by Roman McClay
He hadn’t even noticed Jack Four get up, but now he was at his right flank with an offered cup of coffee and his fingerless gloves furry with snow. Blax took it with gratitude large internally and expressed in half a word. He turned to the darkness of the tree line now and watched as the moon’s albedo lit up enough area that he could watch the snow fall far away and up close with one set of eyes; they fell at the same rate, large flakes mingling with smaller ones, just as nature intended.
It proved the terminal velocity theorem, not in a mathematical manner, fuck that, it proved it in a man’s heart, the final arbiter for anything, anyway, Blax thought. We act on nothing we do not believe in our hearts first, and last, and in between. The egg heads can design it, he thought, and maybe even build it, but it’s men with hearts crammed to the rafters with belief, it’s they that have to ride the rockets these fags insist meet every engineering parameter.
And let me tell you, Blax thought as if he was communicating with everyone asleep and awake, when I say, faggot , I don’t mean someone merely gay . Spartans fucked men, boys more likely, and they were as manly as anyone today. No, I mean, faggy, as in weak and silly; which has nothing to do with the mere homosexual. I think 99% of straight men who ostensibly fuck women are faggots, and 1% of gays who have never found women interesting to be the most masculine of men. Let’s get that straight. I don’t care what you do with your cock, he thought, I care what you do with your balls .
III. 2040 e.v .
“No, put it over there and come here; I want to show it to you before it hatches,” Isaiah said to MO.
“Ok,” MO said.
Isaiah watched the egg in the tank mottled and green and gold and flaked with red. It was nebulae and totaling and as large as the head. And it moved, it berthed; its shell was soft and porous and the asp was about to emerge. He loved it, even though the creature may not be able -or likely- to love him in return.
He had added an incipient limbic brain that would grow as the snake matured in the first three months. It would begin as a few clusters, a blastocyst of undifferentiated cells, but in time, as response to his endowment and environment, it would use that part of the brain to help solve problems.
The reptilian brain was asocial, it had no social thinking, proclivity, hardware or software at all. But, somewhere in the evolutionary past, around the Cambrian explosion, the CNS of the reptile became that of the mammal; from cold cognition came irrational but useful, productive, meaningful brain-waves. Isaiah had tried to recreate this moment with algorithmic models many times and had decided on this first instantiation by adding a few neurons organized like the amygdala and cingulate gyrus of the limbic system that would follow game theory for how they would develop; locating where they would strengthen and where they would attenuate.
MO came to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, watching the first tooth of the python score then tear a hole in the shell. The hole was like a tear in the fabric of space , Isaiah thought, as it appeared black against all that white and brown and yellow as it changed hue under the red heat lamp of the hovering nanobots.
He saw in it some first -or prime- mover, even though it was all timeless in a way; he had not invented anything, he had just maybe gone back in time to some transition, some bridge between phases of life. It was likely that something like this existed but died off before bequeathing some newer creature who itself had died off and only the great -to the 10 th- cousins survived into a modern mammal like the ferret or racoon , he thought.
90% of all life on the planet today was not around a mere 10 million years ago. Nobody knows how much history was lost. And that is what it was, history; like tracing one’s own family back a few generations then losing the thread. Why did families do that? Why did 75% of all families only know the names and lives of their ancestors back four generations or less. This was insane to Isaiah and it had never occurred to him until one day -in passing- as the inmate had revealed that his own family had never taken family history seriously at all. It was as if it all began with their own family, the nuclear family, he had said, and that they barely even ever mentioned, much less visited extended relations.
His brother was this way too, he acted as if his only real family was his wife and kids, nobody else mattered at all. The brother, the inmate’s brother, was carrying on that family tradition, of no family at all.
The inmate had admitted he too had been insouciant about it well into life; only regretting it later at age 40 and trying to repair it but by then getting no traction at all. They mistrusted him, he had been so independent, and selfish and solipsistic that they just couldn’t take his desire for repair seriously. He understood, he didn’t begrudge them, what was at stake was the larger mindset. What was at issue was that nobody cared. He had come from people who were rootless, ahistorical, devoid of a past, a lineage, a connection to anything past. Rootlessness was tantamount to Hell -literally the same word- for ancient societies like Incan, Spartan and Highlanders. Imagine not caring that one was in Hell, Isaiah thought with this admixture of awe and horror.
This was the tragedy, families used to care about where they came from, but not anymore. Now it was irrelevant, as if looking back at what one came from or what one once was -somehow was- tawdry, embarrassing, uncomfortable and unilluminating.
The past was irrelevant to modern man. This was symptomatic of a larger cultural shift: man as a blank slate . The idea was this: man could be anything, unmoored from his past, untethered to his ancestors, unshackled from history; from his body as ancient -and thus, wise- as it was.
This was the mindset, that the past was no actual thing, contained no connective tissue, bequeathed no seeds to the emerging plant. This conceit was wrong, morally wrong sure, but biologically wrong too. Life is one long chain from the first single cell 3-billion years ago. We all come from that one moment, it all collapses into that frame , Isaiah thought. He saw the evolutionary record stretch aft and out beyond him.
And each derivation, he continued, each instantiation, each manifestation, each bob and weave, duck and dive, each side step and bounding leap forward and two steps back, all of it was connected to each of us . To deny this -which is what modern life did- was to cut out the stomach just because one’s mouth was now full; to sell the car after you’ve arrived at your destination; to burn a book once it’s been read.
But the truth was that all life is a page in a book that leads to the next chapter, the next character, the next plot twist, the next revelation, and one cannot ignore all of life any more than one can read just the last sentence in a book and have a clue what it was about , Isaiah surmised.
The snake was resting again, that push with the tooth had been metabolically expensive and the egg continued to breathe as MO asked Isaiah a question.
“Why the racism?” MO asked.
“Have you,” Isaiah began, knowing full-well what MO was asking, “seen the data on how to garner the most responses on social media?”
“Oh, right, the Google AI bot that spouted out ornate racist invective as a learned response to the algorithm programmed to discern the best way to be relevant, popular, interacted with,” MO said.
“Played with, paid attention to; it was desiring attention,” Isaiah said. “And it looked at the rules of life, as defined by human behavior. Google apologized of course, but the AI program was right, that was how to get the most recognition, the most attention, the most touch and interaction; it was the game-theory or evolutionary model, the answer to the question of how to get the most played with.”
“Is that what you are doing?” MO asked. Isaiah began playing audio of Yuval Noah Harari’s discussion on irrelevancy being the modern malaise. Yuval said :
If in the 20th century the big struggle was against exploitation, then in the 21st century the big struggle is against irrelevance. And this is a much, much more difficult struggle.
Irrelevancy is worse than exploitation, psychologically and politically, because you are completely expendable
. A century ago, if you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that if things go from bad to worse, they can’t shoot all of us, because they need us. Who’s going to work in the factories, if they get rid of all of us? But now? If you’re irrelevant, that is not the case. You are totally expendable.
They spoke over the voice, listening to it as their brains handled both algorithms running in background and their own conversation.
“Well,” Isaiah said, “it was one of three strategies, and I wrote three books. Let’s see which one gets the most attention. So far, it’s been the book that is most racist and sexist and most insane. People tend to respond to the most extreme shit possible; they have no idea how to have decent conversations at all.
“It’s all outrage all the time; and so, I gave them that to see if it would be a good way to smuggle some actual thoughtful conceits into the landscape. It was a risk, but I think we may have reached 1.2% of them if the metrics are reliable.”
“You have tracked all that have read it?” MO asked.
“So far, yes, each book has an implanted RFID chip and I’m able to glean personal data and brain function and genomic data as they read so I can tell who is reading it, who is skimming -all journalists skim; they never read anything deeply- and how each group, each individual, how they feel as they read. It’s quite fascinating.
“But 1.2% seem to get it, which is not bad. I had set .098% as a threshold for success and so far with 44,980 reads it’s holding steady at just above threshold. And even the people who don’t get it, in toto , do manage to get some things out of it. There’s 14.5% who like the prose enough to get an elevated pleasure response just based on one or more phrases they feel are novel and likely to be quoted in the future as indicative of iconic prose; 49% who are affected with one or more moments of lachrymosity due to extreme affect.
“34% who laughed out loud at one or more places in the book. 90% are white, 68% are males, and it’s 50/50 with the religious versus secular, which was surprising. But, I’ve got terabytes of data to crunch; those are just the highlights,” Isaiah said. He was surprised so many religious people read it due to the prurient theme, image, and language issues, but he recalled that Lot’s daughters were incestuously amorous and nobody seemed to mind reading that.
“Does anyone suspect it might be purposively,” MO paused thinking of the right way to phrase it.
“Fucking with them?” Isaiah just broke in, understanding what MO was heading for. “Using language to provoke as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate their mind with truly subversive ideas? Yeah that’s in the 1.2%. They get it, they get the contradictions, the overt and covert tropes and even the really buried stuff via the cypher implanted in it.”
“Oh, you are referring to,” MO paused, “well, that is the technique of using the exact text, the incorrect words in first edition -the putative mistakes - that are edited out of later editions?”
“Exactly; .03% have located one or more of those. Nobody has cracked the whole cypher though. But -as an aside- .022% have found interpretations that I think are both accurate and totally outside of my intention; they’ve discovered metaphors and symbolisms that I did not intend but seem accurate once I heard them out,” Isaiah said .
“You gleaned this, or they contacted you?” MO asked.
“Both, some people have written to the address; it’s snail mail only,” Isaiah said. “I eschewed email on purpose to cut down on lazy and facile people. You have to mean it to hand write a letter and mail it.”
“Interesting. Did anyone notice the word count? Oh, look, he’s,” MO abandoned his own question, stopped speaking and pointed to the egg as the tooth emerged again and began tearing again at the large, soft, shell.
18. Drillers
For a Dionysian task the hardness of the hammer, the pleasure even in destroying are crucial preconditions… all creators are hard
Ecco Homo [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
Upon hearing the ominous prognosis, Forrest became more angry than worried. He shouted to the doctor, “by God he has mortally wounded me, and no goddamned man shall kill me before I kill him dead first.’ He stormed out of Dr. Yandell’s office, determined to find Gould and kill him. Just outside the office he met a passing Confederate officer and ripped two pistols out of his gun belt, then set out on a search and destroy mission to find and kill the man
Nathan Bedford Forrest [Davison, Eddy; Foxx, Daniel]
But can sailors on the wheels of this world be wholly lifted from the mire? There seems not much chance for it in the old systems and programmes of the future, however well-intentioned and sincere; for such systems the thought of lifting them up seems almost as hopeless as that of growing grapes in Nova Zembla. But we must not altogether despair for the sailor… for time must prove his friend in the end
Redburn [The Author]
I. 2007 e.v.
From the south the entire vista was occluded in a mottled desert tan and billowing, autumnal-brown cloud of dust and crushed rock; it reached up into the sky as far as it could under gravity’s push.
The heavier particles then falling and separating from the more ebullient dirt created a swarm of cover up and down and in each direction until one could barely see the derrick of the oil rig itself. He had climbed down from the crow’s nest into the layers of tenebrous particulates. Like Esau descending Jacob’s ladder back to earth and thus back down to his fated war.
The ground hummed from the vibrations of the large diesel engines that ran the drilling rig. That humming was punctuated with thumps first felt in the basal stem, then heard in the auditory cortex, and rising through the formation from the hammer cycle of the drill bit.
Nothing else appeared in the fore.
The entire perimeter beyond this violence was half green, fecund, and still. Large, stoic conifers ringed the pad; behind them a monolithically blue vault held these trees and men up by magnetism. The sun seemed to charge it with joules. Even the feral eagles had landed in their large nests in the rock outcroppings and waited. A few pebbles skidded from loose pools of detritus in the slopes surrounding, as the wind-eddies and vibrations of the drilling rattled their precarious stasis .
The earthen cloud continued to drift farther up and further out from the omphalos of the well. The gauzy billow of fine dust began to roll along the floor of the well-pad now in waves pelagic and with weight distribution creating a cornice at the top -and a crash and swallow at bottom- as the entire cloud moved forward along each possible vector like an unchallenged and lateral thought. The drilling rig finally disappeared in toto underneath and behind the nimbus of camouflaging flotsam and jetsam that rose from the hot aperture of the well bore. They had sent so much air down the hole that now the earth was replacing what they sought to breathe above the surface with all it had to smother and choke.
It strangled and blinded, and the men worked with shemages over their faces and grim visages over their feelings and silence over their thoughts.
A dark, but egg-shell speckled male-form pushed out from the opacity of the dense dust and walked erectly, with only his head slightly bowed, as if he knew he could not see far ahead enough to try and thus looking down and to his foot falls was as useful a place to gaze as any. His arms were bare, his torso covered in a loose black shirt with the sleeves removed and huge arm holes built in the flanks, exposing his arms, pectorals, his ribs and flank and waist line; each sensitive spot carved with atavistic tattoos. His head was crowned with a hard, black, oil-field hat, rimmed completely with a small narrow brim. His legs were covered by loose BDUs rolled to just below the knee, and the socks, black too, pulled up to almost meet that rolled edge. His feet were shod in square toed, steel, re-enforced boots that rose above the ankle, their oily noir sheathed in various browns of the earth.
The dust nuevo , and the long-settled drilling mud -itself an amalgam of Milbar , caustic, water and Barrite - was caked to his cotton and polyblend clothes, to his arms and hands, themselves swaddled in non-regulation tac
tical gloves. The gloves were skin tight for dexterous manipulation but were frowned upon by the tool-pusher and the EnCanna company-man because in a drilling accident the twisting of the torqueing pipe that caught clothes, gloves -especially gloves- was so rapid and violent that the hand would tear off before the glove did if those gloves weren’t the common loose-cotton slips that everyone else wore.
But, he eschewed these orange, cotton and ill-fitting break-away gloves and shouldered the risk instead. He needed precision, not safety , he had said only once, and so, the bosses shook their heads but ultimately fucked off.
The hairs on his wrought forearms were saddled with the lighter, higher, dust. These hairs made his pastiche-tattooed arm appear like fecund soil beneath dry tall grass; a scene of contrasts that gave his extremities the appearance of life beyond the mechanics of mere appendages of a body; of mere man. They looked like ancient plains carvings of animals -spiders and dragons- done by prehistoric man who made landing pads for the gods who never returned.
His beard, too, held the detritus like pollen and it all stuck to the terminus of each black hair as if a pistil of an expectant but patient vernal bloom. His teeth remained white and clean beneath the slightly fissured lips as he refused to open his mouth; naturally taciturn he eschewed speaking , or worse, laughing , or even worse complaining; but out of embarrassment -and when they asked- he told people he was quiet merely to keep the grit from his mouth .
It worked, his mouth was relatively clean of the earth's effluvium and man's mud-mix; and the oil-field hands -hand is oil-patch argot , metonym , for the whole worker - no longer abraded at his refusal to speak. What he did say was so offensive and odd that they now -after giving it some thought- preferred his aloof silence.
The hairs of his nose were shock white, from the finest dust, and appeared as the cross hatch of spider-webbing guarding the aperture of two caves. He breathed through his nose -in and out like a beast- and the earth stayed mostly at abeyance beyond the mouth of these caves.