Hyperion: Stratigraphy

0 .0 mya – virtual particle haze, icing sugar

1.0 mya – high porosity rubble

1.5 mya – tholines, tar, nicotine, fibres

2.0 mya – low porosity rubble, buttons, loose change

3.6 mya – ices (astronomical)

3.9 mya – documentation

5.2 mya – sediment

5.4 mya – unknown, possibly jam

5.5 mya – ices (gastronomical)

5.6 mya – mud

8.6 mya – mud generators (all that is known about the civilisation who built these is they had a highly advanced femtoscale technology and that they really liked mud)

9.2 mya – carpet tiles, dust bunnies

9.3 mya – strange matter / gluon amalgam

9.5 mya – outer core of tightly wound rubber bands

10.1 mya – inner core of synthetic cork

Diplomacy

The pamphlet says that “our mediation service is the most highly sought-after in the Galaxy because Hyperion’s unique quantum-physical status reduces travel costs and waiting lists. Our friendly staff are uniquely equipped by their own multivalent nature to the onerous task of finding a common ground between the most disparate points of view.”

How it all works is that we set the pleroma to pick up the various representatives and wait until it collapses into a state where they’re not actually maiming one another. Then we get them to try and talk it over. Technically, what this involves is perturbing each current active self-state so that it will either find a pathway to some kind of stable ensemble-attractor, or, alternatively, react by fleeing the pleroma altogether, to be replaced by another, and hopefully more relaxed, instance of itself.

My favourite way of doing it is to throw rocks at them.

This morning I’ve got a representative of a space-going species who operate entirely on reason and logic, and an ambassador from a neighbouring system whose culture operates entirely on reason and logic as well. These two have been at war for something like three thousand years: I think it all started as a dispute over either comet mining rights or the timing of certain seasonal festivals, or whether comets could be mined at certain seasonal festivals or something like that. You’d be surprised at how many civilisations claim to be operating entirely on reason and logic. They’re always very proud of it.

The second one just pulled something out of her mantle that looks like a field mortar. Sorry, I’m going to have to go and get a bigger rock.

Ghosts of Hyperion

The Forms, the memory of Nature, the Library of Babel, the implicate order, Anima Mundi, the collective unconscious, the plane of immanence, the Ten Thousand Things: and you think that you have a housing shortage on your world. If all the different transcendences didn’t somehow subsume or contain each other (as archetypes or forms or definitions or implications etc.) it would be even worse and I probably wouldn’t even be able to afford the rent on a crater.

I can’t make up my mind what costume to wear for the Halloween party; I was going to go as a creature which can conceive of its own non-existence but then Barry reminded me that Felicity did that last year and I’ve already done going as myself, which is much harder than it sounds. Maybe this year I’ll go as “the third who always walks beside you”, even though it’s a bit corny. I’ll just take the chance that no-one else shows up in the same outfit.

Of course we have Halloween here: every different conceivable version of everyone who ever will live is here, as well as everything else, including Halloween. Talk about All Saint’s Day. The tricky thing would be to not have Halloween.

Mollusca of Hyperion

Visions of Hyperion

True story: last night I had QUANTUM in Scrabble but couldn’t find anywhere to put it, so I rearranged it (changing the blank from an M to an A) to make AQUANAUT. I wasn’t sure if that was an actual word or a 70s cartoon super-hero, but it was in the dictionary.

Coincidence? I think so!

I really hate doing visions, so even though my name is on the roster I jump sideways into one of my alternate selves a couple of times. I know that this won’t work but I’m doing it anyway to tease Barry, who turned up just now to give me the day’s assignment. Today Barry is a brightly coloured ceramic tiki mug with thick blue vapour pouring over his rim. “Cut it out,” he snaps, and dropkicks the lazy alternate self into me even though my name wasn’t on the roster. I’m not sure whether to get annoyed at myself or at Barry.

The usual rectangle of deep red velvet curtains appears, cutting off the beautiful view of the Rings and Titan. It’s not just the driving and the mess I hate, it’s the paperwork. I’m holding a handful of forms printed on pink and purple stationery which has a border of unicorns and dolphins in glitter ink. Blah. I glance at the first form.

OFFICE USE ONLY 1 Stated reason given to subject for refusal to disclose Ultimate Truths (tick ONE) Subject cannot comprehended UT even with 100% of primitive brain Subject insufficiently pure of heart (or other personality-proxy organ: be sure to check for local linguistic convention in your folkways handbook) UT reserved for afterlife (non-reincarnatory) or higher state of being (reincarnatory) UT withheld out of compassion for subject as it would reveal painful details of subject’s future 2. Actual reason for refusal to disclose ultimate truths (tick ONE) Subject not paying attention Subject unable to comprehend UT even with 5% of brain actually in use Subject completely peaking, wouldn’t remember anyway UT depends for impact on pun which only makes sense in Old Plutonian, really falls flat when you have to spell it out for them UT withheld out of annoyance with subject UT withheld out of embarrassment

Breakfast on Hyperion

Zurek and Paz calculate (not recently — this is fun, not breaking news) that if Hyperion were isolated from the rest of the universe, it would evolve into a non-localized quantum state over a period of about 20 years. It’s an impressive example of quantum uncertainty on a macroscopic scale. –Cosmic Variance

Pushing my head through a few layers of rubble, I rested against the crumbly wall of my crater to enjoy the dawn. The sun rose in the south, hesitated, coughed and set very quickly again a couple of degrees west. It then smeared itself underneath the sky and sent a lazy ribbon spiralling east-nor-east, behind Big Lump, which is where east-nor-east has been for the last few weeks.

It promised to be a beautiful day, bright and sunny but with only a hint of decoherence. A neatly laid table set with silver cutlery and fresh white bistro linen appeared next to the crater. It held a plate of soft poached eggs, two buttered muffins, a silver pitcher of hollandaise sauce, a pot of freshly made tea and the mummified head of a bull giraffe. I rearranged the dusty debris of the crater wall into a comfortable beanbag shape – I don’t know how people can live on non-porous worlds, it’s really very convenient and cozy as long as you remember not to breathe in when your mouth is covered – unfolded my napkin and politely tossed the giraffe’s head towards the southern horizon. It spun gently for a while, silhouetted against the Rings, and then blossomed into an impressive brown and yellow aurora.

There was a small frog where the yolk of the second egg should have been. It turned out to be slightly overdone, but you can’t expect everything to be perfect.