future me > Higgs field > Gao, now

Someone read my mind, wrote down the ideas, and showed them on screen to me. I was totally absorbed that I didn’t even think of ghost for dread.

‘Would it be easier for you when regarding it as something come from the future?’

That’s the first phrase of this piece of text. It reminded me of something...

‘Revisit. Cool, Gao, now. I know you’re there watching this piece of text.’

They are my thoughts... I can write like this? When do I have this super mental power to tele-write on the screen of my laptop?

‘No, you’re not tele-writing. I am, I send this to you real-time, well, nearly real-time. The path between you and me is now open and through, therefore we can talk.’

I gazed at the laptop. Am I dreaming? No, it can’t be. I’m conscious. Can you answer this question from me? Woodie bludie five plus one.

‘Six, six, voo-e doee.’

Do I know you?

‘Yes. Frankly, I know you more. I am the future you.’

......Me? In the future? I could go there, or I am old enough to be there?

‘Old enough.’

How old?

‘Say, more than two hundred years of age.’

I can live that long?

‘Yes, everyone can, if they want to.’

That would be... the Twenty-third century, right?

‘Right.’

You, call back to Twenty-first century?

‘Yeeup.’

What for?

‘Bored, I guess. Tracing back time is always fun.’

Yeah, boredom can make people do strange things.

‘Lu visited you?’

Suddenly I was stunned. You really found him.

‘You believe it just now? I thought you may be different. You should believe him.’

You talk like you don’t know me, that we’re two persons.

‘Two entities, yes. If we haven’t connected, we are the same. I know you, and you guess me. But now, we are both existing because we are in two different worlds.’

You come for me? Wouldn’t it violate some kind of causal relationship in the cosmo?

‘Energy. It is infinite and powerful. Says it’s omnipotent. Higgs field, you should know more closely than me.’

Indians can't see Columbus's ship

‘What about cloud computing?’

‘Any grouping, computing, networking can resemble cloud. Collectively.’

‘Who are you? You again?’

He did not answer, but began to cite, ‘Upon this moment, the red or white? Life or reminiscence, shalt flee thee to eternity. What’s in your lifetime seems total, the whole, is now a piece...’

I sort of heard that the last word was ‘behold’, and then the voice and image gone.

What was that, the latest episode of the strange events thread? I clicked at the site link, but there was ‘error 404’. Who could evade a link, hyperlink that works forever in the Web, probably except the little 404. Then I recall, from 4 plus 4, once 8 was my lucky number, a number for ambiguity, discrepancy, variance.

Was I mistaken... that's why I bumped into all these queer occurrences?

Somewhere a 404 message was created and sent to me.

Yes, I met strange things. Do I believe it? Do I want to believe it?

Then I remember someone’s words: ”even if aliens have come, we couldn’t have possibly recognized them”. You don’t know what you are looking at if you haven’t ever thought of it and have the faintest idea. Columbus’s ship. Native Indians. Take the book on my table as an example. If somehow a book is not in this form, how can I recognize this is a book. The vacant space in a drizzle resembles a flower, carved by air. How can I grasp it? It breaks before tangible. The best masterpiece drawn in water by someone, soon disappears, leaving only watermark. It exists for just one second. May be two. What’s the use of thinking this...

A page came into my laptop. Firewall was nothing. I read the already open text. After reading it, I pondered for a while before knowing it's special. It’s not only special, it’s what I thought for my fiction. Fictitious. Now it’s on screen.

In Chinese language.

I stood up, stepped aback.

fishdexing: index like fish

I downloaded essay from the site because its lines caught me. It said one way to smart up, or smarting the web is to have tons of dead fishes pouring into it; called ‘fishdexing’. If there are enough stupid things, it will grow smart itself.

How come?

Chaos theory.

Because those are not real fishes, they are ideas, innovative constructs. Have there been at any time known in history that ideas are just like floating in the air, in the ocean, visually for you to grasp, to interpret in your own specific self brain? Not on books the hard medium anymore ! There would be so many vehicles that significations are infinite. The more we flush ideas down, the sooner we get great compositions otherwise wouldn’t have dreamt of.

When I saw it, the so-called web semantics seems like history, mere line-by-line coding to make a mechanical unit move. It becomes clear that there is no need to make semantic rules to index the web, just let people tag or index as be. They think they are cool in tagging, but it’s just a historical chalking, recollecting lexicon. The capability of relating the disorder or unordered to create novel significations is the real informatics at work.

A larger brain. A greater collective consciousness, tangible.

I know this is good stuff as soon as I saw it. I wonder what this site was, so I paused to find out how I was redirected to this. Soon I saw some strange images which resembled ultra-sound reflection. A figure, maybe.

'Listen to me.' It starts to broadcast to me.

Now? Suddenly I am aware I am not recalling past memory.

'Thou shalt not temptst thy lord.'

What, are you talking to me? Is this the site of the article?

'You think this is a joke again? No, pay attention. The so-called tag cloud at your times is a suggestion of foam metaphor such as that at the quantum level.'

Krakk & victim

The Beijing Olympic Games 2008 is only a month away. I had not heard of any new mascot coming up in the news or market. Could Lu make it on time?

Probably not. Unless he had found the beads... No, not the beads. How can any beads save China rural robotics industry? Gradually I became aware that the whole incident of Lu’s visit was an accident. A joke by accident. A happenstance.

Instead of beads, there was news that terrorists would strike before and during the Games. The military police and secret agents were taking precautions to prevent it. So that was why I got the midnight phone call, I guess. But I hadn't do anything... except the essay. Yes, an essay was enough to run up the expenditure on a suspect. Public security was a sufficient excuse.

The essay came from one of the batches of downloads. You see, owing to the needs of my job, I always need to download articles from the internet. Of course I needed to keep track of the sources. But sometimes the quantity was so big that I was lost in the texting cloud.

I always try to give tags to the source sites, but then they had no structure. Before long I was myself in tag clouds. No kidding. I used special terms like ‘me’, ‘木仔仔’, and ‘hade’ -- the final one came to mean ‘had e’ where ‘e’ could be everything from email to ‘electromise/r’.

Some tags I couldn’t even remember. I thought I can, but not.

Then one of these essays was linked to some unknown but authority source in a certain circle. This dramatis personae with the codename Krakk came to attack me; at worst it could become a powerful cracker, evil at times and demonic for most of the times, turning my webpage into a melting email image, asked why I intruded upon his/her territory. I did not know what I had done to irritate this fellow. Finally I apologized for something I might have done.

Then I learned that it was a joke. I was victimized, being a jokee. I was angry and turned the certain essay in to the police. From then on the essay became a medium in pulling the trigger among the joker/ devil, police and me.

The midnight call was probably the latest alert.

all the strange things before earthquake

I woke up in the morning with a headache. I took some pills and a day off. After breakfast I thought I could do something about my writing and the sequence of strange events. So I started to keep a close eye on my laptop.

Then related events came in.

Somewhere the animals were nervous, either running or, quite the opposite, remaining still. Birds flying at high speed. Dogs barking continuously at some invisible beings. Rooster got itself on the top of scrub. Tigers timid? And the flies as well as mosquitoes disappeared to nowhere, just like bees. Snake awoke in mid of hibernation, and was frozen to death in snow. Cats walked away and disappeared as usual, only for a longer time. But rats were intimidated, waiting to be caught. Fishes ashore.

There was strange noise from underground, with the sky appeared curious colors.

Yeah, one more thing to go before earthquake can be announced -- dry and hot weather.

But monitoring weather was hard for me. My headache came back. I took a nap, ending up with a sleep. When I woke up, I was conscious of something to be happened. I checked the news.

No? Maybe not yet. I waited.

Expectation engaged the threading, and I wanted it to grow powerful. I was waiting for my probable quantum psycho-supernormality to effectuate, making it happen, if ever I could do so.

It was until days later that earthquake stroke near where I was staying, New Zealand. It was nearly 6 by Richter magnitude. It could have caused a lot of damage, but the quake was a hundred kilometers deep down, in result nothing particular happened on earth surface.

Maybe there were some drastic reactions down there.

quantum psychology takes shape

x x x x

I woke up cold at midnight. A tiny light was flashing in my room. It was my notebook. I opened the lid and found a message come in. Just a glance before sleeping on.

A pair of small meteorites measuring less than a kilo in diameter were approaching Earth. Well, it was still more than a quarter of million kilos away. Scientists are observing them closely, just in case they might run off-track and hit us, then we are all doomed.

When would this probable doomsday news be broadcast to common folks? Did they worry about it may arouse the-end-of-the-world melancholia? Few days later, maybe.

And how?

Just as I was going to bed, the voice-over-IP was ringing. I seldom got calls at this time of the night.

‘Hello?’ I answered.

‘Don’t involve yourself with the underground anymore.’ A low and stern voice said.

‘I did? No, I haven’t got involved...’

‘Listen, Lu is insane. And he has contact with terrorists.’

‘Who are you?’

‘You don’t need to know if you don’t know. Take my words.’ Then he hung up.

What a strange call. As I was lying on bed, Lu began to appear in my mind again. I began to relate some strange things happened these days. If the quantum psychology is right, that when you have threaded yourself into a line of correlated events from the mind, which is strong enough to merge into some kind of string, superstring, then you would live that line of history on. Judging from the things and events I recently encountered, I may have that quantum string happening to me.

Yes, I suspected so.

But mere suspicion was unable to convince myself. I had to see more. I am conscious that I am expecting something, and every morning when I wake up, I will consciously make my coming day.

Gaia again, this time as an underworld tribe... moving the tectonic plates?!

From the earthquakes happened so far this year, it reminded me that it was predicted a year of frequent earthquakes. From earthquake to chaos, it seemed the Greeks had it: Gaia, in Greek
mythology, was the daughter of Chaos.

I couldn’t help but plot that an underworld tribe bears the name Gaia. No, again it’s not my original idea. There were so many people who had used the name. This time, I used it for a tribe which has dealt with the crustal chaos for so long that they can... move the tectonic plates?

Wow, if they can, then what gigantic, immense power they have !

What about the theoretical plausibility? ...Well, fluid dynamics. The lava, the liquid metal belongs to fluid. If water is powerful, then imagine lava at least a thousand times more powerful than water. The body of mantle drives the seven major and other small tectonic plates. Gaia can move them because... they live with the plates for millions of years and have developed related technology. Even if they can’t move them, they know well enough about the chaos of the plates -- just like watching a sphere of boiling water, that they can avoid the disastrous impact.

If the Gaia tribe messes with us, we are pissed. So, don’t mess with Gaia.

While Lu might not be searching for the beads anymore, I still was. I don’t know the causal relationship; it doesn’t matter whether the future me told Lu who in turn told me. I was thinking about the lotus beads, no ,lotus seeds. And my infant robot in relation to lotus.

I’m not a buddhist just as my kid sister is. But I always like lotus. It was my wish to use the very flora of spiritual ‘superterran’ to associate with a cold, metallic, mechanical robot. Extremes are brought together to contrast, to cross-flow the mind and the body.

The soul and the physical.

I was content in working with this dichotomy.

Papa is the mother, and mama is Papa ?

Where was Lu?

I tried to reach him by phone, but to no avail. He did leave an email account. I waited after sending a message written in Chinese to him. No, half day had passed but still no reply. He couldn’t access to his email in some rural landscape newly shaped by earthquake, I guessed.

The last resort was a postal address. Are there any people who still write a letter nowadays? As the final resort I wrote one.

Writing still worked. After a week or so I got a call from someone who claimed to be Lu’s family. She told me Lu once called home, but left no correspondence hint as to where to find me again. She said she would tell Lu what I said in my letter if he called home again.

From then on I rang up Lu’s family once in a while to find out what was going on with him. Sometimes it was answered, sometimes not. The same answer was that Lu was still searching. Yes, I could assume Lu heard of my advice. If he went on, it was his business. Gradually I forgot the man.

It was special about Maori god Ruaumoko among natural myths of volcano and earthquake. He is not an animal, but rather, a personified entity. I figured him to be one of the underworld population, a wanderer suffering from chronic, if not forever, nostalgia which was described as a loss of feeding from Papa, mother earth. His rage rebuked the terrestrial ever on.

What an interesting invert. The mother is called ‘papa’ which in many cultures means the father? And Maori gods are nearly all male. Papa is the mother and mama is papa. Where have all the other goddesses gone?

Presumably in other subterranean locales. Just thought of them as another tribe, another world. Underworld.

earthquake and myths

When I had time to do more research, the fact stunned me -- New Zealand has earthquake everyday !

Every year there are around 14000 quakes, 1.6 times hourly. Many are not to be felt. What would have occurred with this frequency? It has been going on for such a long time that it is possible a large quake would strike. Actually it is predicted to happen within fifty years.

I couldn’t escape from earthquake, could I?

Many races have mythology of earthquake, usually about an animal which causes it. Here, the Maori myth says Ruaumoko, the god of volcanoes and quakes, was at rage when his mother dropped him into subterran when she was bending down to breast-feed him. Rage becomes eruption and earthquake. What a pity.

Beads. Crystal, polished gems. Seeds.

Seek the seeds.

Is Lu really searching for those beads, by chance meeting a lotus or two? I realized what I had suggested to the poor man, a Herculean task. Along the cracks on earth, those forced out by immense tectonic force... I needed to call Lu so that he might want to stop searching. At least I have done something to make him rethink whether he should seek the beads in this way or not.

quake quake there, Sichuan, and quake quake here, NZ

‘I’d better hurry.’ Lu said and left a contact address.

I watched him leave, thinking of seeking the beads myself. But I should be busy; I was going to New Zealand. I would try to stay in touch with him. It helped my writing.
x x x x

I didn’t know New Zealand has earthquake. I thought it is safe. But no, there were quakes. The worst one ever recorded was the 1931, grading as 7.8 . And for volcanoes, the Auckland region is active.

Sichuan came to my mind. Quake quake there, quake quake here. A fantasy curled in my thought: what if the earthquakes are related to each other?

I checked and found that there are seven major tectonic plates on Earth. New Zealand seems caught in the subduction zone and spreading zone of the Pacific Plate and Australian Plate. The area affected is mainly South Island where I was staying.

Had anyone used seismological wave to transmit message? What if in a way the tectonic plates know about each other’s activities? Not just touch, but the information, culminated for millions of years and have already reached an equilibrium state so that when vibration gets rough, the others know.

But they were not humans nor creatures, even when... Then suddenly the underworld stroke me. Creature living under the crust, perhaps in the cracks or underground landscape such as a lake? They have to know about the quakes because it endangers their home, their lives, their all !

If the underworld was long enough, they should have the related technology about quakes. What a rich history that would be. They are seismologists everyone.

Yes, but that was only my imagination. The underworld.

The last thing I thought of was the beads Lu mentioned. They were from the underworld.

find the beads along the quake fault

Lu took it as a positive attitude and somehow a nod. ‘So, where are they?’

‘You just brought up the underworld. Have you found any clue?’

‘There was a place famous for beads. Should I go there?’

‘Is it along the fault torn open by the quake?’ I asked.

Lu mapped the geography in his mind before answering, ‘Sort of.’

‘Then go and ask about them, and pay attention to lotus.’

‘Lotus?’ Lu looked round and pointed at the pond, ‘like this one?’

‘Not every lotus pond is the place. You have to be alert.’

‘Okay, lotus with the fault.’ Then he asked, ‘Would I finish the doll before the Games?’

‘Well, even during the Games, the world knows of your achievement.’

‘Yeah,’ he smiled.

This rural man came for a confirmative message. Anyone told him one and he would be happy to go on his way. Well, perhaps not everyone, it’s only me. Why me? Am I looking for something like this rustic man does? An idea, and he came along. From his words I have borne an idea, maybe the best idea I ever have. In return I gave him hope... Or, have I done wrong in pretending to be the man he spoke of? If I aren’t, then I have a problem for what I did. But then I may be the man... provided the being were really the future me.

I am or I am not the being ?

infant robot by a lotus pond

‘Let me ask you a question.’ I paused for his silent acceptance before I continued, ‘If I am not the future being you mentioned, then I really don’t know what you’re talking about and where the beads are. What if you’re wrong about me?’

‘Then how can I ever find the beads? Without them my clay doll wouldn’t have come alive.’

‘Alive? The beads are so important?’ I asked, ‘but aren’t they just beads?’

‘They are great beads, seeds...’

‘Seeds?’ Then I realized I mistook the sound.

There was a small lotus pond in the far corner of the courtyard. I caught sight of an erect stem. I always wondered how could the flower still flourish in the night.

Lotus seeds. Suddenly I was inspired. An infant robot coming from the future, settling in a... a temple, waiting for something to happen or someone to come, and of course, with the seeds being the key to its survival, its being, its trans-temporal evolution... I was excited.

Lu studied me. 'Sir, you look different.'

I smiled, with the joy of working through the plot of my would-be fiction. I might just include the sixth mascot idea. But then I realized it was Lu’s idea, or that of the future being he mentioned. I couldn’t do plagiarism.

‘Are you now the secret being that visited me?’ Lu asked in a low voice.

‘...Maybe.’

consequence of being the future me

Lu seemed happy that I did not argued with him. ‘Can you show me some hints to find the beads?’

‘I don’t know...’ Then I was aware that I was expected to be the present form of the future being who visited Lu the other day.

He looked at me, trying to see if I was hiding something from him. Would he consider this a test by the future being? As time dragged by, Lu grew suspicious and a bit impatient.

‘But you’re a writer,’ He said.

‘A writer doesn’t necessarily know everything.’

‘The things a writer writes about always come true.’

‘Who said that, a writer?’

‘You!’ Lu was angered.

‘No...’ I again became conscious of my being the future being that visited Lu. I didn’t know whether this will be true but now I had to bear the consequence, if not responsibility.

There was a phase of silence.

rural miners make robot

I was speechless.

‘Aside mine, there’re other families.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Others living in the same mountain. You see, we run a mine of our own.’

My eyes grew wide. ‘Do you have someone who’ve learned mining science?’

‘No.’ Lu again shook his head. ‘Just dig. No need to learn mining.’ And before I answered, he added, ‘Don’t mind the mine.’

I should have known he was just one of the rural homemade miners. Family business. And instead of mining they now came to making robots. Chinese people couldn’t be that naive. Populism. It may hurt.

‘Yeah, maybe we are affected by past history, that we believe we can make steel from ore just by burning a big fire.’ Lu showed his wit of reflection.

‘Do you think it’s plausible?’

‘Possible?’ He nodded, ‘Only if you have faith.’

I tried to disagree but, just by looking at his face, I knew I could hurt this fellow by saying so. After all, he now took me as the future being that visited him. Then I resisted my own reaction.

native homemade robot

‘Quake has something to do with anything. We’re living on the crust. The underworld rules us all.’

‘Are you part of the underworld?’ I asked.

Lu was silent. His expression prompted me into thinking he was one of them.

We kept the silence for such a duration that when I tried to resume the dialogue, he quickly broke in, ‘I am on a journey to find the beads.’

‘Who make the robot then?’ I asked.

‘I have a family. They’re doing it.’

‘They know how to do it?’

‘Again, it’s not rocket science.’ Lu was cooled down a bit. ‘It’s native homemade robotics. ’

future me telling other people to find me?

‘Listen, I am a writer.’ I said. ‘I have ideas of someone coming back from the future, that’s not totally my plot. To tell the truth, what you’re saying about an infant robot is somewhat similar to an idea I have in mind these days, though I haven’t designed it to be the sixth mascot of this year’s Olympic Games.’

While I was intending to continue, Lu said quickly, ‘It’s okay. Maybe you should know, the being once said you’re closely related to it. Therefore I came for you...’

‘He knows me?’

Lu's eyes were wide open, and spoke in a made-believed tone, ‘Maybe it’s the future you.’

‘He looks like me?’

‘Not really. I can’t really figure out his face.’

‘What else did he tell you?’ I tried to convince him, ‘I mean, if I were him, then the queer logic of time travel allows me to ask about myself, right? ’

Lu smiled, ‘It makes sense. He told me to find some beads.’

‘Beads? Hand-made?’

‘Mmm, I don’ t know because I haven’t found them. They should be somewhere in the faults torn open by the quake.’

‘So the quake had something to do with it.’ I said.