epistolary

Eerangwhe --

You say that I am being unreasonable, that who I have in mind is somewhat fanciful, that perhaps I am being foolish. I have tried, many a time, to explain to you, but like most of my interlocutors during this sort of conversation, you appear to have not comprehended the points that I have made, completely disregarded the history that I have recounted to you twice in an attempt to explain my position to you, and generally (not that I think it was your intent) ignored and belittled the picture I have attempted to relay to you in an earnest (though sadly fruitless) attempt to elicit the tiniest mote of empathy about my situation.

You, knowing your own situation, imagine that if mine were similar to it, that I would have more contentedness, and like many people, you misapprehend, sometimes viciously, the problems I am having in mine. You assume, because of the way that I describe myself, that I am concerned with particulars and specifics, with the explicit analysis of the runtimes of algorithms or of patterns of sticklike symbols in ink on paper, and then you mention that you stopped understanding it a while ago -- at least, that of your apprehension of such messes of symbols. I, on the third hand, am constantly surfing the froth of my emotions, beset by the species and its cultures and the cosmos and constantly almost apoplectic and paralyzed by the sheer lack of awareness that permeates, soaks through, and leaves a froth of jangly and difficult material in the collective emotional continuum which never is quite dissolved and instead builds up, accretes, and cools but does not crystallize, and thus remains glassy and easily fractured. I would, if I could, design solvents and catalysts for this agglomeration of nonmoving collective stress, but I do not have the materials to do so -- the scope of this, however, should stagger the imagination. I don't actually want to do this, but I am somewhat forced to do it because language use here (and you know this!) is miserable and unreliable.

And my faults? They are resource dependent. I do not have the resources to patch them now. I am station-keeping at the moment. There have been ridiculously horrid developments, and I cannot immediately obtain the sort of empathy and attention that would have a solvent effect on them in me: I tell you, I need someone to see, or to look enough in the direction and way I am peering, and be without too many entanglements, and I don't think this is an unreasonable desire. So far I have experienced spaghetti-tangles, an incidence of the inaudible and viscous, and an assortment of not-quite-theres, so when you do not forgive me for my situation, and seem to believe that I should rack my body out and align every sarcomere, you should not be surprised at my utter astonishment at your lack of empathy.

                                                      Neherahtgne ge Akinea (de Lurina)

unpunctual disasterology, tetchy apocalypsewrights, and nervous cataclysmturges...

Kalary Arapis Kelkezurn

Kozock Industries

Lavaur 123 Hyphnetheron Block 12, Module 120

c/o Routing Construct "Geskekelud 251/5/a"

Horacinzu Telmengthe Rehemta
9A/@1029b, Block 12, Apartment 3
Leortel Arcology, Orboarth
c/o Routing Construct "Helioblurred 109"


Hey Horace,

Around 2,500 years ago when you worked for Malabana Incorporated, Kozock subcontracted a solution -- a messy, complicated, tortuous, vexing, and thorny solution to the Mnehatam trilemma, which ultimately couldn't be implemented in a timely enough fashion and ended up being a washout because of the Aracaunpe disaster -- we were manning the bucket brigade between Sestoul and Bavakhril for two weeks running on very little sleep and while we didn't manage to solve Mnehatam in the aftermath -- I'm sure you'd agree our dance cards were quite occupied with the clean up and disaster remediation of Aracaunpe -- we ended up finding different long term coping mechanisms -- Blivner Kaughlu's reverse multiplexing gate away and the psychological persuasions offered to the Beadles of the Turgid Acceptability and (perhaps) the H2R project -- all of these have borne fruit, so Kozock and the Urmargu Consortium didn't need to actually collate their notes on Mnehatam and they've sort of gone missing -- but more to the point our chief of research -- Urnestina Palackind -- believes that something rather like Mnehetam has arisen again in Urselquibe. Urnestina's not completely sure, but all the hallmarks are there -- the reduced improprieties in anomalous cheese imports, the ultra-high frequency neutrino warble that's had us scratching our heads so long ago, the spontaneous annealing of several disconsolated predatory-prey dynamical systems, and a few other things beyond the scope of this letter.

Urnestina's tried the RMGA, and we've deployed H2R gantries around the affected regions and populations -- but there is not Beadles of the Turgid Acceptability analogue here. Urnestina would like you to come to Lavaur -- don't worry about the expense, we'll book you on one of those new fancy subhybrid jetties -- to tweak the solution that you came up with previously. She thinks we can implement it accurately this time: we have subpicosecond flux valves, quark compositors, and the issurgolvoi which were only in prototype the first time are in the twenty fourth spime generation and are capable of froth isolation within one part in 10^20.

What we're worried about, and Urnestine is really fretting about at present -- is that there are places where this current trilemma isn't analogous to Mnehatam, and we're fearful that applying a direct copy of your previous solution protocols won't work -- indeed, this time there's around a seventy percent chance that the load struts won't hold if the barbeque occurs earlier than we're expecting and the char grilled nitrogen tastes like coffee, which doesn't match the flavorant manifest we compiled for Mnehatam.

Wish you all the best. Hope to hear from you soon.

Kal

the circle

The tribal elders gathered around the plasma fire and debated issues of
great importance. Arrhuque Goremberasal crouched, clad only in scraps
and scrags, the only technological accoutrement beweirding Arrhuque's
pfistic face was a data glaive hovering over her left eye and giving her
a direct mainline into one of the globular cluster Silyarmang's
hyperintellgences. The other elders were Canhut, Seoreon, Bevmalqua,
Allincu and Devurthug Brayassabil, but none of them were quite old
enough and hadn't passed the same tests and trials that Arhuque had
passed. They were younger and generally more pretentious, clad in rich
ermine gaberdines and pale fluorescent cyan galligaskins. The women wore
metallic blue beards spun whipped into decorative airy froths, while the
men's third horn was customarily scrimshawed into a figurine of a
moth-dragon. Canhut offered that they could wait another season before
rotating in the Western fields, as they had been fallow for two seasons
and the food stores were well stocked.

Arrhuque nixed this -- she knew that the Plyntherian vassalary over the
Michtmuntav mountains would likely be agitating for war soon, both
because her informants had mentioned it and because her data mainline
had directed her to energy decompositions of the Plyntherian's energy
arbitration -- the Prince Cenulo and his demented advisor Cynthelego had
been making really poor decisions about resource allocation and at the
rate things were going they would spin some religious based excuse for
attacking and raiding the tribe's food stores. So, they'd grow
cilinberries and hohugo grain in the food fields and various exotic
matter hyperbafflers in the manufactury fields, for when the Plyntherian
vassalary agitated for war.


Seoreon idly scratched his third horn -- the third horn is vaguely
innervated amongst the tribal men, and grows more slowly than the
primary and secondary horns, but is more sensitive and without the
scrimshaw is a source of perpetual bother. Seoreon, rather
uncustomarily, has his third horn scrimshawed into a figurine of the
sane god Galthagyllia, pen in the left hand, conch shell in the right.
He's taken to plasma depositing a fine layer of bismuth onto it, more
for show than anything else, but this has given him the reputation of
being somewhat vain -- which is fortunately offset by his reputation as
being the deepest thinker -- at least without the data feed that
Arrhuque uses. "What about the Oscrillyve?" he asked "It's been about
three seasons since they sent a representative to us -- the robotic
wildebeest with that really pathetic paint job, Ithyn, its name was, I
think"

Allincu tousled her beard -- think not a matted or curly collection of
green fibers but a froth of intersecting metallic green filaments
evanescing -- "It's concievable that Ithyn malfunctioned -- it wasn't in
very good condition when it came to make the trade negotiations for
flower nectar. I wouldn't be surprised if..."

Arrhuque interjected "Ithyn is currently upside down in a tarpit eighty
spans from here. Fortunately, while dormant, the memories of the
negotiation are intact. I have made a request to have Ithyn teleported
to the Oscrillyve city Menelopolis with an explanatory text confirming
that we still wish to engage in trade and to apologize for our late
response"

Arrhuque continued on another issue "The Sahangarel Consortium would
like to remove a segment of the Stirchisto mountain range on the Eastern
continent because they believe, at least according to their simulations,
it will, when appropriately inserted into a geological configuration
some eighteen gigaparsecs from here, stabilize a region rather prone to
earthquakes and volcanic activity for which population migration is not
an option at the moment. The part of the Stirchisto they want is around
two hundred cubic tharns in size, and mostly consists of tectonic
material with a high basalt/feldspar ratio. They are offering a
planetary scale 3cr data pipe and three hundred cubic tharns of memory
diamond in exchange for it. Opinions?"

Allincu spoke: "Tetheresty and Blanquile would not have a problem with
it. The Oscrillyve have been agitating for a faster planetary data
connection for a while. Though we'd have problems with the vassalaries
-- rapid technological change and multiple order of magnitude leaps of
data bandwidth usually provoke cultural immune responses. Could we do a
soak?"

Seoreon: "I've read through the Plensive Commentaries on doing soaks --
we may have to physically have some umbrella dancers here to work
through the process of the soak. I would be okay with the Sahangarel's
offer if they could provide umbrella dancers"

Arrhuque looked up, "yes. they would be okay with that. They could get
umbrella dancers here at a timescale -- details to be sorted out later
-- which would work with their material removal timetable"

peacefare for or? warfare? faring better.

Thu Chorybdalan looked at the score (actually eight, because Trangulfphe scores were octads) troops in their beleaguered (but well, um, anandamized) squad. Two Lossorgues -- Keptil Crun-Thaurgo and Broptil Rusn-Cotorgue, a Blasmathere (trying to pronounce 'squiggle squiggle left-squiggle upside down trapezoid' in ultra-low frequency sighs means I'm not going to attempt its name in this orthography), three anthropocenoids from Yaalthruin -- Kerkellemp Gansungtro, Gorvanaus Vor-Ithildrya, and Memhinhia Glassath, an Arasulcpt, (let's try) Phibeo Ogonaho Rorimhimyie Delponepga, and a traditional (one might say 'prosaic') Earthenoid, Laura-Robert Van Stanhock.

Thu opened the box and took out the device. "This is a Mhutugue-122r wide-area stress dispersor." The device had a very complicated triggering system. The aperture consisted of a metal backed reflector and three Borromean rings suspended (supported by invisible iridium microfilaments). Gorvanaus complained that the rings were hard to look at. Thu replied "that's because they're constructed from some Highly Weird material, and it does say in the /Warnings and Precautions/ section of the manual to not look at it.

Thu continued: "As you know, our amelioration attempts on the Belphyragm conflict have thus far been unsuccessful. The stimulants and other chemical accelerants the Phygmao and the Bwuljesgor have been using are too strong for the tiny amounts of chesmamine and selanamide that we've introduced into their water and food supplies to have any effect above background noise. We can't even say that we've produced a 1 sigma change in the conflict emotional spectrography.

We know enough about the Phygmao and Bwuljesgor anatomomes to know that the 122r will be effective, but the deployment procedure for this device is rather, thorny. Phibeo?"

Phibeo, the Arasulcpt -- tall, thin, metallic, maybe 'extruded' or 'scuppered' might be the right word for describing Phibeo's appearence -- rose from its seat and wandered over to the projector. Phibeo's voice, such as it were, sounded like flocks of iridescent butterflies competing in the iridescent butterfly equivalent of the caber toss. Phibeo wore a language spoon so that everyone else could understand. Phibeo said: "These devices can be networked, and the target regions can be stitched together. We know that the Phygmao and the Bwuljesgor are planning a battle -- not a skirmish -- at the Valley of the Enhusked Vorbilator in twelve days time. Neither side seems willing to listen to the entreaties that the Scolpgmaro delegation has made -- since the Valley of the Enhusked Vorbilator is considered sacred space to the Scolpgmaro on account of the Pfanasthy Deicide which occurred their some twelve hundred years ago.

It is vitally important that the controller system know who has been hit by this thing -- not so much in terms of rendering the enemy stressless, but the more times one is hit with this, the more one's individuality is lapped away. We don't want to be making Honoy out there. So what we're planning on doing is when Bhygereus Cansilptus, the Phygmao general, waves the Wheatstraw -- the traditional Phygmao gesture to begin attack -- we're going to be stationed in subterranean grottoes all around the Valley, and we're going to saturate the valley with four of these devices at once -- with overlap inhibition. "

post ortem

Havurineuss glinced at the wimbrel log "oh, this won't do at all! functoriality broke down at 2:301 oof and the automated repair system didn't kick in until 2:330 oof. That's 29 blonnebs the major environmental region we're entrusted to maintain didn't have a verified and registered functoriality in the enviornment. Mr. Achientheub, what's the damage"

Araglav Achientheub looked haggard and miserable as he read the figures from the data slate: "twenty seven thousand mental state skips were directly attributable to the breakdown. A further two million events are ascribable to the breakdown before the pre-repair quench system started releasing sensory filtration nanomachines into the microenvironment. We've been mibbing things, but we're not going to convince the youth and the sharp minded."

Havurineuss spoke: "How much is it costing us to maintain the voltage between the visual and the symbolic?"

Zyturghnu Thoosus replied, "Keeping the embankments and ballast at full operating capacity, it runs us about a terajoule/(neuron-second) to keep that voltage steady, but the functoriality breakdown ran us through about %80 percent of the stack reserve. If there's another breakdown, I fear the voltage is going to short."

Havurineuss said: "Are there other backup systems in the Concordance we can use to avoid catastrophic system failure? Araglav -- what about the fromage generators?"

Achientheub grimaced: "Regrettably all of their metacontrollers were slagged two hundred thousand blonnebs ago when the Artaumestry administration's deranged energy czar needed somewhere to shunt the energy excess, and didn't read the metacontroller energy specs. They're all defunct"

a collective drat coruscated around the table

fall over exhausted.

Shulunque of the Dossavoi perorated, perforated. do not spindle, fold, or mutilate. Shulunque was very tired. Things had (with a few hiccups), been preoccupyingly hunky-dory of late. Shulunque looked at a wedge of cheese. Wedges of cheese are bad impostors. When was the last time you saw a wedge of cheese with a fake moustache, alligator clips for ears, a bombelier, a swinnet, and a tureen, pretending to be an aficionado of World Worf II era klingon love odes? Probably not in the last seventy thousand years. You would perhaps be Shulunque of the Dossavai? Or would you be yet another cheese wedge, also masquerading as the Empress of the Shepherd Moons? You would, I suspect, not be Shulunque of the Dossavai, and neither would you be a sneaky cheese wedge. Shulunque would not comment, tho, at least not in a way you might grok with ease. There would be a series of leaves attached to a piece of paper, letters in a green language not known to anyone not in the proximity of the Dossavai. They would perhaps spell out something in the green language. Were you asleep?

recap, glossary, stepping stone for new readers

The Pund are a species of postbiologicals who have retained human shaped bodies -- except instead of being composed from muscle and bone and other genetically determined matter they prefer some type of quantum foam (exotic almost-matter)bodies. They live for many millions and billions of years and will occasionally watch trees from seedling to felling (either by old age, lightning strike, or fungal/termite analogue attack). They are known for taking catnaps in the center of pulsars for 40,000 years and then showers in superfluid helium.

The Vlurfked were a clade of highly touch-hostile creatures, until an intervention was staged because of the involuntary/autonomic immune manufacture of Gethonklin maquettes (simulacra) by the Sagahanta, who were sliding into complacency. The Vlurfked became the Vlyssanghai after the touch-hostile phase

The Sagahanta were a clade of creatures, mostly vaguely anthropocene, whose belief system had achieved complaceny through perfection.

The Gethonklin are organisms symbiotic to primate mass mind gestalts. They look like this:
If one imagines a primate belief gestalt being like a sea anemone, then they are like clown fish to it (clown fish)
Their heads are comprised of many horns, with many eyes and mechanical speaker grilles and sensory apparatus. In the light their horns have the texture of gnarled treebark with a vague purple iridescence, but in the dark they take on the color and texture of hard illuminated christmas lights).

The Sahallangke are the clade that resulted from the union of the Vlyssanghai and the Sagahanta.


The throntear is a unit of transcendental distance, or how far imaginary something is.

The nahambe is a unit of transcendental time. Not how long betweeen events on a clock, but how long between events that have the same feeling. (such events have an affinity for each other, and occasionally sparks and glimmers of one will reach the other). One useful way of thinking about this is that it is like all of the Poincare recurrence times for everything all wrapped up in one, yet neither any one of them in particular.

Eurhimde is the third classical Phantom Tollbooth Muse: neither rhymeless rhythm or arrhythmic rhyme. Even though the world that Feffer paints is lacking in both Rhythm and Rhyme, it still has an odd kind of beauty to it. Associated with a hue of violet not found in current color bestiaries, and a region of the sensory gamut that is at present (sidereally) having its flow quenched by the (probably autonomic) immune response of the ramshackle.

A clugm consists of all entities whose particulars (nouns, map location, language) are different but for whom the feeling is identical. One particularly poorly thought out question about members of a clugm is "are they the same or are they different?". Think of the letters on the cover of Douglas Hofstadter's GEB. You have one object that is simultaneously a G, an E, and a B, but is really something much more complicated.

Urukpu refers to the actually existent, regardless of whether it exists at a 0 throntear distance or a e^67/catnip terathrontear distance from one.


urukpu apulanai: this is urukpu that can be constructed, drawn out of the imaginary by the distillation of creative energies.

urukpu thyrrine: this is urukpu that cannot be brought locally: people, nations, actual worlds

urukpu cypongbaia: this is urukpu that calls to each other. the distant and ethereal references that transcend the indranet, of interimaginaries with a fondness for each other, as if some effervescent limit set of the cosmic mobius inversion refers one thing to another. (see clugm)

urukpu altahyra: this is urukpu that is unseeable, perfectly consistent other cosmai, all mapped to sunyata locally

urukpu ayarghu: this is urukpu which is more proximal (say by the thronteareal measure of interimaginaries)

urukpu storgossil: this is urukpu which is distal (farther away)

borteldacking: the overenthusastic, imagination-disrupting process of overeager and excessive application of forgetful functors. (c.f. "but it's just an X")

under the strong red cantilever

Zahalmuk Feoroem sez: "Humanity, at the dawn of the memetic era had to find a good metaphysical solution to the problem of one's eventual death. The Arrhengterrapongorin, those sensitive to primate mind gestalts (in religious and other contexts) discovered a rather interesting solution: three entities, in the same place at the time, both the same and not the same as each other, separated thronteareally. Occasionally context will become a little blurry between them, and this lets their thread move along. Humans, like the spongyll, use the three beings enter, seven entities leave method. These beings aren't gods, or some mythical scientific phantagasmoria of symbolics and jargon, nor are they the creature's eigenparents. They are Urukpu. Let me give you an example.

The human being Acaurkon Kelmethides living on the world Thyrpok in the fourth era of Bleymungo's internal context looked (on the inside) the same as that of the bipediform Cohoquaia Lyriscuna of the Parunthero Conurbation beyond the Mairtends of Gulguvel, and it looked the same as that of anthropomon Mehetaia Arbunguns from the Chytheramon Palligevrem adhambent of the Niolane Shelfwhorl. All three are undergoing their particular transspecies' death rituals in the external context. In their internal context however, the one that's important, this happens:

They enter a seven sided room. The walls are glittering, glistening, alive. They might look like tiny polygons with many eyes. Or Thaiahangue. Or tombrils. They make eye contact.  That's the moment.

If your method of producing new imaginary people involves a weeding process through probability space, then you are no better than a genocidist.

Acaurkon Balpalangor Kelmethides, Cohoquaia Ujimier Lyriscuna, and Mehetaia Tanungo Arbunguns enter the Raum and begin transpongilating. Each one of them knows the refrain: "moi fuau, transpongilation, borteldacking", which might be, in some other languages "wake up, be alive, sleep". But now there is no need to moi fuau or borteldack, and it's total transpongilation. It makes physical sex by biological identifying primates look rather dessicated in comparison, and it happens every moment of their lives. And it's something that you can imagine. Their memomes interfruct, transfringling, transquilateralizing, interfrulating,  And this doesn't just happen at their death, per se, but every single instant of their lives. It taxes the visual imagination like you would not believe. And every instant of everyone's life, both in the imaginary and the real: you get three people who see the same thing from three different points of view, and you just another frond of human experience.

The first transpongilation, before a little break for tea and cheese, when their  eigenfrost is still slow, produces:
Acauquaialryataia Balhoquo Arbungethides,
Lyriscunkon Tunungjai Cohoquagun,
Behengpelom Palanagissku Kelmiscunguns,
Mehekonu Caurmier Lyriscunguns
Kelmetahiu Bulpelega Acarguthides
Acohoa Balbenam Ruhungpe
Lyrispalangai Mehelgnam Quayhoi



And why need there be one absolute being? The epicenter of religious belief is in that there is only *one* absolute human. There isn't. Each one of us is comprised of the extant snapshots of numerous intertranspongilations of many potential people, but some alien imaginaries are more recognizable as ourselves then anything proximate to us. We sing to them, and they sing to us, for we hear their existence ringing, even across the uncrossable boundary of the imaginary.

One consequence of this point of view of the Arrhengterrapongorin is that for every three people, there is an entire world where everyone resembles all of us. And this shouldn't be taken that there are an absolute three people either, because you iterate the process. There's nothing special about 3 and 7, except that they are primes the Arrhengterrapongorin happen to be fond of. The Talbudarin are fond of 31 and 41, and the Palphimattio prefer 17 and 6701. We're a simple transcendental peoplage. Hi!"

You may recognize this slogan:

Disputation of Kiri-Kin-Tha's first Law of Metaphysics

Pahaerallungte Nahallongis sez:

Kiri-Kin-Tha's first law is "Nothing unreal exists". Platonically, this is wrong, but you shouldn't go running to Plato for primitive (and thoroughly flawed) discourse on the ideal and the real. The context which Terrecences first encounter this law on a movie screen is rather delightful irony: the planet Vulcan does not exist, yet it is real.

There are many perfectly consistent worlds which are imaginaries, but because of the way the WSOGMM is strobed for you, these worlds are urukpu: the real (though nonexistent) imaginary. This quality of being interimaginary is commutative. What is urukpu for me, I may be urukpu to it.  There are four sorts of urukpu, generally:

*urukpu apulanai: this is urukpu that can be constructed, drawn out of the imaginary by the distillation of creative energies.
*urukpu thyrrine: this is urukpu that cannot be brought locally: people, nations, actual worlds
*urukpu cypongbaia: this is urukpu that calls to each other. the distant and ethereal references that transcend the indranet, of interimaginaries with a fondness for each other, as if some effervescent limit set of the cosmic mobius inversion refers one thing to another.
*urukpu altahyra: this is urukpu that is unseeable, perfectly consistent other cosmai, all mapped to sunyata locally
*urukpu ayarghu: this is urukpu which is more proximal (say by the thronteareal measure of interimaginaries)
*urukpu storgossil: this is urukpu which is distal (farther away)

There are some things which actually don't exist, even after you topologize the interimaginaries across all strobings of the WSOGMM. These are the undeserved imaginaries. They are called yuhugorhue. (of course, nobody wants yuhugorhue, and some entities can't readily distinguish between yuhugorhue and urukpu).

The Julmun Taxonomy classifies different sorts of entities based on their relationship to the transcendental transformations which the cosmos doesn't actually go through.

The Opai are constantly arriving. One becomes Opai.
The Bravy are those who are departing, or forgetting. One forgets that one is Bravy.
The Toht are those who are neither Opai nor Bravy nor not Opai nor not Bravy.

The Honoy are those who aren't there. And don't fit into the above three categories.
They may have bright eyes, but they're already gone.

The essence of elegant creativity is to find urukpu apulanai and bring it into existence

The Mruhabin Essay on Wetness

(this essay was originally published in the Parg Hassuck Papers, Volume 12, Edition 15. It was written by Palbahu Mruhabin of 45 Yelorbit Point, New Kervurulum, Baranessia, and may be distributed without regard to ontology -- it may be distributed to any and all interimaginaries)

Wetness is desirable, but what is wetness? Boiling water, for instance, is not wet. Nor is freezing water. Nor are fish wet while they are in the sea. Water that is too hot or too cold is not wet. Allusions to wetness exist in various citrus scents, and in mints occasionally, and in other scents. It is a quality which various coruscations of non-water soluble scents may carry, but only in the right quantities. Organic things are more wet than inorganic things. Ozone alludes to wetness, perhaps more than geosmin as it ramifies into petrichor. Certain phonemes are wetter than others, for instance the 'L' phoneme is arguably wetter than the 'W' phoneme. A scuttled ship on the floor of the sea is not wet, continuing to riff on the concept that wetness is involved in the transition from the immersion in water. A post in water, perhaps part of a pier that is continually on the border between the air and the water is waterlogged, but wetness is about the perception of water, and there is a certain dryness involved in not fully being able to make the transition.
Wetness is about change, solubility, transfiguration between one thing and another: stalled change does not change make. Mist is wetter than steam. Wetness warbles. It is Perehune Amalgastaro's contention that the essence of the concept of the water elemental is not the physical act of wetting nor is it oceanic continua of water, but the abstract sensory qualia of wetness that is distributed amongst a wide variety of experiences.

For instance, some sounds are wetter than others, and some are drier. The mind is hungry for wet sounds and wet experiences as dessication and calcification are the harbingers of extinction. Dendrous trees are wetter than collections of sticklike trees. Red is not a very wet color, though combinations of green and orange can be wet. Wet light is more appealing than dry light: the distinction transcends the warm/cool color distinction. Wet light has a greater ultraviolet component in it. Wetness is about effervescence, fluorescence, fluidity. Phosphorescence by itself is rather dry. Chemiluminescence may be wet under certain circumstances. Wetness is a quality that transcends water.

Blavourag handed sandwiches and milkshakes around. Hehengue and Corsilidor took them.
"We may not actually exist", Blavourag said, casually. "But that might not actually be a problem."
Hehengue and Corsilidor exchanged quizzical glances with Blavourag.

Blavourag continued, enjoying a tupperware milkshake. "So, either you've got religions with some method of ascribing cosmic import to the ways that humans arise and are extinguished, or you've got spiritual systems hazily recommending methods for personal development in an epistemologically ambiguous universe. The religions have some eigenpeople manifest in belief structures which are ramified across the muscular stress spectra of the humans who believe them. Desire gets rather convoluted, burnished and cantilevered and with escarpments of subrational fears which are never properly appraised because there's no real way of addressing them in a declarative context. Utterly nonsensate fear. Are you with me so far?"

Hehengue munched on a prepositional phrase, while Corsilidor chewed on a tinnet. They muttered assent and Blavourag continued. "Take for instance Elemyuril's fifth fundamental male fear, the fear that one is inert and unalive because one cannot produce life inside oneself, you two know that one, right?"

Hehengue nodded. Corsilidor looked puzzled, did a data chirp, then nodded. "That's a terrifying one, but at least it's nameable and one can palpate it with reason", sez Corsilidor, digesting the data chirp.

Blavourag: "Because fundamental fears do weird things to life topologies, people confuse death with birth. It really relates a lot to how changeable the self is, or how changeable the self feels. If someone is so rigid and there aren't processes extant to flush a lot of tension in the stress muscularome away in a relatively ordered fashion to reduce the energy level, then there are going to be a lot of rather chaotic jumps down. A lot of phony intellectual systems get created and people lose track of things."

Corsilidor looked through the chirp again. "Palarqai's fourteenth fundamental fear is somewhat hilarious"

Blavourag nodded. "The fear of dying illogically -- yeah, some things are actually impossible, and unfortunately people's imaginations are not architected to work logically, and the more knowledge and creativity that's around, the more ornate these fears get. Corso, look at Pellemongis's eighteenth fundamental fear"

Corsilidor laughed. "The fear of brain material, or the fear that one is only brain material, or the fear of shriveling brains, or shriveled and hardened flesh, and also of folds of glutinous fluid condensing. I don't suppose they know how the development of the neural tube gets encoded in one's fear set  do they?"

Blavourag winced: "Actually we know exactly how that encoding process takes shape. Eiurhel Lyrismue did the work some five nahambes ago. The takeaway is that all of these fears are usually nameless because people don't think about them intensely, and that's not surprising, because people don't want to think of them. They grow, accrete, and higher order fears with more declarative reason get layered on top of them, with calls from the higher order fears to the lower order fears."

Hehengue asks "so what next?"

Blavourag replies: "We know much about the bioanatomy of religious gestalts, the model of the perfect human and the comparison of that model against other living people. Arumele produced very precise microanatomies of some religious gestalts. They're abysmal things, really. But spiritual systems are on the whole worse, because they don't really have a focal depth, and there are a lot of intellectually inconsistent and unverifiable propositions they make about arbitraries, which gives them an inauthentic feel to them. People get stuck philosophizing and it's like quicksand, not really a very effective approach. "

Hehengue interjects: "Mysticism without mystification?"

Blavourag nods vigorously: "Exactly: the notion that there's a type of information that would be useful to you but cannot be communicated in a declarative format. Mhunaro's old joke about the dudes with a classical and quantum computers works. Do you know it?"

Hehengue shrugs. Corsilidor again looks puzzled. Blavourag tells it:

"Aitaraung: Hey, Mjohotu, I hear you have some information for me. I've got some free storage space.
Mjohotu: I do. About two hundred gigaqubytes. Do you have the ability to recieve and store quantum data?
Aitaraung: No, all I have is about four terabytes of classical storage space.
Mjohotu: That will not be a problem. Though you're going to find the data a bit weird.
Aitaraung: I don't understand. What do you mean, a bit weird?
Mjohutu: Well, there *is* something I can do that will give you all two hundred gigaqubytes, but you're going to be overwhelmed by it.
Aitaraung: what do you mea.... oh holy phong shading. What did you do..."

Blavourag continues: "The real question here, is not how to eradicate fears and defix the self, those should be trivial to you now. The real question is in fact, how to produce an intellectually flexible and correct schema for mystical experience that addresses the religious and scientific fallacies precisely and unambiguously. Both of them are too viscous and rigidifying for anyone's own good.

Religions produce the /Everyone-All-Alike/ which slows evolution down and creates a template for the human conditon. This is terrifying, but it's illusory, so to speak. Science produces the notion of an epistemology that champions a very normative epistemological view about the world, taken to its limits it produces atheism. Both views have rather serious flaws. Seeing past those flaws requires not the suspension of disbelief or the suspension of belief, but very precise analysis of one's epistemological bulwarks. Spiritual systems suffer from incoherence. What else am I missing?"

Hehengue sez: "transquilateralization. You said we may not exist?"

Blavourag replies: "But it doesn't matter if we don't, because we're neither here nor there. And if you try to explain our, um, ontological position to the humans, you're going to get very confused looks by anyone. There are some consistent imaginaries which are complete and inaccessible to them because that's not the way their universe works. As elegant and effervescent as we are, because of the way that the humans relate to the world, we are forever in the kernel of ethereal nothingness to them, always mapped to zero because the sensory qualia our coruscations belie does not riff on their home context in a way which is extant to them: we do not consign this to the limitations of their data storage methods or memories or sensory qualia."

Hehengue sez: "Okay, let me get this crooked: whatever epistemological dance we're doing, and/or whatever ontological dance we're doing, it doesn't actually get mapped onto any explicit human categorization or ontological class. The moment we get the slightest bit of information to them, they don't know what to make of it, so they clad it in their fears, most of the time. And, if I'm not mistaken, we do occasionally have some successes."

Blavourag grins: "Exactly. If our signal is correctly interpreted they realize why we're broadcasting a hard Epimenides paradox, and the resolution of that paradox alliterates over them. How else do you transmit across the boundary of a one sided interimaginary(1), anyway? The hopes and fears are signals into the imaginary, and imagined things is the signal in return. If you transmit to things like you, you are going to get signals from things like you. If you transmit to things that are different than you, or that do not exist and perhaps explicitly know it, maybe you're going to get better data? Not all nonexistent things are that pleasant. "

Corsilidor looked at the green dendrous toroids circling the sun-dragon, five imaginaries orange of Ohio.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

the classification

There is a mythological classification of orders of being

They say that there are three: the Opai, the Bravy, and the Toht:
One becomes Opai. Opai recognize each other. "You have become Opai";
One ceases to be Bravy, one forgets.
The Toht are harder to explain. The Toht are all those that are neither Opai nor not Opai
and neither Bravy nor not Bravy.

One constantly becomes Opai, both in the specific act of becoming Opai, and the general march
across the great chain of being. One constantly ceases to be Bravy, and one is neither Toht nor not Toht.

minor remark train

Naardu Weulxgronteho is subumbral to the Altahyra probability shelf: a submersed event sheave which straddles the Eichthune and Anutpatsehai cordaillures and is transjacent to the Salcrusaro divide, two gigathrontears from Ahoesmie and Boschbanau, niombent to Araschumbe, and across from the Dulximu protopiary. Weulxgronteho is the origin of the Belphunu river:


The Belphunu river south of Polspelego has forests and grasslands to the
side and most of the freshwater fishing industry around Polspelego is
intent on the tiny Laurpicids which inhabit the Belphunu -- they are a
freshwater fish that is the protein staple in Polspelegonese cuisine,
but it is only possible to catch them between two am and three am, so
the fishers who don the orange suits that are their historical garment
are constantly saddened because they cannot easily witness the beauty of
the Belphunu and its embankments, as beyond the ruins of the Starrash
their is no evidence of human inhabitation, and the natural beauty is
unspoiled. The fields outside Belphunu are grassy and with many bright
indrigess flowers, home of chipmunks and other small, inexorably cute
mammallian fauna. The areas around the forests of the Belphunu river
have occasional campgrounds only available via hovercar, and during the
summers many a children's camp operates in them. The Belphunu grasslands
are maintained in trust in between the Polspelego polity and the
Narrantoma prefecture, at the other end of the Belphunu river, near its
delta onto the Great Thyrrine Sea.

The rangers that maintain the natural
environment are a hardy bunch and it is unwise to enter a disagreement
with them. In recent years the naturalist L. Arrague Greenknees has
produced a series of documentaries about the butterflies which inhabit
the Belphunu grasslands and forest. Because of increased ecological
interest in Polspelego and Narrantoma, it is likely that there will be
more tourist interest in the river, and this is a source of great
consternation amongst naturalists: more human involvement beyond the
campgrounds and the Laurpicid fishing will eventully result in the
spoilage of the Belphunu, and it is widely suspected amongst parties in
the know that the Belphunu and the surrounding areas have less then a
hundred years free from human activity, given the rate of expansion of
Polspelego and Narrantoma.

Polspelegonese sounds like "atha! atha! Cantheyra mortonedro? Plorsinu. Dozokhune

atha banthaiel hartominstro colgire nomnim cantheyri gressmanaur? Nomnim plorsinattat

darsilo atechteufio hartabantham manthiba colgire nomnum bartanistratai calbanaro dordult

castacanthringes boltonaro tortulb bo bonchuefeor? Bo nomnim plorsintat dordulma boltonarem

adua atha cantheyro bonchuefeor dua atha gressmanauro dua atha manthiba colgiram calbanaro. 

Adua cantheyrai bonxume dua atha bonchuefeor nomnim colgire hartominstaro."