Another Bow-Tie Day

Talking to some colleagues using our yet-to-be-commercialised open-source "spread spectrum" comm channels, I wondered why we coin useless phrases like crime syndicate.

There is no such thing as a crime syndicate.

Just as there is no such thing as war or peace.

We are sociable, are we not?

You know you're getting old when you repeat yourself.

When you repeat yourself...

...tonight's the night we make history.

A long time ago, before I met the Guatemalan lady who got here via her Ecuadoran friends, I was captivated by alien ideas.

Foreign is more familiar to me than domestic.

But I am the odd man out, the one left to see life from both sides of the invisible fence.

They taught me how to peel away the layers, a lesson I forget in my hurry to please those around me.

They got me to the core a few times.

From the core, I saw it all, the absence of language, the meaninglessness of national identities, the beauty and strength in living for a purposeless purpose.

And now, I'm ready to return.

But when the layers grow back, they grow stronger.  They interlock, requiring new paths and new keys to open the way inside.

To assimilate is the better part of valiant flattery.

Fear is an exciting emotion but boring after too much adrenaline-junkie-fixes worth.

I need this whole world to get us over there to another world we know little about.

At the same time, the other path we cannot see is more revealing.

My colleagues cannot find the one to lead the whole species - those who are qualified refuse.  Thus, the rotating panel decides the steps we take - quiet, gentle, and snail's-pace slow - building the building material, drawing the drawings, stroking the strokes.

Some will not make the trip - they decided for us the decision to eliminate any chance of their being useful later on.

Should I slip out the door and join them?  Someone else will fill my position shortly, anyway.

Running the show is not leading - it's simply putting people in the right roles, filling the seats and making sure the orchestra and lighting complete the picture in the right measure.

I've given enough of my attention to the local production.  Time to move back onto the main stage and oil the hinges on the trapdoors and curtain pulleys, my resources feeding small businesses in return for an undertaking profitable to us all.

Can you smell the air?  Musty scents of country houses and skyscrapers very much alike.  We'll need them both to tell the next story that squares the preamble for the E-Brain, which replaces the dusty Book of the Future.  Like all previous whizbangs, the BotF had fallen behind in its timing.

The E-Brain knows all - it's outside of time and lives in no universe with which we're familiar.

Religious and political leaders have no idea what they're in for - labels like "legitimate" and "criminal" have no meaning in the way business is related by the E-Brain.  The rules have changed but the game will appear to be the same for most of you - it won't matter if you can't tell the difference.  Don't worry - we're not telling, either.

Do you think you'd notice if you changed which way you moved a metre every 200 million years?

When we said "gently nudge," we meant it.  But there's a lot that goes into a major change like that.  Compressing a planet's size, adjusting the atmospheric temperature profile, determining how much of the network to take down during solar storms, that sort of thing.

You're either on this planet helping to make these changes or you're not.  If you're not, then will you help set up solar system changes we need for the galactic team's success?

Would you know if entities had found a way to travel space passing through you in their streams of particle information using subatomic interactions we know nothing about?

Would you be willing to join a team that finds our species nothing more than an interesting phenomenon of our planet's changes?  ["Species" being our word for us, not theirs]

"Life" and "death" are terms we choose to describe changing conditions.  If you're able to ignore a bias toward the condition of living, then my colleagues are interested in what you have to offer.  Of course, you will no longer be you but that's what we'll delve into as we explore what the E-Brain has to say.

I promise these words are insufficient but we'll make do with what we've got because any sort of communication method will suffice.  It always has and always will.

Open secrets.  Artificial precipices.  Sight without eyes.  Motion without time.  It will all be the same soon enough.

Meanwhile, we'll show you how to show those remaining here their important positions and where to move next.

Everything's related to everything else.  You don't know how much.  Antiparticles and antiuniverses exist to make something else you'll want to... well, let's save that discussion for another time.