Mirage Mir

Part 1

Tribeč

[[last-bikepacking-tour]] The messenger closed the door and set off on her last bikepacking tour before dawn, heading southeast from Bratislava, along the left bank of the Danube River, through five centimetres of snow that had fallen during the night, almost two centuries before I have hands to write with.

The sky brightened a bit beyond Kopáč, and a few minutes later the strong northwestern wind pushed into her back like an endorsement.

Near Šamorín, the messenger widened the tires to 4.2 inches, providing a larger contact patch with the ground, spreading the weight and helping the bicycle float on top of snow rather than sinking in.

She engaged the bicycle’s battery and started to speed up, moving up to fifty after Kyselica, hands hidden in pogies, deep warm shells against the cold.

When the clouds parted and the sun poked through, she tried out her voice by talking with her drone companion Averkije Skila — about the behavior of the bicycle and optimal distribution of load and commenting on riding position, on breathing, weather vs clothing, and its layering.

The messenger loved this ritual, the transition into the attention of a wanderer, calibrating her body and the structure she rode.

The drone suggested lowering the tire pressure down to 4 psi, improving traction and stability, everything else just fine.

Every metre felt like her first touring days.

The body moving through the landscape, the body dragging them all forward, her and the bicycle and the mass distributed along its frame — spare parts, tools, camping gear and food enough to battle dark models of transcontinental expeditions — heavy rains in the mountains, multi day temperatures below zero, crashes and broken structures.

She had always dreamed of such a challenge, but this trip was different. Today the messenger packed for the certainty that she would not return. That it was impossible to return.

So it was mostly food she carried, more than her weight, dried and packed as best she could.

[[komarno]] Just before ten o'clock, the messenger reached Komárno and finished what she considered the fastest part of the journey.

She picked me up from Donnager, a tiny semisubmarine that brought me from Belgrade with a few other personality constructs.

She hurried to catch the ship, because it was allowed to stay in the harbour for seventy minutes only — then returning back to The Black Sea, cutting the stream at three hundred.

There were other constructs already waiting. They’d arrived/were brought some days earlier, in tiny vehicles carrying them along the river from the southeast, mostly.

Actually, there were more constructs than the messenger and her bicycle could carry and she had to decline a few.

The food was more important.

Despite reduction, the rest of the constructs had to slow down all processes to zero, thus shrinking the substrate mass running their consciousness into the smallest volume possible.

Me, I did not need to. I came already packed, small and hard as stone. It has been a while since I’d been up and running in warm jelly speeds.

At noon, February 24, 2084, the messenger continued north into what used to be Slovakia, along the river Váh and then Nitra, passing three checkpoints before arriving into Great Moravia proper.

It was just as well that the constructs were all dormant, non-active and packed like food. The sentinels made it clear this was a permitted, but barely tolerated visit.

The river route lead straight into the capital city of Nitra, where she checked herself with the Tribeč Border Guards.

The messenger presented admission papers and in return, received both a jar of rembirin and dupačky, the outfit for entering the mountains.

Last, during a consultation with a senior Guards officer — an old, tired man, yet still younger than her — she was presented a construct as part of The Terms and Conditions For Admission and Visit,

proposing and urging The Admitted Visitor and Tour Manager (hereinafter “the visitor”)
to accept and accomodate
an expert personality construct Ziller
to be uploaded into/accomodated within the visitor’s cargo bike
to be connected to its sensors,
in a technical consultant role.

A cop, the messenger thought at first, but felt good about it somehow and agreed to all, did not mind and installed the construct’s heart/core on the bicycle, giving him eyes and ears, curious what his voice was like.

It was already dark when she checked out of the The Guards building, left the city and entered the foothills of Tribeč mountains.

She did not venture further that day, but camped when the lights of Nitra were still visible below.

Quick and quiet dinner of lyophilized nettle curry with coconut milk, pumpkin, sugar peas, cucumber, carrots, broccoli and green beans. The good stuff.

In the morning the messenger melted some snow and warmed it in the camping shower.

She saw and touched her body for the last time in her life, cleaning herself with a tiny lump of dark blue soap.

She lotioned herself with rembirin, multiple times in succession, until her skin began to take on a beige, seemingly intact surface and then put on dupačky, stretchy soft overalls, hugging her body like a baby, even her head covered.

The messenger continued northeast, climbing up to Tribeč mountain itself and explored the ridge from there — Malý Tribeč, Medvedí vrch, Mišov vrch, Javorový vrch, Rakytka.

Throughout the day she drank from a bottle full of yoghurt like material and kept leaving a sip in her mouth for minutes at a time, until it soaked into her skull.

She started to burp softly, her ears popped once and hearing wastly improved.

In the afternoon the messenger left the bike a few times and ventured on foot, looking for clues in relief or just staring intently at a few square centimetres of the ground.

When it was getting dark she arrived at a small dimple in relief.

The messenger lost her voice/ability to talk by then, built a tent close to this terrain bowl and lit a fire, feeding it with oak branches late into the night.

There was no breakfast, only last drops from the bottle and thinking, before entering the sea a river trembles in fear.

But there is no other way. The river cannot go back.

She checked with the drone and determined the most useful approach point to enter the perimeter, got on the bike and started cycling towards the circular depression, some twenty metres ahead.

She made the first ten before noticing the trees to rise, get bigger and further from each other.

And then, the longer she rode, the more the estimated time of arrival increased.

So riding was all she could do now, ride and hope that a sufficient quantity of the active interface particles entered/noticed her body while the lotion and the yoghurt were strongest in her flesh.

Many more hours passed until she started to feel a negligible decrease.

Moving became easier, the breaks could be taken further apart.

Snow vanished and the surface turned into short, bright grass and there were leaves on sparse trees she passed.

Every forty or seventy kilometres the messenger inflated and expanded a tent around her and let the silence lull her to short sleep.

The hours became days, although there was no way of telling precisely, since the day above in the base reality was getting slower and the daylight has changed its color as much as few hours.

Also hunger and all pain in the joints and muscles subsided — only the urgency to move remained, to traverse as much terrain/distance as possible.

Then all the electronics the bike was equipped died, together with the companion drone’s chassis and Averkije Skila had to board the bicycle and share its tiny substrate infrastructure with Ziller’s construct, the only technology working.

The whole expedition was irrefutably inside the active interface.

Very soon the microscopic particles of several substrate styles caught on the bike while manipulating with/packing the constructs back in Komárom started to bloom into diamond or flower shapes, making the bike heavier, more difficult to operate.

The brakes started giving in and the bike became not enough, however cargo and heavy duty it was built.

She could not proceed alone.

[[ainei-aniemi]] Ainei Aniemi (*2024 - †2079) was the first construct the messenger contacted and unpacked from the cargo space. She used to be a vehicular architect/designer.

She assembled herself a body and helped the messenger build a four-wheel cart. Simple at first, for two bodies, cargo and the first renderable items that had to be packed/carried.

Ziller and Averkije had more space, but evidently learned and worked together to help with building simple machinery and sensors, rendering parts out of any available matter basically, any lump of soil.

They gained speed and the messenger quietly enjoyed the ride, because not able to talk yet, her body in the process of restructuring/transmuting into substrate of the active interface, too.

Not much later, however, Ainei suggested they need a better driver to go even faster, so the messenger contacted/woke up a former pilot Syandre Lotvi (*2052 - †2081). He became the third member of the crew and took over the wheel, because handle bars were not useful anymore.

Ainei Aniemi with Syandre iterated the vehicle every twenty hours, tweaking the frame, brakes, wheels, the cabin or the cargo space.

The speed they were able to reach now! One hundred became three hundred klicks per day, but that was the safe limit — even with heavily versioned downhil vehicle the terrain was too difficult.

The vehicle needed a better surface, but there were no roads — so after a mutual discussion, approved by the messenger, the crew invited the fourth person into the interface reality — a construct of a trail builder called Popol (*2029 - †2073).

His chosen assembled body shape still resembled a human, as agreed in the team contract, but adjusted for sculpting and heavy lifting.

He asked the small crew to stop, to break the descent.

So they built a camp, where Popol started assembling a storm cloud and huge dog/deer/bear creatures. They roamed and practised around the camp, a few dozens in the end — Ainei, Syandre with the messenger helping Popol to keep them organized.

After all were properly set, the creatures rushed away through untouched forests below, dragging the storm cloud behind, its torrential rain washing away trees and rocks, with thick layers of soil and leaves, and further clearing the corridor trampled by those quadrupedal creatures.

When the camp quiteted, the crew redesigned the downhill vehicle, so it could rush without undue braking down the gigantic slope.

Imagine them, in a cramped, but extremely cozy cabin of a vehicle continuosly reconstructed.

Syandre at the controls, the messenger next to the pilot and Ainei Aniemi behind, with all the other constructs, databanks and cargo. In the back, Popol with his huge trunk and hands, navigating the stomping creatures, via sensors Averkije Skila and Ziller operated.

After seventen thousand kilometres, the forest biome turned into even, grassy terrain and the track faded, ended.

No sign of the dog/deer/bear creatures either, only the parked storm cloud.

The light outside in base reality of Tribeč mountains, eternally high above, turned to late afternoon glow by then.

Down on, the terrain consisted of ever so wider wave of ridges and valleys. The vehicle utilized their walls for braking, jumping or generally navigating and changing lanes when useful or neccessary.

These were beautiful and scary times, the messenger told me later.

It should have taken approximately ninety to ninety five days to reach the lowest point of the terrain bowl in the mountains of Tribeč. Assuming you're moving for twenty hours per day, at a speed of four hundred kilometers per hour.

But after one hundred and twenty days (2 900 hours), the expedition arrived nowhere near the bottom and it became clear that the ride down the slope is not going to take seven hundred thousand kilometres. Not even nine hundred.

Ziller the rector and Averkije Skila both announced that more like thirty million, based on their current/possible measurements. Maybe even fifty million kilometres more.

Another ten or fifteen years of traveling, if the crew kept jumping and riding down around the same subsonic speed, with breaks once a day or week.

The messenger’s food supplies didn’t worry her, even though calculated for two hundred days only — she could already eat and digest the active interface mass.

It was whether to stop eating them for good and lose the last remnants of human or any biology — which implied Miller could assert a legal claim to participate in how to proceed.

The messenger knew they needed some ideas what to do and Ziller’s made sense, she just did not trust him nor his offers to help.

In the end it was Popol and Averkije, who persuaded her to give Miller a chance at the wheel. To come up with a plan. Both.

Thus Miller the rector left the vehicle infrastructure and its sensors and moved into a body, finally a person, the only one with all the details of real skin and his chest rising and falling as if breathing.

He rendered a guy around fifty, bald and tall, in loose dark pants and shirt.

He proposed to wake all the constructs still dormant and assemble them into various teams for a design sprint, a timeboxed and taskboxed process to define a problem, design and test a prototype — with her visiting each group and deciding at important points.

The sprint took forty two hours and brought following findings and learnings:

The crew needed some kind of drive, faster than the pull of gravity could provide,
they might be able to build jet/propulsion engine, but were not able to create fuel in sufficient quantities,
the local physical laws enabled sound to travel almost four times faster than in the base reality,
so the most promising idea of the design sprint turned out to be utilizing sound frequencies,
since there was methodology and process and precedence by the players the Glass Bead Game,
to activate and move and even restructure the interface bedrock with audio,
to force the interface bedrock to react and produce low end frequency bursts the vehicle could absorb as a sail catches the wind.

The success metrics:

Reaching up to five thousand kilometres per hour,
traveling forty thousand kilometers per day,
sustainably for thirty or even fifty million kilometres, if needed.

I did not take part in the design sprint — was woken up and offered a form only after the decision and project kick off.

So when the downhill vehicle was about to become a mountain I poured into a body.

As if something in some distance could suddenly be discerned, my thoughts appeared. At first only a sensation, of going from one place to another.

When I could open my eyes the room seemed as big as a hall, but it was me who was tiny.

Mostly I just slept, feeling the gravity through my small skeleton and what felt/worked like muscles, gaining mass.

Inbetween slumber I recalled there was no other immediate expectation or a task to perform, only to get used to my body and the self image within.

To keep that self-image stable.

I was left alone for the first few days.

Until the messenger started sending me shapes and written notes — testing my coherence perhaps — and she must have been satisified, because asked if she may visit my coupé, the small space where I left the core case with substrate mass running me and poured into a body, a small one at first, like a child.

I agreed and that’s when I saw her for the first time, crawling into my safe space.

She said, welcome on board, Mira Melko. I’m Diziet Sma. Would you like to go for a walk?

I nodded, gave her my hand and she took me up on the roof.

I remember I perceived no sharp distinction between foreground and background in those first moments outside, the mega landscape was not a backdrop, and everything that happened was a part of the scenery.

If you’d paid attention as I did, it still seemed like a small dimple in relief we were descending and I asked to play there on the top of the vehicle for a while, reluctant to talk and Dizi did not push me either.

Then I asked her to bring me back into my space and let me sleep, but promise to take me for a walk the next day, too.

Every time I woke up we walked a bit further to the back of the vehicle and watch Ainei Aniemi and her constructors there, extracting slabs of landscape/interface and turn it into frame components, remodelling the vehicle into a many times larger entity.

They collaborated with a multicouple of vocateurs calling themselves The Hysteron Proteron Crew.

They were installing sonic projectors, acoustic radiators and covering huge openings with surfaces that moved back and forth in response to signals from the crew members, creating air pressure changes that produced sound waves and tones.

I grew fond of the sound system builders, and insisted that I wanted, no, I needed to stay outside, to listen to the vehicle making sound and wait for the answer of landscape when it arrives and Dizi agreed, seemed almost happy and took me all the way up the hull, covered by soft, long hair carpet material here.

Together with a few of ancillaries, she helped me to create a cosy nook with a view, like a nest embedded in the ground.

I remember when I was left alone out there, some sounds lulling me to sleep and others trigerring tingles and sweet shivers, the flight-or-fight reflex and what being in the womb might be like at the same time.

The bass, so instantly and obviously physical.

I remember waiting for the phase culmination, when the lowest frequencies washed over the landscape, then falling asleep.

The next time I woke up I asked Dizi if I could have a pen and paper.

So I started to write, but not to get things down or out in some mark of finality but to think through ideas first.

The pen helped me, compelled lucidity, as it has always done.

As it helped you, dear Mira.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, that was almost too much to bear for you.

You were preoccupied with absence, the value of things left behind. You dedicated so much energy to creating a record of you and what life was to you.

Contributing one more layer, like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world.

Is that who I am?

An accessory, a frame of reference, an external memory?

Maybe at first, but you have always liked stories within stories, doublings and self referencing.

I feel I need to take this story as seriously as I can.

I spend most of the time in my priehlbinka, hidden in the soft surface and I listen to the beats and waves trying to wake the landscape and I write.

It is very difficult for me to weave a linear, readable text. For hours I struggle to describe a single idea or scene I see the first seven minutes after I wake up, until utter exhaustion.

But that is the only way I can concentrate and write something down. Even though I know it shortens my lifespan. My service life.

I write and raise my head once in a while, to watch the bottom area, still millions of kilometers further down and it feels like the best time of your life again.

Castalia

[[20091218]] The best time of your life started on December 18, 2009, when you let the lights off and locked the door from the inside.

You sat down, leaning against the wall and your backpack and your eyes closed so suddenly you didn't have time to think: “I’m falling asleep.”

You were amazed to find yourself in the dark, mild and soothing to the eyes, a few hours later, in a time of freedom, when one does not cook, shop or clean, when one is still. Only the poorest in the factories made things while the first world rested.

You didn't move for a long time, a body in the corner of a room that you’d never slept in, in a land you’d never visited.

You meant nothing at last, you had no accountability except to yourself and the sentences you would write from now on and manage to connect day by day with each other.

You’d never been afraid to disappear and look for what comes to you in the silence, but suddenly you had time on the scale of months — not hours, separated by weeks of disjointed and fragmented junktime.

You knew you always traced every good thing in your life back to misfortune or failure. You just couldn’t determine what is good and what is bad when something was happening and it was that uncertainty that was keeping you alive.

Because despite everything, you were still following your sense of wonder — dedication to the geometry of thought, the ecology of attention. The cult of learning.

Somehow you managed to stand up, even shower, brush your teeth and find a bed to leave the world again.

You slept through the whole day and woke up when it started to get dark.

The temperature dropped, the rain turned into snow. You put on warm socks, ate a crumpled cake from Copenhagen that survived the whole trip and returned to bed that smelled like nothing, or like Cusarian soap, an empty smell with just the suggestion of mineral water.

You felt certain that you would never again experience a similar feeling of new beginning.

You woke up again on the second morning, to a rhythmic, determined, but muffled sound. You listened to those judicious intervals, and delaying the moment you stood up and looked out the window.

A guy in a mountain rescuer jacket, with a wide shovel, trying to dig a passage in fresh, knee deep snow.

Warmed by air rising from the radiator, you watched the guy and huge flakes for a while. The problem is not that we are alone, you thought, but rather that we are not left alone enough.

Then you entered the third room finally: a small study with a balcony. A desk, sofa and a matching armchair with futon. Soft carpet, smell of wood and flannel.

You noticed a bowl in the corner of the desk, with small clouds above it.

It was not big, you could cover it with your hands, but you didn’t dare to go near the bowl, let alone touch it. It was full of the substrate with active interface, in the shape of a small hill.

You left the room, made a coffee and only then, with a cup in your hand, returned to the writing room, approached the bowl and observed the movement of a cloud obscuring a hillside meadow landscape, partitioned by a few screens of old, dark trees, swaying in miniature wind.

A dynamic spatial model, an environment with granularity of simulated shapes, surfaces and details up to the subatomic level. Here, a piece of interior architecture.

This had to be the moment you felt home.

Also at this very moment, brains from all over the world — coders, game developers and mathematicians, experts in semantics, as well as machine learning or quantum mechanics — were arriving to Cusaria, attending job interviews, lectures and learning the rules of The Glass Bead Game. But in fact and in the end coming to clean up and reconstruct the country after the war.

And to to reconstruct the Dictionary of Cusarians — Lexicon Cosri, as it had been known — to build it all over again, but this time also digitally, not only textually and spatially.

How can we make knowledge tools that let humans work with ideas that are too big to fit in one person's head? In a thousand people's heads? Once information gets large enough, even just knowing what is known, what to search for, what to connect, becomes daunting. How do we scale that?

But you were not ready to take part yet. Fascinated and enthusiastic you imagined all of them, but you could not think of any smalltalk, networking and work then. You were not sure you can help at all.

On the third day, well slept finally, you woke up to the shortest day of the year.

You unloaded your backpack at last, put the sleeping bag roll and mattress into the cupboard, laid out your cosmetics in the bathroom, sorted the clothes and realized it was Monday and there was no daily standup, your team waiting for you, nor any meetings. Delicious and frightening at the same time.

The habit to activate and move, however withered you felt, made you go for a walk outside: at least a few metres up the road, towards the mountains, but you continued about a kilometre up — on white, packed snow — until you arrived at/found Sanatorium Dnjepr.

It was early for dinner, so you were almost alone in the large dining room. You picked a table by the window and ordered a big bowl of borscht. I remember an old lady approached you after you ate it. She was called Nina and worked here as a manager, but also a librarian.

She asked whether you arrived here for the The Dictionary building program, as she called it and you agreed and you thought how wonderful the opportunity was, to be offered housing with no questions asked for months, how cool is that, how crucial, this kind of recruiting strategy.

Nina asked whether you wanted to see their collection and of course you did and she showed you a room full of log books with local dreams that survived the war.

She reccomended a few interesting volumes and you borrowed one.

They also had a huge installation of active interface here, across whole lobby, some of the dream clusters were spread out into a patern of small statues and zones.

A chef passed by as you gazed upon the shapes and stopped to remark that in its raw, unformatted state, the mass/material of substrate reminds muscle, jelly, and sand together, but technically it is cookie dough — the substrate could be eaten.

He was called Andrej and brought you a pack of pancakes, they warmed your hand in the jacket pocket on the way back.

Next day a beautiful routine started: waking up at seven, exercise, making a filter coffee and drink it on a small glassed balcony.

Then sitting behind the desk and writing, in eerie calm, detached from the urgencies of the everyday, accessing the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured.

Writing hard and clear about what hurt. To find out what you were thinking, what you were looking at, what you saw, and what it meant. What you wanted and what you feared.

You wrote about yourself so you could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it.

You had a hunch that focus this deep is a trauma response. You did not care and accepted it might take you a few more years to tidy up your thoughts, to heal.

Actually, those must be my happiest days, too — all those texts and editing work became key data sets and the basic taxonomy of my soul/structure and heart/core.

You never cooked big meals, only breakfast and coffee and went for a late lunch to the sanatorium, reading at and after lunch, next to the big active interface in one of the dark green chairs.

Mostly alone, you got to know few people besides Nina and Andrej the chef.

Then returned to the flat on the third floor of a small apartment building. Learning how to sleep again.

Nine or even ten hours of sleep and snow outside.

Time and again you returned to these days, mentioning them in your journals and notes and tagged them repeatedly with the sweetest of sentiments.

The polemic

You left the flat at the end of January, after forty days of solitude.

The last coffee, watching tiny clouds above the miniature installation of substrate with active interface, as they scattered with morning sun.

On your way you said goodbye to Nina, returned the borrowed dream log books and Andrej gave you a pack of string cheese and flatbread stuffed with herbs, and decided to walk you to the cable car station and did not want you to leave right away, but to drink some mulled wine with him.

And you did and he talked about being a Russian and an overwhelming sense of shame for the world he used to live in, sadness at the ignorance of people who don't know history, and a bit of dismay at how powerless human reason is and how weak are the primitive principles of humanity that he once assumed were innate in human beings.

You managed to take the pre-last cable car of the day, up to the ridge, where you planned to spend a couple of days, at a mountain hotel/observatory — waiting for a group of Austrian climbers, expected to arrive from the Northeast in the next two-three days, with plans to continue to Castalia, until 1992 known as The Castalian Autonomous Oblast of the Cusarian Soviet Socialist Republic.

There should be a cottage waiting for you, booked from the Ministry of Dictionary Construction till the end of March.

You expected cosy and quiet mountain lodge, but to your surprise there were some eleven other people from around the world — all heading to Castalia, all waiting for the Austrians to take them over the pass — since it was mandatory to travel with a certified mountaineer in that time of the year.

And you thought you were the only adventurous and romantic one around!

You kept to yourself as much as you could though and the others respected it — but inside, you felt restless — certain you were strong and experienced enough to make the trip on your own. You welcomed this impatience, it meant you were out of the worst.

Also, it was calming in a way, listening to all the chatter and laughing and planning.

A few more people arrived and you grew to a party of twenty two people to head out to Castalia.

On the way up to the pass you entered low clouds. But the path was clear, well trodden by other walkers. You could have made it on your own. Some six hours of marching, with a few short breaks, until you reached the pass.

Located just below the pass on the other side a shelter waited for you, a defunct radar/military base/outpost.

There were two house keepers and rescuers if needed, Castalians, who showed you all spaces aproppriate for sleeping, with few beds available left to those who really needed them.

Almost all of the travellers gathered for meals, drinks and smokes and talking in large space/hall with huge windows in steel frames.

The clouds cleared up, but darknes fell fast anyway and someone noticed tiny lights down in the distance.

A voice said Waldzell, and it was the Frenchman sitting beside you on a wooden bench. You felt his deep voice vibrating from the backrest into you, as he continued speaking.

About the roofs and towers of Waldzell, the city in the high plains of the South Caucasus, founded by Princess Ateh.

But first about her brother or lover, no one knows, the ruler of Cusarian empire, the lands between the Black and Caspian Seas, on both sides of the Caucasus mountains.

The Cusarian Khagan, as the ruler was addressed, had a dream in 859 AD. An angel appeared to him and said: “Your intentions are pleasing to God, but your deeds are not.”

The kagan summoned three philosophers from different parts of the world to interpret the dream for him.

An Islamic, a Hebrew, and a Christian missionary.

This was of immense importance to the Cusarian Empire because the kagan decided that he and his people would convert to the faith of whichever sage interpreted the dream most satisfactorily.

Princess Ateh was taken aback by the plan. For the kagan knew well her position regarding religions.

Their utility, she declared, is ultimately practical — to unite, to bring together, to cement people in formations hitherto unheard of, to put the interests of the group before their own benefit.

Rulers could build a country as a result, yes, but that was not enough for Princess Ateh. She considered the deepening of meaning to be the most powerful conceivable kind of adventure available to us in this world, more exciting than any bridge or system of trade routes.

In this direction lies a better way of governing a country than through religion — bridges and routes and merchants will follow, Princess Ateh insisted.

The kagan listened to her intently, for Princess Ateh was also the High Priestess of ancient sect of scholars, philosophers, poets, and even state officials, who called themselves dream hunters.

They believed that there were nodal points in everyone's life and that each person should carve out these states of lucid consciousness as if on a stick.

Such moments of peak fulfillment in life were called dreams and therefore they were called dream hunters.

Astronomers have a fitting word, syzygy — an interesting arrangement or alignment of celestial bodies in the sky — but it can be used more generally as the state of things fitting together.

Their devotion was to memory, for them it was everything and considered the knowledge gained through experience the greatest asset you could ever have.

They even used ideas and memory objects as game pieces in a game to determine certain roles within communities governed by dream hunters.

It was called The Glass Bead Game, because the game pieces resembled glass beads.

The Game aimed to represent reality to such a degree that a player's own skills and philosophical outlook could be expressed in play — the idea being that rival ideologies and different knowhows were essentially tested in the game before the winners could apply them in reality.

Princess Ateh argued to the kagan that the Glass Bead Game could be adapted and used as a tool for the governance and ruling of the Cusarian Empire.

Cancel the invitations, cancel the debate and adopt the Game, demanded Ateh. Like no other king you would grasp administration, education, supplies and troops. Consider the plans and decisions you will be able to make!

The kagan had no intention to cancel the invitations and stated that he will make his decision after the debate, no matter what.

Firstly, he craved company, he really wanted to talk about his dream with bright visitors and looked forward to hosting the debate in his summer residence.

He enjoyed the preparations and dramaturgy, the setting of debate chambers and appropriate menus and optimal schedules and day rhythms.

But more importantly, the kagan provided Ateh with much needed focus and a deadline — more than a year to work and think, to refine The Glass Bead Game for usage in large scale governance and operations.

More than a year until the philophers were expected to arrive.

In the late spring of 862 an Islamic dervish Ibn Kura, a Hebrew rabbi Isak Sangari, and a Christian monk Constantine arrived safely at the kagan's summer residence on the eastern shores of the Black Sea.

The positions of the three sages, the verbal duels based on the principles of the three different faiths, the persons of the philosophers involved, and the polemic itself have aroused great curiosity, and over the centuries innumerable and deeply contradictory treatises have been devoted to the polemic and its consequences, to the victors and the vanquished, in the Hebrew, the Christian, and the Islamic worlds alike.

Each religion claimed victory, but in fact, the kagan did not accept any of the religions exclusively — more like distributing variants upon different areas of society: Muslim for the army, Christian for the farmers and Jewish for the merchants.

His explanation was that all the three faiths that the sages held — Islam, Christianity and Judaism — presented three layers of God's book, and each nation (country, group of people) adopts these layers from God's book according to the order that best suits it, thus confessing its deepest nature.

At the same time, the kagan started demanding certain principles, procedures and tools to be used by his subjects. Almost invisible at first sight, but gradually all pervading.

The emphasis on knowledge management and learning techniques of the dream hunters — or The Princess Ateh Praxis, as they were later referred to.

Princess Ateh moved to a secluded high plain called Castalia and proclaimed it a pedagogical province, where she established a monastery/university to provide teachers to the host state of Cusaria.

This place was named Waldzell and kagan provided it budget and security like to the most precious fortress town.

Students were selected from the most promising pupils, both girls and boys and they lived and studied in Waldzell to become teachers, spreading around the country.

Teaching kids how to learn, from five onwards, and gathering knowhow from adults and old folks.

And they taught them all, no matter the age, how to build a personal, lifelong archive — an external memory or a second brain, if you will.

How to collect, organize, disstil the most important/interesting information you encounter, learn, experience.

Actually how each Cusarian citizen was to record their life and dreams, and how the libraries were to store and process them.

So they could play the Glass Bead Game and the best officers, soldiers, craftsmen and artists could be found — the most impactful thing the kagan adopted from Princess Ateh and dream hunters.

Because Princess Ateh and her team developed and modified the game so that it could be used to determine offices and political status within the whole empire.

In a few iterations the Game became so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it was as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeded at the game succeeded in life — the same qualities were required in each to ensure dominance.

The court, the army or other imperial officials played for their positions in four year cycles.

Initially consisting of a few thousand players and through the various rounds, these all whittled down until the final game, the victor of which became Magister Ludi. Master of the Game.

Someone we would call a prime minister or the executive officer answering only to the kagan.

Players knocked out from the main series took part in further games to determine their careers.

It became an institution so important, it structured social reality and for three centuries The Glass Bead Game became Cusarian competitive advantage and the lands between The Black and Caspian Seas prospered, as Princess Ateh promised.

As a by product or supporting infrastructure The Cusarians were building Lexicon Cosri — a national knowledge base, unlike any other on the planet at the time or any after.

The Dictionary many of the listeners came here to rebuild.

After the frenchman finished the story a lot of questions arrived and various details got discussed about the polemic, dream hunters or the Glass Bead Game.

Some architect or sculptor explained how dream hunters turned the most important models, experiences and memories into knowledge artefacts, using a special modelling material.

Substrate.

As scientists can distill a complex theory into a single formula, the best dream hunters used substrate to rewrite a story, compose knowledge into a statue, a glyph containing all content.

The substrate was easy to shape and sculpt, didn't chip, and held its shape. When formatted, it could gain the strength of stone and withstand changes for centuries.

Is it true that all three participants of the polemic received this modeling substance as a gift, to build the knowledge of their religion? Someone else asked from the semi dark of the radar/military base.

Yes, another voice confirmed, and some fragments have survived to this day.

We know the fate of the substrate given as a gift to the representatives of both Islam and Judaism. We have records, and even ruins or remnants of installations.

There is an entire scene three square metres large in Tehran — and a few reliefs and statues in Middles East.

The third piece, the gift of the substrate to the Christian scholar Constantine, is regarded lost.

There is a report from the sixteenth century of a failed installation somewhere in the eastern lands and searches have been carried out in Greece, Bulgaria, around Constantinople, but no trace ever uncovered.

Yeah, right, you thought and drank tea.

Next morning the party descended another few hundred metres and split up.

The larger group with the Austrian climbers/mountaneers continued to Waldzell in a long arc above the line of trees, but you remained in the smaller one and reached another crossroads after noon.

It was your exit into the valley below.

You thanked for the company, waved the four fellow travellers goodbye and once again became alone with your backpack.

The further you walked and descended the less snow you saw, until dissapearing completely.

The cottage was about a twenty minute walk above the village of Amtiskav, in the foothills above the plain proper.

Your own house in Castalia, for a while at least. No signal and no internet though. But a huge bed in the corner and many blankets. The first time falling asleep there you felt as a collapsing point at the centre of the universe, sinking on yourself in recursions and sleep hit you like a gravity well.

The second morning you established another schedule:

wake up at six thirty,
morning exercise routine,
water and first coffee,
start writing around seven forty or eight and last until twelve, with one more coffee inbetween,
eat something, make tea from ku,
then head out into the woods.

They were old woods with trees well apart, so you could turn away from the path anywhere and you did, in a huge parka-like coat you borrowed from behind the door.

You also found a pair of tall forestry boots, maybe three sizes too big. Used, but well cared about. Thick vibram soles, the foot rubberized a third of the way up, the inside lined with wooly material.

You still needed to wear two socks and change your gait to fit the boots, but the sweet sense of concealment it provided was priceless. Along with the coat coming down to your knees and with sleeves longer than your arms, you could last half a day outdoors at minus twenty.

It was freezing since you arrived, but not a flake of snow. Frosted leaves and frozen grass.

You walked, three to five hours and sometimes until dark or exhaustion. Whichever came first. You wanted to live again.

And you felt camouflaged enough and far away from the offices in Copenhagen, New York, Buenos Aires or Prague that you dared to ask the hardest questions.

You were starting to emerge from the shock of leaving your job, status and life, able to articulate what actually happened, how you felt.

You could recognize the colors of panic, shame or guilt of not being able or wanting to continue as the Executive Transformation Officer.

That person who was good at something was no longer you. It was just part of you. And you had to let that part go, for the time being. And it felt like starting from scratch. Like you were giving up all the progress you've made?

You roamed wild boar and deer trails, through raspberry bushes and followed the creeks up to their sources, visited all the highest points around and watched the high plains of Castalia a dozen klicks down the main valley, with Waldzell pale in the background.

You touched the bark of trees and thanked for the opportunity to slow down to a different speed.

You wrote a text to Timrava on one of the hills where the weak signal could send it to Europe: I obsessively needed the data from the failure — to learn, to see for myself which way to move and how. Also, what I don't know, what to avoid, what I can't handle anymore.

She answered Everyone good is torn from someone else’s grasp.

And a day later she added: Pretty much everyone you knew that became let’s say successful and/or happy, had to say fuck it and change literally everything at some point in their life. Quitting their job, moving somewhere new, going all in on a weird idea. You have to be a little bit insane to live a good life.

You thought of your former board-level bosses and your team members, and the dozens of hours you devoted to them every week as a leader, in one-on-ones or in meetings, stand-ups, statuses, and your muscles went slack at the image.

But you no longer wished for one thing: to sleep in a locked apartment. You longed to walk quietly, come back, listen to the crackle in the oven, to smell dry heat of burning wood and write.

And you began to perceive the life and job you left as a decade structured only by industrial time — the social construct of workdays, weekends and vacations.

You realized you escaped at the last minute, just short of losing all sanity and confidence in yourself, while doing dangerous things — fighting for dreams, even though failure was almost certain from the start.

Walks and writing ceased to be psychoterapeutic, you noticed that your brain started to change, started to alight upon new topics and rediscover old subjects of interest.

One day at the end of February someone knocked on the door.

A man, American accent, he asked you to show him the best way to a settlement nearby, since he was told that somewhere around here should be a shortcut and was not sure which one of the three tracks was the right one.

A fellow sabbatical programme resident, as he introduced himself and handing you a package — explaining he had offered to bring the parcel from the village post office, containing books you ordered from The Ministry.

You left the parcel behind the door and put on your boots and coat to show him the track he needed.

He came across as a bit older than you, wisened, but gleaming and immediately difficult to hate. The man utilized the time asking superb questions and made you talk so easily, about the real work of life and finding things worth committing to.

You remembered his remark: Then the only job is to design your life to continue to do those things, no?

But did you have no idea who the man was? Didn’t you recognize Sagasta, the American-born son of Cusarian immigrants, the inventor of the most widely used search engine and operating system and CEO of the company winning the tender procedure for developing and partly building the national geolocation and visualisation network, resurrecting the mythical Cusarian Dictionary once again and better this time?

No, he could do genius mimicry, to travel around in disguise, as a fairy tale king and indeed, the man became the prime minister of Cusaria in three years.

Only after you returned, you opened the parcel.

There was an envelope tucked between the books.

It was an invitation to a meeting, requested and signed by The Ministry of the Dictionary Construction and The Magister Ludi, too.

Waldzell

You picked and confirmed the second earliest date offered in the invitation. Six days of waiting, suddenly fast thanks to the set appointment.

You travelled to the heart of the pedagogical province by bicycle with fat tyres borrowed from the guy operating the village general store, one day before the meeting.

You didn’t take the main road, but a path via frozen forest giving way to long meadows, slowly descending into a circular plain.

Back in the late winter of 2010 you had another five hours of daylight and less than thirty kilometres to get to Castalia’s capital, so you were in no rush.

Besides, you intended to make this ride a ritual, a memorial service.

The closer you got to the city the more exograms and glyphs you encountered and you stopped to touch them and tried to read them.

Hard as stone, very smooth on touch and modelled from substrate, but with inactive interface.

You arrived at the city of Waldzell after sunset, March 7, 2010, during the first phases of the Cusarian Dictionary Restoration Project (CDRP).

Damage mapping and rebuild/digitize estimations. Ten centuries of nodes and libraries, with links and linear narratives broken, destroyed in the war or just generally derelict after seventy five years of Soviet attempt at communism.

There were a lot of people in the streets, young and older and old, there was bass coming from a basement somewhere, smell of food, perfumes and voices again, after so many quiet weeks.

The vibe deeply impressed you. But also made you shiver, at once realizing who you also represented in here, a thirty plus years old woman leaving a manager job in Copenhagen’s Europe headquarters of a gaming and media corporation, deadly tired, more less leaving the town for good and answering to the sabbatical job interview programme of the Cusarian goverment, attracting talent to reconstruct/repopulate their country between The Black and Caspian sea, recovering from a colonial war with Russia.

Because this was part of the deal, too and you knew the job interview part was nigh, the invitation could not be anything else and could not be delayed any longer.

Sleeping in a boarding house attached to the inner wall around the city.

You had a vivid dream that night. You were in prison, in an old cell. You weren’t alone in it, and the other person was pointing out clay mugs that stood on the arch of your cell, but from the outside, from the other side of the bars.

You had to do something about them, it was a test of some sort. After a time you understood that you should get one of those mugs inside, only you didn't know how.

You kept popping up and blending back into the scene in the cell with the window, tormenting yourself in feverish combinations and the other person's insistence, but at last you broke one of the mugs, dragged the shards one by one through the bars into the cell, and here reassembled the whole mug, gluing it together with spit and clay from the floor beneath your feet.

You slept so well in the end and felt you were ready for the interview.

You had breakfast and cofee in the canteen downstairs, A Forest played in the kitchen, some live version and you found an old magazine, article about refugees or abducted children (?) and tears blurred your vision for a few seconds, you could feel them in your throat.

Quick walk around inner Magisterium, in freezing air and slanted morning light, before you entered the reception and showed the invitation and met two interviewers — one Castalian monk and one officer from the Ministry of Dictionary Construction.

Praxis

There is an inner ring that at one point in our lives we are inevitably drawn toward. The problem with the inner ring is that once you are actually inside, the entire pressure is to avoid being kicked out.

You understood this very early and tried to avoid any inner circle at all costs, never becoming a teacher or a performer, or a designer, a writer, a manager. Nothing’s somehow fitted.

Until this day.

THE MINISTRY OFFICER: I would like to record the interview. May I?

You sat at one of tables on the inner balcony encircling a cartotech room.

The walls below and around lined with hundreds of small wooden cabinets, drawers and compartments that resembled card catalog systems from old libraries.

There were cozy reading nooks with armchairs and small side tables, large bulletin boards and pegboards with notes.

A large table with several chairs around it and the tabletop made of a thin layer of substrate with active interface, so that you could use it as a huge screen.

Similar screens mounted on the walls, displaying mind maps and diagrams.

There were a few other people working, they did not pay you any attention and you liked it so much.

MIRA MELKO: Of course.

CASTALIAN MONK: In your resumé you mention familiarity with the principles we live by and teach, Ms. Melko. What are the ones you follow? The most meaningful ones?

MIRA MELKO: A certain way to remember, to write a diary.

Instead of describing a real world event or environment I put into words the story or scene it stimulates, reminds of or inspires.

In time, I accumulated a vast amphitheater of interconnected particles for the events and states I find interesting. In the form of story fragments, characters or scenes.

A paracosm, as you call it.

CASTALIAN MONK: What are your use cases for this practice?

MIRA MELKO: While modelling a story or scene, I usually grasp or solve some real world problem, see it from another angle.

This pleasure brings professional insight and professional insight enhances pleasure. Private passion for worldplay influences professional vocation and vice versa.

The more I experience and learn, the better paracosm I have — and the better paracosm I have, the more amusing and easier it is to learn and move, do something — I have intrinsic motivation to expend mental energy.

And that is the key ingredient — the key ingredient not just for important work, but in fact any work or learning.

A sincere interest in something that matters — to be able to fuck around and find out.

Intrinsic motivation is the main problem that supersedes and overrides all other problems of knowledge or important work.

Any advice on personal development is therefore only useful if one is not tired or burned out.

If we really want to fuck around and find out, to study hard what interests us the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible, then we have to feel alive.

To feel wonder and interest.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

For real change someone has to care.