Sunday, February 26, 2012

the eighth event responder

Eight event-responders were gathered from the logging data. We parsed the event response log into individual thalmaceres, and then filter distillation along with proper reduction associated each thalmalcere with the responder. The event responders were divided into a number of classes.

Class A: response time to sensory change is measured on the order of milliseconds.

Class B: response time to sensory change is measured on the order of picoseconds

Class C: other

Class A and Class B were directly derived by thalmalceric association processing. They cover the first seven event responders. The eighth-event responder's existence is not directly associated with any thalmalcere, though it is possible to derive the eighth event responder's existence by inferential filter distillations on the other event responders' actions: viz. the environmental conditions were changing in ways that do not concur to event-responder free environmental conditions when the responses of the first seven event responders are subtracted. It is not possible to precisely pin down times for the eighth event responder because it was operating extrathralmalcerically, but by figuring out what the environmental models the first seven were en average and subtracting that from the environment logs, one can find intervals in which there is a ninety to ninety seven percent probability that the putative eighth event responder issued changes that radically changed the operating theatre.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

the Solvers.

The Solver had been inert for well on two thousand years. It was gray, rigid, mottled, harder than diamond, its face had five eyes. It was completely dehydrated. But it was not dead. Solvers live on a certain class of problems that crop up sometimes.

We had run into one of those problems while crossing the Aurofirene river. We had gotten the Solver out of its storage pod and presented it with the problem.

The thing that would be dead, er, the Solver, awakened. The air in the room obtained a soggy quality, the skin of the Solver changed as the problem filtered through its awareness. The Solver was alive, it coruscated, it effervesced.

The Solver outlined a solution that was rich in breadth and depth and well beyond our ken to create. A look of contentment passed over its face, and then it became quiescent again, rigid, mottled, gray, harder than diamond, looking thin and reedy.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

shuffle-crypsing

Gruyhoerge and Taranque Ahunthkai were the last to disembark from the dinghy. Arangustaro Plynack and Gotsolva Kerumtharo had been setting up the tents and the survival pods as Taranque looked through a spyglass at the Hyore Conurbation in the distance. Gruyhoerge munched at a sandwich and was paging through the last 30GB data chirp they'd gotten the last time they had line of sight with one of the dead reckoners, and they weren't expecting another data chirp for another couple of months. Gruyhoerge said, absentmindedly "looks like Permuk Danthelgoss finally kicked the bucket".

"How long had he been on life support? Some five years?" Taranque said.

"Six and a half after the botched superego transplant failed" Gruyhoerge remarked, looking at multidigests and other slices and foliations of the dumb.

"meh" strugged Taranque. "Looks like someone in Hyore just invented reverse osmosis water filtration".

Gruyhoerge continued looking through the chirp. A lot of ads for Maalkmook brand brain cream. Nothing really fancy.

They'd been keeping their distance from Hyore pretty easily. Being shuffle-crypsed in the local event pool meant that all of their quantum states had been redistributed in such a way that they had been translated into some high order Poincare-recurrence slicing of the cosmos and wouldn't be visible to the Epeyungspid inhabitants of Hyore -- maybe as a sussuration of leaves or some peculiar oil spreading on some water. Something well below the sensory threshold of the Epeyungspids. Taranque's 'spyglass' is actually a really complicated machine designed to examine the microstructure of the event stream in Hyore evanescently, without interfering at all. Despite being in Hyore (more or less), the environment that the team in was very odd, being a complicated mixture of deadly warm and cold spots, requiring constant movement to stay in habitable climes -- a side effect of the shuffle-crypsing. The tents and survival pods were equipped with station-keeping devices that kept them in habitable isoclimes, but it was all rather finicky equipment and required much maintenance.

The shuffle-crypsed environment slice allowed very precise monitoring of Hyore, but also meant that their rate of elapsed time happened at a metamultiple of the time flow in Hyore: namely they were moving both at 110 times as fast as things were occuring in Hyore, as well as 237 times as slowly as things were occuring in Hyore. Which means that if an event occurs in Hyore, the research team being shuffle crypsed can examine both the microstructure behind the event as well as its ramifications at once.

Gruyhoerge opened up his brain case and liberally applied a jar of Maalkmook creme to his brain. The neural accellerant amplified his brain's processing speed by a factor of 20 and he started with the current slice of Hyore events to be analyzed. The Hyore conurbation had been singled out for analysis of the numerous conurbations and promontories west of the Alhavec divide becuase it was felt by Neismour and others that it would be the best example of watching a civilization wake up.

Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest.

The rain was coming down in buckets to the forest floor of the Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest. Birithefely and Mangourad manned the observation station. Birithefely had been transferring this week's observations from the floating data sentries to the three backup storage repositories on the mainland while writing in her diary about watching a busphengal moth last night undergoing its final post-chrysalis molt. Mangourad was  bored and had an old copy of Phusmapolis that he'd been reading. Birithefely had some caulkgress tea and was toying with the notion of adding more honey to it.

Mangourad had just gotten the part in Chapter 3 of Phusmapolis where the Ryphelzil Jongluers march over the Canstapbuil bridge and Krenthala Minyulk has the embarassing medical problem for the third time -- it's a hoot so he was rereading it as it was very silly. Birithefely called out from her diarying "get to chapter four already. there's much sillier sidebusters in it".

Four more years of variously manning the outposts of the Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest -- Yelsaris University had an awfully gigantic grant to study the rainforests of the Kulhu and Iraktagu islands after Pelho Moehdrius had outlined a series of ecological anomalies that got peer reviewed then confirmed after the publication of his first paper in Acta Thermographica some two centuries ago. Moehdrius had noted that despite the heavy industrialization and pollution in the Hylue Peninsula, that the Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest on Iraktagu and the Buhuz-Mohoneury rainforest on Kulhu had thrived. After a hurried series of papers by Ralsmon Chantzgrit and Neiheimbru Stolyaris it was determined that something really weird was going on with these two rainforests. There was a lot less biodiversity than you'd expect. There were only five species when there should have been thousands and millions. The soil housed one bacterial species -- Ruhulgo silembinensis, there was one and only one sort of tree -- the buhuz oak (Buhu megensis) , there was one lepidopteran, the busphengal moth (Atraharku golembinsii) which underwent a weird supernumerary molting after the chrysalis stage (rumour has it that continental insectologists went mad as a result of this), the screny lichen (Gelgaradib scholensis), and the muskmoose, a small mammal, (Schaktaunga maresii), and that despite the fact that previous generations of researchers would have introduced seeds and whatnot, none of these ever took, and so the mystery of these rainforests remained.

Birithefely and Mangourad were graduate students who were doing a summer in one of the observation stations -- well, nine weeks of time doing maintenance on the data sentries. Hardly anything, as the sentries were gravitically powered and required little in the way of maintenance, but the faculty of botanists, biologists, ecologists, and thermographers at Yelsaris steadfastly maintained that it was a good idea for graduate students to get in some field time -- not that there was much to do in the Buhuz-Carraptago forest -- the faculty usually paired the romantically incompatible and teleported them to observation stations. Often a good novel got written during one of these summer sojourns. It was believed that by spending time physically observing the peculiar ecosystems, the future biologists, botanists, ecologists and thermographers would have a better, more intuitive understanding of the absurdity of the Kulhu and Iraktagu rainforest ecosystems.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Asgard hijinks

Thor sits down at an antiquated computer terminal somewhere in Valhalla. Odin is the other entity in the room, at the table, drinking whisky and being relaxedly belligerent but not as thrash-hearted as Thor. Odin, pickled, asks "How are those primates doing?", and belches a little.

Thor, in a voice that would make Brian Blessed appear not at all bombastic, sez. "Let me pull up their current physics tables. Oh, this is miserable."

Odin's single eye was grinning, but his face was a junkyard. "Oh ah?"

"They're still trying to, albeit quite pathetically, unify all forces. Many of them still think that there's a particle which creates mass."

Odin coughs "That old chestnut? What percentage of primate civilizations end up with that dead end?"

Thor states "About 15% to 25% generally, according to Freya's last survey in the universes we are responsible for. You'd think that once they got to 24 dimensional filiform Lie algebras the thing would be obvious, but some of the theoretical sandcastles which their physicists make tend to be beguiling enough they lose track of the actual physics of the thing."

Odin pours another shotglass of whisky. "Fine. I'll have Loki muck around with their experimental apparatus. They could use a Loki break"

Thor groans.

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Usilartu Temple at Thyxeothyre

Thyxeothyre, the tiny island about five thrasmeres out on the Thyrrine sea, is host to the Usilartu Temple, holy to members of the Usilartu religion: which has been dead for at least five nahambes. The temple is constructed of nanomachines, which constantly rearrange its internal architecture: there are buttresses and gantries and cantilevers and extruded pillars and cast pillars with constantly shifting fluorescent and phosphorescent paintings and micromosaics featuring various scenes from the Usilartu mythopoieome: Urtec and Celmaeus at the bridge having the discussion about eventual mistakes and ungifted abrogations. Urtec at the ruins discussing the passage of coincidences with the Three Happenstances, Hayaguno -- the chance of the past, Arapikua, the chance of the present, and Mylbirion, the chance of the future. The Transcendescence of Hyomua, the Transcendescence of Chikonkoa, The Fall of the Nymartielia, Celmaeus discussing the Art of Continuances and Redivisions with the Scoccon God Orahauminabel. The architecture of Usilartu features escarpments, promontories of stone and other temporarily assembled materials. Occasionally the nanomachines build fractal dodecafoams and Sierpinski tetrahedra.

In the First Atrium, there is a statue -- not made from nanomachines -- scupted by Aranseptes Miohongoles, representing Chikonkoa's posttranscendental biome. She is depicted floating five spans
off the plinth, in her right hand there is a scroll with the four Bephragmere identities, and in her right hand there is a yavgale. The yavgale is not pleasant to look at -- it is not composed of corrugated sphelemite like the rest of the statue but of some other make of nanomachines. It is about half a meter in size and its surface is roiling with tiny dark pinpricks swarming in many directions. This is one of a sequence of statues -- in the Second Atrium, Chikonkoa has thrown the yavgale on the floor, and the yavgale is now depicted as a filamentous sequence of rivulets of bulbous, highly reflective metal arranged organically, gently swaying back and forewards. In the Third Atrium, there is no statue of Chikonkoa, but the yavgale has burst from its chrysalis, begun to grow like coral -- the shape of the hatched monsposiorb is reminiscent of the metal sculpture in the Second Atrium.

There are a number of Urtec quotes here and there, written in High Yalgonese. One of the most frequent is "Utter unending trirefringence predicts the past, but the future is seen in the yoghurt".

Thursday, February 02, 2012

differential overforest

Oh, yeah. I'm not sure how long transpired between the arrival and the departure: I wasn't paying attention. I was distracted. I managed to find? Not sure. Little fragmentary syllables here and there. Barely around: barely prepared. It felt like vapor, a thin plume of awareness coiled around my attention and just kind of sprawled around my subconsciousness for a while. My glasses broke; I had, I think, been overly cautious, but I'm not sure at the moment: it was like great disc, a sort of warble, a copper kettle in the city, large, maybe twenty meters in diameter. I tell you: I saw something: lots of gin blossomed bishopry? I wasn't really paying attention to the visual ornateness of it all so much as the feel, which seemed to be slotted in at an impossible angle, and then I fell, or flew: and I hit the angle that the mysterious copper kettle building and the gin blossomers and the girl in the hotel room and the guy with the suitcase all sort of lined up so that the angle wasn't impossible and then things got so odd that my consciousness just said "look, I'm going out now, I'll see you at intermission, mmkay?", and well...

Much later, when I could start applying logic and perhaps try to assign meanings to the experience, I guess I didn't realize exactly how far my perspective had been wrenched up. It's difficult to keep to earthly things when your line to the ethereal is dependable. Like pizza and chocolate milk and tea and whatnot. Sometimes I look for pieces of bismuth in a sea of lego. I've seen glints here and there on occasion. But mostly I get back to the pizza and the tea and the ascii bombykol and just meander back down to the Pund and the Sahallangke and whatnot, and it's not very filling. And then I hear something that hits and reminds me and I go on one of these tangents. I probably should be bearing to sleep.