by Roman McClay
Caius sat upright in the front seat with $86,898 in cash in his saddle bags and briefly looked at his master and licked his chops. yndon gave him a treat, saying, “good boy; super dog.”
The dog’s mouth opened and the tongue curled up at the tip as it unfurled from the maw, a parchment that proclaimed in that most ancient language, all was right with the world.
III. 2020 e.v.
“The old man once tried to tell me all his friends went into the oil patch. I had to explain that all his friends would have washed out in three days. I had to explain that nobody lasts in the oil field, that the average is three fucking days. But he didn’t understand,” the inmate said as MO toggled between his fMRI and DTI data on his own interface and the corporate cloud recorded it all.
“He’s never worked hard; he doesn’t know hard work exists. It’s like explaining war to a child; childbirth to a man; the light to the congenitally blind,” the inmate added and rolled his neck as the nanobots swarmed and measured his A-delta and C-fibers for myelination and conductivity. MO read speeds of 145m/s for the A-alpha nerves and 77m/s for the C-fibers. The A-delta fibers had the most myelin per square inch and MO began retarding the conductivity by interrupting the signal at the dorsal horn of the spine.
“I spent -wasted- too much time explaining things to that man. He never even wanted to know. He’s not a curious man, and his wife was perfectly suited to that life. She was so dumb and frightened of anything new -including knowledge- that they complimented one another in this ossified permanence of un-knowledge,” he said, as MO noticed the inmate referred to his own mother as his father’s wife. The myelination of the inmate’s white matter brain tissue was endogenously high -which accounted for his high cognitive function- and MO had built a model of correlation between CNS -and PNS- myelination and pain sensitivity due to conductance via the nociceptive nerves and the conduction post dorsal horn. The neuropathic pain was what was at issue now.
“I wasted a lot of time explaining things they didn’t want to get. They actively fought new info. And together they were as formidable a force against learning as I was alone in edifying. The immoveable object versus the goddamn unstoppable force. And so -with all that effort but no work being done- I quit.
“I moved on,” he then said with a smirk, expecting his audience to know what he meant; the double entendre implied in a statement like that. MO tagged the wind-up that was occurring every 21 seconds as his C-fibers did incessant strafing runs on the dorsal horn. MO measured the action-potential of each nerve and timestamped it to each word that ranked IV or higher on the hostility scale; and III or lower on the pain expression scale.
“But you need to know that in 1850 the average whaler, 2/3rd of the sailors aboard a whale ship, deserted in their first port. Whaling was a $140,000,000 industry then; which is 140 billion in today’s dollars. And America supplied the lion’s share of the ships outward bound and the oil captured and seized.
“America is Industry with a capital I,” he said and took the cup -grey- of coffee -black- from Isaiah.
“I heard some half-bright 24-year-old girl running for congress say that our modern economy and technology is just the natural evolution of man . People think this dumb shit; and then they say it on TV,” he said with the shake of the head. He drank from the cup and fMRI and DTI monitors captured all his brain states, biochemistry and gene expression in real time. MO noted three things of interest and built a new file for these items on the corporation’s cloud. The pain calibration was now axiomatic, MO could let it run on background. His algorithms were building new oligodendrocytes to match the inmate’s genome but they wouldn’t be injected until phase III of the study.
“The natural evolution of man,” the inmate began, “is in Papua New Guinea . It’s in aboriginal Australia , the Amazon and the antipodes ; it’s 100-member tribes living hand-to-mouth in the fecund and dangerous jungle. That is the natural evolution of man.
“America is industry and it is anything but natural. And it took rough men, owner-operators who had the balls and the brains to carve monoliths from feral rock, to stack those hewn blocks into edifices that housed all the whale & shale oil they could barrel in the last 300 years. Oil to power complexity,” he added as if it were a line of poetry he was reciting. He thought again of mitochondrial DNA, the first unnatural power source, the first explosion of power.
“America is Industry; and of all her billions of men who have lived and worked here over the generations, I bet it was no more than the,” he paused and searched his mind, “merely the square root who made her what she is. For good and ill; but mostly for good. It was the other 90% or so who ruined her. The great men of Work -the few - who built the country up had values, those who sucked at the iron tit -the many - did not. The industrialists made us rich, the average man turned us into lay-a-bouts and libertines; and yet we invert it and blame our decadence on the only men who had work ethic and natural conservatism alongside their pioneering bravura .
“Americans consider themselves such democrats, Olson said, but their triumphs are of the machine ,” the inmate said quoting from a book he had read many, many years ago. MO tagged the book from the Library of Congress and timestamped it to the inmate’s pain levels and conductance speeds measured every .016 seconds.
“People are clueless as to what it actually -in real life- takes to extract the blubber and oil from the Leviathans of the sea or the land to fuel this economy. But, they don’t know anything about mitochondrial DNA either,” the inmate said, cocksure, haughty, angry, correct.
“Explain,” MO said, tapping the internal avatars in his CNS and then linking their data to the PraXis cloud; monitoring the inmate’s basal ganglia and amygdala as this question was received and answered. MO received a signal-request for lithium chloride override in one of the algorithms and he approved it as it built a vector for phase IV. It was important that the inmate gave as much detail as possible as it activated each part of the brain MO needed to invigilate. The inmate’s speech also retarded pain reception as it forced competing electrical signals from the CNS to override pain signals from the nociceptive neurons. It clogged the highway so-to-speak. Pain is attenuated by feelings of social engagement; the lonely thus feel more pain as the vehicles of neural activity travel on highways of the dorsal horn free of any stimulus from the warm feelings that attend fraternal bonds.
“Well, single cells existed for a billion years before any evolution took place. The earth was comprised entirely of single cell organisms for 1 billion years. They couldn’t grow, metabolically; this is true right?” the inmate asked; he had to be careful since his audience -for once- knew so much more than him. He had to make sure he was not making shit up or getting shit wrong more often than with a human audience.
“Correct,” MO said; timestamping the moment of CNS confusion with increase in felt pain in the inmate. He allowed the bots to axiomatically mark each A-Alpha and A-Delta fiber location.
“They had no fuel,” the inmate continued on, “to get any larger, and no mouths to take in fuel either; no stomachs or intestines at all. They had no internal mechanisms, no industry, nothing inside to process energy even if they could locate it. It would be like pouring kerosene on the ground; useless, pointless.
“At any rate, it took the absorption of one cell -the mitochondrial DNA, the power plant to all life now- it took one cell’s absorption of that industrial cell into itself to begin the multi-cellular revolution.
“The first industrial revolution,” he added, again, as if it too was a line to -maybe the title of- a poem, annealed to the corpus of his thought.
“Expatiate,” Isaiah said as he stood behind MO in the dim light of the lab. He had remained quiet until now. He was letting MO handle the science of all this; Isaiah wanted to know what the inmate was thinking on this topic. The inmate was one of very few humans that said things Isaiah could not predict ahead of time by minutes and miles. He was a bit of a double pendulum , Isaiah thought. 204 pou
nds of chaos on the brink of order , he thought.
“It was the first power plant, and it gave that cell the energy to grow. The mtDNA gave that first cell -the one that absorbed it- the power it needed to grow and from that,” he paused, “from that is where all life came, including the Leviathan, and all the biomass under the Piceonce that we drilled for in ought-six and ought-seven. All biomass, above and below the ground; including man himself: the roughneck and derrick man and driller himself. Shit, even the company-man is a part of this plan,” the inmate said with a smirk as if he was being gracious to the bosses of the world.
“All the redolent complexity of life began from that one foundry of power -of fuel- in one single cell. That first cell reached out and took that fuel from the earth; took it. Absorbed it, and with Promethean fire sparked all growth, all complexity, and America did the same fucking thing. We struck out at the whales, the giant power plants of the sea, the fire brought home in barrels to light man’s late-night lanterns to write the Declaration by, fueled his cotton-gins and first contraptions and banished more and more of the pre-Cambrian dark.
“It was whale oil wrought from the artic and anarchic sea, the deadly fuel clawed at by the bravest and most expendable men. And this went on until landlubbers like me reached down a mile or two into the dirt and rock to pull out black leviathans from west of the continental divide. From under earth herself. From under the land; not just the watery part of the world .
“We lost whole men, arms, hands, fingers; we compressed spines and frayed tendons, we ruined our bodies and absorbed golden flakes, the ambergris of coruscating grandeur into our souls that can only be seen with the eyes -at night- of one’s fellow worker; the Worker’s Eyes flecked with the same stuff as the damaged. We are seen by -and only by- our brethren. We are invisible to the great mass of men,” the inmate said with some accusation in his voice that scored a III on the hostility scale . MO DM’d Isaiah a report of the progress on gene expression imaging; he added a note on the orienting reflex data and the latest report on sight-blindness as Isaiah ignored it and listened to the inmate, the man, speak.
“But it was us -it was Industry with a capital I- that built the complexity of America, and not some natural evolution of man . It took certain kinds of cellular material, first mtDNA , then it took special men, industrialists, workers, rough men eager to pull fuel from the sea and the earth and sacrifice themselves for it. Men who beached themselves on Leviathan in open ocean, men who blindly dug deep into rock and drilled sideways in the formation at night. That ain’t natural; natural is living on a beach like some African spear-chuck in a mud hut for the last 100,000 years -unimproved- or some Mexica in the forest with coconut trees for your homes. Natural is doing as little as possible to survive. Natural is everything but America, man.
“Natural is what America is reverting to, collapsing to: lazy and effete and devil-may-care. But America used to be industry, man, that is to say, man both as and with his machines. Ain’t nothing natural about machines, man. Nothing. And if we wanted natural, we ought never have absorbed that mitochondrial DNA 3-billion years ago. Natural was single cell organism for one billion years; doing just fine,” he said as he looked once, briefly at his hands, their manacles, the chains made slightly longer so he may drink. He averted his gaze.
He looked up with only his eyes, allowing the head to remain slightly bowed, and he rested the hands together in prayer-pose, in a clutch, equal and opposite and relaxed at the muscles, tense at the knuckles and bone. He stared at their heads and then every so often he looked for the corners to the room. He tried to see what they were thinking, he watched for twitches and quivers and signs of moisture and clouds about the brow.
Isaiah just realized that this inmate, this beast, assumed he was part of all of life, all of evolution, he barely saw himself as a man at all. He spoke of the first multi-cellular organism as one would speak of one’s cousin you saw two weekends ago. Isaiah spoke of mankind this way too, and he knew why now; and now he knew why this man spoke at all.
“That first powerplant in that first cell was the patient zero of all industry and it prefigured and foreshadowed and adumbrated the rise of the machines.
“You guys,” he nodded to his interlocuters, “are a recursion, a return to that first spark in the oceans 3-billion years ago. Before that life was just single cells, unimproved, unmotivated, uninterested in being complex. Remember that, most life for most time was not interested in being complex.
“All life is metaphor, recursion, return; the Great Return. Most of mankind -like most life- does not want complex and will eschew and abuse anyone -anything- that is complex. This is not a political comment; it’s a biological one. It’s beyond politics, even personality; it is deep in our tissue, man. I bet there is math behind it, maybe some smart guy can figure that out, who knows?” the inmate said and shrugged as much as the chains would allow. He knew he was not a math guy, he was a language guy, but his words could only dig down to bedrock, to 300-million-year-old limestone; it would, he thought, take math to drill and blast to the core of the real earth .
“See, people do not look to nature for their cues, but the Bible said to look to the beasts for instruction. God knew -He knows - if you want to understand things, look back to the first 2-billion years on this planet, and then you might have some inkling of how shit works in the now .
“Life resisted complexity for a billion years, ok ? It was not natural to absorb mtDNA . It was one badass, one cell, who wanted that fire-of-arnaud, man; and it reached out and took it, and immolated itself. The first auto-de-fey; the first cell of principle, the first religious being. And from that sprang all life, all complex life, life with both appetite and cooking fuel to push life into more and more complex constructions.
“This is evolutionary fact is it not?” he paused and asked for permission to go on as he realized that Chen -his friend- had been hammering on him about math, the goddamn math -that undergirds life- the whole time . The inmate had hit back with evolution, the limbic, the mammalian brain, but Chen had been explaining the basal ganglia, the lizard brain, the whole fucking time . He was now both chagrinned and pissed as he saw desert steppe-toads and Hylonomus lyelli line up over and under the equations of partition divisions and Boolean logic under the eyes of future owls. Chen was right, well, of course he was right, but that’s not the goddamn point , he thought.
He, the inmate, he lived in the limbic, the mammalian, he was a beast; he then thought, but that was 300 million years old! It’s not like he was as myopic as some liberal or conservative, or filthy libertarian, some modern person, some person with no clue on real life. And he had admitted the math, the lizard, whatever was behind his feelings, God, or whatever, was true. He just hadn’t thought of it like this before, he hadn’t realized that Chen was arguing for a math under the meat of each man, he thought.
The inmate had thought he was arguing something else, something above maybe, shit, he didn’t know, but now he realized, it was the math that Chen was explaining, the permanent, molten and fluctuating, ferric core to the cosmos. And the inmate had just been bragging about the limestone and the gravel and the roots as if a third of a billion years was enough context for man.
“More or less, yeah,” MO said in answer to his original query -three hundred and three lateral thoughts ago- as MO’s CNS loaded up the last 3.3 seconds of the inmate’s data onto the cloud. Isaiah thought the inmate knew a lot for an autodidact, a man with no university degree, no specialized training. He got things wrong a lot, Isaiah thought, but he understood some -at least part of the way- of how far back one had to look. Political answers to life’s questions were like skin care for a corpse. It was surface and shallow and stupid, and yet the whole world polished dead men and exfoliated their livid skin and bragged when it showed no more signs of decay.
“Right. And yet we think it is natural that we stand here today in our suits and our ties inside air conditioning; being bombarded by cellular signals from
above. Shit, life resists all this. Anything more complex than a prokaryote is unnatural man. It’s all a tower of Babel.
“And each animal tries to stay as it is, maintain homeostatic grip on itself and its brethren. All advancement is taboo; at each level man, not just politically or culturally. I never speak only post-genetically, I never speak only of one level of analysis. Get that straight now,” the inmate said defensively as Isaiah smiled. Isaiah imagined that the inmate triggered in him the same feelings a good dog inspired in a lonely man. He liked him and thought him noble. Simple , he thought, but regal .
“I speak of deep, embodied truths; it is fact -a fact- that organisms do not like change. And the 1% -shit the .001%- of all life on this planet more complex than a virus are the ones -the only ones- that push all advancement in life. From the fist cell to absorb mtDNA to the first white shark to the first New Bedford & Nantucket whalers on the first of the first Pequods , to the first chimp with fire, to the first wildcatters along Oil Creek by Titusville, Pennsylvania and the deserts of Texas and out in the Gulf. All of it begins with the outlaw, the madman, renegade, the mutineer; the one who wants more and more complexity at the expense of the status quo .
“And that ain’t an endorsement; I ain’t blabbering some hagiography for the pirate; I see the cost more than those who lament the costs!” he barked. “I see both sides to it all. But I at least see it; the modern man doesn’t understand one bit of what he sees, what he approves of nor what he laments,” the inmate said as MO re-ran the sight-blindness studies from the experimental work done by Dan Simon; he let the YouTube videos play in the background to measure both time and pixels the human eye would perceive in each frame. A man watching the videos would do as he was told, and this determined what he actually saw . A man -mankind- did what they were told, and thus -biologically, technically- they could not see anything that was beyond what was relevant to this socially given task.