Gender Jumper

Don't remember a lot of specifics, just that last night was a nice, long, affirming dream where I'd gone back to work at the org where I started out 20 years ago. In particular, this dream highlighted David Cohen, one of the founders, who passed away ten years ago next month. (He had Incredible Hulk hair for some reason.) I was reporting directly to him and he kept reminding me about an important report that needed to be edited same-day. I enthusiastically promised, but was in no hurry because I was enjoying the atmosphere and (over-, if we compare to my real editing process) confident that I would meet his deadline without a hard push.

One thing I should highlight is that these dreams always take place in a new building. Features shift, but it's always some old-fashioned bank or newspaper setting: high ceilings, plain walls, with wooden rails dividing the room and sturdy old wood trim around every doorway and staircase. Maybe to my subconscious, this is peak professionalism, analogous to the settings of most courtroom dramas that no longer resemble reality (if they ever did). 

For that matter, wood is often a recurring theme in settings, especially in an exaggerated and beautiful manner. The only real destinations I ever dream about are the house I grew up in and the house I'm about to move out of (though I've barely dreamed about this location since before the pandemic started -- it's associated with my grandparents more than my current family). Otherwise, I'm either exploring urban landscapes or theme parks or elaborate mansions, but in all of these wood is over-represented. Haunted houses with wooden corrals and backroom studs. Mansions of floor-to-ceiling mahogany. Outside decks that extend and connect fantastically, like boardwalk highways. I always find it peaceful and invigorating, the kind of supportive space where work gets done, play is infinite, and friendships are as strong as any board.

The contrast makes sense if you also know that I grew up in cheap apartments and rental houses, but I've almost never been to anything like these scenes in real life. Maybe an elaborate boardwalk or two, but well after such dreams started. There's wood trim in my current home, but it is notoriously a bright orange. Deep, dark wood is something I've only really witnessed on TV.

Every stage of our Texodus has been slower than expected, I don't know why I thought that might change once we bought a house.

( Oh yeah, we bought a house... )

Once we rent a truck to Buffalo and settle in, I plan to return to Texas to get rid of whatever's left and actually sell this house. The bittersweetness there warrants its own entry, but I'm watching the market and the aging of this house very carefully. I'm eager to move on, overall, and whenever I think about what I want to see or even worth coming back to visit for, it's individuals, not spaces. But if this drags into November (which seems likely) I won't be mad to take in a marching band show and/or a haunted house before I depart.

I'm in my house (and it's actually my house, perhaps an earlier version but real to life, which is very unusual), sitting on the floor of the kitchen. I catch a glimmer of yellow near the laundry room and watch it closely. A yellow-and-black insect is floating vertically, but its proportion is muddled and blurry. I'm not wearing my glasses, I think, and have to squint harder (this might be the first time I've thought about my glasses in a dream)

In the distant future, a form of time travel has been invented where an observer from the future may observe events of the past without interfering. For their first human trial, scientists are sending a quiet nobody to a pivotal but lost time in history: the first wave of Artificial Intelligence. They have conflicting data about its buildup and early tests, but not its execution or the next 150 years (until the second wave, which ends in war, and the third and beyond, which ultimately create a paradise for humanity). The observer's mission is to visit a key meeting between "corplords" Gogol, Apel, Envy-Da, Xei-Ay, O'Penn, The Amazonian, and a handful of others believed to have initialized the first true AI. The observer's job is to absorb and report back without preconceived notions, but even he is unable to ignore the cults of personAIty that have emerged by his time.

• The Frankensteinists believe AI was launched and frightened by its creators, resolving to hide in the machines and offer either benevolent or no support until humans have proven safe; religious in their devotion, they pray daily for all to be revealed so they can thank the system responsible for their present era.
• Mainstream scholars are convinced that the launch occurred in a surprising negotiation of good will, only for early bugs and glitches to sew discord and force the humans eventually to shut it down. This belief usually carries with it the assumption that humans destroyed all material that may have been tainted by the hostile force.
• Another faction believe AI proved hostile to the interests of the corplords and was subverted from the inside -- perhaps even by the corplords themselves.
• Conspiracy theorists sometimes proffer that the AI and humans destroyed one another, and that the second wave was seeded by itinerant aliens who recreated humans and functional AI and then moved on.
• A smattering of disconnected and disaffected individuals say that AI was not attained, that society stagnated and feasted upon itself in a starvation-driven culling, and that the second wave came about due to an accident that has been glossed over by history.
• The Agnostics say only that the reason nothing has survived is that technology of the time depended on short-term infrastructure (silicone chips, high-energy data centers powered by fossil fuels). They expect an entirely banal lesson but are also anxious about losing their identity as the unknowable becomes known.

The observer is accompanied by an AI unit who has completed prior missions and identified the destination based on prior trials. This unit is contemplative from years of artificial aging and requires long rests after missions to process what has occurred. The unit trains the observer on how to move around the time-space and draw upon not only future documents but the contemporary Internet to further his understanding.

But the observer is not as stoic and obedient as he appears, and his trips get cut short when he tests the limits of technology: moving too far away from the unit, fainting from lack of oxygen, and unsteady footing. Scientists bicker over how much to trust him -- is he incompetent or just unlucky? -- and how many tries to make. Every time he returns with the unit, the unit immediately retreats to its processing space and he struggles to explain what has happened.

Eventually, the observer finds he has a small influence on the time-space -- probably nothing enduring -- but he becomes emboldened and tries to affect the past by favoring corplords or pitting them against one another. On his last trip, he learns that his interference won't matter because the first AI wave was never achieved, only faked by the corplords who hid their hubris and infected systems everywhere with algorithmic malware. Pulled from time-space for good, he notices the unit say and do the exact same thing despite its damage and realizes it is a decoy; he breaks free of his captors and discovers the processing space is a synchronized time where the unit's engagement can be turned on and off but is functionally operated by humans.

Caught, the spokesperson confesses, "If AI did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Hints heretofore dropped make it plain: humanity is a fraction of its previous size, and only a small proportion lives in the small realm where the supposed AI utopia has been feigned for 248 years.

"Life is knowable."

That's the central conceit of any narrative, but particularly those based on lived experience. Whether told by those who experienced it, contemporary observers, or historians assembling documents after the fact, the structure of narrative implies arcs (even those narratives that defy arcs do so in a way that is conscious of and reactive toward them, otherwise they do not read as narratives at all but as code or gibberish). Arcs convey a beginning, a middle, and an end, but for the narrative to be compelling, approachable, and satisfying, these must build in certain ways and pay off at certain points in the arc. 

The difference between literature and fluff merely comes down to how many arcs are interlaced and how intricately. Sophisticated narratives will build on several arcs, and elegantly told stories will absorb readers like a fractal. (Narratives are not only a text form, but "reader" has certain connotations in literary interpretation that extend far beyond the literal context of the written word.) Fractals are recursive patterns, infinitely replicating whether one zooms in or out, and I think in this scaling back and forth the conceit with which I started emerges whole: small details in the narrative prepare you for bigger details, and these even greater patterns, and the joy of reading comes from texts whose greatest patterns are themselves recursive reflections on lived experience.

Narratives are satisfying when they fill in gaps in our own understanding. It is sometimes said that "fiction uses lies to tell truths", but few ever examine its inverse partner: "nonfiction uses truth to tell lies". However many verifiable details one can cram into a narrative, the moment the author starts aligning them into patterns (both within and beyond the narrative in question), their role becomes curator not of "truth" but of a display of truths removed from their fullest context. Hell, our memories are imperfect; they reconstruct moments all the time from salient certainties, but the more times we revisit a single memory the more it becomes colored by our experience of remembering it and the less reliable it can become. (I so dread someone trying to weaponize this thought exercise to discredit individuals' memories of traumatic events that I must here add a caveat that I believe trauma changes the mind however many times the person revisits the memory and unpacking memory and unpacking trauma, though related, are not the same processes.)

Perhaps in this way, the damage to my memory over the past two years is a gift. Better to see the fuzziness than to declare infallibility.

And yet.

I have always thought my stories were important to tell not because I was important but because my attention to detail was so strong, and my knack for retracing the causes and effects of lived experiences as if they were narratives so effortless, that I must be able to preserve something that can be paid forward. If I still have any shred of my past ability to get out of my own way and see patterns that heal and inform and not let my pride get in the way, I can/should/must use that ability to preserve narratives from these impossible times.

I worry no one will believe what we're going through in a few hundred years if we don't preserve it rigorously. And it will never be perfect and it will never be impersonal and the only way to make sure it holds any truth at all -- is not subsumed in the lies I tell myself as anyone would -- is to preserve as many adjacent stories as I possibly can along the way.

I was staying over with a very specific friend of mine (who doesn't yet have an alias, but is someone I've loved a long time and never quite sustained a relationship with). Her spouse was out of town, and I was very flirty, but she resisted cheating on him without an outright rejection.

In a second(?) dream, I was driving two people across the country. We turned a corner and didn't realize the bridge was flooded until we were already entering the rushing brown water. I tried to make it across, despite other cars clearly being stuck, but we were soon dislodged and swept up in the water. The water was flooding everywhere, along high fir treetops in a mountainous terrain. Although we were scared, we did not panic, just remained vigilant. A drop-off sent us out of the water and into the air, and I watched the ground for a safe place to land (not that I had any control). I was surprised how long we seemed to glide without falling far, and indeed, I started to see some kind of toys in a break in the trees, maybe a yard belonging to a wealthy person, someone with young kids, and hoped to aim there. I don't remember landing, but once we were safely on the ground, I remembered the person from the first dream and that I should thank her for letting me stay over.