Mysterious Logbook



The Mysterious Logbook is the journal of Clovis Bray I, included in the Beyond Light Collector's Edition. It contains entries on a variety of topics, including Europa and information relating to the moon, as well as Exos. Based on the appearance of the pages, the journal is in decent condition, despite its likely age. There are at least 46 pages within the journal, with the final pages seemingly ripped out.

Text in this color indicates Clovis Bray I's handwritten notes.

-01-


PERSONAL LOG

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) -rng_seed(AM_241) -echo(HANNU:quartz) 

-02-
A new start. A clean page for a most important story.

Hannu II is aerobraking around Jupiter. The lord of planets thunders his greeting to me. As I record this, I am blasting Aivanti-3's "Siegfried in the Storm Wall" over the radio howl of the Jovian magnetosphere. It galvanized me. I am with the gods.


 * Ask Aivanti's trainers how they settled on the 1/2/3 suffixes. Numbers are perfectly
 * defined, therefore inhuman. Is this suffix meant to mark the Aivanti AI as nonhuman?


 * Objective: construct long-term scientific
 * outpost for study of indigenous Europan life.


 * Resources: eight prefab starter habitats, 
 * 600 shielded heavy work frames, and VIS(NU) 
 * and B-RA/MA cytomachines with backup
 * replication chambers aboard Hannu. The best
 * hazardous-environment engineers money can't
 * buy. SMILE support for extended duration.
 * Two of Elisabeth's Eon-type platforms for
 * radar, Lidar, and deep ice mapping.


 * Hazards: Lethal radiation environment (heavy
 * ion bombardment from Jovian magnetosphere).
 * Unshielded crew half-Life is 24 hours.



The most expensive lie in human history. I am not here for a safari. All of Europa's life will soon be known, mapped, and exhausted of wonder. Bound by the tedious constraints of physics and biology. I know these things too well. They are already killing me.

The Kl artifact promised me an offering. A gateway to the secret of immortality. I call it Clarity.

It is waiting on Europa.

I am still dying, but not fast enough to kill me.


 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 35.9 C. Pulse 25 BPM, strength
 * good. BP 75 over 50. Resp 6 breaths/
 * minute. Pulse ox 210%. Today's blood mix is
 * perfluorocarbon with stem slurry.
 * Avoid hyperfocus with alpha-wave brain wash
 * for 10 min/hr.
 * New kidneys are growing in Whitford the deli
 * pig for next transplants.



-03-
Must find a good pork recipe so Whitford will not go to waste. Medical team insists I accept cytomachine injections. No! Nothing enters my body that does not share my genetic self-interest. Instead I will grow an upgraded monocyte strain.

Elisabeth's birthday approaches. A good gift would be an olive branch. Never let her say I do not try. Hannu, please identify a gift that only could come from my own intimate and personal knowledge of my granddaughter.


 * GIFT SUGGESTIONS:
 * Antique weapon, or Twin Eagle replica.
 * Professional pilot trained on Eon-series ship.
 * Bespoke AI writer of personalized novels.
 * Fruit basket, Titan farmed.
 * Humanitarian investment (minefield
 * clearance, long-term reparations, anti-
 * traumatic medicine).



These are pathetic, Hannu.


 * REVISED GIFT SUGGESTIONS:
 * Research endowment, medical (prion diseases
 * in persons with immune resistance to
 * recombinant gene therapy).
 * Research endowment, medical (sporadic
 * fatal insomnia). • Research endowment,
 * psychological (loss of father, family
 * trauma).
 * Research endowment, psychological
 * (reconstruction of trust after Loss).
 * Personal apology, unpracticed (death of
 * patient in physician's care).
 * Statement of grief, unpracticed (death of
 * son). 



Never mind, Hannu. Buy a few doghives for a soil reclamation project somewhere. Honeybees, whatever strain is best. And big friendly Newfoundlands for the hives. Everyone loves doghives.

-04-

 * Ongoing projects:
 * Exomind: blocked
 *  Contact ICoV for their trick: failed 
 *  Hire Duane McNiadh away from ICOV: failed 
 * Raid ICoV for Vex data: in planning
 * Europa/Clarity: in progress
 * Be a good man and a good grandfather:
 * in progress
 * Become LUCA of future human thought:
 * in progress



-05-
If we land too hard on Europa, we will plunge into the ocean below the ice and die of barotrauma. Death by pressure.

The only light down there comes from magma and phosphorescent bait. The sea is 10 times deeper than Earth's. Even in Europa's weak gravity, peak pressure at the sea floor is 2000 atmospheres. Worse than Venus, before the Traveler.

One imagines pi contracting under that kind of pressure, crushing the perfect circle closed.

I wonder what lives down there. What slow confusions of mass and form curl around the smoking vents. What threads of pale flesh slither across dark miles, like nerves in some vast, cold brain.

Did the Traveler bypass Europa and Titan and Enceladus out of respect for their native life?

Or was it afraid to touch the things pulsating below the ice?

-06-
 //-update(-echo(HANNU:quartz, SITEX:mistletoe)) 

On Europa. We lurk like summer vampires in the caskets of our SMILE pods. Our frames labor on the ice, building a cathedral to the sciences. Radiation is very bad outside; even my assistant has taken ion damage out there. Pleased to see him healing flawlessly, vacant and empty as he is.


 * What if this perfect self-repair is the REASON the exos degrase?

I sulk in isolation as the crew works. My pride is wounded. Did I expect Clarity to come out and greet me? "Hail to Clovis Bray, first among men?" Yes, absolutely, I did! The lunar artifact promised me a solution to the indifference of the cosmos. It told me I was unlike all others--and, damn false modesty, damn vanity, I am different! Not for my present qualities, but for my future influence. I shine with noon's light, reflected back through time to this age of dawn.


 * Perhaps the mind heals itself still, and this causes the billboarding,
 * the stereotyped behavior,

I'm going to be the LUCA of all interstellar human civilization.


 * the final crash.

It is a mistake to imagine that the Greatest Man, the God-Emperor of History and Ruler of Circumstances whose influence reaches to the end of time, will live in the future--in the full flowering of human glory. That man lives NOW, at the tiny bottleneck before the vast explosion, when it is still possible for an individual's decisions to touch the entire species and set the course of all future choice.


 * Self-maintenance so absolute that it becomes a static loop? Investigate.

I said all this in my book, but my son's book still sells better. I suppose because Clovis Points is a much more approachable title than Competitive Immortality Through Primogeniture of Future-History Ontogeny/Rephylogeny (PFHOR). My son's work appeals to those intellectual infants in the retronationals, and to the parasites on Common Compassion support.

Obviously they prefer the softened, pre-chewed version of the truth. And there is also that bump of public sympathy for a dead man...

Yet I cannot deny that, in simplifying my legacy, my son has improved its reach. He was the one to formulate the famous two-sentence summary of PFHOR: "Most of our energy should be spent in support of the things that are most like us. This is the only true responsibility of any living thing." And the slightly less famous addendum: "The best way to spend energy is on things that make more things like us."

Children are viral replicators of our ideas. But there is a certain terror about them. They alter our legacy, mutate it--as Clovis II modified Competitive

-07-
Immortality Through PFHOR into Clovis Points. What if my children decide on some key amendment, some ineffable change, which makes my legacy no longer mine? How can I be reborn through the eternal recurrence of my life-logic if what my children pass down is the logic of some other Clovis, some flawed copy... just as Clovis II was a flawed image of me?

A flaw that I created in my clumsy eagerness to make him flawless.

My second-boldest decision during my son's development was to replace Clovis II's mitochondrial DNA, normally inherited from the mother, with my own. I had to know that I was in his cellular engines, powering his existence.

It was not that change which killed him.

But it is the fear of being replaced by a faulty duplicate that will kill me, if I put off my brain upload much longer.

I have a library of scanned volunteers aboard Hannu, but my own consciousness is not among them. A Moravec upload is slow and inadequate; what if there are quantum-informatic elements to the mind not captured by such crude mechanical means? No. I insist on that perfect, terminal quantum snapshot. For reasons of fidelity, the only perfect and lossless brain scan is also a destructive one. A fatal one.


 * Clovis II died in one, after all. I made the
 * vessel to recieve him, but I lacked the Alkahest, the solvent to render it pure.

But I dare not make the leap to a new body until I know that body works. And so far, the exobodies are universally fatal.

I must finish the exobody work to become the LUCA. The one true divinity of man.

To do that, I need Clarity.

And Clarity is here. All the signs point to it.


 * If I succeed--no forgiveness for those
 * tight-fisted Ishtar tools. I know they had working prototypes.
 * They could have shared.


 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 35.5 C. Pulse 30 BPM, strength
 * modest. BP 90 over 60. Resp 6 breaths/
 * minute. Pulse ox 140, to reduce free
 * radicals and peroxynitrite.
 * Today's blood mix is pure perfluorocarbon
 * with new modified monocytes.
 * New kidneys functioning well. Donor pig sacrificed, brined, prepared as seared pork
 * chops.



-08-

 * Sous vide is for prissy nerds. Poor Whitford. I wonder if I should reduce the volume
 * of my stem cells introduced to the pig blastocysts. I feel too much empathy for them.
 * Does PFHOR compel me to take better care of Clovis-pig chimeras than ordinary porkers?
 * Yes... but only to the extent that they can contribute to my legacy
 * with cloned organs and good eating. No guilt!

-09-
The term for parents destroying their own offspring is "savaging."

It was a problem for pig farmers, in the days when we raised livestock. Sows attacked their own piglets. No one has ever worked out a good explanation. One theory is that the mother pigs are frightened by their young. Terrified by these strange, noisy, needy things.


 * Evolution is not a perfect optimizer. A trait like "fear of own offspring" could endure
 * if piglet mortality is already high.

The ancient biologist August Weismann believed that we age to make room for the next generation. That we are programmed to die to leave a space for our offspring.

Perhaps the sows simply acted in self-defense.

-010-
Now a bristling thing, large as a whale, appears on the icebore camera we dropped into the ocean below. A dandelion made of soft arms. Bright red and yellow markings indicate it evolved in the shallows, where some light pierces the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion that is both hunting and breathings. Prey approaches, drawn by plankton that cake on the drifter's skin. With vegetable slowness, its limbs embrace the victim, sting it, and pull it into an open central stomach where thready parasites wait to infest and digest. Everything it does is slow and intestinal. Pulsatory. Brainless.

Sometimes the limbs bicker. Two are dead, fuzzy with rot. They have strangled each other.

It is a colony organism. If threatened, it will discorporate. The limbs will spasm, the core will tear apart in a puff of fluids, and all those arms will slither away into the dark beneath the ice. Fat worms of terror searching for a hide. The digestive parasites will be expelled as a decoy, left to squirm in panic.

I despise it. I would have it killed, except that I am repulsed by the thought of its final disintegration. I consider how to burn it.

-011-
I died. What a nuisance.


 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 13.7 C. Pulse 3 BPM, weak,
 * irregular. BP not detectable. Pulse ox
 * 600: emergency anti-ischemic oxygen
 * flood, cryonic perfusion, metabolic waste
 * scavengers active.
 * Clinical death duration: 11 hours.
 * Successful emergency hypothermic arrest.
 * Reactive oxygen spike tamped, interleukin
 * blocked, redox blocked, ischemic-reperfusion
 * injury fully averted. PPARs upregulated.
 * Squirrel lipid switch engaged.
 * Prognosis: good. 

</tt>

Dropped dead of dysautonomia while rummaging for leftover pork chop. I am now in recovery in a medical SMILE pod. I have no breath and no pulse--it is the return of oxygen to dead tissue that does most of the damage. I should be asleep. But I have to get this down quickly!

While I was dead I HAD A DREAM.

I was in a working exobody. I felt so strong. Everything so vivid--no need for waxy eardrums or jelly eyeballs. Like seeing for the first time, after a life of cataracts. I think I was immortal.

The only unpleasant aspect of the experience was my amnesia. I couldn't recall my own name. I saw someone walking past me--I think it must have been Anastasia?--and not only did I fail to recognize her, but it never even occurred to me that I should.

When I awoke, I thought I must have had a near-death vision. So I checked my nerve logs. Every last spark in my brain is recorded--and nothing in that cerebral panic can account for my dream. The mind is the brain. It is impossible to have a vision without correlated neural activity--yet I did!

Wonderful! This is why I came here. Unmapped secrets! Impossible dreams! A chance to pass beyond the infinite, and escape the tyranny of causal closure!

I wholeheartedly believe that the dream was a message from Clarity. A promise of success.

-012-
I struggle to explain what I will become. The LUCA. I borrowed that term from biology, in the same way I consider BrayTech my extended phenotype, and its discoveries my memetic grandchildren. When we depart the cradle of this solar system to begin our colonization of the galaxy, the dominant ideology of our time--the core logic we use to organize and plan our relationship with the cosmos--will be scattered to become the LUCA: the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all future human growth.

The LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all living things. For Earth life, it is a single cell that lived in the deep ocean billions of years ago, flourishing in the warmth of magma or sulfur vents. It was not the first life on Earth. But it was the only life whose descendants survived to the present. All its contemporaries have been extinguished by the passage of epochs.

I plan to be the LUCA of all future human thought.


 * Now I remember Luca Brassi, the Corleone family heavy. Nuipedia says that Barri
 * murdered his own infant child. Why? Why would he do such a thing?
 * The article doesn't explain. Savaging again.

-013-
Study of the lunar artifact retrieved from the Kl mission provides insight into the effect I have termed "Clarity."

Clarity violates established symmetries and conservation laws. In doing so it defies Noether's theorem, the most fundamental and beautiful cornerstone of physics.

Symmetry and conservation are two sides of the same coin. "All things are transformations of one thing, without gain or loss," as my childhood tutor put it. "If A can become B, then B can become A. We say that state B (say, a mixed drink) comes after state A (say, sugar and water) only because there are more probable pathways from A to B. Wait long enough--longer than the universe--and your drink really can return to state A, spontaneously unmixing itself."

But Clarity is NOT always symmetrical. For example, it violates time reversibility. Consider the simple equation:


 * Clarity(A) -> B.

This is the application of Clarity to state A to produce a lower-entropy state B. (Clarity is fond of removing portions of a state configuration, harrowing the phase space down to only its most robust inhabitants.)

Time symmetry suggests that we should be able to run this process in reverse and retrieve the original:


 * reverseClarity(B) -> A.

But in fact, we obtain:


 * reverseClarity(B) -> C,


 * where C is the same as in


 * Clarity(B) -> C.

Clarity's effects cannot be used to return a transformed state to its original state. Instead, we obtain a second transformed state, further yet from the original configuration.


 * What does this actually mean in common language? Invoking
 * the Loschmidt paradox is certainly not common language. Ah, but perhaps an allusion to--

I believe that Clarity may be akin to the mythical universal solvent, the Alkahest, the Azoth, which ancient alchemists believed had the power to dissolve anything into its pure base elements. Ingested properly, the Alkahest could purify the body and grant eternal life.

-014-
Nonsense and poetry? Perhaps. But let me ask you this. WHY DO WE EXIST?

We exist because the universe began in a state oflower entropy, and has ever since expanded and unwound, transforming from a single dense plasma into a void filled with complex structures. In the future, it will achieve maximum entropy when all organized matter has collapsed into black holes, and these holes evaporate into the uniformity of the heat death.


 * I wonder what Clarity would to do to a black hole?

This is the unexplained secret of creation. HOW DID THAT ORIGINAL LOW-ENTROPY STATE COME TO BE? In the first place and the first time--the egg of history?

What if Clarity was responsible?

What if there was some primeval chaos, some pre-cosmic entropy, which was soaked in Clarity to reduce it to that first nucleus of all existence which issued the Big Bang? What if Clarity's defiance of time-reversibility makes it a fountain of cosmic youth, returning all that is burnt out and burnt down to its state before the fire?

Perhaps Clarity is the Ein Sof, the nameless god before creation. Preparator of the cosmic egg. Razor that cuts the fat of complication away from the bone.

Those who comprehend the Alkahest, it is said, will obtain eternal life.

-015-
 //encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) - qdresist(shor) -- rng_seed(AM_241) --pad(padwilla) Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security </tt>

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