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Tesseract Outtake

I’m still working on the second draft of Hylozoic, without much time to think or write anything fresh for the blog. I do have a few new pictures, so to have something to weave among them, here’s an unused bit I cut from Hylozoic for being too arcane.

Chu felt confident. His dreams had unearthed a powerful quantum-mechanical metashape, a hyperdimensional operator resembling a tesseract pattern with a tiny cube set into the center of a large cube, and slanting lines connecting the two cubes’ corners. The lines sketched out six skewed cube-like shapes connecting the inner and outer cubes.

The little cube was the size of an atom, and the big cube was ten centimeters on an edge, the size of a large man’s fist. The vibby thing was that the pattern was undergoing a four-dimensional rotation that continually had the center cube sliding over to become one of the skewed in-between cubes and then somehow jiggling out to be the outer cube, then skewing in from the opposite side and eventually ending up in the center again.

In a painfully strong flash of inspiration amid the lucid dreams, Chu had deduced that his tesseract-shaped operator could transform an atomic-level rune into a rune to be cast onto a quantum-computation to be carried out by a fist-sized region of space. Instead of having to program ten tridecillion atoms with the original rune, it would be enough to program a quintillion cubic decimeters—in exponential notation, 10^18 cubic decimeter chunks instead of 10^43 atoms. A quintillion was just on the border of the current abilities of a kiqqie human who didn’t happen to be a zenohead.

“Tesseract?” said Kakar, shadowing the motions of his mind.

“Gaia dug up the name,” said Chu. “But I thought of the math.”

Feeling a little shaky with excitement, he squeezed the conch-like rune into the tiny central cube of his tesseract, and watched as the shape spun around, producing an warped, inside-out seashell with most of the extra spikiness smoothed away.

“Wait, wait,” clucked Kakar. “I don’t get it. Show me again how you did that.”

“You put the atomic rune into the middle of the tesseract and it turns into a puffed rune that you map onto fist-sized chunks of space,” said Chu.

“Oh,” said Kakar, trying to keep his cool. “I see. It’s simple.”

Now it is. And we’re going to name the trick after me. Chu’s Kludge.”

“Kludge…” said Kakar, searching Gaia’s database. “Ah. A clumsy and inelegant workaround.”

“I’m brilliant but humble,” said Chu.

2 Responses to “Tesseract Outtake”

  1. Jon Trainham Says:

    Hey pretty cool. Hey what do you think Rudy?? I have a new idea what about Cyber Goth or Sci Fi Goth like stories in Sci Fi or cyber setting where it’s like a film where The Cure is the Soundtrack?? Is that a good idea??

    JON

  2. Jonathan Says:

    Dear Dr. Rucker:

    I just read an article about Postsingular on io9.com. I”ll be picking it up shortly. If you must know, I’m one of your former students.

    Prescience didn’t show me at the time, but in the end, I wound up working on games and reading and writing sci-fi of my own…

    I believe you’re partially to blame for that!


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