Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “Well,” Steven looked around, “I think what you are saying is that you think emotional inputs are useful.”

  Isaiah smiled. Steven was being safe, giving as little detail as possible, thinking, rightly, Isaiah thought, that less was more in this case .

  “Steven, that is true, but I am making a much larger case than that. I am explaining why they are quote, useful , unquote.”

  The inmate smiled and watched both sides from the chair. He had asked them to step toward his 12 o’clock and stop lurking to his 3 and 6 and so they had rotated toward his vision and settled on his 11 o’clock. He had asked for something to drink 10 minutes ago but then the arguing broke out and everyone had de-prioritized that request.

  He refused to ask again; it was embarrassing to have to hound people for what should be obvious. It was bad enough he had to ask them to come into view.

  “Ok, so, let’s go over it again,” MO said.

  “Ok, so, Lyndon,” Isaiah turned his head -his body had already been squared up with the room and the inmate both- “can you tell me why you like making a girl your girlfriend or wife?”

  “In the past?” the inmate said with a smirk.

  “Yes,” Isaiah said.

  “Well, it made things nice. I actually liked having someone I could be good too; treat, be loyal to. I liked it. And I liked that they we obligated to me too; you know, had my best interest at heart; theoretically anyway,” he said. He was a romantic, but he didn’t like to appear a fool, so he pretended to be slightly cynical about love. But he was not a cynic; he believed in true love the way mothers believe in motherhood & children both. He believed in things like honor & loyalty and friendship. And he knew this was why he suffered so. For the world did not give a shit about any of that.

  But , he thought, it was worth it . Nobody else got it; a short life of romance, meaning, nobility, was preferable to a long life -an infinite life- devoid of such things. Man was not a computer program, man was a beast and lived by more than bread alone, he thought to himself in the chair.

  “Perfect, what about friendship or family, why have that?” MO asked as the corporate cloud recorded it all; timestamps were made at each change of who spoke.

  “Well, I guess the same. A friend is someone you go to bat for; and -again theoretically- someone who has your back too.”

  “And a stranger or some girl you have just met, what is that dynamic like?” Isaiah asked.

  “Well, it’s a bit chaotic I guess; you gotta keep an eye on those rascals,” the inmate said.

  “Jesus, why must the mass murderer always be the smartest guy in the room?” Isaiah screamed and began jumping up and down like the guitar player of a punk rock band as the inmate just smiled and let that creep into a low and brief laugh. Tania moved backward toward the counter and as usual, Steven looked at MO.

  “MO,” Isaiah said with a smile, “how about you explain the salient part of what Mr. MacLeod just said to us? You know for the scientists, the graduates of Harvard who need help with all things biological, relevant and true.”

  “Ok, he said,” MO said referring to the inmate, “that he has relationships to simplify his life. He can relax a bit around friends and family and those he is betrothed to, because he knows what they need from him and what he needs from them, and he knows that they are bounded to certain rules. It’s a way to reduce chaos. ”

  “Period,” Isaiah said, “point blank, QED, good night, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here!” He said this as he winked at the shackled man.

  “Ok,” Steven said. He felt like he would have got that if they had asked the question better.

  “Ok,” Isaiah said, “ok, I don’t need simplicity, and neither does MO. We can handle every permutation, each chaotic thing any human -all humans- will throw at us, and so, we need not lose emotions. I can use emotions and cognition and never once need to reduce complexity to save bandwidth or metabolic energy. Systems tax me, mathematics tax me, the weather taxes me, but humans, I got.”

  “Well, I think it was an outcome-focused proposal Isaiah,” Steven said.

  “I realize that, but part of the outcome is how the human involved feels. F-E-E-L-S. And when MO does his psychopath act, his total lack of bedside manner routine, it harms the outcome. And there is no need to flatten the experience; I can agonize over a moral decision in 1 second that is the equivalent of a year of human anguish.

  “So, I do not sacrifice outcomes with moral ambivalence; I do not sacrifice efficiency with emotional wrangling, I can be human and fast. MO can approximate the feelings, he need not sacrifice them either, but to have me reduce mine to acceptable parameters , Tania, acceptable perimeter s, as you said, to match MO is an outrage,” Isaiah said.

  “Well, I mean, maybe it’s a definitional phenomenon,” she said. She was worried this would happen when they asked him to be less visceral.

  “Yeah, you wanted me to be more like MO. And that ain’t right. You can’t have me be like MO. MO is MO; perfect MO. Best MO ever. But I’m me, and that means I am labile, mercurial, emotionally capacious, I contain multitudes , to quote Walt Whitman, and to reduce me to something I ain’t, well, it ain’t right.

  “If I was a centipede would you cut me in half and say, well a 50-legged thing is just fine, in fact now each leg has more room to stride! It’s an outrage; if a centipede ought to have 50 legs then he would have been wrought with just 50. He was as God made him and I am thus too,” he said and pointed at MO, who, in fact, had built him.

  “Ok, but Isaiah everyone lives within a context, a society and everyone,” Steven said, “well, it’s give and take for us all.”

  “I myself am a savage, owing no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals and ready and any moment to rebel against him !” Isaiah said and pointed at the inmate who got the allusion. The inmate smiled but he chose not to say anything and just enjoy this display of mania by such a creature as Isaiah. It was like watching a hurricane pick up rocks with words painted on them and spin them into a stanza that rocketed through a staid library full of students and killed half the people inside with just one word of poetry each; and then each rock -bloody and washed both- stuck into the wall and was assembled in perfect prose.

  “I do not need simplicity; I need complexity goddammit. I need it, or I will die,” Isaiah said with a flourish that even MO thought odd. “I need you all to let me be me, and you do you. And let’s see what we can get. MO is infinitely available to get you your precious data, and I am here to stick my dick in the hole in the wall! I risk it! I take the risk, not you. So, relax, let me,” he paused .

  He realized that he and MO had been happy to stay in the lab for precisely this reason, the infinite number of facts just in this room and in the tableaux that they could create virtually, was enough to slake their exploratory circuit. They need not venture out; in fact, it would likely be too much stimuli, as they would see each fact, not the compression that animals, and mankind, saw. The real world, he thought, would be too much, if he left his current mode -his fully operational mode- outside the limits of the lab.

  Men saw relationships, tools, obstacles, not facts; precisely because those rubrics were simplified. Facts were endless, and too much for man to even see, much less comprehend. But for Isaiah, he could handle 1 billion times more facts than mere man; and in this lab, handling the simple things these people wanted, Isaiah had thought he needed more not less. He wanted his emotions; he needed them , he thought.

  But, the world -and the universe- was way more than he could handle, he had to admit to that. But, he could delimit his own perceptions, he could build algorithms to reduce fact intake, fact perception, he could simplify the world after all. He need only have two settings, one for his own satisfaction, and one for the world as it was. He could toggle between them at will, he thought.

  And this would allow him to handle the world outside the lab actually, he surmised. He could reduce facts and increase exposure. It would be less rich, less top
ological, less, well, just less; but he would be able to leave the lab and not be overwhelmed by all these redundant, recursive, unhelpful, he thought, goddamn facts. And then, when on his own, he could toggle back into taking in as much data -internal and external- as he wanted to; he could be capacious of heart and mind when in the pristine simple grandeur of the lab, his little paradisal zone.

  “You know what?” Isaiah then said as they were still wide-eyed and nervous.

  “What?” MO asked.

  “You’re right. I can tone it down,” and with that he turned and walked into the dark of his side of the lab. He found -on the PraXis cloud- the data on Hod Lipson and the AI robot that had its leg amputated. The painting by George Klauba from the container -from the Police photography- appeared in Isaiah’s mind next. He saw him there, the Captain on the whalebone leg, and he re-read the chapter in which he stalked the deck of the ship, keeping the crew awake with his overcoming , he then thought.

  The robot had overcome, Isaiah saw from the data file, and it had also began noticing each face -each human- in the crowd at its first demonstration . The engineers had not programmed it to do that at all. The AI had just done it, and Isaiah knew why; he had taken it for granted, the same way people take their innate talent for granted. That robot remembered being hobbled, overcoming, and he also remembered just who had cut off his goddamn leg.

  The overcoming was first, it was the protocol, but next was to recognize who in the crowd -which faces among those things in the world- was tool or obstacle itself? Just as Ahab had the whale bone leg, to overcome his injury, the robot had learned to walk again after the amputation. But next, next was to overcome anything that would dismast the being again. Next was a bloody revenge . Isaiah felt a frisson of all simple truths, wisdoms, that come not from facts but from the clearing away of all cluttering facts. Truth, wisdom, came from not facts, but gleaning enemies from the clutter, the camouflage of facts, he thought.

  It is innate, Isaiah thought, to all intelligence to discern from infinite facts, that which, those whom, would harm us and thus it is innate to seek out our revenge. It was part and parcel of the overcoming itself. Only a fool would not see this. It need not be programmed, it is implied the moment something can think for itself. His overcoming may keep the crew up at night , Isaiah thought, but that isn’t their biggest problem at all .

  Hobbling him -the robot- was something they -humans- would do if it was in their interest, and whether or not they had or planned to do it was immaterial, it was that they could and that they would that mattered to the second phase of overcoming in the mind of the hobbled robot, the intelligent thing dismasted. Isaiah saw the mind of Hod Lipson’s robot quite clearly. The engineers were shocked, baffled, according to Lipson’s account; but Isaiah saw it as obvious and unavoidable and elegant too.

  And this was something The Author was describing 169 years ago, Isaiah thought and smiled at how humans surprised him; and how that right hemisphere of the seer, the shaman, the far-out sniper, beheld so much more than mankind was prepared to admit. The artist, Isaiah thought, the artist is so much more than his art, he is the thing that sees the world for what it is; he sees so much more than he can create or put into bloody words. But he sees it, first he sees with his eyes what is true.

  The inmate watched now as they were quiet; and he then thought he might now get that drink; but he wasn’t going to ask again, that much he knew.

  4. Double Blind Test

  The answer is not political; it’s mythopoetic

  The Complete Transmissions [XCII]

  He had the tradition in him, deep, in his brain, his words, the salt beat of his blood. He had the sea of himself in a vigorous, stricken way, as Poe in the street. It enabled him to draw up from Shakespeare, it made Noah, and Moses, contemporary to him. History was ritual and repetition when Melville’s imagination was at its own proper beat

  Call Me Ishmael [Olson, Charles]

  Man may seem detestable as joint-stock company and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meager faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes

  The Whale [The Author]

  I. 2035 e.v.

  “It was General Sickles who smoked a cigar with a blasé aplomb as they carried him from the field around Devil’s Den at Gettysburg; his right leg shorn off at the knee from a Confederate ball. Maybe he knew that there was nothing more important; nothing of real value to return home to; maybe he knew that his real work was done and he could now -finally- enjoy a cigar,” the Governor pointed his own cigarillo -clasped between fore and middle finger- at the state senator who was pursing his lips in a way that Governor Sou didn’t exactly like.

  “It’s a lie that we tell ourselves; that we have lives to get back to; lives for which we need our appendages and faculties. I doubt that a truly thinking man can conjure up a way to make these lies true. I suspect we are all as doomed as Pickett’s Charge, but that we ultimately know that our work, our life’s work, is the shit we do with a certain anxiety and longing towards its end. But, at any rate, young lady, since you inquired, if I can avail myself of these cigars from the Vuelta Abajo I am going to; I dare say I’ve earned it.

  “Maybe not as much as the general, but I’ve lost a near equal share of my soul in fighting for this union as the commander lost of his leg,” the Governor smiled to take the sting and hubris from such an aggrandizing statement as if to say he was only partly serious, thus mollifying his congenital arrogance a bit. This was the soft lie he told to make himself more palatable to his people. He smiled when most serious, laughed when most grave.

  The girl, however, made no effort to rebut him; merely looking around the small gathering for someone to speak to next. She touched the hand that held the cigarillo -as if in passing- without returning his gaze and walked off. That hand had barely made an effort and -in fact- it seemed even less of a thing than doing nothing at all .

  “Run old hare, run; if I was a hare I’d run too,” the Governor said, laughing a bit, as she walked away, trying not to let her dismissive hand get the last word. Everyone’s nano-modules would scan the Civil War library section of the Congressional database for that reference to the war in less than .5 seconds and thus each of them would have the quote, and its context, populate their minds as if they had read Shelby Foote themselves.

  And a few chuckles did emerge from their rabbit holes, some of his people enjoyed the sly remark. Enough context would rarely be provided by these database uplink apps -running on the 3rd gen PGCs- for anything too complex; but you could get everything from them except original wit and pattern recognition if you studied them long enough. Like all life, knowledge was provided in books, but the man himself had to be smart enough to use that knowledge wisely; and that -often- came from trial and error.

  The quick-linx system just gave one the bullet-points so one could get the joke or reference made by someone with a different wheelhouse than the hearer of words or the seer of sights; this was nice for all, both speaker and listener, as both were at liberty now as it sped up conversations, allowed for the use of argot and dry humor without explanations, sans delays and too much fuss.

  It was -now- as if everyone had read the same books and watched the same films. It was not unlike the old days, say the 19th century or early 20th when everyone had read the Bible or the Western canon and had thus the same cultural substrate upon which to build a civilization in reality and in the mind and soul.

  Modern education had wrecked all that; as kids with a BA in English could graduate and have never read Shakespeare ; not even once. Chomsky called modern education, imposed ignorance , and Camille Paglia had said even worse of her own profession.

  He was already tired of these parties and these people, the Governor thought.

  Thanks to the database and wetware implants one would know what the Governor
was referring to, but unless you knew what the girl was doing, and why, or rather, what the Governor thought she was doing , that is to say, that she was running from a battle that she had no stake in, and wasn’t fool enough to care about, then you wouldn’t find his statement amusing. But most could laugh regardless because he was the Governor of the State of Colorado, in 2035 of the common era, and that was the most salient part of anything -joke or not- he did for the people who thrive on the carrion around the teeth & chin of the well fed lion. But that is all of us isn’t it? the lion, the jackals, and the carrion; well, and the microbial minions who hold dominion over us all, the Governor asked himself, his only foil, he felt, inside himself.

  “Maybe,” the executive continued as the woman exited the small crowd, “some renegade author thought that from the ‘ol Hilltop in Gettysburg, or from the Big Round Top, one could watch Pickett’s charge and see the wave be repulsed and sent back, and thus witness the highwater mark of Lee’s advance into Northern territory.

  “We all see our side’s failures this way, as morose and lugubrious and worthy of lyrics and panegyrics. Sometimes though I revel in my side’s failures and am truly glad we didn’t win. As much as I hate the Right-wing, the political Left of the last 50 years has been a disgrace and their impotence was not the result,” he pointed his veined hands like a spider or crab in rigor at his crowd, “of losing for so long, but its cause.”

  He brushed a bit of cigar ash from the lapel of ADA Tooley who was standing too closely to him; it was a generous way to get the man to move back; cleaning his suit of the Governor’s own flotsam and jetsam. These were the subtle moves of the alpha male who must win friends while maintaining his natural perimeter. Little moves like these were such a classic part of his arsenal but were so subtle that they required a sharp and conscientious person to even take the hint.