I’ll refer to the Peng who are emigrating to other worlds as ioneers, a word I made up in grad school and have wanted to use ever since. It’s a goof on pioneers, you understand. A cool word. Ioneer.

I used to visualize the ioneers as sturdy, fit, somewhat Nordic spacemen and women like on a Soviet socialist realism poster. Possibly in the throes of endless sexual stim. But now I’m just gonna have the raggedy-ass ostrich-legged kiwi-bodied Peng use that word for their emigrants. I can say that atomic tulpa computations have to do with dancing ions (charged atoms). And, hey, I can have a Soviet socialist etc. type poster with Peng on it, all gussied up to look more Nordic and less like dirty dust-mops.

How does Panpenga (the planetary oversoul of the Peng’s home world Pengö) reach out to program a Peng’s body code (which the marketeers call “an ioneer soul song”) onto the regions of matter on another world so that the atoms in this far-away matter will begin emanating paired fermion waves to generate a matter hologram or a tulpa of some Peng ioneer whom Panpenga has destructively decoded in order to send said ioneer’s soul song across the void?

So as to involve my character Jayjay, I’m supposing that Panpenga does this by telepathically entangling with a certain receptive individual on a distant world. A host. This person becomes a medium for Panpenga. Via the medium’s body, the ten tridecillion voices of the ioneer’s soul-song, (or the ten tridecillion Fourier terms, if you want to be mundane), are integrated into the ambient quantum computation of the world, fanning out to teach each atom in the full volume of a “Peng ranch” (which is a cubical volume 100 km on a side, in other words, several counties plus the air above them and the dirt below)—and thereby creating a tulpa emulation of the ioneer.

By the way, a “tulpa” is what I was earlier calling a “woogie“.

“Woogie” is a little too comical and lovable and cozy. Misleadingly close to—ugh—wookie. Tulpa sounds more sinister. And I like that it’s like “tulip,” as a tulpa is something that grows up. The origin of the word is that, in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is, as I understand it, a material object or person that an enlightened adept can mentally create. A psychic projection. I think I first read the word in William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content, where the narrator is on a trip, and he imagines the people around him are tulpas of his own creation.

By the way, I updated my Be Not Content post today because I finally found my copy of the book, sitting on a shelf about ten feet from my desk in plain view, sly tulpa that it is.

Possibly I might have a Peng working as a control in the Warm Worlds interstellar Realty office which sends wealthy Peng ioneers out to become tulpas on Earth. She might be called Pekka, in honor of the First Bird Pekka, who miraculously (and paradoxically) laid the very egg that she hatched from.

When installing a tulpa across a Peng ranch, the medium gets into telepathic contact with each and every atom in the ranch. Into each atom, the medium sends a single piece of the ioneer’s soul music, that is, term of the tulpa Fourier series data, plus the Peng control algorithm directing the atom to send a matter-wave at the indicated rate towards the tulpa locator signal. Looked at in another way, the medium is like a conductor, getting a ten tridecillion instrument orchestra to play together.

This is a lot of info to display, and we might suppose that in order to absorb and then deploy the info, the medium needs a very large memory. So the Peng can only send ioneers to lazy eight worlds.

Why doesn’t Panpenga program the Peng ranch atoms directly?

That is, why screw around with an unreliable Earth-side medium? Well, you can’t get the fine tuning from that far away. You need a read-write head on the ground. Also the full info has to be sent in a single chirp. A chunk like a zipped install file. (Cf. Freeware and Saucer Wisdom.)

Why is Jayjay in particular a medium?

For instance, could Chu or Thuy be a medium?

For story purposes, I need for Jayjay’s mediumship to be unique or at least rare, so that the Peng will want to keep in him in a coma and carry him around for channeling more ioneers to Earth. What might make him special was how high he happened to be when he yoo-hooed Panpenga. He was so deeply merged into Gaia that he has become a green god, an earth king, and we can do a reveal of this later on. He doesn’t yet realize his full power. Let’s even say that only one person per planet can be a medium.

I can weave back some mumbo jumbo into his beanstalk trip. During this singular moment he became a divine avatar. He became like a Christ, if you will. What? Jayjay? Christ was a great ethical teacher, not some street kid chasing a high. (Cf. Secret of Life.) Well, maybe Jayjay can grow into his role. He becomes really noble and wise. That would be epic, a nice heavy move for the book. He could even offer up his life as a sacrifice for all mankind at the end. Maybe in this wise he would buy us free of ioneer-invasion forever.

Why can’t the tulpas themselves act as mediums?

Well, a tulpa is physically limited to the confines of his or her ranch, so a tulpa can’t go out into the virgin prairie and bring down the lightning of a new ioneer. But the tulpas can in fact program the atoms of their ranch, which gives them direct matter control. See the next post for more info on this…

I had a visit from the young theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson this weekend. He pointed me to what looks to be a terrific series of lecture notes by him, about quantum computation. I wish he’d get it published as a book so I don’t have to read it online.

Note the photo of the 2-D shadows on the wall of the Platonic N-D Ru-cave. I used to resist quantum computations, but as an SF writer, it makes more sense to let them into my heart. Quantum computations are as useful to us as radium was for SF writers of the 1930s, and as quarks were in the 1970s!

Speaking of quantum mechanics, Nick Herbert posted an interesting new paper that refutes Bell’s Non-Locality Theorem…for certain kinds of wack worlds.

I was going good on Hylozoic for a few weeks, but now I’m hung up on a bunch of little writing projects. I finished a story with Marc Laidlaw called “The Perfect Wave”, and sidebar article about SynBio biotech futures for the international edition of Newsweek.

And I still have to write an article about cellular automata for Make magazine, and an article about the far future for an anthology called Year Million.

Saturday, Sylvia and I had an all-Mexican day in San Jose. First we saw these great Aztec dancers.

Love the skull.

And then we saw a cool show at the SJ Art Museum by Camille Rose Garcia — not that the main thing about her work is being Latina, she’s totally a California artist from LA. It’s fun to listen to her talk.

To wind up the day we had tacos at Super Taqueria at Tenth and William Street in San Jose. I used to go there a lot when I taught at SJSU. They have the world’s best corn tortillas for their tacos. You get two toritillas, and you leave one in your basket and you can make a second taco out of all the stuff that falls out while you eat your first taco in the first tortilla. The carnitas…ah!

Sunday we went to the Maker Faire near the old racetrack at San Mateo. Rudy Jr.’s gang (he’s a member) Cyclecide was there as a Midway attraction. Jericho was putting up a bicycle driven automatic music tower that plays four electric geetars!

Rudy on a high bike. They had a bullfight and then they had an exciting event where they threw a lot of bicycle tires and pies.

Good, chaotic fun.

I saw my favorite digital sculptor Bathsheba, whom I’ve met before. That wavy cube shape in front really obsesses me, it’s called a gyroid, which is “explained” in a post by the incomparable popularizer of the impossible, John Baez.

Karen Marcelo showed me a robotic knife stabber she made for SRL (Survival Research Labs). She said one of friends had stuck his hand in while it was still moving and he got cut so bad the blood was spurting, poor guy. So then they put in a piece of steak instead. That’s Survival Research Labs for you: “Producing the most dangerous shows on Earth!”

In a kinder, gentler room I saw a giant squid made of Legos.

It was a brutally windy walk to the (wrong) Caltrain station, the world was broken into Lego dots by the wind screen.

Today I got a preview of the August Asimov’s SF cover, with a story by Bruce and me. Makes me feel like a real science fiction writer, which is very satisying, as being an SF writer was my main life ambition all along, starting at age 13.

I did my reading at the SF in SF series last night. Terry Bisson was the MC, Corey Doctorow read a chapter from his upcoming radical YA SF book Little Brother, and then I read “The Imitation Game,” a short story about the last days of computer pioneeer Alan Turing, and about his persecution by the British secret service. This time, Turing wins… My story will appear in the magazine Interzone this summer or fall.

We had a nice crowd, including Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books in the front row. I recorded my segment of the reading and put it online on my Gigadial pages.

I just read an interesting post by Charlie Stross about lifelogging. The ideas overlap a little bit with what I said in my Psipunk talk. Great minds think alike.

Wednesday evening I’ll be reading with Cory Doctorow for Terry Bisson’s SF in SF series at the Variety Theater near 2nd street on Market Street.

I went to see my far-out physicist friend Nick Herbert in Boulder Creek, as I so often do when I’m starting a novel. Nick knows a lot about quantum mechanics; he has this abiding hope/dream that people will some day learn how to communicate directly with matter. He calls this “quantum tantra.” As Nick puts it, our standard scientific experiments are ways of interrogating matter; and our brains are complex quantum-influenced systems; so why not find a way to get it on with matter.

This lies close to my dream of hylozoism and telepathy, so we see eye-to-eye; though for Nick this is more than SF fodder, it’s a serious quest.

Nick has a cactus on his porch looking at itself in a mirror. Collapsing its own wave function.

Nick showed me what he called a Heisentoy, which was a small hand-made fired-clay sculpture that Arne Olafson of Denham Island, British Columbia, had mailed Nick. Nick first opened the box at night, and touched the object without looking at it, and then he got the idea that it would be fun to leave the object’s appearance in a permanently uncertain state.

So he “showed” it to me by handing it to me swathed inside an “anti-viewer” made up of the spandex sleeve of on of his neighbor’s shirts (she liked to cut off her sleeves). It felt like a cube with the edges finger-pinched out like petals, in an irregular pattern.

As we discussed some of the ideas for Hylozoic, we sat in the La Joya cafe in Boulder Creek, formerly the Blue Sun. They were playing the Beatles White Album on the sound system, which I can’t recall having heard played in a public place since the summer of the Manson murders.

As a boy, taking in the info from movies and the comics, I was sure that: I would serve in the army in a war, spend time in a penitentiary, join a lodge. I always liked the sound of IOOF, the International Order of the Odd Fellows, seemingly still flourishing in Boulder Creek.

After lunch we synchronistically ran into a guy on the street who’d worked on the Doubleday Books sales force promoting Billie Craddock’s Be Not Content way back when. The guy said Billie’s editor was Luther Nichols, and that Billie had been under 21 when his early masterpiece was published.

Driving back to Nick’s house, Craddock passed us on the road, on his chopper with the high handelbars. His ghost. A sign. Be Not Content is going to rise again.