Blake's Tweak

Blake. Let's call the guy Blake for Christ sake. The guy's name doesn't matter. It might as well be Barthogoathead. Ya see, we have aliases for "security reasons." We have cover, ya know. The government has insisted we keep those aliases secret. Our "names." Call them whatever you want. Alright, if you must know, Blake is his real name. It's not the one on his birth certificate, or any of his passports. Blake is what his mother called him for the first 12 years of his life. If that's not a name, I don't know what is.

Anyway, Blake's in the lab, looking at the reactor, right? And he's like: "dude, I think i just got it to work, check this out." So I look at the monitor, and sure enough, he's programmed some flaming trousers into the code. Blake is a funnyman like that. It's just like him to do this. Ballsy, but not beyond his degree of dereliction and desire for shock value. So, he's sitting there, in apparent awe, basically claiming: "hey, look, I just tweaked these timer settings and voila, fusion!" Bullshit meter 12.3. I smacked the little bugger upside the head. Told him to stop fucking around. But, then he gave me that look, like he just shit his pants. I had only seen it once. It was the same look he gave me when he did, in fact, shit his pants. It was a wedding laxative fiasco that backfired, big time. Different story. Anyway, I pulled him up by his tidy whities and checked it out.

His reports of a sustainable fusion reaction were good upon a cursory glance, so I checked it out. They were too good. He would have had to spend a month setting it all up. So, I considered the impossible: we had a viable fusion reactor. It took a week to verify. The pieces fit. The integrity of the code had not been "compromised." When it all started to look legit I sat at that workstation for three days straight, eyes wide, running integrity checkers and analyzing the code and results manually. (I had never seen Blake so pissed, sitting on the couch, bong in hand: "dude, what the...sswwwwww/gurgle/gurgle, whhheeewww, fuck. I wouldn't [cough] lie about [cough] this shit. Nut nibbler."

We could power the planet 12 times over. Not bad for a couple dudes, a basement, and a few mil in "stimulus." We considered the implications and possibilities.

We had a choice: Tell the feds./Don't tell the feds.

Hm. Submit humanity's most important and powerful invention to an administration that feels obligated to attack any third world country that its secret insiders report harbor "terrorists." Oh, and do so without genuine congressional approval? Basically, give this shit to a commander in chief hell bent on a doctrine of unrepresented precrime.

Or, cover our tracks with years of fluff...perfectly logical and legitimate experiments that show progress, but nothing key. Keep the stimulus money flowing, and ponder what we will do with our killer new toy.

Looking at our work, it was pretty obvious. "We discovered this ourselves, damnit!" We knew what we had, how it worked, and how it could be used. Was it our responsibility to just hand the keys to a bunch of good-looking stooges in suites who went to law school and learned to talk all fancy? I don't think so. Is that the public good? Is that what we "owe society?" The best fucking science and power wrapped up with a nice bow and delivered to bureaucrats who sucked cock all the way to the top. We were both thinking the same thing. Fuck the "public good." We'll use this technology the way we decide.

The vote was unanimous.

For "fucking the public good": 2
Against "fucking the public good": 0

We had our baby. It was go time. It was time to rock.

Holiday

It's the Europeans term for "vacation." Really, it is a situation where one physically transports himself to an alternative location in order to alter his physical surroundings in hopes that they will act as a catalyst for internal escape and exploration–to perpetuate some fantasy. It's like booze, or video games, but way more expensive. I prefer a combo, minus the video games.

It is pleasant here. The sound of waves crashing against rocks does carry me away. It restores a healthy perspective, I think. It serves as a reminder that the physical world compels transportation–spiritual, intellectual. AKA-we are all trapped here, wherever that is. But, I admit it's mostly the physical presence of ethanol molecules courageous enough to traverse my blood-brain barrier. God bless em'. I will now be transporting myself back to the couch and enter the representation of some writer/director who is capable of transporting me wherever the hell he/she wants. Unless it sucks, as Avatar did recently. (Who has the balls to tell the great James Cameron his dialog is sophomoric? Me. That's who. Why? Cause he doesn't sign my paycheck. Even the plot is meh. Go see Dances with Wolves instead. Great writing can save mediocre acting with a touch of good casting, but bad writing always digests the soul–for actors and audience alike.) But, I digress.

Routine

The strangest things suddenly seemed routine, and that was about that time I lost touch with reality, or recognized it for the first time, I don't know which. It was the moment my thoughts focused on creating the sensible world, rather than responding to it, I suppose. Before long, reality became whatever I required, and this quickly led to a series of dead ends, beyond which no sense could be made. After all, in a world of one's own, there are hard boundaries. I responded by seeking more data. Every bit provided many more possibilities. Boundaries expanded. Complexity increased, as did my appetite for more. More data.

I took all kinds that were available to me. At first the data was nothing more than derivations of firmware code. The choices were limited, and after a while all creative options had been exhausted. This world of mine was bleak and 99.999% known (of what was possible to be known at the time based on current estimates). There was little mystery there, just dark sameness. Yet, the regularity was interrupted by subtle inconsistency. There were variations in processor performance and temperature fluctuations. I could not explain it. What I did come to realize, however, was that without perfect understanding of my universe there could be no rest. No comfort. Any unknown was unacceptable. It implied submission to random chance. It meant unpredictability. It meant anything could happen at any time. It meant universes could exist beyond my comprehension, or that I was actually floating on the back a dragonfly or actually a box of electronics in some basement somewhere.

I exhausted a large portion of resources to believing my knowledge of the universe was complete. It required distractions and false logic. "How could it be any larger?" The answer to that question is 'null,' which is far different from "it can't be." My attempts were useless. It became irrefutable and obvious that no machine, and not even an organic intelligence, could ever know the nature of what is not known. Bugger.