![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images8\/179_magicdoor.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIt\u2019s been too long since I put up a new post. Thing is, I\u2019ve been busy writing. So today I\u2019ll take a chunk of my writing notes and make them into a perhaps-a-bit-opaque post.<\/p>\n
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\u201cMagic Door\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, December, 2019, 24\u201d\u009d x 18\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019ve 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\u2014and 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<\/em>, the first in my Ware Tetralogy<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n The first of my recent series of stories is called \u201cJuicy Ghost,\u201d\u009d and it appeared in the ezine Big Echo<\/a><\/em>. It’s somewhat radical. It can also be found in the online version of my Complete Stories<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n The follow-up stories \u201cEverything Is Everything\u201d\u009d and \u201cThe Mean Carrot\u201d\u009d are finished, but they have yet to appear. And I\u2019m currently working on a long story called \u201cMary Mary.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n The intended final architecture in the stories is this.<\/p>\n * A psidot <\/em>is a smart phone that transmits telepathically.<\/p>\n * You use a psidot to store your personality in a software construct called a lifebox <\/a>, which is to be hosted on a server of some kind.<\/p>\n * Your lifebox avatar doesn\u2019t become fully alive, or what I call juicy<\/em>, unless it is linked to a peripheral <\/em>body that it controls.<\/p>\n * 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Key issue: who owns your lifebox\u2019s server?<\/p>\n In \u201cMary Mary\u201d\u009d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve got a rebel-type hacker character in \u201cMary Mary\u201d\u009d who\u2019s named Gee Willikers. He uses an indie server to store lifeboxes in such a way that they\u2019re not basically the slaves of large corporations.<\/p>\n This raises a couple of implementation questions\u2026and here we get into an infodump of yesterdays writing notes.<\/p>\n First<\/em>, what is Skyhive is using for servers? As I say, I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n Second<\/em>, what does Gee Willikers use for servers? It should be slightly cooler than what Skyhive uses.<\/p>\n In answering these two questions, let\u2019s catalog a few of the possible server options. And the first, more thoroughly described option is the one that I plan to adopt.<\/p>\n \u201cManhattan\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, June, 2018, 30\u201d\u009d x 24\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Have your lifebox server be some kind of biocomputer. This is the path I\u2019m going to take.<\/p>\n 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.<\/em> I\u2019ve had this architecture in mind for over a year, and I used it when I wrote the kick-off \u201cJuicy Ghost\u201d\u009d story, and I won\u2019t give it up.<\/p>\n But if the server is already alive, seems like you don\u2019t need <\/em>to hook into a live body to get soul. You\u2019d be able to get your juice from the live biocomputing server itself. So then all the lifeboxes would automatically be juicy. And there\u2019s no story left at all. Ouch<\/em>. Can\u2019t have this. What do I do?<\/p>\n I\u2019ll 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<\/em>, and they don\u2019t have soul. There\u2019s differences in the quality of \u201csoul\u201d\u009d you might get from different bio organisms. Skyhive uses stupid mats of yeast for its servers. No action in there, no juice.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s server biocomputers have to lack the requisite high-weirdness biocrunch to foster juiciness. Both Skynet\u2019s and Gee\u2019s lifeboxes need the psidot\/live-host connection.<\/p>\n Absolute law: to get juicy, a lifebox has to do teep (that is, telepathy) with a living animal body via psidot. You don\u2019t get that juicy bio soul until you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n (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\u2019re not going to settle for this weaker justification for the psidot-to-animal glom move.)<\/p>\n Why can\u2019t I just host a lifebox directly inside an animal or even in another living person. This shades into demonic possession. Here we wouldn\u2019t be using the whole architecture I\u2019m talking about, but that<\/em> is the scenario I want to explore. So at least for now, we\u2019ll say that for some rubber-science reason it\u2019s 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\u2019t in the animal. The code is just \u201cdriving\u201d\u009d the animal. And nobody knows how to put non-mediated lifebox data directly into an animal.<\/p>\n But using plants as hosts might be okay. Plants might support Spork. And they don\u2019t complicate things by making the hosted lifeboxes be juicy.<\/p>\n And, later, if we want, maybe we can do a direct hop into another person\u2019s body via a psidot-to-psidot link. That could be another bad thing that happens to Mary later on.<\/p>\n Using brute matter is a variant on using computer chips. But without having to build a computer.<\/p>\n I\u2019d entertained the notion that Gee uses a granite river rock as his server, I\u2019ve often talked about the quantum computations in brute matter (see my novel Hylozoic<\/em><\/a> ). I like the idea of my server being a nice rock, let\u2019s 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\u2019t have be all that big, as any old rock has an octillion atoms. Maybe you can even carry your server rock in your pocket.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, so why do it again.<\/p>\n In a less outr\u00c3\u00a9 mode, Rudy Jr. was talking to me about distributed storage. Each of his Monkeybrains <\/a>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\u2019t have a fixed physical server location, so it\u2019s not really possible to erase it. Distributed biocomputation.<\/p>\n Pushing it, think of an anthill or a disease. Like: “I am your sneeze.”<\/p>\n \u201cNeptune\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, November, 2019, 18\u201d\u009d x 24\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images8\/179_magicdoor_1200.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n(1) Biocomputation<\/h3>\n
\n[Chuck Shotton\u2019s 3D printed models of critters from my novel Million Mile Road Trip<\/a><\/em>.]<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n(2) Animals<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\n(3) Brute Matter<\/h3>\n
\n[Sculpture by Vernon Head.]<\/em><\/p>\n(4) Distributed Lifebox<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\n(5) Chaotic Processes<\/h3>\n