Sanction

by Roman McClay

  The Black Swan [Taleb, Nassim]

  One must admit that it would be contrary to all reasonable expectations to suppose that a God who, for all his lavish generosity, had been subject to intermittent but devastating fits of rage ever since time began could suddenly become the epitome of everything good. Christ’s unadmitted but none-the-less evident doubt in this respect is confirmed in the New Testament, and particularly in the Apocalypse. There Yahweh again delivers himself up to an unheard-of fury of destruction against the human race, of whom a mere hundred and forty-four thousand specimens appear to survive

  Answer to Job [Jung, Carl G]

  I. 2035 e.v.

  “What is it that you want from me,” she half screamed half squeaked in confusion. He had been ranting for hours, refusing food or drink, pulling books from the shelves and reading passages aloud; pointing to old underlining ink, old notes that proved he knew this -or that- all along. He used books to prove someone -anyone- was on his side.

  He pulled corks from wine bottles, he drank scotch older than her, he felt the need to replace all his evil that leaked, replace it with spirits of similar mien.

  “And my chest will explode,” he continued, midsentence, as if she had not asked for any relief at all, “and a thousand rats and a thousand times that of roaches and beetle broaches, the racks of elk, a mizzen-mast sail of ursine pelts, the full bodies of little girls and vivisected grown men and the bones of Leviathan will spill out of my center mass like the Cambrian explosion and on this grey floor with red and black blood and unwoven -pure white- light until the tide of my -finally, mercifully dying- soul rises around the ankled port of Colossus as the remnant of this filthy species drowns in a sea they drink as solution to choking, to seizing, to drowning.” He had said this as his voice faded to grey, his eyes too looked away.

  He had rent and stretched his gray shirt from his chest and his arms -vascular and swollen and hammer-headed with fists cliched and black with these unfading tattoos that seemed to roll on his skin like waves -both new and ancient- each time she gazed upon him. She saw the old tattoos underneath this blackout, this monolith of packed black ink, like scars, like extinct sea beasts marked like history or reminder on God’s newest creation of malice and terror and revenge; she saw dead horseshoe crab and white sharks in the face of a night wave rolling to the beach-break; the dark coral in the maelstrom of surf. Each extinction of each species tattooed over in black; a fossil record just under the monolithic dark; evidence of failure and God’s high standards all buried by black marks on his expanding skin.

  His face was capillary red and slick with saline and his eyes were like black birds huddling in corniced caves waiting for the high winds and rain to abate.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she screamed in total honesty; she hadn’t understood one word he said in a million sentences like these; the mad poetry of some ancient religion she thought, a lost language her modern ears just couldn’t really hear. She felt guilty and stupid and her heart folded in on itself inside her tiny 15-year old chest; she just wanted life to speed up so she could be as wise or as mad as him, to know what he knew, to converse too with these gods, and then maybe he would make sense and then she too would find valence with him. She pulled at her hair, these massive bolts of black curls, feral and perfectly chaotic and she screamed and filled the air with this banshee retort -a bird in flight, in alight- to his diabolism of forested slopes and howls of wind through ravines.

  He grabbed her arms to prevent them from ripping the hair by the roots; he did not want her to come to any harm at all. And he pulled her towards his chest twice as wide as her, three times as weighted, four times as old. She fell into it like a collapsing star fell into itself, and she cried hydrogen and oxygen and then helium and finally iron-gas and leaden water into his shirt and through to his chest and then into his heart and lungs and he wailed all inwardly, silently, mouth agape, but nothing coming out. His eyes burned -seared with tears that seemed to evaporate to steam- his mouth then twisted closed as a defensive wall of gritting teeth began to crack under the pressure of clinched jaws, maxilla and mandible heaving toward one another like tectonic plates. The whole face vibrated and the landscape fissured and mottled and flushed.

  His 61-year-old face -always so young and handsome to approach, she thought- was cracked and broken, blood vessels rose to the surface. His massive forehead-crease radiated out smaller, deeper lines, trails, paths, clues; his eyes were attacked by the feet and talons of corvids seeking sympathetic shelter within his caged crows of eyes. These were eyes that sent out gamma rays, burnt her face, she felt, even as she doubted he would dare do such alchemical things around her. He seemed power repressed at all times: wolf on island in black water lake, chained; unspoken thought in taciturn, mute, man; the ancient gene in modern virus. Potential for doom, she thought, one second before it is unlocked by the gods.

  His muscles ached from the incessant tension, the joints felt like lit fuses on the ends of pipe bombs, his cock was tumescent as the blood in his head drained into his chest and his chest overflowed into his meridian and his equator rolled over on itself as the entire axis of his earth fell out of its processional wobble and every once-empty jar filled at-once with this brine and everything once-full of hope dumped out onto the ceiling and the tell-tale compass and from below doused the candles and lanterns of the captain’s map table; flooding the quarterdeck to the gunwales and the sky right up to clouds whilst emptying the ocean of everything wet; the sharks and the sea-beasts suspended in air. The marine sandglass just flipped and spun on X and Y axis and told time as it always had before.

  He squeezed her tighter and promised his whole aspect was Love; that he had nothing else but; that he would see her exalted above all others even if it killed the world. He begged her to trust him and never listen to one word he said after that; that this madness was the leaking of mantle and magma from the core of mad nature and that all that mattered was the reason that crusted and hardened it all as it reached the sea’s surface and islanded itself as soon-green archipelago of once former-doom; mere history of basalt black and Hell red, he promised. He assured her it was closed up -walled off- once his passions had cooled.

  “I didn’t mean that My Love ,” he croaked out from a riven face and an atomized cavern of lung and chest and precipice of everything atop of these boreal legs and deep tendrils of brachial feet. He thought of all the malice inside him, magma, lava, pressure, all placed there by God, designed to be entombed for how long, how long? he asked in thought.

  How long must a man such as he contain his natural fury? Why was the world unable to see each man as they saw each latitude of earth? Some men beaches, some ponds, some plains and tropical zones of consistent Tao . Yet, some deserts, some glaciers, some volcanoes and riven trenches well below the avoirdupois of the sea. Why, he demanded to know, was it only one type of man permitted now? Why was the world to be all Tahiti and no Artic and no Mojave allowed?

  Why, he asked himself, was he told to be what he could never be? Flood the desert all you want, he thought, it will never be fecund and green and lush; the water will merely rush, and flee, and drown, kill as it races in a panic to the faraway sluiceway, and to the sea. Here he was to teach and train and mentor, build and grow and succor, and yet all that was in him was arch-hot, devastating, born to break bones and draw blood and stop demons in their tracks. He was made to sire a million grey demons to attack Satan’s minions. He was never built to nurse anything but the grudge , he thought as he squeezed his eyes tight. He couldn’t believe that he had promised her and thus lied to her. Lied to his only angel, his goddess, this girl built by God to love him if he would just allow her.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she sobbed with guilt and shame and pleading to make her smart enough, grown up enough to decipher such dark words.

  “The words have been separated from their meaning like a babe and its mother; like Medea and her children. I bark like mad and I know it’s a do
g I’ve become, a jackal surrounding my own lion pride. I don’t even bleed blood anymore; it’s words I expel from these veins. I’m begging the gods to lift this pall from my head, to cure me or kill me, angel,” he wiped her face with his hands, her face so small and preciously white and pink and red in all the right places, she was a portrait of what goddesses wish for themselves. She was what penitent men see above them when they finally kneel.

  Her blue eyes were nearly black at center but still exploding with Saint Elmo’s fires of azul and Prussian blues; prints, evidence, scions of wet blood from the richest and most dour of Visigoth souls of some ancient -uninterrupted- royal line.

  He couldn’t wipe the water away -keep the sea at bay- fast enough as she poured salt-water from those pulsar stars of blue; the cataracts ran over his scarred fingers and thumbs as he brushed the streams and steam away like some giant exiled god who had lost every power except his size and strength to recover purely in order to make pain permanent.

  He lacked all power to heal others or to direct the wind or dam up the rivers; he merely stood in the storm and flailed at these elements; they, these planetary elements, in the shape of her tears and her choking anguish and heartbreak blew in from four corners, scraped the earth like a glacier, poured down, rained down, a monsoon in all five seasons.

  And he held her and kept wiping her face so she wouldn’t drown her eyes; so that those noon-blue suns wouldn’t choke behind these endless, timeless, ceaseless tears .

  “I’m so sorry daddy,” she confessed into the fluid air around them. “I’m so sorry,” she said a million times until he felt his own ears begin to burn with those words like some source of fission, some red and grey coals; his face’s fissures absorbed his own flash-flood of tears; his own sun of brain jammed through each crack and orifice of body and face and his black eyes hued brown again, made bright, as the common corvids alighted, anchors aweigh, from their corniced cave, from his heavy storm of tòrr brow.

  He calmed, and the waters receded in him; and he kissed her lips and dropped his hands to her waist and held that narrow circumference like it was the equator of moon to his one-child planet. Her arms wrapped around him as much as they could, she grappled for more and more territory, his back was so wide she knew each hand of hers was below the horizon of any line-of-sight of the other; she knew each hand was blind to the other as she clawed. But she drove on with each hand, a caravan crossing the Mongolian steppe of this man’s back. She just wanted to bury herself, each finger, and palm into his taut desert as her lips hid in the forest of his beard and her tongue in the hollow of his mouth.

  She pressed her whole body now into his and tried to force her way into him for once; she wanted to know what it was that instantiated him, that pressed out from the core to buoy and tent-pole such a massive man. How much stuff was in him; how much stuff must be inside this man? she thought, as her tongue swam in the always new river of his maw, her hands dug into his unguarded traps, her breasts squeezed themselves into his taut belly and found some electrical socket of soul-source as her nipples transmitted signal and noise to her throat and her clit and the cuticles on every other finger and thumb; skipping each digit like some code or some generational gap.

  He is so large , she thought, but he needed her to hold him up. She couldn’t believe the conceit as she felt it as her insides swam and sloshed about; her stomach whirled and matched the spin of their tongues and the force of their hands on each other’s elliptical parts.

  She had demanded he say it, explain it, explain what he saw as his failure to God and his own genome. My god, she thought, what a horrible thing to demand. To ask such a thing from so proud an animal, to ask that he say out loud what the universe whispered to him at birth; a broken covenant, she thought. She had asked him to break a covenant with the Force Majeure of the World, she said to herself. She had one job, to make a powerful man feel powerful, and nothing else. She had confused herself with 1,000 drôle tasks when she had but one that was real.

  And she knew instantly, and so instantly that she knew she had always known it; it was a knowledge now imbued in every memory she had; she carried this knowledge back into every moment of her life, held its hand and fed it and called it by name.

  She knew that she must make a child for him, make it masculine and intelligent and large; a Charlemagne, an Alexander, a Kahn; make a wild and thoughtful, a dangerous and loving, a chaotic and industrious boy, born silent and stoic but roiling with fire inside from spark made by the first hammer and anvil of the gods .

  She said nothing else, but she jammed all other signals from the universe that focused on him -oh, with their instructions, and injunctions and connections, she thought, from the gods & their wars, enlisting him, promoting him, tasking him with their cosmic demands - she held up her hand to their speeches and she focused her signal on him in their stead. She intervened on his behalf against the incessant gods of this cosmic war .

  She pulled her mouth back and at once held his face in her lithe hands and oriented her orbs towards his. She thus gave him permission and in so doing, asked for his: please honor me and this world with your coldest grains manifold, I’m up to the task my lord.

  The hairs on his arms stood up and oriented like a metal cat at northern lats and he felt a forgiveness surrounded by a Praetorian guard of gratitude. His inner-storm dissipated its energy and fell into an entropy sink at his naval core. He picked her up in toto , her tight legs wrapped around him, her kisses returned to his mouth like homing pigeons and he walked them to their bed. Their child would be a recursion, a mise-an-abyme of genomics, she, Valence, the little queen, his daughter, and their child his triumvirate scion, son and grandson all-in-one; he’d be ¾ or more of him this way and this was a start , he thought. And he then thought -only now- of the Great Return.

  The taboo of it never entered his or her mind, only the harmony it provided to a world demanding the sonorous sound of real men giving voice to a lost language of one-word; of a lost tribe with one cause; of one-man with a lost god of the once noble world at war with the manifold weakness of democracy & diversity and the tawdry appeal of the splintering crowd.

  He heard the barking from the rim of the volcano, he heard the trot of the last black rhino, he heard each word chime like a bell hung in a conquered minaret. As time’s arrow bent and fletched and he lost gravity and direction, as he became her and she him, he dreamed still inside her, her inside him, each a mirror with the other inside backward and smaller until the eyes themselves disappeared and the one true soul loomed large. He both said and thought, and he heard:

  You too said that all gods were the condensed, compressed, most salient traits of Man: His Ideal. Well, the pre-Christian Gods were all warring, vengeful, jealous, and generous, magnanimous too; until made mad with vex. And they were lacking in just one thing: self-consciousness.

  Job, when he pleaded for justice, was answered with appeals to might; God answered with tales of His might. For might made right to the pre-Christian God. For the pre-Christian man was still unconscious; and might made right and sexual jealousy was paramount. The forest made it so in the math.

  The alpha made 70-80% of the children for 99% of man’s reign, there was no democracy of breeding then, not equality of fucking outcome, and the children of men were genomically warring, vengeful, jealous, and generous, magnanimous until made mad with vex. Men were made of this stuff. The stuff of the Alpha genes, the MAO-A alleles, the Poisson distribution of the martial stars.

  You cannot expect alpha males to become the epitome of all that is good under the Christian suns, Pieces, the flying fish, the deep Pacific. We were born under Aeries and Orion, Leo the lion; we were born for tragedy and for war.

  We have sacrificed ourselves, like God did with Christ, we’ve become self-aware, but we cannot be pacified, civilized, neutered. We must make war on all that offends. You cannot take this from within; you cannot take it from us while we’re still alive.

  And this, this moderni
ty, with its incessant cheating and gossip and tawdry shit, it offends, offends, it offends the ancient gods! We shall not be told to let the State handle it, it is ours to handle, Godammit. It was born to us! Would mothers allow robots to birth their children? Would those children allow AI to lick their candy canes and describe the taste ?

  Man -Alpha Man- needs to break the cuckolding, thieving, cheating, deceiving beta male over his fucking knee,” he both said this and heard it in his head as he had blotted out the sun and removed her clothes like he skinned a buck and bent her submissive legs back; rendering her mute and to never speak again in words not touched by this amorous flame and heavy hammer against her inner mettle laid between iron and anvil of the bronze-age man.

  II. 2017 e.v.

  “No, its neuromorphic constraints are a function of spacing, not power, not electromagnetic power,” he said.

  “What are the nominal distances between biological neurons?” she asked.

  “They can be more densely packed due to mitochondrial insulation; the voltage, the intercellular voltage, isn’t at risk of conducting beyond the envelope of the cell or the synaptic pathway.”

  “What’s the difference in MO’s neuronal; his discreet neurons?” she asked.

  “The difference is that his synthetic switches fire at 1.18 billion times per second and a biological synapse hits 50-60 a second.”

  “50 or 60 billion?” she asked.

  “No,” he laughed, “50 times per second. Slow as fuck.”

  “Jesus, and he,” she paused with confusion, “what were the power demands again?”

  “MO uses 55 milliwatts of power per cluster; which is low but because we’re using them to parallel process, as a general intelligence cluster, they work better if they are spaced in an organic manner. It’s just like biological neurons that fire together and wire together; there is a heuristic memory or trenching that happens at 1.18 billion times per second and if the pathway isn’t organic, analog, I would say like a sine curve or like a river bed, shaped by the flow and within the feedback loop of resistance of outer cortical and CNS structure then we’re getting power fluctuations that amount to corruptions or blackouts.