Sankopa ate a packet of old earth biscuits . It pushed his metabolism off its rocker, tanked his health-line for a day, and yanked up his med-premium. His wife was furious. "They had choco-cream filling !!" he explained .. but it didn't look like she understood.

A Med.Cen agent vid-called him, and spoke for a few minutes, explaining the damage, and the procedure required. The nano-bot pill arrived by afternoon courier. He was back to normal in one day, and back to slashing veeds in his home office. Veeds were video feeds which were weeds. They needed to be cut down. Motion detectors in his home office captured his Katana slashes, and deleting the related veeds . His cardio targets were reached in an hour of work, and then he switched to slow tai chi movements for flexibility, veeding as he went ( the right hand front slice was the gesture recognised for delete).  His screen pinged with a red circle in the corner,  indicating incoming communication. It turned out to be a intimation from the CAPaBara.

The enquiry by the Cultural Artifact Preservation Bureau (CAPaBara to those who had to deal with it) was more detailed entailed involved, and equally more annoying. They made him visit their office in the far far distant bureau district, and made him sit at a table which had a polygraph and recording device sitting on it. and  went over his story.  Since all agent cams had  software which  recognised faces, and recorded skin colour , temperature,  and movement patterns ;   lie-detection was implicit in any agent interaction,  Correlated with the vast rivers of data captured from the unavoidable transit gates, the system  ensured morality, in a way.  The clunky polygraph and recording devices on the Bureau table were there only because the Bureau never updated all their tech at once, and had eventually realised that the idiosyncrasy kept the subject off-balance, and more open .

They wanted to know where he got the stuff, to begin with.

Dan had trouble in counting class because he had seven fingers on each hand. He wasn't a mutant, just an alien in Skybox72-7. Skybox72-7 was in Economic Sector 72,  which was in a section of the skyhumans were just one of the many forms. Still, Earth's galactic hegemony ensured that the alien  tag remained

"I'm a number ....  !!???!!" ,  I asked, underwhelmed ...

He adjusted his glasses, continuing to look at me straight...

yes. that's what I'm trying to say. anything that's infinite in nature, by definition contains everything. we humans have thought up numerical infinity, and now we have to face the implication ...

our food lay untouched on the table. a cafe sandwich, croissant , coffee .... rites of passage. noises of the cafe washed over us. beyond the cafe chairs, people moved about carrying books and baskets. The library was our regular place of meeting.

of course I felt like a number. age, employee number, date, time, lat, long, salary, bank balance of assets, number of kids,  friends, car registration .... you could put together and assign a number to all this , and some government and some marketing agencies would've done already, in aggregate. (I wondered what mine was. Half-expected some bureau form would show it) 

but this was not what Slobov was saying.  Slobov was a scientist. But with the madness of a mathematician  . His friends considered him an irrational number himself. He studied dark matter matter while sitting in research ships at the edge of the empire , ran experiments with strange apparatus, and sent reports to research central office in the Far Centre.

 if you view the dance 

holding a soul

you see the skies, stars, galaxies

if you view the dance

holding just a bit of mass, and charge,

you see orbitals, nuclei, atoms

if you view the dance

holding money

you see vaults, profits, economy

what are you holding ? 

what do you see ?

are you not seeing 

the dark space holding the seen ?

 

 problem with home is the laptop and internet makes it simultaneously home and office and gym and whatever, with clacking away on the laptop taking the equivalent of work in the mind

this delusion must go

references : 

toffler - death of distance, repackaging space

mcluhan - acceleration, linearisation 

 nothing beats the excitement of curling up with a michael crichton

(one of the good ones, not the weird assortment of the later ones, like next and micro)

sadly extinct this fun, cos I've read all the good ones

and can never curl up anymore

cause since 2020, 

i just can't afford to drop

tomorrow 

from my thoughts

 To oppose something is to maintain it

says, Ursula Leguinn

dunno which book this is from

the Tao (addiss-lombardo-watson) also says 

to "weaken, first strengthen"

 the infinitely large distances that the 'soul' travels for eons before rebirth

are not distances and time, but the degree of difference between different branches of a probability tree

moving over to a sibling branch is nigh impossible, you have to go back to the start

when all branches collapse, there is no path, then this is called 'self-realization'

an infinitely large cloud of water vapour

floating around, some parts of the sky cold

causing it to water then ice itself

and through the ice it cannot see through

and believes it has seen a-nother

 sacrifice is a part of ancient religion

handing over the best of your produce

to your eternal enemies - 

first is time-decay and/or irrelevance,

 and the second is others

may I not have what I have wrought

may others have what I've wrought for myself

and with this much head-shrinking happens

the iron grip of survival loosens

on the mind

and we train our circuits

to not see tigers in all the bushes any more

and only then may we see and know 

that fragile gossamer joy

gushing with life and love

transcendent but fleeting 

so easily given to children

and late, late, too late we learn

we've only kept what we've given away

"We watch them die bad, slow, painful deaths, and why? Because it’s always someone’s job to watch the money, and no one’s job to keep those people alive, who don’t have to die yet."

from cory doctorow, the ranrprieur who never dropped out

in this world there's always someone to watch the money, but not necessarily enough someone's to watch the people.... 

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-12-09-radicalized-cory-doctorow-story-health-care/

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250228598/radicalized/

Radicalized is fight club meet rainmaker meet kaczynski. 

And as for near-future-sf - ... so near future ........ omg

there's a lot of rot, and it seems the tao-of-pooh holds the cure, but we don't really know, do we ... ?

some day we'll read accelerando, but knowing me, by the time I do that, it will be yesterdays news ..

at some time in the past ( 2000-2004) , esr's catb site was an amazing place to be - read all about open systems, the brave new world, individual liberties, wearing guns, slinging linux code, being a MAN (spelt h-a-c-k-e-r ...).... that world vaporised in a trice, not even smoke left

 marketing is the 'fear and greed tax'  

but government and organised religion is the master 

re-reading old ran-prieur, when there was _some_ hope of 

meaningful system collapse,

not this sideways slide into crypto and nft other nonsense

what happened to whole earth catalog and tools 

and living the land

a pirsig and emerson rolled up together to form a davy crockett

old ranprieur was gold

"In a fast society slow emotions become extinct. A thinking mind cannot feel."