by Rudy Rucker
Figure 26: Boring worldlines and Gnarly worldlines
Creating A Saucer
The mental science-cartoon resumes. The light-speed signal of an encrypted alien personality is represented as a glassy ripple across a background of stars. Actually its more than a ripple, it’s a wave-train, that is, a series of ripples several thousand miles long.
There are many such wave-trains, and they move through each other as transparently as the spreading rings from two rocks thrown into a pond.
Now the image in Frank’s head shows a planet, none other than dear fat round Gaia Earth. An alien-bearing wave-train approaches it and then, upon nearing Earth’s clamorous vibe, the ripples suddenly rear up, thicken, congeal and—out pops a Gray, two Grays, five of them, and a flying saucer.
“Oh, but you don’t like the Gray shape,” says Herman’s voice in Frank’s head, and the cartoon’s saucer aliens change into—Frank fights back an involuntary spasm of disgust—five liver-colored starfish with big red jelly-eggs.
“Watch just one more time,” says Herman, and replays the whole sequence again. This time Frank notices how the wave-pattern of the transmitted aliens first passes Earth, then curls back around and intersects itself. The moiré interference fringes of the waves make a higher-order pattern, and the higher-order pattern bends around again, intersecting itself at a yet higher level, creating yet bigger peaks and valleys, and these in turn bend around again.
Figure 27: Aliens Decrypting Themselves
The mental movie is slowed down so much that Frank can make out level after level of this taffy-like folding of the wave pattern upon itself. At the culminating moment, bumps of the rippled spacetime pinch off into little globs, like rapid water splashing as it flows across a shoal. The drops turn into five starfish and a flying saucer and now the ripples damp down, having converted their energy into something like mass.
“Why do you even have flying saucers,” asks Frank. “If really you’re just reconstituted higher-dimensional electromagnetic vibrations?”
“The saucer is a kind of interface,” says Herman. “A holding loop that lets us stay stationary at a given space location without rushing on and on like radio waves. Also, of course, once we create these semblances of bodies for ourselves, it’s comfortable to have a place to put them. And don’t forget that we need a guest-room for visitors like you.”
Lightspeed Travel
“What’s it like when you travel at the speed of light?” asks Frank.
“It’s wonderful.” And Herman gives Frank a mental taste of it.
As Frank and I later work out in conversation, the key thing about light-speed travel is that when you are going that fast, every place is here and every time is now. Put more dryly, the relativistic length contraction is such that, to a photon, the space ahead looks like a squashed sheet of no thickness. And, due to the relativistic time dilation, from a photon’s point of view the clocks of the world seem all to have come to a stop. At light-speed, distance shrinks to a point and time to an instant.
[Note by R.R.: This struck me as a fine paradigm for enlightenment, reminiscent of a koan sometimes attributed to the Zen monk Dogon: “I say, ‘I’m always here; it’s always now; I’m always I.’ And you say the very same thing. Here and now, I ask you this: in what respect are we different?”]
Frank, who has a practical turn of mind, tries to get a handle on light-speed travel in terms of driving from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe in the Sierras. He puts it to Herman like this:
“Viewed as a whole, the drive from here to Tahoe is a fairly compact experience, because I drive at 75 mph. If I drove at billions of miles per hour it would be an extremely compact experience. It would almost be like everything is here and now. But I don’t get how you know when to stop. Like say I’m driving a billion miles per hour to Tahoe and I suddenly holler out, ‘Hey, let’s stop at that place we just passed, the spot with the minigolf and the go-karts!’ But I’m a long way past that spot by the time I even can manage to say ‘Let’s stop.’ And if I’m traveling at the speed of light, it’s even worse. How do you stop in time, Herman?”
Herman gives a rather long and discursive answer to this question of how the aliens manage to decelerate from light-speed and stop on a dime. Apparently cosmic space includes a number of higher dimensions beyond the four of space and time. And some of these higher dimensions are “compactified,” that is, curled-up like cinnamon sticks. If I’m a smart light-speed pattern, then I’m able to whip around, say, the curled-up fifth dimension so as to do an instant U-turn, which accounts for that folding-over thing Frank was seeing.
Mental guttersnipe that he is, Frank visualizes the U-turn in terms of a stripper swinging around a fire-pole in a topless bar such as the Pink Poodle of Santa Clara, to which Frank makes a pilgrimage at least once a year.
Herman is puzzled by the analogy, so Frank tries again, imagining the light-speed trip and the sudden, discontinuous stop as happening in a single extended moment of mental time, a peak experience comparable to that of a basketball player “in the zone” who leaps into the air, twists, slam-dunks the ball, floats down and lands, with the whole sequence feeling like a single undivided slow-motion gesture.
This makes sense to Herman and he readjusts his representation of a light-speed experience and feeds it to Frank again. What an incredible sensation it is. You (the alien who travels hither from the great yon) have this whooom speed-of-light trip that lasts, strictly speaking, no subjective time at all (even though you do experience it!), and then you swoop down on some fresh world, and it’s minutes, hours, years, centuries, millennia, eons later than when you started and you’re correspondingly far away from home, but it’s like no “time” elapsed during your trip, your trip is a radical discontinuity, a nonlinear spike, a shock-front.
“It’s not quite right to think of the trip as being instantaneous,” corrects Herman. “Things do happen during the trip, only they all happen at once. We cross the signals of lots of other aliens for instance. And there’s the big cosmic background signal as well. God.”
Life In The Universe
The alien guest book outside time like Akahasic Records. But the Blukka built a ziggurat.
Wetware means gene. Herman’s genes are like pentagons.
Shuggoths and sunspots are alive without wetware. Even the galaxy.
God is everywhere.
Meet Rudy at Jahva House 11:30 tomorrow. Ask for 50%, he’ll agree on 20%.
The Alien Guest-Book
“You encounter lots of other encrypted aliens on the way here?” asked Frank. “How many different groups have visited Earth, anyhow?”
“Not so very many,” says Herman. “Perhaps a hundred thousand. Trillions have passed by, but most of them don’t stop. Many of those other aliens are from the insides of stars or from cosmic black holes. A planetary wetware world like Earth means no more to them than a pebble would mean to you.”
“You’re telling me that there’s been a hundred thousand alien visits to Earth?”
“There’s something like a guest-book. Whenever we stop somewhere we leave our memories for future visitors. These are stored as quantum interference fringes in paratime. Now and then some of the less ecologically correct visitors have taken the step of influencing humans to build certain terrestrial monuments or works of art. Most of us feel this is a bad thing to do. If everyone did it, your planet would be a shambles. But, actually, here I am meddling very overtly by giving you all this information for your book. I suppose your Saucer Wisdom will be my saucer’s recklessly garish guest-book signature.”
Frank thinks of a book of “hobo signs” he saw as a boy, and wonders if the compulsion that drove a pharaoh to erect the Pyramid of Giza might be simply a magnified fence-scrawl meaning something like “Bad Dog Here” or “Ask Wife For Handout” or “Good Eats If You Do Chores.”
Catching Frank’s thought,
Herman beams him a guest-book vision of ancient Mexico. Thick rank green vegetation. Hovering in the mid-distance is a saucer, shiny and metallic, but of a rich vermilion hue. The saucer is beaming yellow-green rays down at Mayans who labor on a great ziggurat. A closer look shows that the high priest has a blobby purplish asymmetric alien resting on his back, with a tangle of root-like feelers reaching in through the priest’s neck to control his brain.
“A terrible crime,” says Herman, and the vision ends. “We’ve seen the traces of those ill-shapen vermin before,” says Herman. “We call them the Blukka. Their behavior is so beyond the pale that I’m sure they don’t come from a wetware world.”
Wetware Worlds And Otherwise
“So what is a wetware world?” asks Frank.
Herman explains that this is an environment, typically a planet, where each creature in the ecosystem has a compact program from which the creature’s physical body is grown. In wetware worlds, the creatures reproduce by making small copies of their programs and growing new organisms from the copies. A wetware world is viewed as really inhabited by one kind of thing: the programs that grow its creatures.
In wetware worlds, one privileged form of information replication has managed to extrapolate and exfoliate itself so as to occupy every available environmental niche. Small and large variations in the programs are repeatedly tested out by the mechanisms of mutation and sex. Evolution inevitably arises. The species relationship-diagrams of wetware world have a characteristic branching structure. Every creature in a wetware world is “kissing cousin” to every other.
From the alien point of view, Earth is a wetware world with one basic kind of thing living on it: the protean, self-replicating DNA molecule. All of Gaia’s fauna and flora are close kin: each of our species is DNA based, and each of our Terran organisms has much the same kind of metabolism: a tidy little molecular clockwork of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and light. The whole panoply of Earth’s life could, in principle, re-evolve from any individual representative.
Just as every human language is quite different, being based on a number of arbitrary low-level code-symbol decisions, each wetware world’s molecular biology is unique. In some of them, the master molecule is a double stranded thing like DNA; the advantage of DNA being that it always has its spare copy ready. In other wetware worlds, the wetware code is in a two-dimensional sheet that is able to grow copies of itself like a rubber-stamp printing an image. In still other worlds, the wetware code is a three-dimensional block which replicates itself by quantum resonance.
Figure 28: Ladder Wetware, Sheet Wetware, and Block Wetware.
“Our wetware is in fact a two-dimensional quasi-crystal with five-fold symmetry,” says Herman. “This makes it easier for us to breed different groupings together. Quite often five distinct members of our species will combine their wetware to create one child. Each of us supplies, as it were, one leg of the adult.”
Frank has difficulty in imagining a world which is not a wetware world, so Herman shows him an example, a kind of mental travel movie of a world which he and his companions recently visited. Watching this memory tape feels like experiencing it directly, only from one of the starfish aliens’ viewpoints.
In the tape, the saucer lands on a huge misty plain. A big shambling thing—Frank thinks of it as a “shuggoth”—comes inching along. It is obscenely ungainly, a walking pile of odds and ends. The shuggoth emits a sour bellow, then wallows into a nest. In the nest are bits and pieces of shuggoth flesh which the creature is cobbling together to make an offspring.
Figure 29: The Shuggoth
Other shuggoths appear, none of them is alike. The shuggoth-world is a place in which globs reproduce themselves as wholes, almost like giant amoebas. “They lack the unifying discipline of growing from a seed,” Herman tells Frank. “Such non-wetware creatures have no need to resemble each other at all. Things are tacked on, jerry-built, jury-rigged. There is no consistent upward evolution. It’s like…like philosophy instead of like science.”
“Are there many non-wetware worlds?”
“Oh, yes,” says Frank. “All of the stars.”
Sunspots Are Alive
“For instance,” Herman tells Frank, “There is a race that lives inside your own Sun. It’s rather easy for us to observe them, even from this distance. You call them sunspots.”
Herman shows Frank a view of a sunspot which is really like a solar tornado, or rather like a pair of maelstroms lined by a subsurface vortex thread.
As Frank watches, the vortex wambles and splits off a child vortex like a tornado spawning extra funnels. “Vortices are expert at non-wetware reproduction,” says Herman. “The children aren’t grown from programmatic codes; they’re cloned off whole. There’s a sense in which a parent vortex cares for its children; it feeds rotational energy into them.”
“But are they intelligent?”
“Intelligence—to a wetware-based person, this means reducing the world’s welter of information to small wetware-like codes. Aphorisms, poems, laws of nature, concise mental concepts. The sprawling non-wetware beings think in a different way. They emulate instead of summarizing. Look more closely at the sunspot’s central axis. I’ve highlighted it for you.”
Figure 30: Sunspot Vortex Thread
Now Frank sees a glowing purple space curve which runs along the twisting axis of the great sunspot. The curve is of a remarkable intricacy, like a tangled phone-cord gone mad. The view zooms closer and Frank can see that what he thought was a single curve is in fact a braid of narrower curves. Odd wave forms travel up and down these woven lines, and each of the lines is thousands of miles long. And, of course, each of these individual lines is itself a braid of yet finer structures. So much information!
Frank remembers reading an article about how astronomers are always being surprised by the new behaviors of sunspots. Suddenly this makes perfect sense.
“And of course there’s non-wetware life much bigger than sunspots,” says Herman. “A star as a whole is sentient, and so is your planet Earth. But these minds are too slow and too vast for us to properly encompass. And there are levels upon levels after that.”
Figure 31: The “mind” Of A Sunspot
God
Herman gives Frank a sketchy description of a great chain of being that leads upward. Not only is there life on planets and inside stars, the planets and the stars themselves are alive. At a higher level, the galaxy itself is a living organism—at a time scale we have trouble grasping. The Milky Way galaxy, for instance, takes a quarter of a billion years to rotate around its center. Two hundred and fifty million years. And that’s like one day for the galaxy.
“At the highest level,” says Herman, “The cosmic background radiation is the One Mind. Just like the radio waves which encrypt interstellar travelers like me, the vibrations of God are always present. God is always prepared to appear within you if only you open your…your heart.”
After this ultimate bit of saucer wisdom, Frank found himself back above his cabin. He was tired and hungry and ready to go home.
Temporal Attractor
“One more thing,” said Herman.
“Nothing more,” implored Frank, gazing longingly down at his little house beneath the redwoods. “I need some time to process all this.”
“This will just take a few minutes. We’re going to dart over to Santa Cruz and jump up to tomorrow so you can see your meeting with Rudy.”
“What meeting?”
“Tomorrow you meet him at the Jahva House. You nail down your deal and get started on the book. Saucer Wisdom. We’re counting on you two to do it. If you view some alternative versions of your negotiation with Rudy, then you can figure out the best approach.”
So the next thing Frank knows, he’s floating in a tiny invisible saucer in the Jahva House, watching himself talking to me. The odd thing is that he sees sixty or seventy versions
of the conversation in a row. No sooner is one version done, than the saucer loops him back to the start of a fresh one.
In some of the talks, Frank’s demands enrage Rudy so much that he leaves, in others Frank asks for so little that Rudy agrees with condescending readiness. As Frank watches these variations on his future, it’s like he’s able to reach into them and manipulate them, moving the future time-line back and forth like a stick in a rapid, turbulent stream. Sometimes a little change has a big effect, other times it does nothing.
Slowly the repeated versions stabilize and converge on a single optimal strategy. Frank asks for fifty percent, keeps Rudy from leaving, then “settles” for twenty, which is evidently the maximum that Rudy will pay.
“The future’s not really fixed?” Frank asks Herman as the saucer speeds him back towards his cabin.
“It is fixed,” says Herman. “You need to let go of your old ideas of cause and effect. All parts of time can affect all the other parts, and the single real time-line is the holistic sum of all the back and forth effects. Goodbye for now.”
The saucer lowers Frank down into his desk chair and then the alien disk dissolves back into a complex of bright patterns that merge into the flickering of the three TVs.
A New Style Of Ufology
In closing out our discussions of his alien notes, Frank went into a long rant against the boring bullshit of contemporary ufology, with its dreary obsession with government secrets (compare “hidden parental sex acts”).
“I mean, please!” he concluded. “Why concern yourself with paranoid fantasies about the government, for God’s sake, when the simple truth of the aliens is all around you, as pervasive as the pollen in a May breeze? Do it yourself, and don’t expect some lying moron of a politician to do it for you! Alien consciousness is yours for the taking.”