Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 21

It suddenly dawned on him he missed pu, the interaction with the book. It was a rule book for the universe, much like a bible but without the history, the cosmology, the dreamology. It also did not feature any laws. To be fair, it was not very much like a bible at all, but it was his book and if he read the notes on his laptop well and dug deep enough in his own memory, he tended to pass around the book haphazardly to cause things to happen in the world.

This was the result of a long process of understanding how to change the world. People responded coolly to objective truth, because most people live by their own subjective, objective truth. Strong words work to fire people up. Tantalizing stories move people, but the outcome is the same: we deform truth into our own truths, strong words lead to aggressive ill-directed action and stories either lull or misguide people into believing or following something. It is the Brownian motion of persuasion; you change people, but the result is still chaos.

Engineers discovered something. If you change tools, people will change their behavior and the world shifts. It is not just the materials that determine what you can build, it also depends on your toolset. What engineers failed to understand is that man lacks the essence to create the tools it needs, only the tools it wants. The first thing Tipi knew is that pu is such a tool, born from nature yet full of artificial constructs. The second he knew was that he no longer possessed the manuscript.

He consulted his hard drive for clues and found a series of Toki Ponist encounters. These brought him back to the hostel ceremony that integrated Joakim with Mount Meru. There was a blind climatologist and some useless poet and a computational bio-engineer. Stitching it all together, it turns out the bio-engineer called Piran was the last to have received the manuscript. He found his phone number and called it without delay.

A purring sound indicated that the phone was ringing on the other side.

"Hello? Who's this?" a voice answered.

"Are you Piran, the computational bio-engineer?" Tipi asked artificially.

"You shouldn't be talking to me or you'll get yourself killed like the rest."

And then he hung up. Tipi had not been unprepared for anything, so the response had not taken him by surprise. He wouldn't be much of a guru if such a telephone conversation would startle him. So he tried again, but this time as a video call.

"What?" the voice said when Piran picked up the call. He had turned off the video feed from his side. But Tipi's video signal was coming through because moments later Piran's video came up.

"Toki Ponist!" Piran said. "What a time to be alive. What have you done to the world? Was this some joke to punish me?"

Tipi had become used by now to be recognized by people he could not remember and face their scorn by them. He had to admit it was not nice, but he could also not feel completely responsible for the hurt he had been causing all over the globe.

"You mean the pandemic? That was hardly my doing, I should think."Tipi's eyebrows furrowed. "As I remember it," Tipi said meaning he had just read it in his notes. "It was you who predicted this using your computer models."

"And your damned manuscript. Without it, I would be in the dark like the rest of the people."

"You're welcome."

"Welcome, my ass. People are dropping dead around me when they talk to me about the matter, and now I'm hidden away. I forgot to turn off all my devices,  a mistake I will remedy immediately."

"No, wait." Tipi said.

"Do you have anything that can help me fix this?"

Tipi was silent. He now wished he had made a plan. He simply wanted to get his manuscript back, but this did not seem to be the time or opportunity to ask for it. Besides, he had no idea what to do with the document. He had hoped it could direct is life again, so he would not have to do it himself. But its use seemed more about disrupting people's lives, which made it drop way down on the likiness scale.