Chapter Four is well underway now, I have about 4,500 words on it and a pretty good outline. It’s the same routine all day, day after day. Write a page, print out what I have, mark it up, type in the revisions and maybe write another page, print it out. Now and then I have to take a break to figure out what’s next. I print out the outline and revise that. Or take a nap.

I’m going to hang out on this blog entry for a week or two, just re-revising it and hoping comments accumulate.

Right now Thuy, Ond and Chu are walking down Highbrane Valencia Street. They’re about one foot tall relative to the Highbraners, and they move six times as fast as the Highbraners. Like speedy gnomes.

It’s Christmas Eve (we have Jesus who died on the Cross, they have some unnamed figure who died on the Triangle and is symbolized by a cuttlefish, not a lamb), and people are out shopping. They’ve had telepathy forever in the Highbrane, also they can teleport themselves at will, also they have omnividence (can see anything), and they have endless eidetic memories. And the objects are telepathic too, although they don’t speak English. I’ll use “teep” for a verb to mean “using telepathy.”

Due to telepathy, people have a better control of morphogenesis, and can tweak organisms to take on desired forms. A shop where a guy grows you the kind of tropical fish or mushroom or orchid you want. Teasing a growing plant or animal into a sought-for shape is a delicate craft. I would call the people who do it shapers, but Bruce Sterling has made that word his own. So call them coaxers.

Question: what’s for sale in the stores?

What’s the street scene like?

The buildings are organically grown, or rather assembled from organically grown parts. The windows are like membranes. Parts from a Victorian tree farm. Branches that look like trim.

I’m thinking they have cars for cruising around and carrying stuff even though they have teleportation. But maybe the cars can be flimsier as it’s pretty hard to run into someone by accident, as you can teep them. The cars can in fact teep things themselves and avoid collisions. They are assembled from morphogenetically grown parts.

The buildings and cars aren’t organisms yet, not like in Frek and the Elixir. They’re assemblages of bio-like parts. The cars know what kinds of parts they need, the mechanics teep with them. Maybe the cars scavenge for spare parts sometimes, perhaps stealing from each other. Azaroth, Ond, Chu and Thuy have their secret meeting in a room over such a garage. The mechanics know they’re there, but don’t bother to squeal.

Clothes stores. Clothes are for warmth and decoration. Not really much point in modesty, as you can see under the clothes. But people are kind of used to that. Maybe sell hush-undies that scold teepers who nose under them, though not talking in words — as I suppose our objects don’t speak language — just reacting with anger and scolding and shame. Of course, for some, hush-undies could make the hidden contents seem forbidden and therefore extra-alluring! Blush-hush.

Food markets, restaurants. If we have telepathy we can really watch the chef. Maybe there’s someone with such a great sensitive palate that it’s pleasure to mind-meld with them as they chow down. Or the food talks to you, showing you its past. You’re eating with the chef’s whole sense of the process, the preparation, and as you eat it, the chef’s eye guides you, he’s put teep-tags onto the food.

Would people still get drunk and high? Sure. Imagine the havoc you could wreak getting wasted and “running your brain” instead of just email or phone or conversation. So there are bars that are “screened” so you’d be unlikely to teep out of there and get yourself in trouble.

Screened by overriding musical stylings provided by a black guy with shaved head, sitting with muscular arms crossed, wearing a leopard pelt, he looks like Mandrake the Magician’s assistant Lothar.

Sex work? Well, with telepathy, everything’s free. But you could have a mind that really welcomed you in, and that might be different. Someone who is actually glad to see you. I’ve read that high-end prostitutes talk about johns wanting a GFE (girl friend experience). They won’t be hitting on little gnome Thu, but she’ll witness them trying to pick a guy up. Alternately, imagine a stuffed plush animal — not even a sex-toy — just an object that loves you and is glad to see you.

Art. A painting that decides what you want to see and shows you that. But I’m not supposing objects are all that smart. An object that simply projects the raw experience of transcendence or sense-of-wonder. Groundless euphoria, mindless pleasure, a vision of actual infinity. Or sensual beauty. Perhaps a rock that’s lain in a stream bed and you look at it and sense the lovely currents of the water.

Books? Maybe no books? I could suppose the telepaths won’t actually use language that much. But that would make them too alien, I think. So they have language for superficial small talk, but they more often use teeped images and emotions. They barely use the written language. Books are normally not written in words, they’re rather like hieroglyphs. A beautiful mind loop saved into the endless memory network, glyph by glyph. Writing is more like being a bas-relief sculptor. An array of teep tags. Perhaps there’s a book store like Metotem Metabooks run by a woman who’s just a bit like Darlene from the Lowbrane. And they let Thuy record her memories. Darlene gives Thuy a spice cookie, and she sees the Spice Islands.

Ads. Things projecting vibes of paranoia to get your attention. Or anger or lust or ecstasy: the whole palette of extreme emotions.

Up on the Highbrane, they think of Chu as being very valuable because he wiped out he nants; he’s like a “nanteater”. Here’s a page describing three kinds of anteater found in the Iwokrama forest in Guyana, South America. And here's a video.google.com video of an anteater.

Azaroth, Thuy, Chu and Ond are disguising their mind vibes so Gladax can’t teep them. They’re in a back room over that auto shop on Valencia St. in SF (see previous blog entry just below).

Azaroth sat next to me in traffic school last week. Turns out his parents are from the Punjab; he has a topknot wrapped in a stocking. He's about thirty-five feet tall, typical for a Highbraner.

I was on Valencia St. in San Francisco yesterday, thinking about my next scene with Thuy Nguyen for Postsingular. She’s over in the alternate brane — I’m calling it the “Highbrane” now instead of the “Mirrorbrane.” And she’s hiding out from the universal telepathy by emanating the vibes of, I think, a dog. But where? I’m thinking upstairs at the auto shop next to the storefront church I photographed before.

Later she’ll deliberately drop her mindblock so as to be captured by Gladax — as a way to get inside Gladax’s house to steal her magic harp. This amazing mural is on I think 16th St. between Mission and Valencia. An image of the mindscape.

Thuy will go out with her dog-vibe turned off, walk by this nice Mission pool and tennis court.

And then Gladax corners her in this dead end. Gladax is jamming Thuy’s teleport abilities by strumming her magic harp and disturbing the eighth dimension.

I saw some posters for Scanner Darkly. That’s a movie I’m eager to see.

Does this sign seem spelled wrong? Isn’t it a bad idea to have the letters “shat” inside any business name?

They’re still selling zoot suits on Mission St. Red? Of course! Comes in large sizes too.

Meanwhile back in Los Gatos, the ne plus ultra of public entertainment is, sob, an Elvis imitator.

Could we live in San Francisco? Maybe it would be a bit more work, like you're out on a sidewalk as soon as you go outside. More room down here in Gatos. Whatever. Time to get back into the Highbrane.

Yesterday I spent the day in Boulder Creek, visiting my friend Nick Herbert. I have a picture of him plus a discussion of one of his ideas about consciousness in the “Quantum Soul” section of my Lifebox tome.

For that matter, Nick also helped me dream up some of the material in Saucer Wisdom, not to mention the notion of “tekelili” telepathy at the center of the The Hollow Earth. He’s always had this idea that we might be able use physics to bring about something like actual telepathy in the real world. And once you can read the mind of a plant, you’ll have to recognize that all along the plant was conscious. Why not?

Nick is living something of a hermit’s life these days, though since he still gives talks sometimes he says he’s been called a “performance hermit.”

Once a week, Nick goes to work out at the garage/gym of his friend Reno, also in Boulder Creek.

I went along and had fun. I’m a yoga guy not an iron-pumper, but I did some stretches with the light hand-weights.

Nick’s friend Allen Lundell and his wife Sun joined us for lunch at the Blue Sun Caf� in Boulder Creek.

Sun seemed like a classic hippie; in the 80s she lived in a famous commune in the Haight. Last year she was the Bad Witch at the Emerald City camp at Burning Man, and she was telling a story about how the Elves from the Elf camp brought them a jar of Elf Magic beads and treated them to some Elven Jello. She joked that everyone in Boulder Creek has learned to levitate, and that the ground of Boulder Creek has levitated as well, which is why people don’t notice.

A couple of other guys joined us for lunch too, including Brooks Blanchard, an electric flutist who sometimes runs the multimedia feeds for performances by the Maui rave band “Lost at Last”. He talked about going to the annual gatherings of the Rainbow Family, a loose affiliation of hippies who meet on National Forest Lands every year — I think this year’s meeting will be near “The Ned,” that is, Nederland, Colorado.

Allen Lundell gave me an incredibly cool toy made by a local Boulder Creek man, who has a website of similar cool inventions. If you read my novel Saucer Wisdom, you might recall that Frank Shook was selling “Lotus Lights” — these were modeled on the “Liberty Lights” available at this site. I didn’t see this cool little fan on the site; what makes it awesome is that there’s four little diode-type lightbulbs on the blade, and the flick on and off in some wonderfully complex and nonrepeating algorithm, which means that the spinning lights makes ever new mandalic designs.

At lunch with these pleasant people, I felt a very long way from yuppie Los Gatos and bustling Silicon Valley.

Nick and I took a long walk through the woods, Nick talking about his eternal quest to make a big discovery relating consciousness and quantum mechanics.

He always brings me back to panpsychism, the notion that all sorts of things might be conscious: ferns, rivers, air currents. That’s the San Lorenzo River, by the way.

I’m working to make this science-fictionally true in Postsingular. The universal computation is already present in nature, even in cracking paint, but most processes don’t have RAM and my friend John Walker has argued, I think convincingly, that in order for natural phenomena to “wake up” they really need memory.

I bid a fond au revoir to Nick, leaving him with the bathtub he keeps on his porch: he calls it his “Neo-Archimedean Research Vessel.”