PmWiki | Stuff / Augmented

YES....yes...this does mean we do indeed mantain multiple Chromium profiles for ourselves. >.>]

Augmented * Somewhere at the edge just beyond the last fleeting moments of a dream, my consciousness begins to assemble itself for the day. Patterns of light from the Google Glass™ display lead the way toward a more and more organized perspective of the world, recognition stirring deep within my cerebellum and jumpstarting higher functions as the EEG and alarm have agreed this would be good timing. After a short few seconds, the concept of I begins to exist enough to draw myself up into the lucid dream state. Once I kick my hippocampus into gear, the pattern becomes familiar, reminding me I've not set aside time just now for play. Eager to avoid the fullness of the alarm forcing me awake through archaic adrenal stimulation, I force myself to set aside the illusion of a space entirely under my control. Pushing off from the solipsistic playground, I begin the slow hypnopompic phase-shift toward the world awaiting me. It is mere moments again before I realize the weight upon my chest is not sleep paralysis but something far more interesting. My fingers flick against the microswitches in the custom input device nestled in each hand, arms comfortably pinned underneath another form of enhanced reality. As I lift my eyelids and look out upon the world, the fullness of my situation sets in with each rise and fall of my bosom.

 A fleeting thought begins to question if each inflation is actually released upon exhalation, but before the sentence even finishes the page fault has begun.  As my higher function begins to engage and the dreaming world is cast off once more, I can feel an almost tangible thunk as my neural runtime remaps in that peculiar neo-cortical way, bringing a complete phase-change barrier between now and then. In fact as linear time is coming into focus this is quite apt, yet even in this thought it is clear the boundary is permeable.

At the divide, a me that isn't is grasping for the glamour that wasn't, running contrawise to herself even as the everything I will be grows outward from the crystallization of intent. In the dream-state, the generative functions bind directly to the perceptual arena, almost the exact inverse of the consciously synthesized hyperreality that has begun to take over. The display blinks again, warning that it soon will have to chirp to insist the integration process begin. The first touch of my will directly upon the virtual comes as my fingers find the pads wrapped around my seemingly trapped useless hands. Maya of course, it all is really, and our story only begins when we cease fighting for our limits and take up the pen ourselves. Faster now it comes together, I trade direct nonlinear throughput for higher-order abstraction and flexible modular action. It is as if I'm picking up from a core file left last time the system fell over, after a quick patch-up another thunk and there we go, a shift of primary consciousness into the meta-real. The display snaps into a kind of pre-digested ready-information focus from its prior state of seeming legibility only promised not proven. As I guide the system through reading the alerts from the night I can feel the horizon of my apprehension widen. I reach first into the network, my will extending through the power under my fingertips, refreshing external memories from my virtual workspace. From there I have a fairly clear grasp of my Intents and that Cave I choose to build to guide my efforts, the fulcrum upon which to move the universe. The horizon however does not wait there, there is little to be gained by replacing one dreamscape with another, so all the while laying there and looking for all the world like a completely helpless doll, I communicate, calling out to those along for this crazy ride. As I do most days, I call my friends to resume their Work, shivering as my senses blend more deeply while I wake and wait and my curves start feeling more and more directly a part of me. Soon they will join me and I will slip a little further into this life, I will be transformed a bit more into the art I am to become.

Most of the rest of the warehouse has been awake for a while; point in fact, most of it doesn't really go to sleep. Gantries print, lase and route through whatever wasn't interesting or urgent enough to get done immediately and got pushed to the night queue. However, breakfast is still getting done by hand, in this case continental style, homegrown corn flakes and coffee from a venerable espresso machine seventy years old. "Come and get it!" pings a text alert on some of the screens. The warehouse's living spaces host all sort of guests, mostly human - that is, most of the guests are human, and those who aren't are at least mostly human - for days or weeks on end, depending on what they're working on; one of the few rules is that the evening meal must be shared, eight in the evening sharp; the tradition is older than Rome. The rest of the time, there's usually grazing going on, and cooking tends to be at least in the low double-digit percent of all projects.

The sudden rush of messages brings Bo back toward the moment again, a few more page faults and perhaps even a kexec between wheren she was languidly contemplating and wheren the irregulars of Concordia have begun to do their best ever impression of assembling for a collective meeting, bacon will bring that out in a person. A few more little nudges to the map and clarity strikes. "Damn" she mutters quietly, even her voice in its chirpy flute-like quality confirming, "internal clock drift is out of hand, this time it came up a good 100 years behind...give or take...". A moment of near-silence as her fingers hit those pads at something approaching a conventional speed around 300+ wpm, not the fastest she'd ever tested, that was the 666 Bo will forever be insanely ecstatic over, but enough. At this, the system finally reports ready and begins delivering a few queued telepresence holoprojections to the meeting while Bo begins to relax, having succeeded passably at waking up and now ready to let someone else do some heavy lifting.

The notional internal log refers to the next occurance as "releasing the singleton lock", followed immediately by Bo calling vaguely into the depths of the neocortex for a certain "Nyoka". Hedging her bets on the elusive cyberpunk, she also lets the names "QMS" and just "the Doctor (here to help)" reach that threshold of intention. Nothing happens for a few beats and Bo waits nervously, though it is not long before the first reply comes in. Predictably, Nyoka's response is "I'm busy rebuilding the temporal cache, and for what it's worth Aurora and I agree the event storm on the horizon is weirder than anything we've seen yet, presuming memory connectivity is reliable. Jacqueline isn't responding to hypercalls and the whole system is in a bit of a complete and total mess, but what else is new? Anyhow sorry for the autoresponder but I'll be sure to reply to us in person as soon as I manage to ensure we don't end up going sane from all this. BEEP.". Heh. "Well at least she's still got a sense of humour..." Bo thinks quietly, unsure if that is reassuring or terrifying.

She isn't left long with that thought though before with a sound like someone forgot to take the parking brake off their Avatar, QMS cuts in over it all to state "QMS Acquiring Singleton Lock and Binding to Watchdog timeout-set Warn at t+30m and Alarm at t+60m and HyAlert at t+90m and Unlock at t+120m. Lock acquired, switching to runlevel 1+. Redirecting log." and then almost as if to confirm there is a significant amount of Ha-Ha-Only-Serious here, she implements said redirection with the same command she's been using for the past few centuries at this point. A few keystrokes and remembering how to type that funky unicode tape recorder symbol later, and QMS has $ cd ~/workspace/????; openlog displayed in a new tmux pane, along with the same little mono VU meter she's gotten so very used to, after a barely noticable pause of course for the newfangled speech-synthesized log header to go into the file, just in case the meticulously timestamped filename is stripped from the data.

"This is QMS as usual, and no, I still can't find my Sonic. Insert standard joke about drinking it, and standard comment about recipe for vodka and caffienated orange juice aka Mountain Dew here. Anyhow, Log to dev null begins this current incarnation, um, wherenever. I think I wrote a tool for that, no clue if its working herenow of course, though I can be sure if I bother to poke at it I'll get ten copies of the header followed by a Windows install disc instead of my log file. Anyhow, looks like its another beautiful day in paradise here in Concordia ++N.0 (we lost count), and now that we've figured out theyr'e really part of our flesh and not the explants Bo thought as she woke, we can finally start getting up. Of course in zero-g this wouldn't be a problem, but here though we often sleep like this among other excuses, a few quick sudo commands will do the trick."

And indeed a moment later, $ sudo t+a --profile grav_earth_max has our body shifted to something less immobilizing. "nah...still too much, no way we'll run into anyone else this big...I'll let the autogain handle it if we do...ugh the things I do..." she giggles as she types $ sudo t+a --std --cup J "...let's leave it there for now...must have been a hell of a party lastnight. I swear we're still tripping metaballs. Or meatballs. Or meatball-head. Fighting evil by....FNORD. Ahem. Anyhow, this thing on? CQ CQ comeBACK? ... Oh well, never anything but dead air on this channel anyway."

"Guess its time for the next installment of Radio Free Horizon's Increasingly Anachronistically Named Horizon Singularity Podcast! I'll be your host and Storm Warden should an Avatar Storm attempt to inhibit our passage as we simulcast across the gauntlet and beyond the dreamshell, throughout the various webs and to parts unknown and unknowable, even perhaps Nightvale should they happen to pass that ordinance connecting the Dog Park and the Unified Unsanity. Although no citizen is allowed knowledge of such things or the Dog Park itself, this should bring them within reach of some of our most distant Deep Umbral repeaters. So, to all of you out therenever from all of us out herenowway, and as always with full credit to Mr. Ronan Harris aka VNV Nation, in his immortal words I do now decree: " And then there is a brief moment before the following can be heard clearly:

    Broadcasting live around the world, on the air in every land, on every frequency.

    across the surface of the earth, to the furthest reach, this is our live transmission.



    To all the people of the world, unrelenting, for all who are receiving us.

    From every station on the earth, loud and clear, this is our live transmission.

"As for the temporal shenanigans, I know it all sounds absolutely mad, but the truth is I wish I were just crazy. If that were all it was, I'd just need a single neon sign to tell me I'm herenow allwhen. This is something else, perhaps just a case of nostalgia run amok, perhaps more, its the more I really worry over. I suspect my attempts to draw magick out of precariously cantilevering my perception and interaction to stretch my light cone into absurd shapes just may be catching up with me. Even this would not be much in most cases but herenow in this particular placetime I'm getting dangerously close to completing a Work I have been undertaking over such a great expanse of metacausality that I can be certain even integrating the elapsed spacetime is at least aleph-5 and going to run me out of infinite tape far too quickly. Oh well, at least I didn't wake before wheren the core I resumed from was dumped. That is always a mess."

((The problem with having a PA system that exhibits the occasional trace of sentience is that it may decide to take "broadcasting live" as a request, and turn itself on. Or maybe it's just an overzealous personal assistant program. So, breakfast today is cereal, soymilk, coffee, and a bit of DJ talk. The warehouse's video library finds itself serving up some Barbarella and LEXX from the assonance. )) <- no idea if this fits, but let's see what the environment looks like <-- everything fits, when it does not appear so it is because the intervening path has not yet been inscribed! <-- nothing fits! of course it doesn't, that's the whole point! <-- neither response is any more or less true than this final statment!

((hmm, wrong window. wrong color. oh well :) anyhow that's the point, see, the name "Radio Free Horizon" means among other things that this is not even just a pirate broadcast, it is a repeating system running store-copy-mangle-remix-and-forward on anything that comes by as well as simlpy amplifying all that makes up 'OUR LIVE TRANSMISSION', that sum total of all we are reaching eternally toward ever greater horizons. [raid upon the infinite postponed, loot: a few random bits of "This Means Something" in the edit history. returning you to your regularly scheduled static screen for the moment]