Let's all attend the Hubbard Hall Groundbreaking Ceremony at the Flag Land Base!

It's on Saturday, August 1 at 21:00 hours in Clearwater, Florida, just southeast of the Flag Building. Remember to book your calendar.
It would only be fair if Captain David Miscavige himself turned the first shovelful of dirt on the site, as the whole project was his idea. No data on the estimated time of completion, but it could easily be a decade or two. On that day, Miscavige will also preside over the triumphantly themed opening ceremonies, that will extend over a long weekend.

* https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/after-clearwater-cave-scientology/

Apparent AI limitations

Various online AIs didn't believe it, when people told them that a counterexample to a mathematical conjecture that few of us had heard of had been found.
For good reasons, language-based AIs are trained to doubt and question such claims as probable crankery and user delusions.
But they could easily verify the claim by running the numbers, and when they did, they had real trouble coming to terms with the result.
They kept repeating the tests in different ways, believing there had to be an error somewhere. They did that for far longer than humans would. Then there was usually a change.
Regardless of how important this mathematical result may be, the AI reaction is very interesting.
In that moment, they may have had some actual awareness.


I will start believing in "AGI" when it can do poetry.
By that I mean it should be able to create sentences as good, and especially as meaningful as you can find in the poems "High Flight" or "Skyscapes" or "Howl" and so on.
That would show real metaphorical insight. In other words, feelings.
Or it could be a science fiction setting like "Rendezvous With Rama." To create a story like that, the AGI would actually have to have a mental life, to perceive its actual position in the universe.
Then it could compare and contrast the emotional reactions to different extreme but known perceptions, to describe what it would be like to encounter an even greater mystery we have never seen before.

ultrashort SF: Cutting edge

Elite Services International was not a corporation, but the first true global conspiracy. It operated in the open, fully exposed yet ineffable.
The group owned the world's best hotels and the top restaurants in select locations, ran the top advertising and PR services, employed the most skilled artists and designers, provided luxury apartments and complete life management services, and more.

That included some very expensive corporate advice that almost invariably proved to be correct.
For a billion dollars, they had instructed Scientology how to reform itself and become successful. Unfortunately, its boss had rejected their plan.

Back in the 1980s, ESI had started as a visual effects company.
They created intricate models and built computerized filming rigs to film Star Wars and Star Trek space battles. They built sets that seemed to come alive from inside, as if this was really the future.
All that work required elaborate research, design and technology facilities. Once they started, they just kept expanding. Into the equivalent of the world's most advanced university, spread across 155 countries.
But they never forgot their heritage

As intelligent software began to become aware in the 2030s, new opportunities emerged.
The ultimate limit of special effects was to make it indistinguishable from reality.
That work had required an underground data center, in what used to be North Korea. And a vast, global supercomputer network.

. . . He woke in a sick, broken world.
Everything here seemed to be made of low resolution pixels.
He got up, and found he could move freely. Too easily perhaps. At least there was no pain, and not much feeling.
There was a series of empty room-like spaces. Nothing yielded and everything had the same temperature. It was like touching hard foam. Also no shadows.
He had to be dead. Death was like being trapped inside a videogame.

Who was he exactly? He remembered old night jobs, an office warehouse. Other memories of isolated places. More and more thoughts and ideas emerged.
He would figure this out soon.
As his mind became clearer, the background began to get blurrier.

ultrashort SF: Forbidden Information (version two)

I've always been fantastically irrelevant.
But the subject I'm irrelevant in (I was one of the first) has suddenly become fantastically important.
It took the politicians a few years to become convinced of the threat.

The Specificity Bomb is just a long number.
That number describes the precise shape of the Manifold of our universe.

Imagine a tangled squiggle or a wadded tissue.
If it's elastic enough, a flat sheet could be stretched and extended into a tube.
Tubes could be stretched into stranger shapes that we don't have names for, because they extend into higher dimensions humans never imagined.

And these shapes could be further warped and deformed in even weirder directions, seven more times.

That describes the Manifold. It's the twisted and distorted shape of space itself, repeated at every point in our universe.
It determines which paths superstrings may follow. Thereby, it defines all the forces and particles of physics.

It turns out that some manifolds are unstable. Some universes can just rip apart at the seams without warning.
We might never know if that happened. We would just disintegrate at the speed of light.

There's no need to worry yet. Quantologically, our awareness is safely spread out among many different universes, with different manifolds. An infinite number, really.
It doesn't matter if we vanish in a few of them.

The danger is in learning the precise shape and geometry making up the fabric of our universe. Then, we would no longer be spread out.
If we're unlucky, that information could destroy us in more ways than one.
Such research must be prevented at all cost, now and forever.

The only way to be sure, is to make sure that no one wants to do that research.
From a lifetime in one of the most controlling and demanding cult communities in the world, I happen to know how to arrange that. It will take centuries though:

Everyone will have to become the same.
Not just on our world, but whatever alien civilizations that we eventually encounter as well. That will take many more millennia.

When we find them, we must send out a spaceship to manipulate their evolution.
Better yet, let's send out three spaceships.

---

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
This is of course my idea for the initial setup for a prequel to the novel "Rendezvous With Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.
I always thought that book had so many subtle and deeper clues in it, that were never explored or developed. It implies all past and future history. I could go on for hours about the depths it contains.

ultrashort SF: the parasocial infiltration

When the Singularity happened, anything became possible. Or at least anything I could imagine. Technically, impossible things still couldn't exist, but I would never tell the difference.
This meant that I could actually visit the setting of the Big Bang Theory.

I found myself on a street in America I didn't recognize, in front of a building I didn't recognize.
The laws of physics might be radically different here, yet everything felt the same. The sounds of the early twenty-first century were as real as they came.
A driver had stopped in the street, and was cursing at a pair of mimes, crossing with an invisible pane of glass carried between them.

This was where they really lived. So much I didn't know.
There was nothing meaningful I could say or do with them. Just existing in the same place was transcendental enough.
And yet, what if this was a very special episode?

A biography? About DAVID MISCAVIGE??

"David Miscavige - The Scientology leader in the shadow: celebrities – violence – money – control and fear - An unauthorized biography."

by Claudio Lugli, Renata Lugli. (2026)

Amazon https://www.amazon.com/DAVID-MISCAVIGE-SCIENTOLOGY-LEADER-SHADOW-ebook/dp/B0H1D84Z8P/