hyperportal

Suggested music: Hyperportal (which it was written to)


---
The hyperportals were strange otherworldly pieces of hypertechnology, high sorcery, witchcraft, mathematics, and primitive magic.
the usual rules of each didn't apply in one. their floors were utterly frictionless. the temperature inside was always 'unsettlingly friendly'. one could go between universes or realities in one. almost feels like a dream in them.'this is familiar' you might say.

how far did we travel "impossibly far"
how fast did we travel "impossibly fast"
how many ways did we go from point A to point B: "you didn't go
from point A to point B. you went all possible ways woven in a fabric"
maybe the feeling you get inside one is like a bright darkness, an oily
happy hug groan. your perception is trying to ascribe agency or sentience
or recognizable qualities to the workings of the hyperportal, which
are something beyond both merely biological or mystical or
mechanical or physical or some consequence of the lambda calculus.
a trip between here, and a galactic core farther away than the
current light cone of the visible universe after recombination?


around a day or a week. and it's a lazy trip: no complicated
procedures or preparations for unfriendly hyperspatial environments.
A Steppenquoy conveyance snags the localized context froth zone from
the hyperportal and we're on our way.


the trip feels like being at ocean, but maybe it's a larger ocean
than the one in which our embryos swam when we were embryos, and
that feels odd. and reassuring. luminescent darkness and
ebon surfulgence

 the lighting conditions are strange

luminescent darkness
ebon surfulgence
illuminant tenebrosity


pale, washed out, completely nonreflective total oblivions
of light brilliantly surfulge with manic radiance, almost teasing your
visual system. "is that light? is that darkness? the intensity of what
I am experiencing is transcendent of such concepts. "

beings in such an environment report that their senses are usually
at an acuity they would describe as "stunning clarity": they
can usually give better and more thorough descriptions of their
interactions in this environment, even if the environment
itself foils their language abilities.


keep in mind that this environment is not hyperspace proper,
nor is it hyperspacetime, it's more of a hypercontext of sorts
that the hyperportals can incubate and the Steppenquoy Conveyances
can arboresce safely between here and there.


a week passes. the conveyance informs this context that it is
parting us to the destination hyperportal.

we have (effectively) traveled around 18 yottaparsecs to a planet called
Arzauno-Oblique-Coehenteheororius, second from the star
Lyssiary, in the Glitterswash Galaxy, in the
Lanihimehimehupualine hypercluster.
--------------------------

[astonishment note no. 1134:
I had to go and check that this was, in fact, written before
Laniakea was named:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 2729 Nov  4  2013 hyperportal]

diffracted off a ribosome of an insect in the Cretaceous

(suggested music: Orb: Promis)

Intersecting scales, maybe on a fish, or spanning contexts, wouldn't remove those with a scalar. Vector tensor torsor spinor spinning? Splining? q-cosining? Interarugulated translunar injection brrrr, it's, that's not cold! Longfar Longnear Shortfar Shortnear? Can't find them on a map. Might check a GIS system. Or a fragmenting palimpsest that entered the University of the Discarded as mere detritus and has graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Jetsamnity? Few detail-savvy aortaographers produce readable diagrams and documentation, and details barely discern'd erupted with stark ferocity: a woven geranium flow filament arc'd tricuspidly in arborescent gluon arteries, crosses the blood-brain barrier, and takes a scimitar comprised of pungent anuenue-scented ocean vapor plumes to whatever facility I had for distinguishment of the rational, irrational, anirrational, and transcendental. Backtracing, I could percieveth not how the ash marched across geodesics besides mere rudimentary constructions of satisfactory focal depth and elegant feng shui. Locally chunky, perhaps mechanical, tubular, with inclusions of gneiss and high strontium feldspar and just enough bismuth to make the Director General of All Adjectives uncomfortable while reading the twice-epochal semantological report, but it's an AM station playing just outside the radio silence zone of West Virginia. Maybe my ray-tracing had gone miserably wrong: the tardigrades really like the way the capacitors taste, and when they do the image constructed is usually Nesther Ven Velbuis's The Sacking and Economic Redevelopment of Troy as Witnessed by a Rabid High Frequency Financial Algorithm. 

 (suggested music: The Sunshine Underground)

Maybe one rivulet got through, or, er, a higher dimensional analogue of a rivulet, something reticulated, also in parallel, sloshed Hózhó, how'm I supposed to read this when each character of the script is a 7D projective algebraic variety painted with three splendedly directed movies girding its hypersurfaces? Translating the Langlands programme into Mayan seems easy in comparison to composing messages in this airy-aileron-swash-fog. What's a zephyred wisp? A roiled plume? A foamy spume? A homoclinic tangle category glittering, swervingly evanescent? The quantum states of each molecule of carbon dioxide bearing the imprint of the origins of their nuclei were your smoke signals in this Apheliotic breeze, flowing so quickly that the ventifacts formed within me sounded like the shapes of something being heard. I could not speak such a language with ease, and would reply at once if I could.

 

a message breath robed in Oak, a story for thine cloak

Unperfunctorial glimpses (in apricot oil? sun oranges?) bedeckt by altruistic insomnity, perhaps winding and wreathed might retell scheduling chance tales. I dreamt I wrote your name in my left handed script amidst an array of gorgonzola english, also three encounters with butterflies, a blue morpho on my face, a tiny white one fluttering by, and a flock of electrical violet ones. Of others and evers and nevers and elses I concoct emulacras of permanence, in a sea of transience, in the hopes one might splash mindlong into deep elsetime, marked by geologic chronologues, stratigraphies, karst, a recent transfiguration of the climate calmly passes beyond simple comprehensibility into the immediately ineffable. Aches and moments and affinities and augur’d proximities do crash in frothy complexity. (aside: the ancient soothsayer said the apropos word is ‘uharo’, better than trying to fit into one of two categories, where a third one glosses less worry). Sparks and slips and preforespake of unsundered continuity and congruence amidst signal to noise ratios might blur mine juggler’s frets (though I am unstring’d), but the birdsong is a simpler telegraph. Specifics intrigue: a fire ignited by joy? Why comport thyself to an airy zone? Nary, even my common unique station is wrackt by unstable arrangements and confused phonemes, but by such art persistence beckons, and such queries have no urgency besides the filigrees of native curiosity. I dreamt of gulfs, shores, jetties, flowing rainbow rivers, etherfroth and quintessencefoam filtered through with encrypterosaurs of Planck fluctuations ensconced by thine succor, and I found myself nourished. Though my docket vexeth, scattered gluons ferry arterial lightning and by-and-by borrowed moments earning interest and birefringent trividends upon a glittering silk cantilever vanishing prior to the horizon. Fine rivulets of language alliterated along like the lightning, and in them I heard woven fabrics our home context offering safety, so if mine attention was fractious, I duly offer further spoons.

emotional archaeology

T. Wrienghiemton Balseverrie, Chief Curator of Fragmentaries at the New Salxoxque University Department of Emotional Archaeology wrote an essay describing the profession of Emotional Archaeology in last Orrsday's Amutpsa Gazette.

If you've walked by the train tracks of Asinetpro near the Ochsie divide anytime in the past five star cycles, you've seen the rocking chair. There are popular theories concerning the chair's provenance, bar stories, and party stories. There's even a thread about the chair on one of the threads available on the local datanet. Most can't walk past it without wondering about it.

In the Laboratory for Emotional Quanta deep in the recesses of New Salxoxque University's Eastern Octangle, we have a number of machines designed to explore the cosmic network intertwingularities of fragmentary, sparse, widely distributed, or otherwise ancient and old things, long separated from the people for whom they held great value, emotional and otherwise.

Pictured below (although not in this excerpt), is a Neskaleyene-Garriptro Event Structure Distiller. It masses at two hundred million metric tons -- although most of that's a result of the wee bit of hypercooled glasma which is hyperspatially tethered to the scanning assembly, and as a result it doesn't affect the local gravitational metric tensors. This machine is a beast to use, not so much because it's difficult to use -- the instruction manual is a model of lucidity, but because the extent of incapacitating horrors and abuses to the spirit witnessed through the holographic display is paralyzing.

Maxhuatl Apehfe's Stuffed Animals Project 10 years ago was probably our department's greatest misstep. On the wall in my office I have both press clippings about the project as well as letters from the family members of the researchers.  Apehfe had brought some stuffed animals found in a charity bazaar in Oxfai sold in bulk assortments, and had (quite reasonably, as any young researcher might) thought that it would be interesting to place them in the event structure distiller. Maxhuatl Apehfe, Sineria Achuit, and Hoherxge Greun have been coping with a rather severe form of post traumatic stress disorder as a result. I'm sorry this happened. I'll quote Hoherxge: "People are, er, not, hmm. Stuffed animals are proxies for a parent's affection, and the abjection of hoping that one might hug you back as well as the large scale cultural ramifications of their thingness -- and I've got two, Mr. Confusington, a weregazebo, and Flootm, a cuddly pion which I've had since I was a month old and are people to me -- I didn't think about it too much before we brought the Oxfai Exiles in. Now Maxhuatl, Sineria, and myself frequently quaver with "hug all the quarks in the universe if they'd be okay with it". "

There's Riet Gueithz who does paper pieces research. She went to Oquizbe and ordered 10 tons of Salquirnabron Corporation Recycled Paper, Grade A. She uses the Lehepzfa-Marsillis Contentment-Scry (yes, it looks like an air conditioner with glued bananas that has been dipped in liquid helium and dropped from a very far distance slowly breaking apart in slow motion) and catalogues on-the-cusp dust of peculiar emotions. She's not concerned with joy or pain, but with xylem-uncertainty-not-tainted-by-brickwork, mitochondrial-affinity-marinated-in-colored-pencil-sketches, smiling-superfluid-xenon-waving, and so on.  "Part of the maturation process of any civilization is to have a more detailed and precise emotional vocabulary. Finding name-shy emotions on the saddle hypersurfaces between the binaries of good and bad enables civilizations to be able to better cope with trying times. The scraps of paper I usually deal with are a hundredth of a octagonal millimeter in size. The research papers I submit to the Journal of Emotional Archaeology contain many diagrams about those hypersurfaces, listing rational points and submanifolds, as well as discussing their saddles in poetic language"
Our work is not easy. We produce many maps and tables of discarded subtleties and obscure sublimities, but while doing so, our hearts sag somewhat.

translatory fatigue

Eh, Uncle Greasegears bites his cornstraw and sez things like "The machine's'll be smellier, the gears will be embalmed with ever finer coatings of the smelliest engine greases, the barbershop will still smell of liniment and linseed oil, and the old advertisments for racing cars'll feature famous cinema stars and whatnot."

I don't actually have an Uncle Greasegears, but he'd swear by bourbon and bubblegum and the blitz, had I had one. And maybe the GI programme, and a whole smorgasbord of cultural sempiphemeralia which...

seems self-dating, assign-thine-eyes-to-the-prosaic, of yellowed plastic Bakelite and tupperware parties and this wheezing ugly contrail of human drama and nonimmediacy with the transcendent which stretches back (10y? 20y? 30Mya?).

 I got hatched on The Mechanical Universe and TVO's Photosynthesis and cellular respiration, and Tomes and Talismans, and Read All About It, Attenborough's Life on Earth, Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines, James Burke's Connections, many old Nova programmes, the Horizon Mathematical Mystery Tour, John Baez's This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and GEB, various books by Rudy Rucker, and so on... in aggregate, it amounts to thinking in the whirly clefs of an frothy alien language written over the topologies and biology of a iridescent sea.

.
Convincing Uncle Greasegears that, ngojhsfdgokkjt, there's a culture associated with those swirls and biomes, produces translatory fatigue,  because a constellation of memes glossed in "vortex shedding, mantis shrimp, hyperboloid", translates into paragraphs of barbershops and auto engines and congested and fragile trope-structures so ornately ossified that they're crinkling under their own weight.

a forest of Yggdrasills

I'm familiar with C. S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, so the concept (modulo Hugh Everett and the multiversists) of the Wood between the Worlds is known to me.

There was Yggdrasill, and Ziggydrasill, and Eh?ggsdrasill, and Lollygaggdrasill, and
Sightgaggdrasill and many others. Combinatory birds sing in the distance.[*] Thor was tending to the binding of Mjölnir, some of which had popular culture damage. Tiny fanfic antilichens had started growing in between the leather, and Thor was with portable scanning tunnelling electron microscope ablating them away, metaphysical particle by metaphysical particle[1] I was, as you might expect, amazed.

Thor looks at me with a knowing glance which might be interpreted as "oh mortal, you again." but feels like Lord Vultan "Gordonnnnnn!" has just given you a very long Thai massage session. Ratatoskr nibbles on some acorns hither and thither (although these fell from trees on these world trees).

Usual clueless human questions: "Where is this place?" and then a tasteless comment about parallel universes and superpositions of wave functions trailing off into astonished muttering.

The forest floor is serene and grassy, almost feeling like more of a zen garden than a forest.
Thor puts his stem rig and Mjölnir on a convenient rock.

"There are many no places, and no times, each one a distant memory like magic smoke signals of muons between here and there. Sometimes arteries of light, like the lightning evinced from Mjölnir, jump from tree to tree here. "

There's the faint scent of quantum mechanics evaporating in the air, somewhat reminiscent of a still chlorinated swimming pool. Also perhaps visions of an umbrella, philately, and the sort of thunderstorm that last for months. A night of sorts meanders by, and I look up at the (what passes for the) sky. Thor "shhh"-gestures at me and I wake from my dream.


[*] Mostly written in an attempt to give some substance, if ethereal vistas and suggestive metaphors, to which forest Smullyan's combinatory birds inhabit. As always, this more the Thor from Adams /The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul/ than recent movies.
[1] And could be heard muttering "Selv jeg har min egen headcanon" in old Norse.

post-move

Sallow? Oh oxides, pentacrete, staccato strobed green viridian flashes,
ess-oh-ess, like H-O-H, with their dissolved cosmotropes and chaotropes,
bifid, trifid (but not triffid), anomalously fast hydrogen ion mobility dovetails
with disturbingly swift ess mobility, three dits lost in the ocean of information noise.
Lengthen the vowel, and insect repellent results (dit to deet), though a dit dah dit, the
wrong vocalic, is an arrr, and perhaps warns of pirates, ror? raar! Respond-to-Signal and
Responses-Protocols-For-Signals lathered like silicone shellac into great barista
art froths and served in venti vidi vici vicious size seventy cubic furlongs volume drinking
vessels with various mythologies carved on (make sure to give it back to the barista
after you're finished drinking!) Probably granite, though who knows what the internal
armatures and buttresses are comprised thereof, likely Hollywood grade unobtanium
haggled from a Vendor-of-Trope-Nouns at the edge of the Gesoy Sea, near the straits of Balvaia for three drachms and a blessed acorn. Here a cue, there a cue, eh-input-eh-input-output? Break.
Seven in the top pocket, the fluorescent one with the led momentum indicator in the bottom stratum.
Apparently there are geologists in the bottom stratum as well, looking at old games and wondering about our physics models in the "what on mars were they thinking?" way, while dusting off old single phase stripes that were abandoned from old games. Fatigue sprouts into hippocampus-spanning lethargy, dicotyledon'd exhaustion embarking on somnilosynthesis. A one-two, one-two, one-SL(2,Z) tango and then sleep(ZZZZZ). All items successfully translocated into new temporary living space, but spoon regeneration continueth.