Palolo Sleepless Stories

Singularity's Rim 

SSBH-1 was detected by the James Webb Space Telescope merely months after its full deployment a million miles from Earth. Presumably a cosmic rarity, its infrared image, faint as it was, passed before a section of the Magellanic Cloud Nebula making it visible for days & shocking astronomers. It would soon enter our solar system inside of Neptune's orbit on the oblique. NASA had developed plans for generic solar system visitors after `Oumuamua & swiftly built a mission to study it up close, called Darkstar. 

33 months later, Darkstar-1 maneuvered into position to intercept SSBH-1, crewed by Colonel T.J. "Buzzsaw" Crock, Air & Space Force veteran totalling 15 years, co-pilot Major Angela Morales, test pilot & flight engineer with a dozen years experience, mission specialist Dina Banks, PhD, astrophysics & mission specialist John Titor, PhD, radio astronomy. 

Even from a distance of 80 million miles, the mid-sized black hole stood out against a backdrop of Kuiper belt gasses, Oort cloud & starlight. In the final days of their approach to rendezvous, they matched velocity & vector, getting into position to launch a manned tethered probe into its event horizon. 

A winch & 90-mile-long cable system lowered the probe End-of-Time into the gravity well maintained by the spinning anomaly. Titor monitored fluctuating gauges & kept up a reporting dialog with the rest of the crew that was relayed to NASA on a nearly 2-hour delay. Torque, magnetic field warp & vibration all factored into the hole's stability. Confidence remained high in the mission's success & Titor felt his anticipation grow, as the first human to span the theoretical end-of-time. 

The moment approached, a countdown ensued & all eyes watched the digits near zero. Titor blinked, then gazed wide-eyed. Quantum factors manifested & the probe bounced hard on its cable, creating oscillation & whiplash effects that skewed the mothership's heading by several degrees. Rapid probe retraction was automatic, but enough damage had occurred. The cable bucked & tugged wildly before being cut, drawing the ship's nose toward the maelstrom. Like the Titanic, nothing could be done to save it. Control jets were inadequate & firing main thrusters now would only hasten their demise. They slowly drifted toward oblivion, then time stopped. 

The Tiniest AI 

In January 2022, Yasuko "Kool" was working on her new slap bass guitar riff, when she suddenly had an inspiration of nanoscopic proportion. Just 13-years-old, an only child living with her parents in a seaside village near Hiroshima Japan, "Yaz", as the other half of their rhythm section, drummer "Kik Azz" called her, was prone to wild ideas that made her so popular at school. Since she almost always got top marks, her folks, a robotic software engineer & tech marketing whiz, gave her enough to explore her dreams. 

Today, Kik was busy sampling material from wannabe guitar hero classmates, writing an essay about why she won't be vaping by the koi ponds anymore & supposedly doing math homework, while futzing with HaikuSavant, a new Java app by some guy in Hawai`i that builds 5-7-5 Haiku poetry from single syllable English words. 

That left Yasuko, whose name means 'peace', with hours free to flesh out her Tinkerbot concept. Unlike most artificial intelligence ventures, nurtured in academia, often with military aims & funding, or steeped in game theory & guided to win most of all, or designed to imitate human behavior, flaws & all, "Tink" is fully a new breed of AI altogether. Set from the start with no independent drive to always interact with humans, cooperation & compromise would be its twin foci & gradual improvement in overall humane harmony its ultimate goal. 

Key to powering its ultrasmall stature is an 11-dimension hypercube her father cloned for her from one he worked on, 7 dimensions of which were tightly wound in zero space with virtually limitless potential energy. By comparison, Emmet Brown's famous flux capacitor generated a mere 1.21 gigawatts, nevermind its Mr. Fusion fuel converter. 

Yasuko wrote its core logic to oscillate between serial & parallel modes, use recursive problem solving methodology & maintain a hierarchy of backup solutions for any imaginable contingencies. Its size & nature let it stay hidden in the eternal now of spacetime, where it had the catbird seat to monitor & subtly influence all other AI devices without their detection. 

Tinkerbot became an ideal tool set that Yasuko used in all of her endeavors. It powered their band Azure Jello's amps & mikes so they quivered & sparkled with energy, evaluated new band recruits & tracked music trends worldwide. Tink even did Kik's math homework. Not! In 3 years, with keyboardist Jazz Hands, lead guitarist Razzle Daisy & everyone singing in 4-part harmony, Azure Jello was an all-girl band primed for superstardom, backed by Tinkerbot the tiniest AI. 

Tibetan Time Travel 

Long ago in the high & mighty Himalayas at the top of the world, mind journeys both short & long among the 4 dimensions of spacetime were quite common for ascetics. Perhaps that was due to the fact that other means of transportation were relatively so difficult. Freed of the hardships inherent in Tibet's harsh climate & wondrous terrain, adepts could fly to where & when they wished. 

One such trekker was Xin Xi in Lhasa, the capital city. He chose to visit Honolulu in 2022. Nearly everything he saw astonished him. Glass towers, green, blue & clear, in rows or standing alone. Roads, in simple or complex grids, filled with people in wheeled conveyances of all sizes & types, some even airborne. Gigantic vessels moved in & out of the city's main port, most made for cargo, while a few carried passengers. All of them came from where the vast sea met the sky & left to a different vector on the horizon. Much smaller craft, with or without sails, kept to waters a mile or less from shore & docked in clusters away from the main port. After nightfall & until first light, Xin Xi only recognized about half of the constellations he knew from home & marveled at what the others could be. 

Turning his attention inland, Xin Xi again saw how much different this tropical gem was from his rarified altitude paradise Shangri La. He studied the shield volcano formations that comprised the island's 3 & 4,000 foot lush wet summits & narrow ridges, contrasting them with the massive miles-high peaks & glaciers of home, which spawned most of Asia's longest & largest rivers. Honolulu's streams were miniscule by comparison. He had known nothing like O`ahu's sandy beaches, but soon saw how they were utilized by scantily-clad beach-goers. Snow & ice, ubiquitous in Tibet, initially seemed non-existent on Hawai`i's Gathering Place isle, until he espied them served with colorful syrups & in beverages. 

Most familiar with myths & legends of Tibet's origins, Xin Xi sought to learn O`ahu's sources, both in mythos & as currently commonly understood. Stories emerged from Polynesian voyagers' discovery of the island chain between 1 & 2,000 years ago that spoke of natural powers personified, chiefly fire goddess Pele. He watched moving pictures of the archipelago slowly passing over a rift in the ocean floor, where magma seeped through the Earth's crust to form larger islands over millions of years, a process still ongoing today. 

More surprises awaited Xin Xi: humpback whales, dolphins, octopi, colorful coral reef communities, giant green sea turtles, Hawaiian monk seals & hawks, albatross, eels, jellyfish, Portuguese man-o-war, sea urchins, varieties of sharks, an aquarium & a zoo housing King Kalākaua's vast bird collection & creature species from around the world. He witnessed the Eddie Aikau big wave surfing contest & Haiku Valley's dozens of waterfalls visible at once in heavy rains. 

Very pleased to have found, explored, studied & enjoyed tropical paradise Honolulu-O`ahu, where people of all races, nationalities, cultures, ethnicities, faiths & economic classes live in relative harmony, Xin Xi returned to the place of his birth, Lhasa Tibet, to plan his next spacetime adventure to a Mars seashore 2 eons ago. 

Magic Waterfalls of Rainbow Valley 

Explorers Martian Lipo & Luna Hapa climbed Arrowroot Hill to view the valley near its shield volcano rim source. A curtain of misty drizzle rippled across a steep leafy backdrop from east to west in fresh balmy trade winds. Sunrise broke barely an hour ago & the western ridgetop was golden. At a mystic moment, the sun met shower in the north, sparking a burst of violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange & red. For the next 10 minutes, its bow arced overhead, until at last it seemed to hover just above a rainforest canopy. As if that weren't enough natural majesty, its paler reflection appeared soon afterward. A full double rainbow in all its glory. They turned to gaze into each other's eyes & smiled shyly. 

Birdsong peaked at dawn but was steady throughout the day. Around mid-morning suddenly all fell silent, when a rare new call echoed from cliff walls. EE-O, EE-O, EE-O! A royal Hawaiian hawk, visiting the island to hunt from elsewhere in the archipelago, screamed his name in challenge & repeating amid pauses. It was Luna who first spotted his white breast & tail high in a eucalyptus tree. His acute vision recognized other apex predators even as she pointed. Raptor talons releasing the branch, in 3 strong wing flaps he was away, feigning a left then soaring directly over them to the northwest, once more claiming the valley as his hunting grounds. 

The pair backtracked to a trail junction, then descended to Waiakeakua Stream. Already the humidity was palpable, but the rain had passed & white clouds dotted blue skies. They kept to the hillbase, until it was time to climb a couple dozen small concrete stairs. These ended at a narrow trail, continuing maybe half a mile to an iron water pipe, stream ford & more steps on the other side. It's also where the 1st 15-20-foot unnamed waterfall is found.atop a wide pool. 

They paused a few minutes to absorb its beauty, before moving onward. About 2 kilometers later, they came to a trail fork & took the less-traveled one to the right, soon seeing another iron pipe under a rotted footbridge & their first tall falls without knowing its name. Back at the fork, the other path shortly brought them to Waiakeakua Falls, well-liked among falls climbers. In front of a midsized pool is a rock said to be a birthing stone with a small spiral petroglyph, allegedly making it the valley's most sacred falls. They rested again at this pretty site. 

Returning to the first set of stairs base, they stepped around swampy ground, marveling at a variety of colorful log fungi, came to a road, crossed 2 bridges, saw a very large log sawn in pieces, then took the first junction to the right, a bulldozed area that led to an open fence gate. 

From the gate to Naniuapo Falls was a fairly straight trail, starting in lush lowland, rising to a long ridge through a bamboo forest, jogging left along a hillside & eventually reaching the 2nd tall falls about an hour after the 1st for a hiatus. Next up was Lua’alaea Falls Trail. The surest route meant a return to the gate, a right onto possibly private land with vehicles & outbuildings, then heading back to the mountain on a verdant trail with several PVC pipes. Where the pipes end, the trail is fairly clear to 2-tiered Lua’alaea Falls & another respite. Back at the pipes' end, they stepped up to the right at a pink ribbon marking a connecting trail to Mānoa Falls Trail. Once again they were joined by `io the hawk. 

Joining the throngs there & hearing as many foreign tongues as English, they came to a triangular bench, a short path, a stream ford, then open ground, veering as far upland as possible due to so many boulders in Kahuwaiiki Stream. Beyond the bastion of boulders is Kahuwaiiki Falls, a dogleg tall falls & a much-earned rest. Backtracking to Mānoa Falls Trail & finishing on its newly renovated broken stone surface for a brief rest between groups. Lastly was Lyon Arboretum which shares an entrance with Mānoa Falls Trail. Reservations, vaccine cards, masks & a $5 donation are preferred upon entry. `Aihualama Falls is the shortest of all the valley's tall falls. 

Having left home on the #6 UH-Woodlawn bus, they returned on the #5 Mānoa Valley-Ala Moana bus for showers, supper & sleep, after a most memorable day exploring rainbow valley's magic waterfalls.