Plasma and Structures
Robert Khaibullin

© Robert Khaibullin, 2026

ISBN 978-5-0070-0677-4

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Plasma and Structures
Part 1

He placed the hot mug on the table. The sound of the action scattered throughout the room. The man disintegrated into molecules whose vibrations formed this very sound. The man was simultaneously the air, all the objects reflecting the wave, and the wave itself.

In periods when the sphere contracted to a certain degree, everything proceeded automatically, without overloads. The range of oscillations remained within acceptable limits relative to the vibrations of other spheres. Sometimes these were points with geographical coordinates, forming clusters. These clusters tended to compress larger spheres down to the size of the majority within the cluster. If they were clusters of spheres, they strove to expand the points inside themselves to a size similar to their own. The dynamics of changes in these points, spheres, and clusters — their mergers and displacements — gravitated toward a uniform distribution according to their ranges of expansion and contraction.

Cities and villages connected by roads formed clusters and pathways between them, covering the planet like categories with internal subcategories — fractally inward and outward. Their stabilities were distributed according to the vibrations of spheres within each subcategory by the distribution of an elusive thermodynamics, where everything is movement. Fixing the picture was conditional, probabilistic, limited by the subject’s perception — relative to the range of dynamics of the sphere of perception in the corresponding period and moment of the subjective gaze.

Sometimes the phenomenological topology folded into two-dimensional space. Details merged into a river. He moved along a Möbius strip.

The first morning sun rays, washing over the planet in a wave, activated the awakening people, animals, and birds, who moved in a wave at the call of metabolism, returning by evening to their previous places. Thus the averaged planetary morphism repeated itself. By morning, everything began anew.

Everyone speaks different words, each in their own way. Some words affect some people positively and others negatively. Sometimes they first affect others negatively, then surface at the right moment and influence positively, then negatively again, and vice versa. This has an oscillatory character. Words affect animals, fish, birds, and people to varying degrees, and possibly, at the molecular level, through waves, all objects in the form of their micro-vibrations.

Some people say, “I didn’t say that,” even though the audio recording clearly shows that they did. What could this be? Perhaps the subconscious erases the memory, having calculated that in case of discovering a contradiction, it would lose — losing a couple of thousand potential dopamine hits. This is somehow connected with mirror neurons. Perhaps it is adaptive micro-confabulation. Perhaps the statement was made in a state of micro-affect, or the utterance “I didn’t say that” itself was said in a state of micro-affect. It could be a habit, a pattern for neuro-optimization. On the other hand, it could be genes of impulsivity, temperament. It could be an inability to read one’s own memory — the memory is there, but it cannot be accessed due to an impulsive movement toward that memory, where the speed does not allow stopping at the right point and examining it. The gaze, by inertia, skips over that point, even on the second and third attempts. The subconscious and conscious accept these attempts as non-optimal and, in self-defense, choose energy-saving functions. Although a couple of thousand dopamine molecules and other peptides are not a great loss for long-term optimization, perhaps in some cases it is significant.

If research is correct, neurons seem to be drawn to each other, forming connections and fusing under certain conditions and with practice, at a speed of one millimeter every four days — roughly comparable to the average rate of hair growth on the head. Even if we discard this theory and simplify the brain as a neuro-architecture in three-dimensional space — neural highways where one can build bypasses and branches as additions to what already exists — these could be concepts in which clumps of energy can dissolve. Linguistic-logical structures that discharge tensions. For example, if a person lies, a micro-thermodynamic process arises in the body, which a lie detector can detect by reading increased sweating caused by agitation and elevated pulse.

If one looks at a refrigerator and says it doesn’t exist, the detector registers this as false information. But if a person is convinced that atoms consist of ninety-nine percent emptiness, and the refrigerator consists of atoms, then in reality it mostly consists of emptiness. Consequently, one can confidently say, with ninety-nine percent certainty, that the refrigerator does not exist. In that case, there is a probability that the detector will consider this information true, because the person will not be nervous. Theoretically, he is ninety-nine percent right, and his pulse will remain normal. This is hypothetical, yet still valid. Yes and no — this is the logic of George Boole, according to which multitudes of decisions flow. But between yes and no there are degrees and dynamics of yes and no, ninety-nine percent as the degree of atomic emptiness, the dynamics of yes and no, its relevance, its changeability over time, depending on the context from which one looks.

Yes and no can be simultaneously both wrong and right. The Möbius strip says that top and bottom are one continuous surface. The rhizome speaks of the absence of one main thing — the main thing is everything, everything is interconnected: microbes, metals in the body, algae. This is a kind of splitting. Perhaps it will not be beneficial, considering the subjective organism that has formed its own optimization paths over generations, its own ways of being. But if one remembers at least one new word, it is already a certain addition, an expansion of what already exists. There will be one more word’s worth of space for the electricity in the head.

Temperament, on the one hand, promotes life, but the matter is not only in *what*, but also in *how* — in speeds, dynamics, intensities.

Details can recede into molecules and cosmos, into silence, through the prism of abstract subjective logic, mathematics, animation mixed with a person who disintegrates into molecules and reassembles, splits in two, turning into two universes, each with its own world and internal worlds within.

In other words, it is like looking at anything that has difference and seeing difference. A picture in which there is at least something that differs from the background — where the background itself is the picture. Even if it is an empty white sheet, upon looking at which one can find differences: differences in perception, in vision. It is different for everyone — speaking of micro-shades, focus, coverage, range. A child has a small eye, an adult has a larger one, and the way it is processed in the head, and in time… If uniform light enters the eye, the subjective eye sees not only this light — it also sees some glares, darkenings at the edges, and movements. In the complete absence of light, light forms arise from memory: faces of people, events, and sounds — mixtures of memories of light and sound, taking shape inside the head.

In everyday life, the eye daily sees many differences: lines, colors, and shades, depending on where one is most often. In a room there are more straight lines and right angles — cabinets, chairs, nightstands, beds, boxes, tables, evenly glued wallpaper, floorboards laid uniformly. Everything influences the person. He himself becomes square and linear, unconsciously, partially. In the village — forest, river — everything is sinuous. The flora grows sinuously; if it is straight, it bends in the wind, forming waves. In general, it depends on which details we are talking about, what the subject is drawn to, and the situational context.

It is rather a geometric synthesis of curves and straight lines — an oscillating slider between a point and an infinite multitude of all possible and impossible forms.

On one hand, line and linearity are similar, but what does linearity mean? From birth to the end of life it is a line, but who remembers this line in full? Only fragmentarily. Even yesterday cannot be described linearly — it will rather be fragments limited to hours, minutes, rather second-long fragments. In other words, to say that life is linear, one needs to see it all at once, as a whole. Blinking divides the day into thousands of fragments. Linearity is connected with eventfulness, but those too are fragments, even if they smoothly transition into one another, because memories are fragments.

Linearity is also linguistics — the word “linearity” itself. Geometry as the forms of events unfolding in linearity. Intuition. Memory. Linearity as society: everyone knows that linearity and society exist, but no one has ever seen them entirely — just as with everything else in certain molecular senses.

If memory is erased, a person will not be able to realize anything. He will have nothing to operate with — neither words nor what he will see. He will exist in pure abstraction, yet still possess some molecular memory: how to breathe, how to walk, memory of certain functions. And what he sees, hears, and feels from the first fraction of a second will be what he needs to remember in order to have something to build upon. From that moment he begins self-learning. But how is he supposed to remember that he needs to self-learn if he remembers nothing — as in infancy?

Where does the cell remember that it needs to turn into a human being similar to its ancestors, and then begin self-learning? Perhaps memory from the cell to infancy is autonomous. It is partially an automatic process — partially because the cell grows in an environment. But does the environment have memory? Can memory and function be considered as one? If yes, then what exactly is this function, where are its boundaries? And how many sub-functions are there inside this function, how many super-functions outside? What is their topology? Does self-learning and adaptation always occur?

If one tries right now to remember something, the reason for this will be that the conversation is now about memory, and that reason is association. Association is what resembles the last thing from which thought bounces. But there can be many associations, and the priority one that dominates the others manifests itself at least because of the possibility of its expression through language in time. One cannot express all associations at the same time, but one can express them sequentially. Yet when the first association is expressed, will only those that were remain, or can two or more new ones come in its place? Because time moves on. Because if one thinks about something quickly it will be one thing, and if one thinks for a long time — another. There can be many variants here.

Temperament plays an important role in this context. Many actions might not have happened, but temperament and time do their work, forming orbital patterns of behavior.

If everything is functions and determinations, then they are as complex as cognitive capabilities allow. How to identify categories if questions of this kind are asymptotic?

Linearity is not simple. It is contextual. In the given context, if one looks at anything, it is not only itself — it is a totality, the singularity of these totalities. If what is observed is recognized, it means it is already in memory. Even if it is observed for the first time, it consists of multiple details from memory, is compared and identified instantly. Parts of it connect, forming something partially new. And the way it feels is assembled from such layers as the temperature of the environment, air humidity, the softness of the shoes the observer is wearing, atmospheric and internal pressure, lighting, level of metabolism, clothing, mood, electromagnetic activity, coronal ejections, sounds of the environment, wind, recent and distant events, radiation levels, and how the solar system was formed, potential future, and many unforeseen phenomena — all summed up and singularized into informational clumps acceptable enough to be thought. As well as the unthinkable — through the thinkable. Everything connects into one sensation, which is dynamic.

It is everything in one. It is observed. It can be a landscape. The landscape a person looks at, and the person the landscape looks at — they are one. There is neither subject nor object. This is a point of view through singularity, which can be divided into subject and object — that is, to compress the vision, the act of looking, the sphere of perception, down to a level of more confident orientation within it. Where confidence is knowledge and belief that it is so, and this is enough to live and perform functions with repeating patterns, but also with events and spontaneities. In other words, down to a level striving for automatism — beginning with the cell in the womb, which develops in a sense automatically. This cell is the future person, but he does not control his own development. It is rather determined — a kind of default function. One can say it is a reaction, a consequence, and at the same time a cause — part of a complex domino effect.

Here one can say that the manifestation of memory is the area between cause and effect, movement within the domino effect. And this domino effect is like an interweaving of all spaces, considering that time is part of three-dimensional space. Thus this effect is not only an interweaving of multitudes of multidimensional spaces, but also of times. Where three-dimensional space with conditionally linear time is the result of these interweavings.

If the functions of the cell and its memory of what the next step should be are automatic, then this too is likely the result of interweavings of spaces and times — the domino effect.

It is as if the result of fragmented views. But if one smooths the corners, connects the gaps, rounds and softens them, something formless arises, undifferentiated — water. Perhaps it is plasma. It is asymptotic nothingness. But when differentiations and differences appear, a sphere emerges with internal interweavings of spaces and times. Inside it is three-dimensional everyday life, familiar to the one who is within it. But as soon as the sphere begins to expand and cognitive endurance reaches its limit, it becomes similar to a space with an increasing multitude of everything imaginable — so much that it displaces the subject himself and seems to compress him from all sides. At the same time, the multitudes that compress him *are* himself.

In the opposite case, there is emptying and nothing to hold onto, no supports. The subject disappears, or increases — he becomes emptiness, which is also disappearance, but also dissolution into emptiness. Here the effects of expansion and contraction are accentuated.

The subject rather oscillates within the spectrum of genetic limitations, but with potentials that activate during cosmic synchronicity as well as synchronicity within spatial topology. Simply put, what happens in ordinary three-dimensional everyday life is the result of the rotation of all kinds of triangles and squares in n-dimensions — and vice versa. In their strange symmetries. But if one removes the angularity, the substance plasmizes. The subject, rotating along its orbit, makes a kind of jump to a neighboring orbital, but misses, and is carried away into a galactic arm, where he floats, passes through a plasma cloud. Multicolored glowing plasmoids the size of a ball fly up to him — some smaller. They study the subject, transmit impulses resembling electronic-bio-acoustic signals. One divided into two, changing its glow. Another became semi-transparent and began to grow, absorbing the subject and the others, then scattered into sparks. It seems they are simply playing, but cannot leave the boundaries of the plasma cloud. Meanwhile, the galactic arm swirled and threw the subject back to Earth, where he was born. Only later did he remember where he had come from.

“I arrived here from the galactic arm,” he said.

At that time, few yet knew one well-known fact.

Part 2

Returning back, he noticed something strange to the right, near his feet. It seemed as if a section of the asphalt had distorted. He lowered his head closer and saw himself as a child — tiny, the size of half a pinky finger — looking up at himself in fear and running away between suddenly growing, almost perfectly even stone slabs, each the size of a twenty-story building. He found himself among rocks, but his small double had disappeared somewhere. Moreover, he suddenly realized that his name was the same as that of one acquaintance. He was actually that acquaintance, although he distinctly remembered that the acquaintance had a different name. It was as if he had turned into a person he knew, but with a different name — not his own, and not the name of the acquaintance. He turned around and saw this acquaintance standing there in a hat by a campfire.

Mostly, when he woke up and opened his eyes, he did not immediately appear in the world. It took time for the world to load. He did not remember what happened in the first fractions of a second — something like a transition from darkness to light, a phase-undifferentiated area. It was the same the next day. He did not know what he would say. He met people he talked to, encountered acquaintances. He was born, grew up, spoke, but did not know in advance about what. First came the greeting, then something was said, and then what followed was based on what was said after the greeting. It all happened in the moment.

A person wakes up and does not know what he will say today, what the subtext of the day will be. Sometimes he prepares, waits, then goes somewhere specifically to talk, without knowing about what. The words may be roughly the same, but the order is always different. If he is not a singer or a poet, the order of words tends toward repetition — it circles around one thing. Sometimes he focuses his gaze on what he sees, saying exactly what the eye interprets. It enters the eye and is transformed into voice through subjective filters. The process of speaking includes what does not enter into speaking but is connected with it and affects well-being.

When a child learns to speak, it happens rather automatically. And only after he has learned to speak does he learn what he says. He learns the alphabet. Even if he graduates from the philological faculty, he understands that he does not understand more about words than before, yet he also understands more — entropically, equivalently — if he needs it. He rather invents what he has discovered. He thinks, attaches something to the thinking, invents, and shows it to others.

Words and deeds are different things that refer to the same. To speak, one must do what is visible. If one does something, it is both visible and not. If one thinks, it is not visible. One can remember something, and it will not be visible, yet it exists — even if no one sees it. But someone might see it and remain silent. Will someone see what another saw, and to what extent will he interpret it in his own way? If it is not visible but exists, then for others it does not exist, because it is not visible. But if those others are not visible, can it be that they exist but are not visible? Perhaps they exist in memory. They are not visible, but they are in memory, and there they speak — each their own.

If I am memory, and others are memory, and all of this is within one I, then I am also the others. If I see a wardrobe, I understand that it is a wardrobe because it exists in memory. When I look at the wardrobe, I am the wardrobe, and everything else that is in memory. But in the moment of looking at the wardrobe, all the rest of the memory leaves the field of concentration. It turns out that I am that upon which consciousness is concentrated. And this concentration is not always static — rather, it is dynamic and conditional. It turns out that I am a conditionally reflexive dynamic area of concentration in the field of associative memory.

And if the concentration in the field of memory had no reflection about what it itself is, then it is what it considers itself to be relative to its current scope of concentration. Perhaps, first of all, I am the symmetries of myself — people. Or I am that to which I assign value. It can be an inanimate object, things. But if I assign value to something, and it is me, then who assigns the value? This is a molecular question, micro-time, micro-interactions that form something larger. This larger thing is not one — there are many, and they generalize into something even larger, and at some level become molar, coarse-grained, where a threshold of accessibility opens for a person who himself is a spectrum, a cosmic differential, he thought slowly.

Finally, he reached the highway. In the distance, a destroyed city flickered. In places, among scattered pillars of smoke, lighter smoke contrasted. He understood that knowing the reason why this had happened would change nothing, and he simply moved toward the presumed halt.

Ahead was a supermarket, which he managed to make out through binoculars. Next to the forest, a farm was smoking. The supermarket was locked. He climbed through a broken display window and saw the cashier — long dried up, judging by the name tag: Spazhek. Spazhek had long been empty, like the dried farm vegetables. The only thing he found was a chocolate bar under the emptied shelves, which he managed to rake out with a racket.

“Thank you,” he said, placing a hat on Spazhek’s dry head. The head cracked with a crunch, broke off, and crumbled like a rusk when it hit the tile, from which keys flew out. He realized two things: the keys had been around the neck and they belonged to the bicycle chained in the parking lot.

On flat tires, he rode to the first house he came across, broke a window, and took shelter from the rain that had just begun to intensify. In the distance, thunder roared so loudly that Spazhek most likely completely crumbled. A prolonged rain was approaching. Judging by the layer of dust, the house had been empty for a long time, as had the kitchen shelves. The door to the pantry was unlocked. Going down the steps, he found another one — a locked metal door this time.

Searching all suitable places yielded no results. The key was neither under the vase, nor under the stones in the yard, nor on the shelves. In the garage lay a small crowbar. The gap in the door was smaller than the tip of the crowbar. There was no hammer. He used a stone, trying to drive the crowbar in, which was bent at an inconvenient angle for such work. It had already grown dark, although it had been dark by the door all along — now it became even darker.

Suddenly, the barking of dogs approaching the house was heard. He locked the first pantry door from the inside. Someone entered the house — it sounded like several people. The dogs immediately sensed his presence and approached the pantry door, barking and scratching. The sound of a shotgun being racked was heard. Suddenly, the metal door below opened, and a mechanical dwarf ran out toward the upper door. Opening it, he ran through the corridor, bypassing the dogs. The man with the shotgun pulled the trigger. The dwarf flew back about five meters. The metal pantry door was already locked from the inside.

He found himself in some kind of club. Music was playing. People were dancing around. Among those present, three stood out — lacquered hairstyles, suits, chains, cigar, whiskey. The two big guys headed toward the new guest, who was already walking unhurriedly but confidently toward the exit. Without wasting a second, he accelerated along the street. The big guys came out of the club and moved in his direction. He turned into a dark alley and ended up in a dead end. Seeing metal stairs, he began to climb them. One of the big guys fired a couple of shots but missed and realized that the bullet could ricochet into his partner, who was already climbing the stairs. The stairs could not hold — part of the flight collapsed, and the big guy fell into a dumpster.

It turned out that workers had just poured tar on the roof, and his feet stuck to it like glue. He managed only to reach a pipe one meter in diameter and jump into it.

Rushing deep into the pipe with many turns, and finally reaching the last turn in the form of a ramp, he flew out of the pipe onto a wedding. A smoke machine turned on. Smoke poured from the pipe. When the smoke began to dissipate, the mafia realized that this was the one they were looking for. He dove into the smoke and hid in the garden. In the end, nothing worked except jumping back into the pipe. The mafia noticed this, ran up to the pipe, and began shaking it.

He was being shaken, but the shaking soon stopped. He overcame the atmosphere. The capsule he was in joined a swarm of ships — the Cryonic swarm, where many Earthlings slept while they figured out what to do, because there were essentially no sufficient grounds for anything. There was no goal.

Humanity had wandered into the so-called self-annihilation arm. The swarm was the sum of consciousnesses — modules that together formed a single cluster. Inside it, holograms were lived out: earthly lives, ordinary everyday routines. In parallel, super-differentiations were solved, which with each step, each iteration, generated the very reason why this was happening in principle.

The one who discovered this thought while inside an earthly iteration, walking through the forest, would consider this thought as pretense, which made it impossible to wake up on the ship, in the capsule. This, among other things, stabilized the processes of the cluster.

Pretense is a branch of creation, a degree of pre-creation, a way to hold the gaps in the shell — one of many optimization functions. To pretend for a while means to create one’s own world in which everything is as it should be for the optimization of earthly man. Pretense can be produced and changed rarely, or it can happen every second, depending on the frequency of practice and the intensity of growing symbiosis. It is subjective and differs from the pretense of others — from their intensity and frequency.

On one hand, pretense is the creation and maintenance of multitudes of subjective worlds for the optimization of these same worlds and those from which they are produced. On the other hand, they are soft geometry — intertwining patterns that acquire either sharp angles and rough two-dimensional forms, or incredible futuristic multidimensional soft reflections, projections, whose symmetries constitute the three-dimensional state of a person in ordinary everyday life. The predominance of one or another multidimensional form depends on gravity, which, unlike earthly gravity, is symmetry. Symmetries influence and determine the state of matter. Pharmacores as intermediate links in the state of man — so he thought.

He had a duffel bag with him, matches, tobacco, and rusks. He was walking through the forest and saw a small elevation in the distance, in which there was an inconspicuous ajar door. Entering it, he discovered it was a bunker, and the door immediately closed automatically. It was a hermetic door with a combination lock. Inside there were several compartments. Moving from one compartment to another, he saw that there were only two, but when transitioning from the second to the first, he discovered that it was already a different compartment — in other words, a third one. And when he transitioned again into what had been the second, he realized it was not the second but the fourth. Thus he counted seventeen compartments that looped and repeated again.

When he finally grew tired of opening and closing doors, he lay down to sleep in the most suitable third compartment.

Waking up, he went to another compartment, which no longer resembled any of yesterday’s. It was a food compartment with two refrigerators and boxes containing a variety of canned goods, cereals, boxes of cookies, cocoa, powdered milk, nuts, all kinds of chocolate bars, containers of water, filters, medical boxes with first-aid kits.

The next compartment was also different: a shower, toilet, exercise bike, washing machine. This time there were only three looping compartments. He understood that every day their number and contents changed, but they changed depending on the fact that he understood this and, building on this understanding, constructed patterns, discovered categories and types, kept computational records, built diagrams. He had to carry a duffel bag with records, maps, notes for years. Compasses, rulers, pencils, spare glasses, magnifying lenses — he packed all of this into the duffel bag before heading to the neighboring compartment. Sometimes he left the duffel bag and looped back to it again, knowing in advance the time-transition pattern. He got used to leaving the duffel bag and always returned for it in time.

Once he returned for the duffel bag, but it was not there. He always knew the door code, but he also knew that this code changed every day. All the notes were in the records. He moved a chair, sat down at the table, narrowed his eyes, and began making calculations. He closed his eyes and, in silence, over the course of four years, came to the point where the door opened. People came, carefully placed him on a stretcher with bells, and carried him into the mountains. They left him there and departed.

He woke up in the third compartment and everything repeated again — and again, and again. Sometimes he muttered in his sleep that he was a monk, and he was not alone — he was a repeating monk, a multi-monk, he muttered.

Once he woke up in the mountains and dispersed immediately across all the mountains. One lived his entire life in the local village. Other lives had different trajectories. Some lines looped, branched, but all of them had continuous trajectories, intersections, symmetries, forming geometric metamorphoses.

Sometimes these were mountain ridges. Below, wavy hills could be seen. Near the hills, rounded roofs of huts were visible. Mushrooms could be seen in the grass. There were mushroom pickers by the river.

Everything was where it was at every moment in time. And where it was not, there was something else. There was the absence of what was not there. There was the presence of absence. There was a monk. There were many of them. They were where there was nothing but them. Where there were no monks, there was everything else. When something appeared, the monks disappeared. When something disappeared, the monks appeared.

All monks are one monk. Everything is the shadow of the monk, except the monk himself. The shadow is the shadow of this shadow. The shadow of the shadow is the shadow except the shadow itself. The shadow is the shadow. Shadow.

Sometimes birds sang in the garden. One sang like this: “tiu-i tiu-i tiu-i ti.” Then another sang the same way. But when many birds sang at once — and they sang the same — it already became “tiu-i-i-tiu-i-tiu-i-u-i-ti.” Although each sang like the others, together they sang not like one. And the more birds there were, the less identically they sang, and they did not let him sleep.

A year later, having opened the vent, there was silence for two weeks. He packed his duffel bag and set off in search of the birds. Climbing a hill, he looked through a spyglass. On the southern slope, children were rolling a tractor wheel. Inside the wheel was a person. In the east, there was a gray-haired sage drinking tea from a bowl and eating sumalak with a spoon. In the west, there was an old sage eating tea with a spoon and drinking sumalak from a bowl. In the north, there was sumalak and an old man — he was from the bowl.

Wiping the spyglass on his shirt, he looked south again. In the south was the north. In the east was the west. In the west was the east. In the north was the south.

He folded the spyglass, put it in its case, placed the case in a bag, put the bag in his backpack, slung the backpack over his shoulder, and noticed something glowing in the distance. He took the backpack off his shoulder, took the bag out of the backpack, took the case out of the bag, opened the case, took out the spyglass, unfolded it, wiped it, and carefully brought it to his right eye and began to look.

In the distance, someone was sending a signal. On a nearby island, someone was waving an object reflecting light and sending a signal. Not far away, on the slope of the hill, lay a boat.

He folded the spyglass, put it in the case, placed the case on the grass, took the bag out of the backpack, wiped the case, put the case in the bag, put the bag back in the backpack, slung the backpack over his shoulder, and went home to sleep.

In the morning he packed the backpack, put the spyglass, halva, cookies, a pack of tea, a pack of tobacco, a pipe, and a mug into it. He reached the boat, put the backpack in the boat, lowered it into the water, jumped in, took out the pipe, lit it, took the spyglass out of his pocket, and began to smoke, look, and sail. He sailed, looked through the spyglass, and smoked. Suddenly he saw smoke, removed the pipe — the smoke disappeared.

He sailed to the island, tied the boat to the rocks, slung the backpack over his shoulders, and headed toward the hills, making his way through thorns, palm thickets, and lianas. He walked all day and found a freshwater stream. He lit a fire, brewed tea, and discovered that someone had opened the package and bitten the halva. The tracks led into the forest. When it finally grew dark, he made a torch from coconut husk. He saw a fire on the hill but did not dare go at night and went to sleep.

He slept well in the warmth. By the fire on dry ferns it was warm, comfortable, good.

In the morning he opened his eyes and felt excellent — more precisely, as good as never before. He decided not to go anywhere. Why go somewhere if it was already as good as never before? He built a hut, began gathering materials, setting up everyday life, catching fish. He built a hut on a palm tree, learned to jump between trees, gathered mangoes. He hid the boat in the jungle and never climbed the hill where a fire was lit every night.

Once someone came and began taking photographs. He photographed the hut, the everyday objects, the fire pit, fish remains, the torch, coconut plates, sculptures, stones, ropes, knots, totems, canisters, nets, the pipe, boots, and left. But after that, no one came anymore.

Once a small plane crashed on the island. It fell beyond the hills, two days’ journey away. At that very moment, a man in rags ran out of the forest. He was saying something in his own language. On his faded torn T-shirt was the inscription “Brazil Coffee.” He pointed his finger at the hill where someone lit a fire every night. Suddenly the plane that had fallen a minute ago flew out backward from behind the hill and flew away.

Night fell. He lit a torch and headed up the hill toward the fire. After several hours, he saw a man calmly sitting by the fire. This man was talking about how time had begun to change after electromagnetic installations started being tested on the island. About how a man had sailed to the island — he had sailed to the island many times and was sending a light signal with a piece of the plane. He looked closely at the man by the fire. The man turned his face toward him. It was himself. He himself had sent the signal. He himself had directed the experiment. He had sent the plane with emitters that had unexpectedly activated in the air. He had created and installed several emitters on the island, built the hut, jumped between trees, and caught fish for trillions of cycles. And suddenly his mouth began to speak it all in reverse order. He began to shake and glow, twist and blur across the ground, flowing down the slope of the hill.

Part 3

At depth, fish were playing. While time passed, something had to be done. Everyone was similar in that they were doing something. These were metabolizing organizations — in the form of fish, animals, and all other living beings, living and metabolizing. A person split a fish, the fish split another fish, another fish split plants, plants split the bones of fish, plants split the sun. A person split himself and others, but not everyone. Mostly, everyone split the sun. And not only that — the sun also split everyone. Sometimes a person argued about what could be split and what could not. He argued, that is, he split. At the same time, a fish was splitting inside him, but the fish was also splitting the person himself by giving him strength so that he would live longer. And the longer he lived, the more the sun, oxygen, other people, other fish, and he himself would split him.

He himself was not only himself. He was substance. Inside him was substance, and not just one. Outside there was also substance, and not just one. Inside one substance there were many substances, and inside those many, and between them, there were other many — like nesting dolls, liquid nesting dolls passing through other nesting dolls. They were like bubbles inside bubbles. They could pass through each other, could merge with others, forming larger and smaller ones. These bubbles could take different shapes — for example, in the form of a fish or a fish’s eye. And when the fish looked, small bubbles could travel from its eye to its brain — that was what it saw. And from outside, from what it saw, bubbles flew off that had come from space. Everything was relations between all possible forms of bubbles inside one large fluctuating formless bubble.

Once a fish overcame itself and became a human. Perhaps one day a human will also overcome himself and change form. Once, a man entered a shot glass bar and began to overcome himself. There was a time when everything was different. He was tiny, smaller than a millimeter. He grew larger and overcame everything. Sometimes everything overcame him and he shrank, but then he grew again. He pulsated.

He left the shot glass bar, walked down the street and pulsated. The bus engine pulsated. Workers pulsated. A streetlamp pulsated at fifty hertz. He walked calmly, measuredly, stepping on the cobblestones in such a way that his shoe compositionally did not violate the boundaries. The changing forms of tiles, puddles, roads, and alleys merged into mathematical intuitivism.

He crossed one street, then another, describing lines, arcs, spirals. He conducted experiments with electromagnetic waves without any emitters or installations. He observed, analyzed, remembered, compared, twisted, rotated, symmetrized, compressed, stretched, disappeared. He disappeared in one place and appeared in another. He wandered through villages, fields, mountains. He was a mountain, a stone, snow, a tree, sand, soil. He was straw, a fly, a spider, a potato, an onion, flour, a spoon, a pie, a yoke, a fence. He lived in the village and was the nose of an old man, the wheel of a freight train. He traveled the world, was a button in a spaceship, a wire on the Moon, a photon. He became a photon and left the galactic arm, got on a tram, and rode home.

He took a piece of chalk and began to draw. He drew a triangle in which all angles were right angles. He drew a round square, a square oval, and an oval polygon with one angle. He drew a circle, and inside it another circle that was larger than the outer one. He added yet another outer circle that consisted of right angles and was smaller than the second. He lowered the upper board, fixed the sound of the board’s wheel on it, turned the bicycle upside down, attached a rattle, and began to construct diagrams of rhythmic synchronicities with events on the roof of the neighboring house and with the movements of pigeons.

He picked up the receiver, listened to the beeps, turned the coil of the telephone and the knob of the radio, and watched how the pigeons spun around their own axis. This formed intuitionist implications. He looked out the window and implicated passersby. Someone was hurrying, someone was lighting a pipe, someone was carrying a bucket of sand. One man carried a two-by-two sheet of plywood, another carried a box, pliers, a hammer, nails. Two carried a pipe. A man in a jacket carried a twenty-liter bottle. All of them created a changing rhythm.

He took a typewriter out of the closet and began to type. He typed words that had already existed before his birth. But if that particular order of his own words was isomorphic to his genetics, then who was typing the text? Could it be that genetic algorithms were typing their own intonations? he thought. He thought that it was they who had thought about themselves, and he, at the same time. No matter what he typed, he was typing a map — a map of himself. Even if what was printed spoke about how he was typing a text inside which he sat at a typewriter typing himself, he was still fractally printing himself, sitting at the typewriter and not in front of it. And at the same time he remained in the memory of friends, in the memory of a dog. Wherever he was, he left imprints everywhere of what had existed before his birth — which had imprinted itself in the form of himself, continuing consciously and unconsciously, accidentally and intentionally, to imprint itself in space, which itself was an imprint.

These were layers. He moved between layers.

Once he took a tabla out of its case and began to play combinations of four variables: ta ka di mi. He connected this with the four DNA bases and the fact that systems of calculation, the tabla, and the gong were invented in India. That rhythm is topos. Topoi are mathematical universes. By producing rhythm, a universe is born. Rhythmic interweavings are interweavings of universes. Rhythm is connected with repetitions. Repetitions immerse one in trance. Trance is connected with synchronicity. Trance is samadhi. Samadhi is infinity.

Repetitions are practice.

Practice is mantra.

Mantra is memory.

Memory is life.

Life is rhythm.

Rhythm is pulse.

Pulse is breathing.

Breathing is meditative.

Meditative is sattva.

Sattva is purity.

The next day, at lunchtime, he heard someone speaking to him on the radio. He told everyone to be quiet, knocked on the neighbors’ door and said he had just heard a knock at the door. No one opened. Someone was talking on the radio. He approached the radio and began turning the knob. The voice began to speed up and slow down. He tuned the voice. The voice said: “Turn one knob to mark four, the other to mark five.” Then the voice said: “Take a step back and do thirty push-ups. Bring new resistors and replace the transformer. Connect the speakers. Attach the amplifier. Across the road there is a good premises. Ring the doorbell, say “owl in the suitcase.” In a few seconds you will see an envelope, a key, and leaflets under the door. Pass the leaflets to the person on rollers at the entrance to the editorial office. A journalist will come out from there and hand you an envelope. Two blocks away is the institute. There, at the entrance from the courtyard, there is a janitor. Give him the envelope. He will check it and give you a case. Wait. A taxi will arrive. Go out of town. Get out at the power plant. There, along the road through the forest, people will meet you. Open the case, carefully take out the capsule with the button on it, press it. The case and the people will disappear. Walk along the road to their car. Use the capsule if you see anyone — they are not real, it’s a hologram. In the car there should be a small device, gray, resembling a cube. It is semi-transparent, possibly in the glove compartment. This cube creates the hologram. Take it in your hand, don’t be afraid. Synchronize with it. It will show you that you are in empty space. Create space using your imagination. It doesn’t work immediately. Try changing locations. Do not move more than twenty-two thousand kilometers away from the cube. Use the capsule if you feel that something is wrong. And remember — everything tends toward equilibrium.”

In the room where he found himself there were books and magazines. They contained images of people who did not exist, but he knew they did exist — they had merely transformed. They existed in the form of their children. And those who had no children still existed. If someone invented the radio and had no children, he transformed into the radio. The degree of a fisherman transformed into rice. Children came to school and ate rice. The mathematics teacher transformed chalk into a bagel. Across the road was a bakery with tubes, nearby lay braids, triangles, rectangles. He asked for half a rectangle, wrapped it in paper, came home, set the package aside, took a ball, divided it into rings, took a formless substance, placed it in a concave form, added rings, subjected it to heat treatment. He took another formless substance, placed it in another concave form, put spirals in it, and also subjected it to heat treatment. He merged the substances, mixed the rings and spirals.

He took a linguistic translator and angularly translated the rings and spirals into pasta and onion sections. He took a geometric translator and translated them back into spirals and rings. He was always surrounded by forms that translated into words. Words translated into dopamine, into actions. Actions were the translation itself. Everything intertwined and was itself an interweaving. It represented categories, sections, levels.

He looked at everything through thermodynamic glasses. Years passed. Space continued to structure itself. Some structures maintained stability, others did not. Relying on stable structures, he decoded something. If he decoded something, then he was encoding something. And if he was encoding something, then he was decoding something. Overall, he was recoding — building upon what existed, and it became different, yet remained itself. In childhood he looked different, but he had always remained himself.

Sometimes he put on electromagnetic glasses and observed how space interfered, although he himself consisted of chromosomes and cells, inside which flexible manifolds of geometry functioned — bio-nano-robots overgrown with variations of their own algorithms. In other words, if one looked at it with the naked eye, it would be what it was — a visual geometric constructor containing information through electromagnetic waves. Through a special microscope displaying an image of the nano-robots on a monitor, if translated into text, errors would appear. Every subjective gaze would describe the object subjectively — namely, sets of letters, words, their order would not be symmetrical, but morphic, intuitively the same. Yet the more subjects there were, the greater the degree of dissimilarity — though mostly in micro-discrepancies.

When translating this into a graph of functions, a diagram, sound, intonation, voice, language, what it originally was became more complex. Perhaps it could only ever be a translation, he thought. And the very fact that he was thinking was also a translation. But the way he translated was it itself in his representation.

In other words, even within one point of view there were branchings into different points of view, and all of them could be correct. Examining a multicolored polygon from all sides, walking around it, everything gathered in one head. But when describing this polygon in words to someone else, it always appeared not as the polygon itself in its originality. Even while walking around the polygon in a circle, with each lap it impressed the one it pleased less than a few laps before. At the same time, he had grown used to it, yet had not remembered the arrangement of colors in each corner. If he remembered, he had rounded the shades. If he described it to someone, he had not described it completely. If he described it and added that he had not described it completely, then it existed completely — in its incompleteness.

It was always unfinished, because it was always connected with something. And if it was not connected, then it did not exist — until one looked at it. If it existed in memory but was not remembered, then it did not exist, because it might never be remembered. Even if it existed in memory but never manifested itself in the actual here and now — even if the here and now was itself a memory of the past, coupled with a hypothetical future in one perception.

On the other hand, if something existed in memory but was not remembered in its fullness, it might still influence actual perception. Moreover, distant memories and waves of accentuations could be closer to the here and now than the physical here and now itself, which consisted of a mixture of all memories. Imagination could be closer and more actual than the rest. A distant memory, the physical present (which itself was a memory relative to which the present was recognized), and the imagined — were one and the same actual presence in it. As long as there was no need, as long as the very relation to it was not remembered, it remained as here and now.

Being simultaneously in memories and on a bus was being simultaneously in memories and on a bus. But as soon as the bus disappeared even for a few seconds, and the memories at that moment actualized to the degree of the bus’s disappearance, then precisely in that moment it was here and now. Yet when the bus appeared and the thought arose that those had been memories, that became the actual here and now — until another here and now arose in which there was no bus, which had already left an indirect trace in any subsequent here and now. And if the bus was accentuated and surfaced in associations, it became more intensely embedded in the actual here and now — which was the area where temporal loops from different regions of memory connected. Imagination, too, was a mixture of memory. It could mix with perception and be coupled with it.

From the point of view of memory, everything was a comparison of memory — associatively actual areas and perceptions. The imagined was the same, but with a degree of perceptions. If A was memory, B its actual state (a mixture of degrees), and V perception, then A ⇒ B, where A was all memory — larger than B, yet equal to it, because B was dynamic intonations, discrete degrees of the entire A. And V was what transitioned into B and already consisted of intonations of A connecting with B, and at the same time looped back with A. That is, A was looped with B, while V was not looped but transitioned into B and, accordingly, into A.

In other words, vision, hearing, the balance sensor, and all other perception sensors connected into one. This one was a mixture of multiple indicators. These indicators were processed and recognized by memory, where memory was these very indicators that had been accumulating, improving, and automating since birth. Yet these indicators continued to arrive uninterruptedly. Thus it looped, and into this loop continued to arrive perceptual mixtures. The area in the loop where perceptual information arrived was the actual here and now. But it was not always “I.” “I” could be located in the loop to varying degrees, in connection with the perceptual.

In the same way, “I” could be in a dream, where precisely the mixtures of degrees of memory and perception within the dream were more evident. Sleep was like that very ring inside a ring, which was usually identified as a dream only after it remained in the ring.

The process of remembering was the process of scrolling this through the ring. What was forgotten was what remained in the ring, but it was unreadable because it was no longer in the form in which it had been. It was such because it was unreadable, where reading itself was the memory of how to read and of what was being read.

The same applied to mistakes. They were not mistakes — they became mistakes only after being realized as such. But at the moment when these mistakes occurred, they were not only not mistakes — they were that relative to which the realization of the mistake was itself a mistake. The realization, which had not yet come, after it came, reversed the positions. This was one variant of the given context.

In another context everything was different. Contexts could change in relation to one and the same thing, where it could change degrees of erroneousness — from yes to no. In each case, from the point of view of each moment in time, the degrees changed. They were not static. They changed only as much as they were held in attention.

A name existed in time only as long as attention was concentrated on the name. It existed by itself only if it itself looked at itself and knew about itself. Even if it really existed in this way, no one could know about it. And if someone found out, then at that moment it began to exist for the one who knew and thought about it. As soon as he stopped thinking about it, it disappeared. But it existed in memory. It existed potentially. And even in this potential case it existed as actual, because it was located in the field of thought.

Absence was elusive as actual. From the point of view of the form of logic applied at the given moment, there was a probability that there were as many forms of logic as any subjective imagination would allow. But all their multitudes intertwined, forming cluster areas. This allowed the matrix not to disintegrate as a species, even if it contained fundamentally different logical universes. They were connected with the rest. They were offspring, degrees of the rest. The matrix itself clustered within itself. At each level there were its own degrees of internal and external equilibrium.

Inside an embryo, nano-robots produced themselves in the form of functions and shapes according to the codes of chromosomes, which represented qualities of lines stretching back to the times of Lyuka, qualities transformed by the environment — where the environment itself was a form of molecular cluster diagrams in relations of symbiosis between organics, electro-thermodynamics, geometry, cosmos, and gravity.

When the bio-nano-robots inside the chromosome passed through many iterations and for the first time looked at their own dynamic micro-architecture with an eye through a microscope, they dropped what they were doing. Some jumped off the threads to look. One dropped little balls and jumped along the ropes. Some stepped toward where everyone was gathering and discussing. Someone from the thin sticks descended the stairs. One uncrumpled himself, called cylinders from bent half-brushes. Another moved like thick sediment. Three transparent ones came out of the hatch along spiral tubes. From the stripes, formless oval-centered things began to spin.

Everyone was celebrating the New Year. Someone was setting off fireworks. Children made a snowman. Friends on a sled spun their friend. He spun them on the swings. They threw him into the snow. He pulled a rope. When they ran, they laughed, ate cake, and listened to a tape recorder.

Part 4

He climbed the ladder onto the ship and flew off. He saw a new planet, stopped, put on an exosuit, landed, and began collecting extraterrestrial materials. Having gathered the material, he flew back, put it in the cabinet, locked the cabinet with a small lock, put the key in his pocket, sat down at the table, looked out the window, brewed coffee, took the mug in his hand, approached the window, and saw someone flying in the distance.

He took out binoculars and began to look. In the distance, a ship was flying. In the ship’s window stood a man looking through binoculars. He looked at the name of the ship — the inscription was illegible. The ship was far away. He thought that he could not remember the name of the ship, did not remember what he had done today, and stared with surprise at the mug. He did not know where the mug on the table had come from. In his hand was the binoculars. He looked out the window and saw himself — the one who was in another ship, looking at him. He got scared, jumped back, and, falling with a delay, saw through the window how he himself got scared and fell. He hid under the window, peeked out, and saw how, a few meters away, his double was also peeking out of the window, looking at the one who was peeking. He realized that the other ship was so close that their side parts should have already collided.

He looked through another window and saw that they were fused together. He saw the double who had also seen that they were fused. He had forgotten how to control the ship. No longer afraid, he looked out the window and began to examine the other ship, searching for clues. The double was doing the same, examining the ship and searching for clues. The name of the ship was out of sight.

Suddenly, something flashed inside the double’s ship. This something had already appeared behind him. Without turning around, he took the binoculars hanging around his neck, began peering into the window, turning the focus wheel, adjusted the focus, and saw that something formless was inside the ship. It was gradually taking the shape of his double. He turned around and saw a semi-transparent, forming version of himself. He poked his finger into the liquid double, pulled it back, and realized that his finger had stuck and was beginning to be covered with a shell.

The shell spread across his entire body, covered his face, and then fell off. The shell came to its senses, crawled toward the kitchen. At that moment, children were playing in the yard. A woman entered the kitchen, saw the shell crawling toward her, got scared, grabbed a handheld vacuum cleaner, and began hitting the shell, not letting it explain anything. The shell crawled out into the yard. The children hid in the garage. A stout man ran out of the neighboring house, grabbed the shell by the leg. No one understood what was happening. Someone was filming it. A dog was barking. The man began beating the shell, shouting, “Who are you? What do you want from me?” He struck with his fist and realized that it had almost disappeared. He was hitting the grass.

Inside the ship’s cabinet, something twitched. Something was trying to break out. On the floor lay a mug with spilled coffee. Next to it lay the cosmonaut. He gradually came to his senses, realizing that the sound was somehow bringing him back to consciousness. As soon as the sound stopped, consciousness began to slip away. He crawled to the control panel and turned on the fans. He felt better from their humming. The cabinet fell silent. He assumed that the material samples were somehow affecting space.

He turned off the fans. It became quiet, but again the feeling appeared that something was in the distance and approaching. He immediately turned the fans back on. The wave retreated. He peered out the window, trying to remember how to control the ship, when suddenly the fans fell silent. From the cabinet, transparent threads began silently spreading.

He woke up by the river, next to a burned-out campfire. Nearby stood a progressive motorcycle with spherical wheels. From afar, a kilometer-high wave of dust was approaching. He got on the motorcycle, which automatically activated. The storm was already slightly moving the motorcycle from its place, but he was already riding in such a way that he could not see what was ahead. He looked at the road through the visualization panel, on which a cliff was displayed. He accelerated as much as he could, flew out over the cliff, jumped off the motorcycle, and slammed into the opposite wall of the cliff — a consistency that absorbed him and spat him out on the other side into an underground forest.

In this forest were futuristic bio-mechanisms. Small white spheres flew up to him. They emitted some molecular sounds. These spheres formed a row that would scatter, arrange itself into different signs, then gather back together, glowing in waves. The row gathered into a sphere. It broke away from the ground and flew toward clusters of mechanisms that were not quite mechanisms. He did not know how to understand this.

He no longer thought about how he had managed to start the motorcycle. He realized that he was that blue-green thing he was looking at. This thing was flickering, and around the yellow one there were four of them. They performed some function. He felt that he was inside this thing. He was this flickering function. Under his feet, other rows similar to the first ones ran by and distracted him. He looked again at these semi-transparent, glowing blue-green things and understood: when he looked at them, he became this function. There were countless varieties of them. They glowed, shimmered, turned into something multicolored and different, constantly becoming something new and new. It never stopped. There was another one nearby, and another. The ground was not ground but soft sparks. His legs began to spark. He entirely consisted of sparks. It was as if he had fallen into a cloud of sparks and was spinning and sparkling there himself.

Everything was so unlike anything that had ever been. Each part was so multidimensional that it was impossible not to pay attention to it, and there were more such parts than one could look at. It was infinite, even in its smallest part.

For a moment it seemed to him that someone was shaking him by the shoulder and saying something in an incomprehensible language. He partially came to his senses and saw people around him trying to help. He was lying on the beach. They lifted him and carried him somewhere. He tried to come to his senses but fell asleep again.

He came to in the evening in a hut. Not far away, people were sitting by a campfire. A bearded man approached him and said:

“You stepped on a poisonous fish.”

In the spaceship, something was growing out of the cabinet, but by this time only recently arrived people with lasers were inside. One of them approached the instrument panel, turned a red switch. “Docking in three… two…” Today’s was the last flight. He returned to his cabin to take a nap while unloading took place. Departure was only the next day, but he still needed to go into the city for batteries, sensors, and some devices to repair the navigation. The small vessel had been plowing the seas for forty years, yet the navigation kept malfunctioning.

“Fish is always needed, but at least we could fix the lights,” he muttered, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette. “What, after all, is the nature of metaphysics, and how is it connected with probabilities, with the theory of primacy, the theory of rings? Can there be civilizations in space that are fundamentally different from us? Is it possible that these civilizations are connected with some of us? That some of us *are* them? They are connected with the rest. What is the dynamics of degrees in this picture? How can the subjective dynamic boundaries of semiotics look from the perspective of multidimensionality — especially when they are translated into linguistic form? In what forms can aliens exist? How long have they possibly been on Earth? Could aliens have existed before the formation of Earth, and even been involved in its formation?”

Hypothetically, they could have a non-static and non-material form. What is not material for one could be the material from which what is living — but not considered living from the point of view of another alien — is composed. A human himself is an alien being for an inhabitant of another planet. But there was also a time on Earth when there were no microscopes; people did not see and did not think about microbes. Similarly, aliens might not see us.

The varieties of alien forms could be the aliens themselves. The very thoughts about aliens could be a form of existence located in phenomenological space, which belongs to hyperspace. Hyperspace could be a particular case of a fractal. Another particular case could be an infinite Koch snowflake, which has a finite outer volume but not an inner one.

One could imagine a limited sphere inside which a person walks through a forest, yet remains within a sphere four meters in diameter. And when the person walks, he still stays in the center of the sphere that creates the forest. The sphere produces real matter for the person, but the person never reaches the edge of the sphere.

From the point of view of the person inside the sphere, other people are what the sphere produces. And so it is from the point of view of every person. Not only that — a running dog is also inside its own sphere. All spheres are located in a huge room and connected to a computer. The number of spheres changes according to the number of living beings on Earth. As needed, workers install new spheres and increase the area of the room. In itself, it is a single hangar inside which there are spheres, a computer, and workers. But the hangar itself is a program in a more powerful computer, behind which sits the creator of the program.