Interesting, the idea that loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality

Olivia Laing,The Lonely City

Brothers, Sisters, Comrades, I feel I should start at the beginning, especially for my 19th and 20th Century readers. They’ll be plenty of time to explain later. Literally, all the time in the world. I’m getting ahead of myself. Having a time-machine, well a mechanism to travel in time, means I do that a lot. I have a dilemma and I need your help.
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    By the way, please feel free to cut along these perforations to rearrange the story. (This is a note for my 18th century readers in particular, who were, are and will be, fond of the periodical. Those of you post the Andromeda collision, who I have affectionately called the ‘Folders’, can mind-meld at your convenience of course using my public mindspace address: www.pms.mindmeld.public. Bear with me. Please. Just start wherever seems most comfortable.
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    Cool, cold gold. Single, elemental, no alchemy will ever now convert me back to base earth. I’ll need your help with this later. To trade an eternity of immortal loneliness for a May fly’s intense community orgasm. I admit it gets confusing, even for me, and I’ve had an eternity to learn this stuff. Literally.
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    I’m nine years old. Harrison Boulevard, Boise, Idaho. It’s quiet. The neighborhood that is. As long as I can remember I have dreamt of a golden angel. More of a golden shape really. It would whisper to me on the point of waking. Simple things at first, like ‘say ‘yes’ to the first question asked today,’ or ‘give mum a special hug.’ Nice things. Quirky things. I didn’t think it strange given what I’d heard Elders say in Church. But it was my secret all the same. Well, I told Grandpa once. He loved dreams and used to interpret them. Grandma read tea-leaves too. 
    ‘I see nothing but loneliness for you when you chase the gold, boy,’ Grandma would say at breakfast, especially when she’d had ‘one of her nights’, as they had euphemistically become known. She blamed me. Of course I knew later she was right. I’ll come to that. I don’t think they liked me having a special friend. Told me I was stupid. They saw it as a threat, I think. Well not think. I’ll stop all this thinking now. I know they did. You see its complicated and I might have to cut along another perforation soon myself. Suffice to say, I was the angel. Well, the future me. The educated me. The me that Grandpa tried to mold differently. ‘Chuck them books away boy, let’s you and me smoke a while and go fishin. Be kinda normal.’ Have I explained the whispering yet? Let’s cut to that now.
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    1948. Grandpa, he’d been my first ‘whispee’. That’s the term I use for those I whisper to. I must have fried his brain.  He knew before I did what I was to become, because I had told him both before and after I had become it. Sorry, cut here if you wish. I told you it was difficult; bear with me a little while longer. It was his death, what we physicists call his real pinch-point that troubled him. Killed his hope really. He decided not to avoid it in the end. Told me my time would come too. My pinch-point. You see he implored me to stop it. The whispering. To accept I had a pinch-point. These pinch-points, in timespace, are where parallel eigenvectors meet. I can go visit folk before and after them, at will, but the point of intersection is a constant – Whatever happens at a pinch-point happens, always. No getting away from it. No advice from me can avoid them - they have to happen - Grandpa always has to die. He hated that whisper. I’d better explain the whispers too.
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    Whispering is the term I gave to when I slowed the time machine down and entered a metaphysical shared timespace with another consciousness. I guess I appeared as a Golden angel to them too. It meant I could tell folk what was going to happen, warn them, or not (look, I never promised to be good). I’m mistaken by some for a poltergeist, or the arch-angel Gabriel, and sometimes for indigestion by the secular minded. Especially by those in the 20th to 3200th Centuries. Pre-enlightenment guys were crazy - they just burned people for mentioning a whisper. I don’t bother with them much now. For the most part, I travelled back in time just to stop Grandpa teasing me. I know what you’re thinking. Really I do. How can I stop something I’ve already experienced? I know it’s hard, but it’s to do with quantum entanglement theory and allowing intersecting spirals of the timespace to share eigenvectors with their respective Eigen functions. I did say bear with me, and I know I’ve lost those of you in the 17th Century pre-enlightenment, but the rest of you hang in there and skip this bit if you need to. 
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    I promise it will all come together. Don’t forget the Folders, either… we are nearly at that part. Let’s go back to a bit after the beginning.
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    With all the whispering to my younger self, I was shaping my mortal self into a studious well-behaved young man. Straight-A hero. I majored in Physics, got my degree and was awarded a scholarship to Oxford, England to start a PhD in Quantum Mechanical perturbation of solid-state field theory. I was considered a genius. I was. But it wasn’t really my work at all. I’d been guided by my golden angel. By my future self. Here’s the thing. Before we get into the difficult physics stuff, imagine you could revisit your younger self… advise and guide to make better choices… then imagine you could keep going back until every choice coalesced into a pathway that led you to precisely where you wanted to go. That’s what I did. I know what you are thinking (no, really I do). You’re thinking which of these guys is the real me? Well, when I had my younger self on the path I needed, we melded. It’s a timespace permanent entanglement. We became defined by a single Eigen function, a complex conjugate of Hermitian space. In short, kind of like a pinch-point but where you carry on living. I worked out how to place my entire neural network, the essence of me, into a golden circuitry.
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    Anyhow my flesh, our flesh, was replaced with a pure infusion of molten gold. Our neural networks mapped and run through a meshwork of golden neurones and synapses controlled by our shared single Eigen function. Sounds dangerous. It is, was and will be again, but you see once the first light speed time-warp was done I could move the golden cone anywhere and to anytime, like ‘running around a fairground quantum wall’ ( all directions at the same time, it’s cool). I could revisit mistakes an infinite number of times to correct them. I had no body, no corporeal reality save the small golden conical lump of metal that held me, well my thoughts anyway. It got lonely for sure. Thirty-five million earth years, shaping, tweaking and refining … me, my thoughts and philosophy. The whispering was a lifesaver really, a way of meeting people, of remembering what I was giving up. My big mistake was not spending more time in the future. Evolution of the human form was so subtle. I didn’t see it until it was too late. I was out of that loop. Like a headless chicken, traveling through time as a golden circuit, not evolving like all around me. More of that later. Later. Perhaps I mean before. Time. It gets complicated but we are making a good start. Bear with me 
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    During my PhD the angel whispered in my ear almost continuously. Einstein, Bohr, Bose, I consulted them all. You see to build a time machine you have to approach the speed of light. No way round it. The thing is once you get there you become fat. Really fat. Well, infinitely dense is how Einstein politely put it. No way round it. No point trying. Except, Heisnenberg chipped in one fateful day with his uncertainty principle and I think we all saw the light (excuse the pun, it was a favorite of Plank’s when I went back to explain it to him. ‘I know Gustav, if we travel at the speed of light all is black, but its a pun. Lighten up a little’). You see you can’t know the speed of something and where it is, infinitely precisely. There’s always a measurable uncertainty. That’s when the penny dropped. Don’t travel in a straight line. Spin. I postulated that spinning at increasing speeds with auto-gyroscopic balance using the increasing density to first propel one side and then flit to the other would mean as the velocity of light was reached the infinite density would act to complete the final push to reach the speed of light. Like a perpetual motion machine but using the properties of a single element, gold, to avoid the inter-elemental friction that would normally build to slow it down. Put the whole thing in a big magnet and the spinning becomes something you can control. Steer. 
    However, once we had a spinning cone of solid metal spinning at the speed of light, with my neural networked consciousness mapped, we lost it. Infinitely dense you see. Fell right through to middle earth. Slowed down and lightened but it was miles down by then. The next phase in space meant it wouldn’t bump into anything. ……… jump back a little now…. It’s beginning to make sense I hope you agree….  Once we had cracked the neural network and replacement of the flesh by gold we had our time machine. The device would float in space but its spinning speed meant it could travel into any timespace continuum; surf the wormholes in other words, and in other worlds. My neural network could plug into any system of information technology architecture, which meant I could speak to anyone, look at anything from any time period. Whisper. Immortal. Floating through space. I kept copies of myself in all the common timespace zones for backup. Multiple consciousnesses. Cool, I thought, until I met the Folders.
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    After a few million years I grew bored. I felt useless. What’s the point of being immortal if you can’t use your knowledge to save mankind? The Andromeda galaxy was coming to destroy our solar system. It has been visible to the naked eye since the 9th Century…. Man, it got real scary in AD 3,003,444 - new planets as big as the moon everywhere in the night-sky. That’s when I decided to save the world. Travel to the pre-Andromeda timespace and help them to escape.
    That’s when I met the Folders, humans who had evolved over the four-billion years since my golden Bar Mitzvah. Never saw them coming. Felt like a total idiot. I was technically. You see humans became aware of the basis of consciousness in AD 2,998,504 and the subsequent expansion of philosophy became so advanced that human brains finally understood the truth of everything, scientific and numinous. Their bodies had changed too. Beyond recognition. It happened about a billion years before Andromeda collides and destroys both galaxies - plenty of time for the Folders to escape and they knew it. Their bodies had evolved to a new species line, so that their brains were now evenly distributed over an entire paper-thin skeletal structure that could fold in and on itself. Not just supple backs and bendy joints, I mean fold and fold again into an infinite origami of translucent flesh. They began to fold into each other. The entirety of Earth’s population folded into each other, thousands, millions, billions orgiastically packed into tiny spaces and launched to escape the solar system. The supernatural was long dead. The secular had evolved but my brain was fixed, inorganic - I had eternal life, of sorts, but not the means to understand the new philosophy - when I whispered to the future folded brain they were beyond my reach - they simply didn’t need to believe me – Occam’s razor cut me loose to cycle a personal time-loop of finite choices, always repeating and never changing in scope or desire or differentness - for many I whispered to I satisfied their first cause - that which existed before anything - but the Folders had outgrown me - natural selection had weeded my usual followers out and I became a mere observer of this future folded race. They were successful too. After Andromeda and the Milky way had settled their score, the universe’s other galaxies teemed with life evolved from the Folders, whose bodies continued to denude themselves of substance whilst their brains became ever more complex and delicate - the folds merging into one, the individual becoming the community, a perfect multi-mind meld. Offspring were like mycelial buds just appearing between convoluted neurons wrapped in a cling film skin. Death became irrelevant as the whole mass shared a single consciousness. The singularity of an individual became meaningless. In a way, I was there before them, billions of years before when I gave up my body for a golden concretion. But I’ve become irrelevant. It’s the risk I took I guess - too advanced for my old whispered audience and not able to penetrate the awareness of the folded people of the future - But you dear reader are my consolation, I sense an empathy for my plight. I face a pinch-point, my final pinch-point. I won’t be able to come back and whisper to you. What do I do? Cut here or read on, I’ll leave my fate to you. I’m tired.
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    So, you’ve read on to the end, which is rapidly upon us both now. Wish me well. Think of me sometime. Remember me, brothers, sisters, comrades. Fraternity. Modernity, for ever and ever….. Eternity. It’s Hell. Amen. End of transmission.
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