Here’s a forty-three-year-old story of mine that resonates with our current pandemic lockdown.

When I wrote “Enlightenment Rabies” in 1977 I was upset about the U. S. propaganda tactic of naming diseases after the government’s enemies: the Russian Flu, the Chinese Flu and the like. And, of course, I was filled with hatred for television. This was one of my very first stories. From the present-day vantage, it looks cyberpunk.

[With Bruce Sterling, twenty years later.]

I sent “Enlightenment Rabies” to the short-lived magazine Unearth in 1978, and they were going to print it, but then they decided to serialize my novel Spacetime Donuts instead. And in 1987, the mostly cyberpunk semiprozine New Pathways did print it.

So here it is again, special for the Spring of 2020, out from the vaults of tiiimmmme.

Enlightenment Rabies

His boots looked so perfect. Two dark parabolas in a field of yellow; slight three-dimensional interest provided by the scurf strewn about. Time to act. Boone took a newspaper the size of a bubblegum wrapper from the stack at the android’s elbow.

“Three dollars.”

Handing over the money, he again forgot where he was. Or entered another spacetime. “The cave and the marketplace” is what he called it. Buying the newspaper was marketplace, and grooving on his boots was cave. This was an old Zen distinction comparable to the One/Many distinction of the Greeks. Boone tried to live at the interface of complementary world-views; but more often than not he was just really out of it.

He passed through the news-shop’s air-curtain and glanced up at the sky. A shareholder jostled him, then remarked, “They’re saying it’ll rain tonight, uh.”

“I don’t care what they’re saying. I make my own weather,” Boone snapped.

The shareholder’s face froze behind his stunglasses and began to fade. Boone elaborated, “If you let those glasses tell you what tomorrow’s weather is today, then you don’t have your tomorrow. You have their tomorrow. Lose the consensus, Jimmy. Wake up, uh.”

The shareholder gave him a cautious but superior smile. “You had your vaccination?” he asked with exaggerated clarity, and walked on.

Boone fell into a dream looking at the gauzy white clouds against the light and bright November sky. Good day for something. He put some music in his workspace and started walking. The shareholder’s question surfaced in his mind.

Vaccination. Damn. Seemed like they’d just been through all that a few weeks ago. Boone had nearly been swept that time. He’d caught the disease…“Dirtbug” they’d been calling it…he’d caught it and would have died if he hadn’t been able to score some anti-toxin. Had cost him ten grand, and he’d had to kill a man to get the money. This time he’d do it the easy way and let the state vaccinate him.

Boone sat down on a bench and took the newspaper out of his packet. It was really a small white-light hologram. He held it up to his eye and looked through to see an old-fashioned newspaper spread out on a table. Social hygiene was page four.

…tragic death of three patients at Veterans’ hospital…ten soldiers at research center…new virus isolated…disease has been named “Enlightenment Rabies”…

Boone laughed bitterly. There must be more people working the interface than he’d realized. The state invented the diseases and spread them, but it always named them after some perceived social ill. This time it was enlightenment, next time it might be underconsumption or dirty teeth. In any case, the point was that if you were too wasted or stubborn to go get the state-administered antidote you were going to get swept.

…cramps, buboes, and convulsions ending in death by suffocation…crash vaccination program…available November 17–20 at these local centers…

Boone checked the date on the paper. Today was the 20th. Now where was the nearest center? After a few minutes he knew where to go. Off the interface, brought down in the marketplace, running scared like they wanted.

Halfway down the block Boone bumped into his friend Ace High. Ace was standing on the sidewalk with his head thrown far back and his arms wrapped around his legs. The Metal Crane position.

Boone stopped to look at Ace for a minute. Ace’s eyes were aimed at him, but there was nobody home. Boone was clearly in the presence of an unvaccinated fellow-citizen.

“Hey Ace,” he said, trying to straighten up his friend’s bent body, “Come on, uh, it’s eigenstate time.”

Ace High was infinitely differentiable. He got the message and locked in on the signal. His face split like a melon when he smiled, as he did now, uncleaned teeth glistening in the sun. “Why…does the doctor…have no face?” he crooned, guessing Boone’s meaning. “Let’s go, boss.”

Boone and Ace High started off for the vaccination center. It was easier to be going together. That way if you forgot where you were going, your friend might still know.

“Let’s get some stunglasses on,” Boone suggested, feeling through his pockets. He still had his pair. Ace had lost his, so they decided to stop in at the next news-shop to get some.

Boone was already feeling the effects of his stunglasses. His mind was filled with safety tips, news updates, and new product information. Purposefully he went into the news-shop and bought a pair of stunglasses for Ace High. It was an attractive little shop with a big multiplexed holographic display in the corner. If Boone looked in just the right direction, the image his stunglasses produced fit right on top of the image displayed in the news-shop. An indescribably beautiful moiré interference pattern appeared, and he was gone again.

Fortunately Ace High had already put on his new stunglasses. As he watched, Boone slowly assumed the Silent Planet posture, his face turned rapturously to the news-shop’s advertising display. Ace High looked at the floor, not wanting to disturb his friend. The stunglasses were projecting a three-dimensional holographic image in front of everything he looked at. The image was multiplexed, so he couldn’t actually say for sure what it was of. It was a lot things at once, and his brain knew how to sort out and store the information. His trusting brain was soaking it right up.

As he watched the stunglasses’ images, Ace High’s slack exuberance turned to responsible concern. Concern that he had not drawn his paycheck for two months. Concern about what he had been doing for two months. Concern that everyone receive their Enlightenment Rabies vaccination, particularly himself and Boone. Concern with the fact that more and more young people were turning their backs on the real world, only to go chasing after some kind of crazy half-scientific hopped-up occultist mystagogic blue-dome swizzle, uh.

Boone was more or less squatting on the floor with his arms between his knees. He was singing or moaning a wavering note. The Music of the Spheres is what the kids called it, and ordinarily if your best friend was singing the Music of the Spheres you left him alone for a few days. But they had to get that vaccination or they’d be swept.

“Are we crazy / are we insanéd / are we zeroes / that someone painted?” Boone muttered when Ace shook him. Then he shifted phases, the images unlocked, and he was walking out the door with a headache.

“The old bus station, right?” Ace High said. Boone nodded, and they started down the cold and dry sidewalk, flooded yellow with clear November sun. They were wearing their stunglasses, and each of them had about half of his attention occupied by the multiplex image the stunglasses projected into any part of the visual field not under active scrutiny.

The bus station was a ten minute walk away, but they didn’t talk much. They were absorbed in watching a dinosaur show. They couldn’t even tell that it was multiplex anymore. Their whole conscious minds were involved in the show they were watching, and the incessant messages from all the “sponsors” were being sorted out and stowed away subconsciously.

Soon Boone and Ace High had joined the long line of waiting citizens that snaked out of the old bus station. Everyone had stunglasses on. Some people were watching sports, some were watching old movies, some were watching sex, some were watching university extension courses. Nobody was watching the November sunlight sliding across the street like nectar from the last flower of the year.

In December, 2019, I had the lenses of my eyes surgically replaced by soft plastic lenses. My own lenses had gotten cloudy and dark over the years. I was delighted by how rich colors became, seen through new eyes. Maybe I’d been painting with such bright colors because my vision was dim? I held back from painting for three months, and in March, 2020, spurred on by the onset of the Covid-19 plague, I started again.

“Pandemic Triptych” Three acryclic paintings on canvas, March, 2020.

Turns out that now I’m using even brighter colors! Working at a fever pitch, I painted a Pandemic triptych. shown above. Left to right, Infection, Panic, and Peace. The initial panel, Pandemic #1: Infection, shows a tumble of heedlessly festive micro-critters, spotted with itchy dots to suggest disease. I already posted an individual image of Infection alone in my March 17, 2020, post, so I won’t repost it here. Instead let’s go to the 2nd one.

“Pandemic #2: Panic” Acrylic on canvas, March, 2020, 30” x 40”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

In Panic, I went wild, hitting a nice strong abstract-expressionist style, with super-intense colors. I created some delicious shades of orange by mixing cadmium red and the lesser-known diarylide yellow. In all three of the Pandemic panels, I started by setting blobs of paint from my palette onto a damp blank canvas, along with gobs of heavy gel medium. And then I freely smeared, going for gestural brush strokes, and not letting the colors mix together and get muddy. To bring order, I outlined choice passages of action painting, and filled the extra parts of the canvas with flat colors.

I think Panic looks, overall, a bit like a face with holes in it. But some of the smaller areas look like faces as well. Those two pink patches at the bottom might be a hapless Covid-19 victim’s lungs. Or buttocks. Or shoulders. Or neck. Hard to be sure exactly what’s going on…and that’s the fun of it.

While I was painting Panic, it started hailing like a mofo. Really heavy hail, like somone was dumping beads of ice onto me. It felt great, I felt alive, I wasn’t thinking about disease. Got a photo. My art studio in the hail. “Be it e’er so humble…”

“Pandemic #3: Peace” Acrylic on canvas, March, 2020, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

For Peace, the third panel of Pandemic, I wanted a sense of recovery. As before, I smeared around some blobs of paint from my palette, and then I outlined them, and added fields of violet and orange. The central shape is perhaps a bit like a holy baby or, looked at more abstractly, like the famous mathematical form known as the Mandelbrot Set. For more info see my Paintings page.

Every day, there’s clouds in sky like cabbages in a field, patches of shadow and sun.

My month of March is slipping by.

The Derby Girls celebrate Pi Day!

Grateful to see old posters from pre-March 17, reminding of the days when there were events. You can order take-out food as well, but no movie theaters, no coffee shops, no library. In terms of my habits, there’s especially no place outside the house where I can write on my laptop—at least until the unpredictable (like me) March weather clears up, and then I might sit on a bench to write in the little Los Gatos park by the post office.

The virus is so global, very strange. I don’t like pandemic SF novels, and now I’m in one.

Long and winding road.

We go for a big walk in the hills every day or three. We walked in Almaden Quicksilver Park the other day.. This photo fills my heart to overflowing, the winding road, the patch of shade, and on the hill a great oak I visited in years gone by… Sob. I’m reacting to being cooped up.

Still shopping in the supermarket, but just once a week. Picking up takeout food every now and then. Supposedly you can get supermarkets to deliver to you, but actually they can’t, as they’re all booked. And introducing a third-party take-out-food delivery person only seems to add a danger-stage.

A perfect Platonic cloud.

I have a friend who claims they’re getting total strangers who aren’t even stores to deliver groceries to them. Anonymous food-people who you’d never think of buying food from in normal times. Old crab that I am, I suspect my friend isn’t actually doing it. Just talking big. Whole new vistas of finger-wagging have opened. But why would I stop stop buying normal, clean, authorized food from real stores?

Fantasy rap: I engage an indie food-purveyor and…a seedy coughing man shows up three days late with a half full bucket of garbage that he found an alley, sun-ripened, and he keaves it outside me door, I never actually see him, just hear him coughing, and he’s charged my credit card $400 bucks plus a $40  tip…

Big balls!

Thing is, I treasure our weekly trip to the supermarket, a touch of normality. So I’ll keep going there, but now, sigh, I’ll be all obsessive-compulsive and wipe everything off at home and, sigh, wear a facemask in the store, although that’s a look I really really dislike.

The anonymous faceless mass of humanity thing. Zombies, ants, puppets controlled by chips implanted in their skulls. Never forget that crisis is an ideal opportunity for the oppressors.

Saw a good sunrise anyway.

Setting aside the insane, baffled thrashing—in some ways the lock-down is peaceful. There’s never a deadline, none all day, and no plan at all. I take my as longs as I feel like it for my little projects and tasks.

Weird light forms on our stairs, rich with mathematical interest.

At least we have the backyard. I nap a lot. And paintings, writing, social-networking, and watching TV. We Love the 2003 series Slings and Arrows on Acorn. So grateful when I find a series we can watch. I started watching this cartoon series on Netflix, by Matt “Simpsons” Groening, Disenchanted. Love it. All the little odd jokes that his writers stick in. The richness of the wit. Sylvia spurns this show, so I use my earphones.

California barn like old Kentucky, whar I was born and mostly raised.

The other day there was a little sun, so we drove east of San Jose, over the Diablo Range foothills, to the valley with Grant Park and took a long walk in grassy fields. A few poppies are out…many more will be blooming next month. No cows, per se, but much evidence of cows. Only saw one other person, and he was fifty yards away. Unfortunately he was mowing along a fence line with a leafblower, sigh, shattering the longed-for calm. But we walked a little further and it was just us and the plants and the weather, the fractal trees and the fractal clouds.

My haul of hail.

Still trying to wrap my mind about the pandemic and the shelter-in-place. The days feel so looooong. I’d like to start writing a new story or, I should be so lucky, a new novel.

My story “The Mean Carrot” is online in this hip zine Big Echo. It’s pretty funny, at least my idea of funny, and with some heavy aspects as well. Also I finished and mailed off “Mary Mary,” a novelette, but who knows when the editors will look at it. Both of these stories fit into my Juicy Ghosts cycle.

With a sculpture in the San Ho museum, back in the days when we did things.

You can go online to read or stream a podcast of me reading my first story in the cycle, “Juicy Ghost.” The tale may be good for your soul if a certain noxious public figure has frayed your nerves till they’re ready to snap!

Dig this double fractal, clouds and trees.

As above so below.

Looking around our house in, as I keep saying these days, “my copious free time” (which is a phrase I picked up decades ago from a song by Tom Lehrer) anyway, I came across a beloved old book, a gift from daughter Georgia, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. It contains this wonderful haiku by Issa

Insects on a bough
floating downriver.
still singing.

That’s the story of life isn’t it? We’re the insects of course on our (possibly) flowering branch, floating downstream to who knows what (probably destruction), and yet we chirp and saw, making noise, hello hello hello.

Poppies of the Golden State.

On the back flyleaf of the book I found a penciled transcribed haiku of my own.

 Old house cozy haze,
My friend shows me
his aquariums.

I think I originally wrote it in the winter of 1976, during the winter of 1976 in Geneseo, upstate New York, where I had my first job teaching math. The friend was Don Drake, younger brother of Dan Drake, also a friend of mine (and I think a former student as well). Big snowstorm that year, four feet deep, much forced isolation. Drake lived a few doors down, on the second floor, and took me up to see his bank of aquariums, at least three of them. I think “cozy haze” suggests that I was high. It was one of those scenes that sticks in my memory like a stained glass window in a dark cathedral, and I come back to to over and over again, both awake and in dreams.

Don Drake fixed our family up with an aquarium of our own. We kept it beside our TV. Our two-year-old daughter Isabel loved it, and would look in it a lot. Her first word was “Fish.”

My office in Lynchburg.

March 22, 2020, was my 74th birthday. March 22 was my 74th birthday. Two times 37.

I was 37 in 1983—a time of renewal, a year after I’d lost my teaching job in Lynchburg, Virginia. I’d embarked on a hot run of writing books on my Selectric typewriter, working in the office I’d rented in an abandoned building at 1324 Church St. in downtown Lynchburg.

I used to bring the typewriter home in my car every evening so the bums (who occasionally broke in) wouldn’t steal it. In March, 1983, I was finishing my big book, The Fourth Dimension, and that summer I started Master of Space and Time. Half a lifetime ago. I wrote six books in four years, 1982-1986. One of the high points of my life, that period, though I didn’t quite realize it at the time.

Ah, the romance of the Early Years Of Bitter Struggle!

In free days, 2019, spending a night at the famed Hi-Lo Diner and Motel in fabulous Weed, California.

This year, by way of celebrating the end my second 37 years in our cooped-up condition, dear Sylvia phoned up seven of our nearby neighbors, and they gathered on the street outside our front door, everyone staying six feet apart, and when Sylvia led me out, semi-unsuspecting, they sang Happy Birthday, with my neighbor Gerault and his son playing trumpet and trombone. So touching.

Speaking of brass, we saw this posse at the 2020 Women’s March in January.  

Anothe recent treat was a Zoom group video talk with the family, the kids and grandkids, 7 tiles, and it was really nice. I’m thinking the video-conferencing trend will carry on past the pandemic.

We’re under a corona virus “shelter-in-place” edict here in the SF Bay Area, hanging around the house, flipping twixt Twitter, FB, Instagram, email, messages, Google , NYTimes, WaPo, and links thereof. I’m like a seedy spectral figure in a 3 am Reno Casino, working the slots. Waiting for a hit, and not getting one. Here’s my painting of the virus.

“Pandemic” Acrylic on canvas, March, 2020, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I like how the colors came out. And the polka dots pull the whole thing together. I’m gonna do a bigger one now. Instead of having a “plan” for this kind of spontaneous work, I might take all the wet paint that’s still in my palette box and paint that on in chaotic mindless shapes that seem to look good in the moment, letting my brush do the (non) thinking, and then I start “fixing” the now “ruined” canvas.

(Here’s a picture of my art studio.  I pull the table out onto the lawn)

My friend Vernon Head says painting is all about ruining it and fixing it over and over until you feel like you can stop. I know I can stop when I can look at the canvas and think, “I can’t believe I did this, I’ll never do this good of a painting again.” If I quit before reaching this (admittedly somewhat self-delusional) state, then every time I look at the painting, I feel like, “Ugh, I’ve got to work on that one some more,” not that I always do go back and rework, and not that reworking is necessarily a good idea. Play it as it lays.

Tabletop landscape with a fabulous reflective “teapotahedron” or “Utah teapot” in the mode of the graphical object studied by early Computer Graphics guys at University of Utah in 1975. I make my tea in it every day, having terminally burnt the living sh*t out of my cast-iron Japanese pot.

We had a high-tea party get together in San Francisco on Sylvia’s birthday in February. Here’s son Rudy Jr. and his wife Penny T.

My art hero Dick Termes was in Half Moon Bay for a show at the end of February. He paints on spheres, and he hauled a load over them over the Sierras in this cute little trailer.

I like the square spirals on this one. I think basically it’s a cube on a sphere, with inscribed whirling squares in each face of the cube. Dick is incredibly careful and fastidious in his work…drawing it, painting in faint paint, and then in dark paint (acrylics)…takes him maybe six months to finish one of these works, which he calls Termespheres.

The man himself. When I was working on my novel Saucer Wisdom, I went and visited Dick at his all-domes house, and made an excursion to that classic UFOlogcial “Close Encounters” Devil’s Tower nearby.

Lovely springtime around Half Moon Bay, breathtaking fields of yellow flowers…sorrel or mustard.

I like stopping by the Pigeon Point lighthouse—the building itself very rickety by now, but they have the giant Fresnel lens on display in a visitor center. Love these things…the full round curviness of a lens is sliced and displaced into a flattish shape. Like fitting yourself into a job.

And naturally you gotta worship the Whale Rib.

I was in the woods near the upper end of Lexington Reservoir, and found this graffiti. Great spontaneous freestyle font.

We were on a Fellini kick and watched a bunch of his movies on the Criterion channel and on the Amazon Prime Filmbox add-on channel. Nights of Cabaria is truly great. Marcello here in La Dolce Vita. We were reading this Kindle book of interviews with Fellini, called I, Fellini, some great stuff in there. Very funny how Federico related to Marcello, kind of teasing each other. F says he picked M to star in so many of his movies because he’d seen M around Rome eating good meals in restaurants with such great pleasure that F knew he’d be the perfect stand-in for his transreal persona in Dolce Vita and 8 1/2.

Spring hits early here, like in February, and sproing.

Another tablescape, with vanishing points. I’m not getting out as much as I’d like to.

I’ve been painting a certain amount and Sylvia has been quilting. This is a recent one called “Dakar.” More on the Sylvia’s Quilts page.

I found a a couple of sets of beautifully fey and whimsical manga-type Japanese covers of my novels, and I sold this set.

Rudy gave me a cordless drill…my old electric drill is thirty years old, and I’d thought of it as kind of modern, but this new one kicks big ass.

Cleaning out boxes of papers in our increasingly copious spare time. Came across this collaged out bit of a yam box from a supermarket. I had a whole thing about those yam boxes back in the early 1970s. First of all “Play Boy Yams” spelled backwards is “Smay Yob Yalp.” Second of all, back then I wrote a “Playboy Yam” song, to be sung in the style of Robert Johnson.

I’m eyeless and I’m waxed
I’m orange all the way through
I’m pointed at both ends
Now whaddya ganna do
I’ll be your yam
And do what yam boys do
I’ll be your yam all night
And in the daytime too.

A sawed off limb, a wooden eye.

Invoking the “airing out” loophole to the shelter-at-home policy, we walked up the block today. Our beautiful world. My favorite tree nearby is this mossed oak wye.

In the basement-cleaning vein, I sold a ton of old author copies to Recycle Bookstore in Campbell and downtown San Jose, CA, before the virus kicked in. When the stores reopen, go check ‘em out, bargains and rarities galore.

[This is a surfer friend of Rudy Jr’s, explaining to me that Doritos look like waves. He’s John Bolingbroke, an inspiration for my story with Marc Laidlaw, “Surfers at the End of Time.”]

I finished writing a novelette, “Mary Mary” that I’ve been working on for seven weeks. Here’s a part of the ending.

Wafting into Gee’s cave, ectoplasmic Mary spots the gorgeous clone Mary, lying on her bed, mouth slack, in a state of torpor. She settles onto clone Mary like a shroud—or like a flesh-eating jellyfish. She sinks directly into the young woman’s flesh, and behold! She’s fully alive, with her soul in a body, just the way it’s supposed to be. Truly risen from the dead.

“Good deal,” says Gee Willikers, sitting up from the other bed. “I’ve been making calls. Will you marry me?”

“Are you joking?”

“Am I?”

It’s been too long since I put up a new post. Thing is, I’ve been busy writing. So today I’ll take a chunk of my writing notes and make them into a perhaps-a-bit-opaque post.

“Magic Door” acrylic on canvas, December, 2019, 24” x 18”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I’ve been writing a series of stories that all have to do with telepathy and with the old notion of achieving immortality by uploading your personality into the cloud—and then by having your software run some kind of new body. I first started writing about this theme in 1980, forty years ago, when I wrote my novel Software, the first in my Ware Tetralogy.

The first of my recent series of stories is called “Juicy Ghost,” and it appeared in the ezine Big Echo. It’s somewhat radical. It can also be found in the online version of my Complete Stories.

The follow-up stories “Everything Is Everything” and “The Mean Carrot” are finished, but they have yet to appear. And I’m currently working on a long story called “Mary Mary.”

The intended final architecture in the stories is this.

* A psidot is a smart phone that transmits telepathically.

* You use a psidot to store your personality in a software construct called a lifebox , which is to be hosted on a server of some kind.

* Your lifebox avatar doesn’t become fully alive, or what I call juicy, unless it is linked to a peripheral body that it controls.

* To link with a body, your lifebox communicates via a psidot that sits on the body, getting input from the host body, and controlling its moves.

Key issue: who owns your lifebox’s server?

In “Mary Mary” the main lifebox server is owned by Skyhive. Like the Google data-centers, the Skyhive servers generate an overarching cloud. They charge rental for storing your lifebox. If you, or your estate, can’t pay, they put your lifebox into service as a gig worker. Your lifebox might be doing computational tasks in the cloud, or it might be running biobots in the real world, such as flying messenger biodrones.

I’ve got a rebel-type hacker character in “Mary Mary” who’s named Gee Willikers. He uses an indie server to store lifeboxes in such a way that they’re not basically the slaves of large corporations.

This raises a couple of implementation questions…and here we get into an infodump of yesterdays writing notes.

First, what is Skyhive is using for servers? As I say, I’d been instinctively thinking of Google data centers, buildings with stacks and stacks of machines that are chips in a box. But this is kind of retro. Everything else in my story is biotech and biobot and post-silicon. So the servers really ought to be biocomputational.

Second, what does Gee Willikers use for servers? It should be slightly cooler than what Skyhive uses.

In answering these two questions, let’s catalog a few of the possible server options. And the first, more thoroughly described option is the one that I plan to adopt.

“Manhattan” oil on canvas, June, 2018, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

(1) Biocomputation

Have your lifebox server be some kind of biocomputer. This is the path I’m going to take.

Problem: this seems to undermine my current projected juicy ghost architecture which says: Lifebox software lives on dead server, and gains soul by using a teep psidot to connect to a living body. I’ve had this architecture in mind for over a year, and I used it when I wrote the kick-off “Juicy Ghost” story, and I won’t give it up.

[Chuck Shotton’s 3D printed models of critters from my novel Million Mile Road Trip.]

But if the server is already alive, seems like you don’t need to hook into a live body to get soul. You’d be able to get your juice from the live biocomputing server itself. So then all the lifeboxes would automatically be juicy. And there’s no story left at all. Ouch. Can’t have this. What do I do?

I’ll say the bio computers are programmed in a boring Von Neumann architecture-type way, like with this imaginary LISP-like language that I call Spork, and they don’t have soul. There’s differences in the quality of “soul” you might get from different bio organisms. Skyhive uses stupid mats of yeast for its servers. No action in there, no juice.

And Gee is subject to this ex-post-facto constraints as well. Okay, his server will be slightly more interesting than yeast mats. Like a redwood tree. Or a smelly bucket of piss (with lots of microorganisms in it). But for my story to work, even Gee’s server biocomputers have to lack the requisite high-weirdness biocrunch to foster juiciness. Both Skynet’s and Gee’s lifeboxes need the psidot/live-host connection.

Absolute law: to get juicy, a lifebox has to do teep (that is, telepathy) with a living animal body via psidot. You don’t get that juicy bio soul until you’re hooked into a real animal or insect body. Why is this? Wal, you glom onto those way-sick natural computations in a holistic body, with its mitochondria and ribosomes and quantum entanglement and all that fine shit.

(As an aside, even if your lifebox was alive and juicy on the server, you would still need the body so you have a peripheral with sensors and effectors in the physical world. A disembodied juicy ghost (if such a thing were possible) would feel lonely and second-rate But we’re not going to settle for this weaker justification for the psidot-to-animal glom move.)

(2) Animals

Why can’t I just host a lifebox directly inside an animal or even in another living person. This shades into demonic possession. Here we wouldn’t be using the whole architecture I’m talking about, but that is the scenario I want to explore. So at least for now, we’ll say that for some rubber-science reason it’s not feasible to dump a lifebox program directly into an animal or a person. You have to rasterize (as it were) the lifebox onto a trad-code Spork server, and then the psidot knows how to take that kind of code and link it to an animal body, and even then the code isn’t in the animal. The code is just “driving” the animal. And nobody knows how to put non-mediated lifebox data directly into an animal.

But using plants as hosts might be okay. Plants might support Spork. And they don’t complicate things by making the hosted lifeboxes be juicy.

And, later, if we want, maybe we can do a direct hop into another person’s body via a psidot-to-psidot link. That could be another bad thing that happens to Mary later on.

(3) Brute Matter

Using brute matter is a variant on using computer chips. But without having to build a computer.

I’d entertained the notion that Gee uses a granite river rock as his server, I’ve often talked about the quantum computations in brute matter (see my novel Hylozoic ). I like the idea of my server being a nice rock, let’s say the rounded stones from creeks and rivers, or like boulders you see sitting around in forests. (I think these are mostly granite. The solid black rocks from rivers are basalt, and the layered ones are schist.) A soul-server rock doesn’t have be all that big, as any old rock has an octillion atoms. Maybe you can even carry your server rock in your pocket.

[Sculpture by Vernon Head.]

But, you know, all of a sudden server rocks seem kind of silly to me. Better to just accept that the servers can be low-level biodevices without enough oomph to make a hosted lifebox be juicy. As I say, I did the living rock thing in Hylozoic, so why do it again.

(4) Distributed Lifebox

In a less outré mode, Rudy Jr. was talking to me about distributed storage. Each of his Monkeybrains customer antennas has a few megabytes of extra storage on it. You could split up your lifebox and have the pieces hopping around on network storage devices. This could be done even if the devices were biocomputing fungus lumps. This might be another alternative that Gee might use in stead of big Skyhive-type yeast mats. Here, a hosted lifebox doesn’t have a fixed physical server location, so it’s not really possible to erase it. Distributed biocomputation.

Pushing it, think of an anthill or a disease. Like: “I am your sneeze.”

“Neptune” acrylic on canvas, November, 2019, 18” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

(5) Chaotic Processes

Very early on, I was talking about Mary’s server being a waterfall. Back when I wanted to call the story “Mary Falls.” The notion of natural processes being usable computers is in Postsingular and Hylozoic—as is the notion of computing rocks—but I think I could make something new of the computing natural processes. See the sketch in the next two paragraphs.

I was walking in the woods yesterday, and looking at a tastily chaotic bunch of wind-waved branches, and thinking about how, wherever I am, I always look around for something chaotic to, like, feed my mind. And I was thinking that it would be nice if, at some future point in the narrative, a person’s lifebox storage hops from one natural process to another. It not hosted on a yeast-mat or in a redwood tree or in a computing river stone. It hops around. The lifebox mind is like a person using stepping stones to walk across water. Always have an eye out for the next vortex of natural chaos that you can be hosted on.

A soul like this would still need a body for doing stuff. But it would be a body whose mind lives on in the waving of the branches in the trees. That’s cool. Objective correlative: that’s my life.