Monday, May 26, 2003

I'm up late writing about weird things on Mars. For my latest, see the Cydonian Imperative (page 38).




What the hell is this thing?


Almost done with John Shirley's "Demons." Speaking of whom, Shirley alerted me to a new "Popular Mechanics" article that attempts to bury the Roswell case once and for all. I stopped by Barnes and Noble and read it. Old news, unfortunately, and nothing particularly surprising.

Apparently there's a new article in "Scientific American" about the multiverse; I tried to find it but couldn't. But undoubtedly many trillions of alternate Macs in other universes found it and are writing about it as I type this: a disquieting realization.

I call the world we think we inhabit the "ontosphere." It's rather like Keanu Reeves' "Matrix" in that it's basically synthetic and hallucinatory; control and power over "reality" is a carefully orchestrated feat of fact management overseen by self-appointed experts. Their weapons are religion and belief, drummed into our skulls by an omniscient media.

But the multiverse is like some monstrously potent secret weapon, an upwelling in the fabric of consciousness that, if exposed, promises to shatter normality. Jacques Vallee, one of my favorite thinkers, thinks that we're interacting with denizens of the multiverse in the guise of flying saucers and absurd humanoids. Just as time, space and energy are different ways of addressing the same fundamental mystery (existence itself), sentience overshadows all three. The multiverse is intelligent, self-reflective, inscrutable, abiding.

William Burroughs, with characteristic prescience, urged the masses to "storm the reality studio."

Are we up to the task?

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