My old kind-of friend Frank Shook was in town the other day. He materialized right out of the ether, emanating form a tree fungus. I have a lot about my adventures with him in my “novel” Saucer Wisdom.

Frank was telling me some stuff about teleportation, which fits in with my Hylozoic novel project.

Constraints on Teleportation

In order to keep the world from getting too chaotic, and also not to make things too easy for my characters, Frank suggests constraints on teleportation: No Mass Limit, and Silps Can’t Teleport.

(Mass Limits on Teleportation) On a single teleportation hop, a single person can only move a certain limited amount of mass.

(Not “Everyone” Can Teleport) The power to teleport is limited to certain people or perhaps limited to the human race. Animals, plants, and objects can’t teleport.

Mass Limits on Teleportation

Suppose that on a given hop, a person can only carry along about as much mass as would fit in a suitcase—say twenty kilograms. In PS1, the heaviest things that people teleported were the magic harp and a battlefield backpack-style atomic bomb.

But suppose that a group of people working together can teleport larger things. So if you have a two thousand kilogram pre-fab home to transport, you might need to get a dozen or more people to pitch in.

Make it thirteen, like the Last Supper. One of them flubs—the Judas. And the front porch is lost in the subdimensions. n.

[This week my dear old friend Gregory Gibson visited as well. He’s a dab hand author himself, as well as being an antiquarian maritime book-dealer. He was in town for a book fair under the aegis of his firm Ten Pound Island Books. Greg helped me discover the writing style I call Transrealism; in 1969 this sage suggested, “Suppose you were to write about your real life as if it were science fiction.”]

Not “Everyone” Can Teleport

Can objects teleport? What a mess that would be… I have enough trouble keeping track of my wallet, keys, and glasses without them sunnybucks teleporting themselves. Teleportation for objects seems risky. Think of fire, and of how joyfully the flames hop from branch to branch—wouldn’t fire want to teleport itself from tree to tree? This would be a disaster; the whole planet would go up in the spreading inferno.

How to justify the lack of teleportation by the silps? I’d like a fairly firm reason.

Disinclination. Through the eons, objects have been immobile or, at best, passively mobile—why would they want any kind of new-fangled travel now? Maybe they don’t have desires. Maybe that part is lacking. Maybe, if you don’t reproduce, that whole part of you is eliminated. So then they’d simply be too mellow to teleport. Imbued with Buddhist non-attachment. But I’d like an explanation that’s firmer and more science-like.

Interdiction. Maybe the planetary mind Gaia won’t let objects teleport because if they did it would mess up her ecosystems. That’s a little arbitrary.

Mental Structure. Silp minds differ in essential respects from human minds. Compared to a silp, a human’s methods for producing thoughts is weirdly complex and roundabout. They think via a direct quantum computation with lazy eight memory, we do it via our neurons. Perhaps silps are inherently literal minded and can’t cohere themselves into two alternate views?

But keep in mind that, I’d also prefer than plants and animals don’t teleport. Otherwise the rats and ants would eat everything or—if the vermin use third-party teleportation—all our food would always disappear down into the rat warrens and the ants hives. So let’s suppose there’s something unique about a human-style mind that permits teleportation. The painfully evolved ability to be ambiguous and unsure and self-doubting.

If Objects Teleport…

It could be that, later on, maybe bit by bit, the objects do learn to teleport . Maybe that’s a bad side-effect of the Kang parasitizing our silps’ computations, or of the Rull trying to slime us. The objects get restless and bored—or frightened—and wander around. “Where’s my chair?” “He got bored. Went for a jaunt to Alaska.” “He got scared. He’s at the bottom of the ocean.”

But the Kang or the Rull will, as I mentioned before, mess this up.

Social effects of Teleportation

People can live anywhere they can find a vacant lot to build on.

You could be stealing stuff all the time; not only can you see it via omnividence, you can hop there, grab it and carry it home.

If people can reach out and move objects by teleportation, then no woman’s jewelry is safe. Or your food, guns, sculptures, paintings, furniture, and so on. Criminal gangs like the Beagle Boys could work in concert to whisk away cars or even houses. Does property no longer matter then?

Suppose I wake up and my shoes are gone. A passerby has nicked them, and taken them home. The up side is that I can always locate my stolen shoos and teleport them back home. An ownership revision war.

Another possibility is that I can tell the silp inside a valued object to make itself and the object telepathically invisible by pinching off its connection to the point at infinity router in the eighth dimension. But silps might not like to do this. It’s lonely to be cut off.

My son Rudy is working on his cool picture sharing site www.monkeyview.net . Free!

Rudy can make computers do anything he wants them to — including splitting reality into an endless binary tree.

This weekend I saw R. U. Sirius and he interviewed me for a podcast on his MondoGlobo site.

I always enjoying hanging out with him. He’s slightly worried these days, he thinks he may have wandered into a parallel universe, further down the binary tree than the node where he was born. But I’m still shadowing him.

Click on the icon above to access my podcast.
Great sound quality on this one; thanks to Jeff the engineer.

I was up in San Francisco with Sylvia this weekend. Here are some pix and notes, with a few more remarks about teleportation mixed in for filler.

I gave a reading at Borderlands Books, always one of my favorite venues. A good crowd, a lot of sales. I forgot to bring along my tape recorder for podcasting purposes, but my old friend Faustin Bray of Sound Photosynthesis was there to videotape the event. When will this video be obtainable? ”Soon come,” as they say in the islands…

Always nice to be on magical Valencia Street.

“How does teleportation work?” Thuy asked Ond.

“Teleportation works by getting mixed up about where you really are,” said Ond. “In quantum computation, we use the word ”˜coherent’ to mean mixed up. The usage is opposite of what you might expect. It’s like if you’re sufficiently coherent you can’t talk at all. If you’re sufficiently coherent your whole body folds up into a single wave function. As if you were this one exceedingly complex electron.”

“I’m not an electron,” said Chu. “I’m a Higgs particle.” He giggled and made pig noises. “Oink, squeal, wheenk.”

“Alright,” said Ond. “And I’m a quark. Thuy can be the electron.”

“I’m dark matter,” said Thuy, getting into the silly jabberwocky game. “So what’s that ocean we see in between the worlds?”

“The Planck frontier. Fall through it and the subbies eat you.”

The colors in the Mission are so great. Especially in the rain. Viva Mexico! I’m thinking for my two alien races in Hylozoic, the Rull and the Kang might in some ways resemble the Mexicans and the Chinese. Note that we do use that same word “alien” for immigrant…

The murals covering the Women’s Building on18th between Valencia and Guerrero are mind-boggling. I love this image of the woman artist. Note that she’s reaching down through a layer of reality to paint. She’s reaching into the subdimensional world. It’s great that this image is also reflected onto the sidewalk.

Might teleporting bodies ever collide with each other? Or get merged, like the scientist and the fly in The Fly? I don’t quite see that happening here as it’s all about a single coherent wave function’s behavior, and not about a signal through space.

Generally, quantum mechanical state-function waves behave linearly and don’t interact with each other. But I might suppose that in some situation we get a nonlinear interaction, a coupling, and we get The Fly. The character is all, “Buzz, slobber, hi guys!” Maybe do this to a bad character. Dick Too Dibbs.

We were staying at Hotel Boheme , a little place I like in North Beach, right by the Stella Caffe and Bakery, with their cozy (non-blinking) neon sign near our window. The pastries in North Beach…ah.

I had my scrap of paper with me, working on the first chapter of Hylozoic — I like to print out what I have, carry it folded in four in my butt pocket, then get it out and mark it up in cafes. Always more interesting for me than the newspapers.

Nice to be doing the writer thing in an actual beatnik cafe, the Caffe Trieste, with guys even wearing berets. I missed a trick and left my own beret at home. But I got in some good scribbling.

There’s this funny tradition about brass bands for Chinese funerals. When Hong Kong was a British colony, the Chinese saw the British marching bands and decided this was just the thing for a fancy cortege. So the Green Street Funeral Home has a marching band, and just about every Saturday and Sunday morning, they’re out there playing these great old hymns and then leading a hearse down Stockton Street.

The procession goes right past the Tang Fat Hotel, which I spotted about two years ago, and ended up working into Mathematicians in Love, as I like the name of it so much, also it’s handy to the Vallejo Street Garage where my characters have their getaway car.

As it happened, this weekend they had a Chinese New Years fair on Grant Street, which was cool. I like the line of the tents’ tops, it reminded me of Bruegel’s painting of the two dancers at the fair.

Using Occam’s Razor, I’d do best to suppose that the aliens—the Kang and the Rull—use a telepathic teleportation method for their intergalactic travel. A catch is that they need to be able to visualize the target. But aha, it’s precisely due to the awakened Earth’s telepathic emanations that the Kang can come to us! Like if you light a cigarette, the sniper can aim at your flame. They couldn’t teleport here until we became telepathic.

[DJs doing a live broadcast for of a Chinese radio station. ]

Perhaps an individual needs help from his or her peers in order to teleport a long distance. We might suppose that a single unaided person only has the power to teleport themselves from one side of the planet to the other, and that they need to get others to help push them for the longer jumps. However I wouldn’t want the requirement to be linear, as then I’d need so very many people to help me jump a distance of many light years. Maybe it only take about seven helpers to get you up into the light-year-jump zone, and when you’re in that zone you can jump as far as you like in our space.

I think I’d like to allow third party teleportation. So our psychic power of teleportation can be used not only as a point-to-point travel method, but also as a kind of aethereal hand by which we can reach out and move distant objects around.

How would third party teleportation work? Suppose that, sitting in my living-room, I want to teleport an apple from my fridge to the top of the table at my side. How do I proceed? I visualize the source and target locations as when doing personal teleportation, that is, I visualize the fridge drawer and the tabletop in the living room. But now, rather than doing a cohere/collapse number on my body, I need to do it on the apple. I teep into the apple and coax the apple’s state function into doing the cohere/collapse. I become the apple for a moment, I merge with it, I cohere it’s state function to produce locational uncertainty, and then I collapse the apple’s wave function into the apple-on-table eigenstate.

We saw some boys doing a lion dance; two of them per lion. It was great.

Always good to be in San Francisco, with so much to see.

I’m giving a reading at Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia St., SF, 3 PM, Sat, February 10.

I mentioned I’m having some computer problems, and Rudy, Jr., persuaded me that I need to flash my ABIT motherboard’s BIOS with an upgrade. If you’re a computer hacker, BIOS flash day is a rare and sacred event. Like the day when the ants get wings and fly out of the hive. Like the five dead days that roll around every three years in the Mayan calendar. A hush falls…

The hard part about flashing your BIOS is that you have to do a clean boot either off a CD ROM or off — scared relic of our ancestors — a floppy disk drive. And, like most modern machines, my computer doesn’t HAVE a floppy disk drive.

Making a bootable CD ROM with a DRDOS.IMG file didn’t work for me, though I told ROXIO to use to make a bootable CD.

So I went to the High Temple, that is, Fry’s, and I got a USB Floppy Disk Drive and OH NO it installed itself as the B: drive, not as the Floppy A: Drive, so when I entered ADVANCED BIOS SETTINGS to set FIRST BOOT to FLOPPY, and rebooted, the machine was looking for a (nonexistent) internal A: floppy drive and spurned my my USB floppy disk drive B:

Gnashing of teeth. Rending of garments. Panic and fury in the ant hill that is my brain. But then I noticed that in my ADVANCED BIOS SETTINGS, I could set FIRST BOOT to be USB-FDD, and oh, joy, it booted off the floppy and showed me the beloved A:> prompt and I entered the sacred formula:

RUNME.BAT

……………….and I flashed the BIOS.

Five minutes ago. SO FAR everything’s fine. I’m livin’ in a fool’s paradise! Might as well get this post up before I reboot once again and discover my machine is a doorstop.

On a later day, I’ll tease out some SF metaphors of flashing the BIOS, but now I have something to say about Omnividence and Telepathy.

This is another of my series of notes towards my novel in progress, a sequel to my Fall, 2007, novel Postsingular. I call the sequel PS2 for short, though the final title is probably Hylozoic. For earlier notes, you can run a search on my blog, or just click to this list of the notes.

Teleporting is all about making yourself uncertain about which of two possible locations you’re actually in. The trick is to eidetically and precisely visualize both your source location and your target location. Video isn’t good enough for this very rich visualization; you need something as strong as telepathy or omnividence—I used the orphidnet in PS1, and in PS2 (and in the Hibrane) I use lazy eight telepathy.

Once you have your source location and your target location clearly in mind, you can confuse yourself about which is which by linking up the two scenes, feature by feature. Thus if one scene has a cliff then the other scene needs to have something that you can at least think of as a cliff. If there’s an espresso machine in the coffee shop where I’m sitting, and I want to go home, then I have to think of my TV as being essentially the same thing as the espresso machine and, conversely, I have to think of the espresso machine as being essentially the same as my TV. Angular boxes that make noise.

In PS1, I initially have people using Jayjay’s so-called metamorpher agents to help set up the links, but soon people get the hang of weaving scenes together on their own.

Where I’m going with this is that I view teleportation as a three-step process. First you perfectly visualize two locations and mentally weave them together, second you become uncertain about which location you’re actually in, and third you abruptly observe yourself, asking, “Where am I?” Thereby you precipitate a quantum collapse of your wave function, putting you into a specific location.

[Generally I’m just going to act as if the collapse puts you in the target location. But, logically, you have a fifty-fifty chance of finding yourself either in the source spot or in the target spot. If it doesn’t “come up heads” on the first try, you might need to keep “flipping the coin” till you get where you want to go. But I didn’t mention this complication in PS1. Perhaps I can hint at it in PS2, by remarking that there’s a strobing quality to some teleportation jumps, like a lightning bolt striking repeatedly. Like the lightning strokes at the start of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Like the multiple camera flashes in a nighttime video on the bitchin’ celeb-stalker site X17online showing, like, Lindsey or Britney or Paris walking from a limo to a restaurant door. The Advent of the Great Old Ones. Whoah. Is this BIOS flash day? But generally I’ll suppose you don’t notice the false starts on the jump. Suppose you just view them as part of the observation.]

I’ll summarize teleportation once again (avoiding any mention of the repeated measurement issue). First you eidetically visualize your target, second you turn off self-observation and spread out into an ambiguous superposed state — neither here nor there, neither now nor then, not inside, not out — and third you observe yourself in such a way so as to collapse down into the target location.

I’m also supposing that anything I’m tightly coupled with (i.e. whatever I’m clutching) will teleport along with me. That way I can rescue or kidnap other people by whisking them off to distant places; also I can steal things. I’ll suppose that I can carry anything up to weight of, say, a heavy suitcase. Twenty or thirty kilograms.

Expressing teleportation as a formula:

teleportation = remote_viewing + uncertainty + self-observation.

I’m now going to replace the word “uncertainty” by a more buzz-worthy word: “coherent.” In quantum-speak, having no particular location is called being coherent . Note that being coherent is as opposed to our normal, unexciting bourgeois state of being nailed down in one particular spot, which is decoherent .

teleportation = remote_viewing + coherence + self-observation.

Becoming coherent means tuning out the real-world stress-questions like “How much do you weigh?” or “Where are you?” or “What do you think of Iraq?” or “Do you love me?” Bailing out of the meaningless social games. Like a junkie on the nod—or a yogi in a state of bliss. “I have no feelings.” “I have no body.” “I’m everywhere.” “I’m coherent.”

The process of becoming coherent feels like a single psychic gesture. No need for drugs, a simple breath can do it. Inhale Many, exhale One.