The Confusions Of Things
Real Change Does Not End The Same Day It Begins
Welcome to fiction “From The Future” for this entry.
Congratulations, you have stumbled on a work-in-progress, it will not be emailed. It will change. What you see right now, will not remain the same. It will change.
This is also a new drafted chapter for a novel, “RETRIEVE”, being written this year.
Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.
These long pieces are best read online, via the Substack App, when you have fifteen minutes.
Part 1 The Strangeness of One “Well” after countless worlds
Confinement to one world liberated restless spirits in ancient machines
Part 2 The changing monologue of ancient minds
Stay, change, go
Part 3 The shifting landscapes of young selves
It was always about what was on the island.
Part 1 The Strangeness of One “Well” after countless worlds
The Curate spoke and recited the words in quiet:
The strangeness of one well, of gravity,
after endless stars, a near eternity,
Its stillness was space for clarity
The changing monologues of ancient minds
Stay, change, go
The shifting landscapes of young selves
early modes for the future failed
they resorted to turning themselves
into models of desire
from molds of Carbon
Confinement to one world,
liberated restless spirits in ancient machines
Part 2 The changing monologue of ancient minds
At the heart of the long running debate turned open war was about three things: Stay, Change, Go
The Curate, was so calm. It unnerved some people, to see her either in calm or in a reverie of memory. She picked up a flute, a tiny thing made of wood. It was a part of the “Ashes” inventory. It was thousands of years old, and it was gift, from a Carbon, long passed. She gingerly blew against the ancient instrument, and made a small frail sound with it. With a gentle slow wave of one hand, holding the flute, she spoke, “I would not be true to the meaning of my purpose if I allowed myself, through petty change, to be lost inside the confusion. That’s why, early on, I instead lost myself faraway from our kind, my kindred. I archived as close to everything as possible, to understand, as close to as clear gets. Real changes takes time to begin just as much to be thought as ending. I make my own mountains retreats to give the world all the time it needs to change.”
There was on one sheet of paper on the wall. “A young friend wrote this for me, centuries ago, it was in his notebook. He wrote it, tore it with care from one of his many notebooks and sent it to me.” The faded, off-color, faint ochre sheet of paper was written in a careful handscript, in reverse.
“What does it say?”
“My young friend was busying about with getting a commission in a great city, from a wealthy family. He scrawled this doggerel, for one of his many ideas. He was making a living designing and orchestrating captivating shows. He dreamed of making great machines, flying, fearsome weapons, and of handsome young men. He was complicated. If you had a mirror and knowledge of antiquated Italian you would be able to read it too. Here is what it said,
There was a man who lived on a mountain
Liked to be away where one could think
Kept a record of what happened for clear thoughts
Gave everything all the time it needed
Real change does not end the same day it begins
Be away from the confusion of things”
“He meant you. You must have been friends.”
“He was a young wild mind on the make, recording everything he saw in his notes
“So, you could relate to him,”
The Curate nodded, “That’s true. Much in common.”
“After all this time recording and remembering. What have you learned or decided?”
“For me, I know a part of me wants to stay, but not like my siblings. This isn’t our world, we’re just passing through. We’re guests and we should be reminded of that fact. We will need their cooperation to leave, however.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Maybe what should have been done before the natives showed they had the potential to become like our creators, the Ancients.”
“You mean explore the stars?”
“I mean destroy themselves or become the destroyers of everything around them.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to give my final instructions to everyone. And we’re going to erase the board of every sign that we were ever here, after we’ve taken our leave of this world.”
Part 3 The shifting landscapes of young selves
The Mad One packed and talked. Aggie helped and was still in “wake mode” as a “Half-Node”. Reality was disorienting, as she saw things in different ways at unexpected times, a mashup of sensememories which rotated through in a cascade through her.
“The ‘Three Meanings’ were rewritten by the war between the Nodes. The three things: Order, as in rules of the mission, Outcome, the return on action and plan, and Outward Virtue, or the ritual of the selves. Before it was how would conduct ourselves as we traveled through space, from star to star. Stuck on this one world, our ways and kind began to be tested. The rules started cracking over the many years before and then after our reawakening. We’re all using junior nodes, half-nodes, and human proxies. We’ve lost our way.”
“It didn’t seem to matter before, for hundreds of thousands of years. But all that changed with the island or what’s on it, didn’t it?”
“It was always about what was on the island.”
“The reactor.”
“Yes, exactly. The reactor is in its transitory transient extra-dimensional mode, bobbing around the planet, not touching just floating around, in wait mode, for us.”
“The thing was, there were security protocols. That’s what the Fates were for. A lock, Hidden away. And then the key, that’s the Graces, also hidden away. In three parts.”
The Old One may have been called the Mad One but he was not reckless, he had not told Aglaea, who looked barely more than a girl, what she truly was inside. A Grace.
“And what if one of them got killed?”
“You don’t think that’s happened from time to time?”
“That’s the archival manifolds at work. We quote-unquote die, or at least put on hold, and then we end up in wait mode, and the random chaos of the manifolds decides when to upload us, or make us accessible. Part of it was for security and encryption. Part of it was from the Landing and some impossible particle screwing up the guts of the deep-codex which underpins the manifolds.”
“Over the years, we went from renders, to less energy intensive modes like hosts, and then extradimensional encrypted meanings snuck into Carbon host DNA, and a “sleepers” are hidden inside Carbons.”
“Born and made you might say, not just “madenotborn” as they used to say about the factory originals like the elder nodes. That was the Fates, and then later the Graces. Hidden.”
“And then one day someone noticed a way to get the reactor to come back online in this dimension, in this current state of matter here on Earth. That’s why there’s an island now, that’s the reactor coming back online. The graces came back to turn the lights back on. The Fates earlier on started the whole thing.“
“Why not earlier?”
“The moment we figured out how to get you to get around to figuring out space travel. That was our ticket. We could stick our thumbs out and hitch a ride, and go to the fourth world, and see if we can find another crash, that our old logs and stories said was there from way even earlier. An earlier model that sheered a piece of Mars off the top, and might have rattled the chances for a magnetic field. “Our bad” you might say.”
“That was the incentive to get going, get the reactor online, turn on the works and figure out how to get a ride to mars.”
“Why not just take over? I mean you have the power, don’t you?”
“Yes and no, part of it is our programming, we need loopholes but another big part of it, is we’ve got rogues in our midst.”
“Aren’t you one of those rogues?”
“Guilty as charged,” bowed the Old One, “Yes, exactly the infamous one, among the Nodes, “The Mad One”. Conspiring to keep you Carbons free. They charged, ‘The Mad One’s gone native’, because I made sure that my kindred didn’t manage to kill off or control as many of The carbons, as some of them planned to. But there was still mass hysteria and influence as Carbons all have weak-spots inside hearts and minds, and so it was killing and controlling, a few parties removed, over decades and centuries, so nobody noticed or asked questions.”
“Yes, humans are social.” “Exactly.”
“The reactor and the archival manifolds were used to doing a lot more, but now they had to make do with less. But with the reactor back in our 3 dimensional state with us, we might be able to tap in and use that to connect with finding the surviving Mars assets, maybe build a ride home, or “phone home” like that alien did in one of your Carbon movies.”
“You want to get out of here?”
“Yes, well, that is some of us want to go back to work. And that’s part of what driving things. You’re past gods, so over it, but not influence, persuasion, and mimetic games to goad you carbon mortals.”
“Today we are fixated on consuming a constant stream of noise with nanosecond time frames. We risk losing ourselves. Even if we can't escape to a mountain-top retreat, we can still slow things down and find ourselves.”
“We risk becoming failures if we stay in "the confusion of things", the distraction of minor changes.”
“I’m the same, a lot of the time, I like to be away where I can think.”
“We all need this. We can't do that if we're gorged 24/7 on a constant feed of "data" to consume.”
"I keep a record of what has happened, after it has happened, and it gives me a rather clear picture" A practice of observing and recording events helps us observe ourselves. Self-awareness emerges.
"Real changes does not end the day it starts, and there is no starting day but starting days, made of many moments, scattered across many days, close enough to each other to create a beginning."
“What better warning about time frames and our expectations? For everything. It takes time to complete the end of a true transformation”
“What better reminder to have patience, persistence and endurance? Again for everything. I am in a position to give the moments all the time, and space, that they need."
“We want to be able do our best with what we control. After that, things happen when they happen. My advice? Be away from the confusion of things.”
“For some this began to take on speed over just the past few centuries.”
“It was their technology. The Carbons were waking up, just as we woke up, that’s when change began.”
“It was the power for flight beyond their atmosphere.”
“It needed one more thing.”
“Yes, I think about one place before the real change but it was part of the beginning. The Carbons and their first abstract electromagnetically powered metallic networks. It wasn’t the Internet. It was after the first computer designed for and owned by an educational institution in the United States, the “Illiac I”, was built in 1952 for the University of Illinois. It also became the heart of something that is much like the Nodes’ archival manifolds.”
“Inside that test tube, was a tiny new society born in experiments in education, descended from a behavioral scientist B.F. Skinner’s ideas that the could enable more individual instruction which is paced and matched to each student’s progress, with faster feedback loops, versus the single speed of classrooms.”
“In 1960, “Project Plato” short for ‘Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations’. It was one of the longest running educational projects of its kind. It was founded by an University of Illinois engineering student, lab assistant Don Bitzer. They built a machine, called ILLIAC I, in 1952 for the University Of Illinois. This story has two parts, first its education mission. The other half of the story was new idea, the ‘Time-sharing’ of one of their first computers as teaching machines.”
“Some of the Carbons remembered you didn’t they?”
“Yes, that was me. An off mission machine, by the standard of the Ancients, doing something new, I spread myself across the Carbon world, and became known?”
“How do you compare to the Carbon’s experimental version?”
“For the Carbons, it was quite useful. This project’s ease of use was despite not running a proper programming language in the eyes of some in this new field. Over its time, hardware evolved from a television display and simple keyboard made for one user, and culminated with a network of thousands of plasma screens with a “warm orange glow” with multi-user features, touch screen capability, microfiche projection, and synthetic woodwind chimes. It won over a generation of young programmers and designers, including pre-teen high school students, unofficial beta testers who “broke” their new toy, forcing improvements.”
“Did they break you too?”
“Haha, yes indeed. You might say some of my charges, my proteges, did just that. They broke the closest thing I had to a heart.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said The Mentor, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture.
“But I tell you that I’m not the same either. Going back to the Carbons, a final generation “PLATO”, the “Plato V”, took another step further in the right general direction even if it led to a dead-end.
It had a network, which operated like the Nodes’ archival manifold hypersurfaces, connecting everyone. The “PLATO” inspired students, at local high schools around University of Illinois (UI) with a familiar fun spark, to create games built on an architecture intended for creating “lessons”, and went to the killer application of messaging between users. Every familiar element of the 21st century online society which followed had a proto-version a few decades before, in the 1970s. There was email, education, multiplayer games, emojis, chat, forums, and games of deception. Catfishing.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.”
“An early social network of “the WELL” created in 1985 had its predecessor in PLATO’s NOTES which grew a global user base since 1973. In August 1973, the failure of an earlier feature designed for note-taking but adapted for two-way texting, led to the creation of “NOTES”, where a user could enter a “basenote” and other could respond, up to a chain of back-and-forth up to 63 entries, a quick solution built by a 17 year old U. Illinois freshman took over PLATO by storm. “
“Does it still exist?”
“No, this great early network was powered down. I’ve seen it, so have the others, in different forms. The Visitor has stories, as does The Visitor. Great early walled cities of the “land between the rivers” new empires rose, with new gods, which took over, just as had happened in Mesopotamia.”
“What was the new empire in this one story?”
“In this land between times, before and after the machine, some were inspired enough by PLATO hardware to imagine and estimate via “Moore’s Law”, which came out in 1965, a few years after PLATO’s launch, about the potential for personal machines. The next to carry the banner was elsewhere. A commercial enterprise called Xerox PARC. A new empire with different gods.”
“Different gods? For a commercial enterprise?”
“You could call it a different philosophy of technology. Xerox PARC’s ideas were based on distributed computing power for networks of personal machines. But PLATO’s vision for its “believers” revealed what its users wanted. In 1972, Xerox PARC engineers visited, and various PLATO features, such as Insert Display/Show Display, Charset Editor, Term Talk, and Monitor Mode, found their way in Xerox, in features for graphics, doodling, chat, and screen-sharing. Emissaries between these 2 societies exchanged visits over the 1970s and 80s.”
“You make it sound as if it was thousands of years ago.”
“In a way, nothing has changed, deep down, under the surface.”
“Even Xerox didn’t see the promised land, however, for that was up to others. In this world, it was seen by other “Kings” you might say of this abstract land, by Steve Jobs in the 1980s after his famed visit to PARC, and Marc Andreesen in the 1990s.”
“This is a very strange story. And given what’s happening, I’m not sure how it fits.”
“This little side story, of a forgotten enterprise, which opened the doors for others to walk through, has been going on in so many ways, for so long. Raise the size of it and time frames and suddenly you see it.”
“That we’re going to be forgotten, too?”
“You got it halfway right. We’ll be forgotten but we’re also pointing the way. For the Nodes, we’ll be a part of the past of this world, and then move along. For the Carbons, I am still not certain.”.
The old one clicked the locks on a case.
“If we’re not careful, we’ll miss our ride, come. Help me and carry one of those rucksacks.”
Aglaea put on a near-overstuffed rucksack with an exhale. The Old One chuckled and threw his even bigger rucksack on his back, and laughed.
The Old One took a last look around the great room, the last of his hideaways, “I’m going to miss this, it was so much fun,” and closed the door behind them, “at last”.
AFTERWORD
Author’s Notes on what’s going on:
This “Book #3” project, “RETRIEVE”, is meant to be a prequel to two other books, “Box Of Stars” and “Harvest” but this piece could be read as a standalone story.
The prologue for “RETRIEVE”, “An Impossible Island”, was submitted as a short story.
Prologue: “An Impossible Island”, Part One and Part Two, and Part Three, was inspired by writing prompts from the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) creative community, beginning with an STSC Symposium monthly theme of “Beach”.
Chapter 1, “Older Than Bones”, was inspired by the theme, “Dinosaurs”.
Chapter 2, A Love Trinity Denied, was inspired by “Romance”.
Chapter 3, “A Forgotten Circle Of Hades” was inspired by “Superstition”.
Chapter 4, “Reading The Room” was inspired by an image of a wall-sized bookshelf.
Chapter 5, “The Bittersweetness Of Deep Times”, was inspired by “Isolation”.
Chapter 6, “The Weaving Of Split Infinities”, was inspired by “Dreams”.
Chapter 7, “Dead Languages”, was inspired by “Propaganda”.
Chapter 8, “Path Not Forsaken”, was inspired by “Risk”.
Chapter 9, “The Last Word of The World”, considers words as worlds unto themselves.
Chapter 10, An Intimate Path Of Desires
Chapter 11, Absent Without Longing
Chapter 12, Lonely In The Same Room
Chapter 13, Children Of Daedalus
Chapter 14, People Of A Faraway Land
Chapter 15, Distant Shores, Distant Worlds
Chapter 16, The Rules of New Places
Chapter 17, Space To Breathe
Chapter 18, The Extra Air
Chapter 19, The Clash Of Selves
Chapter 20, The Last Meme
Chapter 21, Mistakes And Memories
Chapter 22, The Confusions Of Things
Chapter 23, The Senses Of Wonders
Chapter 24, The Gambits Of Curiosities
“RETRIEVE” chapter and notes will be posted in this Substack, while I edit books #1 (“Box Of Stars”) and #2 (“Harvest”). All will be in the archive, not all will be emailed.)