Recent Stories

Tautologies

By J. J. Mounts-Miller

For Appaloosa Radio

October 2024

I have been thinking a lot about something I read in a magazine. I had read: “Brain waves spike during death.”

Researchers found that in the process of dying, brain activity increases. When it is graphed, it represents a distinct series of sharp, upward spikes. Before these spikes, there is usually a period of low-level dormancy, typically a relatively flat line of limited brain activity. Then, during death, brain wave activity spikes.

This has taken me into an extended philosophical meditation about logical truth and the nature of consciousness.

The Night Truth Walked Into the Sazerac Lying Club

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“Topology,” Senior Officer Q’in said. His voice was not loud, yet it carried to the back row without amplification. “It is not the study of shape. It is the study of continuity. And how to break it.”

He engaged the projector on his wrist. A sphere of hard-light materialized in the air above his open palm. It was perfect, blue, and hummed with a low resonance.

“A sphere. Euclidean. Predictable.”

Q’in made a sharp, chopping motion with his hand. The hard-light sphere shattered. It didn’t explode; it dissected. It fell apart into a hundred jagged, glowing shards that hovered in the air like a constellation of broken glass.

“I have scattered the set,” Q’in noted, his eyes scanning the cadets. They looked bored. They were brilliant, certainly—the Realm of Li produced nothing but brilliance—but they were soft. They had never seen a variable they couldn’t optimize. “You see randomness. I see unspecified paths. Lesson one: There is no chaos. There is only data you do not yet understand.”

He clenched his fist. The shards snapped back together. But they did not form one sphere.

They formed two.

Two identical, humming blue spheres now rotated above his palm. The volume of the light had doubled. The mass of the information had doubled.

A ripple of unease went through the cadets. One student in the front row—a boy with the gold ear-cuffs of the merchant caste—frowned. “Holographic trickery, sir?”

“Banach-Tarski,” Q’in replied, dismissing the hologram with a flick of his wrist. The light vanished. “A paradox from an ancient Earth mathematician. If you decompose one solid ball into a finite number of point sets, you can reassemble them into two balls of identical size. You create something from nothing.”

“That violates the conservation of mass,” the cadet challenged.

“In physics? Yes,” Q’in agreed. “In this reality, we are bound by the tyranny of matter. But in information theory? In the quantum topology of a code-breaking algorithm? Or in the mind of a strategist?” Q’in leaned forward, his eyes locking onto the young cadet. “In those spaces, you can create an army from a single soldier. You can create a fleet from a single ship. You can create a victory from a vacuum.”

He straightened his tunic. “But you are not here to learn philosophy. You are here to learn how to weaponize infinity.”

===

Story has ten chapters.

Season of Light

By Linda Villatore

Before dawn, I peeked out my bedroom window. All was still.

A sanctifying snow had fallen overnight, blessing the trees, muffling all sound. On that cold Christmas morning, the air was clean, even and calm.

The oddest thing was the light. The trees and misty sky were blurred in powdery blue… everything outside was resting, effervescent and blue.

I opened my eyes wide to a surprising peace, wondering at this blue. I woke my little sister so she could look out with me.

The tranquility was almost blue enough to quell her Christmas excitement. Not quite. Urgent to unwrap presents downstairs, she tugged at my sleeve. “Let’s see what’s under the tree!”

Down we went.

As I had wished, Santa left a heavy box for me. Ice skates!

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THE RIDE

In June 1979, two brothers drive an electrical contractor’s work truck up to the Mojave Desert from Huntington Beach, California.

They could not be more different. Professor Tomar Hinton is an “up and coming” philosopher now teaching at an exclusive private university in North Carolina. His younger brother, James, is an electrical contractor leading a crew which is constructing huge windmills on the crest of the desert’s mountains. Tomar has returned to his parents’ home to facilitate the funeral arrangements for their father. James offers his older brother use of the contractor’s work truck, but still needs a ride up to the work site.

The trip up to the desert worksite will take three and a half hours and begins at an “ungodly” hour in the middle of the night. There is no radio in the old truck, and the brothers are forced, as a result, to talk with each other.

An intimate, yet powerful story, of communicating across vast differences.