Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  “Will,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He no longer has free will.”

  I looked back at the trace. “Am I supposed to be able to read that?”

  She shook her head, with slight impatience. “You can’t read it,” she said. “But it can be deduced.”

  “Yeah, well,” I murmured, still ardently searching the trace for clues, “I guess I failed the exam.”

  Will is a modifier capable of altering the spatiotemporal activity of the neuronal network by exerting fields of analogue-predilection that become effective via the reactive properties of the vital cortex. There are two ways it can fail: if the modifying principle breaks down, or if the reactivity of the cortex is depressed. Either way you get an instant zombie.

  I couldn’t find a thing. I dropped the trace.

  “Let’s stop messing around,” I said. “Is the printout intelligible?”

  Martinez carefully tore off the pages of the line printer output, which were stacking themselves politely on the shelf provided for just that purpose. He passed them over to me without comment.

  I looked at the garbage, trying to make sense out of computer jargon for the first time in several years, finding it harder than looking at graphs. I couldn’t see a thing.

  “It’s all Greek to me,” I said. “Just gibberish.”

  “Perfect score,” said Jenny. “Not many people spot that. Most of them ask me what it means.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “Now you’ve spoiled it. You were right the first time. It is gibberish.”

  “What’s the point of having the computer turn out gibberish?” I asked, reasonably enough.

  “The computer is programmed to make sense,” she told me. “It has the decode process that we worked out before we sent him up operating quite normally.”

  I thought for a minute. “You’re saying that his personality has been completely disintegrated?”

  “No.”

  I gave vent to a quick snort of exasperation. “Then he’s got himself a whole new private language. He’s acting out fantasies that bear no relation to his old reality. A sort of metamorphosis of the mind.”

  “That’s right. We think his mind has suffered a kind of perspective-inversion. His viewpoint was turned inside out, if you like. If before we consider him to have been inside himself, looking out, using an inner ego to act as arbiter and interpreter, then now he’s outside himself, looking in, using an external — or at any rate totally different — ego to act as arbiter.”

  “How can he be outside himself?” asked Hurst, who was lost several minutes back, but was still trying valiantly to take an interest.

  “You think he formed a new ego because his old one wasn’t up to it?” I asked.

  “What else can we think?” asked Jenny, rhetorically. “Johnny was a sane man. A very sane man. He was what one might call a counter-solipsist. A solipsist thinks that everything else is a figment of his imagination. Johnny, though, thought everything else was solidly, dramatically real. The solipsist can account for everything — he need never lack an explanation. But Johnny could exist only in the one reality-context. He had a strong mind — a very strong mind. But it was like a diamond — brittle. Uncrushable, but quite easily shattered.

  “Johnny thought he was a unit of a universe. He hardly had any concept of self that was independent of that universe framework. In a different framework, which is obviously what he found in tachyonic phase — how could he adapt? What chance had he? But you, now — your concept of self is very different from Johnny’s. It doesn’t matter whether either of you was right or wrong, sane or insane — those things are relative to context. We’re now beyond context, and it’s your mind that is definitely the more useful. Understand, I’m not saying that Johnny was sane here and insane there, while you’ll be sane there but insane here. Certainly not. You’ll be as insane relative to the tachyonic context as you are to the Earthly context. But you have the flexibility. You have the adaptability. You see what I mean?”

  “In a word,” I said, “maybe.”

  “In hyperspace,” she said, quite patient, because she was sure of her ground and could restate her case any number of ways, “the sane structures of Johnny’s mind became useless. They shattered, were thrown out. The same thing would have happened if a mind which was ‘sane’ relative to the tachyonic phase was suddenly precipitated into the slower-than-light phase. Sane minds are narrow minds. But a mind which allows for other reality-contexts as a matter of course is a different matter. It’s ‘insane’ relative to any particular context, because it’s badly adapted — a bad fit — but it can make some sort of adjustment to almost any context — if, that is, it can make adjustments at all. Your mind has adjusted to here; there’s no reason it can’t also adjust to there. You won’t be sane — I’m certainly not saying that your schizoid view of reality is any more true than Johnny’s normal one was. But it’s the view we need. If we’re right — and you can prove us right or wrong very soon now — space travel is for schizoids. Socially adjusted schizoids only, because it’s just as bad to be a dogmatic schizophrenic as to be a dogmatic realist, but for schizoids, nevertheless.”

  “And ain’t that a laugh?” I said, still looking at the printout. “But I don’t see why it prints out anything at all. Why gibberish? Why not question marks?”

  “It’s not the same sort of program that was built from your model,” said Martinez. “Your program is to assign keywords to patterns and thus gives us a picture of what you’re thinking about and the patterns of change that occur. This program assigns letters and not words, so that something comes out even when no keyword in the vocabulary is applicable. We search for patterns in the letters — new, synthesized ‘words’ and frequencies of juxtaposition.”

  “You’re trying to decipher his mind from pure theory?” I said. “I’ve heard of ambition, but . . .”

  “We have his old model as well,” said Martinez. “It may help. And we’ve come a long way since your initial breakthrough. There are theories about universal patterns and tendencies to make assignations in particular ways. Also, of course, we have some theories about reality-structures now that we didn’t have earlier in the Project.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but theory is theory is . . .”

  “We have a pure mind there,” said Jenny. “The only one we’ve ever seen. A virgin mind, untroubled by heredity and conditioning. That’s human nature, coming out of that computer. Johnny is a valuable commodity.”

  “Sure as hell,” I said, with aggressive sarcasm. “Very valuable. To whom? To him? Very valuable indeed. And I suppose your machines will keep him alive till he’s five hundred, considering he’s not about to do anything ill-advised that might jeopardize his health, like living? We’ve got men in Block C like that — you try hitching Bedbug to your machines. He’s pure human nature, too. Dead from the neck up and the waist down.”

  “You could put it that way,” said Jenny flatly, forestalling Martinez. She knew me.

  “I’ve heard of taking arms against a sea of troubles,” I said, “and by opposing . . . well, you know the rest. But do you honestly believe that you can send me into chaos — a mariner drowning in a sea of troubles — in order that I can make some sort of sense out of it? Order out of chaos? Who am I, God?”

  “No.” The denial came from Martinez.

  “Just an impure case of human nature,” I said, dryly.

  “Anything God could do . . .” commented Hurst. I guess ten minutes without an inane remark must have been pushing his record fairly close.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Faith is a wonderful thing.”

  I looked again at the trace that was telling the story of Lindquist’s mind. If you set a monkey to producing random letters in a sequence, rumor has it that he will one day present you with a copy of the complete works
of Somerset Maugham. You can see why no one’s bothered to try the experiment. What was Lindquist going to produce? the skylark of space? a la recherche du temps perdu? catch a falling star and put it in your pocket?

  None of them. If he tried really hard, the net production of his thirty score and ten years might be the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Complete with typographical errors.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “If I come back like that, put me in a glass box and put me in the foyer of a strip club. Don’t let me fall as low as this.”

  “You won’t come back like that,” said Jenny.

  “Well if I don’t, put Hurst in the glass box instead. He’s the guy who gets to be me if I don’t, isn’t he?”

  I don’t think Hurst liked the idea.

  I left Lindquist to his private agony. Jenny stayed behind. Hurst followed me, dogging my footsteps like the avenging angel.

  “You remind me of an old joke,” I told him.

  “Which one?” he wanted to know.

  “You’re never alone with schizophrenia.”

  Cage of Darkness

  Contacts

  Some of the men in Canaan have wives and children. When he is condemned to Block C, effectively he has already lost them. It is not always as simple as that. They often continue to haunt him, just as — I imagine — he haunts them in their own version of existence, for years. The fact that the haunting is a haunting of love and futile need and the carcass of hope rather than a specter of vengeance does not make it any the less terrible — nor, indeed, any the less fearful, though the fear is of a different kind. It is the appearance of the vengeful phantasm that is feared, while it is the departure of the phantasm of human contact which is dreaded as the ultimate extinction of being in the world.

  The incoming letter is always and absolutely devoid of hope and life no matter what its contents. The Dear John letter, when it comes, is virtually a euthanasia. It is the outgoing letter which is the focus of uncertainty. That is the contact with something to offer, apparently. That is the contact which will always retain some kind of meaning. The incoming letter cannot prevail against the environment; it can bring in nothing of the outside world for more than a fleeting instant, because nothing of the outside world can survive in this kind of a cage. The outgoing letter, on the other hand, carries part of the inmate back, away from the prison, out into the daylight. It is a kind of escape; it tells the inmate that he still has some kind of existence in the world which human consensus says is real. It may be only an existence scribbled on paper, like the works of an author long dead, but it is an existence of a kind and an existence which can continue to grow and ramify as long as the inmate can put pen to paper.

  The outgoing letter, I must make you realize, is a thing of the utmost importance. This is vital to your understanding. Will you please accept, if only as a working hypothesis, the extreme importance of the outgoing letter? I promise you that this will be the only favor this document will ever ask of you.

  Now think.

  Censorship operates with respect to every piece of paper that passes in and out of Block C. They censor the books that come in, and if you underline words in the books they rub out the lines on the way out. All lines can be erased. There are only pencils — soft pencils — available to inmates in Block C. When a prisoner writes a letter, he presses down hard, to make sure that even if the words are rubbed out the impression remains. He runs the risk of having his letter destroyed in consequence, if he strays too far over the borderline of what is “tolerable,” but it gives him a little extra latitude. I have known men who would quite literally write certain passages in their letters in their own blood to prevent erasure. This is futile, because such letters are virtually certain to be destroyed.

  These are some of the rules of censorship:

  A prisoner must not write about prison conditions.

  A prisoner must not write about prison guards.

  A prisoner must not write about prison events.

  A prisoner must not write about escaping.

  A prisoner must not write about desperation, about the possibility of his committing suicide, nor about anything which implies that his condition, mental or physical, is intolerable.

  I offer these without comment, save to say that each and every one of these rules may be transgressed to a degree which the censor may consider “harmless.” One never knows where the line is drawn. More important, one never knows whether one’s letters get out unviolated or not, or to what extent they have been violated if so. Incoming letters which might tell a prisoner about such censorship are themselves censored.

  There are other rules:

  Letters may be sent only to, and received from, people on a list of authorized correspondents which the prison authorities must approve.

  Only two letters may be sent per week. (There is no limit on the number of letters received in a week.)

  One may write only to individuals that are personally known to the prisoner, never to individuals who are not known to the prisoner and never in any circumstances to an organization of any kind.

  Again, no comment. But an observation: people outside try many devices for making their letters less easy to censor — pressing down hard to make an impression, using all kinds of code and invisible ink. Most fail. Many letters are simply intercepted. There is no way for the prisoner to tell his correspondents on the outside about the things which may or may not have been censored from letters. Any such reference is automatically censored.

  Perhaps there is one thing more to be said about contacts, and that is about the guards. They are always present. There are always a lot of them. They are human, too.

  But there are always the cameras as well. At every junction there is a camera set high in the wall. Total surveillance at all times. We can never know who it is that enforces the rules and regulations of the prison. Perhaps the guards would let us live, just a little, if they could. But they have one endless chorus which puts an end to all our efforts to make human contacts out of them. The regulations rule absolutely supreme.

  “It’s not me, mate,” the guard will say. “It’s the camera.”

  Madman’s Dance

  Eternity in the Balance

  I enter chaos.

  I see the fury of irrationality. I am that fury. The four elements — fire, water, earth, and air — have beaten their plowshares into swords and are bearing arms against the people. The universe is being torn apart by the massive forces of their bickering.

  Beneath me, all around me, within me, the surfaces split. They show me sheer faces of bloodstained rock, and then they slam together again, mocking me. Fountains of molten rock and flame leap into the skies, dying like roman candles. People climb the fountains like beanstalks, ride them like broomsticks, and shatter into sparks.

  A pulpy liquid mass that is the grass that conquered empires is still half-visible here and there, but in most places it is reduced to black ash indistinguishable from the ash of the petty emperors. The birds are flying high in the fiery sky — I wish I am a bird — but when the flames rend them, they are not born again. I am the phoenix, too. Only I. Only one.

  There is no place of safety in the turmoil. The paint on my mask is melting, and I can feel the electric sparks within my brain surging and swelling, preparing themselves to be a cyclone. The suns are neither aloof nor uncaring. They spin like wheels and flare and cough. They are vomiting fissioning hydrogen.

  In time, the atoms will be torn apart, and the electrons and the mesons themselves. The worlds wave like flags in the random wind, flapping and clattering and complaining. Each time their colors are visible they shudder and change. Vast clouds of dust are rising everywhere, blotting out all semblance of eternity, carrying with them the roasted spores that might have been some kind of hope for the rebirth of time, in another place, if there is another place, and not just nothing wrapped
around the far horizons.

  Slivers of flesh and fragments of souls slide from the edges of ever widening cracks in the fabric of space, to fill the yawning crevasses and overflow into nowhen.

  A blister of substance bursts somewhere close at hand, and I am bathed in flame and flux. For an instant, the stream of serum is whirling around me in a hot-air cocoon, and the harsh light of it plucks at the skin on my eyes. Then I am clear again, watching my infinities give up their sick ghosts into the painted skies.

  Traveling from the far end of a new-formed furrow in the universe, a vast wave of living tissue is swept by black flood water toward my station, as the barrier between space and unspace which supports the tide bucks and heaves in the grip of a fever. A second wave, approaching the first from the nearer end, picks up colossal speed, and both waves rear up on their hind parts, growing a million eyes apiece to watch the coming crash. The edges race ahead as the wave fronts become concave. The vast bowls of amoebic plasm become steeper and steeper as they reach for one another.

  They meet.

  A kaleidoscopic image of scattered eyes is all that comes of the furious copulation. There is no chance for anything else to happen. Just eyes, fluttering and rattling like marbles in a whirling box.

  I watch a chain of mountains explode, gunning their hearts at the multiple suns. But their substance is only flotsam and jetsam in the wreckage of the sky. A fissure splits beneath my feet and gradually spreads — I am straddling the gulf, with one foot on either lip, and the debris of the universe flows around my feet as it surges to fall into the sightless depths. The gaping abyss grows and grows.

  I watch the vivid lightning dissect the darkening blurs that is all that remains of the horizons. I see pinnacles and spires tumbling into dust. I see in the sky that was above me, but is falling slowly like autumn leaves, the wrathful reflection of a vast holocaust which is consuming me. I see the flames themselves — all that is left now that matter is destroyed — cavorting in my wounds, I see the plumes and vortices of my crumbling being, red in the castellated flames.