Friday 7 September 2012

...etc...

...He had recruited the ants. How much did ants weigh? - more than rats. Cossack dancing aside, the rats had proven largely ineffective allies. They did little but amuse, and ill-discipline meant they often failed to respond fruitfully to nose-whistles. Amusement had its own value, yes, but B. felt on reflection there was a little too much esprit, and not enough de corps. In the theatre of war, amusement was not the most effective weapon, and the world was at war.

It was Lovelock who had first noticed the traces of Mars' mating with Venus, to produce Gaia. The big bang, as it had come to be called, was the cornerstone of modern cosmogony. No serious scientist could deny it. The standard model, which had failed in a few decades going forwards, could with confidence be extrapolated backwards billions of years. And stars that were no longer there, showed that they always hadn't been.

Yet ants weighed more than rats. Even more so if they were carrying leaves, or pianos. One had to add them together of course, but ants were very social, apart from when killing one another. Would that humans were the same. Humans were much harder to weigh together, and B. knew, because he had tried. That was what made B. a scientist. A scientist of the highest order. Only a pedant would protest he had no formal qualifications.

Pedantry dictated ants counted with their feet. With their foot-brains. If one glued stilts onto ants' feet on an outbound journey, but removed them for the return, they always stopped short. Because the foot-brains had finished counting. They were masters of the internal ant-abacus. Approximately all animals were ants, and all ants were computers. What were ants if not computers? They were ants. Such computational power when multiplied together! B. had made another breakthrough.  Gates was after this power. He was seeking to construct a global network, a global abacus of ants. An ant on every desk - wasn't that the clue? And for every desk-top ant, - the tip of the ant-abacus iceberg - a million subdesk - laptop and below. B. had seen the future, and it disagreed with him. Millions, trillions! Invisibly orchestrated, subliminally stridulating, unseen, unheard to all but those who kept the strictest strigil, the inexorable iceberg of the antichrist ant-abacus glaced its somnambulant descent, scouring the valleys of B.s U-shaped dreams.

Tuesday 4 September 2012

...etc...

A great sage had once asked wasn't the garden beautiful enough without having to believe there were fairies at the bottom of it. So much for great sages. Onions were better. An onion wouldn't have asked that. The garden was horrific, and the sage had then gone on to make up rather a lot of fairies.

Fairies danced on pins. Adam Smith had seen a pin factory, but by an accident of timing, - as so many lives - had missed the Industrial Revolution. He liked specialisation, and the masses had specialised into poverty. He left distribution to the invisible. He then committed the fallacy of composition before worse - decomposition. Pre- wind turbines, he was unable to renew. Ricardo had been French, and never recovered. Malthus had been depressed, or sinister, and had not foreseen Bill Gates' population control. Marx had a beard and was inadequate at sums, even though no sum is greater than the sum of its sums, and the longest could be done the shortest, in steps. Keynes had meant well, but was too counter-intuitive. Hayek was evil. None could do ethics. None until B.. The calculations were incomplete without ethics, which had an economic value. And did Fantasia make money? No, yes. The answer was when. One had to master Time to see. Time, and the black box of humanity.

Arbeit macht frei, yes, but not frei from arbeit. What was the point of being frei, if you had to arbeit? In the New System, full unemployment was the goal. The abolition of unearned incomes was best achieved by making all incomes unearned, and then forgetting about the abolition. Apart from rents. The greatness of a nation was determined by its poorest member. That was the measure. No great nation had slaves, or bought the products of slavery elsewhere. There had been no great nations. But one was about to be. About to be born. Its borders would be the very atmosphere. The sky was the limit. This was the true meaning of globalisation. The birthing was imminent. That was, of course, if B. could defeat the troika, and its master abortionist, agent no. 1.

Agent no. 1 was crushing open source - legally, illegally - the law didn't matter. But it was worse than that.

Monday 3 September 2012

...etc...

It was a two-way mirror. Two. You saw that number everywhere. Fat ladies, turtle doves, of clubs - the list was not endless, but B. had stopped after six days. He had most of the twos. Three would be next. Or would it? It would. He would have to do the fractions later. And B. was not to be decimalised.

B. had stared into the mirror of humanity for a long time. He had seen many things. Many images, many screeds. He had heard tell of moves to censor the internet. That was to be expected. The censor was the psychopath, for ideas can only be killed. B. was not a psychopath. No. Not unless you fell for the dictionary definition. Censoring was for the weak, the minimally coherent light-minded fools who ate tinned food and bought Dyson vacuum cleaners, which nature abhorred.

But the images had not affected B. He was too strong. The longer he stared, the weaker the images became. The weaker the stare, the longer the image. The image the longer the starer the weaker the stronger the B. And B. was fast approaching maximum strength. He would not be diluted to taste, like a mere Robinsons orange and lemon cordial.

Light did not travel in straight lines. How would it know? Who held the ruler? Why were they invisible? How was it you could hear a light switch from around a corner? The eraser had laughed when B. had told him. But B. had been laughed at by better people than the eraser. The eraser had said light travelled in every line, but erased all but one. Erased itself. B. had detected a hint of bias in the explanation.

Explanations were best done in the absence of bias, and with one's feet in a bucket of cold water to cool the foot-brains, where higher thought was done. B. had heard of a man who had lost his foot in a curling accident, and, minus one foot-brain, he could no longer perform the higher thought-calculation of balance. He had grown a phantom foot in its place, which disturbed him greatly as he was in constant pain from the cramp in his invisible curling toes. The fool. If he'd had a mirror, he could have merely uncurled his other foot-toes and the pain would be gone in an instant. Foot-brains were easily tricked, even when they weren't there.

But there was nothing wrong with B.'s foot-brains. No. He had the perfect balance. It was other people that were unbalanced. It seemed appropriate that he should inform the DVLA.

Sunday 2 September 2012

...etc...

Why did bread and water - useful things - cost little, and silks and diamonds - useless things - cost a fortune? It didn't make sense. B. had once heard of a man, fabulously rich with silks and diamonds, but dying of thirst in the desert, who had traded all his diamonds for a single drop of water. He had kept the silks - they kept the sand out of his face, and it had to be admitted, made him look rather dapper. But he had died a few hours later because a single drop of water wasn't really enough. Clearly he had been deficient in the haggling. But the question remained, and so had the camel. He could have drunk the camel's blood, yes, but camel's blood was very salty, and it might have been considered a breach of trust. How could he have looked himself in the mirror after drinking his friend? He didn't have a mirror. If he'd had a mirror, he could have reflected the Sun to signal to passing aeroplanes. Even a hot air balloon would have sufficed. He could have used the mirror to scorch a scorpion, or sand snake, to pass the time whilst awaiting aircraft. And of course, he could have used the mirror to check his eyes were in their correct places. But no. He didn't have a mirror. It was a tale, essentially, of poor planning.

That was the moral. The parable if you will. The Cashmere Revolution would be different. B. was a planner. A planner one step ahead of the troika. And the troika had made a costly error. One that would ultimately prove fatal to their cause.

Agent no. 1, Bill Gates, had invented the internet. He had used another name at the time - another persona - but it had been him all the same. It had been many hims in fact, but just the one him really. The archetype. If you counted all the people in the world you got to 7 billion. A number that would fit in a third of Wales. But if you divided by a billion, you got to 7. A number much more manageable. A prime number. Cicadas had used prime numbers since shortly after the dawn of time, for the purposes of synchrony. They had a scientific breeding program - that much was obvious. But so did Bill Gates. B. felt it only a matter of time before Gates would make his move. Would start to seek to control human breeding, probably beginning in the third world.

But the internet - the mirror of humanity - worked both ways.

Saturday 1 September 2012

...fragments for later padding...

REM:- match tenses later

It was around the age of 40, that B. had first received the diagnosis. The terminal diagnosis. Four, perhaps five decades at best, the doctors had said. The trouble was the prescription. The cost of the prescription. B. appreciated that rationing was a necessary evil - in any system of finite resources, but infinite demand, rationing was inevitable. That was the way things must be. A fool might complain - but how could it be otherwise? Money didn't grow on trees, the most one could hope for growing on trees was biscuits.

But B. had not sat at home sulking. What would be the point of that? Sulking was not the point of the universe, no. And B. knew the point of the universe. Besides which, B. had private means. That had been the clever thing about gathering the means. B. had enough means for the first part of the prescription. The motorbike had not been a problem. It was item 2 that was to prove expensive. The teenage blonde. The teenage blonde with the superstimuli.

Many people had laughed at cuckoos, with their ugly beaks and silly clockhouses, but then many people had voted for Hitler. Hitler and cuckoos were different things - B. could see that - but they were also the same. They were superstimuli. Hitler, cuckoos, and the Pope's hat - all the same. It was superstimuli that ran the world. That was the method of the troika. Cuckoos, and Popes, were fed for free by unsuspecting dupes - all because of the superstimuli. And Hitler was no vegetarian.

In the coming age of the New System, the third and a half way, females would be bred specifically for their superstimuli. B. had a strong feeling about that. That was the scientific way. That was the goal of empiricism. An unspoken goal perhaps, but the goal nonetheless. However, the rational person starts a journey from where they are. Not were they would like to be. The thinker started at the start, not the destination. Had not Mao himself proclaimed that the journey of a single Magi started with 10,000 miles? Mao was a proclaimer ahead of his time, but not with ginger hair. B. had ginger hair, but no glasses. There was no myopia where B. was concerned - if anything, he had hypersight. Sight beyond sight, like the Sword of Omens.

B.'s first attempt to collect item 2 on the prescription had suffered a setback. At the holding bay a loud bell had heralded the parade of the breeders. It seemed to be an over-elaborate ritual - conducted twice daily - matins and evensong -, but such was the nature of culture. The intricacies of the ritual were, as yet, impenetrable to B. and it soon became obvious he had transgressed one of the rules. Maybe more than one. Clumsy. And the troika were relying on B. being clumsy. That was their only hope.

But how else? What possible way in all the world could B. achieve immortality, other than by creating a miniature copy of himself inside a breeder? The answer came from an unexpected source.

Wind turbines. What did you see all around the land? Wind turbines. Renewable energy. Renewable. That was the secret. B. was to be renewed. It had even spread to the sea. All around the coast, giant wind turbines spun their green electric life-juice webs, wafting the world like pinned spiders with five legs pulled off, on vertical record players.

Sagan's golden record would last a thousand years. B.'s cds skipped at 5. And Elvis had a lot of golden records.

It was clear to B. that God didn't exist. Not in His conventional forms, as foretold by the prophets. In fact, B. alone in the world could be certain of the fact of God's non-existence, since God Himself had told him. It had been a confusing day, one of those days that were difficult to dress with order.

William Blake had just finished drawing Newton with his mason-compasses, and was trying to claim he saw angels in a tree. Clearly the man was hallucinating. Something had gone wrong with his primary brain for sure. Otherwise he wouldn't see biscuits as angels, would he? It was patent nonsense. Either biscuits were biscuits, or they were angels. Which was it? He couldn't say. And yet he did say. And he said angels. The man was insane.

It was unlikely God would speak in quatrains. Or so B. had thought. But a moment's reflection revealed that, outside of Space and Time, - nowhere, never - probability theory was invalid. Immaterial beings did not require material, and B. could see that there was no material. Elvis had released no material for years, but it was deeper than that. And B. had it for sure. That was when the quatrains came.

A signal depended on a receiver. B. was that receiver. It was time for the quatrain download. Dark split the matter and the ice-daemon tremored like a reed in Bohemian lips...

Since nothing is justified, or unjust
The only imperative that you must
For all the world of is to ought
To teach the lessons you were taught

You know the lessons that were true
You know the them, you know the you
The talk the teacher treasure hoard
The chalk writ deeper than the board

It was evident that God was not very good at poetry. Perhaps that was unkind. Perhaps something had been lost in translation. Perhaps the signal had been clear, but the receiver had not been finely-tuned enough. No matter. It was the next verse that stood out to B. like a 4D pencil:-

I speak the truth from A to B
I speak for all eternity
I speak as you and you as me
Put you and thou and we get thee.

It wasn't much better, but one had to start somewhere. Or, nowhere in God's case. Even harder. What did it mean? Could B. be some kind of God? One that didn't exist? By their very nature, Gods were impossible paradoxes, immune to the feeble proddings of science. If there really were a God, one thing was certain. He would be impossible. A slow smile of appreciation stretched across B.'s skull-meat.