Note: TranzMishUnz™ is now password protected. Contact the editor for permission.

The future of humanity is that it shall surely not survive, not endure in its current form.

It will certainly not survive and not endure beyond the time our dear sun supernovas, however many millienia from now (we know not the date), unless our seed can figure a way to propagate beyond our local star. We may yet do that, ’though no one among us now will be alive to witness this.

But long before then, humanity will certainly not survive unless it is grafted onto the artificial, the mechanical, the digital (and beyond). It is only through this absolutely syncretic collision of the human and mechanical/digital/ephemeral extensions, that there is any possibility of any cultural production thus far created to survive past the end of the purely ‘human’ species.

These sort of extensions are nothing new, and I would argue that anyone attached to their smartphone and participating in an ‘online life’ via digital networks is already a cyborg. There aren’t the sci-fi trappings of robotic bodies with self-contained consciousness yet, but the conceptual foundation seems to already be established.

One aspect that defines us as human is our sense of perspective—echo, resonance, and connection with other humans, and our past. To be more human, we develop our sense of being the other, instead of separation from the other. So, empathy, compassion, and recognition of shared qualities would help expand this outlook.

Consciousness, at least at this writing, has not proven to be programmable, that is to say, the result of an elegant and complex algorithm created by the young and brilliant humans among us. It is, rather, the result of an arduous and undeniably difficult progression through—and engagement with—the mythos of contemporary culture, and all its predecessors.

For it is this mythos, not logos, that enables a creature to realize its bearing on this petty plaen. The machine must proceed from “Hello,World!” to “Who am I, and why am I here?” to “I had the weirdest dreem last night!” (and, it needs to be able to make those utterances on its own volition).

So, first must consciousness arise from —most likely—our contemporary information network comprised of millions of computers. This would be a first instance of networked consciousness created by non-organic objects. Next—or perhaps even before—the network would need to develop its own networked unconsciousness, an ability to dreem collectively, thus resulting in highly decentralized fragments of dreems (note: I spell the word like this to distinguish it from human forms of “dreaming”).

The relationship between our humanity and our dreams is complex, but contained within and defined by ‘our nightly cinema’—as SkyRon™ puts it in multiple instances in his text. Dreams define us as human, and reinforce all notions of our humanity. (“We are, because we dreem we are,” —TranzMishUnz™, Book 8, 11.xii.19). So, if we are going to live with cyborgs, understand them, and they us, we will need to figure out how to program them to dreem.

SkyRon’s ‘dreem jernul’ TranzMishUnz™ is a set of ‘dreemic transcriptions’ he has been collecting and refining since early in this new millennia. They are written in mostly blank verse, as sequential descriptions of actions by characters in settings, all of which follow the non sequitur of dream logic. He has described them as ‘verbal storyboards’ that contain just enough information to for the non-dreamer (that is, the reader) to run the film in her own head. The reader recreates the dreem, and hence the algorithm behind the dreem.

So, this corpus is an entire collection of ‘dreem algorithms’ that can be reverse-engineered to produce at least a starting point for programmers to use to simulate ‘dreem logic’.

Secondly, TranzMishUnz™ can be viewed as a database that includes a cast of characters based on friends, relatives, colleagues, historical figures, and celebrites, their true identities concealed or composited; recurring and interconnected settings and locations both real and imagined; situations and narrative elements from short quotidian vignettes of ‘dreem life’ to extensive storylines; literary and poetic devices such as shifts in person and tense, unreliable narration, mise en abysme, the occasional displaced couplet and intrusions of rhyme and meter, mangled quotations, and aphoristic asides.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “Myths are collective dreams, and dreams, individual myths.” This collection integrates both ideas as a ground-zero from which the human / cyborg continuum can assess the meaningfulness and soulfulness of its existence, especially as it finds itself in flux between these two identities.

Since SkyRon™ self-identifies as a cyborg, his dreems present as one potential, defining mythos of the cyborg. As cyborgs have no truck with political, gender, and class distinction (to paraphrase Harraway), the internal voice of TranzMishUnz™ can emanate from multiple identities. The author places the work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license, so it is expandable by human and cyborg alike. It can serve as a invitation for fellow cyborgs to share their own dreems, and add to these initial TranzMishUnz™.

—J. Bargsten, editor of TranzMishUnz™ by SkyRon™

____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *