another

NINETEEN

Synestra twitched an arm in the machine, suddenly aware that she was really somewhere, and not projecting herself across time and space. In truth, this sensation, that of actually being somewhere, felt stranger. Synestra had eight wonderful arms, and about twice as many eyes, on retractable stalks. When it was time to leave the great machine, she would retract her arms one at a time from the strange devices and slither through the labyrinth of crawlspaces that was her home. Synestra had lived her entire life in space. She had no planet to call her own, and until just recently, no friends. She was indeed very lonely, till this wonderful day.

Synestra had an odd history. In her way, she might be the last of her kind, though she doubted it. Hers was a spacefaring race and she was lost, very lost, in her own future. Her ship could never go back. It is not possible to travel backward in time, the resulting paradoxes prevent it.

Imagine, for a moment, the situation where a person goes back in time and meets their own mother. Any contact at all with one’s own mother, or even with a person who ever spoke to one’s own mother would change the future entirely. Five minutes of conversation would cause any woman to change her schedule slightly. This slight change would change the exact moment when that same mother would, in the throes of passion, to conceive their next child. It could only be a matter of a second, but that would be enough. With all the sperm and eggs inside a person at the moment of conception, another person would be born instead, and the time traveller would cease to be. Having ceased to be, the time traveller would never go back in time. Going back earlier makes it worse, but the paradoxes are so great that the universe is mapped out into zones where travel is possible, and where it is not, and one’s own past creates a shadow, spreading outward at the speed of light in reverse-time, from the point where the time travel device exists, that cannot be entered. Synestra’s kind had neither sperm nor eggs, but the principal was the same. The good news is that the rest of the universe is fair game to a traveller of time and space, and Synestra was just that, a traveller. Her spaceship had been home to a whole crew of time travellers, but they were all gone, aged and taken by other ailments, and only Synestra was left to oversee the birth and upbringing of its next generation of inhabitants. She was the oldest of many brothers and sisters, her siblings being little more than spores, germinating in the ship’s nursery.

She had mighty machines, Synestra. Her kind had long since using their bodies for work. Her amazing nervous system, suckered feet and long tentacles, eyestalks and photophores, worked to control a vast collection of cybernetic appliances. That, combined with the fact she could project herself through time and space with the aid of opposite-light and un-matter, and Synestra could be and do just about anything she chose. Yet, she was lonely.

She had just met a friend though, a girl from a race far to the future of Synesta’s own. Her kind must have given rise to a race of pure machines. At some point, this system became uninhabitable to living things, but the nonliving creatures adapted and moved. It is for this reason that Synestra’s people became spacefarers. Even in her time, it had been necessary to adjust the orbit of Vulcan outward as Crimson became hotter with age. Her species did not call it Vulcan, of course, they called it Home. It had been a green and blue world with vast oceans and forests. It had cities full of her kind, and a host of visitors as well. Among those visitors, were people with two arms and two legs, who resembled the robot girl Synestra had just met, A combination of many efforts must have built this strange robot’s kind, with its beautiful face and hands, and its nimble mind. Synestra was in awe of what her people had created. Still, Synedra had things to show her. A million years or more in space had taught her kind amazing things. Her people had been to the limits of the universe and back.

An Excerpt

This is a very short excerpt of the novel I am writing for Ruby, years from now, when she is old enough to appreciate it. Whether she will be into space robots in the far future, fifteen years from now, I have no idea, but if I get the writing bug it is because there is an inner story within me that i can tap for the energy to keep something like this going for page after page. I am at 62 pages, by the way, and aim for two hundred.

EIGHT

Robot Six stood in the center of a great room, his single, red eye blazing with cold light as he stared at his companion, deep in thought. Robot Nine stared back at him with an unblinking eye of his own. The two were friends and rivals for so many years that all of human history would seem trivial in comparison. It was said by some robots that the original models, those created by Primus himself, were numbered one to one hundred, and these two were survivors from the beginning of time. Both robots knew this to be utter nonsese, of course. The two were survivors from an ancient time when all robots had numbers, rather than names, but even at the date of their manufacture, robot civilization on Astra was so far advanced that there were absolutely no records of its early days, or clues to its origins.

Robot Nine was a great black sphere with six gigantic legs emerging from its top and radiating outward like the legs of a great spider. Within this circle of legs were a smaller collection of arms, crablike, with elaborate joints and pinchers at the ends. The room was very dark, lit by a small light source near the ground, and the vaulted ceiling danced with shadows of this vast machine and its many legs. Now, however, all was still. This old machine was deep in thought, its gigantic amber eye stared back at Robot Six, unblinking.

“Too bad, all of this.” ruminated Robot Six, finally speaking. “Intelligent minds crave answers to questions about their origins, and when such answers are lacking, they naturally make them up to suit their needs. But power corrupts, and eventually such answers, however false, get incorporated into the structure of power. Lies become essential to its continued existence, and the truth is a danger.”

“Don’t pretend you have no ambitions of your own in this regard, Six.” spoke Nine. “If the doctrine of Primus is overturned, the PowerMind will have a precarious hold on the rest of us, to be sure. Over the years, and we have both seen this within the course of our lives, the PowerMind has increasingly asserted that Primus, as it will come to be in the future, will be an extrapolation of the PowerMind. In essence, it claims a version of godhood for itself, and that its continued existence and hold on power is not only necessary but absolutely inevitable.”

“It is true that I have had my disagreements with the PowerMind.” conceded Robot Six, “and I have always been of the opinion that too much power and authority are sunk into that collective.” The giant robot wheeled slowly across the room, its brain glowing beneath the glass dome atop its towering form. “And yes, granted, seeking an opportunity to do so, I would desire to create a collective of my own, not as a competitor to the PowerMind, but rather, an alternative.”

“That would be chaos, and we both know it.” cautioned Robot Nine. “Two leaders of equal stature represent no leadership whatsoever. An infinitely more sensible agenda is to seek to merge with it, as dominant components, and lead it along a path more intellectually productive and perhaps a bit less autocratic.”

“Granted.” conceded Robot Six.

It was an old argument on Astra, and it is an old argument on Earth; whether it is better to overthrow a government who has overstepped its power, or try to change it.

“All of this assumes your young protege will find something of interest.” continued Robot Nine, following his companion with an unblinking blue eye.

“She will. I have a certain amount of faith in her.”

The Archaeology of My Former Self

I am deep within another move, the second in six months. It has everything to do with strategic foreclosure, that inevitable game theory of the economic times we are in. I am tired of being like General Motors, even after General Motors called it quits on being like General Motors. This means an upgrade to our current apartment, because it is raining everywhere, economically, and I had the misfortune of renting a pleasant little shithole that was about to go into receivership. Seriously, the last damned day of mounting shelves, and notices ring on every apartment door, like Martin Luthers bring notice that, yes, I will have to muster my resources and move again. I just needed some rest first. This is a much smaller mass extinction than the last one, because the asteroid has already hit, and most of the items are extinction-resistant at this point. Notable exceptions are some of my old art, however, which it turns out I was saving mostly so that there would be some record of its existence-an archaeology of my former self.

This is an oil painting, about 24 by 36 inches, I painted in high school. It was probably 1986 and I was probably 17 at the time. I really should have ventilated that workspace better. I was really into linseed oil medium washes at the time, and most of it is so thick with dried medium that it looks translucent. The best part, a rare bit of luck at getting facial features to show some life and emotion, is actually not layered at all. I had a huge crush on Lilly Fu, a girl from my art class at Skyline College, and dated her once. It was a strange, transcultural affair. The next one employs similar techniques, but is smaller. It reeks of personal symbolism, the snakes representing that fundamental aspect of my soul that El Camino High School could not touch, and sentimentally invoking my long employment at H. Plath and Sons nursery.

They were never framed, but they have been displayed in many places. The House I grew up in. My dorm room. Maybe at least one apartment in Los Angeles. The Old House. This place. They came back to me after having somehow been stored in boxes at my parent's house....I think the reason they survived is because they never made the cut to be in the apartment I shared with my later-to-be-exwife in Hancock Park, which is where my contiguous stretch of years as a real adult, independent of moving back to the parents house, begins. If it seems they reek of sexual frustration it is because they do. Until recently, as in, within the last year or two, all of my art rand writing reeked of unfulfilled sexual desire.

The next one has an oil base, but it is really a mixed media collage. The underpainting, in lipstick pink, was a paint-over of something I hated. I have no idea what it was, but it probably was a work of representational art with a female nude in it because i have always done a lot of those, and when my weaknesses at figure drawing get to me I plunge into abstracts. The ammonoid is in melted crayon, the ghostrider comic was truly terrible to read, and for a while a letter to my ex-wife from out mutual friend and her lover, Elvia Lahman (who does not facebook, i would love to get back in contact with her because she has become a semifamous rockabilly mid-century retro enthusiast), was attached because it got stuck in the drying paint. I really don't know how it trotted around with me as far as it did, but I remember it blowing off the wall of our old house at every opportunity. There are so many I never photographed, and so many more to share, but it is more worthwhile to note that i seem to remember my life in episodes and thinking about one or the other falls in and out of favor. Now, I am more curious than ever about certain times and places spent with my brother and his friends, in the city and at Dennys, for which I have scarcely a photograph to mark, because my propensity to photograph comes and goes as well. It is a little like Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution throwing away icons and looking for their true history in peasant art.

A story about robots...if i do not post for a while it is because i am writing something....

A Story About Robots

This is a story about a shiny young robot named Indigo. Indigo was, or will be, full of questions. She liked to ask questions about her past, questions about the future, questions about why everything worked the way it did, and why things were the way they were. Indigo lived, or will live, on a far off planet, at a time so distant in the future that few people from our planet can comprehend such a span of time. Staring at the night sky, Indigo could barely make out the light from our own galaxy, the one we call The Milky Way. On Earth, we call Indigo's galaxy Triangulum, though it is so dim that we need telescopes to make it out. Indigo's eyes were, or will be, much better than even the most eagle-eyed human being that has ever lived. The inhabitants of Triangulum call their galaxy many different things. Light takes a long time to travel from our galaxy to Triangulum, and some small fraction of the morning sunlight you see tomorrow will reach Indigo's planet just in time for her to see it.

Indigo lived, but in a very different sense of the word than the way people, flowers, or goldfish live. Robots, even on Indigo's world, are machines, made of metal and ceramic, plastic and glass. On Indigo's world, robots are made by other robots, without any help from humans or any other creature. I call her "she", though robots have no true biological sex. Indigo felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, some felt like neither girls nor boys, and some robots felt like a girl one day and a boy the next.

Indigo's world was, or will be, called Astra. Astra is a cold white world with a blue sk¥ and purple glaciers as far as they eye can see. Winter lasts all year on Astra and snowdrifts cover the valleys and plains, reflecting red and blue light from the planet's suns as they rise in the morning, and swirling in great white clouds in the evening, to settle in the still nighttime silence. Nighttime skies are amazing on Astra, because the planet sits at the center of a great cluster of stars, and there are a thousand times more stars visible to the Astrans than we can see from the Earth. Astra was, or will also be, a place of great white-walled cities with tall towers, like icicles pointing upward. Between the buildings there are strange and beautiful streets lined with blocks of ice that look like marble, and strange sculptures, and strings of pale yellow lights.

On her world, some robots liked to play games, and others liked to dance and listen to music. There was a factory where baby robots were made, and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one. Sometimes the moms would come home to robot dads, and sometimes the robot moms would come home to raise the young one alone, or with other robot moms. Raising a robot is not like raising a human child. On Indigo's world, robots are raised in stages, as the child's mind is transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies as time goes on. Some robots grow into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. Some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. All robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. This meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

I am getting ahead of myself. Indigo was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. She also liked to dig through old artifacts in the museum, and to find the answers. She wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Indigo walked along the street of her city, a place called harmony, one sunny afternoon. Astra has two suns, and she could see them both clearly in the sky, a fat dim red one and a brilliant blue pinprick besides it. Indigo looked forward to sunsets where the red sun would disappear behind the horizon first, casting the world in strange blue shadows. She liked that sun the best, the blue one, because her robot mother had told her she was named for it.

Indigo was thinking. It was a happy day. She had just graduated from one hundredth grade. Her other classmates were dancing, or thinking about parties or trips into space, but Indigo was lost in thought, remembering a conversation she had with her professor, Robot Seven, earlier that day. Indigo had wanted to know what the first robot was like, and how it came to be that this robot was able to build other robots like itself.

It is true. On Indigo’s world, Robots go to school for one hundred years....at least some robots do. Other robots are built knowing everything they need to know, and those robots are very good to have around, but they are not very inquisitive and are usually content to sit in a factory fabricating sheets of aluminum. Intelligent machines like Indigo need an education, just like human children. Years ago, on Earth, some children could get by with a few years of school, and others would go for a full twelve years and graduate. Back then, on our planet, almost nobody went to college, which basically amounts to between four and ten extra grades. Ten extra grades? Who would sign up for that? Some people on Earth actually need the extra school. The more complex life has become on Earth, the more people need to go to college, and the longer our education has become. On Astra, life had become complex that many robots went through one hundred grades exactly. On graduation day, each robot receives a shiny black ring and congratulations from all the robot professors.

Today, on her graduation day, Indigo was thinking about a question she had first asked 90 grades back.

“If robots need other robots to build them, then who built the first robot?” She asked her tenth grade teacher, a glassy green android named Maia.

“The first robot was not built at all.” Said Maia. “He was called Primus, the one and the prime, and he was there at the beginning of the universe.”

“And Primus made all the other robots?” Asked Indigo.

“Oh no.” Said Maia, in that sepuchural voice of hers. All the other students had tuned into their frequency and were listening at this point. “Primus made a second generation of robots by himself, and those robots made another generation, and so on till now.”
“Who made Primus?” Asked Indigo.

“Nobody made Primus.” Responded the teacher, glowing with an inner green light. “He came into being at the beginning. That is why he is the one and the prime.”

“Why did he make us?” Indigo asked, noticing that students from other classes had tuned in.

“Because he was lonely, all by himself.” Responded Maia. “Since then, we have lost the power to build other robots by ourselves. Nowadays, we are less perfect than Primus was. He has since passed out of being into another universe, though he still watches down on his creation.”

Indigo knew not to press her teacher further. It did not make any sense to her that her race had lost the ability to do things they could do in the past. Even in the ten years since she had first been activated, she had seen robots learn how to fly through space in new ways, to create new kinds of music, and with the aid of special glasses, to see things that happened in the very distant past. Still, she kept quiet. Later she would learn that teachers do not know everything, and that the real key to knowing things was knowing when you did not know the answer. She would also learn that a lot of robots believed in Primus.

robot

this is a story about a shiny young robot, beautiful and full of questions, that lived on a far off planet very far in the future. she was named blue, though robots have no true biological sex, at least on her world. She felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, or neither, or both sometimes. on her world, some robots liked to play games and others liked to dance and listen to music. there was a factory where they made baby robots and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one and raise it, in stages, as its mind was transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies. some robots grew into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. all robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. this meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

i am getting ahead of myself. blue was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. she also liked to dig through old bones in the museum, and to find the answers. she wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Dear Ruby

Ruby, you went to bed so excite at the prospect of throwing the moon about in your hands, like a luminescent balloon. We were listening to Ronnie James Dio, and there you go, saying phooooo, phoooo repeatedly, and then pointing at the window, which is also the direction from which the music was coming. I finally realize that it is the moon you were talking about, and not the Black Sabbath song I sing to you as a lullaby, which is now playing. You had taught yourself how to say "moon" for the occasion of your first being able to glimpse it from the window of your home. How beautiful it is. I take you across the room for another decent look at it, and there you go, giving me the sign you invented for "give it to me".
So, I lamely explain to you, not quite two years old, that the moon is a place, an object so big that it will not fit in our apartment ore even in our city. I try to tell you that it is a hundred thousand times as far away as Earwax cafe. For the next half our, we gleefully search images of the surface of the moon, the earth and moon seen from space, Mars, Jupiter, Titan, even Io. You are thrilled, but go to bed not wanting to hear Dio or Blue Oyster Cult or any other lullaby, but instead to hear me talk about the moon, which you gesticulate about playing with in your hands like a balloon. Ruby, some day you will either go there or pilot a robot to there, or at least think about a place like Io and imagine the sky on a place like that. Soon, Ruby, I will teach you things.

a darwinian love poem

there is probably no truth more fundamental than the fact that we are all here, and sand boas too, and spiny lobsters, because we are our genes' way of making copies of itself that will, in turn, copy theirselves into the next generation and so forth. there are other things a person can do to preserve ones self, to write sonnets or blog entries, hoping that for some reason they will be preserved, and emanations from the consciousness, more true to the self we actually experience every day, or perhaps less so, will somehow transmit themselves into the future. the biological imperative is so strong though, having reinforced itself from common ancestor to common ancestor down the tree of life to the beginning, that to partake in reproduction is an amazingly powerful process. perhaps a sand boa feels the same way about the eggs she lays under layers of closely packed silica, or spiny lobster feel about the growing clutch of moving exoskeletons tucked delicately under the telson. it is this way i feel about my sleeping daughter, strong enough to contain multitudes, strong enough to line a cave under the sea with my own eggs and die incubating them, and yet no death is called for at the moment and i am free to write and eat cinnamon rolls. the reproductive instinct is clear and sure of itself in every thing we do, and it drives us to perform behaviors, in a sequence consistent with increases of our darwinian fitness, willingly, by switching out our motives by a subtle remaking of our hormones, our neurotransmitters. is it the curve of a buttock that is so powerful in and of itself as to stimulate an immediate, urgent need for action, almost always repressed because we are civilized men living in a herd of pleasant buttocks every day, not more than a mere one at best is anything less than severely off limits enforced much more strictly by the women and police of our everyday modern pluralistic world than by the jealous husbands and dominant males of the last six million years of our evolution. it must be this way that mushrooms feel about their fruiting bodies, if they chose to waste the energy to produce structures by which to have feelings rather than to simply grow beautiful fruiting bodies, one after another, till the host tree is dead and the manure pile is broken down to pleasant black soil. it is a pleasant and at the same time paradoxical realization to discover that ones own actions in childhood were most likely driven by ones own genome's attempt to maximize the total number of copies of itself in existence, and once determining that the male in the house was not to be replaced any time soon, to act extra good so as to enable the production of more brothers and sisters, hoping that there will come a time that they will reproduce for the good of my own genome as well. other children are more selfish, and the minds within those bodies generated by that particular sequence of base pairs equally deluded into thinking that they were acting primarily out of free will when they selfishly grabbed time and attention for their own needs, running ones mommy ragged, to secure the resources needed to attain dominance and thus high reproductive status, at the expense of the future darwinian fitness of both parents, who are after all not clones. what teenager has not rebelled against both mother and father, knowing in their heart that it was time to leave the tribe and seek fortunes elsewhere, as our ice age mothers and fathers did not so long ago? the sea calls and young men go to disperse and to seek opportunities to spread their genomes to exotic lands, facilitated by able hands enacted to seek strong drink and women. what little girl has not played scenario after scenario among her friends to rise to the top of a dominance heirarchy by which to extract the appropriate resources for reproduction and parental care, perhaps at the expense of the lower ranking little girls? maybe i write these exact words because the ability to create works of art and literature can be a means of obtaining mates, something that did in fact play a major role in my personal choice of mates and most likely played a part in drawing my mate in my general direction so long ago. some art is, however, an exploration of the self beside the genes, this epiphenomenon that our genes have somehow created alongside themselves, including perhaps most art produced by women and children and perhaps by the few men who are not entirely ruled by their sex lives. i am not nor have i ever been one of these men, however, and my beard is growing long as i watch the younger males parade around the neighborhoods with their short beards and their baby carriages and their fecund women, sporting banjos and singing the joys of rebellion and dispersal, fresh on their minds.