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.

[Posted Monday morning, revised Monday evening.]

The Hrull are slobbering manta-ray-like aliens who are slavers, conscripting humanoids to act as aids to intergalactic trnasport. They fly when in our atmopshere because they’re buoyed by domed hydrogen bladders, or maybe methane bladders. In space they use humanoid pushers to teleport.

I was gonna call these guys the Rull. Years ago, I wrote a story called “Wish Loop” featuring an alien creature resembling a sea skate that is called a Rull. I didn’t realize at the time that A. E. van Vogt wrote a series of stories about humans fighting against nasty worm-like shape-shifting Rull. The War Against the Rull. So I decided I better call them something else this time. I decided to go with Hrull. An element of homage to van Vogt, and an odd-ball spelling, kind of east European, maybe Czech.

Amazing video, it totally changed the way I think of the Hrull. The Hrull aren’t evil, they’re beautiful. Although in Monday morning’s version of this post I speak as if the Hrull will have saucers they travel in, in the evening, after a day with Nick Herbert, I think the Hrull ARE saucers. And maybe, rather than selling engines, they sell freighting. Carrying goods and passengers in ther cavernous mouths.

For the Hrull’s home world, I start with the idea of an ocean world shaped like a water torus encircling a sun—a bit like Ringworld, though not flat. The collection of water-planets is called Hrullwelt; I like the harsh, Teutonic sound of this name. Such a torus would be dynamically unstable. So we can suppose that the torus has broken into giant globs; we have a toroidal archipelago of water globs— like an asteroid belt where all the asteroids are water. And the Hrull leap from one glob to the next.

Their great wings glowing in the empty darkness of space, soaking up solar radiation. Perhaps with pusher-creatures attached to their bellies like remoras. Or perhaps the pushers ride in their enormous mouths like cleaner wrasses. (The Hrull are filter feeders despite their menacing look.) Although the Hrull who visit Earth are only thirty feet across, maybe the big freighter Hrull are a hundred meters across. The littler guys who came here are scouts.

The Hrull conscript humanoids and use them as integrated symbiotes for star travel. The Hrull use humanoids as pushers to power teleportation hops. Practically all of the alien races use Hrull for shipping and for passenger transport. The Hrull come in various sizes, such as interstellar and intergalactic—the power and range of a Hrull depends on how many humanoids are dangling off him or swarming in his mouth. Like cylinders in car engines.

Robert Sheckley wrote a story, “Pusher,” about humanoids as being the only kinds of species which are capable of teleportation. I discuss this in a Feb 24, 2007 blog entry.

As I said before, with Sheckley, I would maintain that we can teleport precisely because we have so much regret, doubt and fear. Why? Having doubt and fear involves creating really good mental models of alternate realities. And being able to create good mental models of alternate realities means the ability to imagine yourself being there rather than here. And this means that we can spread out our wave functions in ways that other beings can’t. We carry out certain delicate kinds of quantum computation.

Perhaps the humanoids that make up a Hrull pusher are surgically and chemically made into pathetic paralytics unable to escape the engine rooms? No, that would be too harsh, as I want my character Chu to be part of a Hrull pusher for awhile and then bounce back. Let’s suppose that when you’re a Hrull pusher, your encased pupa-like in Hrull body-slime, which slowly hardens. The Hrull slime provides full life-support—oxygenation, hydration, nutrition, and waste removal. People call it godslime.

Why? Well, the kicker here is that the humanoids pretty much enjoy being a Hrull pusher—it produces an intoxication of some kind. Perhaps psychedelic ecstasy, but perhaps something cozier and lower-chakra.. Perhaps The Hrull are intensely interested in the infinite, and being swathed in their godslime makes you feel as if the most important part of you is infinite, in heaven. Your body becomes just an attachment point to maintain a presence in the gross material plane. Or maybe the godslime just makes you feel like you’re on a happy date with your best girl. At home with grandma for the family reunion up in heaven.

But working as a Hrull pusher isn’t endlessly pleasurable. After awhile, you notice that you’re hearing a continual hum—like a leaf-blower or a clothes-dryer or a refrigerator—the hum is in some sense driving and owning your thoughts. The hum is the mentation of the Hrull. The pushers get to go off on leave in the Hrulls’ ports of call. But eventually they make their way back to their owner Hrull, as they miss the godslime. I can see an evening of spacers like this, the vibe reminds me of Samuel Delany’s story, “Aye, and Gomorrah.”

The Hrull carry Chu back to Hrullwelt to test and display him as a sample for a new line of Hrull pusher. The Hrull clients also know about Earth, but they leave the use of pushers to the Hrull. The clients aren’t going to be kidnapping humans themselves. Only the Hrull can exude the essential godslime. That’s the Hrully angle for using humanoids as pushers.

Maybe, as a pun on the Sheckey usage of “pusher,” the Hrull pushers also make a little money when in port by selling small amounts of godslime to rubes. “Just a taste. Your heart’s delight.”

I’m thinking about having some direct matter control in Hylozoic. I’ve written about this before, calling it femtotechnology. It was in Freeware first, and then I worked out the science for it in Saucer Wisdom. Here’s a long quote about femtotech from Saucer Wisdom, a scence featuring my old characters Harry Gerber and Joe Fletcher.

[Begin quote from Saucer Wisdom.]

We’re early in the year 3001, looking in on the founder of femtotechnology, a dumpy guy with thick lips and a slobbering way of talking. He’s telling his plans to a tall skinny assistant who has a little tuft of curly hair. Their names are Harry and Joe.

“We’re going to invent femtotechnology now,” sloppy Harry is saying. “To make a long story short.”

“Say what?” says curly-top Joe.

“I’ll explain it again,” says Harry. “First of all, here’s the official prefixes for small numbers.” A radiotelepathically projected chart appears in the minds of Harry, Joe, and the eavesdropping Frank.

Name *** Numerical Symbol *** Prefix

Thousandth *** 0.001 *** Milli-
Millionth *** 0.000001 *** Micro-
Billionth *** 0.000000001 *** Nano-
Trillionth *** 0.000000000001 *** Pico-
Quadrillionth *** 0.000000000000001 *** Femto-
Quintillionth *** 0.000000000000000001 *** Atto-
Sextillionth *** 0.000000000000000000001 *** Zepto-
Septillionth *** 0.000000000000000000000001 *** Yocto-

“Yawn yawn, I’ve seen that,” says Joe.

“Seen but not understood,” says Harry. “To grasp the meaning of the word ”˜femtotechnology,’ you should first think about the word ”˜nanotechnology.’ A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. An big molecule might be ten or twenty nanometers across, maybe a little more. A water molecule is smaller, about a fifth of a nanometer. Nanometers are a natural size-unit for measuring molecules, so when people developed the technology for manipulating molecules they called it nanotechnology.”

“Then how come the dooks who work with molecules say they’re doing wetware engineering?” asks Joe.

“That’s a historical accident,” says Harry. “The original nanotechnologists — we’re talking about nearly a thousand years ago — thought they were going to be making tiny machines. But that idea turned out to be bogus. Biology has the lock on nanometer-scale fabrication. The word ”˜nanotechnology’ died because the first guys to use it had some wrong ideas. It’s sort of like the way the alchemists thought substances had philosophical virtues, and then a few centuries later it turned out they’d been trying to do chemistry. The old-time nanotechnologists thought molecules were like machines, and then a few centuries later it turned out they’d been trying to do wetware engineering. Nobody wants to be branded an alchemist or a nanotechnologist because those original groups were wrong in important ways. But my point, Joe, is that wetware engineering is indeed nanotechnology. It’s what’s going on when you use medi-germs to clean out your arteries. It’s what’s happening when a diamond-spider spins carbon fibers for construction. It’s what happens when a cloth-plant weaves cellular automaton fabric for your shirts.”

“Don’t hurt yourself, man,” says Joe. “You’re explaining too hard. Try this one: according to the chart, picotechnology should come before femtotechnology. Why don’t we do picotechnology first?”

“There isn’t much happening at the picometer size scale,” says Harry. “The next really solid thing below molecules is the nucleus of an atom. And that turns out to be about twenty femtometers. So if we start doing things directly to atomic nuclei we’re talking about femtotechnology. There isn’t going to be any picotechnology because there’s nothing interesting that’s a picometer in size.”

“Very clean,” say Joe. “Femtotechnology. I’m down with it, brah. But what are we going to do to the atoms?”

“Transmute them, Joe. Dirt into gold. Gold into water. Water into air. Air into chicken soup. Making stuff out of ”˜thin’ air is quite practical, you know. Air has more mass than people realize. A cubic meter of it weighs a kilogram. The air in your bedroom weighs about as much as your body.”

“But how does transmutation work?”

“Transmutation is mostly a matter of changing protons into neutrons and vice-versa. An atom’s nucleus is a bunch of protons and neutrons. Take oxygen, it’s got eight neutrons and eight protons. And hydrogen has one proton. If you could change protons into neutrons, you could stick sixteen hydrogens together, flip half of their protons to neutrons and you’d have a molecule of oxygen. Like that. And by the way, when you change the nuclei, the electrons take care of themselves.”

[Here’s an amazing video of femtotech transmuatation from the far-out video site Flight 404.]

“But how do you change a proton into a neutron? Smash it or something?”

“That’s the crude old nuclear physics way. Instead of that, we femtotechnologists are going to use quark-flipping. Takes much less energy. What’s quark-flipping? A proton is a quark-bag holding two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is a quark-bag with two down quarks and one up quark. To change from one to the other, you just need to go into the bag and flip the one quark.”

“Aren’t there other kinds of quarks, too?” asks Joe. “Besides up and down?”

“Strange quarks,” says Harry, smiling wetly. “We’ll get to those later, my man. But first we need to get the femtotechnology matter transmuter working.”

“What do you want to call it?”

“I don’t know,” says Harry. “Horne O’ Planty? Spelled weird to make it a trademark, you understand. Or maybe a Polish Knife? My mother’s people are Polish. Or call it an alef? Or maybe a cradle or a loom?”

“How about an alla,” says Joe.

“I like it,” says Harry after a moment’s thought. “Alla. Fine. Now what’s still missing, Joe?”

“How to make it work is what’s missing.”

“Incommensurable magnitudes,” says Harry. “We’ll use three titanium bars of slightly different irrational lengths. The square root of two, the cube root of three, and the fifth root of five will work. Each bar will have a matter-lens that grows quark whiskers, and the whiskers will embody a one-dimensional nonlinear wave pattern that tells them where to turn. The whiskers will split and grow along all the edges of a parallelopiped control volume. Within this box we’ll use a chaotic cascade to fuse all the nucleons’ quark-bags into a quark-gluon plasma that we’re free to flip, shuffle and regroup. The process will be directed by high-level user request patterns made via a custom-designed radiotelepathic uvvy which incorporates low-level implementation instructions for a few thousand basic substances. You can help with that part, Joe. And in our commercial release, the control uvvy can act as a carrying case. The alla!”

“Wavy,” says Joe. “I’m there, dude.”

[End quote from Saucer Wisdom.]

I want some cool weapons. I need to think of what they do and give them fairly simple names.

The stonker. The target gets cold and frosty then falls apart. Could be that it damps atomic vibrations or, funnier, the atomic silps are too stoned to hold together—Sonic mentions a thing like this in Chap 1. Not sure of the name of this weapon. Devibrilizer looks too much like “devil.” Vibrilizer is backwards. Nuller sound Star Trek. Stonker. I like stonker, it sounds like stoner, stomper, stink and stalk.

The klusper. Amps up atomic vibes, overloads the atoms with Gaian information flow, they heat up and explode into plasma. Klusper like crisper.

The gobble gun. Looks like a hollow barber pole. Is always sucking some air in front and sending it out the back. Crank it up to full power, and it inhales everything in front of it, empties out a cylindrical tube about a kilometer long and a meter wide, turns the matter into a tidy black coil of degenerate-matter in back, like the sh*t-vein of a shrimp. At first I wanted to call it the gomper gun, which sounds funnier, gomper like gopher and Gomer. But gobble gun is so much easier to understand.