What Links Here? (2 articles…)

Gaksloope

I've been meaning to come clean for some time -- so I will share more here if you somehow crawl out from under the nest of hidden links to find what is happening for this one -- but it's true, it's always true, it always will have been true -- I am in constant contact with Gaksloope, who lives in an alternative-reality cubicle, fourteen minutes into the future.

Gaksloope -- immortal yet not quite anything other than mortal, is a convergence from the wake of a time-ripple that rides ahead of us.

You -- mortal -- dumb -- trapped in three dimensions -- can't see the way ripples move over the 4 dimensional surface of the multiverse.

There are possible futures -- jostling with each other -- collapsing and expanding -- to create a fuzzy, wiggly, wobbly future scenario, that is only guaranteed to be "real" if it isn't quite "our" future.

That's "the unseeable future" -- it's weird -- it's just the way logic or the arrow of information or the arrow of causality or the pole of destruction or the paradox of incredulity that arises when the present is given direct information about its own future. THAT is the trick. You can see the exact future of your brother universe here and your sister universe there -- you can see perfectly well, precisely what will happen to them -- but you can't see the future of your own universe -- not quite -- not clearly -- not yet -- and they can see it your neighbours -- but the moment you try to convey to each other exactly what you see -- the moment what you see of their future becomes equivalently wonky. Just the tiniest bit wonky at first -- but soon it was so wonky that the whole screen -- right at the point where you shone the light on your own reflection for your own future -- grew into a complete blur, blurred beyond hope of being seen, blurred to nothing but a visual equivalent of pink noise.

BUT GAKSLOOPE SEES THROUGH THIS

GAKSLOOPE TELLS ME THERE ARE FIXED MOMENTS

THERE ARE EVENTS THAT CANNOT BE AVOIDED

imagine bobbing flotsam rushing down a swollen river, unsure if microcurrents tip you hither or if not hither the yon, from one moment to the next -- but in the river -- a post, higher than the flood, was bolted to the river bed, driven deep into the mud, and it stands unmoved by the rush of the river of time and the pounding of the flotsam and jetsam -- it was bolted there long ago, four minutes ago, it does not matter when, it always was always there, even if it, a moment ago, it was never there. There it is. Right there.

THAT is a fixed moment.

An event in the flow of time which must occur. A nail driven through a piece of bacon and a slice of fried egg and a strand of spaghetti, nailed to a wall, held in place, even as the rest of your breakfast, exploding against the wall -- or frozen in time immobile -- gives in to the pull of gravity, the nail is the fixed moment - and there are fixed moments, the same fixed moments, in this and every universe:

  • Ringo replacing Peter Best.
  • Napoleon for one moment, looking at Moscow, with that daring, foolish glint in His Eye.
  • A particular bus driver on a particular day, on a particular road, in a precise time, precise location, precise mass, direction, and specific kinetic energy. There may or mayn't be a bus. But there is always that precise kinetic bus-driver's vector. And a smell.
  • A butterfly, unaware that it is famous, but whose one particular flap, at one tiny moment, is one of a handful of fixed moments, that can never alter no matter how often the fabric of time is rolled forward, rolled back, rolled forward, rolled back....

Gaks (as I call him) -- which is to say -- Gaksloope -- is what they call "like that". Not a fixed point -- but a fixed line. A slash, as if by a sword, across the delicately blowing silken curtain of space and time. A constant. A constant in a sea of variables. Or, if we look out for Gaks' own frame of reference: a dynamic function in an indifferent n-dimensional hyper-mesh of fixed constants.

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