Q: Why is an aktual able to cast runes and affect matter?

A: Rune mastery results from spanning all the scales; you can teek down into every level of a material region and control the endless (convergent) series that is reality.

After I’m aktualized I can create an object by raising up some Subdee matter. I can, like, spin the wheel of scale in a region. And I can change my size.

I can shrink myself to atomic scale and directly kick an atom. I’m a true quantum mechanic—with a wrench. This is a more powerful interaction than is possible via lazy-eight teek, which lets you move things but doesn’t let you actually change the quantum computations.

When Jayjay is casting ioneer runes, he’s jittering from normal to atomic size at a femtohertz rate—he looks hazy. Maybe he emits some Cerenkov radiation, or grows evanescent transfinitely complex beetle antennae from his head.

Q: What’s the relationship between the transfinite aktuals and the alien Peng?

A: Let’s suppose that the Peng make a practice of parasitizing newly aktualized beings such as Jayjay. The Peng typically try and grab onto newly minted aktuals, using them to cast the runes that will instatiate their ioneers.

Allowing Panpenga to link to Jayjay was a major goof on his part.

The aktuals should have warned Jayjay, but they neglected to. They’re fallible. They apologize. The experienced aktuals know better than to open themselves up to contact with parasitic races like the Peng, but Jayjay was caught unaware, like a newborn antelope attacked by lions.

The Peng prey upon telepathic aktuals, and the Hrull prey upon telepathic humanoids who aren’t aktuals yet. The Hrull like to stunt humanoid races at a lazy eight stage, which is really only a prelude to the full aktualization stage. They infantilize races so as to parasitize them.

Subtextually, the Peng and the Hrull represent two kinds of obstacles to enlightenment: conventionality and decadence.

Peng = Consensus reality, McDonaldsization, TV, lack of imagination.

Hrull = Drug addiction, loveless orgies, gluttony, the “left-handed path” of sensual indulgence.

Q: What are the personalities of the harp and the pitchfork?

A: Instead of being like blinding, dull gods, the avatars are somewhat humanized: bumbling and uncertain. The pitchfork and the harp are mates: a he and a she, in love with each other.

The harp has a poor sense of direction, she’s patient and musical. She bosses the pitchfork and she nearly always thinks he’s wrong, even when he’s right. She likes to sing. She likes for the pitchfork to strum her with his tines. She has a beautiful contralto voice.

The pitchfork is pushy and physically clumsy and has difficulty reading the emotions of other beings. He’s less verbal. He likes to jab things with his tines. He loves the vibrations of the harp’s music and voice; he wriggles when he hears them. He himself speaks in a twangy Kentucky accent.

The pitchfork wants to get to ‘s-Hertogenbosch to be near the harp. But he can’t go straight to her because his and the harp’s human-scale avatars are subject to normal physics. As long as the harp is locked up in Hieronymus Bosch’s studio, the pitchfork can’t get at her.

Q: Why, in general, did the pitchfork and the harp get involved with us?

A: In general, aktuals want more beings to become transfinite aktuals. The aktuals reproduce like crystals, by spreading a particular kind of spacetimescale patterning. Think of the vertical “post pile” crystals within a cooled volcano’s lava plug. Each crystal is the template for the next one.

One might say that the aktuals want all beings to have transfinite consciousness, but this would be a bit too exalted. Basically they want to reproduce.

There might well be an aktual body intersecting with some or all of a person’s life history—indeed if you become part of an aktual, this is the case. This transformation is aktualization; we use the word aktualization to refer to the process of a spacetime region linking up and down to form an aktual.

Any specific spacetimescale being can serve as a crystallization point: a seed that sends a transfinitely rapid cascade of aktualization up and down, linking the entire spectrum of levels and then, in a culminating ecstasy of unification, closing the loop from Absolute Infinity to Zero.

Q: How, specifically, does the pitchfork get involved with Jayjay?

A: The pitchfork appears in the Lobrane time stream shortly before Jayjay has his vision in Chapter One. He and the harp have some hope of actualizing Jayjay. They see an opportunity to work via Jayjay, as Jayjay is so high.

The pitchfork and the harp intended to incarnate themselves together, but an aktual can’t consciously control the patterning of its avatar’s worldline. The whole overall gestalt of the universe comes into play, ensuring that the patterns are consistent.

When the pitchfork appears in the Lobrane, the harp is over in the Hibrane in the medieval village of Hieronymus Bosch. The pitchfork wants to get to the harp, but he finds he’s able to aktualize Jayjay on his own.

Note that it takes the whole book for Jayjay to realize the full import of what’s happened to him in Chapter One. This is, a transreal correlative for my own process of discovering Jayjay’s altered nature via the process of writing the book.

Q: What is aktualization?

A: In aktualization a helical connection arises among the scale levels. I might say that the scale connectivity is a series of gauge renormalization morphisms. In ordinary words, it works by connecting a series of looped strings of graded sizes: cutting the loops and sewing them together, each loop hooking to a next larger loop and to a next smaller loop.

To make someone an aktual, you snip his knotted loop, and attach one end to an end you get by snipping a loop at the next higher level, and attach the other free end to an end you get by snipping a loop at the next lower level.

For this to work, we need for there to be large string loops as well as little ones—think of cosmic superstrings. And iterate this, cutting further loops up and down to take care of the new free ends you keep producing.

To enrich the range of string loops, we’ll also suppose that consciousness has a physical dark energy correlative of a string-loop nature. As James Clerk Maxwell wrote (if only jestingly):

My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
And thine doth like a convict sit,
With marlin-spike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying.

Looking downward, when you are aktualized, your body is the same as one of your cells, that cell is the same as a particular atom, and so on. Looking upward, your body is the same as your planet, your planet is the same as your galaxy, and so on upward.

Aktual telepathy works by reaching up in scale to the mind of Gaia and dropping down from there to any other being on the planet. Also note that an aktual has access to all the mass of Earth—and up beyond— and can easily store endless amounts of data.

Q: How does it feel to be aktualized?

A: Jayjay’s awareness of his atomic silps is a partial step towards aktualization; and his vision of our galactic supercluster’s silp, Cronos, is an upward step.

His mind goes into a transfinite regress, like a transfinite sequence of falling dominoes.

He is Earth, the galaxy, a cell, an atom. He even feels sympathy for the subbies now. For everything to fit consistently, he has to give up a certain autonomy, a certain patterning, but he gains as well. Things shift and link.

He sees a collapsing travel cup with endlessly many cylinders being pulled up and up. The cylinders snip join, making a helix. At the end, he can see down the hollow axis of the helix to Absolute Infinity or Absolute Zero—and these two insuperable limits are the same. Like surfing down a glassy tube toward the rising sun. He feels an ecstatic sense of closure when the Absolutely Infinite scale cylinder wraps around and bites its own tail.

Here’s a relevant quote from my first novel, Spacetime Donuts , one of the very first cyberpunk books.

On the one hand, he moved towards Everything by letting his feeling of spatial immediacy expand from his head to include his whole body, then the tree branch and the beehive in the tree, then the garden, the city and the night sky. He expanded his time awareness as well, to include the paths of the rain drops, his last few thoughts, his childhood, the tree’s growth, and the turning of the galaxy.

On the other hand, he was also moving towards Nothing by ceasing to identify himself with any one part of space at all. He contracted his time awareness towards Nothing by letting go of more and more of his individual thoughts and sensations constantly diminishing his mental busyness.

The overall image he had of this activity was of two spheres, one expanding towards infinity, and the other contracting towards zero. The large one grew by continually doubling it size, the smaller shrank by repeatedly halving its size and they seemed to be endlessly drawing apart. But with a sudden feeling of freedom and air, Vernor had the conviction that the two spheres were on a direct collision course—that somehow the expanding and contracting spheres would meet and merge at some attainable point where Zero was Infinity, where Nothing was Everything.

—Rudy Rucker, Spacetime Donuts (Ace Books, 1981)

While were were in Cruz, I had a hypnagogic pre-dream while pondering this; a fabulous rush. I was on rails going out past a vanishing point; this was mixed with the sensation of being in an elevator. I had the ecstasy of transfinite acceleration: more, more, more. And then I was a flat railroad car with two antennae—that’s what my body looked like, seen from the rear. I was looking at myself from a few feet behind, seeing over my own shoulder. I glowed yellow-white against the black/dull-red night sky, a sky stippled with starships, dimensional transporters, and transfinite hoppers.

James E. Carrig, 1946 – 2007

“Dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.”

I went to grad school at Rutgers with Jim Carrig; we were both getting Ph. D. s in math. He was Irish, from the Bronx, dark-haired, a solidly built guy, something of a wild man.

[Jim in his gorilla suit, in our house in Geneseo, NY, 1974.]

He’d tell me great stories about things he’d done with his running buddies in NYC. Like the time they rented full-body gorilla suits, took acid, and went to as many bars on Third Avenue as they could. Seeing them enter, one of the bartenders said, “These guys drink for free.”

Jim was a huge Rolling Stones fan. I’ve been playing my old vinyl copies of Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers this week, dancing and remembering him. One time he and his then-wife Fran managed to get four tickets to see the Stones in an afternoon concert at Madison Square Garden. They took my wife and me along, a great show, a big time. I remember Jagger on stage saying, “Did y’all get off school today? Ah did.” When we got home, lightning had struck the tree next to our house.

[Fran and Jim in our back yard in Geneseo, NY, 1974.]

It’s because of the Stones connection that I put up that YouTube video of “Gimme Shelter,” a song Jim really loved. We liked the way the beginning is like surf music. Keith lugging a long-board across the sand? The video is maybe kind of wimpy, maybe Jim would have mocked it, but he would have enjoyed that too, and, after all, the video is from 1969, which was right around when we became good friends.

Jim and Fran would give great Halloween parties, and if you didn’t show up in a costume, Jim wouldn’t let you in the door.

He had a thoughtful intellectual side as well—we used to love discussing the nature of time. We thought we were getting older then, pushing thirty years of age as we were. He was cultured, with wonderful taste, a bon vivant.

I wish I could see him one more time.

That quote at the top of this note is from Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, of course. I once heard Jim use this phrase to describe those high point moments when you’re tuned in on life. Dancing to “Sister Morphine” with my wife and Jim’s ghost on my porch the day of his funeral, I had my hand up to the starry sky, waving free, hoping to touch him.

I was at a beach house in Santa Cruz the last few days with my family. While I was there I worked on some Q & A about the transfinite aktuals that I started thinking about a couple of weeks ago.

[Ocean reflections in the sea lion hole of the Santa Cruz wharf; those white lines are reflections of the railings. Looks amazingly like a CA.]

Q: What is the structure of spacetimescale?

A: The basic intuition is that reality looks different at varying scales and that interesting new features appear endlessly. You can zoom up or down, transfinitely finding unending novelty.

I speak of a spacetimescale continuum to indicate that scale is as fundamental a dimension as space or time. This follows if matter is infinitely divisible. For if there is no smallest feature of the world that can serve as a unit length, it’s necessary to specify the scale at which one is observing the world. There is no privileged lowest level to serve as the default scale. Therefore we need to work with the full spacetimescale continuum.

The Planck length (about 10 to the -35 meters) has sometimes been regarded as a lower bound on scale. But I prefer to think of the Planck length as simply a particularly interesting location on an endless scale axis. What’s above the Planck length is dual to what’s below—in the sense that we find equally many scale levels on either side. We can think of the size N above matching a reciprocal size of the order 1/N below. In my SF, I refer to the sub-Planck-length region as “the subdimensions” or as Subdee, and I call the creatures in this realm subbies.

I’m supposing that the scale dimension is transfinite in both directions. For instance, there’s alef-null and alef-one above and below I have 1/alef-null and then 1/alef-one. More than that, in keeping with my notion that space is an Absolutely Continuum, the scale axis is Absolutely Infinite.

We can call the beings up above the transfinite levels alefites. And if we push down to transfinitely small levels we have subalefites.

[I dialed up my camera’s ISO to 3200 and took this spooky night picture of the empty cottage across the street.]

Q: What are the bodies of aktuals such as the harp and the pitchfork?

A: I am writing about some transfinite beings called aktuals, where the name comes from Georg Cantor’s discussions of “aktual Unendliche” or “actual infinities.” The harp and the pitchfork are aktuals.

Rather than having my aktuals be transfinite in space or time, I’ll have them be transfinite in scale. A given aktual might be in contact with us and the subbies, also with the alefites and the subalefites.

To begin with, think of an aktual as a scale cylinder. By this I mean a bounded region of spacetime viewed at every scale up and down. My usage of “cylinder” here echoes the familiar geometric notion of a cylinder as a plane region that’s extruded into the third dimension.

I’ll suppose that the aktual’s body cylinders extend through every level of scale, that is, an aktual’s body is an Absolutely Infinite scale cylinder.

I think of there being an Infinity = Zero wraparound, as in my novel White Light. The wrap is at Absolute Infinity, also known as Ω, which wraps to 1/ Ω, which is the same as 0.

An aktual instantiates a wraparound of this nature. An aktual is a worldsnake Ourobouros biting his/her tail. So an aktual could, strictly speaking, be viewed as a scale torus rather than a scale cylinder.

[Stagnaro’s restaurant on the SC wharf. Kind of a Hopper scene.]

Q: Do aktuals overlap?

A: The scale cylinders of two aktuals have to overlap, for otherwise, there’s only room for one aktualized being on a planet, one aktualized cell in an individual’s body, and so on. If there were no overlap allowed, and if the harp and the pitchfork were to be distinct beings, then their avatars at any given spacetimescale cross-section would have to be an Absolutely Infinite distance apart.

This said, it may be that there’s only one aktual on Earth, at least to start with. This would be good for the story. It’s just my character Jayjay to start with; he’s different. And at the end of the novel Hylozoic, everyone gets aktualized, which leads to the third novel, Transfinite, of the series that starts with Postsingular in October, 2007.

A physical change has to happen during aktualization, your body has to actually match the patterning of Gaia and the patterning of at least one of your cells—although I suppose eventually all your cells could be aktualized to match you.

[Playing with the twins’ monkey blanket.]

Q: Say more about the limited intersection of an aktual with the spacetime of a particular scale level.

A: The harp and the pitchfork only intersect our spacetimescale in a limited zone.

These manifestations within our spacetime are incarnations or avatars of the higher aktual beings. Aktuals’ avatars are subject to the vicissitudes of cause and effect; they can’t walk through walls; they don’t have infinite intelligence.

The avatars don’t in fact know what the eventual outcome of their efforts will be. They hope that fresh regions of spacetime will aktualize in the near future. Their goal in visiting us is to promote these transformations. In fact the process works even though they couldn’t plan the details.

The aktuals have worldlines that form loops within the joint continuum of our Lobrane and the parallel world called the Hibrane. I’m thinking of closed causal loops for the sake of both tidiness and paradoxicality.

The higher self of the full aktual isn’t something accessible to any of its avatar cross-sections, save in an emotive way: an unspecific sensation of metaphysical profundity that has no actual content.