Personal Blogs

Today I've worked an early shift, watched a Morse [the one in Italy] and I'v've done three hours of topology revision. Which is more than enough for anybody who is even approaching normally-human basic.

I'm just re-reading the unit texts, surprisingly this has gone well. I'm now grokking some of the stuff that hadn't gone into the meatware the first time round. I'm starting to get a feel for the tools available and what it is that we are trying to achieve. [Although I'm unsure as to what we do achieve, the course just peters out.]

I had my first squatch at the specimen paper today—didn't really like. What worries me is that I'm unversed in the 'dark arts' of the maths game. In the exam you need to be able to mash symbols and know the ways that you need to be mashing them without thought. I plan to practice but time is tight.

The groups course needs to be worked at too. I intend to avoid the tilings/wallpaper/lattices twaddle. I just won't have the time. Besides I like groups, I'll treat it as an amuse bush when I'm too mind-wiped for topology.

I might get through this.

"Does this weird distance stuff mean?"

"We aren't sure, after a while you get used to it ... have you two done the topology course?" We nodded.

"You can move from A to B, if A and B are different in some way but we aren't certain that you can get to everywhere. After all it's all so bloody white, how can you tell? Apart from a few places it just the same fucking white ... space." I [another I] glared around angrily at the whiteness.

"Maybe connected but not path connected?"

Us n00bs had arrived here on piggy-back. The journey had taken some time and although [the other] I'd been upbeat I was pretty certain that there had been some mis-steps along the road.

"So we don't know if it's continuous?"

"Would it help if we did?"

"And what about us? Are we all the same?"

"We seem to be, none of us has ever spotted another acting out of character anyway", he fluttered the fingers of both hands. "We all miss pencils." We all grinned.

"So what about the fishing rod thing...?"

"Probably an extension of the fact that we don't have fishing rods and yet see our other selves as having them. Our minds struggling to make sense of something in a way that we can comprehend. We're desperately seeking rules."

Our mobile phones started to ring.

"What do you mean they don't understand one? What can that possibly mean?"

Two other mes made wavy circular motions with their left hands, heads down, eyes averted. Another me looked as annoyed as I felt.

"Wait a minute, what hands do we use?"

"The same mixture, just the opposite."

"..." I didn't know what to say.

"Everything is messed up here, the stuff that we did with our right hands we do with our left hands. And the stuff that we did with our lefts..."

"You won't have noticed it yet but we think different too. We're a lot less logical and way more emotional."

Four blue eyes fastened on my face. I must be frightening in real life.

"That can't be right", the other new me said. "For if that was the case we'd all be holding our fishing rods in the same way."

He was right.

look what god has done to us

he made me

[At this point insert your own name, did you think that reading came without any cost?]

I'm the biggest idiot that ever was, but as I write this I'm smiling, are you?

Nobody, and I mean nobody, understands the rage inside me, even those who have rage inside them. You see humans can't understand one another.

And if you believe that?

My mum and dad gave me a bag of chantrelles and a grand cru St. Emilion. Dad also lent me his Steve Jobs biography, so that I can talk with him about it. Perhaps as a shunt.

What am I for? I always ask this of myself on my birthday. I have a nagging sense my of uselessness. My failure to achieve what I should. I piddle around at nonsense, every time I seem to be making a difference it gets taken from me.

Nobody ever troubled to tell me the rules. Still, I fear that I'm not doing enough. I've been given this most marvelous thing—life, and I'm pissing it up against the wall.

I resolve to change but I can't help but notice that all those who do manage to change seem to have the life sucked out of them. What made them special, what made me love them, what made them fun. Was gone.

However dead I might be tomorrow, I need to be alive today.

Plans gang aglay.

The parcel people say, "Consignee Cannot Be Reached".

I get stung on the lug by a wasp.

Started the new course blog though.

I asked.

"Present a bit of a difficulty. They're insoked." [Another internal word, meaning that they're interested in the world and don't make judgements about it based upon a recieved understanding. That's the best that I can do </shrug>.]

"They seem like us, first-rate, third-rate minds."

"So why don't we understand them?"

"They seem to have no understanding of maths."

I laughed, "you mean that we can't communicate our understanding."

"No, it appears that they have no conception of the natural numbers."

"Eh? What do you mean?"

"They seem to be fractal. Dimensions, they always see things rationally."

"So why aren't we?"

"We are a bit...", he [me] waved a hand to indicate the four of us.

"But..."

"See. That's the difficulty."

"It's not that they can't conceive a zero, it's that they can't conceive a one."

Or last TMA away? Much the same aren't they?

The song danced to. [Although I wasn't doing much dancing today.]

"We seem to be time-sequential", one of the older mes said. He had a, kind-of, focused look about him that others say that I have when I'm on-task, a look which I've never seen for myself. The other n00b was looking like I felt. Blootered.

"Is this a dream?"

"We don't think so, there no skringe and it appears smotret."

I was stunned, these are some of my internal words, I've never shared them, why would I? Who would understand?

• Skringe: the feeling you get in a dream when you realize that something isn't quite right
• Smotret: The Russian word for see [ish, Russian words are iffy]. I use it when I see something that I know but which might not be real

"You've got to understand that a whole succession of us have been working at this", I was droning on.

"What?"

"When we came here there were thirty-two of us..."

"So where did we go?" The other n00b asked. Before I could.

"The problem is that this is a reality whose rules aren't built into us. We can understand stuff but only in a way that doesn't make sense." I wasn't to be stopped.

"It's beyond belief that we are in a world where Marsh-Wiggles exist, this must be something that our minds are doing to make sense of it."

"So why don't we have hats?" We all said.

"are alway a power two of us."

This was odd to start with, how could they add me? But some sense of mine was seeing...

"Is it that...?" I started to ask.

"Yep, they are marsh-wiggles. And." He paused and wiped his face. "There isn't a puddle-glum. We've checked."

I asked to the air, but to the other me really, "where are their hats?"

"That might be a great part of our problem."

"What?"

I was stood on an endless whiteness with a something that looked like a me hailing me from thirty feet. He was very still.

"Don't take so much as a single step."

"What?"

"Distance doesn't work the same way here."

"What?"

"Neil, we know this stuff, you remember the discrete metric, you remember that Greek guy..."

"Euclid?"

"Him. Well it doesn't work that way here."

"What?"

I must have taken a step, or shuffled, because I was suddenly about a mile away from the other me. He was just a black dot on the whiteness. A mobile phone that I didn't know that I had rang in my pocket.

"Don't do that again. Do you want to be lost here?" My voice said when I eventually managed to get the thing working.

"Why is my personal metric working?" I asked.

The phone went dead and things started to get weird.

My marked topology TMA arrived today. I was at work, my wife phoned me. She'd been watching the [recorded] last ever Morse and had been crying.

"You, OK babes?", I asked, actually worried by the sound in her voice. She explained. I don't remember seeing that episode and, now I don't suppose I ever will.

"Your big envelope is here." That's what we call it, the TMA. We made chit-chat whilst she opened it. By now Tish knows where to look on a PT3.

I was sat in my office. Danny was reclined in the chair under my 'magnoliaboard', feet on my desk. Duggie, the new guy, was sitting opposite looking mystified. Danny has heard these conversations before, Duggie despite having been warned still doesn't really get it.

Tish reeled off my mark, I said I loved her and put the phone down.

"You done good bud", Danny said.

"Indeed. Fag?", We all went for a fag, although Duggie doesn't smoke.

Before we got outside something distracted Danny, I don't know what but he came to the smoking-gate smiling.

Because Danny is a temp he'll be taken from me soon. I can make soon sometime later, but I can never make it forever.

What a shitty world we live in where things that are right get destroyed because people who don't understand life see it as untidy and have the authority to 'fix' it.