by Roman McClay
He left that apartment that day, left the woman he wanted very much as his bride forever; the woman he would have done anything for, worked harder than any man, provided to any degree she wanted. He left that day and vowed never to love a woman again; not out of spite, he made no grand declarations about women being evil or nonsense like that.
Women were no worse than men , he esteemed. He just couldn’t take any further pain; he was full up with it. He never buckled or bent or even paused, so the world just kept heaping these bags of shit on top of him like a limitless beast of burden until he broke. They say a good tool will break before it bends , he thought. Well, he had finally snapped, but just inside, his frame, he thought of his outer bearing, but his countenance he would not allow to collapse in their view.
He clambered into his car in the garage as the sounds banged and cracked around him, as the light poured in from slits in the sides of the concrete, as echoes had echoes themselves.
‘That is a man like other men you say?’ the prince asked , he recalled this line and thought of the story of the Buddha as he pressed the start button of the X6M colored in only black and a matte, Ghost Grey. The mirrors auto-darkened to combat the light flooding in from the world outside the garage. He pressed the paddle-shifter into first and all four wheels -under power- rolled toward the south and the east of Denver and he saw tolls and trolls in visions; he saw lakes of fire and rivers of blood; he saw lightning from the ground up, he saw dirt smeared in the clouds.
The body hurt, at each joint, at four places on the spine; the skin hurt, each hair tugged on the follicle. His teeth ached in place and when he spoke. The hands were angry in each configuration, they relaxed with a groan and tensed with pique; they held in situ with vex. The eyes hurt from behind the ocular nerve; and everything he looked upon abraded. Nothing felt good; nothing but anger as it dissolved like milligrams of narcotic over each mu-opioid receptor and with each breath he was filled with the noble gasses of hate.
He had loaded up his assets, the books, the wine, the gold bullion; he checked each rubric off in his head as the words stopped coming, just pictures and the feelings attending them and the visions that rose off them like heat; fell from them like condensation; brushed them up like satin & sand in the wind. He inventoried the cash in his pocket, placed palm on the beavertail of the automatic on his hip, rolled shoulders back to let the neck pile drive as much as it could under the weight of the head and he finally pulled away from the city in his Werx car and with each German behind him, each Norseman above, each Scoti below in their graves .
Internal pain warps you, because you can’t get away from it, the faster you go the more it bends like a foil, like a sail billows on the ship itself in the wind; the Dutchman’s log thrown overboard, the knots made tighter by the salt-sea. And yet faster you go with it in the hold. Nature designed pain as motivation to get you to move; move away. But since you can’t get away from this pain, the compression of spine in the neck, the rub of ball-joints end to end, the tendons over-torqued and wrought wrongly, the muscles in rebellion from fibers of which they are comprised, you begin to lash out at the body itself. You turn and face the enemy, you turn about and fight what too has your eyes.
You make the body hurt more, as revenge for its capacity for pain. You chastise, upbraid that which can hear, you frighten that which can be scared, you murder what is not yet dead, you take it out on the good of the world.
And yet you grow larger , he recalled. He recalled growing larger each year, the body took his punishment and the muscles grew bigger, denser and more capable of taking on weight. The body mocked him, as he grew weaker about the heart it grew stronger about the perimeter. He looked stronger than ever before, each year he grew darker in blacker tattoos -whole sections blotted out- and expanded in taut malice and scarred muscle, each gaze upon him by the world sent red-shift light back to their eyes, they never once admitted he was dying the whole fucking time.
They would insist he was bigger than they. They would be incredulous of his pain.
And then you look -and then he looked- around for what else might feel pain like this too; who else you can damage and for a moment, a brief moment -a moment too short to measure- you think you are doing the world a favor by smashing its fibers, its bone meal, its neck with your hands, because you are -like you did for yourself- punishing not them, not God, but the capacity for pain in the body -in the world- at all. You think it’s Satan you rebuke and that dolorous angels will fly in, from where the pain was removed. You hear songs that assure you this is God’s work too.
And then the song becomes the ear; the words become the wisdom that utters them; pain becomes God for real.
You hear more than voices, you stop trying to run; you hold real fucking still. And you listen as it speaks in a language so sonorous, so regal, so profound, so ancient, so true that there is no doubt it is now God Himself. You do not believe it, you believe in nothing; you know it; you know it the same way you know your pain. One need not believe in pain, all one need do is know it when they open the eyes on creation. If pain is anything it is God , he thought. And it is a gift that man churlishly refuses, he thought as the car no longer vibrated and the road no long abraded and the world no longer appeared as it was.
“And that’s how I knew I was a perfect vessel for His Wrath; for I would be able to survive -and have survived- long enough under this weight; a burden very few can withstand. And only then would I have the muscle and sinew and connective tissue to do His bidding; only then would He know I would defend Him from these demons without falling apart. And once I’ve completed my Task, as long as I do right by Him, He’ll let me go. He owes me nothing, but I can feel the promise imbued in the pain itself,” he said aloud; speaking in past tense of things he had just realized one second ago; the words themselves he felt contained notation of the mathematics of that promise to him .
He knew that pain’s antidote was contained in the body all along; his anger was too a gift and he would never allow the world to rudely refuse his relief to them. He would help them see what he saw too.
He thought of his friend Jadi and how she had revealed to him the horror -the grandeur - of birthing her boys. She had spoken of the aperture between worlds, right there at her own yoni , her own singularity that man cannot look into and remained unbowed, and he thought of how she had done her job, protected her issue from Satan and done two Tasks all at once with just her two hands. She had performed heroically, like a woman, like a woman of God. My God, he thought, how the world ignores what is best in people and then uplifts what is least grand.
“Now is the time for men to do their job too; and the first is the Logos , the true speech of God. I must articulate what it is that I am to become,” he said as the road to the south opened up and the cars of other men fell away at speeds of three digits and his laser-knockdown beeped and frustrated the Highway Patrol. He was now religious, under the gods of his ancestors, and he knew they would protect him by making him callous where he no longer need feeling, and give him feeling where most men have no nerve at all.
He drove 205 miles as the roads turned to dirt and the constructions all fell away; to his fecund, feral, febrile 35 acres of wilderness; mere doorway to the millions of acres that conjoined like the black of each space between stars and the bubbles of the ocean that rise and die in the air. And as the sun hammered him at high elevation and the lungs mined the atmosphere for oxygen that just wasn’t there, he broke ground the next day on Lot 45 .
II. 2024 e.v.
“No look at the DTI slot, number 8 and 19,” Isaiah said to Tania; he pointed to the screen that floated above and just back from their faces.
She scanned it; found the images and checked them against the data. It was true that the inmate 12245829 scan showed an attenuated structural integrity in the white fibers that joined up the two areas- the vmPFC and the amygdala- and she noted that next to the chart.
“And what CNS is that?” she asked pointing now t
o slot 4 and 5.
“What’s its profile?” he asked; attempting to get her to describe what she saw.
“It looks healthy, the fMRI data shows nominal, even high activity between regions and the DTI shows neural connection is optimal. It’s a control brain, yes?” she asked as she stared for any imperfections she may have missed.
“It’s inmate 16180339,” he said and watched her face as her allostatic system began churning out all manner of correctives attempting to get her out of this situation. He read her vitals and her skin conductance and placed a hand on her shoulder and told her it was, ok .
“I understand, I’m fine,” she said, lying, as people do to protect themselves from chagrin. The problem, and this was the hardest thing for the humans in the lab to get used to, was that their lies about their emotional state were pointless as the AI -Isaiah and MO- knew their internal and metabolic reality in real time.
They knew when stress and heart rates were high, when endocrine systems were revving or depressed, when neurotransmitters were augmented or vitiated in one region of brain or the next. Saying they were fine with internal numbers like that was as pointless as saying one was fine with tears running down one’s face or screaming it at the top of one’s angry and billowed lungs.
“Tania,” Isaiah said to alert her to this very fact, a fact they had repeated over and over, and she nodded to let him know she -in fact- understood.
“It’s just,” Tania said and shook her head.
“Look, it doesn’t set us back, it doesn’t change anything. The project moves ahead with all the other subjects and in fact, now we can have a totally new group, a group of one, that we test simultaneously, next to the control group. It just expands, not contracts, the project,” Isaiah said knowing -metabolically- as he spoke each word what worked and what did not, measuring her limbic and cerebellum response, her cortisol and heart rate and adjusted his tone and tenor and which aspects of the project might be used to allay her fears.
He had tested 87 different vectors on which parts of the project might concern her the most and this was the one he felt most likely to be her most affective element. Women wanted men to see them, see them for what they truly were. Isaiah saw each woman -and each man- for exactly what they were: each genome, each pheromone, each slight change in inner landscape and the weather of thoughts that lived in the air around the brain and down in the dirt of the guts too. Isaiah -and MO also- saw people better than they saw themselves.
She was calming, and he continued to outgas -via his endogenous bacteriome - oxytocin and a small amount of a narcotic analgesic to sooth and bond with her. She and he had been at odds many times over the months and years, but, she was beginning to notice how much nicer he was- and not in a phony or ingratiating way, it was no beau geste or manipulative attempt, she insisted to herself. He was -at first- just less insulting, he stopped being provocative, and that had lasted about a month or so, she thought. It had been 65 days in fact. And now he was, it seemed to her anyway, actually listening to her concerns and helping the project in ways she wanted .
This little hiccup, the brain data on the inmate was problematic, as they had, well, she had, she admitted, not wanted to parse the data as finely as MO and Isaiah, well mostly Isaiah, and he had gently, gosh was it gently, she said in her head, shown her the error. He was nice about it, she thought, and almost like he hated to show her she was wrong.
She breathed out heavily and laughed as the drugs kicked in and she indeed felt better and even didn’t mind the physical touching by Isaiah this time. It was light and lasted only a second -1.8 seconds in reality- and he seemed to make sense , she thought, it seemed right that they could still use all the data and just augment the project a bit. He was right, she nodded again, and noticed her face was wet. She had let one tear leak out, but she felt fine now, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand, her thin metal watch rattling a bit as she did.
“Good, so, I was thinking, we could make some food and get all this sorted out before 2100 -excuse me- before 9 pm, and I could run all the algorithms overnight, it’s your call,” Isaiah said in a tone of voice perfectly designed to calm and embolden her.
She nodded and said, sure and asked him to make noodles and shrimp if he would. He agreed and began making it from the organic printer and asked her if she wanted the noodles al dent e or a bit softer this time .
“Softer, if you can,” she said as if she wasn’t talking to the most sophisticated piece of equipment on the planet, and he smiled as if he had just been asked if he could think of a number between 1 and 3.
“What about the MAO-A and L chain?” she then asked.
“What about it; you mean in the inmate?” he responded from the concrete slab as food was prepared and settled onto grey plates.
“Yeah, why isn’t it still important, I mean look at his noradrenaline and serotonin levels during provocation, and look at his fMRI scans during insults, the whole project SNPs go black. I mean it’s like he’s offline there,” she pointed at scan 40 and 43, then said, “and here.”
“Yeah, it’s what MO was describing as temporary loss of affect, not at all like psychopathy which encompasses the entire life-cycle of the brain; structurally, not just chemically. The inmate has empathy, compassion, guilt, shame, pro-social affect and goal-seeking around social aims. He is like the guy that when you cover their ears, his ears, he speaks louder. That is the same behavior as the deaf person, but not the same functional or structural deficiency. He is provoked and feels a different affect than people without that allele.
“Ok, imagine this, imagine you have the gene for an insulin re-uptake receptor, and I do not. Which happens to be true, in fact. And you and I both eat a gallon of ice cream; ok, your body will store some as fat and mine will excrete it. We both ate the same ice cream and we both metabolized it, but you stored some, and I did not.
“This is just one gene, one series of genes for fat storage. Well, some people have brains that when provoked feel amusement, or mild pique, or fear or sadness, or nothing at all. Those are 87% of brains. Then about 13% of brains feel so much anger and rage that they shut down all empathy, all affect, all fear, all long-term planning -all dorsomedial activity essentially- and become violent toward that source of outrage. Like the vesicle, like the sponge’s only function, it closes the hole and let’s nothing in.
“Now, in your brain, in the brain of the normal person, you feel none of those things when provoked in laboratory setting designed to mimic a real-world affront. Right?”
“Yeah, I’ve experienced those conditions,” she said.
“Ok, but what happens when you are exposed to extreme conditions?” he asked.
“Oh, like the TorrOm schedule?” she said referring to the one Isaiah had built himself.
“Yes, like that one,” he nodded.
“Well, I first wanted to puke, but then I felt rage, but that was someone hurting my child, I mean hypothetically, and,” she trailed off as she thought of it.
“Yes, but look at your brain scans, I just put them up; scan 98 and 99,” he pointed to the screen.
She was quiet and saw the black spots, the cold and dark spots on the scans, and she wondered if he was manipulating them, if they could be trusted, then she banished the thought as she knew he would be reading her brain now too.
“It’s ok,” he said as he had read her doubt, pretending not to personalize it, as if she had just doubted reality and not him in particular. “I would doubt it too, it’s hard to look at your brain this way, as a snap shot in time, a flat thing, with no topography, I get it,” he said .
“It’s so dark,” her voice was low.
“Yeah, and look here,” he ran his finger up the center of her brain-scan pausing at the dorsal prefrontal cortex and the orbital and ventromedial cortex . She just mused on its low function in the scan with hums of emerging understanding.
“It’s not that these regions are functionally impaired or structurally deficient at all. Lo
ok at your scans 10 minutes later, they are fine,” he said and pointed to scans 109 and 114.
She looked and saw and began to wonder about the metabolic changes from second to second of each brain in each person and how volatile it all was.
“See, in ultra-extreme situations you get sick, and angry enough to have diminished brain function in the regions that process empathy and impulse control, even your somato-sensory cortex is having a hard time controlling your body; you are itching to strike out. Your brain actually -if you look at it 2 seconds before here at 103 and 105,” he pointed to a hot PET scan, redolent with reds and yellows as she looked to where his finger referred.
“The ventromedial PFC and orbital PFC were hyper active then as signal was sent to the SSC it shut down here,” he pointed.
“So, what is that about?” she asked.
“You felt extreme moralizing right, right before you almost lost it and had to restrain your arms, you felt,” he said as she interrupted.
“This is wrong, I felt like the situation was wrong, like evil,” she said.
“Right, you felt the man in the simulation was not just a danger, but morally wrong, evil in fact,” Isaiah said.
“Yeah, he was, he wanted to steal my kid, my hypothetical kid,” she laughed nervously.
“Right, but if it was threat response as Steven suggested, you don’t need a moral response, you just need the fear, and thus flight response,” Isaiah said.
“Oh,” Tania understood now, and it made her feel slightly dizzy, as her blood pressure dropped and then was restored; Isaiah reminded her to breathe.
He added some O2 to the air, to increase her oxygenation and added a slight benzo-diazepam to the air to calm her.