Mysterious Logbook

"And my vanquisher will read that book, seeking the weapon, and they will come to understand me, where I have been and where I was going."The following is a verbatim transcription of an official document for archival reasons. As the original content is transcribed word-for-word, any possible discrepancies and/or errors are included.

Cover of the 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)

ENTRY 1

-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

NOTE--BAROTRAUMA

-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?

ENTRY 2

-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!

NOTE--SAVAGING

-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.

NOTE--EUROPA LIFE

-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.

ENTRY 3

-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.

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.

NOTE--CLARITY

-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.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, WILHELMINA

-015-

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

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ANASTASIA

-016-

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) - qdresist(shor) --
rng_seed(AM_241) --pad(padana)
Warning: this transmission will expend
entangled qubits for security.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

-017-

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) --
rng_seed(AM_241) --pad(padelsie

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

-023-

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) --
rng_seed(AM241) --pad(padelsie)
Warning: this transmission will expend
entangled qubits for security.

MESSAGE FROM BRAY, ELISABETH

-027-

//decrypt -pkey(clovisroot) --pad(padelsie)

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

-032-

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) --
rng_seed(AM241) --pad(padelsie)
Warning: this transmission will expend
entangled qubits for security.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

-041-

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) --
rng_seed(AM241) --pad(padelsie)

MESSAGE FROM BRAY, ELISABETH

-042-

//decrypt -pkey(clovisroot) --pad(padelsie)