The 12

Buck understands that if you want to be a writer, sometimes you just have to start writing even if you have nothing to say.

Take today, for example. Buck doesn't have squat to say, but if you're reading this, then he's already taken up a few moments of your precious time for nothing. Are you entertained? Do you find this intriguing, or even mildly interesting? Doubtfully. So if you don't want your day to be a total loss, it is in your best interest to read no further.

You have been warned.

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"To provide some context for Buck's situation and the epic struggle he was about to face," typed Buck shortly after conquering a programming bug at work that had been bothering him since the previous day, "it is convenient to introduce a new term to represent a time scale that 21st century readers weren't aware of prior to its discovery in their future. The unit of time is called the g-pon*, equivalent to the average lifespan of known universes. A g-pon is roughly equal to 32.71552 x googol-plex Earth years, based on the precise duration of an Earth year on January 1st of the year 2237. When g-pon is used in the plural sense, it sometimes takes on a slightly different meaning, referring to an instance of a specific universe that occured sequentially prior to our own (see entire footnote below). For example: the phrase 'three g-pons ago' would indicate any time within the lifetime of a universe Alpha-3, which ran its full life cycle before our current universe (Alpha-0) began, and also indicates that two other universes (Alpha-2 and Alpha-1, in that order) ran their full life cycles before our universe began its first iteration.

Buck decided not to go into a universe's iterative properties. Some things were better left unknown.

"Anyway, eleven g-pons ago, an intelligent entity capitalized on the dark matter energy transfer betwixt universes to translate himself from one universe to the next in an effort to elude his enemies. This intelligent entity was the last of his kind, and in fact wasn't truly alive in any conventional sense at the time of his escape. Technology had enabled him to preserve his memories and thought patterns in a device which resembled a small orb, even as the horde of evil beings which had wiped his own race out of existence had brought death to his physical form. It was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan which required him to penetrate to the heart of the enemy home world. When he allowed himself to be captured and executed, his memories transferred to the orb which was hidden on that world. The orb served a dual purpose: not only did it contain the elements of his identity, but also it was a vessel devised to slip into the dark energy nodestream moments after its initialization. Slipping such an object through to the next universe brought no harm to the object itself, but as he well knew, such an action was best practiced deep in the vacuum of space, far from populated worlds, due to the dark energy anti-matter after-shock event that occurred in the source universe when such an event took place. In other words, when the evil beings executed him, they doomed their own home planet and its star system, wiping out a healthy chunk of their civilization along the way and leaving the scattered remnants of their species to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened."

Buck then decided that this was a patently ridiculous literary path to follow. He wasn't about to argue that memories and thought patterns (or general disposition, brainwaves, etc.) were equivalent to the soul, which is really what he'd want a character to have. So he found himself at a place where he was hypothesizing an immortal being (more like an "identity") who more or less latches onto the bodies and souls of those who happen upon the vessel. In other words, these beings who find the vessel remain true to themselves and their general nature, but they absorb his experiences and ways of thinking, along with those of anyone else who found the orb along the way. This goes on for several g-pons, of course, which brings him into the current universe where the orb manages to slip into a black hole, the same black hole, in fact, where Buck's ship is being smashed into plasma.

Does Buck obtain the orb and the memories of trillions of beings who have shared the immortal entity's life across the universes and use the knowledge contained therein to escape the fate of which he isn't even aware? Is it what makes him aware of his true, external circumstances? Or is some other character in Buck's life the keeper of the orb? How did the sinister beings track the orb down across the cosmos in their effort to seek revenge for the destruction of their civilization? Is the intelligence mentioned in last week's post behind the black racer snake's eyes one of these aliens out for the entity's destruction? Are these the same evil beings who were Will anyone really give a rat's ass?

How does dark energy create an explosion of any magnitude when it's really thought to be nothing more than the residual negative energy of empty space, containing an almost unimaginably low quantity of energy per cubic centimeter? You see, Buck actually went and looked this stuff up a few days after drafting the premise above. It turns out that dark energy accounts for something like 74% of the universe's mass, but it's homogeneous, spread out equally in little tiny portions throughout the void between the planets, stars, galaxies, clouds, clusters, and all the other stuff that's out there, a good 20% of which is called "dark matter," a blanket term used to refer to a whole class of invisible objects which scientists are pretty sure is out there (one example is dead stars which no longer produce light). So anyone who reads Buck's account of the dark energy anti-matter explosion is going to think, "Huh?" Buck doesn't want that: he's hardcore. He wants his science fiction to be possible.

So he decided, at least for the time being, to abandon this possible thread of fiction on his blog, but he did chose to go ahead and publish this entry. If for no other reason it's because he liked the footnote that he wrote below. Meanwhile, all that was left to do was explain the title, "The 12." At the end of each universe, or when the time is right, the entity creates another orb, and sends it and all the previous orbs through to the next universe. This is to propagate the new life form he has essentially created via the use of this technology. So there wasn't going to be just one entity, but in Buck's time, twelve (with eleven orbs, the orb for the current universe not yet created). The experiences and memories associated with each are wildly different, and of course each can come into the possession of any manner of intelligent being, so that equates to twelve bad-asses running around the universe alternately wreaking havoc, playing hero, or just plain wandering.

Of course, this too was full of holes, since the number of orbs could grow exponentially, since each possessor could make a copy and send it through. Buck considered that maybe there was some logical rule enforced that required all orbs to be brought together for another to be created. This would force the beings who possessed the orbs to seek out the others, possibly fighting for control of all of them. Naturally this reeks of being like the standard "Highlander" premise, unless Buck writes it more as a cooperative venture, which would allow for the revenge-seeking aliens to play a more serious role as potential spoilers of the original entity's grand plan.

Maybe Buck will take up this idea again one day, but what he really feels is missing is the human element, and how to make the reader give a flying fuck about the original entity and his mission. That, and what to call the bad beings. The right name for that species could make or break it...and what makes them special? What separates them from the orcs of the literary world?

"Cheers, oh faithful reader," writes Buck as he returns to work.

* Footnote: From the Encyclopedia Galactica, ST 3260: g-pon is pronounced /jē'- pŏn/, or alternatively, /jə - pŏn'/. Etymology: A form of snigglet combining the terms "googol-plex" (10 to the 10th to the 100th power) and "eon", an ambiguous measure of geologic time. The term was coined by Buck 99 in the 25th century but discovered by 21st century readers via a web log ("blog") that he somehow published on an actual, real-world blog on 21st century Earth's primitive Internet network from a nearly identical network located within a fictitious LifeNet© simulation context aboard a private spacecraft accelerating into a black hole's gravity well. How he managed to pull this off is a matter of continued speculation and arguably the most brilliant technological feat in the history of the human race. It is conjectured that he used the black-hole's x-ray emissions as the means to transmit the data, but how he mastered an understanding of singularities and their effect on time to deliver a message to 21st century Earth, and how he managed to ensure that a mechanism existed in the real world of 21st century Earth to receive the transmission and upload it automatically to the necessary network servers, remain enigmas that defy mortal comprehension.

The term itself did not come into widespread use until the 23rd century when scientists finally proved out several key facets of the nature of the cosmos as described in 99's blog. Prior to these proofs, it was widely believed that 99's blog was itself a hoax. This skepticism had persisted for several centuries due to 99's lack of advanced mathematical theory which rendered him unable to articulate in his blog the mathematical concepts scientists would need to understand commonly accepted facts that he had been taught in grade school.

A useful analogy taken from an actual event in human history would be to take a star Blukker player in her prime, stick her in an ordinary Plonomax Node Generator field, send her back to Medieval Europe armed with nothing more than an embedded universal translator so that she could communicate with the natives, and have her try to explain to them how to design and build a machine to return her to her own node. Impossible, right? Indeed it turned out to be, as was proven when archives came to light revealing that this exact experiment was performed by scientists under Hung-Xao's regime. It is believed the Blukker player was none other than Linda McCallister who is famous for having disappeared without a trace at the height of her career in the WLBS during the Shanghai Olympics, and that she was ultimately found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake.

At the heart of it, what Buck 99's blog revealed was that over cosmological timescales (which are non-linear, since universes are born and die sequentially in relation to each other yet exist in parallel), a universe's dark energy component fluctuates wildly, since dark energy is shared across universes while associating with only one universe at a time. 21st century scientists knew that the universe's expansion was accelerating and that the dark energy seemed sufficient to ensure a universe that expanded ad infinitum, but they failed to account for as-yet unobserved binding of dark energy by adjoining universes.

Meditations

"Our hero, the intrepid Buck 99," wrote the blogger by the same name and who didn't really know what the word "intrepid" meant, "continued to fall inexorably into the infinitely dense oblivion of the black hole while his spaceship's damaged LifeNet© system (see "Into the Rabbit Hole", September 5, 2006, and enjoy the gratuitous addition of the copyright character) fed his slumbering mind a series of fictional scenarios designed to trick him into believing that he was leading a typical, middle-class, Caucasian, 21st century American life. As stated before, the singularity's effect on Buck's perception of time was inversely proportional to the accelerating rate of his descent, effectively rendering him immortal. Tragically, instead of forever surfing the waves of Oahu's North Shore as he would have been doing had the Hawaiian surfing program he intended to run been initiated, he was stuck doing time as a cube jockey thanks to his buddy e-Taco who switched the programs on Buck as a practical joke just before lift-off."

Buck checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was observing him as he typed his blog entry on client time. Not that it was a big deal: Buck was in a strange situation. He had a new client that he hadn't even met yet, so his days were spent teaching himself new skills which he would need once the client surfaced from wherever he was hiding to reveal what the actual project would be. All Buck knew was that he would be doing systems analysis, software design for web application middleware development, and the actual development work itself. He did not know, however, what system he would be working on or what business need the application would satisfy. For once, Buck was actually eager to get started. This was the kind of work he was born to do, and he was way ahead of schedule on the self-paced tutorials.

The coast was clear, so Buck continued his third person narrative.

"Buck wasn't sure whether he hoped he was a better programmer in his fictional life than he was in his real life. In real life he had made an egregious error when programming his ship's navcom system, resulting in the perilous situation with the black hole of which he was blissfully unaware." (Here Buck paused to consider the implausibility that he would be able to write about something in his blog about which he had no knowledge, and asked his forgiving readers to "suspend disbelief," to borrow a phrase from the vernacular of his fictional American context, and absorb the footnote* at the end of this entry as a possible explanation.)

"His real life error, however, had some unintentional and not necessarily undesired consequences. Sure, his self-aware avatar was stuck in a cubicle day in and day out, and yes, the program came equipped with an apparently incurable chronic back pain disorder. But he had immortality, and thanks to recent innovations in 25th century technology, he had free will within the Context. Yes, the Context enforced certain rules: he would age, he would die, and he did not have the telekinetic powers or x-ray vision he so craved. When he finally died within the Context, however, he would be re-initialized, and who knew what deviations from the original programing would follow as a result of distortions caused by the singularity? The possibilities were endless. It could be a fantastic adventure.

"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole experience was the existence of the wonderful Mrs. 99, and the life and family they had built together. Were they nothing more than objects instantiated by the Context and incorporated into his perceptions ? Buck didn't think so. They were too...transcendent. Mrs. 99's wisdom and emotional range was way beyond his and any of the 25th century programming powerhouses' capacity to reproduce. Instead, it was more likely that the unconscious mind had a back door through which it was connected to a network of other souls, souls belonging perhaps to bodies that, like his, had been sucked into the gravity well of the black hole. Had they, unlike Buck with the LifeNet© simulation, no consciousness available for them to draw on, and were therefore drawn toward his "reality" as to a beacon of light or a lifeboat adrift in dark, fathomless seas of non-being?

"In any event he was thankful for their company, because without them he wouldn't survive the horrors of Cubopolis."

Buck savored the syrupy sentimentality of what he had just written before caving in to the demands of the testosterone with which all true men are endowed. "Consider for a moment," he wrote to address the reader directly, "the lifespan of this magnificent black hole. Perhaps it is billions of years old. How many others have succumbed to its pull? Tens? Hundreds? Billions?

"A better question to ask might be what kinds of beings might it have drawn in? After all, Buck was in deep space, far beyond the range in which homo sapiens represented the only intelligence. Humans who had ventured this far and returned to tell the tale spoke of vile, unmentionable alien beings, abominations of nature of frightening appearance, terrifying intelligence, and sometimes even poor fashion sense. What if some of them were adrift in the sea of unconsciousness too, and were becoming naturally drawn to the beacon of Buck's LifeNet© scenario? What then?

"In what would become a classic great moment in bad timing, some of these beings would slip into Buck's simulation via the portal behind his unconscious mind at precisely the wrong time, when things were starting to go well. Buck had passed his Java certification exam, taken a relaxing vacation at home, taken some time to learn some new programming skills, and finally rid himself of the mantle of Project Manager by being staffed on a project to do precisely what he hoped to do: design and build software. It wasn't longboard surfing in a tropical paradise, but it wasn't project management either, and it guaranteed that he would be left alone to do his thing at least part of the day. The days always passed more quickly when he was immersed in the code.

"Other things were going well, too. Mrs. 99 was homeschooling the kids, and by all meaningful measures the change was doing everyone good. It was the right decision. Meanwhile, Buck had found a new passion: reptiles. Buck was now an amateur herpetologist involved with a local herpetological society, hanging out with scientists and academics and striving to conserve and protect the environments of reptiles and amphibians. He was also a budding herpetoculturalist, having acquired a total of nine pythons (seven Python regia and two Morelia viridia). It was possible that he might be able to manage a side business breeding them, or dare he dream? He might even turn it into a full-time career. He had become a moderator of a major herpetocultural site and a respected member of several others. The internet was a rapidly growing marketing channel for reptiles, and he had technical skills to bring to bear in that space. Life was looking up for Buck.

"He even managed to win the July 2007 Photograph of the Month on the herp society's web site. It was a classic close-up shot of a Coluber constrictor constrictor, and if you looked closely at the photograph, you could see the distorted image of Buck and his companions in the reflection of the snake's eye.

"But Buck failed to see something else in that reflection, something that by appearances was quite faint and may have been a trick of the light or something shadowy that might have been hovering just over his shoulder when the picture was taken, but in truth was surfacing from within an alien soul lurking hatefully behind the serpentine avatar that had writhed in vain to free itself from its human captors as the digital image was captured..."

...to be continued...


* Buck's explanation for how he can write about the black hole about which he has no knowledge: Buck is a creative writer, after all, and where, he asks, do creative ideas originate? The best ones always come to mind unbidden, as if from another place, but in truth they come from the unconscious mind, the back of the mind. The back of the mind knows more than it lets on. To hit a tennis ball correctly, for example, the body must coordinate hundreds of muscles making thousands of major and minor adjustments into one smoothly orchestrated physical act. The front of the mind cannot and does not keep track of all the details, of course: the back of the mind does. How hard is the pinkie squeezing during the follow-through? What's the left ankle doing as the racquet strikes the ball? Think about how complex such a simple act truly is. When a player is "in the zone," the front of the mind simply watches the ball and lets the back of the mind handle the rest (thanks to Timothy Gallwey, author of Inner Tennis, for the analogy).

So while Buck's conscious mind (or at least the consciousness he perceives within The Context) is unaware of the peril his true body is in, his unconscious mind, the back part of his mind, is still alert to the disposition of the body and what is really going on. LifeNet© has event handling to prevent the back of the mind from seizing control and awakening the sleeper except in emergencies (which the navcom missed, in this case, thanks to Buck's lackadaisical attention to detail when coding systems upon which his life would depend), but the unconscious self cannot be completely prevented from notifying the consciousness of things it deems of importance. In other words, Buck's unconscious self is expressing the truth as a wild idea which Buck's Context consciousness is mistaking for creativity.