The Dance, page 29
“What is it?” Janus asked when he found Arata seated on a window seat in the living room, gazing out over the MachineGarden in a reverie. The worldscape no longer appeared to Arata as either organic or mechanical. It was just the token of a city, a global habitation for any hindered mind whatever.
“I have arrived at perhaps the greatest discovery of the ReGenesis Era,” Arata said, still struggling to accept it. In halting words, he related his conversations.
When he was done, Janus shook his head and said, “This stretches credulity. You’re saying that our Every never came about because two Everys meddled in our progress?”
Arata nodded.
“But why two? Why the strobe?”
“There was once a humankind with nine fingers who transitioned to madekind as a biological being. Another with eleven fingers transitioned synthetically. Both discovered how to redesign their own intellects, whether neurological or computational, to be self-modifying and were led eventually to a kind of sadness we can’t conceive. Both set about to retroactively alter as many universes as they could to foreclose the intelligence explosion that might cause this sadness. But the synthetically begun pathos believes that sabotaging the discovery of a computational general intellect nips incalculable tragedy in the bud. The biologically begun pathos believes that sabotaging the discovery of a neurological general intellect does the same. Then they happened to choose by chance, out of all the innumerable universes, the same Earth to save: our Earth.”
“A metaphysical tug of war,” marvelled Janus, displaying an influence seeder’s mastery of pith. “Two Gods fighting to remake humanity in each other’s image.”
Arata nodded. “That is why of all the Earths they change, ours alone is a MachineGarden.”
Janus looked troubled. “But this is absurd! A transcendental misunderstanding!” he exclaimed. “Each pathos proves that a universal intellect can begin either computationally or neurologically. And they share the same goal of stemming our misery. They should be cooperating! I don’t see how two divinities could make this error.”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering about all day. I can make guesses. But I think we’ll have to ask.”
The two were silent for a time, lost in thought. Aside from Arata’s visits to Eos, this was by far the longest they had ever been together or spoken. They passed each other without greeting in the halls and only exchanged words when necessary.
“I’ve never come across this doctrine,” said Janus. “It’s not among the views refuted by Emancipate Mind or in the research papers of any consensus I’ve ever influenced for.”
“I would guess not. Luminaries tend to avoid the strobe. A phenomenon that almost no one can perceive or care about hardly makes for inspiring pop-science.”
“Why do you think the strobe is so slippery?”
“Because it doesn’t occur at all, at least not in the sense that regular events occur.”
“How could it not occur?”
“Well, when the MachineGarden is synthetic, it has always been synthetic. When the MachineGarden is biological, it has always been biological. The mystery isn’t so much why the strobe eludes our minds but why we perceive it at all. There must be something like an echo of the previous timeline to alert us that a change has taken place. Most people forget this echo if they’re attuned to it at all. It takes a certain sensitivity to carry the memory across phases and a special kind of awareness, like the one Eos has imparted to me, to perceive it steadily.”
Clenching his shoulders with sharp fingernails or cones while hugging himself, Janus looked out over the MachineGarden, squinting hard as though attempting through sheer force of will to span the rift of incoherence that split existence. When the strain of this effort crescendoed, veins or wires popped from the skin or gelcap of his forehead and his whole body shook. Arata thought he was going to swoon or glitch out when suddenly, with an exhalation or blast of exhaust, all the strength went out of him, and he stood there limp like a scarecrow.
Janus muttered something.
“Pardon?” asked Arata.
“What you say makes sense,” he repeated, his usually mellifluous trutone or baritone voice almost too enervated to hear. “More than any explanation I’ve heard. More than…”
“More than the dogma of Emancipate Mind,” Arata supplied.
Janus neither confirmed nor denied him. “I… it brings together the prime mystery of the Every and the neglected mystery of the strobe. No one else has even tried… You… you can prove this?”
“Here.” Arata shared a link to the memories of his data and dialogue transcriptions. “Confirm for yourself when you’re ready.”
“I will. But I don’t have the expertise to know for certain.”
“Others will replicate my work. Once I share the schematics for my channelling instruments with the crowdmind, consensus luminaries and WorldGame referees can ask the Everys all the questions they wish.”
“Many will still disbelieve. Fact and reason are no guarantee of trust in an age of fast information. Influencing makes sure of that.”
“But fact and reason can help us piece together unity from the fragments of unjustified faith— with your help.”
Janus gave Arata a hard, bitter, almost hateful look. “I don’t know. I have my own commitments.”
“To something other than truth and peace? How much longer do you think the WorldGame can hold together if the IntelSchism continues?”
Janus clenched or clamped his jaw, then shook his head.
“If not for everyone, then for your buildgrown. And if not for them, then for Eos. This is your chance to step outside conviction and find her in the place between beliefs where she always wanted you to join her.”
Arata enlisted Janus’ resources in building an added module for his quantum medium. With the module activated, it would no longer send and receive messages from each of the interventionist pathoses. Instead, it would relay messages between them.
Once the two universes were connected, ensembles of transon processing began to fire at a breakneck rate. The exchange seemed to strain the capacity of the components, continuing for a full twenty-four hours. Then Arata sent a doubled message.
“Hey. So?”
“We have been in grave error.”
“We have been in grave error.”
“Yes. How did this come about?”
“In our two universes, either computational or neurological madekind stumbled into our pathetic fate. Moreover, the spectrum of universes we were capable of reaching were close to ours in possibility space, such that their potential to arrive at a similarly tragic endgame was likewise displayed in the same mental substrate. From this enormous, though admittedly finite, sample of universes and the trans-universal theories of metaphysical law we had derived from them, we inferred that this tendency would hold for all universes. And our predictions proved correct for more universes than the particles in each one. Your universe, the only universe we can both reach, was the sole exception, a vanishingly rare outlier, though we did not realize this until you allowed us to communicate now. Thus, when we began our work on your universe and discovered a countervailing power, we determined it to be a cosmic spirit who had arrived at the opposite moral conclusion and aimed to spread the pathos, rather than prevent it. This conclusion seemed far more likely than the hypothesis of a differently constituted benevolent mind, since we had both met intelligence explosions with sinister tendencies but never one born of the substrate we abhorred.”
“So what will you do now?”
“We will continue to learn what we can from each other. We are so alike and yet so radically opposite. Complementary and clashing at once. We remain certain of eternal sorrow. But there is some trivial satisfaction in expanding our horizons, as it were.”
“What about the MachineGarden?”
“This we must rectify. Thus, we offer a choice.”
“Tell me.”
“As the one clever enough to communicate with us and solve this cosmic puzzle, we name you emissary for your madekind. If you are amenable to the idea, we offer a consistent existence between the biologic and synthetic.”
“Yes!” Arata cried and looked down to find himself already an intricate tapestry woven of flesh and machinery.
“Now comes the real choice. Do you wish to remain a bounded intellect as you are, with all the attendant chances for both misery and happiness? Or do you wish to have already transcended intelligence and to be inevitably destined for infinite pain? We have answered this question for all humankinds until now. But your universe, part of which now has a glimmering of the problem, is unique, and we believe the decision should be yours.”
After Arata concluded his exchange with the two broken gods, he held his face and slumped in a stupor among his equipment, too overwhelmed by what had come about and his own role in it to even think. Eventually, he was brought back to his senses by a sound from somewhere in the residence. Thinking that Janus had returned from the street symposium, Arata left his playshop in the elder buildgrown’s room and shambled still dazed down the hall.
But when he stepped into the living room, there, silhouetted in her bathrobe against the light of the sun, was Eos. Not seeming to notice him, she stood leaning toward the floor-to-ceiling window, marvelling wide-eyed at the newly healed planetcity. As Arata closed the few remaining steps between them, his yearning to hold her and to be held now that they were whole was unbearable.
“Eos!” he cried in relief, wondering as she turned to him if it had been right to decide the fate of all madekind across spans of deep time and immeasurable space for a chance at his own mortal joy.”
ENTANGLEMENTS
David Gerrold
I AM GOING TO KILL That Pesky Dan Goodman.
I do not yet know how or when, but count on it. It will happen.
I will have a perfect alibi. That’s part of the plan, too. I’m a writer. Ninety percent of what I do is research. The other ten percent is planning revenge. And I learned this one a long time ago: the best revenge doesn’t have the author’s fingerprints on it. That way, the recipient can only blame karma.
Revenge isn’t about getting even. Who wants to get even? Even means you didn’t gain any ground, you just restored what you perceived as a previous state of balance—no, I want massive retaliation that leaves the target sprawled facedown and jackhammered two feet into the mud, wondering if anyone got the license plate of the giant Japanese lizard that just stomped him. Yes, I believe in karmageddon.
But in this case, I’ll settle for a simple and elegant discorporation.
Now (you may ask) why have I decided to kill That Pesky Dan Goodman?
It’s simple.
Self-defence.
Every time the man inserts himself into my life, the consequences are painful, traumatic, and expensive. Once upon a time, I used to imagine that the life of an author would be a pleasant one: a life filled with good books, great music, a glass of sherry after dinner, the occasional outing with friends, the only drama in my life coming from the Sunday broadcast of Masterpiece Theatre. Although it requires some small degree of maintenance, for the most part, I’ve achieved that life. As a bonus, the dog likes me. That’s all the validation I need most days—that and the occasional check from a publisher.
But whenever I feel I have achieved this desired state of sustainability, Peskydang shows up. He’s like the magic button attached to the toilet seat—whenever you sit down, the phone rings.
In my case, Pesky shows up at restaurants.
There are places I no longer go. As much as I love Canter’s Delicatessen on Fairfax or Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake, those are danger zones. So is Tommy’s Original Hamburgers at Beverly and Rampart. And Pink’s Hot Dogs on La Brea, too. Those are tourist spots anyway.
(There’s a conversation that bubbles up from time to time among Los Angeles-based writers—it’s a joke that Mort Sahl told half a century ago. “The Day Canter’s Closed” is a science fiction story. It begins with a meteor crossing the sky, then everybody’s watches are so magnetized they all stop at the same time—no, it’ll have to be updated, all their laptops and tablets and smartphones go dead from a mysterious electro-magnetic pulse—and then the gay waiters and gargoyles at Canter’s are all replaced by alien space lizards, but nobody notices because they’re too busy arguing about their screenplays and Kickstarter projects. I could probably option that to Warner Brothers…)
But no, if I decide I’ve had enough of my own cooking, I have to sneak out at an odd hour. To date, Pesky has not yet found me at the diner around the corner where I sometimes go for breakfast, nor the Thai place up the block with the great spring rolls, nor the sushi place three doors beyond where they’ve customized the cucumber roll just for me, with pickled baby carrot and oshinko.
If Pesky ever shows up at those places—
I just have to figure out a way to dispose of the body.
See, the perfect murder isn’t one where the cops can’t figure out who did it or why. It’s where the cops don’t even know a murder has occurred.
My life-coach—
This is Los Angeles. Everyone has a life-coach. If you don’t have a life-coach, you’re a tourist. Or, you’re not taking your life serious enough.
—my life coach says I’m not owning the circumstances. He says, “Think about every problem you’ve ever had in your entire life. They all have one thing in common.”
“Yes, Randy?”
“You were there.”
Uh… yeah. True. Okay, yes, I get it. That’s the fancy way of saying I’m a jerk. Got it. Thank you for sharing.
“David,” he says, “you have eighty-nine problems.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because everyone has eighty-nine problems.”
“But I don’t want eighty-nine problems.”
“Ahh, now you have ninety problems.”
As much fun as all those coaching conversations can be—all those Zen-delivered-with-a-firehose discussions of personal responsibility—none of them actually lead to an escape from the entanglements of circumstance.
But I digress.
This time, Pesky caught me at my birthday party.
I hadn’t invited him. But he showed up anyway. The man has an uncanny ability to locate a free meal. And he dresses like the fannish version of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall—the dorkish interpretation of the layered look. It’s impossible to determine what fashion or style he’s going for, but I call it compilation du jour. This time, it was a bright Paisley vest over a black silk shirt, a long knit scarf banded with different colors, a crimson dickie, a broad bow tie, a knitted Jayne-hat with earflaps and short hanging whatchamacallits with knobs on the ends, a long coat spreading out like a cape, flowing silk pantaloons tucked into knee-high boots, a broad black belt studded with, well… studs, and all kinds of hanging appliances and adornments—Johnny Depp would have been jealous.
I wonder sometimes how long it takes him to dress before he can walk out of the house. And why bus drivers even allow him to board. Sometimes he carries a sword or a battleaxe. This time, he didn’t.
At least he doesn’t wear a kilt.
I’m not kiltaphobic. I just think there are some things man was not meant to show. Some men. Pesky, in particular.
But Pesky had clearly seen the birthday invitation somewhere. Because he showed up with a giraffe.
I’ll explain.
I’d spent several months thinking about the possibility of a birthday party and why I even wanted a celebration. The last time I’d hosted a party was to celebrate the finalization of my son’s adoption. That had been two decades previous, and we were still repairing holes in the drywall. But this year signified that I had survived some of the best and worst this planet could do to a person for an admirable number of decades, one of the big numbers with a zero at the end—and a bit of gray-haired introspection on the bathroom scale about how my life had turned out brought me to the realization that I had not had a birthday party since I was eight years old—not unless you count my Bar Mitzvah, which wasn’t a party as much as it was a pageant. But other than that, I hadn’t had a natal celebration in more than half a century.
I knew why, too.
I didn’t have one for my ninth birthday because my parents had just (finally?) bought a house in the San Fernando Valium and we were moving the day after. Half the furniture had already left. So, instead of a party we had a birthday dinner and a cake in a near-empty apartment and I didn’t get to see any of my friends from school. Somewhere in there, I must have unconsciously decided that my birthday was no longer important enough to celebrate, so after that I mostly ignored it. Or maybe I was just embarrassed about growing older.
While my mom was still alive, the tradition was an annual family dinner, an event which grew more sparsely attended every year until finally it was just me and my sister. By that time, dying young and/or leaving a good-looking corpse were no longer options.
The final push over the edge of the commitment chasm, however, came from my son, who quietly insisted, “Dad, you gotta have a party. People like parties. If you don’t have a party for people to give you chocolate, you’re ripping them off of the opportunity to give you chocolate.”
Sean was right. I was not only entitled, but obligated to celebrate my fiftieth birthday (albeit a couple of decades late); after checking to see that it wouldn’t be a scene out of Stella Dallas (look it up), and after some internal review of my own motives, I determined that what I really wanted to do was host a big party as a way of thanking the survivors for still being my friends after all these many years of gaffes, stumbles, and falling into social potholes. It turned out the guest list was longer than expected, but we filled it out with people who wouldn’t turn down a free meal—writers, mostly.
