Chapter 411: Eighth Merge to 128 Minds; We Slow Down

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 (Continued) to Thursday, January 31, 2008

The point of view is now reverting to the version of me that is the normal focus of this autobiography. He now includes the version of me that the preceding chapters focused on, and is continuing to use the same body. (Those are sentences you're unlikely to read in any other autobiography.)

I now had 128 minds, which is 2^7 so a tidy power of two again, not that it seemed to matter beyond making the arithmetic easy.

During the initial conversation soon after the Voyager arrived in this new dimension, #119: <We're not going to be leaving your dimension any time soon. Those of us that rolled the twelve 6s have had three very painful goodbyes in a row. They were so traumatic we need to take a break. Plus we should let our body catch up to the changes. We were starting to get more information from our subconsciouses but each merge has set that back, and we should let that process finish to see if there's anything to learn from it. We've quadrupled the number of minds we had at the start of the Voyage, and this is a good place to stop for a month or two.>

#13: <I'm sure we're all happy to stay here as long as possible. Forever would be good.>

For the record:

• Proximity is 96 feet and INCREDIBLY detailed. I could stand in the middle of a soccer field and most of it would be within my proximity range. We are two powers of two more than thirty two minds now, and each power of two had increased proximity's resolution by what seemed like a factor of ten, so it's a hundred times more detailed now. I knew of things going on inside bodies down to bizarre levels. I was also sensing energy easily now, so there were very few electronic devices I couldn't detect. Battery powered wrist watches weren't detectable yet, but most other powered items were, almost certainly including all but the most energy efficient bugs, as bugs use quite a lot of power to transmit their signals through walls and far enough to be picked up by the buggers. I wouldn't even have to look for transmitting bugs now, as they'd simply appear in my proximity sense, a nice contrast to the MANY hours I'd spent searching our Peoria Road home for bugs.

• There are 128 fingertips per mind, so 16,384 in total. Maximum width is 64 inches (1.6 meters), minimum width the reciprocal of that, and I have a great deal of control over their shape. Not quite enough to make a single fingertip into an "m" shape (not that I wanted to, that's just an example), but slightly simpler shapes such as an "n" or even a recognizable "y" were doable. I could make a perfect halo out of a suitably sized "O".

• The Blinks Allowed Effect is not a Sleep Allowed Effect yet, at 8.5 minutes.

• My maximum force is 219,000 kg unconsciously, but I'm gaining 160% through consciously trained tapping and projection, giving a total of 570,000 kg (1,257,000 pounds or 628 tons).

• A sight blob canceled when it got 590 feet away, and I can still have only two simultaneous sources without suffering the damned superimposition.

• The amount of heat and light I can radiate is unbelievable. Each mind can produce 768 x 60 W lightbulbs' worth of heat, x 2.6 (with the training bonus) x 128 minds = 15 megawatts. The "768" value was according to the mathematical progression. We'd initially thought the first heat blob maxed out at about 0.75 of a bulb, and it'd increased by a factor of four every doubling of the number of minds, to arrive at 768 bulbs-worth now. It probably wasn't the exact figure, but it'd be in the ballpark.

• Déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks should now occur an average of 4.25 hours apart and last somewhat over four minutes, so I'd be in a déjà vu link approximately 1/60th of the time, increasing my abilities even further during those times.

The amount of force and energy we can produce would be unbelievable if we hadn't observed it firsthand. We did some googling and as a comparison, the most recent nuclear power station to go online in the USA generates 1,167 megawatts, enough to power 250,000 households. I generate 1/78 as much power as a nuclear power station! That was awesome and inexplicable.

[[The amount of energy there is in the Universe is an ASTRONOMICALLY larger number (actually, even more than "astronomical"). A large proportion of which can be tapped because it's dark energy (that just means your scientists can't account for it, which is because it's positioned where it can be tapped, only overlapping with the three-dimensional space you're used to). The Universe is made of Consciousness. Consciousness needs energy to operate, which it obtains by tapping Dark Energy. So the Universe has to be, and is, structured to allow that energy to be tapped. Or maybe because the energy can be tapped, Consciousness is possible? It's the usual anthropic mess. Ignoring the how and especially the why - because even at the time I'm writing this I honestly don't know - my minds were tapping into the Universal Dark Energy source. The limit on how much could be tapped was unimaginably more than the miniscule amount I was able to draw at this time.]]

Weird things are becoming possible. For example, the Moon is 380,000 km from the Earth. At 1 g acceleration (Earth g's), I could fly halfway to the Moon in just 1.7 hours, so about 7 hours for a round trip. I'd have to go in an airtight box to avoid being exposed to the vacuum of space, and I like to breathe so I would go in a box big enough to hold 7 hours of air, or perhaps 10 hours' worth just in case I'm not very good at celestial navigation. I'd have to line my box with sheets of metal to keep me safe from radiation, but I can carry hundreds of tons of material and still accelerate at 1 g, so it'd be easily doable.

Mars varies from 55 to 100 million km away from the Earth. Call it 75 million. Halfway at 1 g would take 24 hours, making 4 days for the round trip, so I'd need to take some good books. I'm almost tempted to rent an amusing Halloween costume, fly to Mars, then walk around in front of the Mars Rover's camera. The hardest part of that trick would be deciding which costume would be the most fun.

Both the Moon and Mars figures are using 1 g, which I could easily exceed, especially once I was out of the Earth's gravity well. Sitting comfortably, 2 or 3 g wouldn't be a big deal, reducing the above times significantly (increasing the acceleration by a factor of x divides the trip time by the square root of x).

I waited the short time required for another déjà vu. Roughly four hours later the déjà vu arrived, taking me to 160 minds worth of power. Everything else was what I expected, the increase in my abilities matching the mathematical progressions precisely. My link partner was blown away by our new level of abilities compared to his 32- and 64-mind experiences. That the déjà vu worked so well confirmed that my mission still had the green light to proceed further, once I'd achieved my objectives for this plateau.

I will settle into my double-life, living 8A's life very much in the way he would have if I hadn't arrived. I'll even enjoy parts of it, as he has good taste in pretty girls. I agreed with his judgment of which were SCS's most beautiful girls, for example, and was happy that some of them were still having casual sexual relationship with me when they visited. We often had sex in small groups too, as a way of stopping the individual girls from getting clingy, that being the excuse 8A used with them, worded more politely.

I won't mention anything about my Voyaging situation to anyone but I will show some minor improvements in my abilities, including upgrading my downstairs study's computer system because I have a great deal of reading to do for my courses and I'm going to be here for a while with minds to spare. It's worth increasing my studying rate because I'll take that knowledge with me when I leave. Showing the computer upgrade to the Williamses will make them very happy, for a while, and make my developing into needing to go on a Voyage more believable later. [A few days from now, I upgraded it to sixty four screens. More than that had some technical problems it wasn't worth overcoming as I didn't have wall-space in my downstairs study for many more screens without getting silly. Fitting sixty four screens in it required mounting them in a semicircle that covered two-thirds of the small room's walls, and "getting silly" to fit more screens would have meant mounting them on two-thirds of the room's floor and ceiling, shaped in a rough sphere so they'd all be visible from a central sight blob. Another reason I didn't go beyond sixty four was that I couldn't read even that many. My brain didn't have the necessary visual resolution, but that was a limit I thought my brain would adapt to meet.]

I had two items on my To Do list:

1. Get some R&R. 8B were VERY much in need of that, and 8A wouldn't object to getting some more.

2. I was VERY aware of my mission. Having déjà vu's an average of 4.25 hours apart, which always started with the other Mark getting very excited over the new level of proximity sense, made it impossible to forget my mission even though I wished I could. Having quadrupled my number of minds since I'd started my Voyage, I was at a stage where I should put some serious effort into acquiring knowledge about my abilities.

^

You'd think that getting some rest and recreation would be easy, but it turned out not to be.

• I didn't know how long I'd be here as that depended on when my learning about my abilities leveled off, but I knew it'd be only a few weeks so long-term R&R games like the SCS project weren't worth thinking about.

• I'd spend more time with my loved ones, but I couldn't spend so much more that they suspected something. Giving them a week's warning of my leaving would be about the right amount of time. I didn't want to tell them before then - as a justification for my becoming so lovey-dovey - because that would be harder on them. Nor did I want them to suspect after I'd left that I'd known for longer. I wanted them to have a very clean dividing line at the "I have to go on a Voyage of Discovery" point. There wasn't much I could do to ease their upset after I'd gone, but I could minimize the things they might worry about.

• The woman whose fault it was that maturing had been invented was on my shit list again because I had apparently matured past an interest in meaningless sex. Recreation by chasing free sex seemed like a shallow waste of valuable time now. There was no point in my making a pass at a girl, or in my accepting a pass one of them made at me, because new girls' hopefulness would depress me. I knew there was no hope at all.

I was too depressed to do things that would make me happy. It was a sad situation.

[To illustrate how sad it was, several weeks later we discovered that 8A had never heard of Jessica Alba. We googled her, and in this dimension all she'd appeared in were three movies when she was a young teenager and nothing since. 8B joked that maybe she was a failed wannabe starlet and would be extremely easy and thankful to be picked up by someone as rich and famous as us, but we couldn't be bothered making the effort - that's how depressed we were!]

Other than giving my loved ones more attention, I started spending more time with my second-tier girlfriends. I liked them and enjoyed their company, and there were enough of them that none of them would feel I was being clingy.

Mostly what I did was my die-appointed job: learning about my abilities. As well as testing the usual ability wish list, I took the time to test things I hadn't bothered testing on my previous two-week stays in each recent dimension. I did so in ways that hid my activity from my families. The following list is partially chronological. There are some overlaps because some of the tests took quite a while, but generally the later-listed items were tested after the earlier items.

• During the frequent déjà vu's, my proximity sense could detect dense matter. For example, if I was standing near an armed security guard, I could sense his gun. It only picked up very dense matter, but I could see it in fairly good detail. It was clearly the beginning of a new nuance to my proximity ability, which further merges should improve on. It was interesting and potentially useful to me, but probably wouldn't be something I could teach to the five-merge Marks.

• My ability to sense emotions was very detailed now. The extra resolution meant that the 'colors' of the emotions no longer overlapped with each other, which had previously made them harder to identify. Now I could sense them individually and could discern a greater number of simultaneously felt emotions.

• I could sense electricity flowing into a lightbulb, so I turned the light switch off and attempted to recreate the same electrical flow in the wire. After a few seconds I got the lightbulb to burst into life, and then it burst into shards. I cleaned up the mess, replaced the bulb, held a plastic bag over the light fitting, then destroyed another bulb. I fetched several more bulbs. The next bulb only blew out rather than blew up, so I was getting better. It took a total of six bulbs to get the knack, the bulb glowing steadily. I couldn't think of a practical use for it, but I could now remotely generate the household's electricity. I learned how to generate DC too, after a trip to town to get some replacement flashlight bulbs. Getting AC power's polarity to alternate at 60 hertz had been difficult for me, but I'd JUST been able to achieve it. Had our power cycled even 50% more often, my brain wouldn't have worked fast enough to be able to induce AC power. That limitation meant I couldn't render bugs ineffective by creating sound waves that cancelled our speech, and couldn't make myself invisible to radar, infrared or visible light. In all those cases I couldn't detect the too-rapid oscillations nor create oscillations of my own to destructively cancel them.

• Could I change my body shape faster than before? Yes. The rate of change was about quadruple that of when I turned into Ron Fisher, about half of that gain came from my having a more detailed proximity view of my body as that enabled me to guide the processes more effectively.

• What were my natural and kiatsu-assisted healing rates? I hadn't tested these for a long time, and was amazed that my body healed something like 15 times faster than Ava's - I considered it her turn to be cut - and applying kiatsu increased that by another factor of 5, making it possible for me to heal a combined total of 75 times faster than normal people. A cut that would normally take a week to heal took me about two hours. The girls and I could see my kiatsu-treated cut healing as we watched it. I could sense some of the larger effects of kiatsu now, and it energized the area being projected into in ways that made the organs work better rather than just faster. I suspected the invigoration went all the way down to the cellular level, but that was way beyond my ability to detect. [[There are approximately 1E14 cells in a human body, and my resolution had about 1E7 'pixels' of information, so I was sensing blocks of ten million cells. Ki can be thought of as a "life force". That's not really accurate, but there's enough truth in it to explain why treated areas "work better" rather than just "work more".]]

• My food needs were 5% of normal, provided it was a well-balanced 5%, "well balanced" according to my current needs. For example, I needed very little carbohydrate but a high proportion of oily food. I tested my food limits by under-eating and soon found out that if I was short of something, then I had specific cravings, like a pregnant woman does (I imagine). The cravings were presumably created by chemical processes too small for me to see how they happened, but they were quite specific, quite demanding, and quickly shut up when they got what they wanted, just like thirst when your body craves water. I didn't know that the cravings were reliable or complete, so after the experiment I made sure to eat and drink well, including way more than the 5% I needed. Excess eating made sure my body got what it wanted, after which it got rid of everything else.

• My bodily requirements for sleep settled down at thirty minutes again. Sleeping is a time of vulnerability and it could be a big problem in an emergency. Sleeping at the wrong time could have been a fatal mistake in the last days of my stay in the CIA lab, for example, especially if it had made me miss the next déjà vu. I tried to find a way to get rid of the need for it. It took me a couple of weeks, but I managed to achieve a two-step solution: (1) I got my body and nearly all of my minds to fall asleep, while some minds managed to stay awake. They were able to proximity sense what the body was doing while asleep, which was several things different than when awake. From that information, my minds learned how to activate the body's sleeping processes even when it was awake. (2) I trained my minds to be able to sleep while the body and other minds were awake. I couldn't be sure I hadn't missed anything, but I stopped all normal sleeping and didn't suffer any bad effects. I had my minds grab sleep whenever they individually felt mentally tired, and I activated my body's sleeping mechanism when it was relaxed. It was easy for it to nod off for thirty minutes while I kept studying.

• The prospect of carrying a mirror around to reflect heat if I wanted to fly supersonic for a long period annoyed me, so I turned my attention to NP-points, trying to see if I could color them white or perhaps blue, to block some of the infrared light from radiating into my sled's cabin. My improving subconscious information flows led me to discover a better solution. I didn't understand why or how it worked, but I found a way of creating NP-points so they didn't let any light through. Normally they're totally transparent, but I found a switch that made them totally non-transparent. Having no matter, they have nothing to absorb light with, so not letting light through meant the photons had to bounce off. That meant I'd created perfectly mirrored NP-points. That was considerably better for my flying sled than colored NP-points would have been, especially because all the other NP properties weren't affected. As a learning exercise, I continued trying to develop colored NP-points, but never had any success.

• Mirrored NP-points was the closest I got to invisibility. In other words, I failed to find a way to get that ability/dream to work. Flying subsonically in a totally enclosed mirror was quite close to invisible. Because the mirrored NP shell of my sled would prohibit heat transfer by radiation, conduction and convection, my body's heat couldn't be detected either, although if I flew supersonically the heat bloom of the sled itself would be easily detected. I thought that I might even be able to fly covertly in daylight now if I was flying high in a sled with a very sharp bottom, like a yacht's keel, so observers on the ground looking up at my sled would just see sky. It wouldn't be perfect, especially if observed from above, but it'd be pretty good on cloudless or uniformly clouded days.

• SURELY I should be able to get sound blobs working by now, either sending or receiving? Nope, after considerable effort, including a great deal of research on how sound and hearing worked, they continued to be annoyingly and totally unattainable. There were too many problems, the main ones being that I couldn't see the air vibrate at the source and couldn't create the vibrations at the destination (human voices can exceed 1,000 Hz), and NP-plates made terrible mechanical diaphragms as they have too much internal rigidity.

• What about more sight sources? I could see how my brain worked in enough detail to know that having more than two sources wasn't going to happen without their views superimposing - but I tried anyway. Proximity gave me something like live MRI scans of brains, so I could see which areas of them were busy. It was easy to gain quite a lot of understanding of the sight process, as closing and opening my eyes for each visual center highlighted where they were, then I could 'watch' them function, albeit at a very coarse level. I could do several other MRI-like visual experiments too, prompted by what I read in several medical textbooks. I was putting a lot of effort into trying to find ways to get multiple sight blobs or any sound blobs at all working, but all my ideas were so totally unsuccessful that they were both fruitless and vegetableless (my sense of failure extended through to my sense of humor; sorry about that).

• I spent quite a long time trying to get my 590-foot maximum range extended. It seemed that I should be able to improve it. Nearly all of my other limits improved by a dramatic multiple, but that just inched upward by an arithmetic increase of 24 feet each merge, assuming the merge is with a 32-minded Mark. It did double if I doubled my number of minds, but it was almost the slowest improving merge-related ability as most of the others increased by a factor of four or eight. Only the duration of déjà vu's increased slower, by about 1.5 times per doubling of minds. Learning how to increase our maximum range would be something that all the other Marks would VERY much appreciate, but doing so remained beyond my reach.

• My subconsciouses opening up more gave me some insights into the process where adjacent NP-plates merge into each other to become a single, seamless plate. That seemed like it should lead to some potentially very useful fundamental understanding(s), so I worked on it diligently. Fruitlessly again, as no useful gains were achieved.

• My NP-plates could now stop handgun and rifle bullets. I had to get them all into position before the shot, but the plates were larger now, making them worth hiding behind. It'd only be a useful skill under circumstances where I knew a distant sniper was shooting at us from a specific direction, such as immediately after the first shot that had hit Ava. It was useful against closer shooters too, but I'd defend myself from them in a more effective way than just by blocking their shots.

• One obvious idea - "obvious" except for my failing to think of it for an embarrassingly long time - was having light blobs radiate more than one frequency of light at the same time. They can see multiple frequencies, so why not radiate them too? [[How they see and how they emit are actually performed very differently, so that question has no practical basis, but it still should have occurred to me earlier.]] I got it to work quite easily. Making white blobs was easier now, but it hadn't been all that difficult previously. I could make a reasonably good still image by getting individual parts of the light blob to give off different colors. It was like using Microsoft's Paint program, so quite crude. The final result couldn't be used to fool anyone as it was transparent. I also tried to make a large light blob function like a TV screen with me creating the show. I did manage to get a stick-figure human to walk up some stairs, but the crudest possible cartoon was the best I could do. I wasn't able to coordinate all the required actions fast enough. I couldn't even split the job across my minds because only the creating mind can control a ki-effect. Theoretically there isn't much difference between having one light blob emitting multiple colors and multiple blobs emitting a single color, and the latter allows multiple minds to be involved, so thinking of getting one blob to radiate more than one color didn't achieve much beyond my embarrassing myself for not thinking of it earlier.

  The source of this story is Storiesonline

  To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
  Log In or
  Register for a Free account (Why register?)

  Get No-Registration Temporary Access*

  * Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.