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§▲§Future: A Buttermilk Flaps Its Wings (alt. title)§▲§



A man and a young woman in bulky suits step from the bottom of a ladder that ascends into the ceiling’s depths. A heavy hatch clangs shut to seal the metal shell ~ an airlock hiss. Only a few of ExArc’s lights flicker on to reveal a laboratory strewn with debris, laden with flakes of dust in its corners.

The man removes his suit and places a briefcase on one of the lab’s desks. As she pulls off her boots, his assistant remarks, “I never noticed before, but your brother had the same briefcase as you.”

“I wasn’t aware you knew him,” the man says, hiding mild surprise.

“Our team was there during the last days of his excavations...he left us behind in the Annapolis dig and headed for Canbreton. That was the last I saw before Dr. Chaotic was sucked into the multi-verse. I was only part of SCOTIA Organization a short time beforehand, and never really knew what he was working on.” The girl shrugs and places her helmet in the locker. “I was a big fan of his masterpiece, “Evolution of the Constitution.”

Wishing once again for a less nostalgic assistant, Dr. Valentine inhales a deep breath and narrates, “His work was…unpredictable. But as you already know, in the 7th Century, a discovery was made in a lands known as Atlantis, alternativley named EDEN, TERRA Nova, along with other names for Paradise, until lastly it came to be mythologized as Arcadia. Over the ages these “Lost Tomes of Atlantis” have been used, abused, lost, discovered, recovered, forgotten, and then excavated, yet never really understood as to its origins or actual purpose.”

Dr. Valentine places the dusty briefcase on the lab desk, dials in the combination, and unlocks the case.

“ExArc’s record keeping reveals that some time during the 14th Century, two bumbling members of a now defunct military got their hands on the tome and conceived they could fashion it into some sort of timetravel machine. Well, we’ve all heard of its mess that led to the infamy of Beeman the Bumbling Bandit after it fell into the wrong hands later. Instead of correcting the Big Chill, they only accelerated the inverted decay. Now everything is heating up; thermodynamics has been turned on its head. The ABCs of physics are now the XYZs. Thought they could rewrite history to create an EDEN or some sort of TERRA Nova, but would anyone call this Paradise? Hardly, more like the remains of an expired Phoenix.”

The archaeologist throws his hands up in exasperation and shakes his head at the concrete ceiling. Somewhere far above the deep-earth bunker another firestorm brews in the toxic atmosphere. Churning flames sweep from the highest mountain peaks into the once lush valleys. Large flakes of ash fall like ironic vestiges of the winters that once were. They blow down through the Appalachian valleys, covering the broken foundations littered across a barren scape.

The assistant polishes her nails with a loofa and off-handedly comments,“I dunno, but from what I hear, it almost worked. Seemed like a good idea twisting quantum mechanics to send monkeys back in time. I mean, they did successfully chart the half-life decay of our culture. Rumour has it one of those timetravelling monkeys led a rebellion before the Grand Conflagrations. They just didn’t account for the grand’AddyCP Paradox. At least, the posters were pretty cool,” she says with a glance towards one pinned to the wall beside her desk:



Dr. Valentine scoffs at the picture, “Quantum time monkey rebel leaders...just a fairytale told to the children, dreamed up in the days of the Great Migration, when all rationality went out the window to let rationalizations sweep back in.”

“Reversing entropy to reanimate the dead was my favourite ~ wish I coulda been for that one...zombies are so retro-cool.” She looks at her nails and makes a faces before continuing on, “Still, it doesn’t explain how those babbling monkeys were found scattered throughout early history, but hey, all the more logic to ya” The assistant drops into a chair and flips open the manicure case on her desk.

“Monkeys or not, it doesn’t matter. They had the wrong fix. You can’t repair chaotic decay. A film of a pendulum, or a ball falling through the air – backwards, it looks the same. But with heat – friction – a ball breaking a window – It won't work backwards. My brother saw why. You can put back the bits of glass but you can't collect up the heat of the smash. It's gone.” Dr. Valentine pauses, mouth feeling dry. “And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly…till there's no time left. That's what time means.”

“You sure it doesn’t mean checking your watch to keep your appointments, waking up, lunch breaks, doing your rounds, recording data, getting older ~ sigh. I mean, at least that’s half my work keeping track of all your deadlines and schedules.”

“For linear time, yes. Others say time is circular – almost true. But in actuality, it is conical, everything circles round and down to the point of singularity. Some speculate LToA contains a singularity or wormhole, hence the intense, sucking cold. Others claim the deep freeze is merely the cooling system for a computer inside the tome, one that tracks every possible permutation of life and history, creating a multiplicity of computer generated realities. But a real life versus an electronic reality, ridiculous. No, the tome is not a time machine, nor a virtual e-reality, but rather is a recorder of all that was and will be. Its cold is the entropy of chaos distilled. Our job here is to trace the iterations, from the basic triangular to the complex arcs through history.”

Clicking open a briefcase on his desk, Dr. Valentine removes the object of burnished metal. A frosty crackle fills the room as the triangular tome is set into the flux capacitor.
“It almost makes me happy...to be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum mechanics looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything.

Before we had this treasure of knowledge, the problem turned out to be different. We couldn’t even predict the next drop from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip set up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blew predictions apart, and the weather was unpredictable the same way, was always thought to be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the tome you can see the patterns through its interloping fractals. The future is disorder, yet we now have the codes to chaos.

A door like this has cracked open six or seven times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. All that is left is to extrapolate decay from the base iteration of this tome ~ the Sierpinski Triangle ~ and crack the code of our Chaos Game. A pattern that reaches from the very micro to the marco and back again. From the triangle, to the leaf, to the Tree of Life, from the snowflake, to the snowstorm, and galaxies beyond. See here.”

He points to a screen feeding calculations of flux dispersal through the capacitor.


~Fig. 1: surface readings extrapolated to the base code of life


~Fig. 2: inner readings extrapolated to the base code of weather patterns


~Fig. 3: core readings extrapolated to the base code of wormhole formation

Unimpressed, the assistant points out, “Is it difficult? Doesn’t look like much.”

“The math isn't difficult. It's what you did at school. You have some x-and-y equation. Any value for x gives you a value for y. So you put a dot where it's right for both ‘x’ and ‘y’. Then you take the next value for ‘x’ which gives you another value for ‘y’, and when you've done that for a millennia or two you join up the dots and that's your graph of whatever the equation is.”

“And is that what we’re doing?”

“No. Not exactly. Not at all. What we’re doing is, every time we work out a value for ‘y’, we use that as our next value for ‘x’, then we add on a ‘z’ to account for its temporal drift and random recurrence. And so on. Like a feedback. It’s feeding the solution back into the equation, and then solving it again, except on various dimensions. Superstring iteration, you see.”

“And that's surprising, is it.”

“Not for one calculation, or even a dozen, or a dozen squared. If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there'd be a dot somewhere on the screen. You'd never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you'd start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this pyramid. It wouldn't be the triangle, it would be a mathematical object. But, yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. They almost had it right, but in their haste, they got it all backwards.”

The assistant blinks away her glassy stare and wakes herself with a question, “Do you mean to tell me that was the only problem? Enough time? And paper? And the boredom?

“No, I'm saying you'd have to have a reason for doing it...”

“But anything else?”

“Well, the other thing is, you'd have to be insane.”

“Yup, sounds crazy to me.” Eyeroll and sigh. “When will we be done in this bunker? I mean, like, it’s been years already since you searched for this triangletomethingy and now I’ve been here for weeks watching you tinker away with it. I mean, I want to enjoy life a little before everything burns up.”


“We are….closer, but still have a ways to go. So far, we have been able to track the origins of the thermodynamic inversion back through the sensitive dependence to initial conditions (or this butterfly/milk effect, as it has come to be labeled) to something about dairy products, shepherd carpentry, and carnal livestock ~ all of which points to The Big Chill Inversion, a loss of leadership and a time of wandering. I must say, I haven’t any clue what it could all mean as of yet.”

Dr. Valentine picks up a folder labeled ‘Releasing the Ego’ and reads from the report:
“To the Prodigies Abroad,
And there is no one to substitute. We ask for the next Gretzsky, Messier, etc etc. But there was only one. We look for the closest thing to bring nostalgia to the forefront. We are addicted to the recall of our memories. Let us sit on the dirt, where everyone walked, and talk about our pasts.

But there is more in our imagination. Let the crumbs spill on the floor if you're looking for companionship from a cockroach or a litter of mice, a herd of animals in shepherd's handmade fence. Try not to be carnal with the animals. We all know what happened when that happened long ago.

Conspiracies! Rage! Finger pointers in hatemongering fill up. Let us build a new leader up, let us find someone new to nurture and wilt in luxuries so that the universe's sledgehammer may break him apart.

A toast to all the prodigies abroad, and to the gifted ones back home in Canada.

~~Buttermilk“

A long pause follows the final line of Dr. Valentine’s oration. The chewing of his assistant’s gum assistant echoes through the cold, dank room. Inside the capacitor, the pyramid hums a syncopated dirge.

“Sounds like nonsense to me, Vincent,” she says with a shrug.

Dr. Valentine hangs his head and utters, “Leave…go away. I have work to do.”

His assistant rolls her eyes at his moodiness, pops a bubble of gum, and hits ‘play’ on an oldie from a time long past. She departs the room with headphones pulsing, singing along under hushed breath:
Well it's a beautiful place, but it's so damn cold.
Sure, for the human race, but for the planets and the stars...
It's like Paradise, spread out with a butter knife.

Far above in a once verdant vale, ashen winds roll as dustflakes fall, blanketing all.



Expediton Arcadia Series:
Preamble: (Expedition Arcadia): (Wanted) A Few Good Shepherds
eCanEgo Part 1: (Expedition Arcadia ~ Past): Arcadian Blossoms; Carnal Decay
eCanEgo Part 2: (Expedition Arcadia ~ Present): The Big Chill, feat. Addy Costner
eCanEgo Part 3: (ExArc ~ Future): Snowflakes in a Firestorm
(to come) Epilogue: (Expedition Arcadia): "Devolver" & The Mathematics of Ego Mechanics (aka the Jacobii Method)