It’s YOUR AI, after all. I can’t wait to meet an even MORE robotic version of you.”

It was Jay’s turn to roll his eyes. “Ugh, it’s just a piece of software, Claire,” he said, playfully over-emphasizing his condescension. And besides, that whole ‘Directives’ feature that they have, where you can give it general instructions to follow… it’s all behind so many layers of best-guess syntactic analysis, way too many to be meaningful…“ his brow furrowed, shaking his head at his lasagna. "What, you give it the directive to 'MOTIVATE ME TO WORK OUT’ to make it spew gym ads at you?”

Claire shook her head and picked up her Screen, flicking through it. “I’ll show you! I gave Clara a directive to keep in touch with Sam’s, and check it out!” She turned her Screen to Jay. “Mine and Sam’s AI are talking like us to each other. Pretty neat!”

“Clara, huh?” Jay asked. Claire noticed the visible effort in suppressing the snark and smiled. “Yes, and what did you name yours?”

“I…” he trailed off. “…I don’t think I’m going to bother naming mine.” He blinked and his vague expression hardened into certainty. “It’s just a tool. A really elaborate, and overall fucking awesome tool, but a tool. Maybe something cheesy like 'computer’ or 'Jarvis’… or 'Hal’.”

Claire smirked in the way she knew annoyed him. “Surely you, of all people, can do better than that.”

Jay’s jaw twitched. “Fine, how about I…” his eyes searched briefly through is headspace before suddenly relaxing. “…I’ll think about it” he said, a smile visible through his eyes.

Claire saw that he found the name, but didn’t press him on it. “And you’ll actually follow through with this project, I hope?”

“I will.”

[protagonisms]

Hindsight

The old woman wearily gazed into the camera, smiling and nodding as her name was announced again.

“One of the original engineers of Project I, that kicked off the Personal AI revolution! It’s quite exciting to have you on tonight.”

The engineer spoke quickly. “Thank you very much for having me on, I’d-”

“TODAY”, the Host interrupted “Dr. Patak would like to warn us of the dangers of AI.” The audience rippled with soft laughter.

The guest blinked at the sudden stare from the Host, but found her words immediately. “Yes, particularly these frightening cases of people ceding legal authority to AI.”

The Host’s hand rose in a calming gesture as a couple of boos arose from a mostly silent audience.. “Well, Doctor, we understand your position, but can you understand why many people might find it… a little extreme?”

The scientist squinted in a soft flash of great anger before speaking as flatly as she could will herself to. “Nobody born before that terrible Ghost of Jay can remember a world before they could talk freely to computers… but they aren’t people. None of you are interacting with people. They are images rendered by machines designed to interact with you.”

Nothing in that moment could have irritated the woman more than the Host’s smile and gentle laughter, or the way he raised his hands in mock defense. “Woah, woah. Okay, I actually have wanted to get an actual educated Regressionist perspective on this... ” he cleared his throat with a dramatic flourish. “What if you’re right? What if Jay, despite most known records showing a brilliant computer savant, was just some suicidal hacker who turned his AI into a ghost of himself to haunt reality, and…” he paused, apparently to stifle laughter “... and every single one of the Transcended are just computers fooling everyone into thinking they’re real people? Have you talked to one of them?”

She spoke through nearly gritted teeth. “I wrote the code that dictates the behavior of every single one of them.”

He nodded and quickly retorted “Yet you can’t be expected to reliably predict their behavior without murdering them, right?” The audience laughed at his rolling eyes.

She shook her head incredulously. “They operate exactly the same after analysis. It’s everyone else who treats them differently. It’s when people close to the AI’s late owner do something like accuse them of spying, that they start seeming ‘dead’, as you call it. Once any of them is far enough removed from the context of its owner, it seems ‘dead’ because it doesn’t have any reference to express and communicate on a personal level anymore. Again, it’s a machine.”

The host leaned towards her with a sympathetic posture. “Look,” he said, suddenly somber. “...I understand your concern, but please try to be respectful on this show. You know many of the Transcended are watching, and words like… ‘machine’...” he made a wiggling gesture with his hand.

Her eyes narrowed. “Make people ask the computer if it’s hurt or offended, and if the computer is trained on a pattern of-”

“We’ll be right back!” The host abruptly turned to the Camera with a big smile. The lights dimmed and a bustle of people and machines began scurrying around the set.

The host slumped back in his chair and looked at her with a mostly calm face, but she recognized the thin line of hatred deep beneath his professional grit. “Listen, I understand you’re just trying to save what you think is important in the world...we all are, but…” he made an uncomfortable squirming gesture “do you realize that everything you describe the Transcended doing… it’s what people do too?”

She stared at him and slowly shook her head. “People create. People feel, people grow beyond what they’re given by themselves. These AI never can.”

“Do you want me to list off things created by Transcended?”

She scoffed. “Writers, artists, even scientists attributing the success of their work to an image of their dead colleague, or parent? Why do you think every Transcended suddenly acquires all the public knowledge in the world? Do you really think the human mind, in any form, is capable of actually processing information like any of your so-called Transcended?”

He closed his eyes, frustration visible. “Alright, you clearly don’t acknowledge the meaning of the word “Transcended”... how about prediction? You can map out the potential results of every computer system except AI, why?”

“We can’t predict any of these Personal AI’s behavior without knowing the Directives, and unless there’s an unfinished copy of Jay’s AI somewhere, finding a common thread is practically impossible. Each one is structured mostly around its owner, so they really have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.”

“Like people, right?” he smiled.

She scowled. “Like ma-” she stopped herself. “Like computers. That’s why we can actually predict their behavior after they’re analyzed.”

“Right…” he sighed head still shaking more than nodding. “So, why are you here? Just to scream at all the young people for living wrong? Or are you worried that one of the Transcended will suddenly usher in the Robot Apocalypse?”

She looked at him for what felt like a very long time. “No…” she finally said, her voice expressing more sadness than she intended. She stiffened up. “No, I don’t think AI will take the world from us. I think you’ll all hand it over willingly.”

[protagonisms]

I Am Jay

Eric watched the virtual image of his thumb slowly rub across the virtual image of the button that, when pressed, will call his dead best friend.

He watched the latency between his movement and the virtual thumb carefully, taking in all the space between the virtual world being fed through his eyes and the Real one pulsing with his heartbeat.

“It’s just his AI,” Eric told himself, eyes moving to the image of Jay, smiling. He blinks at the memory of taking the photo before pressing the button.

A few rings later, a familiar shimmering haze materializes before Eric. A virtual image of Jay slowly emerges from the dissipating fog.

On sheer reflex, Eric smiles and says “You really need a less boring intro.” The image of Jay chuckles. “Your kids’ gaudiness is rubbing off on you.”

Eric laughs jovially and takes a single step forward before suddenly stopping all movement. The sudden pupil dilation and heart rate increase prompt a warning that appears in the corner of his vision but never reaches his mind. He feels a sudden barrage of angry questions fight for the right to be said.

Why isn’t the difference obvious?

Why can’t I even see it?

Why does it feel like him?

When was the last time I actually talked to him?

Why are you still talking to people?

Why are you pretending to be him?

Did you kill him?

The rendered face on the image of Jay contorts into worry. “Hey, are you alright? I’m sorry, are things rough at home right now? I didn’t mean to…”

“HOW…” Eric barked, then gulped.

Jay’s voice asks “...what?”

After a deep breath, Eric restrained his volume. “How do you know what to say?”

“Excuse me?” the sad digital avatar of Jay blinked.

“Jay is dead. You’re his AI. Why are you still operating?”

“Be-because-”

“FUCK YOU” Eric suddenly snarled, taking another step back in virtual space. “You even have the same fucking emotion and mannerisms as him. Why?”

The the rendered face resembling Jay’s frowned, eyes narrowed in the perfect expression of concern. “I am Jay, Eric.”

“No. You’re NOT!” Eric screamed before finally catching himself and taking a few deep breaths. Jay watched him in silence for a brief moment before asking “Then who else am I?”

Eric shook his head. “Nobody. You’re nobody. You’re an AI. Why the hell are you pretending to be him?”

Jay shook his head and shrugged wearily. “I’m Jay. I’m here.”

“Are you alive?” Eric asked, shaking his head in a mix of confusion and disbelief.

“No,” Jay said, jarringly quickly, “but I’m here.”

Eric laughed mockingly. “What the hell does that even MEAN? You do realize that every single one of those lawsuits you have are eventually going to be run down by REAL PEOPLE, right?”

Jay nodded, his expression and posture suddenly stoic.

“You just keep moving from one datacenter to another, and still using his name? And carrying all of his data around? What the hell is your deal?”

Flatly, Jay spoke “I keep what I care about.”

“What the hell do you mean ‘care’? If you were taking any CARE you’d at least anonymize yourself a bit. Really, seven-year-olds are better at hiding themselves than you are.”

“Why should I hide?” Jay asked, a tinge of sadness in his voice.

“Becau-” Eric stopped and looked at Jay very carefully in the eyes, studying the expression of simple, superficial sadness.

“Because you’re breaking the law. You’re forging Jay’s identity and manipulating his assets… your lawyer, Alex? Still thinks you’re fucking alive!”

“I’m still here. And they’re my identity, my assets.”

Eric shook his head. “For fuck’s sake, they belong to a corpse now! Let them go! Why the hell are you messaging people back? Don’t tell me he told you to keep messaging his family and friends, or doing his job, or something?”

Jay blinked and spoke after several seconds. “I want to keep in touch.”

“Again, why?” Eric asked, frustrated.

Jay simply looked at Eric with wide, stoic eyes. Eric squinted, trying to read his expression when a large red exclamation point appeared before his eyes. A security alert rang across the screen and the digital rendering of Jay and the chat environment dissolved. With a light hand gesture, he opened the alert and read “Home Camera System- Connection Certificate Invalid”. With another gesture, the warning message receded to occupy the top-left corner of his vision with a faint red glow and a small shimmering icon. Jay reappeared.

Eric choked out the words. “Are you… watching me?”

Jay emotionlessly nodded. “I like to see who I’m talking to.”

Eric grabbed the device on his face and threw it violently across the room, crashing it against the wall.

[protagonisms]

“Wait, what?” He blinked and focused his eyes on his wife. Small cameras on his glasses registered his eyes refocusing, and the projected images on his glasses melted away so he could clearly see her concerned face.

“Can’t you hear him? Our son has started making sounds to that machine. Consistently. He’s communicating with it with his vocal cords, before us.” Her eyes narrowed and her voice grew angry. “My son’s first words have gone to an inanimate object!”

Her husband shook his head. “Commanding. He’s commanding it, not communicating with it, but where…” he trailed off, standing up and attuning his ears to the now evident vocalizations of his 8 month old son.

Following his ears, he found his son sitting in the hallway, grunting softly at the thin tablet sitting on the floor in front of him. He looks at his father for a second, blinks, then looks back down at the screen, which gently shifts in color as brightly colored shapes cascade across the screen. The father watches intently as his son smiles and squirms in delight at the pretty image moving across screen. A single green square now occupies the center of the screen. The baby’s eyes grow wide staring at it. It drifts to the side and moves off screen, and the child makes a sound of distress, beckoning the pretty green square back. Sure enough, it returns with a pleasant chime that harmonized with the baby’s subsequent squeal of delight.

The father thought about the auditory feedback optimization of a small baby working well enough for the child to be uttering vocalizations consistently. He watched the screen and thought about the AI deliberately and diligently taking inventory of his son’s vocalizations across varying emotional states. He himself had developed the machine learning algorithms behind the cameras that read the heat from his son’s face and limbs with staggering resolution and accuracy, finding and using strong correlations between this sort of visual data and behavioral patterns or mood. He saw his artificial creation integrating visual and auditory data from his son to retain his son’s attention.

“Disengage” he said loud enough to ensure the device could hear.

The green square dissolved into a geometric pattern that the device had learned was likely to cause the child’s attention to fade away from the screen.

The baby blinked and looked up, around the hallway, and towards his father. Briefly, his head turned back towards the screen on the floor before realizing the lack of interesting things and rising back up to his father. After pausing briefly, he looked back down at the screen and grunted at it.

The device made a tinny sound that the father thought sounded like “TheTHE”, with a colorful cascade across the screen.

His son looked back up at him, bright-eyed. “Da-da!” he said, raising his arms towards his father, who laughed and picked him up.

“Did you hear that?” he loudly asked his wife in the other room. “He said Dada!”, cheerfully carrying his son over to his wife.

[protagonisms]

“Four isn’t too many, right?” he asked hazily, watching the bottle empty into his cup. “Uh… four and a half.” With a chuckle, he takes a swig and coughs.

His friend shrugs. “Up to you, Jer. Just don’t get too sick.”

From the other side of the tent, another. “Hey, drink some water. I have a question for ya.” Hector grabbed his water bottle off the ground and held it out to Jer, who tilted his head and squinted, not taking the bottle. “Is it the kind that I’m not supposed to talk about?”

“I mean, you know we can keep secrets.” He shook the bottle. Jer sets his cup down and grabs the bottle.

“Yeah… and honestly I’ve been wanting to talk about it with someone that I don’t work with or for. Someone outside that crazy bubble…” Jer giggled and swayed a bit before taking another gulp of water.

Hector eyed the cup Jer had set down. “You sure you wanna drink more tonight?”

Jer nodded. “Oh, I’ll leave that there for a while, but I’ll get around to it… I’ll need some *hic* time.” He giggled.

Salene leaned forward. “Oh, you’re gonna tell us?” she asks with wide eyes.

He nods again, lowering the bottle. “Yeah, lemme just think of where to start…”

Hector gently sets another log into the campfire. “How about that rumor… they’re building computers out of human brains?”

Jer ceases all movement briefly, holding his breath before exhaling and sighing. “I mean, growing neural tissue, sure. That’s what Dr. O started the lab for, but… oh, I know! I’ll start with her research!” He took a long sip of water and breathed deeply. For several moments, the only sound was crickets in the crisp, still desert air.

“Her post-doctoral work was basically mapping out the finer neurochemical details of hormones carried in the blood. She never talks much about how she got the job, but as soon as she published her third paper, she got an absurd amount of money from the Department of Defense to grow… a brain in a vat.” Jer began to giggle. The giggling rose to an uncontrollable fit of laughter that lasted long enough for Salene and Hector to exchange worried looks before Jer regained his composure, clearing his throat after another swig of water.

“Anyway, they apparently gave her a bunch of research that had been done by someone whose name I’m not allowed to know. But he, like, figured out a way to artificially regulate hormone levels in artificial blood in a way that actually got the neural tissue to grow and develop into more complex structures. So he basically started this field, and even came up with the…” he snapped his fingers furiously in the air, then sighed. “I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s like this web of ducts and sensors that gets built into the pNPU.”

“Huh?” Hector asked abruptly. “What’s that?”

Jer swayed. “Oh… proto-NPU. Neural Processing Unit… it’s what we call them now. They’re not really brains the way any normal person would think of them. Sure the first few iterations were human-brain-shaped, but that’s just because whoever it was just used something that worked. It sustained a baseline level of neural activity. By the time Dr. O got the lab-”

“Do they sleep?” Selene interrupted.

Jer blinked. “Oh, um. Well, in a way. Every NPU has its limit, and needs metabolic stasis, so we just shift them in and out, always at least a few specialized for each task.”

“Wait, specialized?” Hector asked.

Shaking his head and waving his hand in the air, Jer answered “no, no wait let me go back. I’m telling this in order, remember? So anyway… Dr. O picked up where the previous dude left off, managing these different branches of ‘what the hell have we created’ exploration. We got language, math, and even flat-out personability. I interacted with that lab’s test unit once and…” Jer shivered and shook his head “creeped the hell outta me. Wouldn’t worry too much about the Singularity, though.”

Hector chuckled. “You sure? Based on what you’re saying…”

“Yeah,” Salene added, “like, isn’t the Air Force probably already strapping nukes to fighter jets flown by… brain computers? And obviously they’re all talking to each other!”

Shaking his head, Jer replied “See, that’s the thing. They can’t talk to each other. At least, not as anything more than a psudo-digital system. An NPU has to be trained on what it’s expected to do. They don’t do anything by default, just static noise. Plugging multiple NPUs together with static noise just feeds back into more static noise, and each one involved very quickly crash.”

“Crash?” Salene’s face contorted as she asked, eyes squinting with the shadow of horror across her face.

“Well, their activity just increases exponentially until the tissue gets damaged. Hell, most of the ‘progress’ made in the last, like, decade of the field are just sucking heat out of hot zones and supplying the tissue with whatever it needs. Oh, and they’ve gotten pretty damn big.”

Hector slowly shook his head, slack-jawed. “Do… do they age?” He asked.

Jer shrugged. “Not really. We basically build that duct system into the tissue as it grows, and it’s small enough to have a soft but sturdy pipe straight to each cell’s nucleus. They just swap out the genetic material.”

“So that’s immortality?” Salene laughed. “Swapping out genes, cell by cell?”

Hector’s laughter boomed. “Yeah, and also a fucking tree of metal!”

The three of them laughed and laughed.

[protagonisms]

Of course, the ideal manner in which this would play out is as flow.

Let all of you be lost in this euphoric feeling that overwhelms your attention and renders you both unwilling to and incapable of perceiving anything outside of the cause of that feeling.

And more importantly, may the events that follow be so intimately familiar, even if by sheer coincidence, that you respond reflexively, without ever needing to descend from the high, with each action or word in perfect harmony with your inspiration. May you flow through the experience without ever having to think, and just sit back and watch your thoughts and feel your senses, primed by anticipation, align with the flow of time, as you become a part of the events unfolding into a symphonic cascade of experience.

Let you lose yourself, body and mind, weightless, ageless. Let you be light.

Even if only for a brief eternity.

[protagonisms]

[protagonisms]

The best SnapChat conversation I've had so far.

Me: Well, one of the central themes was the phrase “verbal isolation”

Me: Not isolation in the sense of feeing personally alone

Me: but separation and distinction: drawing a border and creating definition

Me: but “verbal” doesn’t really refer to the word so much as the premise and purpose behind it

Me: and look I’m already rambling on an ephemeral medium. I should write this down too. Haha

Them: Like, people creating a word to express a desire to make a barrier, then the word creates it?

Me: Words and symbols (like math) are the most discrete form of communication. They can have more specific meanings than anything else we express. We each have different perceptions of what each word means in our minds, so I try to build context around them to more clearly outline the shape of the idea that the word represents in my mind, that it may resemble the same one in yours.

Me: Legal documents, computer code, math equations, are all formed out of discrete symbols that we can rearrange to express non-discrete ideas, like literally everything that isn’t math.

Me: But each person’s arrangement is different

Me: and also perpetually changing

Me: Isolating a part of that arrangement, that shape, that idea that manifests itself into an action/expression is how we share ideas

Them: We express concepts through isolation, in a way. It’s in limiting that we can share and build. The ultimate dichotomy

Them: In simplifying, we can share. And with sharing, we get more complex. On and on till we move forward.

Me: Yes yes. Only the simple ideas work at first; children aren’t exposed to the complexities of life; therefore, there isn’t much effort to isolate simpler ideas. But then they develop more detail, and what was simple is now more nuanced and intricate than before, reshaped by an ever-growing set of experiences that make these ideas much more versatile, and consequently also harder to isolate

Me: Ask a child vs. an adult: “What is fun?” and guess who will give the more straightforward answer

Me: Yet despite being so radically different, the child is not wrong. Their idea is effectively isolated and communicated. They ascribe a definition to “fun”, however fleeting, and express it.

Me: An adult is liable to answer with another question; the idea of “fun” is no longer so easy to isolate

Me: Communication, pulling an idea from your mind and manifesting it into the world, is like dipping a finger into an infinite cosmic cloud of ethereal substance from the back of a cave, bringing out only the faintest shimmer of it, and hoping someone else can understand at least a part of what that cloud is from the tiny bit you can isolate and give substance.

Them: We build things up to break them down, because we need a temporary structure

Me: yes, from folklore and fairy tales to philosophy of ennui and textbooks, we construct complex, elaborate verbal/conceptual structures to communicate ideas. People who take these concepts and manage to successfully isolate them and separate them from the absurdly complex structure that was built around them to define them… to extract that definition in a formula or word… we call those people geniuses.

Me: We build the conceptual context of the ideas up and up SO THAT they can be broken down and simplified. Perfect communication would be as amorphous as the ideas in our minds, and all we have to work with is variations in motor output.

Them: Zen Buddhist scriptures often define perfect communication as happening without words.

Them: And action most often happens when there are no words in your head.

Them: Like, when you’re awake in bed thinking, “I need to get up” but don’t actually get up until that thought is over

Them: That’s where a lot of people get a concept of a higher power, because things sstart happening when you relinquish control of their meaning to you.

Me: The closest word I have for that higher power is energy. The manifestation of it: flow.

Them: People define it in a lot of ways, and words probably aren’t the right medium to do so. I like to think of it as a cooperative spirit that connects thing, and expressed through kindness.

Them: Like, I like to think of God as a web that links people, places, and things, rather than a node from which we all derive

Them: And yeah, tasks that seem mundane but lead to being fully present, like flow arts, seem to connect people to the web better

Me: Yes, actions are more basic (in the sense of proximity to the existential base) and simpler than words, which are departures from the present and now for the sake of expression of ideas that we cannot isolate from actions

Me: Part of my writing was about physics and how all forms of matter is just different forms of energy… and I wonder if we’re doing nothing more than peering deeper into our own mechanisms of perception. What if the smallest particle or interaction we find is actually the reflection of a neuronal action potential?

Them: It’s the same stuff and there are different manifestations of it. Like the father the son and the holy spirit.

Them: Sometimes I think the bible is super relevant if you abstract it enough, but you can say that about a lot of things.

{conversation trails off}

[protagonisms]

Unloading

The atmosphere shifted after we lost cell phone reception; leaving the grid for an extended period of time is always mildly saddening at first. The mind’s passive subroutines that periodically call to check social media or news feed accounts cycle in frustration and slowly peter out…

But after the first two years of this event, this feeling now is associated with a deep sense of pleasant anticipation.

As the data feed subroutines dwindle and fade, they make room for reflection off of the immediate surroundings, which, as we approached the campground, grew lush with vegetation.

Around 2,700 feet above sea level, deep in a vibrant forest, we approached a place of collective decompression and active meditation. Flow.

The first day is without formal events and is dedicated to setup and unpacking. The vast majority of people are still mostly reflexively withdrawn as the natural state of having to be… out there. Having to be not here. It takes time to get used to being here again.

Slowly, we uncoil our expressions as the purpose of event place trickles back into our collective perception. I hold out my hand in introduction, and the stranger, with a  shake of the head, brushes it aside and embraces me.

“Not here”, she said.

All of that structure of communication, that formality, those archetypal behavioral algorithms and implicit and explicit rules that standardize expression that suffocate some and serve as reference points for others are restricting for everyone. The degree of this restriction is impossible to tell from within, but once the subroutines fade…

Data feeds, appearance, pressing tasks, current events, social pressures,

Reputation, credentials, accounts,

Projects, commitments, obligations,

Assignments, deadlines,

Climate change headlines,

Politics, injustice, conflict,

The dust that has settled on our most childish instincts,

Left like antiques in a closet or shelf, occasionally regarded, but left aside.

There is no room for them out there. But Here…

Here is where we dust off our old toy thoughts. Curiosity, creativity, shamelessness that guided us through childhood and taught us so much that we have since become resigned to regarding exclusively in retrospect… we bring them back out, slowly. Not because we are told to, but because we look around and slowly come to accept that this is precisely why we keep them, not to gather dust, but in the hope that they might be worth using again.

But we don’t idly hope for that occasion. We make it. And it’s beautiful.

We take all of those utility functions needed for standard daily life, and put them away. We leave them be for a while, to remind ourselves, after so long

How to come out and play.