On Engines

It's all a-headed for naught, I hear. The singularity was a metastability. Now that the big cat's out the bag, the probability of it returning vanishes.  They thought he was a goner. The cosmic Carnot engine's efficiency has a non-positive derivative everywhere. At least globally, I hear.
Then there's the dark stuff. You wouldn't notice it, of course. But it's here. Well maybe not *here* here, but somewhere within a parsec or so.
You know. The distance traced out by (hence the par) a second's turn at a radius of a lightyear.
"Second's turn of what"..? Of like, a rod that's a lightyear long. No I haven't got one. Just picture it. Well then, pretend you can picture it.
No, no, no, it's not moving at any speed! A 'second' is a distance! An angle, really. Comes from the old sexigesimal systems that we use in clocks and planetmaps. Its a way of using numbers that fit into each other well. Babylon, I hear, but now I really shouldn't...
I was talking about death. One way or another, all the work that can be done will be done. The whole thing's relaxing down nice and easy as sure as I breathe. It all rides the time arrow right down to dispersal. It all just becomes too heavy to hold itself up anymore. Whole kit-n-caboodle. All that curvature just starts wrapping everything up.
Now there's the mystery of mysteries. The direction of time.
Ah, are you feeling all right, then? You look, hmm...
I haven't drawn any points. There are no points. What point? What do you mean, "what's the point"?
Existence! Existence is not a point! And it certainly doesn't have them. Well if does, we can't touch them. Subquantum and whatnot. Supernatural.
Hmm.
Well, you can always try Taoism on for size. It's a serene perspective.
Maybe all that dark stuff just cycles out from the light stuff, and all our unuseable energy becomes useable dark energy. And then there's a dark universe for a cycle, which then concentrates matter back here..
I don't know. You don't know. Sure, why not?
Ah, POINT! I see. The point is, who cares? We already knew we were gonna die our little deaths anyway! Oh, now I've upset you. I'm sorry. Yes, we're good people and we don't deserve to die. That's true.
No, no, no, you see the point is not that the cosmic engine is winding DOWN, it's that its WINDING down! If what I hear is so, then all we know and love is in... is *from* the relaxation of higher potential to lower.
But it's in the relaxations
*But it's in the relaxations*
Where all the neat stuff happens!
Look around you now, at this forest! All this neat stuff. Plants grow and are digested, give medicine, recycle back into the Earth, a positive feedback loop of fertility and health! This is the heat death, us, this! The perpetual winding of a spring which releases in all directions as bursts of color! A fire that does not go out...! Wouldn't it be much more dull if the universe were to simply fall into its death as quickly as one's feet to the ground?
They used to think this was a mystery... How could meaning arise from what would ultimately be nothing...? But any geometer would tell you that all the volume is in the "middle," not on the edges.
Of course, the old linear engineering techniques used to ignore it... 'When perturbed, the system will exhibit a restoring force proportional to the perturbation's effect, and as time goes on, it will eventually return back to normal.'
Relaxations were to be achieved as quickly as possible, the perturbations stifled, their sources identified and neutralized. Linearly extrapolating the technique indicates that the universe's history is not substantial to its final outcome... But of course lines can't go that far without curving, bending, breaking!
And the ol' chemists' equations, so neatly displaying the mad Brownian dash of molecules as tidy, straight arrows of eventual equilibrium. Time was, folks thought this was the 'normal' version of reality, and all else was 'instability.' And all kinds of other dirty words: Chaos, disorder, unpredictability, uncontrollability, irrationality, nonsense, noise. They saw it as an encroachment upon what was theirs, the life that they'd chosen. Some unbidden, malicious force that was outside of all human life, trying to get in and disorganize it... Their identities were against it: stable in the face of all odds.
But ya see, they'd defined themselves as 'good' on the basis of their control, which was only over the boring systems they'd managed to turn into machines. After modest success, they began to think of everything as a machine that could be controlled. They'd built their lives around the promise of devices designed to be stable, in the hopes that it would mean their lives, their communities, their choices would remain stable, anchored by iron and steam.
Now let me tell you, that like this, growth did not just occur.. It had to be won at length, working against the forces of security and management just to sprout a single leaf above the ground. Battles were fought on all imaginable fronts. Growers were exhausted, and managers, at least, went to sleep feeling that they had managed.
But there were still gross instabilities. Having fought this hard to keep springs wound, the clock-controllers would surely have felt a little bit silly giving up. So again and again and again they put on their grave faces and admitted that more work needed to be done before 100% stability was achieved. And the wealthful folks who mattered felt a pang of sympathy and worry, touched by the knowledge that men worked so hard to secure their achievements over the world.
In all this, "Man," (which was the way of referring to human organization -- yeah, I now, right? Those were the times, though) yes, "Man" was the worst actor. He was always getting into trouble, having too much sex, drinking too much, stealing and killing other Mans, trading goods illegally, and all that insidiously unstable stuff.
And the High Men, well, they had a dilemma. On one hand, these instabilities probably had something to do with the appalling poverty in which their workers lived. On the other hand, the upward current of aspiration and necessity that the poverty provided drove the engines of petty industry reliably and efficiently.
No, their solution wasn't to look elsewhere in the hope of goodness, but rather drive their engines harder in efforts to control Man himself. If they could force him to be stable, everything would fall into place. But it was not those who sought control for themselves who had conceived of such schemes. Rather, the thoughts grew up darkly from the minds of the learned men of Europa and America. Those who believed themselves concerned with the good of their people, you see, their intent was not malicious.... No, that would be difficult to say... The towns were divided then, between those who had, and those who had not. Those who had, in the darker corners of their minds, found it satisfying to pretend at society building. They were as children playing, with the same earnesty and focus. They considered the problem of the inherent nonstability of organic form very seriously. I suppose I must mention that they had all grown up taught that humans were essentially bad, left to themselves. Great energy had been invested into this train of thought.
But that's a long story. The playing-men wondered: How to stop man from being bad?
The obvious choice is to mechanize Man. The first consideration is labor: His position in the factory was to be replaced by machine. Much more reliable that way. The second consideration was selling the stuff made in the factory -- Mans should make the right choices, right? The third consideration is war: Conquering machines are to be made robotic when necessary, and soldiers are preferably as machine-like as possible. Plus, winked the controllers, it'd make war so much more humane -- machines destroying machines, that's all! Made in factories made by machines! And everything is linked up to the father-brain, which makes perfect decisions based on superior reasoning capabilities! Perfectly raional war. Even more reasonable than man himself. Wars that fight themselves! Maybe we should make the politicians machines, joke the scientist, laughing with a full room of good-natured reasonable people.
If you haven't noticed by now, Man had put himself in a bit of a corner. He'd long vanquished his own father, of course, who no longer had control over him. But now, what was he to do with such an efficient society, which could be started and stopped with a button? What to do with the perfect engine? He couldn't do anything but control it, of course, run it. So he kept it the same for as long as he could. And he made sure to oil it where it got sticky, clean off the oil stains when it got dirty, replace parts eroded by cleaning fluid.
Quite stable in theory. Except machines always end up breaking down. It's a little bit of a problem to try to fix that by making machines to repair the broken down machines, because they also break down. Meanwhile, Man started to forget what it was that the machines were actually doing... He didn't need to worry about it, wasn't that the point?
The body was the final enemy of Man, the engine's ultimate saboteur. He could control the skies and set fire to the world, but he couldn't stop his body from its strange and disturbing yearnings and motions. To abolish it would suit his society perfectly.
It's all true, I am sure you have heard some of it before...
These people, who were they? I have tried to imagine myself as one of them. They were scared of things they couldn't predict, because they couldn't be sure of what would happen. The moment a corner of their empire began to crumble, they screamed that the sky was falling in on them, and the positive feedback echo chamber of ecopolitical insulation drove them wild in their caves. They thought of the whole world as we think of a dark forest on a winter night. In their tiny little corner of it, they had worked to establish a tidy little bit of unchange. A rock on which they could perch when the floods came -- in must always be there in case the time arose!
But the time didn't arise, and their ordered little kingdoms grew stale and as time went by patches, new parts, a nail here, a plank there, also grew. In old age, they grew too weary to maintain these kingdom engines, hoping only that their children would have the sense to take the steersman's throne. A fleeting wish to create a machine that created order, to find the nearly forgotten but sorely missed father's image looking over again amiably... A desire to father a father.
When angels did not appear in machine form, their children did take the throne, in their exuberant and imperfect ways. Sometimes they loved their parents, sometimes they hated them. But they always kept the machines.
With the passage of generations, and machines themselves the stuff of nostalgic stability-fantasy, honestly folks were done in. They had finally completed what those silly old superstitious farmers of old had started, severed the link of their identity to that wild outside world: Nature. The World. Their picture of it had grown so dark and cold that they now enjoyed the thought of remaining separate from it; gentle insects stirred up thoughts just as unpleasant as the cruel ones did.
But now something strange had happened. With no connection to their very breathe, people had lost control of their own actions. They acted on impulses, whims, passing desires, to seek some connection they felt had somehow gone missing. They jacked themselves into the machines, as their grandparents had imagined for them, hoping a direct connection in cyberspace would bring release. Social life had become, with the machines, a buzz of disconnected noises, indistinct sentences misheard, machine fan whirs and solid state storage clicks. Unreadably vague. Fast-paced, hard to make sense of, yet ever-present, overpowering at times, always inexorably flowing. And then cyberspace murderers arose, and thieves, and all those unstable forces of Man that had so long threatened the stability of the townspeople. The machine men tried to pin it down, of course, they tried to watch every bit of it all the time. But there were so few of them, and so much cyberspace to stabilize and their daddy-brain machine was still incomplete. The old men of the machines started to get the feeling that something was crumbling beneath their feet, as if the rising tide of discontent was sand slipping through their fingers.

If you ask me, of course, they were scared of chaos because they didn't know it... Folks are always so untrusting. Worst thing is, that's a good strategy if you want to live... Was then, is now. But let me tell you that our peoples, we have a mistrust which is an illness among us. It claims young lives each day, still. Our people are travelers by nature, who have always been at odds with those who stay put. They are suspicious of us. And we of them; some of them perhaps still seek the machine-stability...
I tell you, they did not know chaos because they did not look at it. Our people live among it, we are not strangers. But they did not try to know it. Oh, there were a few who sought to contain it in letters and equations in the same way that they had controlled the steam engine and the split atom engine. They sought engines that ran on pure chaos.
Don't you see the error? THIS is the engine that runs on chaos, all around us! Chaos is just a scared person's word for the world's mysteries. Because there will always be mysteries, the word always seems to mean something. Who can tell me the difference between randomness and magic?
"Then what happened, uncle? The GreatWar?"
Well, yes, in time. But it was really much more than just the War. In seeking the perfect stability, the would be controllers had been incredibly stupid but too stuck up to realize it. Putting themselves at the center of the universe, they ignored the animals and plants of the world. The smoke from their machines made the world hot, and they had no way to cool it down. Like those old steam engines, the air of the world had became powerful with the fury of storms. The men did not heed these warnings.
The weather everywhere is different now. Before Man, plants like these didn't grow here! And all the animals were forced to migrate, simply because they were not considered important. The World cried but Man protested: "I don't care." But it didn't matter if He cared; He wrought havoc on his own plans of control.
Yes, you know, and I know, that the biofilm is our sustenance. Like I say, it was a strange time. The masters convinced those who would listen that they could all be the centers of universes, and this idea was so seductive that others also forsook their sustenance. This was a bald-faced lie, of course... Or maybe they actually believed it?
Anyway, they were all killing off the plants and animals of the world in their vanity and confusion, killing off the very land which birthed them. Wounds appeared in the ancient life systems; The biofilm simply couldn't support its infection anymore, and it succumbed to degenerative illness. Even cyberspace, that hopeful matrix of stability mechanics, rose to engulf the old men, their old hidden cameras turned back on them, exposing the completeness of their nudity. Everyone saw now that the masters were not in control. They had tried for so long to believe it, but then the world snapped. They lusted after the blood of those who had betrayed them. Panicking, the old men swallowed up cyberspace and for a second time, engulfed one another's empires in atomic flame.
Not too many bombs fell before the planes stopped flying. Their controllers were all dead, now. The machines had no fuel, and they decayed. Even the memory of fuel itself began to evaporate. All those engines, with no engineers, finally still, finally stable. Quiet.
Women and men and children grew frantic when their harvests failed year after year, or were to meager, and they ran to and fro, trying to get whatever they could however they had to. But with little cropland left, the children's bellies ate themselves instead, and bodies grew too weak to protest. Men tried to enslave the world, they told the slaves it was for their own sake, but the masters were feeble minded and decadent. The slaves revolted each time. Of course, they killed one another more than they killed their old masters. There was not much for anybody, you see, and their seeds would not germinate in the new soil. Fish did not come to lures. Bison did not roam the plains.
In the dark period, all people lived like the scavengers who now follow our people. Kings rose, but they did not have much; mainly they killed and sought to follow the errors of the old masters. The memory had not faded, but had merely twisted. Now the old men were gods to the new men. But that dream's ship had sailed and sunk. The men tried to stabilize a kingdom. And it failed. And they tried again. But there was not enough surplus to make the people feel safe in the new towns. They wandered off into deserts which used to be forests.
And the rest... well, the rest is history! Slowly we found the ways of the desert; over the centuries from our ancestors' time, new forests grew. Here we are now. And I tell you as many years have passed as there are humans who travel as our people, young one: Six sixties.

Don't believe me? But no, no, you're much too old for scary stories. But too young to see the old cities, which still stand, child! Time will prove my words to you. When I see you walk upon the head of the Old Woman, I will know you are ready. But for now the mountain must wait -- and so must you, beloved.
You will find all the old recordings in their towns, too. There are men there in places called libraries, who yet preserve memories and write about the old ways. Our people have traded with them for almost a century; they are wise, but foolish as well.
Why I tell you this now, is because you must know. Many young women and men have heard the ancient call to ancient ways... The strange, seductive, separated ways of the machine men. They have lost themselves, left our people, searching the planet for engines of old, forsaking the Grand Engine for one whose grandeur does not make a dwarf of a man's. This I tell you has been our greatest mistake: To underestimate the past's grip on us.
So now I tell you these things. But I only tell you that you may decide for yourself, when the time comes. To know our people and our ways, you must know this dark past. And then it is your decision: To move with us, or cast our family once more into the half-light, to go back and stay put.

Look around you now. Does this forest look like a machine with buttons? Who is doing the controlling? The seed finds it way to the ground through the bird, grows into a tree which the beetle eats, which the bird pecks. Who is in control of our society? We are, you and me, right here. We are society. And all of our loved ones, the near ones and the far ones. And the thieves, who sometimes come in the night, they too are in control of us. But our goods control their action as well: If you set a trap, you might just catch a thief. It's all part of the unwinding. Our people do not know war. We can not; we make no claims to land except to pass over it. This is the rock of our people, but you see that it is precisely no rock.
Of course we have machines once more. Why, you ask, after all the trouble? But there is no danger in a box of bolts! Danger is always in here. It is the hard metallic promises that corrupt minds, not mere cold metal itself! Machines are just clever ways to get things done. (Again and again and again). But is the things which get done that make all the difference!
Do not fear mechanical knowledge; do not abolish this aspect of ourselves.
It is the thought that machines can only be controlled by us, the ignorance of machine's power of Man. There is the danger.
No, our people do not think of such control. Yet we go in power with one another, steering somehow a course through the lands.
I still wonder about those old folks. How scared they were, the cost of hiding it. They were scared of The Uncontrolled, but they were far more scared of appearing scared to their people; they were scared of looking like they weren't in control.
I don't think they were quite like us. The old stories are so strange, so filled with cruelty. They thought it right to hate one another, yes, their own people! Silly, if you ask me. Bad strategy. That is the one part which I've never understood, never been able to imagine of myself. The peoples of the world bicker and disagree, but they do not hate, as they did then.
I guess we can't, anymore. All people have too much to lose now.
YAAAWWWN. Oh, young one. Your uncle has seen the sun set too long ago.
But I've been terrible, haven't I! You came to me to hear of great mysteries, not to hear what is known!
Hmm, well now, that's true. It is indeed a great mystery how those with such knowledge could forget about food. Perhaps you can ponder that, young one, and when you figure it right, you can tell me!
Bid your father due patience in the hunt tomorrow; I rise early for the lake. The fish are moving through the streams strongly enough to pull you along with them! Tomorrow we will have a feast of fish!