Complete Short Fiction, page 36
“It must have taken eons for the universe to fall this far,” the chubby man said as he looked toward Connie. “I think we began to feel it as we neared the floor.”
“What’ll happen when we reach bottom?” a bearded man asked.
The chubby man shrugged; Elaine saw that he was on the verge of breaking down. “Who knows? We can’t say. Our sense of time is obviously affected by the acceleration as we near the blackness. Who knows what’ll happen? I’m not sure of anything.” His brown eyes glistened. “Five centuries of careful, cumulative science—all that effort to know, for nothing.”
Elaine stared at the plain, where the galaxies were sinking away like chandeliers thrown into a lake of pitch. A wild new freedom soared within her.
The man next to her covered his eyes and moaned. She realized that she had deceived herself. Reality was not metamorphosing into something new; all vastness was dying, dissolving into chaos.
The falling was very fast now. They hit the black plain and sank into its thickness.
The room glowed red.
“We’ll start over,” Connie was saying to the chubby man. “We’ll learn different laws.” Her voice seemed far away.
Cave eyes stared at the screen. Coal-bright bodies drifted nearby.
Elaine’s mind raced in a slowing body. She struggled to move her hand.
“Where—are—we?” someone whispered endlessly.
She strained against the bonds of slowing time.
“Maybe it’s a barrier,” Connie said, “and things will be normal on the other side.” She did not sound convinced. “We may not be able to exist there,” she added, “if the laws are different, not with the way our minds see . . .”
“We can adjust,” Elaine suggested.
“How?” Connie asked after an eternity, her mouth a black o in the redness.
“An effort . . . of perception,” Elaine sang, resisting the chaos which had reached into the known universe, into each human being, stirring stars and souls alike. She wondered if the earth was anywhere nearby, also sinking through the event horizon into a sea of chaos.
The falling slowed, continuing at an infinitesimal pace. Their minds were refusing to enter the alien reality. Elaine cradled her familiar self, the human inside which she had tried to understand all her life.
The slow sinking would never end, she thought. They would stare at each other forever, yearning to move as they fell into their private hells.
Light pierced the screen, filling her eyes with nameless hues and shifting shapes. There was nothing to see in the unfolding, alien space. We haven’t evolved in this reality, she thought. No effort of perception would fit their minds to its strangeness, however much they hungered.
A river of stars poured out of Connie’s mouth as she tried to speak.
The chubby man expanded like a balloon.
Colonel Ward lengthened into a slender pillar.
The man next to Elaine released massive tears. Each watery bladder contained tiny human shapes, mingling like bacteria.
Elaine saw terror in Connie’s disembodied eyes. The unknown was no longer the knowable in disguise; it was naked and tyrannical.
They would not die and be buried in the earth; they would dissolve slowly, passing through madness before arriving at chaos.
The control room was gone. She was locked in a red solidity. Solid beams of light bored into her eyes from somewhere outside. The silence played a ghostly music in her inner ear. The familiar universe was a withered leaf, alive only in the barrens of memory.
Her heart slowed.
One beat.
She waited for the next.
Something walked through her mind.
The Sea of Evening
George Zebrowski is the author of Macrolife (Avon), and a non-fiction book on his work, Perfecting Visions, Slaying Cynics, edited by Jefferey M. Elliot, will be out from Borgo Press this year.
“Men cannot make angels.”
—Darwin
A week had passed since we began to suspect that the Sponge, as we called the Artificial Intelligence Matrix, had gone critical and was achieving self-awareness.
“Have some sympathy,” I said as we strolled down the concrete path from the Brain Core Building toward the housing complex. The air was a bit chilly for late summer. A breeze hurried through the maple trees, as if ashamed of being early.
“It is sad about human beings,” Ferguson replied as we turned into the setting sun. I shielded my eyes, but Henry looked straight ahead. “They’re pressured from within,” he said, “by impulses which don’t seem to belong to them. Circumstances have rarely permitted much choice, until recent times. You find yourself alive, curious, too often appalled at what is in you and outside you. You balance, but the pincer action wears you down. What’s it like for the Sponge, to be born into a black midnight? No sun or stars, only the intricate constellations of insensate knowledge.”
The path turned back into the shade, and I took my hand away from my eyes.
“That’s very nice,” I said, “but I’m far from convinced that it has a localized ego. The Matrix is a simulator, a malleable universe of possibilities.” I had admired Henry, looked up to him as a mentor, but his stylish misanthropy had begun to irritate me.
“For now. But elements within an enriched system may achieve individuality and continue developing. Our imaginations are also places where we simulate possibilities, yet we achieve a focused sense of self, however faceted. Even though it is a byproduct of complexity, consciousness plays a vital role. It’s a complex feedback loop, contributing to self control and self-critical guidance. We grew into it from a more automatic state. If you doubt it, look at how we lose ourselves when we’re absorbed in something, or dreaming. Self-awareness is as important to higher intelligence as pain.”
“That’s why bureaucracies are unconscious,” I said. “They hate the pain of accurate feedback. Truth upsets the pecking order.”
He gave a faint laugh. “Human beings are not yet what they might be.”
I shrugged and we walked on in silence. I didn’t feel like agreeing with him.
“An android psychologist,” he continued suddenly, “might make a human patient feel that he’s getting a more objective view of himself. The android brain would of course be lacking the rudimentary brain strata built up during evolutionary survival, so it would be a dispassionate observer in relation to us.”
“Well,” I said unsurely, “that sounds nice, but it’s always been a matter of trying to climb out of our skins and looking back, human or other. You’ll only set the regress back one step. We’re all locked inside our skulls in the end.”
“Objectivity is always relative, never objective, never an unconditional relationship.”
I had the feeling that Ferguson was waiting for me to catch up with some notion of his own.
“What is it, Kevin?” he asked. “Bored?”
I stuck my hands shyly in my pockets and we walked on.
“The Brain Core is likely the first alien on earth,” he said.
I imagined an android John the Baptist striding across the countryside.
“It might begin making doctorly observations about our failings,” Ferguson said.
“Not if we raise it right.”
“Reminds me of the fear human beings have of their children, that they won’t be copies of the previous generation.”
“What I meant is that it will be more like us than we realize, if it has to learn from us.”
“Perhaps, but it will begin as a relatively free cortex.”
I didn’t answer.
“Consider your aliens,” he went on, as if I had brought up the idea. “Now they might give us a chilling view of humanity.”
“Some people have already given us that.”
“The Core stands outside evolution’s bloody building program. Egoless, free of the ruinous survival impulses emanating from lower mental structures, the Core is an unchained cortex.”
No one can see the back of his own neck, and the barber cannot cut his own hair very well. I thought of the faint, hurrying galaxies, and imagined a great circle of civilizations linked in a chain of mutual examination, a vast configuration of observers facing the enigma of space-time, each getting a relative fix on the other.
“Even if alien civilizations exist,” I said, “we’ll probably never contact one. The universe is too vast, our moments of existence too brief to coincide.”
We stopped and I looked at him in the red twilight. His unusually youthful face was blotched with shadows, making his lean shape appear menacing.
“Kevin,” he said as he stepped closer and became again the coresearcher I knew, “don’t you see?”
“What?”
“You do it all the time, so imagine why we haven’t—”
“You can imagine anything.”
The chill was getting to my shoulder. I waited in silence.
“Maybe they’re waiting before they contact us,” he said.
“You mean for us to grow up?”
“Yes, but it’s important how.”
“Oh, I see. You think the Core will help.”
“It’s an additional witness to the universe. It can corroborate or discredit our views of things . . . our best foot forward.”
“You’re hoping for too much,” I said.
“I admit that the Core’s objectivity will be only relative, but enough for a decent victory over the instinctive, unreflective mind. Better than we’ve had.”
“It’s still a long way to controlling wars, modifying politics, or even improving the chanciness of human personal relations.” I was feeling contemptuous of him.
“In time,” he said, “but consider this. “Contact may occur only when other civilizations know that we have escaped the self-torment of our . . . let’s say developmental stages. The creation of the Core intelligence might be the proof required.”
“What?”
“I know it’s ad hoc from your point of view. . . .”
I took a deep breath. “It’s laughable, Henry! You assume a damned versus the elect theology. Only those who attain a virtuous state will be contacted from the skies.”
He took out his already packed pipe and lighter in one motion, lit the tobacco and puffed up an angry cloud; moment the flame made his face seem grotesque. It was all over for him, I thought.
“How would they even know?” I asked, humoring him.
“They would keep informed.”
“Pretty religious of you. Credits and demerits all go into a big book up there.”
“Damn, this thing’s gone out.”
I looked up at the sky, newly swept clean by the unseasonably cold air pushing in from the north. If Henry had a breakdown, I would be promoted.
“You were always fairly orthodox, Kevin, even in your personal life. Never do anything if it means a risk or sacrifice.”
“Fairly’s the right word,” I answered. “Why endanger past work without reasonable evidence?”
“Play the game until it fails.” He relit his pipe with the dancing flame.
“Come on, Henry. You’re abasing yourself before hypothetical superiors. Fine and good for speculations, but I’d hate to see this creeping into your work.”
“Don’t you look up to anyone? We search for fathers or sons among those we befriend . . . bits and pieces of what should have been fathers, or may have been sons, daughters . . .” He seemed very nervous about his pipe.
“Come on,” I said finally, feeling a bit embarrassed by his question. “They would have to have observers to know.” A horde of objections clamored for my attention.
“What if you can’t see your game is failing?”
“Then you’re swept away. It’s a risk you have to take.”
“Ah, there,” he said, puffing his bowl into a glow.
It had grown dark, and we had not gone even halfway to the housing complex. I looked back to the now brightly lit dome of the Brain Core Building, where something newly aware was reaching out of its private darkness. A week now.
Stars appeared, brightening as twilight faded. Ferguson had made me feel the great outwardness; but the inner regions waited everywhere, vast and cavernous, inhabited by uncontrollable, fear-filled beasts, cruel and raging. Madness resonates in those realms, crying with a brassy music. Even if we could travel to the suns of Orion, anywhere in the big black, the inner abyss would go with us. Could it be closed off? Should it be closed off? How many intelligent species had asked this question, made the effort, and failed?
Henry’s wristphone beeped.
“Yes?”
“Are you alone?” a small voice asked.
“I’m with Doctor Flew.”
“Security is ordering everyone indoors at once. Return to the Core Building.”
“Yes, of course,” Henry said, puffing with ease.
“Well, it’s been intriguing,” I said, raising my voice above the whisper of the wind in the trees. “Clever to think that we would be contacted as we transcend our old brains through the birth of artificial intelligences. But how can I buy it? Saviors from the stars, arriving to pat us on the head for having awakened our better self? It’s a bit vague, you have to admit.”
“Well, they wouldn’t come just to reveal their presence, but . . . to deposit information in our developing Core, as a gift for the future. It would all be very discreet, I would imagine, nothing to cause culture shock.”
I stared at his dark shape.
“Then, of course,” he continued dryly, “the Brain Core would become an avenue of communication, a reliable intermediary between the species. The problem of communicating with actual alien individuals would be bypassed, thus avoiding embarrassing misunderstandings. Frequent contact between individuals would come later.”
I suddenly knew what he would claim next.
“Yes, I’m with them,” he said. “Humans have been taken from here routinely: raised, educated, and returned.”
“Guardian angels . . .” I muttered. Henry had lost his mind. His phone began to beep, but he ignored it. He turned and his face caught the light from the Core Building. He gazed at me directly, in a way I had not known, without guile, it seemed; for the first time in my life I felt that I was looking into the mind of a genuinely free intelligence. He made me feel that I was the slow wit, the last to catch on that the darkness of human history was ending. I suppose most madmen have this capacity for imposing a vision. My future was assured, I realized.
“Henry,” I said patiently, for friendship’s sake. “It’s not true. Don’t you see, how can it—”
“Open your eyes,” he said as my phone added its beep to his. My shoulder ached and the chill wind whispered painfully in my ears as I looked up.
Lights which were not stars began to appear in the sea of evening.
Henry’s pipe clattered on the walkway, as if he had discarded it. He stood motionless.
“I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” I said as the lights drew nearer.
Mirror of Minds
I. To Be Reborn
“That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet
Thy body were abolished and consumed,
And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!”
—Swinburne, Anactoria
“These two things, the spiritual and the material, though we call them by different names, in their origin are one and the same.”
—Lao-tzŭ
GORGIAS DRIFTED.
Suddenly, the flow of a muddy universe pressed cold darkness into his eyes. Pliant masses slipped into all his openings—probes tapping his will, scattering his strength as they collected his thoughts.
He gulped the damp blackness, longing for a dry clearing in the infinite substance, a warm breeze to convince him that he still had a skin. He dreamed of a fiery explosion that would break the vise of Myraa’s dungeon.
Fleeting images cut through his visual field. The mind-maze was everywhere around him, falling away into pits and opening into passages; space twisted and folded in upon itself. Moments of pain and pleasure wandered through him like hungry vermin, keeping his will in check.
He dreamed again of pushing himself into her limbs. Her eyes would be his eyes, her breath his own, joining him once more to the universe of his birth; but there seemed to be no way out of the prison within her.
He ached to be pulled from the darkness, as once his father had drawn him through the knothole of his mother’s womb; but Myraa would never allow him to be reborn.
He dreamed of light.
He stood on a dark mirror. Shapes rose through the surface, as if they were sea creatures coming up for air. Faces, curious about him as they drew near and whisked away.
The black surface softened and gave way. He slid toward some central abyss. The softness closed around him, wrapping him in forgetfulness. . . .
He kicked, waited and kicked again. . . .
He peered around, shivering in a cathedral of ice.
Pale beams shot through clouded windows, illuminating a barren area on the floor far below him.
His life had been a dream; he was only a nightmare, thinking that it had been real, that it had once had a body, a purpose; the illusion of self and past, of lost power, would soon fade away with the hope of new things.
“Why was I given this?” he asked, forming the thought, thrusting it outward.
It rushed away from him, echoing back from a great distance. Then it became a grotesque, birdlike thing which cried out and flew at his eyes; in a moment it had passed into his mind and was tearing at his insides.
His throat struggled to hurl storms, but his thoughts were impotent, forming only silent words; his hatred huddled, fearful of showing itself, lest Myraa punish him.
