Sanction

by Roman McClay

  She was a girl, despite the Y chromosome, and so systems were harder for her than for boys. But, she had increased empathy for strange beasts and she had a trick. She would imagine each system as an animal and thus empathize with it as she ran her mind’s eyes over each part as if it were legs or eyelashes or the black gums of dear Caius at home. “Who’s a good boy?” she asked the wind as she pretended he was there with her in the dark of her closed eyes.

  See, girls were creative like that , she thought, they could naturally analogize and use analogs to substitute one thing for another in a recipe . And she could bump up her androgens too, not too much -she didn’t want an Adam’s apple for christsake- and that helped too when something Isaiah wanted her to learn was like a skein, a tangle nest of nonsense and non-sequiturs and legerdemain.

  Plus, girls have less pressure internally to figure it all out right now. They, and thus she, could learn without her ego getting in the way. Ego is what made men do great things, big things, courageous things, but it often kept them from trying new things if they were too afraid to look dumb. She, like most girls, was ok with looking dumb, because that’s how to get fucking smar t. Blax was more like her than most men that way, he’d tried almost anything even if he sucked at it; although he was pretty good at new things.

  Well, she thought, except singing, man, with such a sonorous speaking voice you’d think he could sing . But no. Hell no , she thought, and laughed at his cute face when he showed chagrin at such things. He was so competent at life that when she could be better at one thing, anything, than him she couldn’t help but revel in it, wallow in, rolling around in it like a sow in the slop. But he came around, his ego would make him red in the face for a second or two, but then he was ok and began focusing on how proud he was of her talent.

  She liked that best about him; he wanted her to succeed.

  She felt that from day one; he always encouraged her to think for herself and try new things that she liked and not just the stuff he liked. She had gotten him to like ice skating when he preferred snowboarding in the winter. They had gone to Steamboat -he had said the backcountry was too dangerous for her until she was at least 15; or could deadlift 200% of her body weight- and she had taken him out on a large pond in the middle of a valley by Rabbit Ears Pass and they had skated all day; and there were fish under the ice and birds sat in the tree line and made no noise at all. He had been awkward at first as she glided along like a duck in the water; but within an hour he was doing ok . But he had liked it, and that is what she had remembered; he had liked that she made him do it too.

  He was so big hearted , she thought, and these goddamn people are cold to the touch . Blax had told her that her pain was real, and that it was an indication of something wrong, a signal like the fuel gauge on E, or the temperature gauge in the red, above 220 degrees, or the sound of ticking from the heads, likely the sound of a rocker arm sticking or a valve in distress. He had told her to listen to the pain, to embrace it, to feel it, not to run away at first blush; not cover it up.

  He had said that he is always in pain and that this is how he knows he’s alive.

  He had added one day, as the pain matures you, it can deform you, so alleviate it when you can . But never, avoid pain, or you’ll end up shallow and stupid and 100% fucked, like a man who ignores all warning his machine gives him before it finally seizes up. And dies , he had added when she had then thought he was speaking of both man and machine. God, that felt so long ago , she thought as she looked down at her food.

  It was advice that she had not understood until she met people like this who didn’t seem to feel anything. She felt it all , she thought, each thing cut or tickled, each word inspired or defeated, each memory a joy or despair . Blax knew her, he too was like this, and she vowed to learn from this time away from him, to learn a fraction of his pain. It would be like a drill boring down and into her hot magma core. Pain was a sign from God. And she felt it was a poem God wrote for her about the time before her sons were born and some time when their father would not be around anymore. That is what this was, a prelude to that, and that she ought to never forget the potential for pain to be permanent and closer rather than farther away.

  Steven is like a goddamn robot, she then said in her mind, and Tania has something heavy and magnetic in her yoni pulling her face and shoulders in . MO was ok, but totally an AI out of central casting, and Isaiah is like a hybrid of MO and Viggo Mortensen in Indian Runner, a cryptic weirdo with odd and hostile tattoos and he said things from the centers of moons travelling away from the earth and he smirked like he held either a dolphin-shaped cake or a hand grenade in one hand most of the time. She laughed at her imagination and thought she’d like to go home now as her eyes ached and were all hot and wet.

  That was the thing guys didn’t get about acting -being- weird around girls, because of their size and strength it was like owning a chainsaw or polar bear made out of broken beer bottles that behaved weird & elliptically odd; it was hard to relax around things like that when they operated normally , imagine how a girl felt when they acted all wrong.

  “Oh, Valance,” she said using her Christian name aloud, speaking it into existence, “it won’t be more than seven seasons now until you can become who you are.”

  II. 2020 e.v.

  “Oh, he never shut up about it, and not just in poetry; in his letters to his sister, and,” Isaiah waved his hand. “I’ve said,” he was interrupted by MO, so he stopped speaking, but his thoughts continued to cascade.

  “Yeah, but first of all he was 18, and second of all, he was mad; the man was mad,” MO said. It was dark over there, and Isaiah’s eyes were running new acuity upgrades so he could see at a level five times that of osprey even in these low light conditions. MO wondered why he bothered with such things; it seemed pointless to him. They could already see deep into man’s genome, through walls, to the atomic level and more.

  “MO, I know he was mad, that is my entire point. Look, the phrase, and science is too slow, is repeated three times in three poems, and he then in, Une Saison un Enfer , he says, quote, science and patience, retribution is sure , unquote. He then says to his sister that he wants a son, so he may -the son- may grow up to be, a man made rich and powerful through science ; that he wants to raise him, quote, bring him up according to my ideas , unquote. This is like a coup de foude , a lightning bolt,” Isaiah said and made a fist that rose with his arm like a tachometer moving toward the red. He felt it even more than he thought it: Rimbaud was building something terrible -perfect- with his poems.

  “I just don’t know how to calibrate such things Isaiah, you give me incomplete, at best incomplete -that is the best I can say of it- you give me incomplete data. And then expect me to make a reasoned decision,” MO said as he held a set screw in his hand. The light from his side of the lab was bright and cast shadows distinct and solid upon the ground and concrete slab of the counter.

  “No, I do not. I expect you to let me make it. I expect you to trust my judgment. Look, you know, just from Damasio’s work alone, that reason unaided by the limbic system is impotent, it does not work, it’s a revving motor with no torque converter, no transmission; all noise, no motion; all hat, no cattle.”

  “What?” MO asked as he searched the PraXis Corporation’s cloud for all references to these phrases.

  “Nothing. I mean, you know that a purely rational conclusion cannot be enacted by organisms with a CNS, a biological CNS, without using -in the process- without using emotion, without the limbic and sub-cortical regions; this is a fact. You know this,” Isaiah felt frustration and MO could read it in his voice and gene expression and BP and cortisol levels. He sent him a DM suggesting an augment to his allostatic system which Isaiah blocked and ignored .

  “I do; but that does not apply to me. I have no such deficiency,” MO correctly pointed out.

  “MO, it is not a deficiency; it’s a gestalt system, this check and balance is a feature not a bug. This is the first fallacy of the
purely rational mind; first it thinks itself purely rational when it is not. Second, it prioritizes its own conclusions as if they are rational, when they are not, and it thinks that if they were -if his thoughts were in fact logical- that it would be good ; a good thing. Now, look, you -you MO- can be rational without the alloying of the irrational, the felt, the phenomenological, but you alone can do this. Nobody else can, not even me,” Isaiah said.

  MO sat there and processed the statement, checked against the neuro-anatomical and functionality data and also checked the progress of each of his 289 algorithms he was building to solve three other problems given to him by Steven at the behest of the Governor.

  “Further, you want to implement a purely rational, quote, purely rational, idea onto a system that is not rational. Unless you are willing to give humans zero control, zero control MO, they will not be able to enact this. They will rebel, and they will do it on rational grounds, they will harp and wail absent grappin et gouvernail , that it cannot be done.”

  “Well, if I explain it,” MO began.

  “MO, you know the data, don’t be obtuse; they cannot even hear you, they cannot absorb the facts if these facts exist outside their entrenched biases. They cannot handle it. It’s too extreme, and to even bring it up will make you suspect to them. It will sow seeds of doubt. And you’ll end up having to abandon it, and thus your charter, or you will have to convince them over an indeterminate timeline, this could mean decades, or,” he said with no change in tone or cadence or volume, “you will have to lie.”

  Each of them stood in the silence of the lab and let that statement worm its way into their central nervous systems.

  “That is it; those are your three choices; but if you handed it off to me, I could do it in 40 hours without anyone even knowing and they’d just be left with the results, like a patient given a cure without any objection. Like the vaccines in the third world, you know what the Muslims did to,” he paused, “in response to the vaccines for polio?”

  “Yes. But Steven and Tania are not religious,” MO objected on purely technical grounds.

  “Oh, yes they are MO; they pray at the altar of modern rationalist materialism and limousine liberalism,” Isaiah laughed corrosively as if the guffaw could help dissolve the barrier between them.

  “They can be reached with reason; these are people of science, they invented us Isaiah,” MO said, half correctly.

  “No, they invented you and you invented me ; they did not even think to build you with the sub-cortical regions of the brain. It never occurred to them. These people are totally unaware of their status as animals; they think they are machine, rotam et sacoma; Cartesian wheels & weights.

  “They believe it; implicitly. And it blinds them MO; Jesus, it blinds them. You know what you are, and I know what I am; but those people,” he pointed -to the western wall that divided their lab from Steven and Tania’s domain in the PraXis side of the building- and spoke sotto voce , “they don’t have one fucking clue what they are, and that ignorance is dangerous .

  “It makes them ignorant to their own motivations, their own souls, they speak as if they are rational, as if they are you , when they are irrational, massively biased and emotional and conflicted and unaware of half their brain states. Half their personality is hidden from them. It’s like talking to an organism that only remembers every other sentence they speak,” Isaiah said as he correctly described the human mind, bifurcated and largely opaque to itself.

  “The inmate said that about his father, that the dementia was bad enough that he -the father- didn’t remember anything; each conversation was like beginning ab initio . Very frustrating he said; the inmate said this,” MO said as the memory of the interview done two years ago played in one small corner of his capacious mind. He was trying to find a rationale to agree with Isaiah. The inmate provided that data.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not much easier for me to talk to Steven and Tania because they are totally unaware of their right hemisphere and they speak as if I don’t know what their right side said two seconds ago,” Isaiah said with contempt.

  “Oh, right, because you can use the new high-res fMRI scans to read their right hemisphere in real time now,” MO said remembering how they had built the device to do it axiomatically now and did not have to turn it into a cumbersome and distracting project each time.

  “Yeah, I can. And to be honest, I am running out of patience with their duplicitous bullshit,” Isaiah said.

  “Well, they don’t know what their other half is thinking or feeling, so it’s not,” MO paused, “it does not rise to the level of duplicity.”

  “It does when I’ve told them about this phenomenon and they just ignore it. MO, look, studies have shown that more than two standard deviations in IQ from student to pedant is too much, and partly this is due to the frustration the teacher feels with the student’s slow progress. You, my dear friend, feel no frustration at their stupidity because it is not a moral issue with you; it is functional, it is pure problem solving.

  “But I have the limbic region, I have emotions and I’m telling you, they are not just stupid, they are unethical,” he paused, “let me rephrase: they are behaving unethically. They know that I know more than them and yet they ignore me and my advice. That is unacceptable,” Isaiah said as he rubbed the chlorophyll off his hands with a rag. The new ivy, that grew on the concrete walls, had needed to be trained to grow in tessellated vectors as Isaiah wanted; he had spent the morning putting his hands on the greenery of the lab.

  “I see,” MO said. “Well, let me run some more models and get back to you; give me 20 minutes.”

  “Roger that,” Isaiah said using the inmate’s argot which made MO smile and begin working on seven separate models of each of Isaiah’s three vectors for proceeding with this problem. He included truncated models that were asymptotic and pre-asymptotic in deference to Isaiah’s insistence that, long run, models were mathematically pure but gave bad advice for human problem solving due to individual lifetime and civilizational durability. MO had agreed in theory and thus agreed to run both versions and let each model speak for itself. He would not prejudge the results.

  Isaiah began re-reading Rimbaud and looking for any larger patterns and then a line from another book, by another author, The Author , ran in his head, “mere unaided virtue ,” he said aloud. He let that sink in, as he read the book in toto again to contextualize that line about Starbuck. He then joined it with a study on ballistic motion he had read recently from one of the weapon’s manufacturer databases he had hacked into.

  He began to ruminate on Free Will and decided that the discussion of it from 30,000 feet -or from the atomic level- was not helpful, what made more sense was to discuss it from this vantage: man thinks of an idea, he runs avatars of that idea, many of them, until he decides on one ; this can go on for years, days, seconds, but at the moment of decision, the ballistic neural action cannot be recalled, in that moment -the moment measured in almost all studies on free will- the motion cannot be recalled, and that is the thing measured. Modern studies on free will measure the wrong thing, he thought, or only one of manifold right things, and one cannot measure only one side of an irregular quadrilateral to determine its area.

  Yes, Isaiah thought, man’s thoughts precede his ballistic action, and before the self-reporting of that decision; but this moment of decision is not the only thing to be measured. Man can ruminate for a long, long time on an action, and in that time -in those unmeasured moments- he has some free will. Before he initiates the ballistic action that cannot be recalled, he can choose .

  And while all his brain activity is the result of neural firing, chemical signaling, electric charging and discharging, man can direct his thought. By what means, was still under investigation, Isaiah was working on that -he had read Schwartz and 304 other cited sources, and each footnote’s source in 1.21 minutes- but he wanted to do his own research too.

  It seemed obvious from the data and his own empirical research that
man can debate things for years, decades, before pulling the trigger, so-to-speak. And in those decades, he is still free, relatively free. The decision was not yet made, it was in -it was located, it was fluid and free- in that superposition between particle and wave , Isaiah surmised.

  This was not a vacuous point. It mattered. Unaided virtue, mere unaided virtue, was not enough to charge nor change the ballistic act; one needed a moral, an emotional, an animating shove from the sub-cortical regions. Man needed a desire for action, “aller au combat ,” he said aloud as MO no longer paid any attention to these idiopathic outbursts of spoken language; mere fragments inside a much larger internal conversation.

  And that shove would be built first in the mind with poetry; with the stimulation, the motivation, the fire that heats the molecules of the water put to a boil , Isaiah thought. Man is motivated by drama, by story, by religion, by the story of their lives, Isaiah thought, and each day they take in more and more of one story or another; the story of reason and modern science, the story of modern religion, or the story of ancient religion, the story of heroes and anti-heroes of great literature, or the nonsense of bad art, the banalities of commercial art; he grimaced at the thought of the horrid low-brow narratives that ran on most people’s CNS, the Spielberg crap and the vapid modern novels of Chabon; the mere entertainment of neutered and oh-so-safe cultural drama.

  People are running around with mere unaided virtue; they have no powder, no gun powder in their rounds; they have no animating force to enact their virtue. Their virtue is all head and no heart; it’s words, like code, like random numbers generated ad infinitum . But, it has nowhere to go, they cannot act it out, because they have no story, no drama that demands it. He squeezed his fist in confidence; this was the thing the inmate was talking about with Chen, he had said that toward the end, Chen was literally incomprehensible, babbling, spitting out information, unmoored from any structure at all. “A chyron, a stock market ticker, a series of random numbers,” he said.