by Roman McClay
After a nod and a handshake -always initiated by Lyndon- Chen sat down on the grey couch and looked around at all he had seen. He was tired, winding down, and this was the time each day they passed like ships in the night. As he rested in place, his friend began to speak.
“You wanna see something?” Lyndon asked, and Chen nodded and said sure, sure he did . As this was said -agreed to- his friend walked back into the hall and opened a door that Chen had never noticed before, maybe assuming it a utility closet or something unimportant; something ancillary. Chen rose and followed and as they passed through it, and into an open, warehouse-style elevator, brown and black with unpainted steel and with viscous grease on the chains and wheels, he realized they were going under ground even further than where they had been. They had been living -Chen now saw- at the top of the compound and not the basement as Chen had assumed given that the ceiling of where they had been living for months was a meter or two beneath the surface itself.
The freight elevator moved slowly -with some noise- below the concrete floor; Lyndon closed his eyes and seemed to sleep as they descended. Chen looked around at the walls of the shaft as they went down -he felt- what seemed like at least a couple hundred feet. He felt nervous and began to feel his fingertips itch and too his nose.
As they approached the bottom the aperture of the elevator egress appeared -and lights came on- revealing a square cut in the rock. Then the carriage settled on bottom; the half door -covering just the bottom four feet of the elevator- rose and they strode out into a narrow -20 feet maybe- hall. And the floor was smooth, polished concrete, in grey and black like winter clouds, and to their right was the largest glass wall Chen had ever seen, and it went on for meters and meters, and behind it was -now he saw- water. How, he wondered, how many gallons of water?
And just as he was seeing the water and glass for what it was -an aquarium- the 21-foot White Shark appeared in the glass, swimming, jaw shut, small fish at his flank, eddies of water here and there, bubbles and colors from blue and black to clear, and the grey dorsal top of the shark as it descended appearing as lowering storm clouds in western motion over the static land of its white belly below.
II. 2037 e.v.
The black headed eagle was large but immature; and he sat atop of his Pinion nest as the bald-headed rex landed and stomped around a bit. The tree had a wide top, not tapered, and it gave the birds of prey the elevated position; there was no higher spot in the region unless one went to the Spanish Peaks themselves. And with this splayed terminus they had the best of both words: breadth and height.
The black headed one was still young and had not developed its white feathers on the crown. Blax watched it and remembered his dream of the Aegolius funereus from last night and the sounds it made in the bare Aspens. There had been no crowd, no procession, but a death had occurred in the somnambulism and the owl watched for him it seemed. The boreal owl was not common here in Colorado, and as he reminisced, he remembered then the snowy owl, Bubo scandiacus , a male and female -with her black markings like sand or water ripples, eddies of black on white- had appeared in the same dream. They were stationed at the other side and the male had watched not the thing the boreal had watched, but the funereal owl himself.
The Bubo is not nocturnal , Blax’s PGC told him, as he wanted to know what each symbol in the dream might mean. The data from the coder populated his mind with the facts that these owl turn white after pubescence; born in redolent black. They are artic and live in Canada, above the circle, and Eurasia. They nest upon the ground .
He watched the eagles move around a bit in his tallest pines -40 meters from the house- and the Jacks also milled about performing small acts toward larger goals.
Jack One was cleaning all their firearms and Jack Two was in the garden thinning it out and checking the soil acidity with his fingers -with the nanobots attached to them- that needed just the moisture extant in the air to give him such read-outs. Jack Three was priming the carburetor on the chainsaw, about to clear some brush, Blax guessed. Jack liked to keep all growth of the perimeter trees up from the ground to 75 inches; and Jack Four was not around and had not been in a while , he thought, and it made him nervous it now seemed.
The eagles flew off in a sortie that left the nest undefended as Blax watched the juvenile fly west and the adult fly south and over the valley.
He listened with his new software to the birds on the eastern end of the land as they began to chirp and issue seet calls. He recognized their specific calls now thanks to the algorithm Isaiah had uploaded to him from the lab in Florence. It was based on the research done at Cornell’s Ornithology lab and the work of Slobodchinoff as well; Isaiah had merely added fuel to their research to produce the software for their PGCs.
Dogs were as motivated by praise as food, it was determined, and the methodology of the man they had purchased their GSD’s from had employed this exact concept; even as he had no data to back it up. Petr Spurny had bred and trained the two GSDs they had at the compound, one was owned by Jack One and one by Jack Four and they were just 14 months old now.
He thought Jack Four was likely hiking with his dog and he noticed Jack One’s GSD, Revelation , was seated in the shade by Jack as he took down and field stripped Blax’s own 9mm Scorpion , manufactured by Sig Saur . The Jacks had begun manufacturing their own weapons with the new 3D printer and CAD software from Death-Athletic; and had moved toward all polymer pistols and carbines so they could evade all metal detectors while traveling. But they each liked to keep atavistic mil-spec weapons as well. The Sig Saur was a reliable platform and Blax was grateful for Jack’s willingness to clean them after their weapon’s training that morning.
He listened again to the birds; he took note of some small bird species making now a seet call to denote the eagles in flight compared to the chick-a-dee calls when they were close but stationary.
The software made all this intuitive, but Blax liked to deconstruct it and make sense of it. He liked to ask the why not merely the how .
He had planned to see if the grey squirrels could be incorporated in the call list. He had read that some squirrels imitate bird calls and he wanted to see if he could amalgamate them with the prairie dog specific calls that denoted what type of animal -pig, man, or dog- and what color clothes or skin each predator was swathed in as they approached. It was a sophisticated proto-language and he deconstructed its syntax with the aide of his new software loaded on his coder.
The camera recon drones were sufficient for all manner of things, but Blax liked the idea of being able to read the birds and other animals for alerts just in case. The drones had no failure risk due to poor craftsmanship or bad software, but they could be interfered with by law enforcement. But the bird, well, he thought, consider the birds .
He was dehydrated according to his PGC and this was his second alert to drink fluids, the first he had ignored as he was reading some material on his new bird-call software at the time. But now he walked inside the containers and poured himself a glass of water and sliced a lime on the black cutting board and dropped it in and watched it fizzle a bit. It seemed a cold cauldron to him and he drank from it slowly and closed his eyes and let his mind wander to things not too far back.
After his eyes opened he watched the haliaeetus fly low along the plane outside the southern kitchen window and then he drank the water down. The fire in New Mexico could be seen from this window too, and he watched as the white smoke billowed and made clouds on the horizon and wafted their way.
He wanted to protect his men, his brethren, his sons , he thought, and he found himself hyper-vigilant and increasingly so as they showed more and more insouciance. He knew it was due to youth, the innate lack of fear, lack of death conception, the inability to see the worst just yet, and he admired it. He ought to be more like they and they ought to meet him half way, he thought, but maybe it was best they each occupied each extreme. They had just finished their latest mission, the Denver Mint, and had left the trucks in Ag
uilar just off the highway for Isaiah to pick up.
He walked outside and knelt on the dirt -just east of the agogic pad- and placed his hand on the surface warm from solar gain, and felt a vibration he could not name; a feeling he could not tell if it was from inside of him or from the earth itself. His PGC had no data on it, and he turned it off and just felt the ground as the men worked in meditative silence. He loved watching work be performed by men who felt it was necessary and lovely both. His men enjoyed their work and their bodies were still young and not in chronic pain as was his. They could work all day and barely be sore; their minds drank in and absorbed; their souls were fat with purpose and they had a youth he had never had.
This is what all fathers want. His own father had just provided a father at all, for his -Blax’s grandfather- was absent. But Blax could provide actual instruction and encouragement. He had depth -desire- his own father never had. His boys could be given an actual education in ethics, literature, science, mechanics, horticulture, hunting, welding, dialectics, botany, metallurgy and poetry and history. They were complete men, and not the deformed and bent man that he was; like the horn of the anvil, he thought.
He had had to learn all this on his own and it had come at a price they did not have to pay. He had learned it all by dint of mistakes and poverty and labyrinthine fits & starts; the stupidity of mere unaided virtue . He had had to escape his immoral family, the amoral banality of the unthinking human. His brother of course ignored the meaning of the religion he purported to adhere to, he ignored the innate meaning of the quantum physics that made his equations work. All his kin cared about was that it worked, the brother never peered into the machine nor the ghost. The father never strove for anything but what lay apparent on the ground.
To them The Bible was practical advice, the quantum superposition just worked out fine. His brother didn’t care about the implications of entanglement or of the moral universe’s epistemology. He was the epitome of the pragmatic man.
So what if two particles light years apart could communicate in experiments even Einstein found too spooky to be ponderable. It gave Blax’s brother no pause at all. As long as his engineering equations worked and his wife was happy, and the neighbors agreed he was a moral man, who cares if what he did was insane, banal or immoral at base? He got along in society, the brother thought, what else mattered? What else could matter?
But, if making money was a banal way to live a life, as it appeared when one combined the moral principles of the Bible and the weirdness of how the universe was so instantly connected at a distance so far away, well , then to still focus on this commerce at the detriment of all else seemed an insane way to live , Blax surmised. It was more than wrong, it was sinister, he thought. It seemed like focusing on saving one’s lucky penny in the middle of a stick-up robbery; obviously -if one was being robbed at gunpoint- the penny was not that lucky to begin with, and to keep it at the risk of getting shot seemed even more asinine given this lack of innate power of the coin itself .
Why focus so much on material survival when the universe seemed much, much more than that? he asked himself as if speaking to his brother. But the wind and birds both blew and no rejoinder from kin was received.
Why ignore the innately odd meanings of our ancient tomes, the bizarre injunctions of First Kings and Revelation and turn away from the entanglement of quantum world, or the unknown constraints and boundary conditions and laws of energy conservation just to get some stupid earthly project accomplished? What was the point of selling more air conditioning if the universe was something much hotter, much weirder than -as JBS Haldane had said- not just what we imagine, but stranger than we even can imagine?
But Blax knew the retort, he knew it as deterministically as the universe itself might be if the closest star beyond our sun -575 light years away- was younger, closer, than some predetermined rules at least 576 years old; or more likely from the big bang itself. His brother would say that he had to survive and thus to ignore money and pragmatic shit would mean his death and that of his family. That is always what the simple minded say , Blax thought.
Blax was not saying -he never said- to ignore money or the material life. No, it was the over-focus on it, on money -to the blindness of all else- that was so insane to him. His brother and that shallow wife of his, Blax thought, had worked too hard on not being material poor and thus found themselves spiritually poor instead . They had no inner lives. They didn’t ponder the mysteries of life, they just accepted the de rigueur explanations and homilies and the pragmatism of everything working out. They didn’t dig deeper, they didn’t care to find out. And this seemed as sad as any life he could think of. They ran out the clock on the most bizarre and beautiful thing of all: to be alive and awake in the now. And this was why his brother was not just insipid but lazy and weak too. It was all connected. He skimmed along in life. Blax’s brother avoided all contretemps and his lack of strength in each domain was the result. He was old in age but still callow and useless as a newborn babe.
How, he thought, could a person not find all of life too weird to almost even live it? Maybe the psychedelic experiences Blax had had was what made him this way. Travis had never had a trip on entheogens. He would call them drugs of course, he had the idiotic reflex to follow whatever the law said; as if the government knew even one goddamn thing of science or truth or love. That people had been using peyote and mushrooms and DMT for millennia before the FBI existed, let alone decided it was illegal, never entered into his brother’s brain. For him, like all modern people, life began at his birth, he never thought back past that epoch. He was ahistorical, he didn’t even know that alpha males used to have 100 wives and most men had none; a Pareto distribution of amour .
He didn’t know that even today, any of us, all of us, Blax thought, have twice as many female ancestors as males in one’s family tree. Most men did not reproduce, and the other half over-reproduced. It was like that in life and only recently did each man get a wife.
But Travis didn’t know that, for he skipped right over the Biblical histories that showed Solomon and King David and the steppe histories of each prince. He knew nothing of the Zhou Chinese practice of the king gaining all daughters from a household, and on and on and on. He knew even less of the sexual dimorphic species that always show a Matthew Principle in distribution of mates. To those that have everything, more will be given , it said in Matthew; Blax barely let the rest of that scripture unfurl as he tried to edify from so far away. The elephant walrus, he instead thought, and Common Chimp alpha males, all have harems with the betas getting none. It’s all or nothing in the natural world when males and females are a different size; like men and women are . Each ancient religion took this for granted, it takes a modern man to ignore all that is laid bare before him. Only the educated can be so dumb , he thought.
But, his older brother was so ignorant of taxonomy, biology, evolution, history, and real religion that he would need a month of intensive training to just get .0001% of what his little brother, Blax, knew. But, why even think of these people? he asked. Why waste one second on them? They never thought of him, that was certain. Travis had admitted he never thought of his younger brother at all. He admitted it. And of course, Blax could murder him, and this would be the right thing to do, to teach him the lesson he sorely needed: that you cannot mistreat a man like Blax without consequences . But, in fact how many men had in fact mistreated Blax and gotten away with it? Hundreds? More? The tiger is never mocked in nature, but only in the zoo , he thought. And where did they all live but in the zoo?
He had the capacity to dispatch them, yet he demurred, with larger goals always in mind. How tenable -how stable- were grand designs when they came at the price of man’s simplest -foundational- nature? How long can a meal be delayed in search of larger game? Ah, he berated himself, was this not the other side to the coin he used to indict his own kin? Was he not being a hypocrite now?
But, he had his boys, his men, to train and care for a
nd he didn’t want to sully himself any further with these emasculating thoughts ; no matter how true , he thought, he enjoined as some kind of temporary punctuation on his permanent dialectic between each hemisphere of his soul.
He had already done more damage than he thought he could take. He knew the counter arguments, it wasn’t like he was obtuse or some moral, preening, fool; he knew that what they had done was right, even necessary to both avoid a war and protect man’s greatest accomplishments if war did come, it was both prophylactic and mitigation plan if the harm should come. He also knew that mankind, even its wisest and most moral -of which he considered himself in the top 1%- did not know enough and was not wise enough to make the best choices. Maybe not acting, maybe thinking one more day -staying the execution of his instincts- was his destiny, his Fate after all . Maybe he ought see his family as doing their duty too. The deer had their role, not just the bear .
Man was so corrupt, so limited and so unwise, knew so little, and knew so little of himself, that any true solution to mankind’s problems, would be counterintuitive to man himself. This seemed axiomatic. Why would the right answer seem right to us?
Think, he said to himself, why would the correct answers appear right to a species that couldn’t figure it out on its own ? Surgery seemed like assault to the ignorant tribes that had no knowledge of invasive procedures, shit, to the aboriginals who knew nothing of tumors or other maladies that surgeries absolved. To the bushman the surgeon wasn’t just wrong, he was malevolent; the man -this surgeon- had a knife and was wanting to cut the bushman open!
Modern man has no idea what ails him, he has no idea why the pareto distribution applies to stars in each galaxy, to city populations, to wealth and other things. Man was wholly ignorant. And yet he would demand that his political solution was the right one. He’d demand it! Blax shook his head as he felt the earth, on his knees, as the cloud cover made the day a bright and flat grey; it ceilinged the sky low and opaque.