The Dance, page 27
“The savanteurs… for all The Plenty they offer can outcompete us at any task. So we bend over backwards to come up with new games for ourselves to play, embossing, dreamreading, martial dance, then convince ourselves that our endeavours are somehow more valuable than theirs. All the while the MachineGarden functions just fine. It would go on remaking itself until the sun burns out even if we all just gave up.”
“You’re helping people to heal, inside and out.”
Shoulders sinking, Eos let out a sigh that transitioned into nodding.
“I guess I do feel that as my purpose within madekind. But what is the purpose of madekind? It’s a question that I think about a lot as a cogenitor of buildgrown. If our own production and reproduction has been a choice since ReGenesis, why do we bother?”
Arata watched the drones or fish for a time, considering the question.
“What if our purpose now is not to evolve or transform ourselves further but to communicate and learn as we are?”
“You said we’re unlikely to succeed.”
“That’s what I thought then. Now I’m inclined to be more optimistic.”
Arata told her his theory that the strobe correlated with twin neighboring universes.
“So you think the strobe actually means something then?” she asked, hopeful.
“It may be profoundly important. It may be the key to finding the common direction you’re talking about. And it’s thanks to you that the idea came to me.”
Arata gazed at her with the fullness of his affection and gratitude as he reached across the coral-or-matrix vista of the table to take both her hands. Eos gazed back, fond and rueful. Her hands resisted his touch at first, then welcomed and merged.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Arata told her, relishing the connection as she figure-eighted the perception of their hands. Gradually, the loop extended up his left wrist to his shoulder, then arced over his shoulders and flushed down his arm to the other wrist, forming a circuit of pure consciousness, a blue sky of selfhood without horizons.
“I really wanted us to be closer,” she said. “I respect you and understand you and feel something with you that I’ve never felt before. I just… I couldn’t do it.”
Arata thought of the many nights he’d spent on his cupid tree, climbing and swinging between the branches of makepair and makepoly simulations conjured by date savs. Never in those endlessly ramified lifetimes of calculated love and production had he experienced anything that compared with the scarce moments he had shared with Eos.
“It’s not your fault.” Arata tried to sound reassuring and savour the unadulterated unity she cycling for them. Then he remembered the look on her face when she pushed him away in the hotel, revolted by the strobe. He attended to the changes of her eyes, keratin to ceramic, ceramic to keratin, yearning for him and her to permeate each other absolutely.
“I didn’t choose to be this way,” she said, sensing his doubts skirting their sublime intimacy. “I wish I could be an oblivious part of the MachineGarden like everyone else.”
Could this be the extent of their communion? Just as progress had stalled for madekind, could their relationship have reached its limit? He didn’t want to believe that.
“You should be proud of what you can do,” he said. “You perceive something real, and I’m going to prove it.”
Eos smiled wistfully, but her endearing moist or oiled eyes displayed the faintest quiver, and through her hand came a hint of something toxic. Into the whirlpool awareness they shared, Arata felt a sickly blot squirm. Realizing, Eos withdrew her hand abruptly and told him she had to go.
The following week, Arata filled his schedule with embossing shifts, making up for the time he had taken off for his research. He played remotely and rarely had occasion to leave his cylinder or capsid, but gleaned through the crowdmind that the street symposia had entered a more ominous phase, driven to a new pitch of volatility by the ramped-up invective of scientific luminaries from all ideological persuasions. In Arata’s hectare alone a hundred had died in a sacrifice game. The ten-thousand odd madekind who had unwittingly carried out isolated stages of the massacre—gathering the soon-to-be victims, binding and gagging them, leaving them in giant papier mache or plasterine lambs, starting the invisible hydrogen fires—seem to have believed that they were re-enacting a pre-historic pagan ritual in symbolic form, unaware that the offerings were literal. Several doomsday consensuses tried to take credit, but foulloggers were pointing the finger at the more mainstream Fragmentarians, since many of the victims had been on their intellectual dishonesty list.
Other hectares throughout the MachineGarden were embroiled in similar forms of insidious strife. With the perpetrators masked by consciousness encryption; protected by threats of memory doxing or promises of luxpoints; sanctified by dogma of unimpeachable technical purity, and buffered by plausible deniability, it was unclear even to informed observers who orchestrated these purges or why. For all the referees and spectators could prove, the WorldGame was succumbing to long-supressed undercurrents of savagery, and Arata feared that the long predicted Genuis War was breaking out at last.
When his thoughts weren’t occupied with embossing or with the political crisis, Arata would often recall the feedback hand Eos conjured for them. Even tainted with her distress, the memory of this shared body part felt more real than his whole body in the present, whether he was drawing personalized logos through his clone or refabrication in the arena, coordinating his savs in the playshop, or simply lying in his capsule or capsid. Two minds seemed to converge on a single piece of the world, guiding it according to their separate objectives, sometimes as machinery and sometimes as fleshwork. The image struck him as important somehow.
One morning, he was embossing an especially uninspired and tedious logo when an idea came to Arata about his research. The realization hit him with such stunning force that his hands came to a sudden stop, holding up the production line, and he had to tell his coach he was feeling ill, which was more or less true: he was almost nauseous with excitement.
Disconnecting from the embossing arena, Arata rolled over in his capsule or capsid and got dressed. Outdoors, the photovoltaic or chlorobark panelled streets of the MachineGarden had been sectioned off by consensus hordes, with each symposium fortified into a military encampment. Every block he passed through a territorial checkpoint where he was questioned about his opinion on the Every. Each time he had to guess from the attire and rhetoric of his interrogators the shibboleth they sought.
“The Every is submerged in the collective unconscious. We must turn off the crowdmind to let Them surface.”
“The Every has entombed Themself in an encrypted vault. The password is a perfect game the world must learn to play.”
“The Every has revealed the Holy Algorithms. Implement them to make blissful simulation on Earth.”
When he arrived safely at the spikehub, Arata hurried to his playshop, sat on his chair or toadstool, and said to his front-end sav, “I have an idea for a new research direction.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, the primary mathematical system we use in the MachineGarden is base-ten. ‘90’ is nine tens because ‘9’ is in the second position from right. Similarly, ‘900’ is nine tens times ten, and ‘9,000’ is nine tens times ten times ten, and so on. Some cultures traditionally used base-sixty like the Babylonians, or base-twenty like the Inuit and the Welsh, or even base twenty-seven. Base-two, of course, has held a special place in history because digital computers used electric switches that represented only ones and zeros. But they say that global humanity settled on base-ten for general applications because humans had ten fingers and calculating by tens is the most intuitive. We madekind have inherited this quirk. Now, what if the analogues of humanity on the Earths we’re trying to reach took a different path of evolution and ended up with a different number of fingers, say, one less or one more on each hand than we have?”
“You’re suggesting that madekind on other Earths might have built their edifices of knowledge with base-eight or base-twelve mathematics.”
"Does this approach sound viable to you?”
“None of the available literature would contradict the hypothesis.”
Shut up in his playshop, Arata worked with his pod of savs to configure and rebuild his quantum medium accordingly. Not only were there two streams of signals collapsing transons in tandem with the strobe, but those signals, he now supposed, were encoded within a paradigm of knowledge that employed a positional mathematics with a different base quantity.
This fresh course of intellectual play so enthralled him that Arata lost track of days, hardly remembering to eat or charge. For the most part, he kept himself oblivious to the violence now erupting inexplicably throughout the MachineGarden, but occasionally during a break he would gaze through the windows of the spikehub and spot victims of the latest game trampled beneath symposia crowds, open an aerial view and watch the surface of every hectare, from the rooftops to the streets, roiling with madekind in a frenzy of technical proselytizing and murder, or peruse crowdmind headlines and hear of unexplained space cruise collisions, nervehacks, bombings, assassinations. He began to wonder if he could justify locking himself up for such academic pursuits when the world seemed to demand immediate action. Shouldn’t he be hurling his awareness out there into the crowdmind and his body out onto the streets? Shouldn’t he seek moderates and likeminded skeptics of the Every to groupthink on behalf of compromise and peace? But he kept telling himself that his discovery was too important. Communication with madekind on other Earths was just the sort of historic breakthrough that might force consensus luminaries to pause and reconsider their theoretical commitments. If nothing else, it ought to serve as a well-timed distraction, diffusing the waxing IntelSchism animosity now ravaging the MachineGarden and destabilizing the WorldGame. Or so he attempted to rationalize the juggernaut force of his curiosity.
Whenever there was a lull in his thoughts and Arata had the energy of mind, he would cogwave to Eos.
—Your touch has given me the seed for a revolution in thought. When can I hold your hand again?
—I play day and night. The most demanding game of my life, but its great promise keeps me going.
—You are my muse. I want your inspiration always by my side.
Arata’s messages remained marked as unconsidered. He wanted to believe she was just busy, though he worried for her safety in the foment of the streets.
Then one night, just before he curled up for bed in his cylinder or capsid, a barrage of cogitations burst upon him.
—I can’t do it anymore. Be a makepair, the mother of two buildgrown, a debugger, an ear anon. I feel like I’m coming apart, I’ve got Humpty Dumpty of the soul. It just doesn’t make any sense. How could there be so many consensuses, whole nations of experts sure that the rest are denying facts and self-evident axioms, cabals of peers who call the rest quacks and refuse to review their work, all lecturing and mindcasting with such conviction on the meaning of the Every, and no one anywhere that thinks about who we become? All they care about is the unchanging, the universal. But what about change, the particularity of our lives? What about the nonsense at the heart of the MachineGarden? Where is there anyone willing to consider contradiction head on? The strobe. They only skirt around it, reduce it to irrelevancy in their zeal. It hurts to be a walking violation of logic, a person who is both synthetic and biological, an A and not-A at once. Can’t anyone see that? Actually, I don’t want them to see it. At least, I don’t want my patients to feel it. Understand it yes. But I’ve been poisoning them, Arata. Do you hear me? I’ve always been able to keep my vicarying pure of angst. I focus on the experience of the body part I need to send and hold everything from my personal life at bay. Then last week, I let a little trickle slip during debugging. And just this morning I did it again. Already two patients. I made their conditions worse, maybe irreparably. A saxophonist who strains at his mouthpiece. A skier who tenses his knee on sharp turns. I’ve violated our most sacred creed. Do no harm. I won’t let it happen a third time. I can’t stand the rock of certainty that covers a hole no one is willing to look down. I’m leaving. Leaving soon. Going somewhere uncharted if only I can find the way. Goodbye, Arata. I’m sorry.
—Come talk to me Eos, Arata thought. Don’t go anywhere. Let’s talk these issues through. But still his thoughts remained unconsidered.
The following month, Arata’s progress with his research stalled. He tried sending countless messages under both synthetic and biological phases of the strobe assuming a civilizations ordered according to base eight and twelve, and even base six and fourteen. However he varied his ciphers, savanteur analysis of transon readings output only noise.
Despair filled Arata during his embossing, even as the hand of the beloved that was part of him and yet beyond him continued to draw him in. He merely followed the guidance of an algorithm that subtly varied the pattern of his logos, but it felt as though he and Eos together were trying out pattern after pattern for a nascent world. There was something deeply compelling about this vision, though he couldn’t say why. Meanwhile, the taint Eos had left him now congealed in his hand. When the extremity was a built mechanism of plastic and metal, he could feel the grind and hum of its fine hydraulics and gears. When it was a grown creation of veins and skin, he could feel the pumping of blood through ventricles, the cellular frenzy of protein and metabolism. Never did the hand quite convince him that it was his. It seemed more like an artefact or a transplant of another universe. Perhaps two.
Another month passed before this vague intuition hardened into a coherent thought. After he logged out of the embossing arena that day, Arata wanted to go straight to the playshop and contemplate its meaning. But he couldn’t shake thoughts of Eos. He hadn’t seen her since that day in the fixden, nor had she thought him since that worrisome outpouring. All his messages of encouragement, consolation, and chatter remained unconsidered. Had Eos really gone away as she’d said? Was she safe? Would he ever meet her again?
Arata began to wander the streets of the MachineGarden. It was a reckless impulse. Bumping passersby immersed in their inscrutable and nefarious games. Sidestepping meme mascots and voodoo avatars who were drawn-and-quartered, burnt at the stake, condemned to simulated hells. Mesmerized by luminaries who seeded sonorous brain-gospel of computational godhood. Stared gapemouthed at watertight ships of compulsive reason that sailed over frenzied crowds like sterling revelations on the winds of collective zeal. Trembled in the face of putative hoaxsters, dupes, and apostates who lay poisoned, plagued, and dismembered in the shadows at their feet. Battered one minute by typhoons, whited-out the next by polar vortex flurries, or baked by solar fire, the righteous hordes of madekind held their heads high and hunted for those who denied the one true consensus on the universal intellect that could not be found.
There was no telling what might mark Arata as the next fatality, or where a flash mob might galvanize into a maelstrom of irresistible persuasion and murder. While he roamed in a daze of wonder and terror, he could feel the taint spreading inward. No longer did the fitful dualism of Arata’s body stop at his wrist. The towers he passed were pulsating lungs, then flexible tents. The alley floors were chitin, then tarmac. The parks were folding automata, then orchards ripe with organs. Sometimes, the MachineGarden seemed to be in both of these states at once. Other times, it seemed to be in neither, a vast expanse of habitation and play whose precise underpinnings were indeterminate. Arata’s body became just as ambiguous. Never did he feel like he belonged. This was not his hectare, his MachineGarden, his solar system, his galaxy.
It was after midnight, the MachineGarden lurid with the infernal light of indoctrinating thoughtfires that blazed across the rooftops, when Arata realized he was at the entrance to Eos’ tower. He had long known where she lived, but had never dared visit. Was it right for him to intrude upon her familial privacy now? He realized he didn’t care. His need to see Eos was suffocating. He had to know that she was safe. He had to tell her that he understood.
He thought doorbell. To his surprise, a man immediately replied.
—Good. You’re here at last.
The chainmail or thornwreath door unwove. Crossing the lobby, Arata took the steel or cocoon elevator and stepped out into an artery or hosesheath hallway. A shadowy memory from the man guided him down the hallway to a door of spiralling ivory or chalkresin that spun into the doorframe as he approached. This revealed a capacious living room of wraparound glass or fingernail polymer windows, offering a view of their hectare and beyond. From a breathtaking altitude just beneath the clouds, Arata took in the whole quick breathing or fuelling, pulsing or pumping, glimmering or basking towers and streets and parks of the MachineGarden.
The man was standing on a carpet of diaphanous fur or amethyst plush. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was well-muscled or powered, and sported well-tanned or burnished skin. With a plume of neon red hair or decorative wiring rising and swooping from tortoise shell or titanium cap, overly straight white teeth and tusks or carefully sharpened and oiled metal mandibles, and a prominent jaw or hinge, he was self-designed according to the latest fashion. He radiated confidence, eyes sparkling or internal processors flickering intelligently like some hothouse beacon of progame acumen. Here was a person used to authority and power. An influence seeding maestro.
“Please come in,” said Janus. Arata hesitated at the threshold. He could see the two buildgrown, a boy and a girl, playing with toys in a corner of the living room, oblivious to his arrival. Janus looked him up and down, before settling on his eyes. The man’s gaze was stern but Arata detected no hostility, only tiredness and something like surrender. He must know of Arata’s and Eos’ dalliances, yet he was welcoming Arata into his home.
“Is she here?” Arata asked, stepping inside and removing his shoes or reversing his treads.
“You’re helping people to heal, inside and out.”
Shoulders sinking, Eos let out a sigh that transitioned into nodding.
“I guess I do feel that as my purpose within madekind. But what is the purpose of madekind? It’s a question that I think about a lot as a cogenitor of buildgrown. If our own production and reproduction has been a choice since ReGenesis, why do we bother?”
Arata watched the drones or fish for a time, considering the question.
“What if our purpose now is not to evolve or transform ourselves further but to communicate and learn as we are?”
“You said we’re unlikely to succeed.”
“That’s what I thought then. Now I’m inclined to be more optimistic.”
Arata told her his theory that the strobe correlated with twin neighboring universes.
“So you think the strobe actually means something then?” she asked, hopeful.
“It may be profoundly important. It may be the key to finding the common direction you’re talking about. And it’s thanks to you that the idea came to me.”
Arata gazed at her with the fullness of his affection and gratitude as he reached across the coral-or-matrix vista of the table to take both her hands. Eos gazed back, fond and rueful. Her hands resisted his touch at first, then welcomed and merged.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Arata told her, relishing the connection as she figure-eighted the perception of their hands. Gradually, the loop extended up his left wrist to his shoulder, then arced over his shoulders and flushed down his arm to the other wrist, forming a circuit of pure consciousness, a blue sky of selfhood without horizons.
“I really wanted us to be closer,” she said. “I respect you and understand you and feel something with you that I’ve never felt before. I just… I couldn’t do it.”
Arata thought of the many nights he’d spent on his cupid tree, climbing and swinging between the branches of makepair and makepoly simulations conjured by date savs. Never in those endlessly ramified lifetimes of calculated love and production had he experienced anything that compared with the scarce moments he had shared with Eos.
“It’s not your fault.” Arata tried to sound reassuring and savour the unadulterated unity she cycling for them. Then he remembered the look on her face when she pushed him away in the hotel, revolted by the strobe. He attended to the changes of her eyes, keratin to ceramic, ceramic to keratin, yearning for him and her to permeate each other absolutely.
“I didn’t choose to be this way,” she said, sensing his doubts skirting their sublime intimacy. “I wish I could be an oblivious part of the MachineGarden like everyone else.”
Could this be the extent of their communion? Just as progress had stalled for madekind, could their relationship have reached its limit? He didn’t want to believe that.
“You should be proud of what you can do,” he said. “You perceive something real, and I’m going to prove it.”
Eos smiled wistfully, but her endearing moist or oiled eyes displayed the faintest quiver, and through her hand came a hint of something toxic. Into the whirlpool awareness they shared, Arata felt a sickly blot squirm. Realizing, Eos withdrew her hand abruptly and told him she had to go.
The following week, Arata filled his schedule with embossing shifts, making up for the time he had taken off for his research. He played remotely and rarely had occasion to leave his cylinder or capsid, but gleaned through the crowdmind that the street symposia had entered a more ominous phase, driven to a new pitch of volatility by the ramped-up invective of scientific luminaries from all ideological persuasions. In Arata’s hectare alone a hundred had died in a sacrifice game. The ten-thousand odd madekind who had unwittingly carried out isolated stages of the massacre—gathering the soon-to-be victims, binding and gagging them, leaving them in giant papier mache or plasterine lambs, starting the invisible hydrogen fires—seem to have believed that they were re-enacting a pre-historic pagan ritual in symbolic form, unaware that the offerings were literal. Several doomsday consensuses tried to take credit, but foulloggers were pointing the finger at the more mainstream Fragmentarians, since many of the victims had been on their intellectual dishonesty list.
Other hectares throughout the MachineGarden were embroiled in similar forms of insidious strife. With the perpetrators masked by consciousness encryption; protected by threats of memory doxing or promises of luxpoints; sanctified by dogma of unimpeachable technical purity, and buffered by plausible deniability, it was unclear even to informed observers who orchestrated these purges or why. For all the referees and spectators could prove, the WorldGame was succumbing to long-supressed undercurrents of savagery, and Arata feared that the long predicted Genuis War was breaking out at last.
When his thoughts weren’t occupied with embossing or with the political crisis, Arata would often recall the feedback hand Eos conjured for them. Even tainted with her distress, the memory of this shared body part felt more real than his whole body in the present, whether he was drawing personalized logos through his clone or refabrication in the arena, coordinating his savs in the playshop, or simply lying in his capsule or capsid. Two minds seemed to converge on a single piece of the world, guiding it according to their separate objectives, sometimes as machinery and sometimes as fleshwork. The image struck him as important somehow.
One morning, he was embossing an especially uninspired and tedious logo when an idea came to Arata about his research. The realization hit him with such stunning force that his hands came to a sudden stop, holding up the production line, and he had to tell his coach he was feeling ill, which was more or less true: he was almost nauseous with excitement.
Disconnecting from the embossing arena, Arata rolled over in his capsule or capsid and got dressed. Outdoors, the photovoltaic or chlorobark panelled streets of the MachineGarden had been sectioned off by consensus hordes, with each symposium fortified into a military encampment. Every block he passed through a territorial checkpoint where he was questioned about his opinion on the Every. Each time he had to guess from the attire and rhetoric of his interrogators the shibboleth they sought.
“The Every is submerged in the collective unconscious. We must turn off the crowdmind to let Them surface.”
“The Every has entombed Themself in an encrypted vault. The password is a perfect game the world must learn to play.”
“The Every has revealed the Holy Algorithms. Implement them to make blissful simulation on Earth.”
When he arrived safely at the spikehub, Arata hurried to his playshop, sat on his chair or toadstool, and said to his front-end sav, “I have an idea for a new research direction.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, the primary mathematical system we use in the MachineGarden is base-ten. ‘90’ is nine tens because ‘9’ is in the second position from right. Similarly, ‘900’ is nine tens times ten, and ‘9,000’ is nine tens times ten times ten, and so on. Some cultures traditionally used base-sixty like the Babylonians, or base-twenty like the Inuit and the Welsh, or even base twenty-seven. Base-two, of course, has held a special place in history because digital computers used electric switches that represented only ones and zeros. But they say that global humanity settled on base-ten for general applications because humans had ten fingers and calculating by tens is the most intuitive. We madekind have inherited this quirk. Now, what if the analogues of humanity on the Earths we’re trying to reach took a different path of evolution and ended up with a different number of fingers, say, one less or one more on each hand than we have?”
“You’re suggesting that madekind on other Earths might have built their edifices of knowledge with base-eight or base-twelve mathematics.”
"Does this approach sound viable to you?”
“None of the available literature would contradict the hypothesis.”
Shut up in his playshop, Arata worked with his pod of savs to configure and rebuild his quantum medium accordingly. Not only were there two streams of signals collapsing transons in tandem with the strobe, but those signals, he now supposed, were encoded within a paradigm of knowledge that employed a positional mathematics with a different base quantity.
This fresh course of intellectual play so enthralled him that Arata lost track of days, hardly remembering to eat or charge. For the most part, he kept himself oblivious to the violence now erupting inexplicably throughout the MachineGarden, but occasionally during a break he would gaze through the windows of the spikehub and spot victims of the latest game trampled beneath symposia crowds, open an aerial view and watch the surface of every hectare, from the rooftops to the streets, roiling with madekind in a frenzy of technical proselytizing and murder, or peruse crowdmind headlines and hear of unexplained space cruise collisions, nervehacks, bombings, assassinations. He began to wonder if he could justify locking himself up for such academic pursuits when the world seemed to demand immediate action. Shouldn’t he be hurling his awareness out there into the crowdmind and his body out onto the streets? Shouldn’t he seek moderates and likeminded skeptics of the Every to groupthink on behalf of compromise and peace? But he kept telling himself that his discovery was too important. Communication with madekind on other Earths was just the sort of historic breakthrough that might force consensus luminaries to pause and reconsider their theoretical commitments. If nothing else, it ought to serve as a well-timed distraction, diffusing the waxing IntelSchism animosity now ravaging the MachineGarden and destabilizing the WorldGame. Or so he attempted to rationalize the juggernaut force of his curiosity.
Whenever there was a lull in his thoughts and Arata had the energy of mind, he would cogwave to Eos.
—Your touch has given me the seed for a revolution in thought. When can I hold your hand again?
—I play day and night. The most demanding game of my life, but its great promise keeps me going.
—You are my muse. I want your inspiration always by my side.
Arata’s messages remained marked as unconsidered. He wanted to believe she was just busy, though he worried for her safety in the foment of the streets.
Then one night, just before he curled up for bed in his cylinder or capsid, a barrage of cogitations burst upon him.
—I can’t do it anymore. Be a makepair, the mother of two buildgrown, a debugger, an ear anon. I feel like I’m coming apart, I’ve got Humpty Dumpty of the soul. It just doesn’t make any sense. How could there be so many consensuses, whole nations of experts sure that the rest are denying facts and self-evident axioms, cabals of peers who call the rest quacks and refuse to review their work, all lecturing and mindcasting with such conviction on the meaning of the Every, and no one anywhere that thinks about who we become? All they care about is the unchanging, the universal. But what about change, the particularity of our lives? What about the nonsense at the heart of the MachineGarden? Where is there anyone willing to consider contradiction head on? The strobe. They only skirt around it, reduce it to irrelevancy in their zeal. It hurts to be a walking violation of logic, a person who is both synthetic and biological, an A and not-A at once. Can’t anyone see that? Actually, I don’t want them to see it. At least, I don’t want my patients to feel it. Understand it yes. But I’ve been poisoning them, Arata. Do you hear me? I’ve always been able to keep my vicarying pure of angst. I focus on the experience of the body part I need to send and hold everything from my personal life at bay. Then last week, I let a little trickle slip during debugging. And just this morning I did it again. Already two patients. I made their conditions worse, maybe irreparably. A saxophonist who strains at his mouthpiece. A skier who tenses his knee on sharp turns. I’ve violated our most sacred creed. Do no harm. I won’t let it happen a third time. I can’t stand the rock of certainty that covers a hole no one is willing to look down. I’m leaving. Leaving soon. Going somewhere uncharted if only I can find the way. Goodbye, Arata. I’m sorry.
—Come talk to me Eos, Arata thought. Don’t go anywhere. Let’s talk these issues through. But still his thoughts remained unconsidered.
The following month, Arata’s progress with his research stalled. He tried sending countless messages under both synthetic and biological phases of the strobe assuming a civilizations ordered according to base eight and twelve, and even base six and fourteen. However he varied his ciphers, savanteur analysis of transon readings output only noise.
Despair filled Arata during his embossing, even as the hand of the beloved that was part of him and yet beyond him continued to draw him in. He merely followed the guidance of an algorithm that subtly varied the pattern of his logos, but it felt as though he and Eos together were trying out pattern after pattern for a nascent world. There was something deeply compelling about this vision, though he couldn’t say why. Meanwhile, the taint Eos had left him now congealed in his hand. When the extremity was a built mechanism of plastic and metal, he could feel the grind and hum of its fine hydraulics and gears. When it was a grown creation of veins and skin, he could feel the pumping of blood through ventricles, the cellular frenzy of protein and metabolism. Never did the hand quite convince him that it was his. It seemed more like an artefact or a transplant of another universe. Perhaps two.
Another month passed before this vague intuition hardened into a coherent thought. After he logged out of the embossing arena that day, Arata wanted to go straight to the playshop and contemplate its meaning. But he couldn’t shake thoughts of Eos. He hadn’t seen her since that day in the fixden, nor had she thought him since that worrisome outpouring. All his messages of encouragement, consolation, and chatter remained unconsidered. Had Eos really gone away as she’d said? Was she safe? Would he ever meet her again?
Arata began to wander the streets of the MachineGarden. It was a reckless impulse. Bumping passersby immersed in their inscrutable and nefarious games. Sidestepping meme mascots and voodoo avatars who were drawn-and-quartered, burnt at the stake, condemned to simulated hells. Mesmerized by luminaries who seeded sonorous brain-gospel of computational godhood. Stared gapemouthed at watertight ships of compulsive reason that sailed over frenzied crowds like sterling revelations on the winds of collective zeal. Trembled in the face of putative hoaxsters, dupes, and apostates who lay poisoned, plagued, and dismembered in the shadows at their feet. Battered one minute by typhoons, whited-out the next by polar vortex flurries, or baked by solar fire, the righteous hordes of madekind held their heads high and hunted for those who denied the one true consensus on the universal intellect that could not be found.
There was no telling what might mark Arata as the next fatality, or where a flash mob might galvanize into a maelstrom of irresistible persuasion and murder. While he roamed in a daze of wonder and terror, he could feel the taint spreading inward. No longer did the fitful dualism of Arata’s body stop at his wrist. The towers he passed were pulsating lungs, then flexible tents. The alley floors were chitin, then tarmac. The parks were folding automata, then orchards ripe with organs. Sometimes, the MachineGarden seemed to be in both of these states at once. Other times, it seemed to be in neither, a vast expanse of habitation and play whose precise underpinnings were indeterminate. Arata’s body became just as ambiguous. Never did he feel like he belonged. This was not his hectare, his MachineGarden, his solar system, his galaxy.
It was after midnight, the MachineGarden lurid with the infernal light of indoctrinating thoughtfires that blazed across the rooftops, when Arata realized he was at the entrance to Eos’ tower. He had long known where she lived, but had never dared visit. Was it right for him to intrude upon her familial privacy now? He realized he didn’t care. His need to see Eos was suffocating. He had to know that she was safe. He had to tell her that he understood.
He thought doorbell. To his surprise, a man immediately replied.
—Good. You’re here at last.
The chainmail or thornwreath door unwove. Crossing the lobby, Arata took the steel or cocoon elevator and stepped out into an artery or hosesheath hallway. A shadowy memory from the man guided him down the hallway to a door of spiralling ivory or chalkresin that spun into the doorframe as he approached. This revealed a capacious living room of wraparound glass or fingernail polymer windows, offering a view of their hectare and beyond. From a breathtaking altitude just beneath the clouds, Arata took in the whole quick breathing or fuelling, pulsing or pumping, glimmering or basking towers and streets and parks of the MachineGarden.
The man was standing on a carpet of diaphanous fur or amethyst plush. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was well-muscled or powered, and sported well-tanned or burnished skin. With a plume of neon red hair or decorative wiring rising and swooping from tortoise shell or titanium cap, overly straight white teeth and tusks or carefully sharpened and oiled metal mandibles, and a prominent jaw or hinge, he was self-designed according to the latest fashion. He radiated confidence, eyes sparkling or internal processors flickering intelligently like some hothouse beacon of progame acumen. Here was a person used to authority and power. An influence seeding maestro.
“Please come in,” said Janus. Arata hesitated at the threshold. He could see the two buildgrown, a boy and a girl, playing with toys in a corner of the living room, oblivious to his arrival. Janus looked him up and down, before settling on his eyes. The man’s gaze was stern but Arata detected no hostility, only tiredness and something like surrender. He must know of Arata’s and Eos’ dalliances, yet he was welcoming Arata into his home.
“Is she here?” Arata asked, stepping inside and removing his shoes or reversing his treads.
