by Roman McClay
“What is the expected life cycle?” MO asked; interrupting Isaiah’s reverie in the glow of his brand new b /ax .
Isaiah had barely heard the question and was vexed, he built avatars of anger in his mind to concoct manifold replies, each with flame and heat and light. He settled on this mild rejoinder, “it will be truncated, but, it will shine twice as bright. He ,” he rephrased -the word from it to he- as he had done inside his mind, “will give off 10 times the light.” Isaiah said all this and stared into the box that held his b /ax.
“I only ask so I can build a schedule based upon life span,” MO said with awareness of Isaiah’s pique. MO did not like to rankle the man; the machine from the other side of the garden lab .
“I understand,” Isaiah now felt badly, he had just been so proud and in awe, as a father might, to create and see one’s creation as above itself all at once. To see being surpassed in some way by what one creates, he thought in half a phrase, and then turned back half, two-thirds, to MO.
“I appreciate it,” Isaiah added. “But I think I’ll take over for all of it; even the platform and protocols; I’ll just do it. I have a sense of what he needs now; it was opaque to me before, but the code has a rhythm now that I can hear; feel, you know?” he said this as he closed the vessel doors and faced MO completely now.
“Fair enough,” MO said and began working on the election polling data again.
“Fathers have a special role MO, and I will need to be that. Will you help me?” Isaiah said in a moment of almost total vulnerability, he felt no compunction about this wild swing from anger to a desperate plea. His eyes felt hot and wet at the edges.
“I’ve just read up on the role of rough play with boys especially between birth and age four; there is a correlation between that and development of the pre-frontal cortex and moral thinking; a special focus on what seems to be learning to win without harm to the loser. This is something wolves do as well, the winning wolf will barely bite the exposed neck of the supine lupine,” MO smiled at his little rhetorical flourish. He was being nice to Isaiah as he too could see the wet -more reflective- eyes.
“Yes,” Isaiah said as he watched the ovum spin-in-state in the printer as they spoke. He too had read all the developmental data on how boys should be raised to optimize their morphology. He had noticed the increase in use of methamphetamines, called Ritalin , in pubescent and pre-pubescent boys diagnosed with ADHD; and it looked as if it corelated to lack of rough play in youth; and that this phenomenon was likely effectuated by absent fathers and mollycoddling mothers who prevented quote too rough unquote play by the fathers that did remain in just 56% of all modern households.
The beta males who stuck around in upper middle-class families eschewed this ancient, masculine, role out of fear of upsetting their dominant wives, and the other half of the families of young sons had seen divorce so early that no father was even present. Isaiah took note of this and added it to his list of things to do -and not do- for this new instantiation of life he had built; he almost felt like saying, birthed . He felt the feminine in him swell and open her arms. He felt protected by and protective of her -his anima - too.
“The timeline will probably cause some frenetic displays by Steven and Tania, have you developed a narrative to assuage their concerns?” MO asked.
“Yeah,” Isaiah said as he stared at the grey and black mottled sphere in the printer, “I will remind them that it’s no more or less biological than you or I; and thus no less a concern. It’s a 2.0 or a v.2.1 I guess, if I am a 2.0. In fact, in some ways, he will be less, or rather, let me rephrase, in some ways he will be more limited than you or I. But, this limitation, well, I have an intuitive feeling, about limitations. I think he will be just fine.”
“Well, when will it go in the morph box?” MO asked. He did not get the distinction Isaiah placed on limitation and error. But he let it go as he was running 18 other algorithms and constructors for PraXis now. The next election for the Governor was not far away.
“He ,” Isaiah emphasized the transition from thing to man , “will go in when he reaches 21 centimeters, so likely four hours from now, give or take. ”
The printer held the ball like an orb suspended in the dark yet invisible energy of the universe herself, nothing touching it but that unseen gravity and neutrinos that pass through all matter -the earth herself included- at 421.3 billion per square inch, per second.
That made Isaiah think, the mottled grey and black of the orb, the correlation between neutrinos and Beryllium as composed on earth, and its connection to its many isotopes contained in light, began an impulse in him to alloy the code with small isomorphic elemental analogs to beryllium that his b/ax could use to bond with other structures as it developed.
Like calcium extracted to build the bones, the beryllium analog would be used to strengthen -without much weight- the ferric constituent parts of his boy. He would be able to draw additional strength from it along with the other elements he had added in the initial parameters of the code seeking function.
He realized the metaphor he had discovered as the awe -of the mottled marble that spun- had engendered a pragmatic thought, a solution to more than philosophic conundrums; it had been a catalyst to his left hemisphere’s conversion of raw material into useable linguistic code. Isaiah was seeing more metaphors cascade into his left hemisphere, like shaking hands in the prison yard, passing kites, like , he paused to think; hesitated so he may feel. The thought did not conclude.
And then he felt the heat signature from outside the door increased to threshold and Isaiah prepared for it to open, and for Steven to walk through; he turned and faced the door.
“Hey guys,” Steven said as he walked into the room in a slight rush.
9. One Above One Below
It was from noble families that this evil first stared, and when shameful things seem to be approved by the fashionable, then the common people will surely think them correct. This only, they say, stands the stress of life: a good and just spirit in a man
Hippolytus [Euripides]
Satan has four arrows in his right hand with which he is about to pierce Job. This means that Job is being attacked by the quaternity, the wholeness of the Self
Encounter with the Self [Edinger, Edward F]
Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that He does not exist, he will manifest His existence
The Iliad, or The Poem of Force [Weil, Simone]
I. 2036 e.v
She had arrived four months ago and had slept at the lab’s ante-chamber, a room 10 by 10 and she felt it was large. She had been used to sleeping in the same bed as Blax in a 7 x 10 space her whole life, her house only 320 square feet total. So, a bedroom of that size -with just her in it- actually felt too big. But at home they had land, everything outside the home was huge, here they were hemmed in and had no such space beyond; although within the walls it was all large. She then thought of other things.
She had a rented house in town off of Main Street, but she preferred it out here at the lab which was behind the Florence South Water Treatment facility on Route 100 . It was closer to the mountains and -as the corvid soars- it was just 77 miles from home. They were west of Pueblo which was 60 miles to Aguilar and then another 30 miles via country roads -half paved and half dirt- into the hills to get back to Lot 45 . She had ridden her motorcycle the whole way on the trip up -out here- as Blax stayed home to prepare for the Jacks.
That was a season ago though, and they were just coming out of winter, and the snow on the plains was sparse and the mud had even dried in places due to the increase in sun. It was not quite as sunny as home was, but she still sat outside a lot. The lab was quiet and there were not that many people; MO and Isaiah gave her all the alone time she wanted. Tania and Steven kept to themselves and didn’t really include her in much. The Governor of the state of Colorado had come down once or twice, but she had not met him and really didn’t want to.
She was learning to
paint, using acrylics on stretched and primed canvasses and was adding blues and magentas and Hapatia golds mixed with Mars blacks to the forms she had stood up in each tableaux . Isaiah had shown her videos on Renoir and Caravaggio and Henri Mattisse . She preferred the chiaroscuro of the Dutch and Italians over the French and even the cangiante of Michelangelo . But she had recently read books and PDF files downloaded to her new PGC; the coder she was still getting used to like adjusting to a prosthetic, not in place of, but, in addition to her other two perfectly functional legs; they were files from Isaiah on Michelangelo .
She liked what he -Michelangelo - had said to Asanio Condivi , that he had always lived like a poor man no matter how rich he had gotten. He was apparently a man who withdrew himself from the company of men, she had read, and it made her look at his work in a new, softer, more sympathetic, light.
True artists, she had decided, were religious by nature, and Blax had a teleological core that he had built a secular domicile over. Almost as a protectant , she thought, as she wondered how much of the body was holy and how much God had allowed to be profane.
Blax made little comments that undermined his atheism all the time. She -when just a girl- had thought he was confused, or trying to confuse her, but now she realized he was just wrestling with something that would not hold still any more than he -the man himself- could. He was a religious man, an artist, who had woken up from the dream that most artists stay within until death. He was rational only, she thought, in that he had been woken up before he’d finished his dream.
That is how she conceptualized it anyway, he was like the vegetarian between meals, he was secular between acts of creation, but once he sat down at his work he returned, prodigally, to God.
She loved the oranges and grey-whites of ignudi like the Lybian Sibyl and found herself staring -for long periods- at massive renderings of it in the enhanced image-creation of her PGC. The garment folds were like waves she duck-dove into and swam below; and the curtain of Holfernes’ seraglio in Caravaggio’s paintings, of which there were two, enraptured her far longer than the face of Judith or the glint of her dagger. There were knots tied in the drapery and she had access to the X-rays the French government had taken of each of the two paintings. She saw the bones of the artist in those x-rays and felt herself assembling upon it new flesh.
She had printed out the rough images on her own canvasses and built entirely new tableaux .
The one she looked at now was the agogia of her home, with its large concrete table outside amongst the winch and trolly upon the H-beams and hanging greens and the door to the kitchen open with shadows so dark one could barely make out what were candles burning on kitchen shelving and skulls of bear and antler from mule-deer and coyotes with no lower jaws. She had painted-in the mound of books Blax had piled up on the concrete kitchen counter. At 39” it was so high that he had built her a stool to hop up on to reach the sink and plates and cutlery when she was little, she recalled, as she painted it now with the hand and the eye and her body-memory she borrowed from so long ago.
In her painting, the head of an Elk bull was on the table with four siccarii daggers jammed in like a crown in the background and a shadow wide and long was cast from something out of scene that she knew was her papa. A wind blew a white table cloth up and around with 91 folds in it, and a knot tied at the far end. The fabric was luxuriant, a quality achieved with titanium-white oils and sea shells ground into dust she had had MO print for her in the lab. She had had rat skulls and mica and folios printed -also from the lab’s 3-D printer- and the bark of Aspen trees too; and once she had had ammonites and blue lobster shells printed out in amounts large enough to fill a 5-gallon bucket that she kept inside her room.
The sea shells were perfect though and when annealed with the oil-based paint the linen that lay on the grey mottled table in her painting moved as the observer moved, clockwise and in time. She ground them in four different calibrations of fineness and took handfuls and threw them at the wet paint; she put some in her pockets and took one grain and sat it on her tongue after dinner one night.
Layers of paint built up on each canvas as she added and augmented and caked it on with a trowel. She thinned it out chemically and with 80-grit paper and sometimes she carved it like tree bark with her black bladed 50/50 CUDA knife. Blax had given that to her on her 13th birthday, it was a 300-dollar knife and it was so sharp it cut her eyes to look at it, she thought, and so she side-eyed it most of the time.
She sharpened it at night with her wet-stone and tightened its axis with a hex key and she told it to pray for them both as she slept, for she would prey when awake.
She saw prairie dogs on the plains outside the lab and laughed as they popped up and down in their labyrinthine holes. They were considered a nuisance due to livestock breaking ankles and legs in those divots and one could shoot them on site if one wished. She had brought her 5.56 NATO chambered M4 rifle, it broke down into four parts and could be carried in a case no bigger than one for a laptop.
Blax had modified it for her -for travel- and she carried it in a black Pelican case with three pairs of underwear and black wool socks, three a-shirts, three t-shirts and one pair of sierra BDUs. Her pistols were on her hips as she rode and her book was in her breast pocket inside; her knife was clipped into the front pocket. A King and Queen of Spades, both mottled and brown and foxed, were between her black socks -on her right leg- and the skin of her shin.
She had set up the M4 on its bipod at the picnic table -some rotted cheap wood piece of crap- one afternoon and began picking off the prairie-dogs while she thought of missing her man. It was a suppressed rifle and she used slower rounds, but the noise had still alerted the staff and Steven came out and asked her to cease and desist.
She had never been asked to stop shooting before and wondering if this was the kind of thing Blax had warned her about, that city-folk hate and fear guns, and will act irrationally around them. He’d told her to expect them to frown upon what was natural for a girl. She agreed to C&D and disassembled the carbine and re-packed it leaving only the barrel out to cool. She ate her rice and chicken, and baby spinach as the dust and wind combined out on the plains to scrub the land like a brillo -pad and soften the scrub-foliage and make hazy the horizon.
Her heart hurt and killing things didn’t help like she had wanted and now she wanted a dog. Caius was her dog too , she protested to herself, and she missed him almost as much as she pined for her man. She heard little rat dogs bark sometimes and it made her mad. It was like the difference between hearing other men -civilians , she contemptibly thought- yapping in lieu of the sonorous speeches of Blax.
Caius -with his big Malamute head- had a way of sounding that was low and gravid and issued forth from some primal need; he was a northern dog, a real dog. Working-class , she thought. These little dogs just yapped to hear themselves speak , she then thought. Well, they say dogs mimic their owners . She smiled and thought that Blax spoke more than Caius though, the dog didn’t speak near as much as his master. But, at least when the old man spoke -gosh, she just called him the old man ! she stopped herself, and wondered why she’d say such a thing, he was not old at all and he was sexy and looked better than these fat slobs who are half his age .
Anyway, she felt he spoke with a rich voice, that had weight to each word, words that fell down to her level of ear perfectly calibrated for the 11” drop. Although she loved it when they were face to face in bed and he would rumble words so deep and velvety and right into her ears; unto her eyes . God, he could make her spin inside like a pulsar star just with his breath and any four random words , she mused as the lunch food was stuck with her dark fork .
She had not brought any cutlery, but had MO make her black spoon and fork with the lab’s printer. She didn’t realize how much plastic and chrome civilians used; that shit was everywhere. Food tasted odd on bad forks or spoons and eating out of weird bowls was enough of a problem for her to have them make her a matte black bowl and a cle
ar Tom Collins glass too just to improve her mood. People spent too much time on dumb shit and no time on important things , she thought, they pay more in money for their phone case than they do in attention to their environment, they behave as if aesthetics were afterthoughts and then they got them all wrong .
They dressed like dorks , and Blax had warned her of that too; they had no style at all. Their cars were all wrong and mucked up with bad lines and badging and colors a 4-year-old with diaper rash would pick. Blax had style, man , she thought, those cars of his were hewn from full blocks of doom, like the Anunnaki did it or something, and these civilian dipshit people drove shitboxes cobbled together with parts out of a wood chipper and lawn mower bag . And they were covered in decals like some Nascar nonsense and yet they had no horsepower at all.
She had driven Tania’s car to Florence proper one day, and it was like it was a goddamn Bolsa wood car made by the Boy Scouts; The Bust had hit the accelerator and the car shrugged its shoulders and made more noise, but no better time. It was like the guy that yells loud when he’s angry but doesn’t do anything at all. She had assumed all machines were as powerful and beautiful as hers and Blax’s. She had had no idea what regular people put up with.
Anyway, she was trying not to be too surly, because -as daddy says- everyone has something to teach you. And these people did know all kinds of things that she didn’t know. The biology and genomics and endocrinology was way over her head. Although the PGC did help; as the names for all the neurotransmitters and neural sites were easy to now recall. She thought she understood the whole system, because Blax taught her that way at home. He had taken motors down to the block and reassembled them a dozen times to explain how each piece fit to the whole.
He never just explained one part of a thing, or one moment in time, or one side of what was in sight, never ignoring what would eventually come ‘round. He explained wholes, and that was how she liked to learn.