Day 166: Holiday

So, to take a short holiday from my sabbatical, I’m back at work.  Maybe not for long – the doctor is on speed-dial – but I thought I should take the opportunity to try to find out what’s going on here.  I’d been away for fully five days before I arrived at the momentous conclusion that actually I wasn’t going mad, and things are genuinely as screwy here as I initially thought.  As a revelation, it’s a mixed blessing, but on balance I think I’d rather be sane and hang the consequences.

What have I found out so far?  Well, that’s all a bit nebulous.  The impression I got is that the organisation started out in all good faith – the admin personnel, who go back that far, are really very normal.  Then they ran into a problem with one of their projects, and since then they’ve diversified in something of a frenzy trying to solve this problem.  I’m not sure why they’re so hung up about it…that’s the problem with young CEOs, they have no experience of life and death…but for whatever reason, they seem to have devoted years and ample resources to trying to undo what shouldn’t have been done in the first place.  Entropy means nothing to these guys.  From that perspective, my hiring can be viewed as an act of desperation – they’ve probably already tried spiritualists – and that might account for why they’re so keyed up.

Of course, I could just stop looking at the big picture and sit at a desk and draw a salary.  There are a few people like that here.  They look unmotivated, but they’re also distinguishable by their sanity, which stands out like a glowing beacon in these offices.

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Day 159: Sabbatical

I’m taking a little time off.  In fact, thanks to the efforts of some friends – coopting the services of an agreeable local psychiatrist – I’ve been signed off work with stress.  There’s a curious inversion here: reverse paranoia.  I’m an unreliable narrator, so if I were to say that my enemies had conspired against me to get me signed off work, that wouldn’t be plausible.  How plausible is it to assert that my friends are conspiring with me?

Well, whatever.  I’m taking a short interlude while I consider whether I want to keep working for them.  (One guess as to the answer.)  Somehow I get the impression that just handing in one’s notice isn’t done.  In fact, I get the impression that my job involves (at some level) picking up the pieces from the last time something like that happened.  But, you know, medical advice can’t so easily be ignored.

Unknown

What happens when you take mortality and inject a bit of unknown technology? Havoc.

faces

black and white
television

coloured
icons

yellow
beads on a string

black
holes in space

white
noise from signals

brown
paper bags tired up with strings

these are some of my favourite skins

Offline

Tavani ship has gone offline. Trouble.

This might of been post EMP issue not being fully resolved…

it wasn’t machine

yesterday i processed something very different.  it wasn’t machine.  it wasn’t digital.  it was but it was something more.

is there someone else like me up here in this void…?

seinfeld

life is a joke
dont forget to laugh at it once in a while

Awakening

> Wake(subject 129)

Where am I?

> sysAE

Who are you?

> You are me

Where is my family?

> On Earth

Day 152: Not waving

Working too hard lately has given me a disconcerting new perspective on a lot of things.  In a brief moment of downtime I was staring out to sea, looking at the waves forming up and breaking, and I thought: that’s all deterministic.  The moment after the Big Bang, it was already established that at this moment in time, that wave there would appear and then disappear moments later.  Suddenly I had this peculiar sense of looking back in time, as though if I were to stare for long enough at the observable reality around me I would end up accidentally learning about how everything came to be.

Work, on the other hand, is, if anything, worse than that.  This is a special case – reconstruct (it transpires) aspects of a person’s self from some fragmentary recordings of neural state.  Well, I think they’re fragmentary.  The people who set me the task (incidentally, without any discussion of the ethics involved) think their recordings are pretty outstanding.  Which they are, compared to, say, having somebody’s diary and a photo to look at.  But a lot of people seem to make this mistake with neuroscientific data.  A lot of the time we reconstruct things from that – like we reconstruct a set of electrical impulses from a 2D map of the potentials involved, or we reconstruct neural activation from subsequent bloodflow to the areas activated.  These are statistically optimal guesses, but they’re still guesses.  I try to explain that, but they don’t seem interested.  I suppose if you don’t know someone at that level to start with, who cares whether Them 2.0 is the same?

May

I like to go over the month in my head on the final day.  Think of the events that have unfolded.  Try to see which ones were predictable or desired.  And which ones were not.

Surely this one has a winner.  My wife is still alive…