Ch.4 - A song takes over your world

Time seems to pass very slowly when I think in English. I grew up on English. There are some beautiful songs in English. Whenever I am with Jan, when she lets me go, I sometimes feel relieved, but usually, I feel depressed. Wistful, wishy, y'know? Like you want it to come back, but you know it's impossible.

I think about a barnacle attached to the side of a whale, it falls off the side of the whale, and it can no longer travel.

I'm proximately aware that perhaps these images of isolation and impotency suggested by the absence of Jan are one of the reasons she is who she is in the company. Really, control between people who are able to intelligbly comprehend each other is simply a function of aesthetics and rate of information processing. If she knows what you like she can reference it and fill your cognitive slate with subjectively positive notes, and it creates an addicting need. Everyone at Metatron is sort of a dependency addict, whose learned how to survive by habituating themselves to not need.

What just happened with me and Jan is, I was going to describe to you something about a seed inside a seed inside a seed inside a seed, but, you see, before you describe something, you have to become cognizant of it. To become cognizant of it, you must trace it to its source. I can't think in English all the way back to the source of my ideas. I could paint a picture of a place in english. Sometimes an idea can be likened to a place, or you can derive the idea from a place.

The place I described, with all the homogenous sand--you can derive a picture of "one" from that place. What is one? One is the number all the other numbers are built out of. Jan says that if you break up your thoughts into little pieces, then break the pieces into pieces, and so on until you can't break up anything anymore, you will wind up with one thing, and the thing is homogenous with all the other little things. The only difference is in the assembly of the fundamental components. She also says some things appear to be unbreakable because of the way they've been unified, and there is a way of "glueing" things together in a way that they can't be destructed, unless you have special separating information (which often involves knowledge of how the thing was united in the first place). She says the reason Metatron is unified is because of various types of glue, and the glue at the eschelons she works with is made of mostly music.

Waves, wind, fluttering vibrations, strings, pendulums, harmonic motion, energy.
Love? Clockwork.

Ch.3 - Jan's illusions

Jan and I just finished a long, ambiguous conversation about how she draws attention to herself. I'm not certain how to describe her concept of a "thought vector." Basically, it's a blip about a pathways, direction, a little bit about pressure regulation, desire, and hints. Inside Metatron, we've got lots of locally useful symbols that wouldn't have the correct subjective meaning to people like you, who haven't been subjected to the persistent influence of our cult mentality.

The way Jan and I usually communicate is sort of like the way some pieces of your brain communicate with themselves. I think it would be more accurate to say "with each other" (the pieces of your brain) but it would be hard for you to agree with me when you don't have names for all the things that I have in my mind that are making me think that. Perhaps you can aid me in assisting your comprehension of this material. I will list some words.

Nebula, Chimera, identity, noun, epistomological statement, ontological statement, parameters(linguistics).

Hopefully you can look them up, understand the context and how to differentiate each from the other.

Frequently this is how Jan and I communicate, I'll have 7 concepts in my head. Those questions are put on a scratchpad that some people in Metatron can look at, anytime they want. Jan is one of those people. If you ever try to keep track of Jan's concepts, you can't (with some exceptions), because of the rate of change. She is one of those people who is immediately distracted by everything incoming and unifying it into chunks, consolidating those chunks into names, then consolidating the chunks into meta chunks...

If you are a linguistic genius like her, maybe you'd be able to keep track of the meanings she's connecting/processing, but I can't, neither can anybody else at Metatron. However anyways, she can take one of her chunks and explain it. A good metaphor to explain what it feels like to be communicated at like this is, imagine you are sitting in a field, (a brown field, covered with sand). You're not able to end the field, and you know you're different from everything else you perceive since the only thing you perceive is sky and homogenous sand. A goal forms in your mind to end the homogenity, to plant something.

Where do you get a seed? Now, you must forget about the homogenous sand. First, you need room to grow...

Ch. 2 - Shane Cave Rat life surveillance signals noise

Ah, sorry to be cut off so abruptly yesterday, I was in the middle of corresponding with you when an interfering signal came up. Where was I? ...Signal Sound dots web where blip radar metatron Jan unconscious query remember promise Shane.

Ah yes. I promised to tell you about the MRI room. I've spoken with Shane, he knows what I'm doing, and originally he was against it because (I think) his operations work more effectively when nobody else knows what he is doing, how he does it, etc. You're aware, I'm sure, of how everyone who comes up with an original way of doing something that works better...usually wants to keep it a secret. Well, Shane had a secret, let me tell you about Shane.

Shane was the 'Chief Wolf' of the Urban Exploration club I belonged to at MIT. He used to spend an inordinate amount of time fucking with lockpicks, you'd come to his desk, you'd see a bunch of notes about differential equations and applications of economics meshing with biology, theories about energy distribution, flow, Godel, Bach, harmonic equilibriums, eccentric jazz like that, yeah? But then on top of it all, you'd see these little bobby pins, white wires, little keychains, bent bottlecaps, paper clips...

He picked up the nickname "rat" because this apparent penchant for collecting scraps of metal. He was a little bit of the manipulative type, the kind of guy who'd get a kick out of, well, he did things like buy those bottles of expensive, scented soap, put sulfuric acid into them (which dissolves hair but not skin), insert smell-neutralizing agents, label the bottle DO NOT TOUCH stick it in the shower and anyway there were a bunch of girls walking around BALD on campus back in the seventies and now you know why. Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes, Chief Rat, as we affectionately called him, held the loyalty of the exploration crew, and three nights a week he'd lead expeditions, you'd be amazed at all the tunnels wandering around beneath the surface of Boston. He'd trade information with someone, "do research," and wind up with maps of elaborate "meshes" of catacombs, and we'd all go explore em. We were all addicted as hell to this (there was about thirty of us in the club, all sworn to secrecy during the time and for years to come), you could get into some pretty scary scenarios. Once I was creeping along the side of this creek in this spot rat named 'collasal cave' (maybe you've heard of it?) and--have you ever been in a place where there's stalactites and stalagmites, and you can hear the dripping? Well it was dark, and I stumbled, fell into the slippery creek, then I slide to the edge of something, get chucked off its edge, land with a plugh at the bottom of the fall, sort of twisting my ankle. Now I've got no flashlight, no map, no way of navigating unless I can figure out my way back to the portugese graffiti, fat chance, eh?

Well, about seventeen hours of creeping around in the dark later--I never panic, mind you, none of the computer science majors from MIT ever panic, probably because we've been indoctrinated against it by ridiculous volumes of the technical equivalent of "abort, retry, ignore" errors. After receiving enough non-cooperation from a device you depend on, you grow a resignation reflex, a little voice in your head that lets you know that it's either is going to work or it isn't, and all the sympathetic activity in the world--you can thrash your limbic system if you want--isn't going to flip the right switch to resolve the problem, so, either keep investing energy into it, or move on.

I'd gotten to the point where the marginal payoff for "moving on" seemed outweighed by the cost hundreds to one, since I'd tried to move around several times and slipped twice more, once landing within arms reach of a stalagmite with a rim sharp enough to slice your finger off. So I've been laying there motionless, kinda tentatively hoping that the water will stop, or that I can hear something that'll indicate a way to--in fact, at the moment, I wasn't bothering with the reality of the scenario, I was thinking about why don't I have an ampulla d'lorenzini or echolocatory features like a bat--I was bitching to myself about horridly maladapted we humans are to the collasal cave and I guess I would've been ready to die just dwelling on ideas like that, when I hear little patterns of code tapping.

First, I thought it was the drips from the stalactites, then I thought it was auditory hallucinations from sleep/food deprivation. But nop, Rat showed up, and a similar thing had happened to him, and turns out he doesn't need a flashlight to navigate the caves and has can navigate--none of us understood how he does this until after Dan synthesized the blips about trances and mental maps and consolidating information and built the system for transferring stream of consciousness from one person to another, once you're familiar with an way of thinking, from experiencing it, it's not such a big deal to do it, but anyways, to describe it roughly, Rat would just recognize what every room in the cave looked like from the sounds, and he had a picture in his head of which rooms were connected to which, and he could figure out where he was in the room based on the water drips, river, etc, and he came looking for me and he found me and that's probably why I'm still here today.

How did we get the MRI machine? Fort Meade, MD, 1984. You're going to laugh about this. One night Jan comes home with a naval officer, drunk, she's got him in a trance, and he goes on to describe this surveillance equipment which can identify types (wavelength, frequency, etc) of electromagnetic radiation from long distances at high resolution. We took an interview and I'll paste the transcript.

Jan: It's called Rabnon?
Guy: yeah
Jan: What's Rabnon do?
Guy: They mostly use it for computers. To look at computers.
Jan: Computers?
Guy: Yeah.
Jan: What can I do with Rabnon that I can't do with my eyes?
Guy: Your eyes get blocked by walls
Jan: What about Rabnon?
Guy: Rabnon you can point anywhere in a five mile radius and it can tell you what color light is travelling there.
Jan: Where is Rabnon?
Guy: It's in the ELMINT-322 office right now
Jan: Who has access to that office?
Guy: I don't know his name, some guy, likes to wear peacock feathers...

Anyways so it turns out this John Doe with the peacock feathers occasionally picks up cheap lovers at Club Paradise over on Laurens street in Baltimore, and so, to make a long story short--Shane doesn't really want me to go into details, but anyways, Shane picks him up and they go on a couple of collasal dates, evidently the guy was a sort of arrogant psychologist personality type, and Shane really knows how to play those guys, anyways, this Doe guy, he takes Shane for a drunken hippy type, always saying about how Shane reminds him of an "Allen Ginsberg" type and referring to him as his "beatnik freedom lover" in this god-awful condescending tone that's supposed to express affection while belittling you at the same time. Funny about those paternalistic types, the myopia, the life-lived-inside-a-world-of-categorical generalizations...the mechanical patterns of inferences, don't get me started.

The guy was an egomaniac, thought he was ultrasophisticated, the only one in our group who liked him was Jan, who I remember always said she understood him..."his clockwork" as she put it. Jan used to always be finding reasons to think everybody is beautiful. Jan...

Jan says I better stop now.

Ch.1 - One Page

Jan ran the company with an iron fist, especially while she was in a coma. Nobody ever understood how she was exerting control from the nebulous regions of her unconscious, but all the employees could tell whether their actions were in accordance with her will, because whenever they pleased her, their biological reward systems would activate.

I suppose you don't know what I'm talking about. I can only explain the quirky social dynamics of Metatron (Jan's company) through metaphor. Odds are, you have never experienced it, but you may have experienced something like it. Perhaps you have believed in God. God is a powerful idea, because if you do something--even if you're all alone--the idea is that he knows, you aren't going to get away with anything because you're watched. Jan is like that in a sense because she is able to recall anything that she's keeping track of simply by looking it up. Here is how this happened:

Our company started with a team of kids from Cal Tech. Jan was sort of the peacemaker in the group. There was Dan, Mya, Shane, Kenny, Robert, and Jan. They all got together with the aim to study memory and most of our original research had to do with studying the physiology of cats and trying to figure out the local regions where procedural memory information (such as the instructions to perform tasks) is stored. We'd teach cats tricks inside a MRI room (the backstory to the fund-acquisition for this is interesting and before I write the next chapter I'll ask Shane how much I can disclose about this). At first we were teaching them arbitrary things, such as how to identify different types of strings, then how to pull the right color ones in the right sequence to get access to the water dish. We didn't actually wind up using that data until way later--after we'd figured out where to look.

Hah, I wish I could tell you where to look, well, I already did, but your conscious mind censored the communication, and will continue to do so invariably until it becomes comfortable with the idea of totally cooperating with the aggregations of hints coming from tagged sources. It naturally wouldn't be able to interpret until it first learns to identify and trust.

At Metatron we're all very familiar with signatures embedded into every single information packet transaction (we call these blips or radar, depending on the context). Furthermore we have a spatial map of where we put our information, in other words, if I send you a blip it goes onto your radar when you become aware and take notice of it. Then you put it somewhere inside your map, and you're free to forget about it and remove it from your scratchpad unless you want to work on it, since it's been classified. You will now remember it, if you need it, because you put it somewhere, in the midst of a context, and you can search for it and find it via travelling along the web of associations, accessing contextual cues, and narrowing down the context until you hit the exact dot.

Then you can connect it.

We've done some interesting experiments involving the best way to encode information to maximise density. One of the important discoveries we had to make was that the way I'm communicating with you is pretty damn inefficient. We've evolved a region of the brain which treats sound waves as signals