Tag: time travel

Chi-mind

Time for some pseudo-scientific bullshit. There’s your preamble.

All substance, no matter its state, has chi-particles.

Chi-p have imaginary mass and energy and travel faster than light. As they slow, they gain real mass and energy. Slowing chi-p begin aggregating and develop into the ‘strings’  of string theory, M-theory, etc.

Chi-particles ignite ‘life’ and inspire consciousness. Multiple types of chi-p exist. The chi-p embedded in the majority of Humans is one type of chi-p; other types of animate organic matter have different chi-p embedded. There are still other types of chi-p for ‘inanimate’ matter, energy, and dark matter.

The chi-mind is the confluence of chi-receivers, -processors and -transmitters within entities. In some inanimate matter, like granite, these are hive minds. Each chi-mind is depended on the other chi-minds for full appreciation of the fabric of awareness the chi-p convergence creates.

The question that arises to me about the chi-mind is, what is its structure of existence? Why, it’s chi-matter, of course, with imaginary mass and structure. LOL.

Animated, organic entities have a more sophisticated chi-mind structure. While the chi-mind works below the subconscious and conscious levels, the chi-minds interact to establish a shared sense of time and reality that’s often lacking in the inanimate chi-mind. Humans (along with the other intelligent, civilized life-forms, such as the Travail, Sabard and Monad) have a more developed chi-mind than other creatures. As the chi-mind and SoNS develop sympathy through increased and prolonged interaction, abilities to grasp chi-p takes root among some individuals. But, their ability to cope with their chi-mind perceptions are often taken as symptoms of insanity or developmental issues.

There are natural reasons for that interpretation of those people. They’re seeing, hearing and experiencing things that others can’t. Some of it frightens or excites the people interacting with the chi-p, which frighten those around them. Sometimes, they’re so entangled with the chi-mind perceptions that they act out. They believe they’re in another time or reality.

Brett is blessed (cursed?) with a chi-p isotope. It exhibits different properties and mutates others’ chi-p, bastardizing how their chi-mind interprets reality and time. This impacts how memory is affected. Under chi-string theory, only ‘now’ exists as a commonly agreed construct predicated on synchronized chi-mind perceptions, transmissions and receptions. Un-synchronized chi-mind activity can create conflicting impressions and understanding of reality, affecting all underpinnings, actions, perceptions and behavior related to these conflicts.

Whew. Needed that.

I find that I need to write to think sometimes outside of the novel’s construction to understand what I’m conceiving, elaborate and clarify, and shift the thoughts from being abstract concepts into more specific terms. Going to the blog versus a word document seems to engage and promote a thinking shift for me.

Yes; I see and understand that now. Writing in a more public forum requires me to focus more intelligently on what words I use to explain what I’m thinking. It inspires focus and concentration. Then I’m left with deciding, leave it as a draft or post it.

I needed to do this now for this novel because the characters and their disparate story lines are beginning to weave together. I needed to better understand my high-concept’s tangible impact on their situations and actions.

After writing something like this, I sit and drum my fingers in debate for a few minutes about what to do with it. Most often, I leave these as drafts, or copy them and add them to a Word doc called Blog Drafts because they are rough thoughts. Even though I write to understand, and that’s been accomplished, I can’t delete them or not save them. They must be saved so I can return to them, to mitigate forgetting what I conceived, thought and developed. After all, they’re thinking aids.

At the bottom of this are my fears. I worry about being exposed as an idiot. As often done, I’ll flip a coin.

Heads, I publish.

2

Today’s Theme Music

Back into the wayback machine for this choice – which puts in mind the fantasy, wouldn’t it be cool to have a wayback machine? “Yes, but the paradoxes, what you would do to time,” naysayers moan. Yeah, let’s suspend logic; suspend physics, quantum mechanics, all the thinking and all the relative theories. Just pretend you’re a child and play with ideas of all the time travel variations possible.

Here’s one.

Just about every house is getting one. It’s the hot holiday gift, and it’s on sale in dozens of places. You, disliking crowds and cold weather, and feeling bored, restless and wanting a change, surf the net and turn to Amazon to check out the offerings and read the reviews. They come up immediately: Wayback Machines. They’re priced at just under six hundred dollars. If you order today, sites claim, “Receive this by Christmas with Free Shipping!”

Okay, but six hundred eggs. Cards are already heavy with spending for the season for toys and clothes, dinners out. But you’re intrigued. You read.

“What’s included: computer interlink, two bracelets, headgear and software.” You skip into the specs and the system requirements, bringing up your system’s information and running a mental checklist.

You have the computer speed, the computer power, an approved OS, the USB ports, everything needed. Well, hell, you should, you blew a wad on this laptop just a year ago for your own special Christmas present because, WTF, you deserve it.

“This is not virtual reality,” a review says. “This the real thing. You are there.”

Yeah, you’ve read the ads, seen them on television during football and baseball games for half the year, talked about them at work while waiting for meetings to begin, swapped information with friends over wine and beer. You know what it’s supposed to be, what it can do.

So you order your Wayback Machine.

Three days later, it arrives. Boxes are in boxes. You’re usually so organized about opening and unpacking boxes, especially things like this, but you’ve become really excited about what it can do.

“Where the fuck is the quick start?” you ask, and it’s right there, the very first thing you pulled out after opening a box, a DVD. There are cables and the headgear, which looks like one of those half-helmets, the small console, the size of your first Roku, resembling a blue and black cigarette back, and the silver and black bracelets.

It’s a clean set-up and install. Breathlessly you power everything up, starting as the program booms, “Welcome,” even thought it’s a soft female voice. Lights are green. The program shows up on your laptop’s screen. You’re sweating and trembling. Well, the heat is running. It’s snowing outside. The wife, children and grandchildren are all out shopping. Then they’re eating somewhere and going ice-skating. You tell your phone to turn down the heat.

Snow falls more heavily outside past the windows. Inside, it’s just you. Your anticipation amazes you. You hope you won’t be disappointed. You put on the bracelets and headgear. The system checks you out. The Wayback program asks, “Do you want to sync with your Fitbit and smart phone?” Hell, yes.

Thirty seconds later, that is done. “Select a year from your life,” the program says.Feeding off a memory, a hope, a dream, you select 1964.

Then shoves now aside. It feels a little violent, more violent than the reviews said it would be like. Your pulse breaks out into something appropriate for finishing a hundred yard dash. Your body –

Oh, my god, you’re back in it, you’re ten years old ago. You’re so skinny. Jesus. It’s amazing how much you look like your grandson, Yuri.

Your young entity is reading a book. The pages swim into your understanding: ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’.

You tear your attention from the page. You’re back in your parents house, Jesus, a place they sold during their divorce in the mid-1970s, back in the wood-paneled game room, built from the finished basement downstairs. In the corner is your father’s bar, positioned back there where he can see the television or play pool. You’re on that leather sofa he and your mother bought for the room. You remember, “This is where the dog barfed,” a disgusting moment that will happen in another year. You won’t even have the dog for a few more months.

There’s the big console TV. Brand new, the huge Zenith can broadcast in color. Taking over your young self – he doesn’t seem to notice – you pick up the remote control, amused at the differences between the technology of your youth, when color TV was new, and the technology of your life, using a computer to come back here. How the fuck is that even possible? You want to explore but you begin carefully, by turning on the television.

There is a show on in black and white. OMG, it’s the Kinks. Jesus, are they still even alive?

Then, releasing everything but enjoyment of the moment, you’re ten and watching the Kinks in your basement in black and white. Everything old is young and new, and you are free to believe that you can change the world.

 

6

Finer Points

Finishing up another awesome writing day, knock on wood. I exploded with excitement here in the coffee shop, leaping up to rapidly pace with an epiphany. The coffee shop was empty so there wasn’t anyone to witness this except the security cameras.

I’m eighty pages into Part II. One of my finer parts: do I want to use Roman numerals for these parts, or Arabic?

Other finer points: had to add a reminder into the bible that Travail, regardless of sex, sound female to Humans.

More finer points.

  • Still have trouble with some words. Lay and lie today. I believe it’s because they’re often mis-used, and that ends up causing me confusion. Then I researched the differences between replicate and duplicate.
  • Dislike writing and using the expression ‘time travel’. Movement, travel, etc., indicates physical motion in the inventor’s opinion. She, as a physicist, objects to that expression. It’s under discussion and investigation.
  • After yesterday’s intense session, I continued writing in my head when I left. That’s sort of frustrating and exciting because it debilitates my ability to navigate and manage in the real world. Walking was okay, as I was on residential streets with little traffic. Behind the wheel was more dangerous as dialogue preoccupied my brain. I was able to capture this today and expand on it when I resumed my writing.
  • I had to go over where the novel is at and where it’s going. Eight major story lines exist. Each has its own presenting POV. I went over each one, re-stating where they’re at, where they’re going, what (in a broad sense) needs to be written, and how they intersect and affect the others. This was mentally done three times to sort, organize and solidify my understanding. Part of today’s session was then spent capturing that novel map into (yet another) guiding document. LOL.

They’re such intense writing sessions at this time. I love it. They remind me of how wonderful and satisfying writing like crazy can be. I can’t write fast enough to stay up with the unfolding novel.

Now, the coffee is gone, my ass is asleep, yadda yadda yadda. Besides, this new arrival at another table has an impressive stage voice. We all know that she had two glasses of wine last night. It’s been said three times as a minimum.

Time to go.

3

A Dark & Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

My psyche has been talking to me for the last few days. With some reluctance, I recognized what my psyche was telling me. Being a stubborn soul, I preferred ignoring my psyche for as long as I could. Yet, I’d come to a fork. I could continue to the right, along the path I’d been following. I already knew that was rocky. The going was treacherous and uneven. When it comes to writing, following a treacherous and uneven path is mentally and emotionally exhausting, especially if you know that following the other path would be a smoother journey. But —

Exceptions exist. But, the other path was the one my psyche was telling me to take. But the other path didn’t directly relate to the novel I was writing.

Yet it did; I needed to know what happened with Phileas and Brett. Generally, I knew Phileas is a highly respected scientist. Working for a major corporation, she led a team searching for the latest God Particle, a project known, with matter-of-fact drama, as the God Particle Search Project. Significant progress was slow, so another project, private and personal, the stuff of her childhood dreams, drew her.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Phileas first read those words when she was two, but once they were read, everything was changed. ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, by Madeline L’Engle, was the first book she read more than once, and in fact, went on to read a dozen more times. By the third time, she knew all the words and didn’t need to read the book, but settling into bed and opening up a screen above her face soothed her. Being in bed and secretly reading under the softly glowing faintly blue panel was cozy. It was a romantic escape for someone who was otherwise ruthlessly determined, logical, practical and mathematical. In fact, it was a dark and stormy night on Castle Prime, while visiting, when the weather control system in one of the domes malfunctioned, that crystallized the epiphanies that initiated her turn toward her personal project.

It was a dark and stormy night. 

For me to understand what happened with Brett and Phileas, I needed to know more about Phileas and then learn about what happened with her and Brett. I knew many basics. Brett had a son. He didn’t know he had a son. The son, Kimi, had been illegally conceived.

Kimi worked for Phileas on the GPS Project. Brett was a fourth-waver, inhabiting newly terraformed planets on the corporation’s behalf to prove it was safe. Kimi’s ‘fake’ father had manipulated the genetic maps related to Kimi and Brett. The systems had caught the errors but flawed results ended up reversing the maps so the systems thought Kimi was Brett and vice-versa. That’s the basis of the first novel, ‘Returnee’, available on KDP.

While writing ‘Returnee’, I established that the systems thought Brett was Kimi. What I didn’t establish but I knew was that as part of that, Phileas had inadvertently taken Brett when she thought she was abducting Kimi. She took Kimi, along with the rest of her team, because she’d traveled into the future. While in the future, she’d learned things, and now she was covering her trail, and attempting to keep others from following her path – because she knew, in science and technology, that major discoveries like hers rarely happen without like discoveries being made elsewhere.

The result was that the GUFIN virus was created and brought back from the future. And this is where the next novel, ‘Long Summer’, (the work in progress) comes into play. To know what happened with Brett, Phileas, the GUFIN virus, and the Travail, I had to know what happened when Phileas abducted Brett and wiped out his knowledge of what had happened.

And that’s what my psyche was ordering me to do: write that out so I fully understood it. Naturally, I had to write it out in story form, because I think in story-telling form when I’m writing fiction. So, thinking about Phileas and her background, and her literary hero, Meg Murry from ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, I was able to begin:

It was a dark and stormy night.

As I knew, the first line is actually homage to another novel — and Snoopy, of course, loves it — but once I wrote it, Phileas leaped to life.

Time to shut down and call fini to another day of writing like crazy. No words were written in the novel today, but so much progress was made.

0

Wonky Surface Tension

While surface tension chatter is usually about fluids or materials, thinking about personal surface tension emerged from my meditations today. I blame James Blish.

Blish was a terrific science fiction and fantasy writer. I admired his imagination. Flying cities, anti-aging drugs, he offered up so many neat and original ideas, but always managed to do so with solidly convincing style. He was one of those I put up on a pedestal with the hard science fiction Big Three of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

I’m in one of those places where my writing ideas are generating natural highs. I’v been working on cosmological entanglements (which are a similar idea to quantum entanglements) and tachyon time travel telepathy, and their impacts on the story arcs – who goes where, how and why – constructing the final puzzle from the pieces, and making up the pieces on the fly. (For these ideas, please blame Timothy Ferris and his books, especially ‘The Whole Shebang’.) This, for me, naturally demands deep thinking, thinking that stills me with focus and concentration. Then, epiphanies burst free from of the morass of cogitation. Aha, and eureka!

Now I understand my pretend science and construct it with the flimsiest of physics. And now comes the story-telling. How do I weave all this into the novel without sounding like a science book? This is especially a challenge as several disparate threads are weaving around this central idea, creating a loose fabric that’s gradually becoming tauter.

To veer into other metaphors, scenes then explode in my head. I glimpse some shrapnel of what they’re about, but I become excited. The scenes spread faster and faster. Watching and focusing, I try hard to capture the gist of each, get it down, get it down, so I may build around these kernels (splintering into yet more metaphors), create the scenes and string them together.

Like surface tensions in fluids, I need the correct coherent forces to hold it all together. Frankly, this stage of writing always intimidates and frightens me. And I heed what those old masters like Blish did, creating a story that at least has sufficient scientific integrity that people will give me a grudging pass. Meanwhile, I admire certain writers outside of the science fiction realm and prefer their writing styles, people like Erdrich, Chabon, Frantzen, and Ferranti, and yes, Irving, Updike, and Roth, and even folks like Tana French and Kate Atkinson. My style continues to emerge into something like their styles, and that is very deliberate.

It all makes my surface tension wonky, caused by the differences in what I am, where I am, where I want to be, and who I dream of being. Perhaps contributing to the wonky surface tension, if I pause and squint into the far future’s dim tunnels, I can see this gem of a novel glittering and spinning, there for my taking. I fear my reach will fall short.

But rare exhilaration can be enjoyed even when reaching and failing. No need to remind myself of that (even though I did, didn’t I?), because that’s not the impelling force pushing my writing efforts. Writing, and attempting to visualize and capture these stories and their ideas, is just fun. The process also provides an escape. Writing is like an opiate that helps me cope with my life.

So here I am, once again, writing instrument at hand (a computer), along with a quad shot mocha, time, and solitude. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

4

The Hip Bone Is Connected to the Tachyon

I’m having fun with science fictional physics, conceiving way out ideas for ‘Long Summer’, the sequel to ‘Returnee’. Part of this is playing with the chip. What’s a chip, you say? This is actually a chi particle. 

The chi particle is the essence of life energy, the spark that brings inanimate matter to life. In my grand theories, there is a formula of balance that I’m still working out involving the need for the universe to maintain an equilibrium between the chi energy and all of the rest. Most importantly for the entire balance of understanding, the chi particle begins in the realms of dark matter.

Additional characteristics for my grand particle begins with the hypothetical and unproven particle, the tachyon. Like the tachyon, the chip travels faster than light, traveling even faster than the tachyon. Its imaginary mass attracts tachyons. Tachyons become knotted with the chips. As knotting happens, the tachyon draws energy from the chip, slowing both the tachyon and chip. But the chip’s mass is not a direct proportion of the tachyon’s mass, but compounds the tachyon’s mass, adding to the knotted chip’s mass. As the chip-tachyon knot slows toward the speed of light, the tachyon gains more energy, slows more and degrades, giving up its mass to the chip. The chip, acquiring actual mass, begins a transition from dark matter to matter and acquires gravitons. The chi knot seeks the proper stew of atoms and conditions to develop and begins evolving as a life form.

This all is pretty preliminary. It has no math underpinnings, and no doubt many people will tell me either, you’re drinking too much coffee, or you’re fucking nuts. They’ll also grimace, appalled by my display of ignorance, but it’s fun for me, and provides further structure for developing my plot and writing the novel. I mean, this is why we call it science fiction.

Sometime, when I’ve advanced my thinking about it more, I’ll post a snapshot of tachyon telepathy. Remember, as Brett learns (eventually), what happens in stasis, doesn’t always stay in stasis.

I’m twenty-six thousand words into ‘Long Summer’. The summer’s computer issues threw me out of my writing – conceiving – imaging rhythm, and it humbled me. I gleaned how much I take for granted the ability and opportunity to sit down and write.

Got my mocha. Time to write like crazy, one more time.

9

Beyond 3D

Ghostbusters 3D is in our local cinemas tomorrow, and we’re hitting it.

3D movies are normal and expected, so much of it being put into 3D. My first experience with it was Hugo. When the snow fell in the film’s beginning, I was astounded by how the snow flakes seem fall toward me from the scene. Beautiful and amazing, and now, like jets, cars, microwaves, computers, the Internet and a million more modern technologies, processes, and services, so common, it’s the new normal.

Virtual Reality movies may be the next iteration. Imagine, instead, of attending a movie, and while sitting in the theater, you experience the movie from within. With tiered ticketing, the opportunities to watch can be inter-active, so in one side, you can reside within one character, watching, hearing and generally experiencing the movie through them. In another scene, you can be a fly on the wall, turning your attention to whatever attracts you.

Such scenarios drive ideas about what can go wrong. Trapped in a movie, trapped as a character, launched into a new dimension through a movie, time traveling through movies, accidently becoming someone else during the movie – or reversals of these things. Discovering you thought you were born here when actually, you came through a movie. Now they’re hunting you.

Oh, the fun we can have with this.

0

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