remap -4
A sub-dimensional tumble into the introspective void - or something.
Welcome stranger! In these narrow passages, causality loosens its tie and slinks out the back door. If you’ve ever longed for prose that slouches sideways into a singularity, wearing mismatched socks and a sh!t-eating grin, well then you’re in the right place.
New to remap? Here’s a link to the beginning. → remap -1
(The image above is the entrance to “The Environment” from Brad’s first ever online game experience, published in 1998 on Jujubee.com)
remap…
5
The harsh artificial light of an outdoor parking lot at night found Ron Ruvendas smoking a cigarette in the shadow of a lamp post, hashing out some unhooked realities opposite Gaynard Grey. “You knew this was going to reach a boiling point, sooner or later, right?”
“Sure. But I was hoping you could better obfuscate the situation before they went ahead and turned those cards over.”
“Heh. Well, how the hell was I supposed to know they were about to hit critical saturation. I can’t even tell when my kids’ noses need blowing. And here, look at this mess. What’ve I got to go on? If I’d stopped them from putting in that cube assembly, maybe it wouldn’t have come. But surely, it was coming, anyway. And there’s no point speculating, now, is there?” He dropped the butt, crushed it under his shoe, and spat into the darkness, the gob adroitly intercepted by a disappointed bat.
Grey turned, walked a small circle, then turned back to face his old friend. “Listen. I’ve got a guy in Visual who can probably tab the daylights out of these rune dealies. Maybe, I drop him in, mark some of it ‘Need-to-Know’.”
“I dunno, G. It’s not like they haven’t been in control of the entire scenario from the very get-go. I mean, the only real unknowns here are to what lengths this can progress, and what possible agenda could be driving it.”
“You mean, I should just close my eyes and enjoy a ride in the fresh air, huh?”
“I mean, what happens when your man sees something you don’t like? Whadya gonna do with it? Run it up the food chain? See if the fireworks show up? Call me naïve if you like. But I gotta tell ya. As weird and disorienting as it’s all been, I can’t find the malevolence you seem so worried about.”
What further trepidations might have influenced Gaynard ’s cagey behavior remained in the shadows. Ron knew that, by now, he was well-connected with the vested gentry of the upper echelon. Clearly, steering our activities in a particular direction would smooth certain third-party feathers. Which way the influence swayed was still unapparent. “Have you seen the latest Dark Matter slide deck, yet?” Grey chided.
“What? Is that an invitation to go watch the submarine races, G?”
“Heh. Well, some kind of massless particles are definitely showing up en mass in a galaxy near you, old boy. The astrophy kids are looking hard at a gargantuan deformation, more than fifty times the span of Andromeda.”
“Um. When you say, ‘showing up,’ you mean it wasn’t there, like, say a couple weeks ago?” It wasn’t like Ron to be so flip, except when Gaynard was goading him.
“But, you have some interesting ideas about it. Doncha?” Gray grinned a self-satisfied smirk.
Three days later, with the entire lab looking on, Tanya, the Ex/oR (Exasperent/oracle Reader tech) pushed the glowing red button. The usual laser tube warm-up started, followed by the sequential solenoid clicks of each retro-reflective element finding its micro-definition vector, the last one activating a multi-phase projector, precisely focused on the center point of the glowing cube at its primary base. The screen immediately lit up, just as with the previous cubes. But there was no dancing geometric figure, we’d come to know as a sort of preamble to the perforated text messages. Instead, a pattern of nested circles appeared, then faded in order of size, the sequence repeating continuously. Nothing more. The graphic was extremely bright, prompting Tanya to suggest the sensitive screen might suffer some kind of burn distortion, if it went on for too long.
Unintentionally, my finger lightly brushed the edge of the screen, inducing a brief and unexpected buzzing in its mounting fixture. In that instant, Taj, ever the hi-fi connoisseur and sworn enemy of aural distortion, jumped straight up. “Woah!” “It could have audio!” Of course, the retro-reflexer was a purely optical device. Any sounds these things made were rendered mute by default – and I had to admit, by simple neglect of the imagination.
I scrambled back to my lab to search for a surface-mount transducer and an audio amplifier, the sort of thing I once had mounted on my acoustic guitar. Why hadn’t it occurred to the AV that a bit of simple explanatory text might be a very effective? I couldn’t imagine, except that they, if they are a they, might not have any idea how or if we even perceived sound in the first place. When I thought about it, their being so ethereal in our realm, I couldn’t imagine how sound— which requires the presence of air and specialized bodily organs to perceive it—would even be relevant to them. Maybe I’m seeing that in retrospect, memory being such an unreliable companion. So it was whatever it was. And, being your basic pack rat, I managed to dig out an old Barking Bleary guitar pickup transducer from the pile of junk bins festooning my bench-top cabinets. A little battery-powered amplifier appeared in yet another crevasse of a jam-packed drawer.
With a bit of putty, we gingerly adhered my little pickup to the face of the screen and hooked up the amp. Taj was dubious of my antiquated, inexpensive low-tech gear, of course. He wanted to bounce a laser off the screen surface and measure the microscopic displacement, in order to synthesize the audio signal, spycraft style. I so admired his enthusiasm for arcane methodologies. But I’d been steeped in the KIS (Keep It Simple) principle, much too deeply, to go along with the likes of that.
With a twist of the volume knob on the amp, we were tuned in, as if eavesdropping on what seemed to be a conversation, already in progress.
“…will probably not winkdesire clop-opernate,
Explanaturely. Cant bent coriolus innie time.
Maze we. Jug swiss fatty gay, maintenance.
Sod, less katel them chow t’omega distropia maligner, soda cantze hodda binna munkous.
dUe yew stink-day wAnda gumming? Swood jAne jalada bowed um. Myable donna t’lye kit...”
Good grief! We needed a linguist, and pronto. The language they seemed to be using was definitely English, but an unrecognizable dialect. The conversations [speculating here] lasted several hours before repeating; the transcripts reading like, well, how you might guess a drunken alien would pontificate—that is, if they had only just picked up the vocabulary of a new language, without any of its conventions of construction or phonetic combination. As partners in this cultural exchange, we were equally green.
Weeks passed, waiting for the “Talk’em Team” to spit out something useful. While they were at it, Anji got to fiddling around with different laser wavelengths in the reflexer. Inspired by this most recent development, she speculated that there might be more to the cubes than just a single stream of communication; there could be multiple, maybe thousands of channels or tracks of information to tap.
That was possibly the most startling, valuable insight of any. She easily managed to isolate dozens of separate streams, ultimately. Some were only visual; others were aural; still others had a tactile component, accessed by channeling the reflexed output through various robotic configurations. Security really tightened up after we figured out how to drive a Molecular Deposition unit from the cubes, thereby providing the Aist Vidragol with the ability to make physical objects right here in our own puny, four-dimensional realm.
To some, that was decidedly an alarming development. Initially, these fabricated artifacts were infinitesimal, perhaps barely as thick as a layer of graphene. When complete, the amoebic-looking dabs, perhaps only a half millimeter across, would ‘pop up’ into a hemispheric volume and start moving about in meandering patterns, resembling little mites.
To everyone’s further amazement, and the exceptional unease of some, one overnight deposition run produced a series of larger, interconnected, quasi-metallic parts comprising a complete mechanism. Self-actuating, the diminutive machine extended a thin cylindrical proboscis upwards, nearly contacting the MDU’s deposition cartridge. A luminous plasma arc connected the probe to the depositor nozzle, the bright light rapidly changing colors for about ten seconds. The probe then retracted, whereupon the MD unit began building a new array of parts, but at a hundred times the usual pace. The new parts emerged as a replica of the MD unit. When complete, the little device that had zapped our MD unit had been integrated within the replicant.
The meetings and presentations that followed these developments could only be described as “Theater of the Absurd.” Gaynard Grey attended many of them, still participating only as an observer, strangely. Ideas for modifying and outfitting ever larger and more complex MD units circulated like particules in an accelerator. I tried to imagine what the AV might build, given a large chamber, while giving insufficient thought to why they’d built what they had. Some speculated that the AV might be constructing some kind of habitats, or “Waldo” units, for them to occupy and manipulate. I pointed out that they had, in effect, already accomplished that very thing. In retrospect, a very interesting observation of all of this revealed a subtle irony: that our efforts served to bring the AV into our realm, thinking we might somehow get to understand them. But the Aist Vidragol was transparently, methodically succeeding in doing exactly the very same to us.
I couldn’t help myself. I knew what I just said. Yet, I don’t think I said that. I said, “Now I’m doing it,” didn’t I? Griz was smiling, I think. I couldn’t really tell, given among other things, the visiocet interpolation. But I knew he was, somehow. “Grease. Kabubba hapada meme?” I was speaking perfect backward circumflex, and probably with a good accent. I put my hand over my mouth. At least that was still swear aleph tit. Whit? Now ha cudna heaven tinker ride. Hoagie odd. Hoshi it!...
6
I’ll just slip this little note under your door now, while the AV isn’t looking. Actually, I don’t yet know if it’s even possible to look, in the conventional sense. But I have to write this under my breath because, in retrospect, when one has transcended the comforts of our own dimensional bounds, you can no longer know anything about anything at all. So, pull your pants up, and try to stay upright while you ever-so-gently take little bitty sips from this next part. Keep your eye out for the gnarly stuff, especially, on account of maybe it means something – if you just don’t think about it. No promises.
So, unless otherwise noted, it’s the conjectural distillation of that which wasn’t, as a function of the inversion of time, and an analog along an entirely speculative reconstruction of the aforementioned interpretive plane of cogence. Ya see what I mean, right? See what you will as your eyes consume it, because if I was able to observe what ensued from that point on, from the perspective of ordinary perception, I would not be able. That is to say, I could describe what I saw, and with complete veracity, while full well knowing that it was not what I saw, because what I saw could not actually be seen - at least not by me.
But if I could have seen it, the margins of error extended far beyond plausible deniability, an essential wisdom naïve in its infant dotage. Where there was particulate interference, the Void recoiled as quickly as a wasp stinger and backfilled with enterprise. What I could have been: as thin or thinner than a protozoic denizen beneath a glass cover slip, engulfing half of eternity, unable to lament the consequences, as those who would trespass against us. A gentle tapping on my deaf shoulder. “Hi there. Wanda plaid? Oui half un.” From where, when, or what medium this last appeal emerged, I could not make part nor parcel for a decision process, as such was surely beyond my existential purview.
I know not what I know, perhaps more than what I don’t know what I don’t. What am I knowing, huh? Who is that wasn’t? What is there isn’t? There are more of me, perhaps an infinite laughing gallery, all of us helloing in songs of acclamation. Lyrics of illumination emanated from what could be said of the reply, when then there was an I, a common dog, a German Shepherd, I do believe. Wandering aimlessly through the town, enjoying the companionship in stands of daffodils, laid down among them; they ate me as I slept.
Forward back in time, that brilliant pyre of frozen effluvia, now too lost among sensational memories, broadcast like so much fairy dust into a solar gale - my progenating interlocutors were just then sweeping some frivolous detritus under a decrepit old cabin’s well-grayed floorboards. At the remote outpost, here was a transactional waypoint, distracting those desperately lost enough to take even the worst advice from the locals, whilst the proprietors sniggered under their plasmoid breaths. There, colossal stands of titanium-tetrafloride emerged from supra-galactic crystal thickets, sublimating into the darkness, majestic and magnanimous in demonstration of the exaltation of a safe passage. Extending from theta to the zed orbitals, they bore the undulating mass of some weary overnight campers, now abandoned and drifting loose in the ozone swaft. I could be them, as well as I could be the sole remaining gluon that kept some faint reality intact.
By actic molecular husbandry, a non-biotic process of linking trans-dimensional processes, the Aist Vidragol coalesced immense machineries from the leftovers from the various cataclysmic misbehaviors that so many celestial delinquents just couldn’t resist. There were astronomers on Earth, who mistook some of them for gravitational lenses, perhaps the myriad waves of epochal delineations, sweeping through the instrumentation. Some of these had been self-propagating for countless eons, by now extending through local groups and clusters of unwitting galactic petit fours. The Dark component of these behemoths absorbed a hundred thousand times the dimensional mass available, leaving behind immense temporal vortices that plunged deeply from the Void. Whereby, on the scale of eternity, and given the circumstances of existence, these decidedly were where balance met tare.
Something sat sparkling over my basking swoosh. Was I sensing a polarity shift, as these fine particules traversed the nadir of their prime? Interactivity was getting used to me in a fundamental progression of incensed attitudes, beginning with a layered palimpsest, the faint remaining evidence, of countless encounters that counted constructivistic tendencies as a basic disadvantage. Now I was now I was now I was. But when and if was also now, as well as then could suffice for now in more exigent circumstances, which, of course, was all of them. Aleph twitch brought my un-existent guts to a boiling point, way back when there was nothing to know in the first place. The first place being a mythological construct, whatwhenhowwhywherein existence could transition from the Void, presumably, and ostensibly without the intervention of an interested third party, such as an insurance company. So, now as always, if I am feeling [sic] anything, it must be dangling from my conscience, flapping in the ion breeze, like so many wet socks on the clothesline.
The light is nearly all there was to think about me. If it contained me or maintained some evidence of that which suspended my thoughts, I couldn’t know, as there were no boundaries from which to anchor a reference for an argument, be it directly or tangent of being, that which could know anything. Unable to substantiate anything less than never, where photons could meet the Dark, a negotiation erupted into a calamitous acrimony of ambivalent matter, some of it running away at extraordinary velocity, as secure in its worthiness as the fleas on a dog. In one particular exchange – that is, given such events might be construed as finite – I discovered that I accidentally knew everything that I didn’t, that knowing anything at all was a self-contained barrier, greedily hoarding a sack of stolen booty behind its back. And well, since nothing is everything… You get the picture.
Meanwhile, as the Aist Vidragol progressed across the vastness of newfound material reality, sensorial patterns began to accumulate along the inhospitable fringes of the Dark. Rather than rending the fragile veil of space/time, a compromise was struck, whereby clouds of illumination would host the emotional outbursts that prevailed over the surfeit of indignation. A hundred thousand millennia passed as the irony rained down from the firmament, surrounding the elder accretions. Accompanying their arrival, chance would debut at its cotillion of terrible consequences. At that, nearly half the universe collapsed into a hideous, non-dimensional origami prawn; a perfectly wretched development I would never have imagined until this very moment. I mean in this very moment that you are reading this sentence. That is, since this moment is perfectly coincident with every other, or thereby perfectly arbitrary, with respect to the continuity of time. Of course that’s also all over with now, just as much as it was when it happened, chance: the leftover residue, before and after.
Though the universe was and is positively littered with detritus from eons of such epic bungling, it barely warrants a passing mention. And through it all, AV machines continue their crawbulation about the outskirts of time zero, wreaking their own quaint brand of havoc, a handful of galaxies at a time. One would be tempted to think that after the deconstruction of so many eons, with this kind of thing going on, there might be some pretty sizable holes out there in the hinterlands of space/time. And maybe there are. But, you probably also know that lots and lots of pesky, new stellar clutches get laid all the time. So, who could tell, except that not everything in the universe appears to be the same age. If all matter owes its origin to a singularity of space/time one would expect the age of everything to coincide.
On the contrary, given the presence and persistence of the Void, and its attendant depth of extenuating dimensional vagaries, most of existence will consequently present as having temporal origins spanning from prior the emergence of space/time, extending to having never existed, in the first place. Thereby, the exchange of all manner of particules, throughout the non-existential and inverse dimensions of the Void, may be derived. So, maybe that’s some kind of clue.
Concomitant with having to manage all that existential annihilation, making new friends proved a trifle difficult. Just as Aist and Vidragol were certainly a perfectly compatible symbiosis, neither was terribly long on conversational skills. It’s hard to imagine that the infinite could be lonely. But the fact is the AV had, by dint of not thinking of anything better to do, turned itself into a veritable and immense factory of emotional insecurities. Sprinkled throughout the cosmos, one would encounter traces of jealousy pitted against the collective ennui. At times, while ignoring apathy, a searing anger would incinerate everything in its path, leaving behind great trails of regret and remorse. There had been generations of empty pride that taunted the envious and neglected losers of confidence. All bowed in obeisance to the pain of emptiness and loss, thereby hinting at a shape for an unfortunate, relativistic hierarchy, yet juxtaposed by nothing whatsoever. Still, home is where you put your feet up, and anyway, who wants to go out on a night like that?
6A
"Oñ gwaihè ketsiehšą kãtsʰa shaa iš kweyaayoh šąkatwõ. Pecca Chica aiš kʰwãtšʰi shaa, aiš ewaa hwiška'ikweya iš kʰaakwa kãtsʰa eščaikʰwõ. Šëkęk iškwe ne, aiš hahšan aiškwë'akēn kʰeyohwa iš kãtsʰa, yah ahah aššą ne Kishelamàkânk. Kahwakšo kweyaayoh te nüčae thësǫ thënya. Ahni aššąk kweyaayoh te ëwac ašą." -synthesized transliteration
On Thursday of that year, the cave was almost as dim as would allow people to walk about. Pecca Chica was already in the deepest place, digging a hole for the Pure Light. Father and I carried the little canoe down and placed it in the hole so that the god of the heavens would come to collect it. The people prayed over the light for many days. After a while the way to the light was closed forever. -unknown
For centuries, tribal elders regularly undermined the constraints of Cartesian existence through a Void, super-insinuated by the Aist Vidragol, and nested deep within the band’s ceremonial cavern, in what is now central Ohio, in the United States of America. As a rite of initiation, a young shaman candidate would enter a hidden dimensional lacuna, an apparent gap in perceptual reality – then, reappear after an arbitrary lapse in time. Some came back after only a few moments; some, after hours or even days; others as yet having never returned.
One such candidate was Onai, meaning “Woman of the Moon,” a strong, introspective and insightful woman of eighteen years, who had demonstrated a seemingly supernatural ability for solving complex problems of volume, weight and other measurement. When distribution of resources became an issue of contention, she was often called upon as the arbiter in the dispute. But Onai’s most extraordinary gifts were manifest in her startling art projects – some called them her "Annonchia andaeronnion," literally “Dreams come to life.” In her village, it wasn’t unusual to come upon mechanical birds comprised of sticks and leaves, flapping their wings at the ends of long bamboo poles, apparitions driven and playfully propelled by the wind. Naturally, all the children were entirely enchanted by the fanciful creations. Their apparent magical qualities inspired a reverence which Onai dismissed as a minor annoyance. Nonetheless, the knowledge for producing such things had simply materialized within her thinking, without explanation, coming from out of nothing at all. No one could recall such a craft being a tradition from their ancestral past.
And though well-endowed with youthful feminine charms, Onai remained barren while most of her contemporaries became mothers. Somehow though, that didn’t seem odd to anyone who knew her. The sad truth was, though she was hardly put off by men, many eligible suitors felt humiliated by her obvious intellectual superiority, considering her unapproachable. This seemingly unfortunate situation was not lost on the band’s elders, who intuited this was a clear sign that she should become a healer. As portentous as that seemed, Onai and her parents were ecstatic at the prospect of her taking on such an important role—one vital to the entire clan.
As Onai approached her nineteenth birthday, having dedicated her every waking moment to the absorption of her mentor’s lessons, the appropriate time approached for her participation in the traditional “Ritual of the Pure Light.” A small parade of clan dignitaries, led by the elder shamans, entered the sacred cave single file, the celebrant adorned in superb regalia befitting the occasion, and bracketed by her parents. Upon reaching a level floor deep in the grotto, dripping stalactites and stalagmites glistening with the glow of ages, Onai’s primary mentor, accompanied by the chief elder, offered prayers to the sacred space. Handprints, runes and ancient symbols festooned the moist walls all around them, one row in particular an ancestral roster of medicine men who had come before, reaching far back into antiquity.
Proceeding a bit further down, a curtain of stalactites obscured a hidden alcove, where they came upon an unusually round, man-sized stone, reminiscent of a great wheel. Groaning heavily as they rolled the stone to one side, the shaman and the chief revealed that it covered a sizable portal at the top end of a very steep, tubular passage, perhaps similar to a mine shaft but with unusually smooth, polished sides. Of indeterminate depth from the channel’s entry, a dim bluish glow was barely visible at its terminus, suggesting it was a very long way down. Everyone in their party took turns staring down the channel in awe.
Firmly grasping the shaman’s hand, Onai clambered gingerly through the portal, then laid down, toes first, and facing up. “Say when,” he offered with a grin. She would surely drop like a stone if he let go. “All is as it is,” she proclaimed, and released his hand, quietly slipping into the unknown, barely a hushed whisper to be heard. Within a few seconds, she neared the source of the light, which grew much brighter than seemed to account for the closing distance. Perceiving she was about to touch it with her toes, suddenly, instantly, there was a forest in autumn.
Standing motionless, she surveyed her surroundings, instantly knowing the season by its signature odors of decaying leaves, inhaled in tandem with an acrid breeze that stung her nostrils. Behind her, a waxing sliver of moon faintly outlined the shadows of five grizzly looking men. They bore cavalry insignia, and sat whittling on the front porch stoop of a decrepit wooded cottage. Flying bits from their sticks, arcing in parabolic splendor, flared into the night, radiating a brief joy into the shallow breath of an eager darkness, which by then had become a great expanse, yet bereft of any stars.