Framejacking

[Rattlesnake]

((Continued from Finders Keepers))

One foot hit the ground.

They were good, solid boots. Durable, waterproof, warm enough. Anthony had read a book once, or part of one—whether he finished it he couldn't quite recall—which explored, in its old-timey effusiveness, a footrace on the Moon in flagrant disregard for things like pacing and plot. For all the associated labor in constructing such an event in the reader's mind, the relations and drive and drama in-universe to etch such an event into its substrate of verisimilitude, the author had seemed curiously focused in a couple random particulars in their exercise of grand, random peculiarities; one, that one of the competitors was a robot, and two, that running on the Moon was a great way to induce frostbite because the rest of the runner's body would lose heat only to radiation in the near-vacuum and stay threateningly warm despite the nominally near-absolute zero temperature while their shoes would continually connect with the dense regolith and be subject to the much more efficient method of conduction.

That hadn't been a problem for Anthony. Come to think of it, it hadn't really been a problem for the Apollo missions, had it? Turned out that a warm and a cold reservoir separated by a good insulator tended to stay warm and cold. And that narrative canards written by people wishing to impress upon readers the importance and gravity of the author's intelligence were prone to a great deal of liberty in their fancy. It also hadn't been quite that cold on the island, by Anthony's estimation. Colder more recently, sure; the ground had been less slippery today, much stiffer to his step, sending a slight, accumulating jar up his leg with each contact even in places rendered up to the sun's pale, bright touch. Probably below freezing then, where it hadn't quite been earlier.

Oh, that omnipresent cold. It was an anathema to every process of his body, making him work ever harder to keep it all in proper order. Even if it didn't seep through his boots quite like some minor character in 1950s speculative fiction, it did have him surrounded. He took it in with every breath, felt it part around him as the breeze played over his face, touched it every time he made contact with anything at all. Made him nearly anxious for the inevitable conclusion to it all, the ultimate cessation of his burdens.

Time and time again, he fell back to the notion that if there were nothing to feel, there would be nothing to fear. It wasn't proper, really. Wasn't his role as the ghost in a shell, created by strings of nucleic acids in a grand and convoluted quest to produce more strings of nucleic acid, to go against that prime directive. He was supposed to scream and cry and beg and ransack his faculties for any possible artifice to continue it. Yet the more he thought of it, the more he felt what he could only describe as a nondescript glow, warm but neither effusive or dismissive, not judging, simply existing. The knowledge that he wasn't born of the Universe but that he wasthe Universe, or some tiny privileged part of it that was aware of what it was doing. He did hold a certain attachment to that, but he wouldn't once he was forcibly detached, so whatever. The present was what mattered by any objective standard, and so improving the present was the only thing that mattered. Reducing the sum total of suffering, increasing the quantity of joy. To attack those who would do otherwise at the source... such a momentous decision, and one he felt he'd never even made so much as simply acknowledged. There really was no other way. Perhaps that, too, was pointless in its transience, but if it was then it was the closest thing to a meaning that didn't exist, so he'd take that instead.

So it went, the old adage that if you put enough hydrogen together in one place, it eventually wandered through a frozen hellscape thinking about the fact that it would, in short time, stop. The prospect that it might serve as the instrument of termination for another. How the notion of torment beyond that of the mundane world had become so common, so universally-agreed on that one might append it in lowercase form to a perfectly mundane descriptor for an otherwise mundane stretch of wilderness. A place where one's qualia went for the most brutal torment imaginable—or unimaginable—to the bundle of neurons it was attached to. How that transport was supposed to happen, he didn't know, and suspected even staunch believers to have no proper mechanism for. Was his flesh supposed to be conveyed as well in some rarefied form that left the former residence of his mind behind to crumble and decay? That seemed to be implied, generally. Which seemed rather inefficient. If the intent was to convey sensation, there were much more streamlined vehicles for that. And if one's subjective experience, which underwent a thing it called happiness when X specific ion channels were emptied and replenished, were to persist beyond the life of that machinery, then it made sense to simply transplant it to a new form of substrate where those channels simply did not exist.

He had no particular expectation of knowing the truth of such things, no anxiety for answers that did not exist. No falsifiability meant no verification. It was impossible to collate and bind a collection of all the facts of subjectivity. Reality was what one perceived, a series of impressions and half-thoughts translated into comprehensibility by the machinery that housed them, flitting from the ground to the foundations of reality and back in the space of a single step,

Another foot hit the ground.

((Continued elsewhere))