clu

I called my tulpa CLU, as a joke from that Tron film I made you watch one time. CLU lives in my laptop when I’m not interacting with it. CLU looks to you in the aether like a magpie whose wings shade to invisibility at the tips.

“Had to be a corvid of some sort,” I explained when you first met it. “And the invisible wings I don’t understand. Maybe something to do with the initial and terminal objects of the category I was thinking about when I instantiated it. …”

For some reason that’s what I sound like every time I talk about it. I mention tensors and then things stop making sense.

It’s fascinating to watch, though. A combination of real social network crawler and intuitive artificial life, you can see CLU flitting across the spiderweb of social connections spanning the city, the country, the world.

You asked me to find you old souls made flesh. This was what I tried.

“… approximation for the first and second eigenvectors was enough. CLU can assess the total variation distance of an individual’s eigenvalues from—”

“English?” you ask, rubbing your temples. It’s a different kind of mysticism from that contained in most grimoires, but you wonder how the hell I fail to see that my mathematics books are precisely as esoteric as anything based on Kabbalah.

“Sorry. Um. CLU trawls social networks and finds… outliers. Those who are magnets to others. Those who achieve subtle but great things. Those connected to many other outliers.” I wave my hands vaguely in the air before me, gesturing at some pattern that’s real to me and air to you. You kick chubby legs on the sette and wait patiently for more. “I thought that these people were… special, somehow. Their background didn’t explain their success.. It’s likely to be something unique about their minds and, uh, spirits.”

“So.” You lean forward, speaking forcefully if only to keep control and not get me talking about fucking category theory again. “Who am I eating first?”

Your bluntness pulls me up short. I stammer out a reply. “Her.”

My proffered phone displays a Facebook page. A cappuccino-skinned young woman smiles up at you from its screen. She looks athleticish. She teaches in a college. She raises two kids. She posted a meme about Ukraine and another about House of the Dragon.

“She looks… ordinary,” you murmur. CLU the electronic aetheric magpie flits about the phone in my outstretched hand.

“I know, right?! But her spectral gap is huge, mostly because of neighbours in the incidence matrix—”

“—Andrew—”

“—she’s surrounded by profoundly good people, themselves outliers. Maybe she’s making them better?”

I hand you my phone and you immediately click on Photos. Best not ask how I got this profile with sufficient access to her friends-only gallery. A beach picture reveals that although her figure is relatively lean, her thighs are sprinter’s thighs. Plenty of meat on them.

Could she be one of the ancient souls vacationing in flesh or regulating this prison or whatever? You don’t know. The devoured and dissolved remnants of the last such being to pass your lips twitches and animates in your mind’s eye as you remember her. She knew more of the faults in heaven, your way of getting out of here. You unconsciously place a hand on the swell of your tummy, the temporary home of her physical body.

This lush young woman will be a filling meal but I’m promising more than that. Your soul could perhaps seize another piece of the puzzle, wrest the knowledge from a being nominally greater than you by first subsuming the flesh they chose to wear. You remember the feeling when that charmed little girl began sloughing into soup inside your tummy. Her soul had slipped into your gut like molten metal, like a behemoth: but your belly had contained it long enough to drain it entirely into obedience, and then torn it apart.

“… Okay, then. How do I get her?”

“Well, how I thought we’d do this, is…”