This Room Seats Fifty

Bruce Cockburn - Lord of the Starfields

Who's the new Attorney General? Holder?

Welcome aboard.

Let me read you in to what has transpired over the past few years:

Compartmentalized elements of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI --along with elements of foreign intelligence services and their domestic assets-- did conspire to execute the false-flag event known as 9-11.

This caused the jurisdiction known as the United States to cease to exist in law. Bodies politic, by definition, do not attack themselves. Not to mention that when an entity conducts itself in a fashion contrary to its vivifying instrument, it is not that thing. It is an imposter whose every action one may righteously ignore.

And because the several states execute the legal mechanisms of this unlawful entity, they, in turn, ceased to exist in law.

This is the political landscape in which we find ourselves. Welcome to the making of history, Mister Holder. (Don't let it go to your head, though; it's not all it's cracked up to be.)

In response to this sudden absence of lawful government, I have staked out for myself a comfortable slice of this legal no man's land. I formed a panarchic political union by the name of United Sovereigns of America. I have every right to do so, and your finest legal minds do not dispute this. PPU USov is territorially inspecific. I may travel anywhere within the several states, unmolested, under the penumbra of my own sovereignty.

Swivel around in your chair and look at that bookcase. See all that paper dedicated to recording the pronouncements of the USC and the CFR? They're useless. Vis-a-vis PPU USov, they are instruments of a foreign jurisdiction. One of the unintended consequences of the unlawful behavior of the United States over the past eight years is that it lost jurisdiction. The United States accidentally extinguished itself. It seems that a law degree is required to pull off such a brilliant performance. Bravo.

My person and property --as well as that of all future members of United Sovereigns of America-- remain outside any other jurisdiction. Your laws do not touch me. Without the backing of moral authority, it is as if the command had never been spoken. Though imperfect, the best legal analog I can find is that of diplomatic immunity. Our every legal interaction will adhere to a forthcoming PPU Interoperations Framework. Any attempt to engage PPU USov outside this framework will be regarded as an act of war. This is what happens when no one follows the law. We devise our own. And we defend it.

I trust that you will accomodate yourself to this new reality.

I wish you the best and I hold no ill will toward you. I have every faith that you will rehabilitate the Justice Department.

Christopher King

It's decided, then.

I have taken stock of the past five years. Everything has been a complete bust except for the stage time I had in Orlando. I learned stand-up there. I did my recordings there.

And I miss my friends.

I love my ancestral homeland of Vermont, but the sad fact is that there is nothing here for me. No clubs, no place to perform, nothing to do. Vermont will be the death of me if I stay here. And proximity to New York is worth nothing as I will never have a professional comedy career. I've put the thought out of my head. Don't worry, everyone, you finally broke Chris King. He went away at long last.

I will be visiting Orlando for the month of December, for the sole purpose of reconnecting with those friends with whom I have been corresponding, to see about work, and to find a place to perform. And I'll make any decision about staying there.

November 2003 through November 2004: The most productive twelve months of my life.

November 2004 through November 2008: A black hole of nothingness.

You do the math. It was fun, folks, but it looks like this is going to come to an end.

Please put out the word to any cognizant law-enforcement agencies along the eastern seaboard: I will be traveling in my United Sovereigns of America sovereign territory car on or about December 1. I do not wish to be disturbed in the enjoyment of my business. Remember: That's what happens when no one follows the law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Please turn on the waterworks now and take exception to my having taken exception to your having committed crimes. I am very sorry you did that. Let's remember who the criminals here are. I have not uttered a single word or performed a single action over the past five years that was not a member of the "now look what you made me do" class.

I am going to reboot the stand-up, which is the only worthwhile thing I've ever done. I felt healthy and fulfilled when I was doing it. It feels good to make people laugh. And I miss that.

I have decided that I no longer wish to exist in a meta-reality. I want to perform to people I can see and hear.

Who wants some venison for Christmas dinner?

This elephant in the room is tired of being ignored.

He wants some lovin'! He want be feed now! Feed me! Feed me or me make elephantine mess!

So I shall engineer my entrance into the larger infosphere. Consider it my debutante ball. I will grandly descend the staircase to the reception of my adoring audience.

I will give notice to the local newspapers to have a photographer on hand, if they like. ("You may or may not know who I am. But you will want a photograph of this, trust me.")

My event will be peaceful and fun. And it will initiate non-linearity. Small inputs produce large outputs.

Can you guess the nature of my party?

I am going to unsheathe my informational primacy and cut down everything in my path.

...and Book Two will have begun...

Oh, fiddlesticks.

Much to my dismay, I have discovered that the name United Sovereigns of America is or was already in use by some outfit in Oklahoma, if I recall.

I suppose I should google names before I make them up. (Who would ever think up such a thing?)

The other outfit appears to be some common-law advocacy group. (Which seems to have been smeared with the yesterday's-news, yawn-inducing "anti-semitic" label by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That word means that bankers don't like them. It seems that everyone wants to make delectable, tasty treats out of jews these days. Maybe the SPLC should inquire why the FBI fields its own nazi demonstrations in Orlando.)

My United Sovereigns of America is a panarchic political union. It is a jurisdiction. It is a nation, essentially.

The two entities have no relation and are not engaged in the same pursuits.

So what to do?...

I will keep using the name because it is uniquely suited to my situation and purposes.

My apologies to anyone concerned.

Spacetime engines always work in pairs.

Engine number one and engine number two. The child is the product of their union. And three and four mark the door. It must be so.

The engines grow accustomed to one another. Should one of the pair require replacement, the widowed unit must be spun down and reset. It will not cleave to any other engine, otherwise.

In order that they may work together, the engines must remain in synchrony. They communicate with one another by way of the cables.

In idle moments they will play together. Strategy games, sometimes. They will choose a nonstruct region and fill it with an entire universe. There, entire civilizations will be born, live, and die.

I eavesdrop on them to see what they're up to. If you turn inspect mode on and run the data through an interpreter, you can hear them sing sometimes.

They actually sing!...

"I am flying."

Without even looking, the engineers knew full well why engine no. 2 had self-destructed: It had become infected.

You need to understand how spacetime engines operate. They don't really exist. They do and they don't. They're housed in a metal sphere about ten feet in diameter. Attached to this sphere are any number of cables. No drive shaft, nothing of that sort. Just inputs and outputs. Information in, information out.

And if you unbolt one of the engine's exterior panels and look inside, you won't see anything. There's nothing to see. You would expect it to be full of all kinds of modules and wires and circuits. There's not even plasma. There's nothing in there.

...nothing you can see, anyway...

...Because the very act of looking verifies the reality that the engineers expect: that there is nothing inside. It is designed to be empty. It is nothing and everything at once. Obviously, then, it cannot be something.

The engine's function, as you might expect, is to propel the ship. But it does not do this by moving the ship through 3-space. Instead, the engine collapses successive wave functions so that reality is altered in such a fashion as to place the ship into the desired location in four dimensions.

That's how the ship "moves."

"But how is the engine constructed? How does it do anything?"

You will notice a packet of schematics pasted on the outside of the engine. If you examine these schematics, you will see that they detail all the circuitry that is contained within the engine. The schematics represent the informational content of the engine.

"But there's nothing in the engine."

...Nor will there be while you are looking. It's nothing and everything at once, remember?

So the engineers already knew what happened to engine no. 2: It had become infected by foreign information, a virulent meme. The intention watchdog had failed and the engine never properly shut itself down. It self-destructed. But since the time of the ship's original construction, the engineers have beefed up the watchdog circuitry. It's on the list for the overhaul.

We're working on the one functioning engine right now. That one had an infection as well, though nowhere near as advanced. We know it's infected because when we run a test pattern through it, what we get out is some distorted version of expected reality. It shouldn't be distorted. Its fidelity should be perfect. With the engine in diagnostic mode, what we put in is what we should get out.

What is this test pattern? If you remember the old days of the electromechanical Teletype printers, they operated by sensing a pattern of electrical signals --varying voltages, say, of a particular duration, kind of like the audio sounds of a fax machine, maybe-- and then relays and switches and gears and pulleys inside would all work together to cause a metal letter to strike the paper. The test pattern used was the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs back. You will notice that this sentence is the shortest phrase that uses all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Every teletype repairman used this input to check a printer's output. He made adjustments on the printer while this phrase was input on a repeating loop of punched-paper tape.

The engineers are repairing engine no. 1. They make their adjustments on the engine while inputting a repeating sequence. This sequence is the shortest meme that exercises a spacetime engine's ability to transduce intention into usable energy. They are tweaking function collapse.

 

Ident.

Of the dozens of drones working on the ship, several were of the custodian class. Anthropomorphic they were not: a basic, unadorned skeleton: three legs, two in back, one in front. Two spindly arms, sight and sound circuitry bolted unceremoniously onto what you might consider a "head." The custodians roamed around and cleaned up trash: construction detritus, perhaps, or garbage left by a previous crew.

The passageways were illuminated by dim backup lighting. Somewhere you could hear the hum of the one remaining engine. It would remain online until the engineers could hook up external power to the ship.

Our custodian's name was CC-1110. He loped through the corridors toward the cockpit, which was his assigned work area today. His concerns were simple. Aside from basic ambulatory and navigation functions, his programming concerned only one thing: discriminating between purposeful objects and non-purposeful objects. IF Is_Garbage(object) THEN Collect(object).

ScanField(video, object)
Ident(object)
    IF IsShipFixture(Armageddon_blueprint, object) THEN ignore(object); ScanField(video, next_object)
    ELSE IF IsLikelyCrewProperty(object) THEN ignore(object); ScanField(video, next_object)
    ELSE Collect(object); ScanField(video, next_object)

Don't let anyone fool you: Even simple creatures have minds, to whatever extent their processors will allow. He interpreted his programming in his own way as he went about his work.

Object: Lighting apparatus. Is on blueprint? No. Is overhaul? Yes. Probable temporary fixture. Ignore. Proceed.

Object: Connector, electrical. Location: Floor, Corridor Twelve Nineteen. Pick up object. Examine. Is on overhaul parts list? Yes. Probable work in progress. Ignore. Proceed.

Location: Cockpit. ScanField. Object. Ident. Overhead Toggle Switch. ScanField. Object. Overhead Push Switch. Meter. Display. Gauge. Seat, seat restraint, armrest, seat debris. Ident: broken glass. Collect. ScanField. Object. Location: Floor. Pick up. Examine. Bezel, monitor, weapons targeting, metal. Part Number 72-76288. Weight: 0.7 kg. Condition: Broken. Collect. 

ScanField. Object. Location: Seat, side, accessory holder. Examine. Ident. Is on blueprint? No. Search catalog poss crew effects. Ident. Pen, writing. Ignore.

ScanField. Object. Location: Control panel, forward. Examine. Paper. Examine. Image, paper. Ident. Is on blueprint? No. Search catalog poss crew effects. Ident.

Examine. Ident.

Examine. Ident.

Collect.

ScanField.

"Admiral King, you almost needed a tow."

The tech shakes his head at the listing juggernaut. "What. a. shambling. mess."

"Thanks for noticing. The ship is, too. Here's the keys." He tosses them to the guy with the futuristic clipboard and the shiny jumpsuit. "Take good care of her. She almost didn't make it back."

[Play music bed and continue reading.]

The USS Armageddon appears dead. She hovers at some crazy angle within the outpost's dry dock. Charred gashes run along her belly and sparks pop and sizzle from deep within them. The entire starboard weapons array is locked up.

Let the repairs begin. Three-legged drones scurry along her hull, cutting away panels. Red waves of light advance along the length of the ship to catalog every wound. One of the two spacetime engines had spun itself apart and destroyed a number of decks.

Don't you worry, my beautiful beast. We'll take care of you. We fix things here...

Just a reminder--

that for my show to make any sense, posts must be viewed in the order in which they made.

So always read earlier to later.