Category: Fiction

Excerpt #1

The powers that be in the Corps thought that the Ceres mineral may have potential for an Alcubierre drive that could let man expand to the stars. Corps miners had extracted some and found negative energy density (a mass lower than that of the vacuum, negative mass)–a type of exotic matter never before found. Now a folded manifold of space-time around the ship could, theoretically, bring two points together. The ship jumps from the first point to the second, faster than light.

Insight and adulthood

My grandmother told me a funny anecdote. One day I pointed to her belly and said “Grandma, you’re fat.” She then made an effort to lose weight.

As you know, children can have peculiar insight and speak the truth they know. They are both perceptive and imaginative. We see in part and a child’s view can be illuminating. But children ask questions we may forget to ask. It’s not epiphany, but something residing inside the young that pierces the fog of adulthood with freshness and undeterred vision.

However, childhood also used to be the road to adulthood. Today’s childhood is a created state. It’s not a recent one, but instead of poetry and classics, we have created the other worlds of Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Disney, all the way back to the fairy tales. That Disney was brilliant is just a statement of his realization that childhood was ripe for his creations and seizing that opportunity. However, these worlds do attempt to have moral teachings.

Things like child workers in the West were things best left behind and we are best left trying to train them up through better fiction. I don’t think we can fully return to the denser stories of yesterday, i.e. Milton’s Paradise Lost is too dense for children’s minds. Maybe the quality of school curriculum is too far gone.

I’m not pessimistic, but toy stores don’t give the appearance of teaching children valuable stories, i.e. only an unsettled identity. Archetypes should teach knowing the good and not just “knowing yourself,” which today means escapism focused on dissolution of self.

Shouldn’t the old moral be in fiction now imparted to our children?

Developing…

Physical abundance v information abundance

Remembering the old work by Negroponte, bits versus atoms. In the digital economy we learn, organize, and tell stories that are ephemeral.

Electrons versus photons is a close thing to atoms versus bits. It seems that the abundance economy is not physical, but light you’re looking at right here. A simple handshake can move mountains, e.g. a digital transaction with physical tether.

Every object contains its corresponding bits, like an atom with its ghost.

Concealment

The world of concealment, dark figures, breathing deep. One dimensional creatures slip out into two dimensions briefly, ever so briefly. Into three dimensions. Eternal destiny is three to two to one dimensions, out of sight. They still hide in shade.
Imagination can make the creatures slip into three.
We are no mere mortals, but “gods.”

Every argument is eternal. We don’t think what each means. Words take flight and move mountains.

(working…)

Extant

On my trip to Rome, I encountered ruins that offer escape. Back to the emanations of strength and high culture deteriorating. Marble remembrances, rocks you never thought could die. How did things so majestic become dust?

How did centuries pass so quickly, yet rock rot?

The great Colosseum, its floors and walls dead.

There is no memory of its builders. Those men who designed it are not even in history.

The things we hold great become dust. The positions we value, the accomplishments, beneficent action. Laurels are made of fragile leaves.