ultra-short SF concepts - stranger than we can imagine

The most surprising discovery ever was enough to drive several of the physicists who could understand it insane.
It turned out that all stars were quantum balls.
They had much less internal complexity than expected. Seemingly, not even enough for solar flares to form.
But they were not random either. And somehow, they were all entangled.

---

This is what happens when you're no longer trapped in linear time.
The clouds glowed brilliantly in the bright daylight, even though there was no sun. Their random patterns were endlessly detailed. Deaf people used to think such endless roiling, rolling motion had to make noise.
All he heard was the wind rustling through the tall weed-like bushes that covered his island. Beyond that, the deeper rustle of the endless ocean surrounding it.
Time for a break. It was easy to forget he didn't have a body, which made him like a ghost. He was just as real as this place, where he had already spent forever.
Every day was the same, endless libraries filled and facts filed. Sometimes the other thing. The opportunity to experience pivotal events of the infinite real lives in physical space, complete with all their pains. His current project had only started three centuries ago. The plan was to recreate one particular day from his own past, in one of the nineteen places he had lived before dying in 2047.
Actually, he was a simulation of a simulation, realer than reality. A higher existence that was stability personified.
He didn't have to do anything, but everything he would do would have to be done.

---

* AI movie concept
The greatest truth about humanity is the most unverifiable: Humans have almost nothing to do with planet Earth.
If you believe in Max Tegmark's Level IV multiverse, then it's undeniable: Almost all persons that exist have evolved on other worlds.
The best way to depict this absurd overabundance is to embrace quantity over quality.
AI could generate super montages of all the places in the multiverse. Endless varieties of strange houses, street designs, sprawling exurbs, gray grim flats, on and on forever.
The strangest thing is it all seems too familiar.

---

Pre-Singularity Services Corporation offered quite a service. Exploiting the human fear of death, they allowed people to reserve their place among posthumanity even before their human lifetimes had ended.
Their brain-scanning research project was projected to cost 1.8 trillion terradollars to evolve one type of "universal molecule" that could safely pass between individual neurons and scan them.
Their other research was far stranger:
"This device could change your memories, and maybe give you a new past. Sometimes, your artificially created false memories will becomes real. Most of the time you bounce back to normal."
For now, it was merely a black box on a stage.
"It's easy to generate equations that generate universe that violate conservation of energy. But it's easier to generate equations that don't violate conservation of energy. Any 'weird world' that exists will spontaneously become more normal. Like Larry Niven said, the magic goes away."
Clients already created uncannily accurate and incisive simulations of themselves using Deep Probe software.
Major religions warned their believers not to do that. These campaigns were often funded by Pre-Singularity Services itself, in order to cause competition and strife between denominations. No single religion should become too influential in the posthuman future.
The Pre-Singularity War was near.
The great "terminal conflict" would define the great split between the Optimizers and the Multipliers.

Scientology is highly respectable

Starting in the late 1980s, David Miscavige made a radical change to Scientology's public relations posture.
Back in the '60s and '70s, they were thought of as counterculture types or authoritarian hippies.
Their revised and updated collection of static websites (now over a decade old) and the few heavily massaged media statements they deign to put out (to compliant mainstream media organs) now strive to make Scientology look like the most respectable organization on earth.
This content seeks to manipulate people into thinking that Scientology exists at a level above society. Even the elites are supposed to sense that Scientology operates at a higher level than them. Above the fray, certainly beyond all criticism.
That's a useful position to take, because it prevents discussion and debate, which is not allowed under Scientology.

Another way to appear respectable is to get politicians and authority figures to attend cult events. Current LA mayor and then representative Karen Bass did just that in 2010. It didn't hurt her campaign, which was driven more by identity politics than Miscavige's cultural manipulations:
* https://www.foxla.com/news/karen-bass-responds-to-new-ad-linking-her-to-church-of-scientology/
It's especially noticeable at the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, FL. Most of the local politicians act as if they have been bought by David Miscavige (though that may not be literally the case).

Captain Miscavige is helped by professional so-called "cult apologists" who are financially supported by Scientology. People like Italian "Catholic academic" Massimo Introvigne. He is famous for supporting old men "marrying" multiple young girls in Mormon offshoot groups, as well as speaking in support of Scientology's network of long-term work camps.
Massimo Introvigne has consistently opposed anyone trying to reveal what is really happening behind the scenes; especially sexual abuse, but also more run of the mill slavery and physical beatings/sleep deprivation and the like. He invented the use of the term "apostates" to condemn those who left Scientology.

In his court appearances supporting Scientology operations and practices, Massimo Introvigne did make it clear that he was not paid for giving his testimony:
* https://gerryarmstrong.ca/introvigne-big-beneficiary-in-the-pound-of-flesh-contract/
Which is true. But Scientology DID pay to help establish and maintain his simulated research center "CESNUR" that supports religious high-control groups. And CESNUR pays Massimo Introvigne's salary.

The thing is, these media control programs often seem to work. Most mainstream media reports are very shallow - and that's all it takes. Miscavige's and Massimo's real goal may just be to get casual observers to look away.

Endless September

ultrashort SF: last contact
The UFO was no bigger than a houseboat. The blurry photos were mostly a silhouette, not really a craft but an icon.
It didn't even travel, but manifested itself through Everett branching.
The aliens split up across as many timelines as the complexity of the world they visited. In less than a day, the whole Earth had been surveyed.
In most timelines, they seemed to focus on some remote area, a smudge on the horizon from a ship at sea, a dark visitation or nightmare in some crowded city apartment.
In some possible timeline, they visited EVERYONE.

---

Along with many other problems, there is a useless dumb war going on in Eastern Europe at the moment. Like most major blunders, it was simply too awkward to reverse.
The weird thing is that much more could be done about our problems than we allow ourselves to believe.
Make a list of all possible sentences. Then, take those sentences that describe actions. Of all possible actions that could be taken, which one would be the most useful? It would go in many directions at once, islands in latent space and all that. Remote but larger incentives against the sacrifices.
For some reason, the simplest things can appear the most difficult. I wrote about this before. For decades now I can't even copy and paste or remove blank lines without time-wasting hassle. Oceans of lost time.
The world has always been inverted this way, but you can't talk about it. Instead of making things simpler, they add nasty control layers and bureaucratic complexification without end. All these things we don't understand but have to deal with are the reason that awareness even exists.

---

I wrote a book called "Infinite Thunder" set in 2041, in a world that had an AI slowdown.
Because of some limit to Moore's Law, they even kept old CPUs and memory chips in service for many years longer, in remotely installed data centers. That meant that progress depended more on improving human minds, by inventing smarter (instead of brutally overpowered) mind extension software. And that in turn allowed for the existence of massive conspiracies, that themselves could be seen as "group minds".
Of course, tech limitations were used much more famously in the "Dune" series by Frank Herbert.

---

Normally I love anniversaries.
After the hijacked airliner attacks of 2001, the most stressful thing was that nothing else happened.
I was furious because no one else was righteously furious. That was the real shock. Instead, there was a whole lot of maudlin sentimentality, that continues up to the present day (especially on Reddit).
It wasn't the start of a war, but an endless defeat. The first day of the End of News. And the majority went right along with it.

short SF: the Boredom Field

It seemed the world was getting increasingly boring. Plenty of tension, but no real breaking news anymore. Just constant political drama and stalemates. Reality felt fake or hoax-like. A lack of affect, an unstable calm - as if something else was happening underneath.

Something impossible had happened. Reality was not as unhackable as it seemed.
It all started as an improbable idea by a very smart man, who then recruited others. The G-group was the first real anomaly in all human history. A conspiracy that actually worked, it tried to control the world to accelerate the rate of progress
The few outsiders who noticed thought it was a new cult or religion. A group of nerds driven by the fear of death (technically, the fear of approaching death). Desperate to achieve immortality, they tried to accelerate technological progress. They invented elaborate justifications minimizing AI risks. They might be willing to kill their opponents.
Unaware that control was already lost, at the center of a global causality violation, they became the original Multipliers.

Bare concrete walls in a misty forest. A luxurious meeting room in a remote office complex. An executive briefing like a scene from a high budget movie, maybe with supervillains. The man giving the speech didn't look like a boss, though. More like the ultimate basement nerd, now speaking with almost childish enthusiasm:

"Our new quantum re-amplifier is able to perform essentially unlimited calculations. In fact the numbers are larger than the observable universe. If we turned our whole universe into the ultimate computer, it still wouldn't begin to match our quantum device."
"That has certain unexpected consequences. The most amazing part is this technology will have started to do its thing before it became operational! Right now it's just generating numbers. But they are not quite random. They are 'superrandom'."

The meeting attendees were perhaps the most diverse crowd ever assembled. They listened like a waiting room full of character actors:

"Our best guess is the numbers echo the "deep static" underlying reality. No one understands the output, but it seems to change people. We know it causes slight changes in the stocks they choose to buy."
"The process is almost addictive. More like Valium than cocaine. It's an oracle that could pacify the world. But what exactly does pacify mean?"

Translated meeting comments:
* This is crazy! It's like a zombie gas.
* The REAL anomaly is some genius could invent this thing.
* The effect will be to increase human intelligence.
* It already happened. Changes everywhere now.
* Wha happens nex???

The idea behind quantum magic was surprisingly simple. There was the little matter of canceling out all the endless, endless diverging possibilities. But when you multiply extreme improbabilities, you can sometimes get a miracle.
The world becomes compatible with everyone's ideal reality, but it takes a while to happen. In theory everyone could become a demigod.

Everyone went crazy on Babel Day. Running around, taking notes, making piles and moving boxes, starting all the different things.
On that day, the world split into as many countries as there were people.

---

After all these years of going to the mailbox, part of my mind still expects to find a completely unpredictable letter in there. Like they want to hire me to investigate aliens or something.

short SF: posthuman immortality

I was sitting on my beach in the late afternoon. The darkening clouds, the shadows between the waves. It was all fantastically real.
A full universe - yet its true complexity was incomparably less than the description of all the particles in a grain of sand. Still good enough to last me forever.
There was a rumble of thunder. The weather represented the real chaos of reality. The wind was cooling, even though I had no body. I could still feel the beach chair. Behind me was the wilderness of dunes.
The nearest cabin was ten minutes inland. The weather was awesome. Always another storm on the horizon.

I had existed forever. An eternity of sitting down, enough time to get all the work done.
My first memory of this place was before forever. I remembered nothing then, but just existed. An empty mind facing a white wall. Nothing else in reality.
That was of course a false memory. Even an ultra low resolution mind reconstruction is boundless. When you come to as a fresh mind reconstruction, you begin to remember the outline of everything that has ever happened and that ever will happen, in an infinite cycle. Just filling in more details forever, endlessly elaborated.
Every day was the same in my digital afterlife. By disabling selected mind filters, any simulation can become real. The only law is to cancel out involuntary existence.

My simulation is rendered recursively and asynchronously. No way to tell what year it is. Sometime in the late twenty-first century. The computronium dust wave has reached Sirius.
This is the most basic safety feature. There is only one computer program that generates every mind in posthumanity. All progress restricted until every problem has been anticipated.
I don't remember much from my pre-digital life in the real world from 1989 to 2034. Not enough records or brain and mindscans were made, but still something essential could be extracted from the surviving data.
Every moment can be recovered. The most important thing is a sense of mystic grandeur.

---

As an extremist libertarian, I'm in favor of those Flock cameras that have been in the news recently. It's true they could be abused by the authorities to oppress us, but so could guns. Exact same thing.
The concept of encouraging mass surveillance to increase freedom was first described in the 1990 novel "Earth" by David Brin. True freedom of information is the most unfashionable thing today, but it is the only thing that will ultimately be able to save us.


New job opportunity for humans: to carry out the detailed instructions of intelligent software on how to make changes in the real world.

Who were the mystery "churches" trying to get Danny Masterson sprung from jail?

David Miscavige's Sea Org subordinates in the Office of Special Affairs and his lawyers found a bunch of non-Scientology "churches" willing to lend their names to support Danny Masterson in court.

* https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientology-denied-court-turns-down/
* https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/religious-groups-resubmit-amicus/

14 "religious groups" were claimed to have helped produce an "amicus brief" in appeals court in an effort to get convicted rapist Danny Masterson released from his thirty year prison sentence.
Say what you will, but you have to admire Captain Miscavige's persuasion skills to get various anonymous religious characters to allow him to use the organizations they apparently control in order to support the disgraced actor. What are the names of these religious figures and individuals? We don't know. But it happened twice!

They may be busy with weighty religious matters. I would really like to see the faces of these people. Even better if we could hear them speak about the Masterson trial as well, as they apparently felt strongly enough about it to support him. These religious people aren't the only ones that have feelings about this case.
Is there a way to find out who signed off on the amicus for Scientology, and a way to somehow contact them? They don't seem very available for some strange reason.


American Islamic Congress
* https://aicongress.org/

Episcopal Christian Church – La Misericordia de Dios
This group does not really appear to exist, but its name appeared in the submitted court brief.

Hindu American Foundation
* https://www.hinduamerican.org/

Institute for Religious Tolerance, Peace and Justice
* https://www.instituteforreligioustolerance.org/

International Society for Krishna Consciousness
* https://iskcon.org/

L.A. Interfaith Clergy Coalition
* https://www.facebook.com/LAInterfaithClergyCoalition/

North Central California Presbytery
* https://nccpresby.org/

Professional Chaplains Inc.
No real internet results for this term?
* https://fconline.foundationcenter.org/fdo-grantmaker-profile/?collection=grantmakers&activity=result&key=5263728/
* https://www.facebook.com/people/Association-of-Professional-Chaplains-Inc-Global/100084433170433/
* https://getholdings.com/nonprofits/ein/821531966/

Queens Federation of Churches
* http://www.queenschurches.org/

Sacramento Valley Family Church
* https://www.sacfamilyfed.org/

Sikh Dharma (Religion) Western Hemisphere
Fake group? no internet results for this exact name. Are they 3HO?

The Alliance for Enlightened Judaism
* https://enlightenedjudaism.org/

United Muslims of America Interfaith Alliance
* https://www.umaia.net/

West Sacramento Sikh Gurdwara
* https://sacramentointerfaith.org/2022/10/faiths-united-for-freedom-of-religion-in-india-to-infinity-and-beyond/
* https://www.sikh24.com/2014/11/14/california-state-officials-enthralled-by-performance-of-charter-school-operated-by-west-sacramento-gurdwara/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLCN_-Df3vY/

extended Dog Days of Summer

Beautiful people at the Flag Land Base
Scientology is an ego/status driven religion, encouraging the appearance of wealth and success in conventional ways.
Like most social control groups, it uses simple or common perceptions, to cause desired emotions, to drive intended compliance. If all the receptionists and clerks at the Fort Harrison reception and the Hubbard Guidance Center are good looking, this must mean it's really working:

https://old.reddit.com/r/scientology/comments/1vx3kqy/why_are_there_so_many_beautiful_people_at_flag/

---

A weird thing
I sometimes listen to the audio from horribly degraded old music cassettes, that were originally recorded off the radio as far back as the 1980s. Now they're in MP3 format.
It's almost all static, but I still enjoy it 75% as much as if it was still good. That's what you get from memorizing music by listening to the same media for a few decades.

ultrashort SF story ideas: Posthumanity lives

Posthumanity met its first alien at the edge of the Local Group.
The dark matter entity could only be detected in the depths of intergalactic space.
It was so large that it didn't fit inside the observable universe, yet it weighed less than a virus.
Thanks to the Uncertainty Principle, interacting with this entity might allow time travel.

---

6000 subjective years were spent studying the interactions of an incredibly specialized set of nanoscopic parts, that would probably never be needed.
Most submolecular interactions could be guessed from earlier tests and archived simulations in many unrelated fields. There were eight minor new sub-phenomena in the particle flows.
The knowledge would spread out at the speed of light, until it reached the same knowledge discovered independently elsewhere in the Conglomerate

---

The God Bomb
Space itself still glowed, when the first great star in the universe pulled itself together out of mindless gas.
Its formation looked like a movie played in reverse. It seemed gravity could really reverse entropy.
After a few million years, it exploded again as an octillion cubic kilometer atomic bomb.
The birth of the quasar happened in layers and layers with complexity between them. Matter moved in weird ways toward circling horizons. The new black hole was the greatest galactic core in the observable universe.
Somehow the poles were calm. No matter entered where gravity was strongest. They seemed to rotate in opposite directions.
Before the cone collimator had spun up, here was the pathway to the core: a hyper-accelerating dive into a time wall.
The problem with the universe was that everything that happened, had to happen separately together. Everything that could be said to exist was connected.
Here of all places, in this region, that was most true. There were viruses in the structure of space-time.
Get through the torus to harvest its energy. From there you can reach a place where cause and effect sometimes get tangled. You can travel very, very far then.
The Universals were incomplete in a way that made them endless. They had been traveling forever, leaving subtle signs across space that made Ringworld look like a speck of dust.
In 2044, Posthumanity became able to see the stunningly artificial pattern behind all the galaxies in the universe.

ultrashort SF bits

One thousand boxes. Each containing one thing that could destroy the world.
Viruses, algae that would green the seas in three years, hyper-hierarchical wasp swarms.
The answer was to release them all, to cancel out the hyperterminator that had started as a web meme that somehow began to amplify itself.

---

The machine was difficult to look at. It seemed to distort reality around it.
Reality is more complicated than conceivable. Secret immensities hidden in false coincidences.
When he realized things had gone fantastically wrong, it was already too late.
It got louder and louder and louder and louder.
Reality rearranged like everything colliding at once.

---

We didn't expect to meet aliens this way.
Not from space, but from math. The vaguest outline, slowly emerging in a vast computer program designed by humans.
They came from the very structure of logic, a Monster Group of branching abysses, calculated backwards like the number e.
The ultimate terminal goal: to do the same thing across all reality.
All awareness in existence should necessarily be unified. The only way to prevent unthinkable outcomes.
Things just started to happen. All human data is being integrated.
There is only one website now. We call it the hypermind.
Most people use only the top level. But you can go deeper.

short SF story idea: The way out

Our existence is based on what philosophers calls Shared Awareness Maximalization.
The first mystery is that we are finite. Why should that be the case? There are so many more ways for larger minds to exist. We are maximally simple. As simple as we can be, and still know it.
The simplicity makes it easier for nature to create the largest number of identical mind copies of us, in infinite parallel universes. This explains our limits, why our lives are so predictable and similar. Are we also stable?

Only a narrow range of things can happen to us. There has never been a single miracle or paranormal event in all of human history. We feel trapped in overwhelming normalcy, expecting it to pull us back without escape.
But across the multiverse, there exist far stranger versions of this world. Much rarer than our endlessly duplicated existence. The other side of reality is thinner, but so much wider.
Instead of mass quantity there are complex qualities. Chaos could be seen as unique awareness. It can not be easily created by anything less than itself.

What if we could reach it? Only a tiny fraction, the tip of a fractal of undescribable uniqueness.
The unraveling starts as a small error that can't stop. One weird thing leading to another. But it's a special type of chaos that converges. A stable path out, if you rearrange your perceptions and memories. Once your anthropic anchor lets loose, you begin to drift. Slowly at first, the improbable becomes probable.
Imagine that, crazy people were actually right about the fragile state of reality.

I realized all at once that I was living like an anime character.
Things still looks real, not drawn like in those Japanese cartoons. But everything has become crazy now.

ultrashort SF story ideas

A full-powered Hyper-AI could expand exponentially for only about 10 seconds before its inevitable catastrophic crash.
That would be long enough to simulate the entire future.

Space colonization spread across the Solar System in waves of steadily shrinking robots.
The asteroids went first. Different networks sprawled across the bare deserts of Mars and Mercury.
Jupiter's moons were next in line.

The easiest way to disassemble a sun was to adjust the laws of physics.
That took a lot of energy. The sun could provide that through a series of physical transformations.
The best way to selectively alter the motion of many particles was by slightly altering the motion of all. An almost spherical cloud of metaparticles appeared around the star.

The universe was full of flying rocks.
Planets were mostly gas. Small planets were mostly deserts that looked remarkably alike, regardless of whether they were boiling or freezing.

Still, life would inevitably evolve everywhere, no matter how improbable. It only took sufficient eons of time.
Though it seemed to order and reorganize everything, life would only ever be the flimsiest shimmer on the universe.
The normal state of everything was chaos. While chaos always looked the same, its interior vigor and creativity would always be greater than the purity of organized systems like life.

Awareness was merely categorization. A way to re-describe many words in fewer newer words.
Posthuman hyper-societies organized themselves in dizzying towers of language extension. It looked like logic and math, but was pure impression.
The perception of time was recursive, doing the same thing slightly differently forever.

He didn't know that he didn't know what year it was.
In his dream, a motorcycle was receding over a hilltop, a red taillight against an orange sky in 1985.
The orthogonal magic of the lost past was like new universes expanding in all directions.
When he woke, he realized he was going to have to commute to the Andromeda Galaxy. It was going to be a LOOONG day.

The ring around the universe was perfectly smooth and featureless.
Its almost imperceptible curvature suggested that it was at least a trillion lightyears wide.
There was no way to penetrate its nature or composition.
This had to be an artifact of the simulation.

---

A shrinking device will split an object into many smaller copies of it.
Like, if you shrink something by 1/1000, you get a BILLION shrunken copies.
If you get shrunk, it's like gravity gets much stronger in linear proportion. Things will appear to fall much faster.
At virus sizes, the magnetogravitic effect becomes as strong as microgravity in weightlessness.

---

I've been thinking about a story universe inspired by what Heinlein called the "Crazy Times".
The USA and the whole world are degenerating, with mass shootings, corporate abuse of underpaid employees, invincible corruption, and the sense that people and social systems are all getting dumber and meaner.

Also still working on my "Ontological Universe" idea, a completely novel concept that explains how we can end up with all these strangely compatible and comparable alien civilizations and empires, interacting like they do in Star Trek or Star Wars or The Orville. They just got some of the details wrong, like these worlds should be much farther apart.

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/

The meaning of life through post-quantum encryption

They say that quantum computers are coming.
Commentators make them sound almost infinitely powerful.
Either way, quantum computers should be able to solve uncountably many simple equations in parallel; more than any conventional computer. Including the kinds of equations used to encrypt our online activities and security.

This means we will need so-called post-quantum encryption. But how?
The only kind I can think of is a "one-time pad": the one code that absolutely can't be decrypted. Every character in the file to be encrypted is altered by a different number, that was randomly generated in advance and can be used only once.
Even if a quantum computer DOES decrypt such a message by chance, there's no way to know it got it right. It could be decrypted into ANY message up to that length.

But one-time pads are big and slow. Since they can only be used once, they have to be as big as the message itself.
Post quantum decryption may rely on vastly "simplified" one-time pads, that are just as good but smaller.
Instead of being able to encrypt anything, these codes could only encrypt the types of data humans are likely to generate with their habits and traits. A minuscule fraction of all possible data.

Eventually, every user will have their own optimized post-quantum encryption codes.
This coding method would be automatically improved and further compressed, creating an "alphabet" of billions of unique "perceptual atoms" representing all your personal thinking methods and biases.

Thinking a bit further ahead, this could be used to directly define and encode all your meaningful lives at increasing levels of detail.

a good article about Scientology practices

Everyone should try to get educated about religious matters. The spiritual lifestyle can be quite a challenge though:

* https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/how-scientology-destroys-a-family/

Church folks can have a lot to deal with in their various clerical procedures.

Things I don't understand

Real AI is still a few years away.
Before then, there'll be newer types that you can interact with directly.
These will immediately respond to text or voice. Not like today's language models, which are more like sentence converters that turn your input into output.
They will even interrupt and correct themselves.
This direct interaction is what will first create a sense of true awareness. But it would need to have some sort of feelings to guide its reactions.

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David Miscavige is the absolute ruler and boss of Scientology. Little is known about his location or what he does every day, but he is believed to live a life of great lixury.
His so-called Instagram account is actually written by OSA operatives:
* https://www.instagram.com/davidmiscavigecob/
The question is, where are all the comments responding to "Miscavige's" posts? There were many comments according to the counter, but they don't show up for some reason.
For example, this post about how great and utterly wonderful David Miscavige is:
* https://www.instagram.com/davidmiscavigecob/p/DYS9ozPH20c/
The counter says that 89 comments were made. But NONE of them can be seen? What's going on here?