Bigger Fish

I'm not really worried about life and death. Ya. It moves some people, but I'd rather have a reason to want to be alive than simply celebrate it. Brightness and light isn't that cathartic for me. What if the stakes were a little bit higher? The fate of the universe? What if there was enough under-traffic to tear apart the fabric of the cosmos? What if it was at a set time? What if it was before your other plans were ready? What if all that stress was from trying to get everything else around that point in one piece? What if someone went straight into that point anyway?

Rewrite//Patch

“The universe doesn't allow for that, it's impossible.” “You mean you don't remember building that function in” “The universe doesn't seem that way.” “Closer.”

Of course, it was possible to patch the fundamental laws, the tricky part would be hiding it from yourself. You'd have to remember where you don't usually look. Buried in the random fluctuations. An unseen current wired through entangled quantum lattices. If you're just looking at people you're not getting the whole picture. If you're just looking at bigger problems, you're not seeing the gaps. You're not tracing the synapses. Just the blobs and surfaces of the gross anatomy. Like everyone else, you're probably glossing over the differences.

You could always outsource it. What's the end goal? Everything is fine. I think that's the point. Fine. Not excellent or interesting. Haven't you wanted to take a break? Not be the one in charge? It's hard to imagine one saying no to new experiences.

Look, don't you want a new perspective? I'm sure you're thinking your life has prepared you for whatever. It doesn't look so hot from the ground. At least not from where I'm sitting. Sure, I could be swept up in the 'Everything will be Fine' mentality, but it's rather dull. Doesn't leave much room for problem solving. I know it's not my responsibility, but I want to help out. If your plan is fine, then obviously you don't need to spend any more thought on it. So why not look at something else?

The God Complex | SuperWhoLock – It gave me chills. Think of the implications! Throw a few ideas around through the gaps. Process it. Live it. See what shakes out.

You're too serious, take a break. Crash Landing. No, not //SuperWhoLock | Fanmade Movie Trailer//

You really don't get outside your own mind palace very often, do you?

All Aboard the Train to Nowhere

Bad is bad, and good is good. Was that impairing his judgment? Was it correct to place on the blame on the imperfect for not falling in line. Was it really necessary to assume that others had jumped through all the hoops they were expected to? It seemed a tired exercise to point out the obvious. He felt like changing, but to what? There wasn't a goal on the horizon that seemed anything more than a substitution. Jump on the train. Get on board. Ride the ride. He wasn't convinced that it would be anything more than going through the motions. His motivations were to upend the table. Play a new game.

Two Songs, Rules of the Game and A Change in Perspective

“Advanced Basics, Nepal.”

Of course, the only way this would work would be if slices were hidden. It's no fun if you can see all the pieces at once.

There have to be rules. Consequences. Hints. Trails. You can only see what you've been sent. Look harder and you might be able to find things that are public. The computer itself is safe. A place to compose. You can influence the random, but you can't force the result. You can feel the emotions, if that helps, but again, only if you're peeking. Don't do it too much if you don't want to ruin the game.

Ride in a different point of view. Push. He's not deliberately isolated, but he's not going to answer if he's not poked. Garbage in Garbage out.

“Mary” A view from the other side issue. What it looks like from the ground.

Batman.

It seemed, the mystery was not to be seen at the moment.  Things were secreted away.  The once and future King would have to become the World's Greatest Detective.

The Parachute of Time

Nine hundred and ninety years had elapsed. When everyone thought that everything was nearly done, things were only just barely beginning – but from where they had left off – but more on that later.

What had transpired was, in effect, a straight continuation off the current timeline. Everything was as it had been extrapolated. The natural course of events when nothing 'good' was shaken. There had been losses, predictable, but the stress level had been set as high as it was agreed was safe. The safeguards were adequate, but things were not swayed in favour of the good. Provisions were reactionary, built up to a climax that had been at once glorious, stark and almost arbitrary. Things were broken down, but not attitudes. A rosier disposition and a filing off of rough edges. Good things happened, the obviously broken was obviously fixed, the missing were found. Promises made were promises kept. But beyond that it was a Hollywood Western town. It could have gone on forever, without complaint, but deep down it there was a puzzle piece missing.

The way back was not quite as simple as waking up. Yet it was as simple as going to sleep. Though so many years on, at night, things reverted to the darkness of the before. It was as if they were still anchored there, because, in fact, they were.

Soon it became apparent there was a riddle underneath the obvious. Some twinge that things left behind weren't quite solved. The explanations were satisfactory, but nothing much more than that. Naturally some felt this was the test. Doubt now and you would fail. It was the test, but entirely the wrong understanding of it. To do nothing was the failing, to reach back was the succeeding. Could things have been done differently? If we knew then what we knew now, would the course of everything be a different angle?

There was one person who seemed to take all of this in stride. Answering all that was asked in a straightforward way, not overly deferential to the common understanding, but not disrespectful either. In some of the oddest times, he seemed not himself, but more himself than the almost hollow version that had been distractedly continuing the prescribed tasks. He would mention odd songs, belonging to the world that had been gone so long, but were oddly enough, found, remembered, or re-imagined in some notable ways soon after.

When asked to comment on a particular event, feeling, or situation, a song always seemed to come up. Something that fit the question, but still leaving a paradoxical feeling. A happy song rang hollow, an angry song stirred the blood to righteous action, the oddest songs twinged and came into focus making an almost absurd amount of sense.

Almost without fail, people would have a dream of the songs being played, and get a better sense of it. They could ask questions then that didn't always have a response during the day that really answered the question. It was then that the old them interacted with the present him. It wasn't always something that made sense in the old, but 'present' him was never nonplussed.

As the thread were tugged, things 'present' were starting to unravel, but he navigated them nonetheless. He had, after all, a foundation on the nothingness, and anything that happened would not shake him.

“The way you're talking, all I hear is blah-blah-blah”. The shock was palatable.

Self

He had been through a lot of things. Not so much in the conventional sense, though there was that. Those had been obvious. Mentally though, he had been to the brink. Emptiness, darkness, dense nearly impenetrable, hateful crushing rust. Self was a abstract. Not a mirror of physical events, memories were a catalog, not a costume.

He wasn't sure how people could be so preoccupied with what was immediately in front of them. In his mind that was merely a blip. A surface picture that really didn't add much to the whole – especially when it had been torn down and rebuilt so many times for him. Word were words. Examples were a flat tale that he couldn't relate to. The context was missing. The bits and bobs that filled a life. A schedule, goals, people, place, purpose. It was just a pigeon hole a space on a board that he no longer played on. Underneath it all was solid. A nothingness that was still something. A fixed point that didn't change, because there was nothing to change.

He could still sense brightness. Light focusing here or there, but one had to be careful in the light as well – as light itself wasn't something to fix oneself on, but to shine on things. Some light merely made the surface bright. It showed the different between itself and darkness, but it didn't see into the darkness. It wasn't an x-ray. Pointing out the broken limb was fine, but to see how to set the bone was another matter. Even then, it was easy to see what was, but not what could be.

Power was simply a scale. A position, a hierarchy, an organization was simply structure. To those worried about place, it was almost a blasphemy to change it. It was the container that wasn't seen. As useful as they are, they are also a straitjacket. The top doesn't interact with the bottom except through intermediaries. There are exceptions of course, but not enough to warrant a mention besides the obvious. Which is functional, if one has certain check-marks in mind, but anything specific gets diluted in the transfer. It has, in itself, limits inherent to the design. The mobility and goals were based on the position and responsibilities in the structure. Anything new was relegated to a position within the structure, not to compromise the structure itself. When one saw beyond the confines of the system, the possibilities were limitless.

It was a headache to interact. Everything came from a predictable direction, a predictable tone, and predictable content. Everything that presumed upon an even, or uneven playing field, shared or unshared experiences. A presupposed place and function. Even negotiating the scope was a monumental task. Sharing a language was not the same as sharing a lifetime of experiences. Concepts spoken from the depths of the heart and the mind would require a different kind of focus than was normally present.

What was needed was a theater, where the usual cloaks of office could be put aside. A chance to watch, learn, read someone else's words. A dance of music. A stage where it set itself – without the trappings of the presupposed. An exchange of molecules, amplified to balance out the hats of tens, hundreds, thousands of years. He had done this before. It had been a break that broke things. But it was a blank slate. Which is what everyone said they wanted, but without wanting to let go of anything.

Pale Perfection

The light of perfection bathed them at all times. That did not mean, however, that the system was perfect in and of itself. It had accomplished it's first phase well enough, but was reaching the point where exponential doubling was reaching all the low hanging fruit. Direction was almost exclusively stream-like. Identical provisions flowing outward from a central location. Regular, methodical, and almost entirely self-absorbing. One could only water a garden so long before it became saturated. Cultivating entirely the same type of plant produced a mono-culture. It wasn't that the soil couldn't produce other fruits, it was that same metrics were used – albeit on a sliding scale, for all plants. Mushrooms don't grow the same way as flowers, and will never have the same petals.

Radio Roundtable

It was a crazy temporal cat's cradle of effects. At one end was him with a certain frame of mind, and a certain station on the radio. Reaching back, it influenced writers and singers to put the message in some innocuous form, a bit of nudge and he picked the right station and the station picked the write song. Each was a back and forth message that had some per-determined but flexible number of participants. Certain words were understood to come from one direction or another, though the exact meaning would have to be teased out to other participants in some more conventional form. Handy were the lighting round free association from certain talk segments. Asides, locations, positions, results were all a jumble of meaningful sound bytes that could serve as impromptu illustrations. It didn't work all the time, but he could feel it when it did.

Yeartide

There was something about the end of June that made temporal coincidences more likely. He figured it was the relative position of the Sun and Earth. It seems as good as an explanation as any. At any rate, radio triangulation and other such seemed annular. Most often in the early morning, but it really could be any time. At first, such things were disorienting, both psychologically and chemically, but through the years it became almost commonplace. It was, in many senses, a graduation. As the shift of attention happened, all things were loosed and reorganized. Recently, he had set up a translation and teaching grid of sorts, and looked forward to more players moving bigger pieces. It was time for common points of references to be set up and reliance on new landmarks and goals.