The Lightning Stenography Device: A Psychedelic Odyssey, page 1
The Lightning Stenography Device
The Lightning Stenography Device
M. F. SULLIVAN
CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
Mount Ida
Cassius
Katherine
Felicity
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
The Lightning Stenography Device
© 2018 M. F. Sullivan
ISBN: 978-0-9965395-3-1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any or forms or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written consent of M. F. Sullivan.
Text: M. F. Sullivan
Editing: Michelle Hope
Cover Design: Nuno Moreira
Typesetting: Jennifer Cant
Web: www.paintedblindpublishing.com
Email: m.frances.sullivan@gmail.com
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
A king's secret it is prudent to keep, but the works of God are to be declared and made known. Praise them with due honor.
–Tobit 12:7
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
–Minerva Reinholdt
Mount Ida
1
The dissent of Hermes began, not with the creation of their Device, but with the morning his brother dropped the first printout beside breakfast’s hash browns. This, at the time, engendered disinterest. “Are you branching into fiction, Enoch?”
“I fell asleep with the Device on my head and woke up to this.”
For a man who claimed to have slept, Hermes’s sibling had the bloodshot eyes and three-day beard of a man on a bender. High with inspiration, Enoch tapped the printout. “This is incredible. Revelatory.”
Skeptical, Hermes squinted at the page which presaged their conversation. He wiped his mouth with his lavender napkin (one of the good ones he’d taken out for Easter, whatever that was worth); he sipped his water; he read his actions on the page; then, he said to his brother, “This is a most disturbing discovery, my dear.”
“‘Disturbing’? It’s amazing! Who wrote this story? It wasn’t me, and it surely wasn’t you.”
“I assure you: while you worked long into the night, I was asleep.”
“Working all night was the plan, but coffee wasn’t enough. And good thing, too. If it wasn’t you or me who wrote this story, don’t you see who it must have been? Whose narrative voice it’s written in?”
Arching a pale brow, Hermes studied the page again, slid the wire-framed glasses from his nose, and said, “Surely you don’t suppose it’s the work of God.”
“Why not?” With another, brighter laugh, Enoch snatched up the page and mimicked his brother’s permanently preoccupied tone as he read, “‘I just don’t think that sounds like a feasible proposition.’ This, Hermes caught himself saying only once he had said it. With a humorless mien for his brother’s growing amusement, he rose to clear the table. ‘Nor do I agree with the characterization of my attitude as “humorless.”’”
“That is sufficient,” said Hermes, briskly smoothing the sleeves of his white silk shirt. “At any rate, I am not so certain that the presence of this—story,” he said with audible disdain for the offending page, “indicates anything more than the nature of your very active imagination, which, evidently, cannot allow itself to rest even in sleep.”
“So God, then.”
“Your imagination—your sleeping right brain—produced, while you slept, a story.” His left hand momentarily refused to cooperate in buttoning his right sleeve. “A model of the universe, perhaps, and no doubt an influence on the conversation we are having by way of a kind of unconscious suggestion, but to say that this is the work of God...” Hermes laughed and patted the hand of his still-smiling younger brother. “I just don’t think that sounds like a feasible proposition.”
This, Hermes caught himself saying only once he had said it. With a humorless mien for his brother’s growing amusement, he rose to clear the table. “Nor do I agree with the characterization of my attitude as ‘humorless’. If this is indeed the work of the Lord, perhaps He might do with a good editor. Someone to declutter those adverbs.”
“Well, the page is running out, so from here I’m as blind to our conversation as you. Happier?”
“We shall see; though how am I to know if I do not have a page to tell me?” Batting blond lashes and making no effort to hide his small smirk at the roll of his brother’s eyes, Hermes busied himself with the dishes, feeling haloed by a sensation most uncanny. They had been working their whole lives to produce the Device, all things having, in retrospect, lead to the production of the prototype which was still so new it seemed unreal. Had it not been their choice? Inspired, perhaps, by the plight of an arthritic writer-mother, but—
“It’s not so much that anybody needs this sort of thing,” said Enoch, then adding with some consideration, “in fact, it’s probably not healthy for the average person to experience something like this.” A frown crossed beneath his stubble while he pushed himself from the table. As Enoch watched the pasture, horses ambled beyond the window. “I’m still processing all of it.” Again, in as merry and strange a mood as he was, Enoch laughed, then seemed stirred by his laughter and, a hand over his mouth, gazed out among the horses. “I really didn’t write that, Hermes.”
“I know you didn’t consciously write it.”
“Unconsciously, sure, but if something is done unconsciously, who’s doing it? Especially something like this, a prescient story. I mean, my God, Hermes. That little band of metal and wires upstairs: we made that. Sure, you made a genius algorithm to clarify the low-resolution data recorded through the skull, but it’s still just a computer program. Just a Device. All it does is replace the act of typing on a keyboard: thought to text. You can’t have the text if you’re not thinking, right? But who’s doing the thinking if the sleeping brain is the entity producing it?”
Lips compressed, Hermes focused out his own window, on the rams which idled to gnaw a few spots of wet grass near the distant edge of the fence. “Why would God be interested in writing a story about us, if that is indeed what you are getting at? Further, why would God be interested in writing a story at all, when He has created a whole world, and the act of story writing—indeed, all creative acts—are a paltry parody of the ultimate act of so-called deific creation?”
Rocking back on his heels, then forward to brace himself against the edge of the window, Enoch pressed his face so close to the glass that both his reflection and breath were rendered visible to the brother who came to his side. “What if this story is the reason why anything exists at all? What if the act of writing the story brings the world into being? To create a human being who can write a story, you make a whole world, but maybe the inverse is true. Maybe you need a story for the world to exist.”
“Perhaps were we characters in a book, that would be true, but we are far more than all that! We have existed our whole lives, after all. A whole train of memories lies behind us, running down the track. That is the narrative you mean. You mean our memories.”
With a once-over for his brother, Enoch asked, “Have we really existed all that time? What evidence do you have of our thirty-five, thirty-three years against the eternity of the universe? The past is intangible. It could just be a setup put into our heads right this very moment, and you and I have just begun to exist now, or now, or now. Or do we really exist at all?”
“One has tangible evidence of memories. You made this table, dear man.” Hermes patted the oak dining table. “It was just after mother died, remember?”
“Of course I remember. I’m not really trying to say the past didn’t happen. It did. Or, we perceive it as having happened; we have mementos of it and everything to indicate that it did happen. But really, the past is just as real as the future. All we have is this single moment, this tiny”—his eyes drifted to the knots of the hardwood floor, then, reverently, toward the ceiling—“thread of cognition. This single moment in time. Without any interface by which to experience it, by which to make something real, something can’t be experienced and can’t be said to be real; but this reality, this artifice, is held by so tenuous a thing as a thread. As a story, presaging a conversation between two brothers. To write that story, you’d have to build a whole world of people, things, physical and chemical laws, shapes, colors, technology—everything. Just to write a single story. To paint a single painting. To relate to somebody a story about some brothers.”
But Hermes had the distinct feeling that the story would prove more than just that. Outwardly, he maintained skepticism. Inwardly, he trembled with wonder for the mystery unfurling before him, for, of course, his brother was quite right. There was a kind of logic puzzle at work here: an experience waiting to be had by way of the Device. Placing a hand upon his brother’s forearm, Hermes said, “I should like very much to observe this phenomenon. If it would not be too troublesome for you, perhaps tonight we will try to replicate the experiment.”
Nodding, Enoch told him, “I was going to ask you, actually, if you could make sure I’m not just crazy and sleep-writing.” With a grin, the younger brother watched over the horses. “There’s no real way to prove this thing that’s happening. That’s the weird part, the scary part. From the outside, once all this is said and done, anybody who reads the final story will think it’s written after the fact. That it’s me, dabbling in fiction, like you said. But it’s not me. It’s really not me.”
“I know you don’t think it is you,” insisted Hermes with another, gentler pat, his tone of voice softening. “We shall see what it is and get the matter sorted out, one way or another.”
2
Neither seemed reassured by the notion, nor convinced that a completed story produced by Enoch’s sleeping brain would answer more questions than it raised. Each man went about his day in eerie unease, half focused on work around their ranch at the base of Mount Ida, a Colorado mountain overlooking the historic home left them by their late mother. The manual labor filled much time and was good for a thinking man: Enoch was always a proponent of physical activities as a method of rousing the brain in the morning, and though Hermes was less inclined to spend time out of doors unless it was to photograph cemeteries for his genealogical hobby, he had a certain appreciation for the care of livestock which he could not deny. Once he’d fed the animals, however, he shut himself inside again, comfortable in the office where he was free to read or write or tinker with the code of the Device’s word processor to further improve its efficiency. As important as was the hardware’s functioning, so too was the speed and accuracy of the processor; the entire point was that it transmit information at the speed of thought. Until that day, Hermes had only been interested in maintaining the highest speed and resolution. Now, he scanned the code for something else. Some explanation for the result Enoch had discovered. But, of course, Hermes knew the secret to this could not be found in the code, the mere delivery system for whatever functions occurred in the sleep-bound brain; any explanation for this dreaming story was hidden within the human mind and its sleep cycles. For all the years he and his brother had spent endeavoring to create this device, they, or at least Hermes, had never considered the very basic question of what might happen to the sleeping mind while wearing it. But the question now screamed at him, and behind it arose a host of other, far more disturbing concerns.
Jaw set, Hermes shut off his computer and sat back in his seat, much as, that night, he would make himself as comfortable as possible in a chair beside his brother’s bed. The younger man wore upon his head the crown of wires that was the fruit of their long labor, and slept in a way so peaceful Hermes might only envy. The actual process of dreaming, of course, would not begin for some time; until then, Hermes, with Finnegans Wake in his lap, waited for something to happen.
The idea of anything happening was still, to Hermes, rather absurd. This was because the very nature of the Device required one’s intention to write. It was, at its heart, the same as holding a pen, after all, and if one fell asleep holding a pen, one did not awaken to Rimbaud! At least, Hermes did not; he had not asked the same of his younger brother before his going to sleep. It was a strange and absurd idea, that there was something so very sentient lodged within the human mind that it could presage the entirety of a breakfast conversation. Surely it was some vastly impractical and lucky prank; surely there was an explanation which did not call into question anything untoward. Hermes had long since settled his mind on the idea of God, after all. God, and any truth about the idea, was unknowable. Priests were deluded egoists and new-age cultists were acidheads who had taken the whole thing too far. Atheists who worshiped science were the same thing as the religious who confused their model of reality with the be-all-end-all of explanations. When it came to what man knew or didn’t, there was no winner, and Hermes was sure there never could be.
It was an hour and a half before anything happened, and two hours before the writing began. Though Enoch was the neurotechnologist, more thoroughly acquainted with the operation of the brain, Hermes was aware of the pre-REM nature of sleep’s delta waves and found himself intrigued to note that the Device interpreted these as the letter D. He would have to adjust the programming, he mused, to print delta waves with the Greek letter. A funny thing, that letter: the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, and yet, delineated by a triangle. A square was a more sensible shape, was it not? But then, Hermes supposed there was dual meaning to the shape. After all, a triangle was made up of three sides and the whole, creating, then, a separate figure which was the culmination of the triumvirate: the “true” triangle. A sort of independent entity. One had “Triangle A,” made up of three sides, and “Triangle B,” the triangle as a seamless unit; and though they were the same, they were just subtle enough in distinction that it seemed more akin to a kind of transposition, of one state upon another: of the completed state upon the in-progress state.
The arrival of the words which broke the scroll of delta placeholders required a few seconds to draw Hermes from his musing on the fourth letter of the Greeks. In the outset muddled by delta noise, the text soon organized itself into a conversation so eerily familiar that Hermes, a rational man, lowered his book to sit forward just as the narrative resumed:
DDDmiDDDghtDdoDDwiDth DDDa good editor. Someone to declutter those adverbs.”
“Well, the page is running out, so from here I’m blind to our conversation as you. Happier?”
“We shall see; though how am I to know if I do not have a page to tell me?”
Hermes watched the unfurling of the text with a silence thicker than that of a cathedral in its off hours. The page recalled the conversation with his brother exactly as it had happened: their movements, all their ways of being were catalogued as if by some additional observer, some alien, inward or outward, beyond perception, beyond knowing, thinking, reasoning. Something which knew everything about everything. Something which dwelt in the dreaming mind of his brother, yet which knew Hermes’s thoughts not moments before: thoughts displayed in a way which raced his heart. As he reread his musing on the nature of the letter “delta,” lips parted, glasses long removed, Hermes’s eyes filled with tears. Hand to his mouth, he rose from the chair and crept from what had once been their mother’s bedroom to lower himself to the floor of the hallway where, kissing the wood floor, he wept.
“Oh, God! My God! My God—” A breath sharper than a knife pierced the depths of his lungs and welled his eyes with another wave of tears. “My Lord, my God, all this time I have denied what I thought I could not know!”
Lips trembling, the elder brother rose to stumble through the dark of their house, unfamiliar, as if he had not been raised there. Indeed, with a shock of nausea for Hermes, the very corner of the stairs leapt out to assault his knee with a force so sharp he could not help but fall away with a cry. Recovering himself against that house which attacked him, that house which ushered him out lest he wake his sleeping brother, Hermes stumbled down the final flight of stairs to sprint into the starry dark, where half the swirling cosmos was veiled by an overhang of pregnant clouds behind a mountain which dwarfed the very sky. Falling to his knees, hands alternately clasping and gripping the collar of his own shirt, Hermes could naught but say, “Please, please,” and, “Oh, I am sorry. Oh, I see you!”
His brother, like all humans Hermes had ever known or read about, was not a telepath. Why, his brother could not even be said to have been present at the time of the strange story’s creation, being as he was in the depths of a thick sleep! For the sleeping man, or the machine, to guess with such detail the nature of Hermes’s thoughts there in the room, still and alone, would require an act of preternatural prescience. At the very least, it implied that his brother’s dreaming brain was being used as an antenna, perhaps, or that the right brain was linked to the cosmic unconscious, maybe, or that, at the very least, there existed some nontemporal figure which seemed as though to drive the course of human events: to know them, start to finish, inward and outward, as their author.
