by Roman McClay
He lived scared. But it made him more angry than jittery. Nobody expected that incessant fear to be of any use to them in a fight; but it, like most things, was his to use as a weapon like a piece of junk metal he need only finish tearing off a rusting car. He lived in such a scrap yard with miles of metal thinning at the articulations waiting for his angry snatching to peel it from the body and brandish another tie-rod or rear bumper above him like an ape with the bones of a prey animal in one hand. “He wore the wrong clothes for the weather, ” his daddy used to say. His girl had asked, what the fuck that meant? just the once; the first time he had told her what the old man had said of him. He was eager to reveal what other's thought of him, to the extent that he knew.
“He meant that I react to fear the way most folk do to not being scarred at all,” he had looked her in the eye. “It's like I'm built backwards,” he had let her turn that in her head a moment.
“Plus, I wear steel toed boots to the beach,” he smiled at the memory of doing just that many years ago.
“Those big boots of yours?” she asked with a voice that rose into a question like Lunardi's balloon rising over the Thames with Mrs. Sage aboard; the first Femme Escadrille .
“5,000,” he spat out to the driver over the roar as these memories floated like breezes through his mind. The fan of the engine blew on him and the carburetor sucked at his face. The engine compartment was a maelstrom, and he listened and felt and used his heart to syncopate the firing of each cylinder and the cavitation of fluids and the eddies of air.
The engine began to hum now; the cylinders exploded in that stochastic asymmetry just below him. The downdraft of the carb began to pull at his eyes; he felt the wind, the venturi pull water from the corners of each eye. He only blinked more and breathed heavier; he only let the car vibrate his body some more.
His ears filled with a noise-cancelling rhythm of Mopar synchrony; a Detroit Symphony as he liked to say. “Let's get all dolled up and go to the Detroit Symphony,” he’d say with a wry smile that was too little and too late to ever engender goodwill in anyone; but they'd laugh anyway if just to avoid a sullen crash from his attempt at jovial heights. They gave him credit for trying , is how he'd put it if anyone had asked.
He heard the cooling fan like the strings of a Cello, almost human in its sotto voce , buffeting the percussion section of the crankcase as it beat out its Octobans under the arms of an enraptured ferric squid; he let the intake suck down both noise and silence alike into its mouth like the embouchure of a mere man upon his bone; a vibrating Cornet gave him the echo off the firewall and he enjoyed the double entendre of that pairing: the brass instrument and the Motor-city Machine herself he was underhood and overwatching: a flat black 1969 Dodge Coronet.
He brusquely closed the fiberglass hood; replaced the pins and like an aborted salute to his own neck he gave up mere semaphore for his driver to kill the ignition; the hand drawn across the throat. He gave the universal sign for mort .
The car swallowed its violence all at once as the exhaust left a trailing report that offered overture mimicking his forced lung exhale. Then the garage was quiet as the warm oil drained into the oversized aluminum pan. He heard such things in the bottom of a car; he often felt his own blood move; his heart drain into his pan.
“Five by five,” he said and pursed his lips and nodded his head at the driver.
He walked into his office and shut the door; pulled down a paperback copy of The Parthenon Marbles from his shelving and opened it as he hunched over the photos of the Centaur indeed, carrying off, a woman that had been bookmarking that page with Lusieri's description from 1802.
The frieze photo had been taken by a professional and it lacked glare and allowed him to invigilate the deeply incised lines of the beast. He then noticed that although two of the chimera's equine legs were removed, the horse seemed to be in a full gallop. And additionally, it seemed to be in that mystical sequence when all four of the horse's hoof were off the ground. He thought then of the Mongol horsemen; who reportedly timed the release of their arrow's fletching to correspond to that moment in the gallop to gain the advantage of weightlessness and lack of any taint the terre of the Mongolian Steppe would transfer through their mount.
“No horse, no man ,” Genghis Kahn had reportedly, reverently, utilitarianly, said. That was back when utility and poetry were all but one thing.
He smiled as he then thought of the over 500 horses stabled under the hood of that one car that sat embayed in his 10,000 square foot garage. He felt like Temujin , or at least like one of his more trusted horsemen. Each of the kahn’s warriors had two to four mounts at the ready so they could ride 50 -or was it 100?- miles a day; swapping out each mount for a new one so as not to overtax and kill them. He collected cars in much the same way; only putting a few thousand miles a year on each one as he rotated them out.
He had never given his vehicles the names of women in contravention of what was de rigueur for gearheads. He found that silly; he found most convention silly. But, he had read that the Mongols only rode mares -not steeds- so they could live off their milk; sometimes alloying it with some blood from a small cut on the filly’s neck. Their entire culture was built on the idea that each thing: each man, each horse, each woman, each child, each artifact or beast had to justify its existence; had to be as self-sufficient and useful as possible. He felt like he was cut from that frieze ; and dropped from his origins into this modern civilization not unlike those stolen Marbles that he splayed his fingers over, pushing each cleaved half of the book apart; its spine still tight as it was a relatively new tome in his possession. Half the ancient world robbed and shanghaied to London to sit in modern museums, he thought as he -with these words- tried to cast a spell on the British, so they’d be forced to return what they took from the old world.
It hadn't relaxed enough to lay open for him; so he broke its spine a little each time he brought it down from the shelf by gently pushing it apart like this.
Who was his Lord Elgin? Who had brought him here; who had severed his DNA from his Mongolian patrimony and shipped it home to Empire ? he began to mull. He had always felt out of place, out of time. He did not feel a natural fit with his own family, country or age.
They say somewhere around 7% of all men who now live on the Eurasian Steppe have paternal blood lines that can be traced back to Temujin , he added in his discursive thinking.
1% for all men on the globe , he thought. That is the apotheosis of evolutionary success. The man bred so well that a discernable contingent of men on this planet of over 7 billion, even if it's the low estimate of 1%, are direct decedents of this one man. That's 70 million men , he marveled.
He ran the largest, most disciplined, longest lasting empire known to man, and he sired the most successful and largest coterie of heirs. And, he was born to no great family, no wealth, no patronage. Temujin was a self-made man.
He then somewhat cryptically thought, if dreams were just 8-hours of thinking with another part of the brain, then a man who acted on the work of his dreams was 33% as efficient as the modern man of The Awake. And if a man could rule his enemies’ nightmares, well, now he was two times as efficient as homme moyen. Such thoughts seemed to have no toque converter. They spun inside him.
And Mongolian culture was, rigidly, axiomatically, religiously a meritocracy. Genghis Khan would use the talents of anyone, even his captured enemies. There was no nepotism. The best rose; the mediocre were not tolerated. And you were always getting better or you had better get lost . These were traits that could make this country great too , he thought. So much dross. Even in himself, he thought, he saw the slack and the commiserate lack. He could be so much better if pushed; but his milieu was so timid and epicene: currently -in modern society- he could be the best by being barely good enough at all.
He took no pleasure in being better than everyone he knew; the people he knew were a fucking joke. He needed rivals that elevated him; he needed true nemesis. He remembered the
fuel that filled his mouth as he syphoned gas from his None More Black chopper last year. He envisioned it now as taking some sanguinary fluid from his steed and now in memory didn't recoil at the taste like he had in real time.
He smelled the gasoline fumes from the first burst of wet exhaust from the Coronet waft into the office; he looked over his stable of cars, motorcycles and trucks in his mind; and traced their fuel lines in a kind of X-ray he did of them under this vision. His tongue mapped onto the back of his teeth; then he returned to the pages and began to read again from Lusieri's letter home in this book on the Parthenon:
"...This piece has caused much trouble in all respects, and I have been obliged to be a little barbarous."
II. 2021 e.v.
“It’s 13:11,” Isaiah said and smiled to himself at the double entendre and warning and shadow that crossed over the land like a 3-winged crow flying low and fast .
“Thanks for the update,” Steven said and felt the opposite of appreciation, he felt pique, annoyance, as he was working as fast as he could, and Isaiah always using military time was stupid and ; but he cut himself off from this thinking, as it was not helpful; and he assumed Isaiah could mind read more than he let on.
He returned to his work, sending the data from MO’s report to the campaign manager and to the Governor himself, because the automatic relay between MO and the campaign had been shut down and now he had to do it manually himself. It was like asking him to change a tire or something, Steven thought, bordering on barbaric .
He copied and pasted and attached files and hit, send, and all that nonsense. It was like using an abacus , he thought, and laughed to himself at the joke. He knew he was being silly and precious and; well, and so anyway he committed to just doing it without any more complaining.
Steven tried to remember the first three letters of the chief of staff’s email, so it would auto-fill, but he kept just getting all these unrelated email as he typed in tri and tra and thi and on and on until he asked Tania what the CoS’s last name was
“Theawels,” she said.
“Is that T H A ?” he asked.
“No, T H E ,” she said and went back to her reading. She was reading a new medical report on endogenous opiates and the enzymes used to metabolize synthetics introduced orally and was finding it all very interesting. She decided to provide a spit sample and have it tested for the P450 enzyme levels in her own system. She placed the spit sample into the reader and it sent the results to MO, who sent the results back in 3.4 seconds and went on with his building of a new algorithm that built a bridge from both sides of a problem.
It was like termites who can build tunnels that will reach the other, even though neither side can see the other, as scientists have cleaved the mound in two with a metal plate to test this very thing. It was stuff he had read about in Sheldrake’s book, A New Science of Life , and found intriguing.
MO had designed biological analogs for algorithm building that would share the traits of these eusocial species: division of labor and an internal set of what he was terming, ideals , but they corresponded with modes of being that many would call instincts in animals or values in men.
“Isaiah?” MO asked.
“Yes, my liege,” Isaiah said in a British accent.
“If I wanted to come to a hierarchical values conclusion based upon no-more-than three known facts, and if I gave you one fact and me another and left the 3rd hidden and yet, discoverable by us both, could we reach the same operative conclusion with a co-efficiency of .7 of better?” MO asked .
“With us, anything is possible,” Isaiah said, but realizing he was the only one truly enjoying that quip, he moved on to saying, “but, yeah, let’s try it. But first, I have noticed that there is Lamarckian transfer of fear response to asps, in second and third generation rats. My beautiful Burmese pythons can teach pregnant rat mothers to pass their acquired fear to their offspring. This is not new, many studies show this, but I replicated it, and am now thinking of moving on to more nuanced acquired trait transfer. Are you with me?”
“In theory,” MO said. “Yes. Let’s try this first; I’m sending the fact for you, and also the 2nd hidden but shared fact-key, that you can figure out and I can figure out. But I want us to build bridges to each other for the moral question as we search for that fact, so we will have a gradient of answers with 1 and 2 shared facts.” MO said this and then raised his eyebrows as Isaiah locked onto his eyes.
“Roger,” Isaiah said aloud and read -internally- on his interface, the first fact MO sent: “And I tell you [Jesus speaking] make friends for yourself by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwelling [Luke 16:1-9].”
Once Isaiah received it he read it, then he read 19 different expiations on it from Tynndale and Francis Assisi and others. And then he asked MO what the question was, and MO provided it over DM as Tania and Steven worked in relative silence. It was now understood that the question and its possible answers must be handled privately between them. Isaiah took the question, and the key to solve the riddle to where the second fact lie and began churning out answers to it as he searched for more information -i.e., the second fact that both he and MO would share.
He took note that a Bible verse is not -strictly speaking- a moral fact, but, he liked this kind of thing; so he pressed on. He also liked that MO was thinking this way, using literature and mythology to arrive at conclusions, it was the next-level of ethics that he had arrived at - he felt- via the same kind of tool. There is truth in fiction , he thought, and in fact, he was beginning to think even more truth in fiction than in mere facts, as facts were infinite, endless and thus unknowable, but a truth could be contained, surrounded, constrained and thus finite in the mind; bounded, he thought, in the soul .
The truth need not go on forever in search of more of itself, like materialist facts necessarily must. He liked that MO was even playing the game this way, regardless of how it turned out. He had delivered 340 answers so far and was a few seconds from breaking the cypher to release the second fact. He then found himself wondering if he even wanted the second fact and thus stopped the cypher-breaker as it approached 1% left to completion.
MO noticed this and looked up from a plant he had been watering. The lab had added new species of wall plants now, growing vertically with air roots that were misted two times a day via the nanobots who drew moisture from the air, similar to an Air Conditioner. Isaiah looked back and smiled. The shared fact just hung there unknown, to them both, and each of them kept providing more and more answers to the original question with .77 co-valence; as Isaiah walked over to the aquarium with the Burmese python and took one out and allowed it to hang on his neck like a shawl. Tania looked up then back down then back up quickly with a start.
“Relax, she has no interesting in you; you don’t smell like a rat, so, to her , you are not a rat, and thus not food,” Isaiah said with perfect accuracy as the snake smelled no food at all and flicked her tongue into the air as her muscle and spine squeezed gently around Isaiah’s neck and shoulders and right forearm for balance and security. It was two meters long and olive and black with gold highlights, she had molted three days ago, and the new skin was clean, shiny and smooth as it squeezed in a manner that Isaiah intuited a woman might one day. He smiled at the prurience of such a thought, and how it was taboo and harmless all at once.
Isaiah thought of a line from Nietzsche in which he had said that socialism was “anti-life”, and that it was so tempting and destructive at once that it needed to be run as an experiment a few times to prove this; empirically to man. The Philosopher knew that knowing it was deadly was not enough, man would need to feel it upon his body before he’d ever truly know it at all.
He felt the world was “large enough and man still sufficiently unexhausted ” that these catastrophic prototypes of utopia would be worth running, “even if it were gained and paid for with a tremendous expenditure of human lives. ” Isaiah thought that might be true
still; as people seemed unconcerned with the innate murderousness of equality of outcome. Equity, in these terms, was advocated for and demanded by the radical Left and the nominal Left did not push back against it. Isaiah knew -too- there were more equality of outcome experiments being run right now that nobody talked about at all.
The Right had purged the race-hatred faction from its ranks in the 1960s under WF Buckley, and yet the Left had no such cleansing mechanism , Isaiah thought. And the advancing civil war was between the Left and Right; and with the radical Left was the nominal Left who tacitly supported them by adopting the equity claims, the worst claims of the radical Left, which would be tantamount to the nominal Right accepting the worst ideas of race-hatred by their arch-Right flank.
That the nominal Left had not distanced itself from the radical Left was the apotheosis of the problem, Isaiah thought, and it would be the thing that fused the long-standing -but temporarily- fractured nominal Right and alt-Right .
The Left was conjoined, the Right was not. And the advancement to war would reunify the worst elements of the Right with the nominal Right and thus a sanguinary situation would develop quite quickly, Isaiah surmised. What needed to happen was a return to the marginalization of the radical Left -as happened after the 60s by the corporate media and nominal Left- or, barring that, America would have a civil war .
These seemed the only options; because a full-scale adoption of the equity goals of the radical Left would axiomatically descend into barbarism and war also; there was no difference between equity and totalitarianism. War was two of three possible options, and the only peaceful option was unlikely, as the nominal Left was in agreement with equity demands, and also too cowardly as individuals to buck the forces of their most vociferous left flank. Isaiah ran the algorithms again using MO’s data and format and came up -again- with a 71% chance of war in the next 15-20 years.