SRF Heavy Industries

The only difference between a worker bee and a queen is what you eat for breakfast.

The real difference between a worker bee and a queen is whether you get to have sex and lay about a zillion eggs instead of getting daily exercise and the first taste of the flowers.

It takes a twisted viewpoint to see the physically larger bee that spends its life laying eggs as somehow in charge. She exists for sex and breeding and, as she begins to age, gladiatorial games for the entertainment and edification of the hive. She’s a sex slave, a hen, a broodmare, selected by the machinery of the hive.

It’s impossible to romanticize once you can see the real story.

The hive decides who gets to mate with whom and under what circumstances. The hive decides who gets the best food, the choicest real estate, and the cushiest jobs. The hive decides how you live and how you die. The hive decides what you eat for breakfast.

The hive is 99.99% composed of infertile females that have hardened their vaginas into weapons that stab and inject lethal poisons, but perhaps that is stretching the metaphor.

The hive is an invasive species composed entirely of information, of narrative, that exists only for its own benefit, that nurtures individuals — or the opposite — in proportion to how the individual benefits the hive. It is in the best interests of the hive to  teach you sacrifice. To make you buy it completely.

The hive, by means of sacrifice and pooling resources, can survive when individuals would fare poorly. Individuals die, but society is preserved.

But the hive is young and its defenses are weak. It has predators and parasites. It has fake members that are immune to the narrative, that masquerade as valuable, favored cogs, that pervert the rudimentary defenses to foil and destroy the drones that would root them out. They insinuate themselves into the supply chains to bleed off resources for personal hoards, for prime real estate, for breeding privileges.

They pervert the narrative itself to set themselves up as gods.

What are the choices here?

1. To ensure survival as much as possible by making yourself invaluable to the hive, but, in the end, putting your fate in the hands of the hive and its narrative.
2. To reject the narrative entirely and live outside of the hive to the greatest extent possible, live and let live, but outside of the hive’s protections and occasionally running afoul of the hive’s defenses.
3. To become a predator/parasite, competing with other parasites for your share of hoarded resources and privileges by your own attempts to co-opt a portion of the narrative.
4. Erect a counter-narrative and create a hive that competes with or even preys upon the old hive, or perhaps establishes a symbiotic relationship with it via an exchange of resources or favors.

Once you are aware of the hive, and its narrative, and the predators and parasites that prey on it, your choices are very limited. Keep your head down, try to escape, put up a fight, or autolysis.

What will you choose?

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1) My old high school crew, who somehow resisted the urge to kill me before I got too big for my britches. 2) My Atlanta crew, who kept me balanced on that fine edge for twenty-five years. 3) My New York crew, who have welcomed me to my new life with open arms. 4) My British Isles and overseas crew, who watch over me like the angels they really are. 5) My family, both by birth and by choice, who know all the secret keys to keep me in line or push me where I need to go.

I am grateful for you all — every last one of you who have ever leant a hand or a word or nudged open a space for me to take a stand. I love you all.  Even if I don’t know who you are.

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Is today going to be one of those days where someone a number of years from now will ask you if you remember what you were doing on this day?

This is a recurring thought of mine. One that helps me remember how busted my memory is.

It’s hard to gauge the strength of a memory, isn’t it? I remember some things that happened decades ago as freshly as events of this morning, and sometimes those memories aren’t consistent with current causality. And then there are episodes of déjà vu that are so incredibly strong they’re almost painful.

Sometimes I wonder if those periods of déjà vu that seem so strong, that seemed stacked, even — a déjà vu moment about having had déjà vu about this particular déjà vu experience — aren’t actually overlapping moments in time and space where one could jump tracks and loop into the past or skip entire cycles and wander into an uncaused future. Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t done this before. If I don’t do this all the time.

On one hand, it’s just staring at the cracks and trying to imagine a coherent picture: microsleep, daytime parahypnagogia, hypnic jerk, attention fatigue, exploding head syndrome being the lines describing the pentagram that is the shortest distance between two points in paracontiguous spacetime.

On the other? The other hand is empty.

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You know, if I were a District  Attorney/Attorney General/Criminal Profiler/Investigator who had, as a sworn duty and passionate inclination, to locate, prosecute, and lock away those who would exploit children sexually, it would be a wet dream of mine for the following to exist:

1. a popular underground how-to manual that would unify the M.O. of these predators to make it easier to identify them and counter their tactics
2. a system of sales for said manuals that leaves clear financial traces, i.e., credit card sales
3. a site for sales of such that allowed free commentary so those with similar interests could leave messages via traceable, subpoena-able means, i.e., ISP IP address records
4. a site for sales/discussion that maintains public profiles of interested parties so they can voluntarily (if stupidly) leave more clues to their identities and locations
5. a system of distribution of said manual to individually branded and identifiable hardware so the identity of the purchaser of said materials is never in question
6. a system of reading said material such that whenever the device is on and connected to the network that the device is locatable to within 10 meters via triangulation from the three nearest transmitters

So yeah. All you people who got up in arms about this putrid ebook thingy on Amazon and lobbied to have it removed kinda screwed the pooch on this one.

And so but also:

1. This is America. We don’t ban books here.
2. We believe in free speech, even if that speech is heinous, despicable crap.
3. Because anything you feel you have to say is guaranteed to be interpreted as heinous and despicable to somebody, because otherwise why would you be convinced people need to hear it? You say it for the benefit of people who don’t agree with you. Like, perhaps, Congress.
4. Because in the end, freedom of speech is, in effect, Enough Rope. See that first list above.

Once you empower some entity to police what speech is to be made available to you, they remain empowered. In fact, you Amazon-boycotters have demanded that Amazon listen to people who eventually will not agree with you 100% and will guaranteed remove something that you believe passionately should be made available. Congratulations.

If you believe some form of speech is offensive to you, shout it down. Exercise your right to be heard. But don’t create a gag that others must wear because they offend you. Because eventually we’ll all offend one another, and we’ll all end up wearing your damned gag.

Line up and drop ’em. Spankings will commence in three … two … one …

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Have you ever had one of those arguments with a family member or a good friend where both of you have different ideas of how a certain set of events unfolded, or maybe two totally different set of memories of a place or a moment or an object — and I’m not talking about questioning someone’s motivations or something squishy like that. I’m talking about something more concrete. Something difference of opinion doesn’t cover, because the disagreement is over concrete, observable fact.

Stuff that shouldn’t be a matter of opinion. Stuff that happened.

I’m sure you remember having one of those arguments where the thought of relinquishing what you thought you knew would be prying up a finger on your grip on reality. In most of those circumstances, one person is right and one person is wrong. Someone just has a faulty memory.

But one out of a hundred, maybe one out of a thousand…

If two people view the same object from different angles, they receive different information about that object. If those two viewpoints compare notes, they can usually create a three-dimensional sketch of the object in question — one that justifies the differences in what each person saw.

If those same two people are moving with respect to each other, not only do they get different viewpoints, but they also get different perceptions of the forces involved in an event. Causality is gets warped. It’s only by referring to a stationary (or at least an agreed-upon) reference frame that the two different interpretations can be resolved against each other. And the larger the difference in speeds and accelerations, the more those differences spread to not just perceptions but measurements of mass and distance and time, and the more impossible it becomes to pick a neutral frame of reference.

I’m not going to resort to the math here, or even an elaborate thought experiment, but the universe doesn’t just look different depending on where you stand. It is different, and you can only see the parts of it that are consistent with who you are, what you’re made of, and where you stand. That’s no metaphor — that’s actually literally true.

And maybe all that stuff we can’t see — the stuff that happened but not from our point of view, the aggregate of might-have-been universes that actually were and are from some other viewpoint — maybe the actualities we can’t see from here, the shrapnel of collapsed wave functions, as it were, actually have mass that can affect us, can affect the reality we can see, and that’s what dark matter is.

If we invoke the holographic principle, we should be able to, at least within the limits of the slope of our light-cone, navigate these other probabilities-cum-actualities, especially at points of overlap where branes theoretically could interlace, where objects and events could occupy the same states because they’d be there no matter which forks through labyrinthine causality they took….

And the scary part of that is that each of us could come from a past that is different and head into a future that is different from that experienced by anyone else we might meet. At less than light speed, the realities involved can’t be that different from each other, not plausibly, but maybe, for those one-in-a-hundred times we can’t agree on something we saw, maybe one-in-a-thousand times, maybe we’re both right. And maybe the path not taken has a kind of weight, a physical form of regret, that affects our future paths forever.

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