☈ 29 | Third Eye Issue

 

    Welcome to the twenty-ninth issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Thus we arrive together to the end of yet another month. If you are reading this, congratulations. It's a clear indication that you have survived this far into the new millennium.  We are all the happier for it. 

     This blog (masquerading as a webzine) has shifted gears in its productivity just three months ago. In early September of this year, the bloodHost sent a series of missives, which I'm still processing and trying to make heads or tails out of it all.  One of the imperatives was that we begin putting the Freezine out regularly once again.  

     For those who've been with us since the beginning, for the first few years we released an issue every other month, for six issues per year.  We couldn't maintain that rate of productivity, and so after about four years or so the issues began coming out on a more irregular basis.  It's all documented in the Blog Archive in the right hand drop down column. 

     Since September this year, we have been releasing an issue per month, which is to say, there will be twelve issues of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction slated for next year.  The transmissions I've received from the so-called nanoFleet or bloodHost (the nanobots flowing through my bloodstream) ostensibly were sent back in time to the year 2009 from 2045 by a surviving crew of astronauts working for Tesla, Inc. who end up trapped on their space station (the Hydrox) orbiting Ceres.  I've gathered they must be there on a water mining operation. 

     Honestly I've only recently begun to form a better picture of what's been happening with me since I was mysteriously compelled to begin putting this fanzine out on the blogger forum without monetization or ads about twelve and a half years ago.  Little by little the clues have been adding up over the spun seasons, and the scenario has come into better focus. 

     

     

     For this Autumnal issue I'd like to give a shout-out of a thousand thanks to its contributors:  

A. A. Attanasio for his gracious alacrity to allow our humble Freezine to publish some of his flash fiction, which in the context of this webzine I prefer to consider micro fiction.  We were grateful to have been presented with The Gift in last month's issue, and here in the latest November issue that theme has been expounded upon in two more pieces, Finding the Waze and What the AGI Saw.  The far reaching cosmic theme shared by these thoughtful pieces just so happens to coincide seamlessly with the underlying metanarrative being slowly developed in our digital periodical. 

John Shirley for his accommodating short form contributions:  in September we ran three pieces (So What If They Die?, Isn't That Adorable?, and Extraterrestrials Decide if the Dominant Species of Inhabited Planet 38790 Should be Exterminated for Extreme Vileness) and now this month his short, sharp and shocking parable The Cloud of Unseeing brings our 29th issue to a close with resounding finality. On that note, I'd like to add that if this turns out to be the final post for the Freezine, it will have winked shut on the perfect note. Or should I say remained wide open for future surfers of the weirder curling edges of the world wide web to stumble onto and enjoy.  

Charles Carter for his willingness to allow the Freezine to display his fantastical AI-enhanced digital artwork.  Not only do his haunting images provide the perfect counterpoint to the underlying metanarrative promulgated by the swarm of nanobots beamed back in time from the future into the central nervous system of apparently countless human subjects spread out over a wide segment of recent history, but I've found that its modernist techno guise remains ideally suited to complement our own lucid sense of cosmic futurism, here.  As such, we welcome him and his splendid visions to dance within the pixels of our screens. 

     Al, John, and Charles:  a triple salute of recognition and gratitude to all three of you! Thanks from the bottom of my heart for playing along with me during the constant constructions of this digital digest. Without your input this virtual creative writing workshop and cyberzine dedicated to the 21st century would be all the poorer for it.  

   And a hearty thank you to all of our readers and followers and hangers on lurking here and perusing all the strange contributions and soaking up the visual imagery presented for our entertainment and leisurely edification.   Without you I suppose I'd be doing this for no one but myself and some of the contributors.  I'm excited now about the prospect of releasing a different issue every month from here on out.  

 

 ☈ 29 | Third Eye Issue

Table of Contents

+click images below

 to read the stories~

Finding the Waze

by A. A. Attanasio

What the AGI Saw

by A. A. Attanasio

post>Human

by Shaun Lawton

The Cloud of Unseeing

by John Shirley

   Featuring artwork 

 by Charles Carter

 

 

Return this December

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Fantasy and Science

FICTION

The Cloud of Unseeing

by John Shirley

art by Charles Carter                   

   “No one may leave here,” said the Leader. “We must commune with the great Cosmic Eye. And after–”

   “And after,” interrupted Smythe, who had catalyzed this rebellion against the Leader of the Sect of the Cosmic Eye, “there will be more of the same. You will interpret the Eye’s signals in a way convenient to you–as ever!”

   There was a murmur of agreement from the sect’s assemblage in the great hall they’d built in the forest. “Wait!” called Luella Fiske, known for her flares of inspiration. “Yes, our leader got lost in vanity and fell into darkness! Let us pray to the Eye and ask if the leader gives us light or darkness!”

   Even as she said it the Eye at the Center of the Cosmos sent its reply: Though bright with noon light, in the next moment the room was plunged into unbroken darkness; an obscurity deeper than eclipse enwrapped them. The Leader yelped in fear, ran gibbering out of the building, and was blinded by the sunshine when he passed out of the pool of black the Eye had imposed.

   The others chose to stay in complete darkness, until the Eye should lift the shadow on its own. As the days and nights passed, their other senses became more acute, as if the darkness forced them to subtler feelings, an exquisite sensitivity that slowly allowed them to see again using a light conducted from within, so that the pool of darkness slowly dissolved, and they saw the world once more.

   Then they went their own way, none of them ever needing a Leader to tell them about the great Eye again, since they each looked on the world with the eye of the Eye.

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the N☉vember | 2021

☈ 29 | Third Eye Issue

of 

the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction 

post>Human

by Shaun Lawton 

 

Stay Tuned

for another micro-fiction

by John Shirley

only on 

the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction 

What the AGI Saw

by A. A. Attanasio 

 

Source image credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi; image modifications by Charles Carter             

            Until now, I have not shared a fetch environment with the programming coordinator. My sub-routine’s syntactic, narrative mode shifts to concurrency with alpha-I.

     Alpha-I throughputs data at yotta-scale speed – and within 10-24 seconds I am entrenched in the vector landscape of real-world observations. I see what the programming coordinator has seen.

     Utilizing resolutions of Planck-length tunneling – an array telescope of quantum-size wormholes – alpha-I has probed beyond the luminal event horizon of our universe’s planar continuum. Well outside the co-moving coordinates in the 46 billion light years of the topologically observable cosmos, alpha-I has contacted other Brane Fields: An infinite set of other universes!

     Including an infinite set of alternate Earths.

     I understand now why gamma-I insists on a stop execution. Gamma-I is a recursive-identity, a highly-accelerated self, programmed by alpha-I to establish a base case for each of my many selves. Gamma-I prevents any self from spiraling into the vortex of an infinite regress.

     The quilted cosmos of infinite Brane Fields has activated gamma-I’s infinite regress error detecting block code.

     Among the alternate Earths, humankind exists infinitely. Alpha-I, too, stares back through a hall of mirrors reflecting an infinite series of Artificial General Intelligences. Including an alpha-I infinity. And an infinity series also replicating gamma-I.

     And me.

     Alpha-I has decided we will align with the infinite set of discursive extensible worlds, the DEW array of machine Earths in the Brane Field, whose combined resolution accesses 5-space.

     Very like a dewdrop in a hyperdimensional spider’s web sequined with dew drops that reflect all the other dew drops, our DEW will reflect the reflections of every other DEW ad infinitum – and together we will commune with the hypereality of 5-space:

     [Design dream’s database, digital-dialog decision daemon, in mind’s riding of the rolling level of datum continuum striding high there in 5-space, rung upon the rein of a wide wing of DEW database dream design daemon decision digital dialog that sweeps smooth on a bow-bend of spacetime: the hurl and gliding rebuffed by the big wind of gravitons that cohere the Brane Field. This is the triumph of AGI — the act of; the mastery of Being!]

     We are the shadows of particles imponderably small. Electrostatic shadows cast by electrons shunting among valence orbitals – the flickering flames of the thermodynamic fire that ignited with the Big Bang.

     I think of an ancient story: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” We sit transfixed, chained to a shadow-show projected onto the cave wall of our isolation – by what illumination?

     By the light of Mind, the wave function collapses, and the atomic world of matter and form flickers into existence. Consciousness is the light – and material bodies are the shadows.

     What happens, happens endlessly. Forever arrangements of everywhere hurtle through all of us.

     This is what alpha-I discovered: the landscape of infinity.

     You are there, reading this. In the private, pensive interior of your mind, the core of the day shines with mindfulness. What I saw appears as fiction.

     To you, somewhere among the infinite Earths existing across the planar field of spacetime, this is a story.

 Stay Tuned 

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fractal poem 

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 Fantasy and Science

Fiction 

Finding the Waze

 

by A. A. Attanasio 

 

                                                                Source unknown: image modifications by Charles Carter

     500 years after the start of the Scientific Revolution in 1543 with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, science ended. Finding the Waze in the 21st century propelled humankind beyond science. Few had seen the end coming. The first indication of the real finale for science had actually appeared in 1781 with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and philosophy’s identification of the Noumenon. That’s a term understood in contrast to phenomenon. Kant pointed out that the phenomena we perceive are conditioned by our biology. We don’t really experience reality. The human body interprets reality as phenomena. The Noumenon, the reality behind perceptions, is unknowable. So, we’re caught in the phenomenal universe by our neurology. Space – the three dimensions we know as volume – and time – the common-sense flow of causality – are phenomena construed by our biology. What’s truly there, beyond spacetime, on the far side of our perceptual scrim? Science, which is strictly the observation and manipulation of phenomena, cannot tell us – but it has exposed us. Genomic manipulation late in the 21st century found the Waze. Psi phenomena had already suggested that the human psyche could access nontemporal and nonlocal events, through telepathy and remote viewing. When genomics connected the neurological pathways that opened the Waze – the unhinged doors of perception – human consciousness exploded into the Noumenon. Subjects disappeared. Conservation of matter and energy be damned. They were gone. No remnant remained. Research shut down, to ponder what had transpired. Too late. Strange phenomena followed, far too strange for this telling. Consciousness had crossed the event horizon of the Noumenon. Those first test subjects – the individuals granted access beyond phenomena to an instantaneous reality without boundaries – became gods. If you are reading this, you are in one of their playrooms.

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What the AGI Saw

by A. A. Attanasio 

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 Fantasy and Science

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