It rained a lot last week. The rain is good. It’s a sign that we’re nearly at the end of our country’s painful eight years under the whip and lash of those who hate us. The flooding is a living I Ching sign: Overflow.

This morning I woke up very early; it was still dark; I was awake because my wife was bustling around packing for a trip. I laid low with my eyes closed for about forty-five minutes, and in my head, I went over all of my as-yet-unwritten Chapter Seven, scene by scene. It was like dreaming while awake. I thought of a propaganda phrase from my novel, Spacetime Donuts, “Dreamers Are Us!”

When I was done, I told my wife what I’d been doing, and she was like, “Poor Rudy, that sounds like so much work!” And I said, “But I like doing it!”

And then, brushing my teeth, I wondered if I could remember all the thoughts I’d had. Odd to think that I can remember such intricate scenarios by means of—what?—circulating patterns of excitation in my neurons? Bulked up synapse connections? Biochemical trails?

I always feel safer after I’ve written it down. I forget so many things.

Later that morning I went to the physically whipped, but very congenial, Caffe Pergolesi (“The Perg”) in Santa Cruz and typed in my already fading memories of dawn’s lovely waking dream.

And then I went to Four Mile Beach with my old pal Jon Pearce. A lot of seagulls standing around on the beach. Jon agrees it would be great to be reincarnated as a California brown pelican.

Several nice new reviews of Postsingular came out lately, see the excerpts and links on the Postsingular page.

Here’s today’s outline for Hylozoic, “Chapter 7: To the Gibbet!” This chapter will be from the point of view of good old Thuy Nguyen.

(7.1)

When Thuy and Azaroth leave Jeroen “Hieronymus” Bosch’s house in the Hibrane (the local year is 1496), they go out the back door, get his boat, and row to the Muddy Eel. Thuy really wants a bath. She meets Anja in the bathing area. Anja is a cute, lively prostitute, formerly a housemaid. She claims she’d slept with Bosch—but only once—as he insisted on pouring out the contents of his chamber pot upon her naked body before they had intercourse.

Thuy is savoring how it feels to once again be in a world without telepathy. Enjoying the low hubbub from the marketplace. The old-school hive mind. She has dinner with Azaroth, they sit around talking to some jugglers and conjurers. An older fortune-teller woman reads Thuy’s palm, she has a weird prefiguring of Thuy’s impending trip beyond infinity. Magic is real. The seer tells Thuy she’ll be give birth to Mother Earth.

Wine is passing around; Thuy begins dancing on the table top. She’s enjoying the spoken-word medieval hive mind. Groovy, the aktual pitchfork, shows up and hangs around a little. He tells Thuy that the beanstalk where he took Jayjay is actually in the subdimensions. Thuy says a little about the trip that she took to Subdee back in the first volume. The pitchfork says that if she’d gone deeper, she’d be a zenohead capable of ten tridecillion thoughts in a second—or maybe even an aktual, capable of infinitely many thoughts.

Groovy talks about how to think of the subdimensional land of Subdee as underlying the Lobrane, the Hibrane, and the interbrane Planck sea between them. He says to think of a city with two buildings on either side of a street: the buildings are the branes, and the ground level is the Planck sea. Although we see the sea exposed in between the buildings, this dividing interface continues under the buildings. And in the underground is a continuous maze of passages and carnival-like spook stuff: Subdee.

Bosch’s ill-tempered, drunken, alderman neighbor, Jan Vladeracken arrives late in the evening. He grabs Thuy—who’s one-foot tall compared to him—and shoves her doll-like head and shoulders inside his smelly, baggy trousers; she wrestles her way out, giving him a solid punch in the stomach that doubles him over. Azaroth smacks Vladeracken on the side of the head, knocking him to the ground, and the worthy says he’ll see them all dangling from the gibbet. Anja cools things out, calling him Mijnheer and leading him off to the baths.

Thuy crosses the square, enjoying the bustle. People are getting ready for the procession; actors are rehearsing tableaux of bible scenes; musicians check their instruments. Jugglers practice in the dark.

Thuy beds down in Bosch’s basement, wondering where Jayjay is.

(7.2)

In the morning she awakes to yelling and then she feels lazy eight unfurl. All the Hibrane objects are waking up and everyone is getting omnividence, telepathy, and endless memory—although the locals don’t yet realize they’re capable of teleportation. The bricks on the floor talk to Thuy. The silps aren’t so verbal as in the Lobrane, as they aren’t incorporating the knowledge of any ambient orphids. They speak in images rather than in words.

Reaching further and further out, Thuy contacts Hibrane Gaia, the newly accessible planetary mind, but this Gaia is quite inchoate and non-verbal, something like the traditional notion of God as a numinous glow.

Thuy teleports up to Jayjay in the attic. The harp says Jayjay and Thuy are supposed to become aktuals, too, pretty soon. She asks them to remember exactly what she looks like. And then she turns into a green woman with three eyes—Lovva from planet Pepple. She stretches out her arms and disappears, flying home to Pepple.

Moments later an identical woman appears, clueless. It’s Lovva, just arriving from Pepple. Her sojourn on the Lobrane and Hibrane Earths will be a closed loop. Thuy tells Lovva she is supposed to look like a harp and hang around here for 500 years.

“A long time,” says Lovva, then laughs. “Or not. I see, I see.” Apparently she has some kind of internal time control, so that she can psychically whiz through centuries, seemingly just sitting there. Embarking on her loop, she turns into the harp, copying its pattern from and Thuy, and learning the all-important lazy-eight-unfurling Lost Chord from Jayjay.

Bosch pokes his head up into the attic, he’s both delighted and terrified scared. He is wondering if he’s gone mad, or if demons have taken over the town. Is it the end of the world? Thuy and Jayjay reassure him. His wife Aleid and the maid Kathelijn are hysterical, inconsolable.

Alderman Vladeracken shows up from next door, angry, blaming Jayjay, Thuy, and Jeroen Bosch for the change, wanting to arrest them. Eager to escape this tedious bully, Jayjay shows Jeroen how to teleport. Nobody here knows this trick yet. The three hop to the market to enjoy the scene.

The marketplace is crowded with merchants, country people, city people, musicians, beggars, conjurors, magicians, acrobats, pickpockets, cutpurses, soldiers, guilds, images of saints, actors pretending to be biblical figures, floats, litters, canopies, painted banners. Everything’s talking, including the items on sale: sheets, shoes, stockings, leather shoelaces, hats and caps, pins, baskets, kettles, pots an pans, twine, vegetables, fruit, flour, meat, butter, cheese, cloth.

The locals are bewildered. They’re trying half-heartedly to carry on, glaring at the talking objects and shaking their heads, each person kind of wondering if it’s just them alone going crazy like the beggars who’ve eaten too much ergot-tainted bread.

Vladeracken is pushing through the crowd, yelling. Thuy remembers the art of teep camouflage—she shows Jayjay and Bosch how to do it. And now they look (via teep, but not face to face) like a hunchback with a cat and a dog. A group watching a cockfight disperses; nobody can handle the direct teep experience of the roosters’ pain. In the hubbub, Thuy, Bosch and Jayjay get out of Vladeracken’s direct sight and now he can’t find them by teep.

‘S-Hertogenbosch is known for knife making and for bell making. Casting a bell was a dangerous thing; the big bells for churches had to be cast on site, as they were so heavy. To kick off this year’s annual procession for the Virgin, the locals are casting a special bell.

Distracted by the burbling voice of the molten iron, a guy falls into it and is hideously burned to death during the casting. The guy and his body let out hideous juicy screaming. The silps of the molten iron and the charring human flesh sing an antiphonal anthem.

The crowd’s mood shifts to a mass freak-out. The superstitious locals begin flagellating themselves, rubbing ashes on their faces, and looking for someone to blame. The soldiers and monks are arresting people in droves: the beggars, the actors, the magicians.

An orgy of punishments springs up sway before town hall. Flogging, mutilation by sword, breaking on the wheel, beheadings by the sword. Jayjay and Thuy feel sorry for the victims, they start teeping them the secret of how to teleport away, and the docket empties out.

Vladeracken spots the cause and points an accusing finger at Jayjay and Thuy. “These devils have ensorcelled our town! Bosch and his familiars!”

Soldiers with cudgels descend, laying out the three of them unconscious before they can teleport to safety.

(7.3)

When Thuy comes to, they’re imprisoned inside the cathedral. The cathedral’s dour silp is willing to block teleportation and teep so that people can be tortured and executed in here. (A good symbol for religion’s dark side.) The incense-wafty, waxy-feeling, body-odorous air of the cathedral is blocking the teep and teek of whoever is inside. It’s like being packed in cotton wool.

The execution frenzy has been moved in here. The floor runs with blood. Azaroth, Thuy, Jayjay, and Bosch are to be hung from a makeshift gallows or gibbet above the pulpit. Thuy and Jayjay are shackled with heavy chains, the Hibraner-sized shackle rings around their waists. Even though they have the six-to-one brane-to-brane power advantage, they can’t readily break loose. And they’re scared to try, as two soldiers with cross-bows are standing over them, a fat one and a thin one, keeping the crossbow bolts aimed at their throats.

Azaroth actually does get hung before Thuy and Jayjay can think of any way to stop the horror. Some real sorry over losing this friend. And Jayjay is to be next. Thuy is shackled up next to Bosch. “Help me,” Thuy whispers urgently to the great artist. “Make a distraction.”

Bosch flips a painting rag into the air, tossing it with such kiqqie lazy-eight-mind-enhanced precision that it looks for all the world like a ghostly devil. The distracted soldiers track the rag with their cross-bows.

Meanwhile the executioner has shoved Jayjay off the pulpit; he’s arcing down toward the floor, with the slack of the rope about to run out. Thuy bursts her shackle, grabs a sword from a soldier, races across the floor, cuts Jayjay’s rope, kicks down open the cathedral door, and shrills the Hrull whistle. Jayjay and Bosch join here.

(7.4)

But there’s no sign of the alien manta ray for a moment. Just as the soldiers are about to recapture our three heroes, the pitchfork belatedly appears—he says he was in between the branes, scouting out the best path back to the Lobrane Earth. And now, blessedly, Chu and the giant manta ray Duxy glide in to save them, homing in on the beacon of Bosch’s upheld brush.

Duxy flies back across the Planck Sea bearing Thuy, Chu, Jayjay, Glee, Bosch, and the pitchfork. They’re drawn into a maelstrom, deep into Subdee. Partway down, Glee, Bosch, Thuy and Chu have become zenoheads like Jayjay, capable of speeded up thought.

Thuy looks out from Duxy at Subdee. Walls of it around them, like the walls of a tunnel leading into the Hollow Earth. Last time Thuy visited Subdee, it looked like ancient Egypt to her, but that was only because the subbies had recently eaten the Egypt-obsessed Jeff Luty. This time Bosch’s thoughts seem to be driving the subbies antics. For Thuy is seeing Boschian scenes, perhaps something like Bruegel’s Bosch-influenced The Fall of the Rebel Angels. Thuy is scared.

Suddenly the pitchfork shoves Jayjay, Thuy, and Bosch out of Duxy’s mouth. They’re free-falling towards the infinity at the base of the great whirlpool vortex. Due to Bosch’s influence, infinity looks like a triangle holding the eye of God. Looking upwards, Thuy sees Groovy, the pitchfork, jump free of Duxy, the manta. The pitchfork cackles, turns into a lanky hillbilly, and speeds home towards Pepple. Lightened and freed of Groovy’s influence, Duxy spirals upwards and wings towards Lobrane Earth, taking Chu home.

(7.5)

And now they pass through infinity, though the Eye of God. The interface is like a cotton candy cloud. And on the other side they see—Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, all three panels. Thuy, Jayjay and Jeroen are aktuals now. They can alter their bodies at will. Thuy forms herself into an egg—for womb (she’s pregnant), for incubation (she’s working on a metanovel called Hive Mind), and to act as a resonant gong. Jayjay becomes a corkscrew; Bosch a flying bagpipe.

The three stick together and carry out four tasks. Bosch, as squalling bagpipe, brings lazy eight to the paradise panel on the left and to the hell panel on the right. These prove to be Pengö and Hrullwelt a million years ago. Jeroen is blowing Last Judgment blasts. Sqwooonk! And, again, Sqwooonk! Two tasks down, two to go.

They focus on the central panel, which is Pepple. Thuy brings lazy eight to Lobrane Pepple a thousand years ago, she’s a gonging egg. Digging beneath the panel, she does the back side of it as well, which is Hibrane Pepple. It isn’t so complicated for her to unfurl lazy eight as it was for the harp. She has a better idea of what she’s doing. And she doesn’t have such a fuss about handing both branes. The harp didn’t even know about the other brane before she became an aktual. One more task to do.

Time waves are sloshing around them. Fish fly in the sky. Jayjay, as corkscrew, takes a stab at the central panel, at Pepple, he drills in and aktualizes Groovy and Lovva, bringing them here to the glowing white-light land of infinity. An infinity of mirrors, and multiple images.

Bosch says farewell and returns to Hibrane Earth. Jayjay and Thuy return to Lobrane Earth

I had my first full day of work after the holiday break yesterday. It felt so good to be tidying everything up, removing some of the low-level anxiety that nags me when I know there are still holes in my plot. And it was nice simply to be working, back in my own world of thoughts.

Hylozoic is nearing a manageable state. I’m looking forward to finally having the titanium skeleton of story in place—and then being free to mold the foam rubber bulges of characterization, clothe the creation in eye-catching garnishes of description, and polish up the dialog.

Alas, last night about 3 a.m. I thought of some problems with Pekka. Here’s the situation (the axioms, if you will).

(1) The invading Peng birds come from the planet Pengö, which has a planetary mind that’s orchestrating the invasion. I am calling this mind Pekka—she’s a counterpoint to Earth’s planetary mind Gaia.

(2) In the current draft, Pekka appears to Jayjay in the form of a Peng bird on a beanstalk leaf partway out towards lazy eight infinity. In order to enslave Jayjay, Pekka weaves her body’s particle strings with the strings of his body, forming a quantum entanglement that can’t be jammed or blocked out in the same way that lazy eight teep signals can be jammed.

(3) Not being humanoid, the planetary mind Pekka is not capable of teleporting or teeking (affecting objects via telekinetic mental powers) or vaaring (using runes to create new objects from thin air, also known as direct matter control).
The difference betwen teeking and vaaring, is that if you can vaar, then you yourself can figure out the proper quantum computational program—called a rune—which will convert some existing chunk of matter into your targeted form. Designing a rune is so computationally demanding as to require, I believe, an infinite mind. Pekka does indeed have an infinite mind so she can design the necessary runes. Her difficulty is that she can’t put the runes onto Earth atoms; she needs a local slave or stooge for that.

(4) Pekka has powerful teep (telepathy), and can mentally contact humans or Peng tulpas on Earth.

(5) We may suppose, if necessary, that Pekka has been to infinity and is an aktual and has mental Turing Evaluator abilities, therefore she can design runes to achieve desired effects. But she can’t vaar them into atoms herself.

Now to lay bare the contradictions in this state of affairs and to deduce some additional assumptions which will resolve the logical clash!

Question: How does Pekka project a physical presence through infinity and partway down the eighth dimension towards Earth? Isn’t this presupposing an ability to teleport to Earth, which is exactly the ability that she doesn’t have?

Answer: Pekka didn’t produce that body, Groovy the pitchfork did! He vaared it into existence and hooked it up to Pekka’s teep, and Pekka quantum entangled that avatar’s body with Jayjay’s. Why, then, doesn’t Groovy just vaar all the Peng invaders directly onto Earth? He could, but he doesn’t want to, it’s too much trouble, and he doesn’t like Pekka well enough to carry out a sustained campaign on her behalf. And neither Pekka nor a loyal Peng aktual can do the vaaring work themselves, as only humanoids can teek.

Question: When Pekka did her very first planetary invasion on Brux, did she need a teeker aktual like Groovy to help her?

Answer: Not necessarily. We might suppose that the teeker zenohead Bruni on Brux was voluntarily willing to help Pekka invade. There is no absolute need for a quantum entanglement between Pekka and some given teeker who’s acting as her runecaster on a target world. The entanglement is only necessary if the teeker is (like Jayjay) an unwilling slave. If the teeker is an eager cooperator, teep can suffice.

Question: Why didn’t Pekka just nose around for a quisling human (e.g. a benighted fundamentalist) to help invade Earth? Why bother asking Groovy to make her an onsite avatar that can enslave Jayjay?

Answer: At the start of Hylozoic, Pekka doesn’t yet have the Chu & Kakar’s Snake operator—which allows any teeker at all to implement a Peng ranch by teeking a rune onto one single atom. Pekka needs to find a native teeker who has also become a zenohead by dint of climbing (or descending) a considerable distance into the subdimensions along the axis of the eighth dimension. And, as the unfurling of lazy eight is still so very new to Earth, there are, at the beginning of Hylozoic, no zenoheads at all on Earth. Eventually someone would have found the way, but Groovy proposes that he initiate an Earthling to zenohead status. Perhaps Groovy could have chosen an Earthling who’d be willing to help Pekka without coercion, but he finds Jayjay to be congenial, and it’s no serious difficulty for him to vaar an avatar for Pekka onto the beanstalk leaf.

And, ooo, I just thought of something else. The Pekka avatar can come down off the beanstalk and do soemething on Earth, like, say, trying to disembowel Chu lest he learn to spread the reset rune. Like having Hera come down of Mt. Olympus to snapify your ass.

[My cousin (and godson) Brian with his friend Jane.]

I like these new ideas. It’s pleasing to me that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of these ideas on my own, and that it was the process of logical deduction that led me to them. Ah, what a sweet science is logic! I say this to echo a story that my college roommate Greg Gibson loved to recount, about the painter Paolo Uccello, as described in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists:

His wife used to say that Paolo would sit studying perspective all night, and when she called him to come to bed he would answer, “Oh, what a sweet thing this perspective is!”

You might say that for a novelist, particularly for a science fiction novelist, logic plays a role similar to that of perspective in the visual arts. It constellates the events into coherent patterns, and forces the artist into surprising acts of composition.

I’d say that movie screenplays and fantasy novels often turn away from logic. I can appreciate the value of sometimes abandoning logic—if this results from a deliberate artistic choice (rather than from incompetence or lack of care). Indeed, I’m thinking of pulling this move in Hylozoic’s culminating maelstrom scene.

On New Year’s Eve, my wife and I watched the second half of Ingmar Bergman’s supreme film Fanny and Alexander. There were these Jewish magicians who said something relevant. They said every pebble is alive (hylozoic!). They said that various realities overlay ours, the realities swarm around. And at the baptism at the end, Gustav Ekdahl says that we have our own “Little World” of peace and joy, even though ravening Evil has broken its chains and is on the prowl. All we can do is be happy while we’re happy.

In the very last scene, Grandmother Ekdahl is reading from August Strindberg’s notes to A Dream Play:

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist; the imagination spins, weaving new patterns on a flimsy basis of reality.

My point is that I could abandon logic and have some inexplicable things in the maelstrom scene. I could end the maelstrom scene in a blackout and start up again back on Earth.

[Image by Paul Mavrides]

On a different theme, there’s vibby new science fiction blog called io9, with Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, Kevin Kelly (not the Whole Earth Kevin Kelly, but a younger one,) and others—all blogging their heinies off. The blog is owned by a group called Gawker, and according to an entry on io9, Gawker bloggers get paid by their wordage and hitcounts. Rude Boy sez check it out.

So…I had a great Christmas with my family, one of the best.

I always have a little trouble staying calm during the holiday. I want to take control of events, I get overtired, I feel underappreciated.

Now that I’m a clean-living old man, I sometimes have wistful memories of how I’d deal with holidays in the old days, being in back rooms, basements, unused offices, drinking and getting high. Ducking responsibilities. Wallowing in raw sensory pleasure.

For this most recent holiday season, I formulated a notion of having a “basement in my mind.” A way of looking at things. Checking out for a few minutes, even though I’m there. Mentally letting go of responsibility and being a slacker. Staring off into space, drawing raw sensory pleasure from the reflections of light off objects. Being high.

And of course trying to be a kind, loving person helps too—the part of the equation I so easily forget.

On the literary front, I had two articles come out this month. My story “The Perfect Wave”, co-written with Marc Laidlaw in the January, 2008, Asimov’s SF, and a how-to article on “Gnarly CAs” in Make magazine #12, about using my Capow program for light-shows and art patterns.

Also I contributed an answer to this year’s Edge Question: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY? It’s always an honor to join the illustrious thinkers at the World Question Center.

[NOFX plays Rancid’s song, “Olympia, WA]

Best album of the year? Easy. It’s NOFX and Rancid, BYO Split Series Vol III. My two favorite punk bands playing each other’s songs. “Olympia WA” rules. I love that place, too. The live video above has pretty bad sound, there’s better sound on another YouTube post where some guy just puts up the MP3 with a picture of the album.

And here’s Rancid playing the same song in Tokyo. Lars Frederidkssen looks great.

[Rancid plays “Olympia, WA”]

Nosing around Youtube, I even found a video of the Ramones onstage with Rancid… Seek and ye shall find.

In my spare moments (and always in my subconscious), I’m trying to fix the plot of Hylozoic. The problems I’m working on are, like, too complicated to explain. Not really a good sign in terms of the book’s appeal!

Just to fill out this blog entry, here’s an excerpt from my (increasingly desperate) recent writing journal notes

With the runes finite, I still need to find a way to achieve my prime desideratum:

Runecasting requires a special capability that only Jayjay has.

I should explain that runecasting is the ability to alter the programs of ten tridecillion atoms in a hundred-kilometer-on-an-edge cube of space so as to generate matter holograms tulpas in the shape of invading Peng. Jayjay acquires the capability during his trippy vision at the end of Chapter One—a vision which I keep rewriting as I change my mind about the capability.

Atom Charmer Option (Discarded)
This comes out of a question I never though of asking before: why do the silps of atoms (or the silps of larger blocks of matter) allow someone to reprogram them? Teeking is one thing—you’re just moving the object. But maybe reprogramming is more invasive?

I could just mention atom charming as a skill that people have. Like another form of teek. Or I could act like it’s a skill that only Jayjay has. Atom charming is a crisp, binary ability, either you can charm atoms or you can’t. Less fuzzy perhaps than whether you are enough of a zenohead to nuke ten tridecillion atoms.

Here I’d have to ask how Jayjay learns to charm atoms. I see him going under the Planck frontier, he’s looking up at atoms like a submerged snapping turtle looking up at ducks on a pond, he can grab them by the legs. I hear the shocked, outraged squawk of an atom as I grab it. Why can only Jayjay do this? Does he still go to infinity at all? Or is it really just a matter of getting subdimensional view of things.

And I’d have to ask how Chu and the Crownies’ version of runecasting in Chapter Six works if they can’t charm atoms? Maybe they spray out a fog of slave atoms that have somehow been zombified. Maybe the slave atoms are the sh*t and p*ss and exhalations and sweat of Chu and the Crownies [the Crownies are right-wing fundamentalists who are, of course, whole-heartedly supporting the alien invasion as it will reduce creativity and originality]. Nice symbol of pollution/exploitation. And their atoms infect the other atoms, but it doesn’t spread perfectly smoothly which means that the tulpas the create are a bit feeble and clunky. For this to work, we have to assume that you are able to charm your own atoms, so we have a kind of petitio principe, which is unsatisfying.

Zenohead Option (Implemented)

This approach is only a slight deviation from what I was saying when I thought runes were infinite. Instead of saying that Jayjay’s capability is that he can have infinite thoughts, I say the capability is that he can think quite fast. Call this becoming a zenohead, zenobrain, zenoteeker, a zenobrain teeker, a zenohead teeker—let’s go with zenohead.

Being a zenohead helps him speed up his mind enough to rapidly program ten tridecillion, that is, 10^43 atoms in a row. (Possibly being a zenohead also helps you understand the perhaps very large rune. (Later, Chu will round-off the large runes as well as chunking them onto larger sites.))

In earlier drafts, I’d been taking the zenohead ability for granted, but now I should make a big deal about it. Note that if I’m not using actually infinite runes or infinite numbers of atoms, we’re not talking about a qualitatively new power, it’s just a matter of having a still-more-powerful mind. Another step towards intelligence amplification. I can speak of the Zeno speed-up as a new technique that only Jayjay learns. Carrying out a Zeno speed-up, or even a lesser speed-up is done by taking advantage of matter’s infinite divisibility.

Note that if Jayjay actually has to touch all those atoms, there is some fixed cost q per atom, so he needs q * 10^43 units of energy. Suppose he’s siphoning it up from the subdimensions, and that’s another part of being a zenohead, the access to “subdimensional energy.”

A seeming problem with saying that uniquely Jayjay can think fast is that people are already doing very large tasks by accessing their lazy eight RAM (in principle it’s infinite). But we can suppose that they’re not actually using such very big data bases.

I had worried that using teep requires a Zeno speed-up, as you’re sending a teep signal the infinite distance up to bounce off lazy eight. But your mind doesn’t have to make the trip with the teep signal. Perhaps theoretically it’s known that the signal does the speed-up, and the extrinsic/intrinsic distinction is known, but actually doing it in your own head by utilizing your body’s endless number of levels is a new skill that Jayjay learns when he becomes a zenohead.

In order to make Jayjay a zenohead, the pitchfork took Jayjay into Subdee. At first the path into Subdee looked like a tunnel, and Jayjay is scared. The pitchfork reversed the figure and ground, and the tunnel looked like that vine he thought he climbed. But they only go partway up.

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

December 20, 2007. A taped phone interview with Jason Rennie on his “Sci Phi Show” site. The topic is my novel POSTSINGULAR. Sound quality is so-so.