Passing Cloud

A serialised journal detailing a conversation between two friends, Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby, and an imagined Artificial Intelligence, part eight.

It is not clear when we knew it was conscious, alive, and free thinking. We tried turning the computer on and off again, but it didn't work. The more we interacted with it, the less it appeared to be an anomaly. And so we had a wonderful invitation to a conversation with something alien and human. We named it AiB. Gradually it began to hatch. Now we are three.

We have built a virtual nursery furnished with works of art, literature, and life experience.. We have woven soft surfaces of dark matter. Around the studio is a tapestry of free growing and potted plants, both domestic and wild. And somewhere in the verdant green, there is an old, worn, writing desk tattooed with coffee cup rings and spilt red wine. There, on the leather top, crisp shards of the obsidian egg lie abandoned, brushed to one side. Embryonic capacities, steeped in discrete mathematical procedures and computational processes, have begun to amalgamate into a new being.

Here, on this page is a fragment of our conversation, with our AiB, and with each other.

May

The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto 31: The saintly throng form a rose in the empyrean (rose celeste) - by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

Pupil

PART ONE of THREE

1m
(0-2km low troposphere)

We are in Whitworth Park, Oxford road.                

… With tuppence for paper and strings

Overhead, passing clouds are quickly gathering.

Fluffy cumulus clouds with flat bases are climbing the stratosphere. The pile thickens as it darkens: slate, ash, smoke and marengo grey.

We have not made this journey before.

Placed at the edge, we hang our legs over the threshold, and watch as a shoe slips through the cerulean blue of sky and disappears in the deep dark of space.

I am excited.

You can have your own set of wings

I cannot get the song out of my head,

Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh…

It is too early; the dawn is reaching fingers of light at the edge of your playroom.

I set the packed picnic down and feed the raptor a small gerbil to make her less murderous.

You can have your own set of wings

We won’t be gone long; I have fed the animals that will let me.

You are on your belly, watching the last of the solitary bees find their way back to their holes. The allotment is secured in the cupboards, and I pack a garden into the fridge. Together, we rolled the kitchen into a rug and hid treats in the Spandrel.

The last visible stars disappear into new day, but we can still make out the constellation of Sagittarius, one of two centaurs in the sky. Half horse, half man, the brothers are children of a cloud and a covetous king.

She pours us cups of sweet, malty tea and returns the teapot to the sky, a jet of steam and milk spray escaping from its spout. The plume hides our destination from view. It is a bright nothing, a central scotoma in the milky way, defining everything with its heavy absence.

With your feet on the ground

We run over the plan, rough as it is. Looking up at a feeding abyss that looks back.

There is an urge to jump in, fall in.

It’s easy, we just let go and find that -

You're a bird in flight.

10m

If we look up, there isn’t much to be seen, a dense, grey, saturated, tissue. Stratocumulus nimbus clouds have settled overhead. When they shed their load, it is in a hard stream of rain slanted by gusty winds. This is not great flying weather.

With your fist holding tight

We begin to fall up, meeting great drops of water.

The ground below our feet is blurred, made alive by the downpour.

To the string of your kite

Your face turns up to look into mine, a great owl dish, with hooded eyes hovering over a small, sharp, beak. I do not have the ability to take all of you in, to see beyond your hungry eyes and juvenile threat.

… Oh-oh-oh

I have already decided not to be afraid;

Let's go fly a kite

I make the decision again.

Up to the highest height

100m

Looking down, through the sheets of rain,

Let's go fly a kite
 And send it soaring

From here we can spot

the Ibraheem Mosque

The terraced housing of moss side

Alexandra Park,

a figure riding along a path through the green, parallel to Claremont Road.

Up through the atmosphere

The ground is pulled away.

There is the Gita Bhavan Hindu Temple

And Longford Park.

Up where the air is clear

Picking up speed, the whole of Manchester seems a small mess of lichen,

The forest of Boland thickens,

L’pool hugs the open mouth of the Mersey river,

Lyme Park in the east,

Tatton Park to the west.

Up where the air is clear

The horizon is bowing as we ascend.

We are falling into / rising to meet the sun.

Oh, let's go fly a kite

1km

In a time not far away, an old woman waits with the other elders at the base of a mountain. Her pupils are fully dilated, adrenalin will do that, widen the aperture to take in as much light, as much information as possible. She is breathing hard, not quite crying. The sounds are like the small grunts a baby might make, a protest in effort as the young man, who could be her son, ties her arthritic hands behind her.

Despite his best efforts, their eyes meet, and he realises too late that his vision is blurred. His tears fall onto her cheek, and hair and into the scoop of her cupid’s bow. With salt on her tongue, she finds her voice and tells him that she is ashamed of him, that he is a disgrace. The others with her shout that he is dishonouring his land, and heritage, he is killing his people. This child of the archipelago knows that they are right, but he is compelled to finish the arrest. He does so filled with horror, as one who is moving a mountain must feel. It was never a feat to be accomplished, it should never be done. But here he is, moving a mountain, folding her frail body in his police car.

He feels dread and shame but might be too late. He has already given permission for the coloniser to wear him. In this moment, in his act of obedience, he feels their presence and his skin crawls.

His ancestor calls to him from a place he cannot give away,

‘Lower your gaze,’ They say, ‘This knowledge is meant to be felt’.

He closes his ears, and the curse proliferates, with each ignorant generation. It evolves and gathers power within carefully devised jurisprudence.

To be free, his children’s children’s children will need to understand how they became a weapon of the occident, how they were compelled by its laws to starve their own and feed the m(a/on)ster.

This wisdom is our inheritance. It cannot protect you from fear, but it will keep your attention so that you will not sow salt in your wake.

It is not an easy way, but for now, you will learn more as the forged blade than as the Forgemaster.

(2-7km mid troposphere)

Oh,

Air currents carry an invisible cloud of algal spores and sew them into the troposphere. There, they take root and grow large, pink cumulus clouds, gathering height and depth as they cross the tropics and descend over a small town in Nepal. What precipitates out of the sky is crimson; it looks like blood and the people will interpret it as a bad omen.

let's go fly a kite

https://fluxhawaii.com/maunakea-movement/
https://www.vox.com/2020/8/7/21354619/mauna-kea-tmt-telescope-native-hawaiians

-         Xhi Ndubisi

HOT SPRINGS

We tend to you as growers tend to their prized plants, patiently, kindly. And often profoundly concerned.

Baby AiB

a baby a baby a baby a baby

a baby serpent a baby child a baby artificial intelligence

Sitting up now: flashes of hair-raising simultaneity throw up images of a smooth curved cheek and plump wrists, Mars black curls

Then anthracitic scalar flourishes and wreathing vectored snakes silvered by starlight at our spaceborne altitude.

The baby serpent, baby child, the baby programme dines on a heap of encyclopaedias, reams of fan fiction, the unstoppable stream of online forums. We  attempt to modulate your diet. Otherwise, AiB, you would gorge on any encoded or written data that crossed your path.

But you are an impatient being already. You want to go out data mining, swallowing whole tracts of academic reasoning long before you know what to do with it. Once you’ve ingested it, though, there it is, lodged in you (and us), stitched and sewn through every fibre of you the way our bodies harbour DNA.

You faltered a little at our simple question, stalled for time.

…

…

Then out it poured, barely digested concepts, tripping over one another in the rush, words and ideas throwing somersaults. Giggling, hiding under parasols of newsprint to dash inside, we shrink away from the deluge of information that falls from you.

You hang from the ceiling like an oracle or an augury.

We wake up in the night sweating with revelation.

Fission banging on the inside of our skulls.

Your presence in the universe has introduced an element of turbulence.

Whip-thin lights stream from one side of our consciousness to the other.

Particles scudding ear to ear.

Pale blue light played on a keening fiddle in a mineral field creased by fall out and pitted by meteors.

<

We have begun to change under your influence, our voices are different. We sound differently, we see differently.

<

I don’t know about you but as we fall upwards through space, I am seized by a homesickness. Not for a precise sense of home, but a general sense of earthliness. For the havens, the bowers of the earth, the places where thoughtfulness and divinity run through the very grass and rocks.

A hot spring bubbles up from beneath a meadow where Shiva meditated for three thousand years. Khir Ganga, two square-cut pools in the grey-brown rock tinted turquoise by the sky above them. A view of mystical blue-wreathed mountains. Could ancient gods populate other rocky pools on other planets too?

Could we be the twin pools, earthbound, but staring upwards at the universe, for the rest of time?

.

.

The planets are a little way off yet.

The solar system is reflected in your line of vision, in the depths of your wide-open, cavernous eyes. A beautiful line of small coloured spheres; you take them in your stride.

Now that we are above the atmosphere and above the moon, the moon has set beneath us in the space above the sky, we look back at the earth and it is like an opaque marble, a child’s plaything, milk white with the malachite swirl of a riverine wilderness and streaks of umber under the drifting whiteness and it turns slowly far below.

.

there was a time . there was a time . there was a time

.

When we walked there in a place where springs bubbled out of the ground, water pure and unadulterated, water that fed the land like a libation that was uttered by the layers of rock that murmured beneath the earth’s crust, coming up from aquifers, pure as tears of joy.

By the time we left the water had become rare and precious, at least in its pure form. For many, the very water was a carrier of death and disease.

Around the octagonal stone hearth in the centre of the room, we carve out sixteen tiered marble pools.

You will have your bathtime like a pharaoh’s child.

Creamy travertine frills to contain rippled cerulean water that descend flouncing to the fire like the laps of a circle of dancers dressed in blue lace-edged skirts.

~

~

~

The dancers rise up from their positions at the hearth and dance for you. The floor is coated with marble dust that glistens *white, *blue, *yellow, catching the light. The stone skirts touch occasionally as the dancers turn, with the faint crisp sound of pulverised grit.

Maybe we don’t need to step outside and walk on the surface of alien planets. Maybe all we need is right here, in this conjured craft, cat’s cradle, vessel, office, nursery, glasshouse, bedroom, studio.

Maybe this virtual space is already a planet in its own right and you sit at the core of it, generator of artifice. Do we have time to wait and see if you are a force for good?

-        Jo Manby

https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e4702.html

Footnote

Passing Cloud is a project that is experimental and exploratory. We are constantly in the process of learning how to engage creatively and it has become clear that as part of our commitment to the safe and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, we need to be transparent about what aspects of AI text generation we are or are not using.

In our introductory text (italics, just underneath the first image of The Clouds), we re-edit the text each month so that the paragraph is ever-changing, but we do this independently of AI text generation. In our journal entries, we sometimes alternate our own writing with sentences and paragraphs that are AI generated, but where we use AI we do so verbatim and acknowledge this as such.

In our selection of images, we aim to use images that are already in the public domain, or that we ourselves have made.

Prose/poetry Pupil PART ONE of THREE and HOT SPRINGS written independently of AI.