SRF Heavy Industries

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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My creepiest story yet, “The Confession”, is headed your way!

This story hasn’t seen the light of day yet — and, depending on your collective reading habits, may never, technically — but for this one I recommend daylight reading, especially for those of you who haven’t built up too much of a tolerance. And you should realize this is me saying this.

“The Confession” is a piece I wrote specifically for the DAW anthology Zombiesque, which showcases sixteen different takes on what daily lif– er, existence is like for this particular taxonomic branch of undead post-biology, all from the point of view of the “differently alive”. Zombiesque is edited by Stephen L. Antczak, James C. Bassett, and Martin H. Greenberg, and features stories from Nancy A. Collins, Charles Pinion, Tim Waggoner, Richard Lee Byers, Robert Sommers, Seanan McGuire, G. K. Hayes, Jim C. Hines, Sean Taylor, Jean Rabe, Gregry Nicoll, Del Stone, Jr., S. Boyd Taylor, Laszlo Xalieri (hey, that’s me!), Nancy Holder, and Wendy Webb.

Zombiesque isn’t on the shelves yet but is available for preorders from Amazon. The release date is three months away. It’s a shame it’s not out for Halloween, but at least it should be there by the time some other critter onslaught pokes their collective heads up out of their holes in the ground — making Zombiesque the best Groundhog Day present ever! Unless it gets pushed back to Easter, which should also work, thematically….

Here’s a look at the back cover blurb in case that helps tip the balance:

Also note it’s legit enough to have an ISBN number and everything. And I have to say $8 is not bad at all these days for 320 pages of completely ownable and transferrable DRM-free literary goodness. That’s $.50 a story, which is totally non-sucky.

Pass the word!

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Let’s try this on for size:

The devil’s pitchfork is not the affectation of a dandy; the devil is a working gentleman with the background of a farmer.

Poetically true. Logically nonsense. But how does it sit in your head? Does it latch into place by its little hooks and become part of your cranial canon or does it bounce around and slide off into the junkpile?

Here’s the analysis:

The devil’s pitchfork is not the affectation of a dandy. Probably we can take that as a given. We’ve often seen imagery of a hypothetical devil with a pitchfork and pitchforks of any kind would be a bit silly as a salon accessory. I wouldn’t rule it out completely because it’s certain that someone would try it, but we can assume a certain likelihood of failure to pull it off and subsequent ridicule. Or maybe that’s just my personal sensibilities talking. These things are so subjective.

Here’s that second overpacked clause unrolled into individual assertions:

The devil has a farming background. I’m not sure this point has ever been made historically. The pitchfork may have been added on a whim to historical imagery as a convenient toasting fork for, well, toasting, but I’ve never seen a picture of the devil milking a cow or guiding a plow. For instance.

The devil is a gentleman. Arguments could be made that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, so … maybe?

The devil is a working gentleman. Hardly ever an attribute ascribed to Satan, but one could assume that he understand the battle for souls is not something you can sleepwalk through. Again, maybe? It remains hard to picture a blue-collar devil.

The devil is. The toughest one yet. There are so many unobservable, unprovable things you have to swallow before this one is at all appealing to believe. And yet.

And yet.

If you believe in the devil, or at least believe that the concept of the devil is a useful metaphor for the aggregate of all evil that brews in the hearts of all people — a contagious and malignant (in the sense of cancerous, even) aggregate that sometimes seems like it has its own will and agenda — then it’s easy to expand that concept to include that of a devil farmer who knows that a good crop requires plowing and fertilizing and hard work at both ends of the season to ensure a good harvest.

Perhaps the failure is in the English language for having only one word for both kinds of truth.

[*]

If there was ever any soul on earth who understood what it meant to live on the edge, it was Benoit Mandelbrot.

The man’s name is synonymous with fractals, which are, for those in the know, the class of mathematical entities in which any portion of the set is substantially similar to the set as a whole. For everyone else, grab a leaf and look at it closely. Note how the angles between the veins and the proportional distances between branchings of those veins is quite similar to how the leaves are distributed on the twigs of the tree it came from, and how those twigs are arranged on the branches, and the branches on the trunk.

Fractals form at the interfaces between domains. In the case of trees, the interface is the very concrete interface between domain of tree and the domains of air and soil. Between any domains, no matter how concrete or abstract those domains, there is a fractal surface. And the math that governs the topology of that boundary is ridiculously simple — no matter how ridiculously complicated it looks.

It’s because of what I learned from Mandelbrot and his intellectual kin that I learned to watch the interfaces between things — between substances, between individuals, between groups of people, between states of being, between abstract categories — to look for that telltale stutter, the flickers, the swirling interlocking textures, the alien landscape that‘s what you get when you put any “gray area” between black and white absolutes under a microscope.

You can see it yourself when you look at the interfaces between, say, legal and illegal, between your money and the government’s money. The more complicated the rules are, the more you know someone has taken the wrong approach to describing the interface, because the math itself is simple, simple, simple. Measuring the coastline of an island, the boundary between earth and sea, by picking up and laying down a one-millimeter ruler again and again wherever the last wave ended is an exercise in gritty, freezing, salty, damp frustration. And, when you add all those millimeters up, you will get a coastline longer than the circumference of the earth. I’m not kidding about that.

When Mandelbrot made his journey from living to dead, I wonder if he remembered to eschew the millimeter-long ruler in favor of enjoying the intricate interlocking textures he discovered that certainly must describe the boundary between here and the hereafter.

[*]

Over the course of the last five hundred years or so an individual’s risk of death by murder — that’s all intentional untimely demises, amateur or professional, privatized or state-sponsored, individual or wholesale — has actually gone down. This is only true as an average, seeing as there are some locations (physical and/or in Hilbert space) that are much riskier than others, but it’s true nonetheless. So that’s good news.

Risk of death by negligence and neglect — this would be unintentional yet preventable untimely demises like those caused by curable diseases, starvation, exposure, unsafe housing, poisoned water/air/food supplies, etc. — also seems to be on the decline. On the whole. Averaged worldwide.

There are localized hot spots. In places where government is too weak to defend non-wealthy people from unprincipled wealthy people and/or where there is a dearth of compassionate wealthy people. But things are still better. In the long term. On the whole. On average.

So that’s good.

Right?

Look around you. You can tell there’s something a little kinky with this assessment. In the long term. On the whole. On average.

The problem is basically how averages work. In a situation like this, “average” is how you mathematically sweep the horror under the carpet of the doing-okay.

Say you have twenty people in a room, and all twenty of them together earn a million dollars per year. That’s $50,000 per head, so you might be inclined to think that everyone is basically okay. That will get you by if you budget, if you live in a reasonable neighborhood, if you don’t go nuts. Everything’s fine.

But consider. Maybe one of those people earns $600,000 all on his own. And another one earns $100k. That leaves $300k to be split among the remaining eighteen people, and by now maybe you’re suspecting that it possibly won’t be split into an even, meager $11,000 apiece.

That’s the root of the problem. It’s made quite a bit worse because we’ve created enormous machines out of paper that we’ve mistaken for people — machines that tie up an enormous proportion of resources because, for some reason, we allow them to own assets and money and real estate and, effectively, judges and councilmen and senators. Except we don’t count them as people when we do our math to calculate our precious averages. And we certainly don’t count them as people when it’s time to punish someone for the crimes of theft and bribery and murder. Somehow they simply turn invisible.

But you know, in the long term, on the whole, on average, everything is okay.

[*]

I’m back at work after taking September off to mostly fail to sort through some personal business and to mostly move out of my house in Atlanta. Any projects I had going before this contract thing started in late May (with included interruptions) seems so long ago that I’ve lost all momentum and motivation. In fact, motivation for anything is at an all-time low.

Which, I guess, is understandable.

I need to get back into a daily writing routine, if that’s at all possible, and maybe put together some smaller projects first so I can get my endurance back up for something larger/longer. I don’t have a plan yet, but I’ll keep working at it.

If you’ve been waiting for something worthwhile to come out of the machine here, I ask for your patience. It might be a while longer.

[*]

Every year, on this day, around this time of day, I go back and read this again, and all of the little comment threads, so I can remember what happened, how it felt … and how we all knew in advance how the events of the day were going to be used and misused for the next decade.

Some amazing things have happened for me over the past nine years, stuff I would never give back. But looking back over my own timeline, everything up to that date was pretty smooth running and more or less on some sensible track, and everything after that date was all shattered landscapes and tons of wasted effort trying to get back to familiar ground.

There is no familiar ground anymore. Any twinges I’ve been feeling for the American Dream have been phantom pains in an amputated limb.

[*]

The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line.
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald translation

What we shall be is written, and we are so. Heedless of God or Evil, pen, write on!
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, same quatrain, Graves and Ali-Shah translation

Amazing difference, isn’t it?

Fitzgerald tried to preserve the poetry, whereas Graves and Ali-Shah went for literal and idiomatic accuracy. But the point here is that if you only ever saw one version, you’d think it was as accurate as an expert could make it. Seeing two versions in disagreement makes you wonder whether maybe they both missed something….

Pay attention to where your news and gossip comes from.

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