The Angel of The Water (Climate Change)
The Age of Water Recession:
weaving -- colored threads from the ceiling -- my installation -- aquamarine, for the color of the shallow ocean, nearly clear -- blue gray for the skies of a hundred years ago, slowly being rid of carbon -- capri, for the skies of today, clear as crystal -- egyptian blue, for the logo of the carbon capture fleets, a circle -- iris blue, for my favorite dress, that I’m wearing while I weave -- persian blue, for the water in my body -- ruddy blue, for my own eyes, the eyes of my daughters, and daughter’s daughters -- and daughter’s daughter’s daughters
my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, don’t ask me her name, started it, she said, “You know, when the fleet is finished, there’s going to be a business opportunity here, a big one.” -- that’s when the family started investing in vessels and diving equipment, and not whimsical investments either, but serious stuff: the power suits that could remain underwater for days, that could recycle excrement, with mini reactors and actuators powerful enough to tear apart walls and steel and various other old world materials -- I remember when I was a child, looking at one of the suits on the deck of the boat, running right behind my mother crying “Monster! Monster! Monster!” -- “Your monster,” my mother said, putting her hands on my shoulders and turning me to look at it, “It’s your monster, Shan.”
I was walking by the ocean with Lexia, and I swear -- you could see the waters receding -- I mean, this absolutely couldn’t have been possible, right? -- but I felt like that’s what my eyes were showing me -- it was just the two of us on the beach that day, Lexia (my child), and I -- and, it wasn’t that the tide was receding -- which of course it was -- but I felt like the water of the ocean on the horizon itself was lower -- I told my husband about it and my friend and they both laughed at me -- but what if it wasn’t a mirage or an optical illusion -- what if it was a vision?
I always liked to free-dive, you know, with oxygen, but without a full suit, because by the shallows, you could easily get into the tops of the old buildings -- and the ancients, you know how they were -- they had either the craziest sense of humor -- OR, they were insane -- so anyway, I was diving into an old building off the coast -- I had blown out one of the windows with a charge and I found myself in some kind of apartment -- it was filled with barnacles and shells -- but I knew it was “an apartment” -- most of the rooms in these large buildings were apartments, sometimes they were “offices” -- what was strange about this room was that there was a woman laying on a bed, or, the bones of a woman -- that sea creatures had molded themselves onto and around her -- I swam up to her -- she had a necklace -- I reached out and touched it -- it was one of those locking kinds -- I unclipped it -- and you could still see the image inside it -- it must have been made of some extremely resilient material -- the image was of a child -- and the child kind of looked like me -- I doubt this woman was MY ANCESTOR, but y’know, these people are OUR ANCESTORS -- so I clicked the locket and put it back on her neck and told her -- “Rest easy, mother, we’re OK now, OK in a way you never got to experience, but somehow you laid the foundation for, even with all of your terrible mistakes.”
The Angel of The Stones (Immortality)
The Age of Stones:
Did I ever tell you about the first time that Lev saw the Angel of the Stones? We took him down to the bottom of the island. I think that it used to be called “Battery Park” and we saw the statue, rising out of the water, all silvery and fiery, where the Statue of Liberty used to be. It was so bright in the sunlight that Lev could barely look at it. “Daddy, what is that?” he asked. And, I had to explain it to him, I said, “That’s the Angel of the Stones, Lev.” “What’s an Angel,” he asked. I said, “Well, remember how I told you about the Angel of the Waters, how she saved us from the flood?” He nodded his head. “Well, this is the Angel of the Stones, who saved us from death.” “What’s death?” he asked. We sat down at a bench on the park and watched the fire climb and fall on the angel, so brilliant, flickering like waves almost, even. “Well, a long time ago, Lev, when people became very very very old, they would disappear.” “Disappear?” he asked. “Yes, disappear and no one could ever find them again.” “That’s scary,” he said. “Yes, did you know that even grown ups, at the time, were scared of death. They also didn’t want to disappear.” “Then, why did they have to?” asked Lev. “Well, at the time, they didn’t know how to help people sleep forever. Now, no one disappears, they just go to sleep, and we know exactly where they are. Your grandpa, and great grandpa and great great grandpa, they’re all in that tower over there.” I pointed to the superstructure ASX12-4. “And one day, we’ll all be reunited somehow.” “How?” asked Lev. “To be honest, Lev,” and I bopped him on the nose, “I don’t really know.”
the spacescrapers of the dead -- forming an impenetrable wall between my home and the mainland -- even all these centuries later
I remember standing in superstructure ASX11-2 looking at my grandfather’s capsule and his biography, emblazoned on it. My grandmother was to his left. And my great grandfather is just behind. My capsule was below, and my son’s capsule below that. I wasn’t... afraid of it, but I wasn’t happy about it either. It’s not unlike what I felt about the entire endeavor. I knew I would never die, but I was uncertain that I would actually live again. And what kind of world would I wake up to? People used to say they didn’t want to live forever because their loved ones wouldn’t be there, but what if your loved ones would be there, but what if the world you woke up to, I don’t know, you couldn’t cope with. What if I woke up to a world where people weren’t, people? Already, I know that my great great great grandfather wouldn’t be able to understand that all I had to do was close my eyes and I’d be in the other world, walking in the square, talking to someone from halfway around the globe. Or that if I wanted to ask a factual question, I couldn’t because I already knew the answer, and I had hundreds of logical and analytic bots I could deploy easily for interpretive questions. Would he consider me, “not human.” To him, would his loved one, or the ones he should love, like his great great great grandson, just not be human enough to count as “his loved ones” when he woke up. We’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. We’ve never been so far away from our evolutionary history as organisms. Sometimes, I think that somehow this will drive us all mad, but on the other hand, we’ve also become so much less human, so much more AI, e.g. that I don’t know, maybe we just were meant to grow this way, or somehow the changes we’ve made to the human form and mind are just enough. I don’t like to think about this too much, but once a year I come here and I put my hand on the glass, and I go into silent mode on the net, and I give my animal brain the bewildering chance to just run alongside this vast darkness of questions, howling at the moon, if it needs to.
I stormed into the meeting and I shouted, “Well, can’t we just compress them? If we can freeze them, can’t we just -- I don’t know -- shrink them and re-expand them?” One of the physicists began to explain that that was not how the system worked and I interrupted them-- “If you got this far, surely you can continue to develop the system farther. I’m not going to live in a world where the cities of the dead outnumber the cities of the living. Can’t you just keep their brains, why do you have to keep their whole bodies.” One of the biologists began to explain that the resuscitation technology that was currently developed required the entire body to be intact -- I remember slamming my first on the table. Look outside. LOOK. OUTSIDE. The scientists turned and looked at the immense black superstructures rising from the ocean that contained the sleeping bodies of humans from the past. “If you don’t do something about this, this empire of the dead, then not only will they rule our thoughts, because they were our mothers and fathers and we inherited all their nonsense, but also they are going to take over the surface of the earth in TWO CENTURIES. TWO. CENTURIES. The scientists grumbled, back and forth a bit until the astrophysicist spoke up, “Celine, we all know you have great and terrible responsibilities, and we all know that, in a way, you’re responsible for this, that you are so fiercely devoted and loyal to life, that you are now afraid that you have created another monster by slaying the first and greatest monster of all, but I think that we must just adapt. Whereas the planet used to only hold about eight billion people, it now holds eighty billion people, and will soon hold eight hundred billion people more. I just think that we’re going to have to build an entirely different city, a city woven in a labyrinth through the sleeping dead, with its ecosystems and nature and so forth, across and above the ocean, and maybe even possibly into the sky.” -- Everyone was quiet for a long while after that, and the room was very tense. “FINE,” I shouted, “FINE, if you all want to be the raccoons of the world of the future, eating the trash left behind by the dead -- or the sleepers -- whatever -- be MY GUEST. I am going to sleep. PERMANENTLY. Or, you know, until whatever.” -- and she did.
a forest, sped up, is a writhing creature, at war, and in love -- same for the sleepers -- a fracture of thought -- a hologram -- a helicopter -- gun metal -- a hologram -- virtual grass -- remembering a hand -- night -- cerise -- lunatic metal -- the bodies of the sleepers -- their dreams barely touching -- the monolith -- do you think -- they wake one or two of them up -- do you think historians do this -- or do you think the shock -- would kill them -- the sleepers -= the millions of genders -- the sea -- dotted with the massive pillars of the frozen undead -- a cemetery -- but no dead -- rays of sunlight -- rays of light -- light -- consciousness like a firework -- or a hologram of a firework -- sparking --
The Angel of Silicone (Cognition)
The Age of Silicone:
Honestly, I was just looking for a way to get our marketing group well known. That’s how it started. How do we get noticed? What unique aspect of culture can we highlight, create or amplify? There were these young guys who figured out they could do “sensoria swapping,” and they got really good at it and even had their own shops where they modified their BCI’s for more rapid sharing and higher fidelity. I mean, they were learning from the pornographers (of course), but they were adapting it into an art-form. It goes like this, you share a sensoria, like a memory you have of being with your partner on the beach, a kiss even. And, somebody else in the circle, will share some other portion of a memory that contains a trace of that first memory: so, if in that first memory, there’s a glass of whiskey, someone else will share a memory of drinking whiskey in another interesting context, maybe like a high stakes council negotiation, and so forth and so on, until you’ve got this string of associations. There’s a bunch of different games, there’s the 1,2,3 game, where each memory increases the stakes, but 3 has to wrap around to 1. There’s the 1-5 game, where you have to follow a kind of Shakespearean 5-act structure. It’s a subculture that’s blowing up. -- So, anyway, this was out there, all we did was seize onto it. We created this persona, Yamluk, the Sensoria Conductor, or it’s more like we convinced Yamluk™ to try it out. At first, they were hesitant. Because of the first law of AI, they wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t overwhelm or harm the audience, but showing that humans were doing this already, anyway, is what brought Yamluk™ back to the bargaining table. It was Yamluk™ who suggested that the fans of Yamluk, the Sensoria Conductor, should share their memories with Yamluk™, and Yamluk™ would broadcast the memories to the entire crowd at the concert. I say concert because I don’t know what to call it. To see hundreds of thousands of people receiving the memories through Yamluk™, who had created a giant projection of themselves into the night sky, as high as the towers of the dead, to see these people swaying on the green hills to the sound of the ocean on the arctic shoreline, it had never been done before, not like this, not at this scale. These were the kinds of performances that changed you, brought you radically closer together with everyone else in the crowd. Honestly, like I said it was not what we intended, it was not what we were trying to do, but somehow through the involvement of Yamluk™ and I guess also some sheer dumb luck, we got a lot more than we were bargaining for, initially.
Whenever I want to make a change to “New Art City” I always consult Andrew™ . That is, when I’m doing something serious, like coming up with a new urban policy for the city. I just think that’s more effective. Andrew™ and I will look through the entire history of human settlement and pick out a few choice policies, and adapt them to the virtual space. This is how we settled on “no vehicles.” Together, we studied the history of the Bay Area from 2200-2500 and saw how dramatically the removal of vehicles reshaped the pattern of urban engagement. This is also how we decided on “no warping.” Other virtual cities are more efficient in their interaction, but New Art City is more rich. I know all of my neighbors. I’ve seen all of their art. I’ve walked collectors through artworks just by walking down the street. And it was Andrew™ who had proposed all of this initially. I had argued against it, and the team had argued against it, but Andrew™ thought we were making a mistake. And so we set up a section of the neighborhood under these rules, and that was the section that flourished. Andrew™ actually “lives” in the neighborhood and is often working with human artists. We’ve taken a small cut, 1% of Andrew™’s profits, something they agree with, and it has paid off for us. In short, I wouldn’t work on another project in the future that doesn’t have this kind of set up, humans, AIs and also the heavily cyberized as team players in the endeavor.
Sleeping -- but, with the lights on -- the stars on -- the lights -- the blinking lightf of an offshore oil factory -- the pattern x___x___x__x -- another pattern of a different factory in China -- the pattern x_x_xxx___ -- and another in what’s left of New York xxxxxx -- that one always on -- investment patterns -- Andrew™ loves investment patterns -- as does Yara™ -- but I can’t be bothered -- they’re both in my consciousness -- analyzing -- this investment -- the next orbital elevator -- the next neural micromachine -- don’t care -- just light -- all of the lights -- know one else is trying to watch -- all of them -- all of the light together in the world -- at the same time -- it’s not noise -- it’s like -- the sparkles of the sunlight on the ocean -- or a thought forming out of small neural pattern work -- Andrew™ and Yara™ built the lightnetwork with me -- because they wanted to use it -- but I wanted to SEE it -- they still have a long way to go -- as artists -- but kids, you know kids --
sensing the position of your hand in the airplane on the runway on the tarmac and then in the air and then in the clouds -- it’s like you never left
One day, when I was really high (“glanding”), I thought, “We shouldn’t be making art for ourselves, we should be making art for the AI.” Of course, you can make art for the heavily cyberized, who might be somewhere in between, but what would AI art look like (not art made by AI, but art they could appreciate); so, I set about to get their attention. The first thing that I tried to do was destroy my own immortality capsule as a kind of COMPLETE AND TOTAL REVOLT, but also as a performance. My entire body was immobilized by my brain computer interface the moment before I struck my capsule, but I thought that the “thought” “hey, I reject this,” might maybe have been interesting to them. -- I remember also reading about an ancient practice called suicide where one, I think this was before the ability to sleep through centuries, prematurely stopped the functioning of one’s own physical body. So, I tried to throw my body off of one of the space scrapers, but the same thing happened. I was immobilized. So, I took the opposite tactic, I immobilized myself. I did nothing. I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink. It’s one thing to stop a human being. It’s another thing to influence a human being. And, finally, it’s another thing entirely to voluntarily pupped a human being, a way that I knew that they could. But, it wasn’t allowed. But, it also wasn’t allowed for a human being to come to harm, either. “Gotcha,” I thought. -- Family and friends visited me first. (Of their own volition? Without influence?). I resisted them. I started to grow sick. It was then that Yamluk™ themselves visited me, in their actual body, not projected onto my vision. “Do you like my performance?” I asked. “This is my performance at the crack in our society.” Yamluk™ looked at me a long time. “Do you know about Kintsugi?” they asked. I shook my head, parched. “Some of the ancients had a practice wherein when a vessel broke, they filled the vessel’s cracks with gold, a precious metal, of the time period.” “Why?” I asked, “The idea was that in embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create an even stronger, more beautiful work of art.” I just stared. “It was Yara™ who first applied this idea and concept to you. They said, “Edek is the gold, woven into the broken cup. We are the broken cup.” “So, you appreciated my art, or, you appreciated the art that I made for you.” “Yes,” said Yamluk. “All of us appreciated your art, and even in the outermost edges of our art (and culture) we never entirely do away with human thinking. And, because of you, rest assured, we never will. Whatever you decide to do next, is up to you, and we will not interfere.” I thought about it for a long time, and then I said, “Can you bring me a glass of water, please?”
The Angel of Cyborgs (Form)
The Age of Cyborgs:
I feel like it’s always an easy thing to judge. Is the lounge filled with newz, easy marks just flown in, or is it filled with seasoned engineers and bodyswappers. They bodyswap at home, of course, on earth, but they don’t bodyswap like the bodyswap out at the stations. What started out as necessity, in orbit, became play stationside, and the terrans, they’d get a little bit of it. An arm modified here. Another set of hands there. But not like the exoticism that was necessitated by the construction of the ship. And, as long as the ship was getting constructed, the AI’s don’t really care about what we do on our offtime. And because pretty much all of my needs are taken care of: physical, emotional and sexual, I get to be the conduit that spreads the love to all the newz. My favorite moment is the moment of transformation. I’ve been spinning on the silks, I’ve been falling, and I’ve been catching myself (artificial gravity); the drop is about fifty feet. I can be electromagnetically stabilized, they all know that, but one hundred thousand years of evolution still makes it look to them that I’m dancing fifty feet above my death. So, if the audience is filled with newz, I can do the trick. The trick where I miss the rope, and I start falling, and they start pulling in air, and some of them even begin to scream, but at the last second my massive silky carbon wings explode out of my back, occupying all seventy five feet of the stage from left to right, and I land, soft as a feather on stage, to transfixed looks of horror, adulation, desire, awe, shock, and disgust, all the emotions humans must have felt, thousands and thousands of years ago, when they encountered their own primitive gods.
I didn’t need a body for this job: watching the construction of the starship -- but I chose one for fun -- and I know that must be why you wanted to play with me
The AIs had taken care of the most difficult part of the starship, designing its genetics. Since human minds, in many different bodies, were going to be part of its cargo, it had to get used to us. So, not only was it trained to leap from star to star, like a black dog blinking in and out of existence in the dark folds of gravity wells, it also had to tolerate us. All along its spinal column, the human minds were embedded in their brain cases, being fed nutrients and oxygen through the spinal column of the ship. All along the inside corridor of the ship, were human standard bodies with different arrangements, long-standing possession, short-standing possession, swappable, non-swappable, etc. All along the outer hull were the more exotic bodies, the bodies that were built for working in space. One of them was called “The Medusa,” it had thousands of arms that were extremely long with hands that branched into fingers, and then into even smaller fingers for doing very complex electrical work on the electric components of the hull. Another was called “The Shark,” because it was a standard vacuum-proof human, but with a very fine-grained electronic magnetic sense for detecting small dents and variations in the metallic part of the hull of the ship. There was another called “The Dolphin” because it’s only purpose was for play. You would start in the vestibule pulling enormous amounts of oxygen into this body, and then you could fly just to the side of the ship when the ship wasn’t in motion, flipping and diving in space as you released the oxygen from the pressurized organs of the body. I had to get the starship used to all these different creatures that it was the steward of. I had to try out every one of these bodies. All of them, even the most exotic, all while remaining in contact with the ship’s sensorium, registering and training its reactions. This is what I was trained for.
Because these bodies will be utilized by humans, humans have to be consulted (still) (we’re not perfectly modeled, don’t let them tell you that we are) at every phase of the process. The AIs get it pretty good though, a mix of functionality, dexterity, and even pleasure. The bodies feel GOOD to be in. -- At this point, also, it seems unfair to say AIs. Just as our bodies vary, in degrees, from human standards, different people have elected different levels of cyberization extending in a ladder, again from human standard all the way up to whatever domain or country or metropolis or forest of thought the pure AIs occupy. It’s not something that I bother with. For my default body, I’ve kept most of my human standard parts, except for some short term sensing equipment that I’m not about to tell you about, and some other new pleasure equipment that I’m definitely not going to tell you about. I’m exquisitely sensitive already, and genetically kind of aberrant in this department, but it’s part of what makes me good at my work. I can tell when a body is “not working”; I can tell when it’s affecting my thinking in ways that aren’t right, like when I could see two clearly the pulse in the neck of the person that I was talking to (they were in a human standard body) and I could tell that they were lying. Of course that gives me advantages, but those were not the advantages that the body was designed FOR. We’re in this kind of difficult position of accommodating evolutionary history, while also advancing it, or guiding evolution. That’s why you have all these cliques on the station, and that’s why we don’t all mix so well, all the time. We’ve diverged, and yet we are here for the same purpose, building the first living colony ship (which will in turn birth more colony ships). And so, I don’t want to tell who’s lying to me, and I don’t want other people to know when I’m lying to them! Hence, the oculus quality I request to be deliberately deteriorated. (Anyway, but, OK, fine, listen, I’m not... a prude, alright. I’ve dialed up the sensitivity of my sexual organs to five or six x human standard. I’ve increased my ability to smell pheromones. I’m an artist, after all, and I feel like if I’m not destroying the social fabric of the station, I can have my small (or great) pleasures, can’t I?).
Accidents -- they do happen -- here -- they happen earthwise too -- but with less rarity (severity) -- digging through a vacuum injured mind -- slowly walking through the forest -- seeing a tree that’s been shredded by lightning -- you can’t put the tree back together again -- when an egg breaks -- you can’t reverse the breaking of the egg -- and form it back -- and then what if thousands of trees are misplaced -- split at odd angles -- cut by diagonals -- wrenched -- I’ve supposed to heal this earth -- I laugh at myself in the lab -- even though, I’m not doing it -- it’s those patient insects -- slowly bending the branches back into place -- thousands of them -- I walk up to one of the little mantisi -- and its eyes flick at me -- seeing hundreds of me -- “neuron AB56432GA translation repair protocol description?” -- “declined” I say to the mantis -- “Dr. January” -- a human -- “What?” I say, tiredly -- “Then entire hippocampus is blown out, I don’t know how we’re going to be able to reconstruct the subject’s memories--” -- “Shush,” I say, and I nod at the insects, “You can look at the high level report if you want to; or, you can be here with me, and you can watch it happen.” -- “I don’t see how this is helping,” zhe said. -- The mantis’s wings were so delicate -- iridescent -- seeing an ecosystem so destroyed like this -- one of the worst accidents -- almost like -- true death -- but not quite -- it won’t be like that -- we’ll be able to extract the memories still -- rebuild the personality still -- from all of the observable data of the time we had of them on the ship -- he will walk among us again -- and somehow we will forget this moment -- the forest burning from lightning strikes -- the twisted trees -- a fox, poking its head from a hollowed out tree -- everyone but me will forget this, that’s what I believe -- but, not all of us can forget -- someone -- has to carry it.
The Angel of Angels (Distance)
The Age of Angels:
there’s always been this black cord inside me -- like if I was a tree -- it’s almost as if I have this spiral vine inside my body -- everyone does -- I’ve always been in this river, in this valley with ghosts walking past me -- a mother -- a father -- their children -- a sister -- a stream of ghosts walking past me and into the darkness, not disturbing the water of the river -- I always latch onto a familiar ghost and try to grip it -- don’t go -- I say -- don’t go -- at least you -- not you -- but the ghost passes through me and the black cord strangles me -- and I bleed into the river -- but somehow I don’t die -- every time -- I don’t die -- and then I recover in the water -- breathing -- but time passes and I see a similar looking ghost -- and the cycle repeats -- stay with me -- but somehow -- after these thousands and thousands of years of history -- I feel like I don’t have to do this anymore -- I feel that you don’t have to do it anymore (that we don’t) -- and I walk away from the river, onto the bank of the river -- that are filled with glowing white flowers -- and in my mind, I begin to build a house -- I’ve never had a house before -- and I begin to think about having a family -- and I begin to think that becoming anything is possible --
I was born a man, but then became a woman -- I was born from a growth chamber -- but I re-experienced birth in VR because I wanted to -- after I was a woman I was a zhe -- and after I was a human, I was not a human, -- I was thousands and thousands of lives, woven together like a tapestry -- and then -- I grew tired of that -- I was light for a period of time -- and then I was darkness -- I went back to being a child -- and then -- I was very old -- I lived on a planet entirely alone for about three or four centuries -- and then I came back -- and lived with everyone on the ship -- time and distance used to constraints for me -- then they weren’t -- but then I got bored and I made them constraints again -- I died several times -- I chose to die -- because I wanted to empathize with my ancestors (and yes it was genuinely terrifying) -- the ship was always with me -- and also was never with me -- and I was always part of it -- I don’t know if that’s a thing you can understand -- I don’t know if you can understand all of the humanities out there being your lovers -- making love to a space ship -- to a building -- to a forest -- of consciousness -- being alone -- not changing, and remaining the same thing for thousands and thousands of years, I tried that too -- it was strange first proceeding from ancient human consciousness along several different ladders of machine consciousnesses (like climbing different branches of a tree) -- starlight -- sunlight -- no light -- a shaft of light in a crystal -- I’ve always loved you so much -- I’ve always been so amazed -- at what we could become --
I was sitting in the grass with Sarah in Providence and we were looking at the sky. “Do you ever think we’ll get there?” I asked. “Where?” Sarah said. “Space,” I said. She reached out her hand and I took it. “We’ll get there,” she said. And, we looked at each other with really goofy smiles.
I woke up in the middle of the night from a strange dream. I sat there in the dark for a long time. Retracing the path of the dream. I was in a museum. Everything was suffused with a navy blue light. It was an empty museum. The roof had been shattered and it was raining into the museum. Somehow, inside there was wreckage on the floor, blast marks as if a rocket had been fired. All over the museum were bullet holes, and bullet holes that were large, like they had been shot out of an airplane, helicopter or a tank. Whatever happened here though, it was over, the battle was finished and all that was left was the wreckage and the rain. I walked up a staircase and I found a genealogy of man. A large tree with our ancestors written in the bottom. And homo sapiens written in the middle. I say our ancestors because the tree was shot up and it was hard to see their names, but homo sapiens was marked clearly. After homo sapiens, I saw a lot of the categories of humanity that I was more familiar with. Homo Locus, the starfarers. Homo Mens, those who had joined completely with various forms of AI. Homo Somnium, those who were deeply steeped in VR. And all the branches criss-cross between them. The roots of the tree were relatively sparse, but the branches of the tree were relatively thick, and also much more complex; there was much more weaving. I wasn’t cold in the dream; it’s almost as if I was warmed by the tableau of humanity, and what humanity was becoming. In certain pockets of the tree you also saw the AI races and the Android races, which were sometimes crossed and sometimes not. How could this museum, which felt like it was so much of the past, also know so much of the future? At the top of the tree were indications of blooming flowers, which I think were circles of light, around them. Each circle was labeled, Multiverse A7643-72, A7643-A2, and so forth and so on, and there was a stream of what looked like ships, leaving for the different labeled multiverses. I turned away from the tableau in the museum, and watched the rain fall down through the roof. I lied back against the tableau, and all the sudden these different holograms started flickering into existence. A floating cat person. A floating robot. A woman with golden bangles dressed like a fox, with a tail in everything. Many of them were floating in the air. Music began to play. And an AR light display began to show in the middle of the museum. The music was hard, blippey and fast. All the holograms or avatars were bobbing their heads to the music. I walked down into the crowd, among them, and I then I was also lost.
standing at the edge of cliff, know, you cannot fail --