2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.



Here's an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 22,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Eschatology

The meaning of the day of the blog is changing. While some argue that long-form journalism is in, I think it's about extreme-form journalism. By this, I only mean that long-forms and short-forms are increasingly doing better, while the in-betweens are having to constantly redefine themselves, nebulously poised as they are between one mode that takes seconds to go viral and another mode that engages the intellectual and the creative for periods long enough to prompt protracted introspection on all kinds of things.

Having said this, it is inevitable that this blog, trapped between an erstwhile obsessed blogger and a job that demands most of his time, eventually cascade into becoming an archive, a repository of links, memories, stories, and a smatter of comments on a variety of subjects - as and when each one caught this blogger's fancy. I understand I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. However, this episode concludes a four-year old tradition of blogging at least 2,000 words a week, something that avalanched into a habit, and ultimately into a career.

Thanks for reading. Much more will come, but just not as often as it has.

Where do stories come from?

Semi-fiction? A world of superpositions, where stories are there and not there, memorable and not memorable, incriminating and exculpating.

Flitting between the minds of people, between their bodies, it strings palpable threads of dissociation between histories. It is the infinite tongue, an all-spoken, vortices dumped into eternities by anastomosing streams of consciousness parted by ancient providence. It is where women and men are both made, where the idea of a child is first conceived.

Semi-fiction is an osmotic barrier separating not fact from fiction but the real from the could-have-beens, and they are infinite.

Looking at the Lady in the Third House, tending to her parrots, their seed-strewn cages, letting the birds out for a short "walk" as she watches them climb up the stunted clothesline-pole, flanked by a vague memory of wings long since clipped, I see... fear. I see jets of green and red streaking past her slumped shoulders. I see triumph in the momentary stillness between silencing surprise and the agony of seeing slaves freed. I see freedom in a bereaved master, in the days of loneliness she must now spend, her dog unleashed, her parrots magically returned to the skies.

Here is a story of a specious happiness that devoured voiceless freedoms even while being wary of a deaf world.

Perhaps there is that someone, somewhere, slipping an emaciated arm up into the staggered space between falling rain droplets and clicking dry worlds into life, another crashing through a canopy after another in an overgrown deciduous rain-forest somewhere and dreaming up a sea of amassed petals to land safely on, another flying away and away from Earth and yet still drawing closer and closer to home, a sight not glimpsed by the stark, commonplace mind, reserved as it is for the invited adventurous.

Tell me, where else do stories come from? Not from warm embraces nor hands held against hearthstone fires but from half-truths, precarious steps taken forward at the behest of whims and fantasies. Fact is fiction is fact is fiction. The great is not the better good but simply the stumbling one, just like the unborn, the disborn, and even the malborn.

Is anything meant to remain complex?

The first answer is "No". I mean, whatever you're writing about, the onus is on the writer to break his subject down to its simplest components, and then put them back together in front of the reader's eyes. If the writer fails to do that, then the blame can't be placed on the subject.

It so happens that the blame can be placed on the writer's choice of subject. Again, the fault is the writer's, but what do you when the subject is important and ought to be written about because some recent contribution to it makes up a piece of history? Sure, the essentials are the same: read up long and hard on it, talk to people who know it well and are able to break it down in some measure for you, and try and use infographics to augment the learning process.

But these methods, too, have their shortcomings. For one, if the subject has only a long-winded connection to phenomena that affect reality, then strong comparisons have to make way for weak metaphors. A consequence of this is that the reader is more misguided in the long-term than he is "learned" in the short-term. For another, these methods require that the writer know what he's doing, that what he's writing about makes sense to him before he attempts to make sense of it for his readers.

This is not always the case: given the grey depths that advanced mathematics and physics are plumbing these days, science journalism concerning these areas are written with a view to make the subject sound awesome, enigmatic, and, sometimes, hopefully consequential than they are in place to provide a full picture of on-goings.

Sometimes, we don't have a full picture because things are that complex.

The reader is entitled to know - that's the tenet of the sort of science writing that I pursue: informational journalism. I want to break the world around me down to small bits that remain eternally comprehensible. Somewhere, I know, I must be able to distinguish between my shortcomings and the subject's; when I realize I'm not able to do that effectively, I will have failed my audience.

In such a case, am I confined to highlighting the complexity of the subject I've chosen?

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The part of the post that makes some sense ends here. The part of the post that may make no sense starts here.
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The impact of this conclusion on science journalism worldwide is that there is a barrage of didactic pieces once something is completely understood and almost no literature during the finding's formative years despite public awareness that important, and legitimate, work was being done (This is the fine line that I'm treading).

I know this post sounds like a rant - it is a rant - against a whole bunch of things, not the least-important of which is that groping-in-the-dark is a fact of life. However, somehow, I still have a feeling that a lot of scientific research is locked up in silence, yet unworded, because we haven't received the final word on it. A safe course, of course: nobody wants to be that guy who announced something prematurely and the eventual result was just something else.

On the fear of the disgusting

Disgusting things are broken, unnatural manifestations of beauty in an otherwise beautiful world. If anything, isn't it the symmetrical and the alluring that we must fear for their full mastery over chaos?

Disgusting things are defeated things.

With our fear comes the baleful regard we credit them with, the attention of our minds. They don't deserve it, those weaklings. Promise ourselves not to look upon their world as we are walking, or they will all gather at the feet of our attention; no!

Trample them if we must, ignore them if we can.

One day, there shall be no screams, just a hollow silence, the memories of fear long dissolved into the flesh our feet. That day, we will be Masters of the Diseases, and their reckoning!

A revisitation inspired by Facebook's opportunities

When habits form, rather become fully formed, it becomes difficult to recognize the drive behind its perpetuation. Am I still doing what I'm doing for the habit's sake, or is it that I still love what I do and that's why I'm doing it? In the early stages of habit-formation, the impetus has to come from within - let's say as a matter of spirit - because it's a process of creation. Once the entity has been created, once it is fully formed, it begins to sustain itself. It begins to attract attention, the focus of other minds, perhaps even the labor of other wills. That's the perceived pay-off of persevering at the beginning, persevering in the face of nil returns.

But where the perseverance really makes a difference is when, upon the onset of that dull moment, upon the onset of some lethargy or the writers' block, we somehow lose the ability to set apart fatigue-of-the-spirit and suspension-of-the-habit. If I no longer am able to write, even if at least for a day or so, I should be able to tell the difference between that pit-stop and a perceived threat of the habit starting to become endangered. If we don't learn to make that distinction - which is more palpable than fine or blurry most of the time - then we will have have persevered for nothing but perseverance's sake.

This realization struck me after I opened a Facebook page for my blog so that, given my incessant link-sharing on the social network, only the people who wanted to read the stuff I shared could sign-up and receive the updates. I had no intention earlier to use Facebook as anything but a socialization platform, but after my the true nature of my activity on Facebook was revealed to me (by myself), I realized my professional ambitions had invaded my social ones. So, to remind myself why the social was important, too, I decided to stop sharing news-links and analyses on my timeline.



However, after some friends expressed excitement - that I never quite knew was there - about being able to avail my updates in a more cogent manner, I understood that there were people listening to me, that they did spend time reading what I had to say on science news, etc., not just from on my blog but also from wherever I decided to post it! At the same moment, I thought to myself, "Now, why am I blogging?" I had no well-defined answer, and that's when I knew my perseverance was being misguided by my own hand, misdirected by my own foolishness.

I opened isnerd.wordpress.com in January, 2011, and whatever science- or philosophy-related stories I had to tell, I told here. After some time, during a period coinciding with the commencement of my formal education in journalism, I started to use isnerd more effectively: I beat down the habit of using big words (simply because they encapsulated better whatever I had to say) and started to put some effort in telling my stories differently, I did a whole lot of reading before and while writing each post, and I used quotations and references wherever I could.

But the reason I'd opened this blog stayed intact all the time (or at least I think it did): I wanted to tell my science/phil. stories because some of the people around me liked hearing them and I thought the rest of the world might like hearing them, too.

At some point, however, I crossed over into the other side of perseverance: I was writing some of my posts not because they were stories people might like to hear but because, hey, I was a story-writer and what do I do but write stories! I was lucky enough to warrant no nasty responses to some absolutely egregious pieces of non-fiction on this blog, and parallely, I was unlucky enough to not understand that a reader, no matter how bored, never would want to be presented crap.

Now, where I used to draw pride from pouring so much effort into a small blog in one corner of WordPress, I draw pride from telling stories somewhat effectively - although still not as effectively as I'd like. Now, isnerd.wordpress.com is not a justifiable encapsulation of my perseverance, and nothing is or will be until I have the undivided attention of my readers whenever I have something to present them. I was wrong in assuming that my readers would stay with me and take to my journey as theirs, too: A writer is never right in assuming that.

The invasion

The most fear I've ever experienced is when I smoked up for the first time. I thought I'd enjoy it - isn't that always the case when you foray into an unknown realm of experiences, a world of as-yet uninhabited sensations? With that promise firmly in mind, I'd taken a few drags and settled back, waiting for some awakening to come dazzle me. And when it did hit, I was terrified. It started with my fingertips turning numb, followed by my face... I couldn't feel the wind on that windy day. There was nothing about me that let me close my eyes lest they turn dry against the onslaught of dead, cold air. Next, there was the reeling imagination: flying colours, rifle-toting Russian stalkers, speeding cars that cannoned me into the wall in front of my chair, and then... a memory of standing in front of a painting wondering if it was really there.

Through all of this, a voice persisted at the back of my head - is there any other place whence subdued voices persist? - telling me that I was losing control. Now, I know that there were two of me: one moving forward like an untamed warhorse, trampling and snorting and drooling, the other attempting to rein it in, trying to snap my head back without breaking it altogether. I couldn't possibly have sided with either force: each was as necessary as it was inexplicably just there. When I tried to stand up, the jockey brought to mind gravity, my uneven footing, and my sense of neuromuscular control, but they were quick to dissipate, to dissolve within the temptation of murky passions swimming in front of my eyes. My body was lost to me; just as suddenly, I was someone else. Sure, I could have appreciated the loss of all but some inhibitions, but the loss only served to further remind that it was just that: loss. In its passing was more betrayal than in its wake more promise.

Death, you see, is nothing different. Of course, it stops with the loss - there is no "otherside", no after. And with the presence of that darkness continuously assured, the loss simply accentuates it, each passing moment stealing forever a sense. That must be a terrifying thing, ironical as it may sound, perhaps because it's an irreversible, suffocating handicap, the last argument that you will have, and one that you will be forced to leave without a chance at rebuttal. And then... who will look through your eyes? Who will reason through your mind? Who will shiver against the oncoming cold under the sheath of your skin? It is hard to say, just like measuring the brightness of one candle with another: the first could be twice as bright as the second, but really how bright are they? It is a dead comparison, the life of any such glow trapped within the body of a burning wick. The luxury of universal constants doesn't exist, does it?

The common tragedy

I have never been able to fathom poetry. Not because it's unensnarable—which it annoyingly is—but because it never seems to touch upon that all-encompassing nerve of human endeavour supposedly running through our blood, transcending cultures and time and space. Is there a common trouble that we all share? Is there a common tragedy that is not death that we all quietly await that so many claim is described by poetry?

I, for one, think that that thread of shared memory is lost, forever leaving the feeble grasp of our comprehension. In fact, I believe that there is more to be shared, more to be found that will speak to the mind's innermost voices, in a lonely moment of self-doubting. Away from a larger freedom, a "shared freedom", we now reside in a larger prison, an invisible cell that assumes various shapes and sizes.

Sometimes, it’s in your throat, blocking your words from surfacing. Sometimes, it has your skull in a death-grip, suffocating all thoughts. Sometimes, it holds your feet to the ground and keeps you from flying, or sticks your fingers in your ears and never lets you hear what you might want to hear. Sometimes, it’s a cock in a cunt, a blade against your nerves, a catch on your side, a tapeworm in your intestines, or that cold sensation that kills wet dreams.

Today, now, this moment, the smallest of freedoms, the freedoms that belong to us alone, are what everyone shares, what everyone experiences. It's simply an individuation of an idea, rather a belief, and the truth of that admission—peppered as it is with much doubt—makes us hold on more tightly to it. And as much as we partake of that individuation, like little gluons that emit gluons, we inspire more to pop into existence.

Within the confines of each small freedom, we live in worlds of our own fashioning. Poetry is, to me, the voice of those worlds. It is the resultant voice, counter-resolved into one expression of will and intention and sensation, that cannot, in turn, be broken down into one man or one woman, but only into whole histories that have bred them. Poetry is, to me, no longer a contiguous spectrum of pandered hormones or a conflict-indulged struggle, but an admission of self-doubt.

Credibility on the web

There are a finite number of sources from which anyone receives information. The most prominent among them are media houses (incl. newspapers, news channels, radio stations, etc.) and scientific journals (at least w.r.t. the subjects I work with).

Seen one way, these establishments generate the information that we receive. Without them, stories would remain localized, centralized, away from the ears that could accord them gravity.

Seen another way, these establishments are also motors: sans their motive force, information wouldn't move around as it does, although this is assuming that they don't mess with the information itself.

With more such "motors" in the media mix, the second perspective is becoming the norm of things. Even if information isn't picked up by one house, it could be set sailing through a blog or a CJ initiative. The means through which we learn something, or stumble upon it for that matter, are growing to be more overlapped, lines crossing each others' paths more often.

Veritably, it's a maze. In such a labyrinthine setup, the entity that stands to lose the most is faith of a reader/viewer/consumer in the credibility of the information received.

In many cases, with a more interconnected web - the largest "supermotor" - the credibility of one bit of information is checked in one location, by one entity. Then, as it moves around, all following entities inherit that credibility-check.

For instance, on Wikipedia, credibility is established by citing news websites, newspaper/magazine articles, journals, etc. Jimmy Wales' enterprise doesn't have its own process of verification in place. Sure, there are volunteers who almost constantly police its millions of pages, but all they can do is check if the citation is valid, and if there are any contrarious reports, too, to the claims being staked.

One way or another, if a statement has appeared in a publication, it can be used to have the reader infer a fact.

In this case, Wikipedia has inherited the credibility established by another entity. If the verification process had failed in the first place, the error would've been perpetrated by different motors, each borrowing from the credibility of the first.

Moreover, the more strata that the information percolates through, the harder it will be to establish a chain of accountability.

*

My largest sources of information are:

1. Wikipedia


2. Journals


3. Newspapers


4. Blogs

(The social media is just a popular aggregator of news from these sources.)

Wikipedia cites news reports and journal articles.

News reports are compiled with the combined efforts of reporters and editors. Reporters verify the information they receive by checking if it's repeated by different sources under (if possible) different circumstances. Editors proofread the copy and are (or must remain) sensitive to factual inconsistencies.

Journals have the notorious peer-reviewing mechanism. Each paper is subject to a thorough verification process intended to wean out all mistakes, errors, information "created" by lapses in the scientific method, and statistical manipulations and misinterpretations.

Blogs borrow from such sources and others.

Notice: Even in describing the passage of information through these ducts, I've vouched for reporters, editors, and peer-reviews. What if they fail me? How would I find out?

*

The point of this post was to illustrate

1. The onerous yet mandatory responsibility that verifiers of information must assume,


2. That there aren't enough of them, and


3. That there isn't a mechanism in place that periodically verifies the credibility of some information across its lifetime.

How would you ensure the credibility of all the information you receive?

When must science give way to religion?

When I saw an article titled 'Sometimes science must give way to religion' in Nature on August 22, 2012, by Daniel Sarewitz, I had to read it. I am agnostic, and I try as much as I can to keep from attempting to proselyte anyone - through argument or reason (although I often fail at controlling myself). However, titled as it was, I had to read the piece, especially since it'd appeared in a publication I subscribe to for their hard-hitting science news, which I've always approached as Dawkins might: godlessly.

First mistake.

[caption id="attachment_23913" align="aligncenter" width="627"] Dr. Daniel Sarewitz[/caption]

At first, if anything, I hoped the article would treat the entity known as God as simply an encapsulation of the unknown rather than in the form of an icon or elemental to be worshiped. However, the lead paragraph was itself a disappointment - the article was going to be about something else, I understood.

Visitors to the Angkor temples in Cambodia can find themselves overwhelmed with awe. When I visited the temples last month, I found myself pondering the Higgs boson — and the similarities between religion and science.

The awe is architectural. When pilgrims visit a temple built like the Angkor, the same quantum of awe hits them as it does an architect who has entered a Pritzker-prize winning building. But then, this sort of "reasoning", upon closer observation or just an extra second of clear thought, is simply nitpicking. It implies that I'm just pissed that Nature decided to publish an article and disappoint ME. So, I continued to read on.

Until I stumbled upon this:

If you find the idea of a cosmic molasses that imparts mass to invisible elementary particles more convincing than a sea of milk that imparts immortality to the Hindu gods, then surely it’s not because one image is inherently more credible and more ‘scientific’ than the other. Both images sound a bit ridiculous. But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.

For a long time, I have understood that science and religion have a lot in common: they're both frameworks that are understood through some supposedly indisputable facts, the nuclear constituents of the experience born from believing in a world reality that we think is subject to the framework. Yes, circular logic, but how are we to escape it? The presence of only one sentient species on the planet means a uniform biology beyond whose involvement any experience is meaningless.

So how are we to judge which framework is more relevant, more meaningful? To me, subjectively, the answer is to be able to predict what will come, what will happen, what will transpire. For religion, these are eschatological and soteriological considerations. As Hinduism has it: "What goes around comes around!" For science, these are statistical and empirical considerations. Most commonly, scientists will try to spot patterns. If one is found, they will go about pinning the pattern's geometric whims down to mathematical dictations to yield a parametric function. And then, parameters will be pulled out of the future and plugged into the function to deliver a prediction.

Earlier, I would have been dismissive of religion's "ability" to predict the future. Let's face it, some of those predictions and prophecies are too far into the future to be of any use whatsoever, and some other claims are so ad hoc that they sound too convenient to be true... but I digress. Earlier, I would've been dismissive, but after Sarewitz's elucidation of the difference between rationality and faith, I am prompted to explain why, to me, it is more science than religion that makes the cut. Granted, both have their shortcomings: empiricism was smashed by Popper, while statistics and unpredictability are conjugate variables.

(One last point on this matter: If Sarewitz seems to suggest that the metaphorical stands in the way of faith evolving into becoming a conclusion of rationalism, then he also suggests lack of knowledge in one field of science merits a rejection of scientific rationality in that field. Consequently, are we to stand in eternal fear of the incomprehensible, blaming its incomprehensibility on its complexity? He seems to have failed to realize that a submission to the simpler must always be a struggle, never a surrender.)

Sarewitz ploughed on, and drew a comparison more germane and, unfortunately, more personal than logical.

By contrast, the Angkor temples demonstrate how religion can offer an authentic personal encounter with the unknown. At Angkor, the genius of a long-vanished civilization, expressed across the centuries through its monuments, allows visitors to connect with things that lie beyond their knowing in a way that no journalistic or popular scientific account of the Higgs boson can. Put another way, if, in a thousand years, someone visited the ruins of the Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs experiment was conducted, it is doubtful that they would get from the relics of the detectors and super­conducting magnets a sense of the subatomic world that its scientists say it revealed.

Granted, if a physicist were to visit the ruins of the LHC, he may be able to put two and two together at the sight of the large superconducting magnets, striated with the shadows of brittle wires and their cryostatic sleeves, and guess the nature of the prey. At the same time, an engagement with the unknown at the Angkor Wat (since I haven't been there, I'll extrapolate my experience at the Thillai Nataraja Temple, Chidambaram, South India, from a few years back) requires a need to engage with the unknown. A pilgrim visiting millennia-old temples will feel the same way a physicist does when he enters the chamber that houses the Tevatron! Are they not both pleasurable?

I think now that what Sarewitz is essentially arguing against is the incomparability of pleasures, of sensations, of entire worlds constructed on the basis two very different ideologies, rather requirements, and not against the impracticality of a world ruled by one faith, one science. This aspect came in earlier in this post, too, when I thought I was nitpicking when I surmised Sarewitz's awe upon entering a massive temple was unique: it may have been unique, but only in sensation, not in subject, I realize now.

(Also, I'm sure we have enough of those unknowns scattered around science; that said, Sarewitz seems to suggest that the memorability of his personal experiences in Cambodia are a basis for the foundation of every reader's objective truth. It isn't.)

The author finishes with a mention that he is an atheist. That doesn't give any value to or take away any value from the article. It could have been so were Sarewitz to pit the two worlds against each other, but in his highlighting their unification - their genesis in the human mind, an entity that continues to evade full explicability - he has left much to be desired, much to be yearned for in the form of clarification in the conflict of science with religion. If someday, we were able to fully explain the working and origin of the human mind, and if we find it has a fully scientific basis, then where will that put religion? And vice versa, too.

Until then, science will not give way for religion, nor religion for science, as both seem equipped to explain.

The marching coloumns

Every day is a swing between highs and lows, and in the last two months that I've experienced them, they've never been periodic. Setting off the work, the mood depends on the weather: cloudy is good, buoyant, rain is more than welcome, but a clear, blue sky and a blazing fireball in the empyrean is a dampener on my spirits, if not on anyone else's. How will I work if I'm sweating all the time? Hmm.

The traffic in my erstwhile small city has grown to draconean proportions. Some argue that it's a good sign, a sign of the city turning into a metropolis. I don't like it. It not only places more minutes, more hours between work and home, home and work, between the factories and the beach, between the railway stations and the travel-shops, but it turns nice auto-drivers into pissed-off tyrants whom you simply don't want to run into.

It takes nothing to precipitate all this but the clock striking 6. Areas and wards transform from familiar crenelations of microscopic economies, communities of traders, sweatshop toilers, and flower-braiders to hotbeds of rage, of exodus and maddened intra-urban migration... Suddenly, friends want to leave, fathers want to be left alone, mothers want to vent, and sisters want only to know what the hell's going on.

If you're in Chennai and traveling by auto in the evenings, I suggest you carry a book, or a Kindle, or a smartphone with which to kill time. It's a time-warp, absolute and unrelenting chronostasis, with a profanity-drenched metronome ticking away like a time-bomb in the seat in front of yours. Of course, there are also people pushing, people shoving their way through the maze of vehicles. For every mile, I suppose it's 10 points, and for every deceptively shallow pothole surmounted, 50.

In this crazy, demented rush, the only place anyone wants to be is on the other side of the road, the Place Where There Is Space, a vacuum on the far side that sucks the journeymen and journeywomen of Chennai into a few seconds of a non-Chennai space. When I ride in an auto on such days, I just don't mind waiting, for everyone to pass by. I don't want to make enemies of my fellows. At the same time, I never might know them better than their mumbled gratitude when I wave them ahead.

The driver gets pissed off, though. Starts to charge more, calls me "soft", and that I don't have what it takes to live and survive in the city. I tell him I can live and survive in the city alright, it's just the city that's not the city anymore. Sometimes, the driver laughs; most times, it's a frown. In that instant, I'm computed to become an intellectual, and auto-drivers seem to think intellectuals have buttloads of money.

The only thing these days that intellectuals have buttloads of is tolerance.

Tolerance to let the world pass by without doing anything about it, tolerance to letting passersby jeer at you and making you feel guilty, tolerance to the rivers that must flow and the coloumns that must march, tolerance to peers and idols who insist something must be done, tolerance to their mundane introspection and insistence that there's more to doing things than just hoping that that's a purpose in itself.

It's circular logic, unbreakable without a sudden and overwhelming injection of a dose of chaos. When the ants scurry, the mosquitoes take off, and the elephants stampede, all to wade through an influx of uncertainty and incomprehension and unadulterated freedom, real purpose will be forged. When children grow up, they are introduced to this cycle, cajoled into adopting it. Eventually, the children are killed to make way for adults.

With penises and vaginas, the adults must rule this world. But why must they rule? They don't know. Why must they serve? They don't know. Yeah, sitting in an auto moving at 1 mile an hour, these questions weigh you down like lodestones, like anchors tugging at the seafloor, fastening your wayward and seemingly productive mind to an epiphany. You must surely have watched Nolan's Inception: doesn't the paradox of pitch circularity come to mind?

The grass is always greener on the other side, the staircase forever leads to heaven, the triangle is an infinite mobius spiral, each twist a jump into the few-seconds-from-now future. Somewhere, however, there is a rupture. Somewhere inside my city, there is a road at the other end of which there is my city in chronostasis, stuck in a few-hours-from-now past.

Where auto-drivers aren't pissed off because the clock struck 6, where fathers and mothers realize nothing's slowed down but just that their clocks have been on fast-forward of late, where snaking ribbons of smoke don't compete for space but simply let it go, no longer covet it, only join in the collective sorrow of our city's adolescence.

The Girl in Blue

How often have you seen that girl who makes you stop whatever you're doing, and just marshal all your faculties into attention so you can ensure you never, ever forget her face again? It happened to me for the first time earlier this evening.

I was at a coffee shop after having shopped for books at a clearance sale with my uncle and his daughter; it was 2 in the afternoon. I automatically sat down in the chair in the corner, where I'd be beside the least traffic in all the room while being able to look at people's faces. I didn't notice her at first - I didn't notice anyone at first - and was just looking around. Once I and my uncle and my cousin had placed the orders, I ruffled through my haul and was wondering which book I'd read first when I saw her.

She was sitting facing her friend who was right behind my uncle. Ergo, I was facing her, albeit from about 15 feet away. She wore a dark blue top, indigo-blue jeans, her skin the colour of dark chocolate, her lips a faded maroon. She was gorgeous, with large, expressive eyes, their jet-black irises pregnant with excitement every time she smiled, her jawbone angling into her chin below her cheeks with that subtle abruptness that speaks arresting relief but stops short of outright sharpness.

I couldn't keep staring at her - I already knew she knew I was looking at her as often as I could - so I did so in bouts, but never quite letting her out of my sight. She sat cross-legged and constantly turned her head away from her friend to look out the window, at what I couldn't fathom. Perhaps she liked how the skies were clouding over as I did, but I suppose that's just wishful thinking. She smiled often, too, the corners of her mouth stretching into her supple cheeks.

She had a delicate elegance about her, the sort you do when you're handling books that are centuries old, or artifacts to which you attach too much sentimental value. In fact, it was the sort of elegance which you swear you won't do anything to injure the moment you notice it, the sort of elegance that tells you that it's a given that she's going to be graceful.

All this while, my uncle and my cousin were going on about how her college life was going to be - she starts tomorrow. They expected me to impart all my lessons that I learnt while I was in college. But looking at the Girl in Blue, though, I couldn't think of anything. Luckily, before they could get too pushy, my sandwich arrived. I ate in silence; my eyes, however, were clamouring.

I knew I might not ever see her again. I also knew for sure that I wasn't the sort of guy to interrupt their conversation and tell her I thought she was incredibly pretty. For added measure, I was also fighting a battle with myself: one half of me wanted me to whip my phone out, take a quick picture, upload the image to the web, and attempt to identify that awesome face. The other half, of course, emerged triumphant. I'm still not happy with that half.

When her and her friend's orders arrived, her friend did something silly: the mango-shake she'd called for was too sugary, so she slid down the couch to talk to the waiter, conveniently blocking my view of my interest. I mean, who does something like that?! Anyway, the four minutes of visual silence that followed almost blinded me to all else. Reluctantly, I took the time to clarify all of my cousin's doubts. Just when I thought I would have to intervene and somehow persuade the girl to slide back down the couch, she moved by herself.

I could see the Girl in Blue again. Oh, what a sight! By then, I was just looking at her whenever I could, no longer devoting any effort in considering what would be appropriate. How ironical then that I might've precipitated her leaving: she got up just as I caught her staring out the window at some car below. It strikes me now that that car could've been a boyfriend's - fathers don't have orange Suzuki Swifts with a matte-finish - but right then, at that moment, nothing could've swayed me from my apotheosization of her.

As she left, she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. My life flashed before mine. I'm sure she, however, saw a creep. I didn't care. I still don't care. Some moments are well-known not to happen too often, the sort of moments that work away at your memory, displacing one after another as they lock themselves within cages that you hope will last a lifetime, memories that jolt you out of one reality and into another, where it is a picture within your cranium no more but a sensation that suffocates you. That sweet release...

Her legs were slender, like reeds pulsing with life, and she was tall, but not that tall. I, of course, by then had forgotten what sort of girls I liked and what sort of girls simply wouldn't work out. In my cranium, the sensation was filling up. Needless to say that I was distressed as she stepped out of the room and climbed down the flight of stairs. Oh, that's when I noticed her friend: ugly. Never mind.

I know I will forget the face of the Girl in Blue. I will ravish it with my mind's eye over the course of two days, maybe three, and then, I know it will start to morph into other faces, faces more memorable than they are simply gorgeous because they belong to loved ones whom I hurt in the past. Her face will dissolve into the narrow space of a name, and then a date, and then simply an inkling. Until then, I will think about her.

And until the end of eternity, I will have this piece to remind me of the truth of the moment when I saw her.

A clock without a craftsman

Curiosity can be devastating on the pocket. Curiosity without complete awareness has the likelihood of turning fatal.

At first, for example, there was nothing. Then, there was a book called The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol. 3) (Rs. 214) in class XII. Then, there was great interest centered on the man named Richard Feynman, and so, another book followed: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Rs. 346) By the time I'd finished reading it, I was introduced to that argumentative British coot named David Hume, whose Selected Essays (Rs. 425) sparked my initial wonderment on logical positivism as well as torpor-inducing verbosity (in these terms, his only peer is Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day, Rs. 800), and I often wonder why many call for his nomination for a Nobel Prize in literature. The Prize is awarded to good writers, right? Sure, he writes grandiose stuff and explores sensations and times abstract to everyone else with heart-warming clarity, but by god do you have to have a big attention span to digest it! In contrast: Vargas Llosa!).

I realized that if I had to follow what Hume had to say, and then Rawls, and then Sen (The Idea of Justice, Rs. 374) and Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Rs. 169 - the subject of my PG-diploma's thesis) and Kant, and then Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Wittgenstein, I'd either have to study philosophy after school and spend the rest of my days in penurate thought or I'd have to become rich and spend the rest of my days buying books while not focusing on work.

An optimum course of action presented itself. I had to specialize.

But how does one choose the title of that school of thought that one finds agreeable without perusing the doctrines of all the schools on offer? I was back to square one. Then, someone suggested reading The Story of Philosophy (Rs. 230) by Will Durant. When I picked up a copy at a roadside bookstore, I suspected its innards had been pirated, too: the book would have been more suited in the hands of one in need of a quick-reference tool; the book didn't think; the book wasn't the interlocutor I was hoping it would be.

I wanted dialogue, I wanted dialectic in the context of Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus' thesis (Systems of Speculative Ethics as translated by Alfred Edersheim, 1854 - corresponding to System of Speculative Philosophy by G.W.F. Hegel). I wanted the evolution of Plato (The Republic, Rs. 200), Aristotle (Poetics, Rs. 200), Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, Rs. 200). That was when I chanced upon George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge (Rs.225) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Rs. 709). Epistemology began then to take shape; until that moment, however, it was difficult to understand the inherently understood element as anything but active-thought. It's ontology started to become clear - and not like it did in the context of The Architecture of Language by A. Noam Chomsky (Rs. 175), which, to me, still was the crowning glory of naturalist thought.

Where does the knowledge, "the truth", of law arise from? What is the modality within which it finds realization? Could there exist an epistemological variable (empirically speaking) the evaluation of which represents a difference between the cognitive value of a statement of truth and that of a statement of law? Are truths simply objective reasons whose truth-value may or may not be verifiable?

Upon the consumption of each book, a pattern became evident: all philosophers, and their every hypothesis, converged on some closely interrelated quantum mechanical concepts.

Are the mind and body one? Does there exist an absolute frame of reference? Is there a unified theory at all?

Around the same time, I came to the conclusion that advanced physics held the answers to most ontological questions - as I have come to understand it must. Somewhere-somewhen in the continuum, the observable and the unobservable have to converge, coalesce into a single proto-form, their constituents fuse in the environment afforded them to yield their proto-reactants. Otherwise, the first law of thermodynamics would stand violated!

However, keeping up with quantum mechanics would be difficult for one very obvious reason: I was a rookie, and it was a contemporary area of intense research. To solve for this, I started with studying the subject's most pragmatic parts: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Powell & Crasemann (Rs. 220), Solid State Physics by Ashcroft & Mermin (Rs. 420), Quantum Electrodynamics by Richard Feynman (Rs. 266), and Electromagnetic Systems and Radiating Waves by Jordan & Balmain (Rs. 207) were handy viaducts. Not like there weren't any terrors in between, such as Lecture Notes on Elementary Topology and Geometry by Singer & Thorpe.

At the same time, exotic discoveries were being made: at particle colliders, optical research facilities, within deep space by ground-based interstellar probes, within the minds of souls more curious than mine. Good for me, the literature corresponding to all these discoveries was to be found in one place: the arXiv pre-print servers (the access to which costs all of nothing). These discoveries included quantum teleportation, room-temperature superconductivity, supercomputers, metamaterials, and advancements in ferromagnetic storage systems.

(I also was responsible for discovering some phenomena exotic purely to me in this period: cellular automata and computation theory - which I experimented with using Golly and Mirek's Cellebration, and fuzzy logic systems and their application in robotics - experimented with using the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.)

What did these discoveries have to do with Hume's positivism? That I could stuff 1 gigabyte's worth of data within an inch-long row of particles championed empiricism, I suppose, but beyond that, the concepts' marriage seemed to demand the inception of a swath of interdisciplinary thought. I could not go back, however, so I ploughed on.

[caption id="attachment_23735" align="aligncenter" width="600"] I was trapped in the spaces between books, between different moments in history, in time, a totalistic cellular automaton whose different avatars were simply different degrees of doubt.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_23736" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Because of reality's denial of accommodation to manifestations of tautologies and contradictions, so was I trapped within the shortcomings of all men and women.[/caption]

A Brief History of Time (Rs. 245) did not help - Hawking succeeded splendidly in leaving me with more questions than answers - (Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity by Steven Weinberg (Rs. 525) answered some of them), The Language Instinct by Harvard-boy Steven Pinker (Rs. 450) charted the better courses of rationality into sociology and anthropology (whereas my intuition that Arundhati Roy would reward governance with a similar fashion of rational unknotting was proved expensively very right: Algebra of Infinite Justice, at Rs. 302, lays bare all the paradoxes that make India India).

For literature, of course, there were Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco, Lord Tennyson and Sylvia Plath, de Beauvoir, le Guin and Abbott (My Name is Red (Rs. ... Whatever, it doesn't matter!), The Name of the Rose, and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana are to be cherished, especially the last for its non-linear narration and the strange parallels waiting to be drawn with hermeneutics, such as one delineated on by E.H. Carr in his What Is History?) to fall in love with (Plath's works, of course, were an excursion into the unexplored... in a manner of speaking, just as le Guin's imagination and Abbott's commentary are labours unto the familiar).

Learn to like ebooks. Or turn poor.

Ultimately, that was all that I learnt. Quite romantic though that being an autodidact may sound, the assumption of its mantle involves the Herculean task of braiding all that one learns into a single spine of knowledge. The more you learn, the farther you are from where you started, the even more you have learnt, the more ambitious you get... I cannot foresee an end.

Currently, I am reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Soviet-era exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn (war-time dystopian fiction became a favourite along the way after reading a history of firearms in Russia, a history of science and technology in Islam, How Things Work gifted to me by my father when I was 11, and Science and Civilisation in China by Needham & Gwei-Djen (Rs. 6,374 - OK, now it matters)) and Current Trends in Science: Platinum Jubilee Edition - Indian Academy of Sciences, lent to me by Dr. G. Baskaran. At each stage, a lesson to be learnt about the universe is learnt, a minuscule piece told in the guise of one author's experiences and deductions to fit into a supermassive framework of information that has to be used by another's intelligence. A daunting task.

No wonder it doesn't come cheap.

Or does it?

SciAm's new blog on the block!

Scientific American has announced the introduction of a new blog, Critical Opalescence, edited by senior editor George Musser. It will focus on the quirky and the fascinating, attempting to revive interest in forgotten papers, explain usually complex phenomena, and generally potter around with interesting inventions and discoveries.

The Sea

Big Fish walked into a wall. His large nose tried to penetrate the digital concrete first. Of course, it went in for a second, but Marcus recomputed the algorithm, and it jumped back out. The impact of its return threw Big Fish’s head back, and with it, his body stumbled back, too. The wall hadn’t been there before. Its appearance was, as far as Big Fish was concerned, inexplicable. And so, he turned around to check if other walls had been virtualized as well. Nope. Just this one. What business does a wall have being where it shouldn’t belong? But here it was.

He turned into the door on his left and looked around. Nothing was amiss. He walked back out and tried another door on the opposite. All desks were in place, computers were beeping, people were walking around, not minding his intrusion. It was surreal, but Big Fish didn’t mind. Surreal was normal. That’s how he liked them to be. He walked back out. There the wall was again. Has Marcus got something wrong? He poked a finger into the smooth white surface. It was solid, just like all walls were.

He turned back and walked the way he had come. Right, left, right, left, right, left, left, down a flight of stairs, straight out, left, left, left, straight out once more, left, right… and there the canteen was. The building was the way it had once been. Marcus was alright, which meant the wall had to be, too. But it couldn’t be – it didn’t belong there. He walked back up once more to check. Left, right, straight, right, right, right, straight, up a flight of stairs, right, right, left, right, left, right… and there’s the bloody wall again!

Big Fish had to log out. He walked into the Dump. The room was empty. No queues were present ahead of the Lovers, no bipolar behavior, no assurances being whispered to the new kids or hysterical religious clerks talking about being born again. Just him, so he walked up to the first of the two Lovers, and stood under it. When he decided he was ready, Big Fish pushed the green button next to him. The green guillotine came singing down.

The blade of the machine was so sharp, it whistled as it parted an invisible curtain of air. The screech, however, was music to Big Fish’s ears. It meant exiting the belly of Marcus. It meant reality was coming. As soon as the edge touched his head, Marcus came noiselessly to life in the Dump. His thoughts, memories, feelings, emotions, scars, scalds, bruises, cuts, posture, and many other state-properties besides, were simultaneously and almost instantaneously recorded as a stream of numbers. Once the input had been consummated with an acknowledgment, he vanished.

When he stepped out of his booth, Big Fish saw Older Fish staring at him from across the road. His stare was blank, hollow, waiting for the first seed of doubt from Big Fish. Big Fish, however, didn’t say anything. Older Fish stared for a minute more, and then walked away. Big Fish continued to watch Older Fish, even as he walked away. Had he seen the wall, too? Just to make sure, he began to follow the gaunt, old man. The stalking didn’t last long, however.

He watched as Older Fish turned around and pointed a gun at Big Fish’s temple. The barrel of the weapon was made of silver. My gun. How did Older Fish find my gun? A second later, Older Fish pointed the weapon into his own mouth and fired. Flecks of flesh, shards of bone, shavings of hair, dollops of blood… all that later, Older Fish fell to the ground. In a daze, Big Fish ran up to the still figure and stared out. Older Fish’s eyes were open, the skin around them slowly loosening, the wrinkles fading.

Big Fish saw them gradually droop off. Time had ended. The world was crucified to the splayed form of Older Fish. The commotion around him happened in a universe all of its own. The lights flashed around him, seemed to bend away from his bent form, curving along the walls of their reality, staying carefully away from his arrested one. The sounds came and went, like stupid matadors evading raging bulls, until the tinnitus came, silencing everything else but the sound of his thoughts. Only silence prevailed.

When darkness settled, Big Fish was able to move again. My friend, he lamented. He opened his eyes and found himself seating in a moving ambulance. Where are we going? There was no answer. Big Fish realized he was thinking his questions. When he tried, though, his tongue refused to loosen, to wrap itself around the vacant bursts of air erupting out his throat. Am I mute? He tried again.

“Where are… we…”

“To the Marxis HQ.”

Marxis HQ. The cradle of Marcus. The unuttered mention of that name brought him back. What were the chances of walking into a wall-that-shouldn’t-have-been-there and Older Fish killing himself? The van swung this way and that. Big Fish steadied himself by holding on to the railing running underneath the windows. His thoughts, however, were firmly anchored to the wall. Big Fish was sure it had something to do with Older Fish’s suicide.

Had Older Fish seen the wall? If he had, why would he have killed himself? Did it disturb him? When was the last time a wall disturbed anyone to their death? Could Older Fish have seen anything on the other side of the wall? Did Older Fish walk into the space on the other side of the wall? What could have been on the other side of the wall? Had Marcus done something it shouldn’t have? Was that why Big Fish was being ferried to the Marxis?

“I don’t know.”

“Huh?”

“Mr. -------, the reasons behind your presence being required at Marxis HQ were not divulged to us.”

I’m not mute, then. Big Fish laughed. He didn’t know himself to be thinking out loud. The others all looked at him. Big Fish didn’t bother. He settled back to think of Marcus once more. At first, his thoughts strained to comprehend why Marcus was the focus of their attention. Simultaneously, Older Fish’s death evaded the grasp of his consciousness. In the company of people, he felt he had to maintain composure. Composure be damned. Yet, tears refused to flow. Sorrow remained reluctant.

The van eased to a halt. A nurse stepped up and opened the door, Big Fish got down. One of the medics held on to his forearm and led him inside a large atrium. After a short walk that began with stepping inside a door and ended with stepped out of another – What was that? Did I just step through a wall? – Big Fish was left alone outside a door: “Armada” it said. He opened the door and looked inside. A long, severely rectangular hall yawned in front of him. At the other end, almost a hundred feet away, sat a man in a yellow chair, most of his body hidden behind a massive table.

“Please come in. My name is Marxis Maccord. I apologise for this inconvenience, but your presence here today is important to us. I know what you’re thinking, Mr. ---------, but before you say anything, let me only say this: what happened had both nothing and everything to do with Marcus. It had nothing to do with Marcus because it wasn’t Marcus’ fault you walked into a wall and almost broke your virtual nose. It had nothing to do with Marcus because it wasn’t Marcus that precipitated in Mr. ----------‘s death. At the same time, it had everything to do with Marcus because, hadn’t it been for Marcus, you wouldn’t have walked into a wall. Hadn’t it been for Marcus, Mr. ---------- wouldn’t have killed himself.”



Silence. What is this dolt trying to tell me? That they’re not going to take responsibility for what Marcus did? Why can’t they just get to the point, the idiots?! Bah! “I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Maccord. You’re saying you’re going to let Marxis Corp. be held responsible for Marcus’s actions, and that’s fine by–”

“Oh, Mr. ------------, I’m not saying that all! In fact, I’m not going to assume responsibility either. You see, Mr. ------------, I’m going to let you decide. I’m going to let you decide on the basis of what you hear in this room as to who’s culpable. Then… well, then, we’ll take things from there, shall we?”

Ah! There it is! Blah, blah, blah! We didn’t do this, we didn’t do that! Then again, we know this could’ve been done, that could’ve been done. Then, shit happens, let us go. Your call now. Bullshit! “Mr. Maccord, if you will excuse me, I have made my decision and would like for you to listen to it. I don’t care what Marcus did or didn’t do… and even if I want to figure it out, I don’t think I want to start here.”

Big Fish turned to leave. “Mr. -----------, your friend put the wall there because it scared him that someone might find something out.” Big Fish stopped just before the door. “Mr. ------------, the wall wasn’t there a second before you walked into it. It was computed into existence by your friend because you were trespassing into his thoughts. If you had crossed over into the other side, you would have witnessed something… something we can only imagine would have been devastating for him in some way.”

Marxis Maccord stood up. With a start, Big Fish noticed that the man wasn’t standing on his legs. Instead, his torso, his neck and his head were floating in the air. From the other end of the hall, they looked like a macabre assemblage of body parts, a jigsaw held upright by simple equilibrium, the subtle cracks visible along the seam of their contours in the light borrowed from the city that towered around Marxis Corp. Him? It? It. “Mr. ------------, you are downstairs, standing in booth SP-8742, your thoughts logged out of reality and into this virtual one.”



Big Fish hadn’t said anything for a while. The transition had been so smooth. Big Fish hadn’t noticed a thing when we entered the first door. It was like walking through, past, a veil. It was an effortless endeavour, a flattering gesture that drew the mind out of its body. Maccord continued to talk. “Say hello to Marcus II, or, as we call it, MarQ. When you stepped into that first door, your reality was suspended just as ours took over. Once the switch was complete, your limp body was lain on a bed and transferred down a shaft 3,000 feet deep, under this building. You are now lying sound asleep, dreaming about this conversation… if that.”

“In a world where moving in and out of reality is so easy, picking one over the other simply on the basis of precedence will gradually, but surely, turn a meaningless argument. It is antecedence that will make sense, more and more sense. Your friend, Mr. ------------, understood that.”

Big Fish finally had something to say. “And why is that important, Mr. Maccord?” He felt stupid about asking a question, after having asked it, the answer to which might have come his way anyway. However, Big Fish was being left with a growing sense of loneliness. He was feeling like a grain of salt in the sea, moving with currents both warm and cold, possessing only a vintage power to evoke memories that lay locked up somewhere in the folds of the past. The sea couldn’t taste him, Big Fish couldn’t comprehend the sea. They had devoured each other. They were devouring each other.

Maccord responded quickly. “Marcus is the supercomputer that computes the virtual reality of your old organization into existence. You log in and out everyday doing work that exists only as electromagnetic wisps in the air, shooting to and fro between antennae, materialised only when called upon. Marcus tracks all your virtual initiatives, transactions, and assessments. You know all this. However, what you don’t know is that the reality Marcus computes is not based on extant blueprints or schematics. It is based on your memories.”



At that moment, it hit Big Fish. He had wondered many a time about how Marcus knew everything about the place where he worked. The ability to log in and out of reality – or realities? – gave the machine access to people’s memories. This means the architecture is the least common denominator of all our memories of the place. “You’re right.” Maccord’s observation startled him. “You see, Mr. -----------, MarQ has computed me, and MarQ has computed you. However, I own MarQ, which means it answers to me. Before it transliterates your thoughts into sounds, they are relayed to me.”

He can read my thoughts! “Oh yes, Mr. ------------, I well can. And now that I know that you know that the place is the least common denominator of all your knowledge, the wall could’ve been there only if all of you had known about it. However, the wall hadn’t been there in the first place. Which meant Marcus had computed something that had happened fairly recently. Then again, if the LCD hypothesis is anything to go by, then the wall shouldn’t have been there because you continue to be surprised about its presence. Ergo, on the other side of the wall was something you already knew about, but not yet as the source of a problem.”

It was hard for Big Fish to resist thinking anything at all at first, but he did try. When he eventually failed, questions flowed into his head like water seeping through cracks in a bulging dam, simply unable to contain a flooding river. The questions, at first, cascaded through in streamlined sheets, and then as gurgling fountains, and then as jets that frayed into uncertainty, and then as a coalition that flooded his mind.

Big Fish understood this was the end of the “interaction”, that Marxis Maccord had been waiting for this to happen since the beginning. Everyone would have wanted to know why Older Fish killed himself. To get to the bottom of that, and to exculpate Marcus, a reason had to be found. Marcus had known we’d come to this. He let me hit the wall late. He let me know that none else found it odd because they’d been used to it. Marcus had let me be surprised. Marcus knew something was going to happen. And when it did, Marcus knew I’d be brought into its hungry womb to be judged… to be devoured by the sea.

“Mr. Maccord?”

“Yes, Mr. ----------?”

“Take what you need.”

“I already am, Mr. ----------.”

Winterwolf VII

At that moment, the semi-AI beeped completion, and 34 jumped out of the chair in one fluid motion and lunged at 32, pinning him to the floor as the gun spilled from his hand and clattered a few feet away. Did you upgrade yourself?! 32 simply smiled. I REPEAT, DID YOU UPGRADE YOURSELF?! “No!” Why not? “Because I want to stop this war. I want to go home.” No, you don’t. “I don’t?” The grip loosened and 32 was able to turn his head to face 34’s. You must be upgraded. “No!” He screamed without regard, and incessantly, struggling all the while, kicking and grabbing at 34’s crystal frame; however, neither relented in their individual efforts. Eventually, just as the final pellet was about to be fired, 32 was strapped in and the semi-AI had been mounted to the binary-encryption projector. There is no time. They are coming. I will not let you receive all the memories. Know simply what is to be known, for your future is short.

32’s scream was abruptly silenced, casting upon his person a ghostly sheen, because wherefrom the alarm had issued there was only an faint-blue darkness, the face contorted with terror and the jaw held open by the lack of electric impulse.



Twelve minutes later, the door banged open and six members of the crew tumbled in, clumsily wielding guns and looking around frantically. When they spotted the two cyborgs standing next to the viewing port, they held their guns up and advanced.

“You! What’re you doing here? What happened to Commander Fanderay?!” The two part-machines turned around to face the advancing belligerents, a strange expression on their faces: their eyebrows were flicking, cheeks flushing and unflushing over and over. The Earthborn couldn’t understand any of it, and in response, they brought their guns closer and closer. “Which of you killed Commander Fanderay?” one of them yelled. One of the cyborgs answered in the negative, and the men immediately trained their guns on the other one, and saw a quick transition in his facial features. The gel in 32’s eyes was diluted by an array of microfluid valves set behind his “eyes”, quickly expanding and pushing the iris films out. His eyebrows adjusted and consequently widened across the structure of his square face, but only by a few millimeters. The hydraulic pistons underneath his jaw went slack and muscle control across most of his limbs was lost, rendering them momentarily slackened. All this 34 observed with indifference: 32 was finally human.

Winterwolf VI

“Right. Caution. Good. Anyway, where was I? Yes! Evolution! This race of new humans was enabled to evolve at an accelerated pace, to mutate and reform within a decade without having to wait for a million years, with a genetically implanted trigger that would terminate mutatory control once human intelligence was reached.” The New Chance. “Fantastic! Yes! And do you know who they really are?” Humans? “They are us, you idiot! We are the New Chance!” Silence. “Hmm. The people of the New Chance quickly attained human intelligence, in a little less than two centuries, in fact, but the trigger never went off. Why? Can you tell me why, 34?” Because the New Chance lived through an alternate history, the quick development of intelligence was used by the bodies developing in the local environment to acquire complementary adaptation systems. The trigger did go off, but it had as consequence… nothing. “Yes! We were as babies born with super-human intelligence!”

“And then, 2051 arrived when the Earthborn discovered that we had colonized almost seven arcseconds of the Milky Way. And, I suppose, this is where our ‘histories’ start to differ?” I suppose so, too. “As for the logical consistency–” There were no logical inconsistencies. “So you agree with me?!” 32 was elated. I don’t. “Why not?!” Deflation. Because I can tell you five stories, ten stories… no, I can tell you a thousand stories that comprise the facts in your knowledge and yet amount to disparate conclusions. “Are you telling me my facts weren’t unique?” I’m telling you that no fact is unique. “Oh…” You seem confused. “How do you affirm your disbelief, then?” Because, now, I am equipped only to serve Master Fanderay, whom you have slain. “What?!” Because, now, even though your facts may be just as unique as mine are, we are part of a reality that is antecedent to our actions. I understand you. You wish to terminate this mission because you believe the Winterwolf is a warship conceived to join war with the New Chance IV, the last outpost of the New Chance. , however, believe that and your… adopted kind squandered your intelligence, corrupted your purpose, and abused the world around. Now, you are faced with nuclear war.

Winterwolf V

The alarms didn’t bother him; no one would believe an upgraded cyborg could have committed murder. On the other hand, the CEs 32 and 34 were the only cyborgs aboard the Winterwolf, and would quickly turn suspect if the intervention of any other Earthborn could be ruled out. Of course, the Earthborn were quite capable of suspecting themselves with greater conviction than any outsider: such was their legacy. After inspecting the scene of his crime, 32 turned around and sprinted to Bay 32. There, he found CE34 staring out through the window, and quietly closed the door behind him.

“Thirty Four?” Yes, Master Fander – You are not Master Fanderay. 32 laughed. “Of course I’m not. I am Thirty Two.” You are task-mate Thirty Two! Welcome, comrade. Where have you been? Master Fanderay was looking for you! “I had… sent myself in for maintenance.” Indeed! I will inform Master Fanderay that you have returned. 32 quickly thrust an arm out and held 34 against his shoulder, pressing him from moving any further. “You will do nothing of the sort.” Why not? “Fanderay is dead.” There was an uncharacteristic pause. Whether 34’s compiler was computing the causes or the implications of the information, 32 couldn’t tell. After a few thousand microseconds, though, shock registered on 32’s face: the gel in his eyes was diluted by an array of microfluid valves set behind his “eyes”, quickly expanding and pushing the iris films out. His eyebrows adjusted and consequently widened across the structure of his square face, but only by a few millimeters. The hydraulic pistons underneath his jaw went slack and muscle control across most of his limbs was lost, rendering them momentarily slackened. All this 32 observed with disdain: 34 was finally human.

How? When? Where? “Calm down.” 32 quickly realized that was a stupid thing to say to an assembly of chips and wires. “I killed him.” He would later think that 34’s systems hadn’t been reprogrammed with the possibility of having to register incredulity in mind, but the “matured” idiot’s face did come pretty close. When no other reactions seemed forthcoming, 32 spoke. “I fired a bullet through his head and killed him. He is not one of us, cannot be resurrected. Now, you must help me–” Who instructed you to fire a bullet through his head? Who served the orders? What do you mean he is not one of us? We are Earthborn and must protect each other in this time of distress! Who served the orders? Do you require my help to steady our crew’s moral and instate a substitute leader?

It was really funny, the string of these words, because they were uttered without intonation or emphasis, anywhere and in any measure, but were simply blurted out just like any Turing machine would: receive input, compile, communicate output. The anomaly heartened 32 – his brain commanded his body’s core temperature to rise by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in line with some external command. This provided a better ambient environment for the metabolic, defensive, and nephrological systems to function. As soon as this happened, then, the neural feedback system conveyed this development to the brain, which, in return for 32’s external action that initiated this progression sequence, let him laugh.

32 laughed. “Why are we orbiting the NC4, 34?” We are on a mission to rescue the stricken inhabitants of NC4 from a self-precipitated nuclear winter. “Bullshit.” I repeat, we are on a mission to rescue the stricken inhabitants of NC4 from a self-precipitated nuclear winter. Do you possess any evidence to dispute this fact? 32 stared. “Can you tell me what you saw through that window a few minutes past?” I saw an RF monitor detach itself from the Winterwolf and launch itself into the planet’s atmosphere.



“An RF monitor?!” Yes. “What the hell is an RF monitor?!” It is a device that monitors communication signals in the RF band. “And why the hell are we deploying one?!” We are to monitor alternate channels of communication amongst the inhabitants of NC4 once the Tesla coils fail under the ionizing impact of the radioactive clouds. 32’s core temperature dropped. His brain commanded him to frown and he frowned. He didn’t know what to say or do: it seemed as if 34’s new memories prevented him from picking out any logical fallacies in the constructed reality he was now firmly a part of. Yet, 32 decided to try his best. He seated 34 on the chair once more. “Listen to me carefully. Let me narrate to you a story.” No! We must reinstate a leader for the Winterwolf and inform the captain and the crew of your actions! “No! We must not!” So saying, 32 thrust the cables lying on the floor back into sockets on 34’s torso and pelvis, leaving him temporarily without access to his limbic stimulants as the semi-AI commenced a long scan to check if his systems were on track.

“Let me narrate to you a story. You must listen to the story and determine its logical consistency. Then, you must determine whether or not to help.” Before 34 could interrupt, he added, “Your conclusion in this endeavour is presupposed on your listening to the story and assimilating the information it contains and its implications.” 34 fell silent. “Good.”

“In the year 1610, the Earthborn discovered the first free-floating Earth-like planet N4C17. It was inundated with water, the entire planet, and all of it was trapped, preserved rather, beneath a thick layer of ice. Almost four centuries passed before an astronomer named Aloia Lee Gill proposed an experiment to transport genetically reprogrammed humans to N4C17 after drilling through and breaking the ice, to have them under constant observation to understand how humans evolved, how natural selection functioned, and to see if alternate evolutionary outcomes showed themselves.” Eugenics. “Yes– Wait, you don’t dispute the contents of my narration?” Yet.

Winterwolf IV

CE34 came to life. He felt great innocence, although that could have meant nothing in particular to CE34 because he wouldn’t have known the corruption of innocence. The room he was in was empty. Nothing odd about that. His memories, his knowledge signaled nothing disturbing or being as cause for concern. He looked down. His body seemed complete: part human, part metal, part plastic. He removed himself from the chair he was on and stood up, erect, and even as he did, the wires connected to him automatically disconnected and dropped to the floor. At that moment, he could feel a vibration beneath his feet, even as with a terribly loud clunk that seemed to quake the room he was in, CE34 observed through the viewing port with awe as a giant metal bird crawled into view, just simply floating there. A few seconds later, as he gaped agog, his elbows resting on the rails and him craning his neck to see as much as of the apparition as possible, the bird jerked downward and then blasted off. Its journey took it slowly out of sight of CE34, the spiral path it followed dragging it to the location of a Tesla coil.

“What are you doing?” I am looking out the window. Who are you? “My name is Doriant Fanderay.” Master Fanderay. I remember your name from… from, uh… somewhere. “Don’t push yourself. Here, come, sit down.” Yes, Master Fanderay. “You can call me Doriant.” Yes, Master Fanderay. “Fine. What’s your name?” My name is Thirty Four, Master Fanderay. “What class are you?” I’m a computational engine, Master Fanderay. “Hmm. Where are you from?” I am from the planet called Earth, Master Fanderay. “Who created you?” I was manufactured by Starlight Systems in the year 2051, Master Fanderay. “Good, good. Can you tell me where we are?” Yes, Master Fanderay. We are on a mission to rescue the stricken inhabitants of NC4 from a self-precipitated nuclear winter. “Yes, and how will be of help to us?” I have knowl –… I seem to have knowledge… of the planet’s geography, topology and weather, Master Fanderay.

Doriant stood up suddenly. “Where’s your mate?” Who, Master– “Where’s CE32?!” The huge man ran frantically to the door, and as soon as he was on command deck on his portion of the bay area, he picked up a communicator and yelled quick words to his captain at the other end of the line. Just as he set down the transmitter, a bustling commotion could be discerned from the lower levels, and the sights and sounds of strobes and alarms catapulted back to life. Even so, he still heard the click behind him, and a moment later, dropped dead to the floor, the control panel spattered with his blood and brains.

Winterwolf III

Noiselessly, the two jaws holding the first pellet, nicknamed the Bald Eagle, unclamped and withdrew, the hydraulic pistons powering their ductile muscles being emptied of all air. As the cylinders withdrew slowly, the pellet came loose, for a moment just hanging limp in space before a trigger went off deep within its titanium heart, igniting the secondary boosters. Directing itself downward and transmitting the coordinates of its location every second to the Winterwolf, the Bald Eagle started its gentle descent into the atmosphere of New Chance IV.

*

The Tesla coil went dead. One moment, there were sparks, and then the next, the ladder was gone. Hundreds of miles above its zenith, the sky was graying, turning slowly from a deep hue of green-blue to a pale shade of gray. Like a blot of ink on flimsy paper tissue, it was spreading, eating into the sky, a deadly flower blooming to herald the coming of a blighted spring, a malformed foetus come to disrupt a tradition of beauty. The faint odour of ozone was thinning, gradually but steadily, even as the temperature in a large hemisphere around the coil began to drop. Communication around the tower went limp with it. The sparks couldn’t permeate the airs anymore as gusts blowing within their invisible veins turned neutral, dampened infinitely, and were goaded no longer to swing or lunge. A sulfurous stench was becoming prevalent, too. A dragon was coming.

*

To call the Bald Eagle a pellet was stupidity. Tip to tip, it measured 89 feet, more than ten-times the wingspan of a full-grown Earthborn albatross, and from its helm to tail, 11 feet. Calling such a thing a pellet was derogatory, pejorative even, and some would say it was absolutely warranted. Its body was curved like a bow’s, although not quite as heavily, and its underside was pocked with miniscule half-gouges and textured rough. As it accelerated through the dense atmosphere, the gouges prompted the construction’s shell to wear off in slivers at first and then as shards and then as chunks of metal, exposing flasks of combustible chemicals. As the temperature reached magnanimous proportions, the flasks’ lining tore off and set the liquids on fire, which in turn set off small explosives positioned in a ring. Each detonation blew out hundreds and hundreds of pellets of thorium-232, each of which had been “activated” only moments earlier with an electron laser. At the end of the next 24 months, the thorium would decay into protactinium and then to the highly radioactive uranium-232, and New Chance IV would be blanketed with death.



The time-period of two years was chosen to provide the rebels with a chance to relent and surrender, at which point the Winterwolf would send down lead-secured rescue-ferries. At the same time, for each day that they postponed their decision, tens and then thousands would die, and future generations forever doomed to evolutionary insufficiency. It was first thought this could be achieved with full-scale war, but the rebels’ ability to construct cyborgs from decapitated body parts would significantly reduce attrition on the battlefield. Instead, two cyborgs had been kidnapped and their memories extracted, and the Earthborn learnt of the Tesla coils. Simply destroying them wouldn’t do – more would come up. Instead, shutting them down permanently and causing significant biological distress would cripple their beloved New Chance one and for all.