Dedicated to the memory of Darkroom Pete,

and of all the neurohackers who were, are and will ever be walking the Earth, and beyond…

Note of the Editor

From Wiki (Vida 80) - "The expanding universe model was corroborated by Edwin Hubble's 1929 (old code calendar) observations. Independently deriving these equations in 1927, Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest suggested, on the basis of the recession of spiral nebulae, that the universe began as a simple "primeval atom" — now known as the Big Bang."

That’s why, as a conventional and deliberately arbitrary choice, the calendar we'll use considers the middle between those dates of the “old code” gregorian calendar as its origin, and it also shifts the beginning of the year to make it coincide with the beginning of the new ascending phase of the sun, that is to say on December 22nd. In other terms: 22.December.1927 [GC] = 01.Auro.01 [DEC]. The four phases of the Dawn Era Calendar being: Auro, Vida, Sola and Narke. Therefore, if I get my math properly, and keeping in mind the origin is not the year ‘0’ but the year '1', this document has been created on 87.Vida.80 (sorry for any prior erroneous calculations…). It simply means it was the 87th day of the Vida phase on the 80th year of existence of the Universe as we see it, which is often stated with the usual notation after the date in the DEC, the abbreviation 'aBBm', which stands for: "after Big Bang model".

Ignition: Earth – 87.Vida.80 (aBBm)

Last Update: 64.Sola.82

Preface

At first, it was Darkroom Pete’s spirit, in an ultimate feat of supreme folly, which initiated this whole idea. The medium was composed of an old friend whose name will remain unspoken, of Johnny Mnemonic and of Scalino Corleone di Napoli. Then, because it was a brilliant idea, a large number of neurohackers from all around the world thought it might be a good idea to participate and hopefully the future will show us they've slowly, patiently, and elegantly enriched it. This work - still in progress - is their work. It is a collection – and a recollection – of short stories. They are about Intelligence, in all the forms we were able to witness and spot out there - in any kind of humanly experienced situations - and gather in here. They may constitute the most sincere expression of our collective spirit.

Needless to say we knew right from the start that this list wouldn’t be exhaustive; well, it will never be. In fact, this is the greatest trick of Intelligence in its journey toward infinity: it grows on it...

However it is not, by far, the only one

Prolog - "Spark of Light" by an Old Friend...

Pic. 1: Earth

...In space Earth seems a cool gleaming blue pearl, a CGI trick on a darkened set, and from a distance one might never imagine that it is alive...

...I was looking at pictures of the Earth from a distance, when I received an email from Scalino... Perhaps this won’t fit into the story genre itself but I’d like to share it anyway, because I applied Scal’s questions in real time to what I was thinking about...

- Who is the teller of the story here?

History, or intelligence, or me, depending on how you look at it...

- Who is the observer of the events? Who is/are the main character(s) involved in the events?

All life capable of observing and interacting has been a part of this particular story...

- The date / the place / the area...?

…The spark of light first appeared in the sea almost four billion years ago in the form of single-celled life. In an emergence of life taking millions of years, nature’s first multi-cellular organisms began to multiply wildly, and then it stopped...

...Around 450 million years ago a great mass extinction would kill off nearly every species on the planet leaving the vast oceans decimated and empty. Slowly plants began to evolve, then insects, only to be wiped out in the second great mass extinction upon the earth...

...The cycle repeated again and again, reptiles emerging independent of the sea only to be killed off, then dinosaurs struggling to life along with the first birds and flowering plants; their destruction –possibly by meteorite strikes and/or volcanoes, earth’s fourth and fifth great extinctions...

...Against the odds, again and again, life emerged and struggled towards entelechy. Only 100,000-400-000 years ago Homo Sapiens appeared. From cave paintings to books to nanomedicine and the ISS, humans have been a tireless force upon the earth and off, studying the natural world as it unfolds, working with intelligence and interaction to overcome the limitations of evolution itself, giving birth to people with minds like yours; bavarians, neurohackers, dreamers, creators, entrepreneurs and wanderers, who will carry it into the future; all descended from that original single cell, that first spark of life...

...Which brings me to Scalino’s other question...

- What did s/he learn from it?

...I learned that just out there in the wild, in some fraction of a second, some spark of light did change the predictable outcome of the event...

Slot 01 – Darkroom Pete by Alex Ramonsky

• Observer: Alex
• Main Character: Pete
• Location and Date: London – United Kingdom – 48 (aBBm)

I met Pete in London when I was 17. I was moving in to an apartment in London and as the furniture was being delivered, I couldn't help notice a young lady from the apartment next door, dressed only in a short red nightie, banging on the door of the (communal) bathroom shouting "come out, you obtuse bastard". The 'obtuse bastard' in the bathroom turned out to be Pete, and the scantily-clad young lady was his girlfriend.

Traditionally one goes round the apartment next door to borrow milk, tea etc. when one has just moved in, and that's really when I met them properly because they invited me in for dinner and talked my ass off. The bathroom, I found, doubled as a darkroom (in the olden days you used to have to take photographs with rolls of film that you developed yourself in trays of chemicals, or got a pharmacist to do it) and Pete was a photographer. So the bathroom was off-limits when films were being developed and you had to use the one upstairs.

I was working in Kingsbury Hospital at the time, and Pete from then on never went short of chemicals : ) Pete introduced me to photography, decent cannabis, my first LSD, the politics of having no politics, and the hassle of trying to live a life with no hassle. We moved together to a shared house in London and spent three happy years there, after which we all moved to different locations, but visited each other often... ...there is one public house in England that I have never been in not tripping, and it's Pete's fault. All my memories are laced with much laughter. A typical 'Pete' excerpt: we're walking home from said pub, and a public phone box is ringing on th street. Pete answers it and it's some teenage girl saying, "is Mikey there?" Pete says, "Nope, this is the FBI. Mikey's number is -(and gave his own phone number) then we ran back to his house where of course the phone was ringing, he picked it up and the girl said "Hello is Mikey there?" Pete says "Nope, it's the FBI again...we know what you're doing, and we know who you're doing it with" and hangs up.

Pete did photographic work for the navy (but never joined), various magazines, and later when he went into video, documentaries for all kinds of people. His work took him to locations around the world, and into adventures like accidentally chatting up a transvestite, 'road running' (racing on foot across the tops of cars in traffic jams) in Singapore, being arrested in Italy for conspiring to cheat a casino (he wasn't) and (with me) setting up the original Entelechy Institute (which I now find myself chair of), and becoming an 'open source' video pirate (in the olden days when movies still came on video).

Pete hated the media, publicity, hype, nosiness and hassle. He stood for our right to privacy and personal confidentiality, and worked steadfastly to fuck up public databases, inserting names like "Mr Umbadingi Wartflap, South Africa" in Barclay's bank payroll, for example. His hacking was always purely and simply for a laugh. It was Pete who made the Spice Girls bald on their very first website. It was Pete who portrayed the Pope with a christmas tree shoved up his ass on the Christian Foundation website...and it was Pete who took out London's County Hall computer system leaving employees with the screen message "you fathead" for a whole afternoon. He was a gentle person with a great sense of fun, gregarious, honest and always somehow shy. In later years he travelled around Australia, filming most of the landscape on DVD. Nobody knows why.

If you would like to honor Pete's memory, his advice was "have yourself a good time"   he would have been horrified by the idea of a public memorial, so please don't do that.

Slot 02 - “Crayon Soap” by Johnny Mnemonic

• Observer and Main character: Johnny himself
• Location and Date: Mnemo’s bed in flight, Vida 74 (aBBm)

This will probably be a fun discussion. It's about one of the most wonderful drug experiences that I have ever had. Unfortunately, I know not what it was. So, as a fun little jaunt down the rabbit hole of the unknown, I invite whoever is willing to join me as we scientifically

deduce the possible composition of this wonder drug.

I found myself in another visual field altogether. My new surroundings were basically devoid of any colour or form until the moment that I had a thought. When that though occurred to me, as an amorphic form of muddled colour, it was instantly cast out into the void and splattered onto the canvas of this mindscape. I thought again with a bit more clarity this time something with shape and colour, and again it projected out to fill up the void. A red circle, a blue square...the exact colours and shapes were not important. What mattered was that anything I though manifested into this personalized world. The more things I thought the better I became at controlling the thoughts and the more detail the resulting manifestations became. There was suddenly a mountain off in the distance and palm trees in the foreground, all of my own creation. Then there was a dog sled manifested instantaneously right in front of me.

While playing with creating the details of the sled, my ability to do so began to slow. At this point, I could tell that the effects of the drug where wearing of, because I was pulling away from this colourful canvas of a world. As I drew ever farther away from it and back into reality, two objects appeared from the periphery of my vision; a golden coin entered from the left and a pair of blue circular-lenses spectacles entering from the right merged in the middle and at that moment I was conscious again at the table where I had taken the drug.

So that's what I have to go on. It would be really cool if we could figure out what this was made of and maybe actually make it. It could have a big impact on the way we view the world around us.

This experience taught me that each of us has a big part to play in what surrounds us in this world. Our thoughts are literally cast out from our minds, whether internally or externally to manifest our desired reality. The two merging images at the end taught me the importance of

having a clear vision for what to do and the resources, financial or otherwise, to bring it to fruition.

Slot 03 - “The Awakening of Detti” by Le Scal

• Observer: Tine
• Main character: Detti
• Location and Date: South of France - Vida 80 (aBBm)

That other day, in the afternoon, Liette and I were playing in the garden, our mother Detti was seated with her father who had come a long way to see us all; they were drinking fresh fruit juices. Our father Aton was proudly riding a weird noisy machine intentioned to prevent grass to reaching its intended height. Well, I mean, why don’t they let it grow? It won’t reach the sky anyway.

My mother has lived some hard times lately; she had a car accident and all… Although I could say that - I don’t know very well why though - today she’s much lighter than she was before. I feel that she had to face terrible things; one day, in her eyes, I had the impression to catch something which sounded like broken glass. It made me wonder why. Maybe she had forgotten that she will die, and then, at this very moment, she remembered…

Suddenly I heard the door’s bell, so I went there (carefully followed by my older sister…) to see who it was.

It was the Scal! Liette and I were very pleased to see him, we hadn’t in a while. He gently kissed us, and asked us if we were fine. We were. Then we led him to our parents, who were right behind the house from where we were starting. It was so cool to see Scal, but then I thought that he wasn’t coming very often. I mean… I know him since… since err… I’ve always known him actually, he saw me being born! So yeah, I know somehow he’s always with me. But he could come more often, that’s all…

We turned around the first corner of the house, and then, leaving Liette and Scal a few meters behind, I ran around the second corner towards my mother, to tell her: “someone is here”. She paused a fraction of a second and replied: “Le Scal”! Then I looked back and Scal was just coming out of the second corner, surprised by my mother’s guess, and he launched: “Oh yes, beautiful Detti!” And they smiled to each other… For a little moment, I wondered how she could have known it was him before actually seeing him; but well, as I said, she’s much lighter now. I guess she has found her ways…

Then, after a while, at some point in the usual conversation, Scal suddenly told me he had to sketch me one of these days. I asked him why, and he said: “I want to write a story where you would be one of the characters. And I might need to draw pictures of you to tell that story. It might take me some years though, and I have to catch you as you are now.” He paused a bit and then added: “You know… you are quite perfect as you are now, don’t ever change anything. Although, that’s maybe the most difficult thing to accomplish, in this world.” I looked at my mother, and she seemed to agree, well... she was smiling. I was blown… and delighted! Le Scal rocks!!

He stayed with us much longer than usual, that day…

Slot 04 - “Moments of Stunning Interaction” by Alex Ramonsky

Observer: Alex

Main character: Cakey

Location and Date: United Kingdom - 40 (aBBm)

The year was 40 (aBBm). I was nine years old, spending the day with "Cakey" (Biker Tetty's partner). Cakey was a "television specialist", one of the first people to have such an occupation -basically he fixed TVs and other electrical stuff, and had a little workshop I used to love to hang out in. It was really cosy and friendly and warm, and Cakey & Tetty were probably the closest thing I had to parents, so I loved it there. 

This particular night we were staying up late as Cakey was finishing off a job, and we had a paraffin heater on because it was a wet, cold night. This enormous drunk bloke suddenly staggered in the unlocked door, soaking wet, bits of blood and glass all over him, holding a baseball bat. I froze, but Cakey visibly relaxed and smiled. He said "Alright mate! It's a bit crappy out there, innit? -Make us a cup of tea Alex." I thought he knew the guy so I made tea. 

Cakey walked over and shut the door behind the guy, put his arm round him and led him to the fire. "You sit yourself down mate," he said, "get warm, and we'll have some tea. Good excuse for a bit of cake." (Cakey always had lots of cake; hence the nickname). The bloke sat on the chair and I sat on the floor next to the heater. He put his baseball bat down and drank his tea. Halfway through Cakey offered him a bit of whiskey in it and he accepted. As we ate cake, the man started to cry. Cakey said nothing, but patted the guy on the shoulder and started to roll a joint. He sat and smoked it, and handed it to the man, who smoked it too. Cakey put the radio on playing some soft blues, and rolled another one, after which the bloke fell asleep. 

Cakey wrote on a sheet of paper, "Gone to bed, help yourself to tea", and left the workshop open with the heater on and the bloke sleeping in it and we went home on Cakey's motorbike. At their house I asked who the man was, and Cakey said "Haven't got a clue." 

I didn't really understand what had happened, and the next morning the man was gone. Nothing was missing except the rest of the cake. At about lunchtime at the workshop we had a visit from the police. Some guy had gone mental and killed his parents, and run away. The description of him fitted our drunk wet guy, who apparently had left a trail of destruction with his baseball bat, whacking shop windows, cars, and a couple of people coming out of pubs who were now in hospital. 

I still didn't get it, until we heard the whole story. The bloke had gotten steaming drunk and lost the plot, been fighting, and when he returned home his (strict christian) parents had freaked, threatening to call the police and screaming and yelling. A general punch-up with his father had resulted. His imbalance had been equalled by theirs; his action getting a reaction that set up a chain of events leading to their deaths. They had added their panic and fear to his own and all reaped the unpleasant rewards. He was totally freaked by what had happened and had run, taking out his fear on anything remotely in his way, and eventually found the workshop up a little backstreet…

.…And stepped into a different universe. Cakey had greeted him with genuineness, empathy and unconditional positive regard, and his panic found (instead of mirroring) unquestioning understanding, calm, and gentle fearless kindness. Cakey's state of mind ruled the space in which he stood, and the guy found himself enfolded by Cakey's matrix, wrapped safely in sanity. His reason began to return and he cried, and was comforted quietly and with dignity. 

Cakey was not pretending to be unafraid, strong and loving; he was all those things. He was a solid rock inside a whirlwind of nonsense, an anchor to the real, a walking matrix. He could value people without condoning or even acknowledging their behaviour, because he knew that when people got caught up in stupidity and fear, crazy shit can happen. And it wasn't _his_ shit, so why should he join in? 

This is why, before I defined Matrix theory I used to call interaction "Cakey Space" : )

... (Slots 05 / 06 / 07 in preparation or author's approval awaiting status)