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Sixty worlds a minute

4 September 2000
Matt has left the building.

Hm. My feet are unnaturally cold as the light finally fails and I spread my wings for what is (74% probability) the last time.

Coins as dense as these bounce almost a metre when dropped from this height. Millions are caught, even before the rebound, the natives risking injury (years later, hundreds of thousands have their own personal stigmata). Millions fall to the floor and disappear; yet millions more vanish on contact when they're, on the first bounce, caught not with only one hand.

Even now, hours from the end of the world, humanity-B forgets all for cash.

On another world spotted with cities as deep as they are wide, I walk along pavements like rubber from the geothermal heat. The Possession begins as I cross the road so I must join in, smashing windows, raping, cartwheeling.

2.6% of the population are subject to the Possession. For two hours, daily, we lose our minds. As our eyes and minds blank we lose control to Our Lord the Olive King (unseen, for a thousand years) -- and as the only point of contact to the Olive King, we rule the world.

Don't tell anyone, but I'm just pretending. "I can't stop now," I think, as I dance with dollar coins stolen from a passer-by pressed into my eyes, "They've all seen me join in."

The passer-by looks on with joy at only being two degrees of interaction from Our Lord.

At each moment, I live all possible futures dragging humanity along after me. For me, reality is a train inches from my nose, a different universe in each window. To my sister every world is a lifetime. I watched her in the domain of the Olive King look down at her hands and wonder at the scars she found there.

I try to make best use of all that I see. I pass my greater knowledge into my local brain to try and force some of it into the current universe. To what end, I don't know.

I've asked them to break my journey, other times to speed me up the faster to reach the terminus.

But humanity never understands. And why should they? I talk to them as I have learnt to talk in previous worlds, but talking requires common frames of reference and my frame is spinning wildly, aligned instantaneously with another then on, never to match again.

Words are defined by one another, by to what they're similar, and by what they're not. There are networks and hierarchies. A word is a relation, an arrow, from one concept to another. Where do the arrows begin? What is our common origin?

Now I wake to a freezing world and in the moment before my new body assumes and assimilates its past, I shiver. "Don't tremble!" they shout, but it's too late and I'm accelerating towards the horizon. "If only we lived at the bottom of a potential well," I hear them say as I fly ever faster through a frozen paradise, then out into deepest space to join those other humans who couldn't keep their balance.

There we talk, and I learn to speak in the tongues of energy and potentiality. But then I move on, and the next world is crystalline and between ducking the charging crystal grain boundaries I discover that alignment, balance and bulk probabilities determine our minds and perceptions here.

There are no words to describe a unique experience. How could there be? I attempt, anyway, to say. I use the arrows words make to point towards the ideas I have, to what is happening -- but the arrows are spinning like Catherine Wheels; a vector field in a hurricane wind -- and as I speak I dart on a course between concepts almost as fast as I shuttle through worlds.

Still, I circumscribe this island of ideas with a mesh of words. I begin to see each world in terms of words. In each world, I salmon-jump upstream, against the reference flow, towards the ideological centre of the Earth. From there I build towers of ideas outwards in order to explain my condition.

With language derived from the probabilities of opening one of a million doors, I squat in my honeycomb cell (this world is a foam of cells with humans or poison. They have art and sex and all the rest) with dictionaries and encyclopaedias driving towards the root of their thought.

When I've written my treatise I leave my cell and enter the next one, and, finding a human (I'm lucky. The chance of poison is 62%) commence to read out loud.

But I find that sometime during my studies the world has ended, and while the physicality remains the same the topology of words has morphed and changed. Later, while swinging from vines with my mate symbiotic on my belly, I explain my predicament before time passes and mutual understanding also ends.

There too, I find a gulf. Whatever I say, however I use these words, the world in which they make sense dies in the journey between my tongue and your ear.

Shift on: My feet are cold again and as I once more drop coins I look down at humanity-B. My growing excitement collapses as I realise that it's not the same but it's five minutes later. My own body's arrows of perception have turned and I can no longer comprehend even my own condition. I fly on, and as darkness falls the horizon fades out of view.

 

 
     
Previously on upsideclown

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Current clown:

18 December 2003. George writes: This List

Most recent ten:

15 December 2003. Jamie writes: Seven Songs
11 December 2003. Dan writes: Spinning Jenny
8 December 2003. Victor writes: Rock Opera
4 December 2003. Matt writes: The Mirrored Spheres of Patagonia
1 December 2003. George writes: Charm
27 November 2003. James writes: On Boxing
24 November 2003. Jamie writes: El Matador del Amor; Or, the Man who Killed Love
20 November 2003. Dan writes: Rights Management
17 November 2003. Victor writes: Walking on Yellow
13 November 2003. Matt writes: Disintermediation
(And alas we lost Neil, who last wrote Cockfosters)

Also by this clown:

4 December 2003. Matt writes: The Mirrored Spheres of Patagonia
13 November 2003. Matt writes: Disintermediation
23 October 2003. Matt writes: Topology
2 October 2003. Matt writes: Haunted
8 September 2003. Matt writes: The Gardener's Diary
21 August 2003. Matt writes: The Starling Variable
31 July 2003. Matt writes: Two stories
14 July 2003. Matt writes: What is real?
23 June 2003. Matt writes: Mapping and journeys
29 May 2003. Matt writes: Extelligence
5 May 2003. Matt writes: Religious experiences
17 April 2003. Matt writes: Seeing the Light
27 March 2003. Matt writes: Flowering
10 March 2003. Matt writes: Climax state
10 February 2003. Matt writes: The Role of Cooperation in Human Interaction
20 January 2003. Matt writes: The same old subroutine
2 January 2003. Matt writes: New beginnings
9 December 2002. Matt writes: Packet Loss
18 November 2002. Matt writes: Wonderland
31 October 2002. Matt writes: Having and losing
10 October 2002. Matt writes: Trees of Knowledge
19 September 2002. Matt writes: The online life of bigplaty47
29 August 2002. Matt writes: Divorce
8 August 2002. Matt writes: How to get exactly what you want
18 July 2002. Matt writes: Eleven Graceland endings
27 June 2002. Matt writes: Listopad, Prague 1989
3 June 2002. Matt writes: Engram bullets
6 May 2002. Matt writes: Sound advice
15 April 2002. Matt writes: How it all works: Cars
21 March 2002. Matt writes: Proceeding to the next stage
25 February 2002. Matt writes: Spam quartet
31 January 2002. Matt writes: Person to person
7 January 2002. Matt writes: All for the best
13 December 2001. Matt writes: Life
19 November 2001. Matt writes: Giving is better than receiving
25 October 2001. Matt writes: Ludo
1 October 2001. Matt writes: Gifts, contracts, and whispers
6 September 2001. Matt writes: The world is ending
13 August 2001. Matt writes: The Church of Mrs Bins
16 July 2001. Matt writes: Things I Don't Have
25 June 2001. Matt writes: Fighting the Good Fight
31 May 2001. Matt writes: Code dependency
7 May 2001. Matt writes: Up The Arse, Or Not At All
5 April 2001. Matt writes: The increasing nonlinearity of time
19 March 2001. Matt writes: Hit Me Baby, One More Time
22 February 2001. Matt writes: Space, Matter, Cities, Sausages
29 January 2001. Matt writes: Truth in Advertising
1 January 2001. Matt writes: Six predictions for tomorrow
7 December 2000. Matt writes: You must reach this line to ride
16 November 2000. Matt writes: The truth about the leopard
23 October 2000. Matt writes: Shopping mauls
28 September 2000. Matt writes: Heavy traffic on the road to Utopia
4 September 2000. Matt writes: Sixty worlds a minute
17 July 2000. Matt writes: You, Me, and Face-space

Let meeeeee entertain you

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