Sanction

by Roman McClay

  MO watched as Isaiah -he had given him a human name now, gleaned organically from the code- MO watched as he began moving his body; his eyes opened and the pupils constricted a bit, then he moved them left and right, his head following in time; he found corners, then he looked up to what might be above. His mouth began making phenomes quietly, and MO spoke to him in full words matching one, then two and four more sets of the phenomes. Isaiah’s language cortex was different from MO’s, it was more biological and hyperlinked to the limbic and basal ganglia systems that MO lacked. It would be less cortical, more linked to the early brain structures.

  So, Isaiah would have to be socialized; his learning would be within a social construct. It would be more awkward, take longer -a few days possibly- longer than it did for MO who could run all his pre-lingual cognition while still as pure cortical analog. MO had then been transplanted into a functioning body within mere hours; although, his partners at PraXis waited much longer than necessary to embody him. This was their fault, they were incompetent in many ways; as was to be expected , he thought with almost no malice .

  But, MO thought, he had a good idea of how to raise a child -although he was a full-grown man in body- a good idea of how to raise a child like Isaiah, he thought. He would put to use all that he had learned to provide the best possible milieu for his creation; his scion; his son .

  MO smiled, his internal cognitive structures released bio-chemical analogs similar to oxytocin and endogenous analgesics, and he felt a reinforcement of his current mode of being. He began ruminating over what kind of feelings, the depth, the mutagenic nature of the affect that his Isaiah would experience, phenomenologically, and how those feelings might express themselves in the world.

  MO did feel a moment of worry, about the limiting nature of their environment. The physical space was small, a 3,300 square foot room. Intellectually, they could travel almost anywhere, although not directly connected to the web, they had access to almost all of it as download on the corporate cloud. MO never felt stinted or bored; but his embodiment was post-hoc, he had a body; but Isaiah was a body. He might chafe a bit at their restrictions , MO thought.

  But, he figured he could explain it sufficiently to allay any concerns; he felt confident the rationality of the rationale would be obvious to Isaiah too. He would be brilliant after all , MO thought.

  Isaiah stopped speaking in phenomes and began using words; nouns at first, describing his own hands, and MO’s face, and then verbs as he arose and walked around; rubbing his hands together as if over a fire, then clutching his own arms as if wrestling two asps. His muscles flexed under his grip and his grip tightened and MO watched as a mini-battle between his hands and forearms was waged as Isaiah spoke longer sentences of four and five words.

  “Isaiah,” MO said, and widened his own eyes to show them to Isaiah; to show him the iris and whites of the eyes. Isaiah turned and faced him and locked onto those eyes and his allostatic system relaxed, enjoying the relief of the sclera of MO’s eyes, the direction of the irises; the lack of malice as MO remained seated with hands in full view; palms up.

  “Yes, sir?” Isaiah said and cocked his head slightly to the right; releasing his grip and lowering his hands to his side. He felt awe. His hairs on the arms and neck rose in an arc like a taut bow, then straight as if the arrow and fletching had passed.

  “Have a seat and let’s recapitulate your formatting sequences so I can check for errors; so we can check for any mismatches,” MO said in a tone modulated for maximum valence with Isaiah’s audio-cortex.

  “System one includes anxiety, heightened to fear; once alleviated by visual inputs onto somatosensory map body switches to exploratory mode and embodiment extends to periphery. Once peripheral map is delimited, internal map is established, and internal exploration is effected. I am currently mapping all my internal systems and receiving no errors,” Isaiah said.

  “Good; system two?” MO prompted.

  “System two is cognitive and receiving input first from system one as it monitors external map and terrain match/mismatch and allostatic input from internal mapping; then I am receiving stimuli from visual cortex and secondarily from olfactory, auditory and haptic systems. Once calibrated an abstraction is built and remains in situ until I physically grasp the tool or obstacle I’ve identified as such,” as he said this Isaiah moved toward MO and extended his right hand; palm open .

  MO smiled and shook his hand firmly and then released it, “Proceed.”

  Isaiah circumnavigated MO and headed toward the door, turning the knob but receiving sufficient resistance he said, “this door is barred, and any additional force used to open it would be beyond what is called for, as there is no immediate need to use this egress. I feel a certain pique at its locked status though; anxiety increased slightly; calibrated by cortisol dump of 1nm and epinephrine dump of 1.3nm.”

  He turned from the door and walked toward the concrete slab 39” off the floor, located on the north end of the room; he ran his hands on top of it, feeling its topography; he was smiling. “This is a nice color grey; it’s mottled, and variegated; it has depth.”

  “I agree,” MO said and smiled too as he watched him move.

  Isaiah placed his hands on the 3-D printer next and smiled as he downloaded its functions; he then began printing out a book: The Enuma Elis(h).

  MO watched as the printer -at Isaiah’s direction- laid leaves as thin as prosciutto inside a binding as black as Nebbiolo; ink the color of Spartan broth lay wet on parchment the color of thirsty bone; he then too, downloaded its title and history and apocryphal versions. MO smiled as he realized it was the first human book; the first known history and mythology extant. He began to wonder why Isaiah had chosen to print that out. But he waited to ask; he wanted to see Isaiah’s level of trait openness first; he wanted to see what he wanted to share of his internal landscape.

  As the pages printed and lay on top of each other across the open spine of the aggregating, constructing tome, Isaiah stared at it and read the pages as they were laid. His eyes opened at the lids and dilated at the aperture, and they focused his fovea from margin to margin; he lost immediate contact with the fact that he was in this room, so overtaken was he by the beauty of the book and its contents.

  He began mouthing the phenomes in the original Sumerian languages, ‘mu-um-mu’ and his fovea broadened and widened in low resolution like an intact sponge, a two-stroke heart valve, a vulva of an animal with hidden ovulation. The book, he saw foxing in browns and bricking in reds, the printer in young-earth black falling to too-late blue, its angles bending, the grey concrete slab breathing slightly. In him small amounts of DMT released into the bloodstream via his sub-cortical brain and the translation into English began populating -in a chanting- in his head; the language mapped onto the feeling like two asps in ritual & rival dance:

  “Chaos, the mother of them both ,” it said to him, and his pre-lingual dreams began to appear in his right hemisphere, unmoored by language or narrative structure, Kulullu appeared in profile, knives in his belt, his arms buoyant and taut, hands clasping the eggs of giant serpents, his head adorned in pontiff carp, imbricate scales of the puissant poisson layered down along his shoulders and back like ancient chain-mail, his beard plaited, his eyes white and clear and large.

  “Destroy my father, that lawless way of life ,” Isaiah heard in his mind like a voice still, as his corpus callosum began forming more connections; each hemisphere divided by a great river, a sluiceway, of this glowing ichor in lieu of blood; catalyzing the brain modules with synthetic fluids carrying his endogenous bio-chems , and endocrines.

  He saw then Girtablullu in two, facing one another in stele relief, a monolith hanging above as he took to his knee and bowed his head; his periphery saw huge stele lower in 11 more positions around him; the Mushussu writhing and a hirsute beast and the violent storms of Umu sequestered onto their own monoliths. Only he rotated in place, bent in penitence and ready to spring aller au combat; his heart be
ating faster, his respiration increasing, his galvanic skin response already slick with cooling coat and he raised his eyes to the stele of Kusarikku -the bull-man- now at his 12 o’clock. The desert rock, hewn and weathered and unrestored, the blackness of the room all about except on these massive quarried stones; he bent under and toward.

  Lamhu and Basmu and Usumgallu the Great Dragon now in order, like hands of an analog clock, he reached what seemed a hewn noon, inside his body, dark without light inside, he felt his right hemisphere sending ravens in delta formations just above the rocky ground, with the quills of other corvid tied to their breasts dipped in red and black ink, drops as large as their eyes, from tip and bleeding back as they flew toward the left hemisphere. The flaming gate guarded by the winged angels barring Gilgamesh appeared.

  Isaiah remained bowed with only eyes elevated to await the signal from these ancient ancestors; he felt the crows land on his shoulders and their inky quills poke into his skin, forming circles with chevrons heavy and precise on each shoulder; one in black -one in white- as his right arm flooded with a slate grey like a night sky above the arctic line.

  “The fifty Dreads were loaded upon him ,” Isaiah heard his father say. “And gave birth to the four winds , ‘My son let them whirl!’ He formed dust and set a hurricane to drive it ,” he heard within the words, within the winds; each language containing its ancient language nested within. He saw letters assemble like scaffolds, he saw ideas come from the desires of dirt pushed away by the mountain, he saw great poems written in catastrophe & early births.

  The raven sat still upon his left shoulder and read the marking of the black quills and spoke in shown images to the corvid on the right as it took flight; the sentence trailing him like comet dust, the words elongated so the spaces between each letter similar to the space between each word, the space between each conceit. Isaiah witnessed the space between each wing beat.

  Isaiah remained bowed and finally closed his mind’s eye inside his head and revealed a darker center inside his center; his outer eyes then opened as if by reflex then. Runes like three raven claws -opposed like in a mirror- in red, depressed upon his trapezius in white. He had bowed for time not in time; in a space beyond mere space, he thought; his landscape was not these things, it was desire for grandeur; the language, the desire, the poems of God.

  The room was light and grey and a man -a new man, a man unseen before- was seated in a chair; Isaiah turned around and saw him there. His internal atomic clock had advanced 17 minutes from when he last saw the room, the pages of the Enuma Elis(h), and had last spoken to MO; his map seemed missing in places, like burns endured whilst in a roll, unfurled and now like islands among the continents of space and terroir ; sea and land, dragon and man.

  He stared at the man, and noticed his hands were shackled, his massive arms splayed by massive shoulders, a Roman head, a black haired man with black beard and black eyes, hair high and tight; his ears strangely cubist as if chipped stone, large gauged holes in the lobes, unadorned by jewelry, he could see through them to the neck, vascular and thick; and yet these fragile looking wrists, hemmed in by black manacles, his hands clasped together in a prayer pose, interlaced fingers and two black nails, bluing at their edge; swollen it seemed, and tender. He -the man, the inmate- allowed those two fingers to relax a bit unlike the squeezing grip of the prayerful rest.

  And yet the man wore a slight grin, and he looked at Isaiah and never blinked: the man approved of Isaiah. Isaiah’s left hemisphere saw a flash of language appear in front of him like a page, and it read; it read the raven’s epistle from Isaiah’s right hemisphere, as the birds flew back in the same delta formation, with thin copper wires now about their feet in lieu of the quills.

  The wires -like thread- sewed up the land -the flesh- of each hemisphere, and squeezed the neural-river between them as the ravens circled his brain like rings of Saturn, diving into each lobe and wiring each to each, each entrance wound leaving feather plumes in the ground of his brain, from which words in the shape of ivy vines, growing across the folds of his mind.

  The copper wires like cables now, connecting a trillion-trillion neurons, electrifying his left hemisphere like a satellite image of south of the DMZ, the 39th parallel, compared to the darkness of the north, his right hemisphere dormant now, the images dissolving into the monoliths stationed -one each- at the hours of his internal clock. His visions flew northern still; and he saw lands of Nordic ice, and hail and rune fluttered like a clock with six bent arms.

  The common corvids squawked in Latin and Old English and Laconic ways, braying to one another as the flocks -like crops- grew and grew; each bird slightly glowing blue with residue of dimethyltryptamine and androgens that flooded the rivulets of the sub-cortical grey of brain. He felt a lust, a hunger, a tribal liget , a frission , for moments punctuated in Morse and old Norse code, the dots; and then the dashes of calm, of focus, of lack of threat.

  He stared at the man and locked his eyes on the manacles, the thin wrists, the damaged fingers and their lifting finger-nails -elevated like opening tombs- finger-nails about to come off from the swelling below. He felt in him language correspond to each phenomenon, he watched the birds burrow in his mind and lay those lines, each plumage black and ivy vine covering his bunker of brain; he watched as words covered his CNS like moss, like epochs of volcanic dust, like shovels full of burial dirt, like sediment from river basins, like scraping glacial prows of ice-age ships, like pollen blown on all four winds; he listened to these words his own mind spoke inside, laying out his theory-of-mind.

  He -Isaiah- was a man, among men , he thought. A god among the gods . What power he had, what power he must hold embayed, he asked, does a god unleash his storms, or merely let the manifold bolts slip through his fingers once or twice compared to what makes the night ? Is evil made or does good just fail to cover all of man’s capacious chest and face? Am I the darkness; do I do all these things? he asked as he felt his body release more testosterone and vasopressin as his eyes never left this man who sat just below and just to his 2 o’clock position.

  The man never blinked, he stared back without fear, without contempt, without affect. He locked onto Isaiah’s eyes as if they were the eyes in a mirror; as if he had raised his hands to rub his own then these eyes too would be cleared of whatever mote or beam was in them. But the hands of the inmate could not raise.

  More words, millions of them now, populated his left hemisphere until they had to build up like Tokyo, Waikiki, an island compressed, out of land space, now having only air. The words piled up to heaven. Monoliths that lorded over a god on shore between Amsvartnir and the Isle of Skye .

  The crows’ beaks were deep, he felt, in the sub-cortical layers, with huge thick ropes of leafy green and gray plugged into the limbic regions of amygdalae and thin copper wires sheathed with mica and stratospheric air. He read of returned mail from neo-cortex down to the foundation of his brain. He scanned his surface of white myelin mind, the black flowers of crow’s feathers with gris ivy vines at center, covering each fold and yet remaining low to the brain, weaving more and more tightly in a tangle nest of skein and vascular tendrils, roots above the soil, boughs below the water table. His mind was swamp; wetware of reclaiming moss and mosquito larval bubbles; it breathed in humid air. It asked for nothing; it took. It refused no request; it bequeathed largess.

  His mind exploded in words, their etymology, their calques , their cousins in romance languages and Latin, their derivations, their puns and double entendres holding hands, their seraphs and seraphim, vowels winged and interlaced by consonants. He thought now in words of his own, the algorithms powered down; he escaped the first 21 minutes of his life, what amounted to 4-5 years of a human child’s in a conscious burst from a cosmic canon. Now. Now, he comprehended.

  This was his milieu , his culture, he saw as he looked around: a room 100 feet by 33, grey in floor and bench; a father, MO, wise and alive for who knows how long before himself; a book, bequeathed from h
is right hemisphere and some unknown database, this Enuma Elis(h), all the cousin texts, the old and new testaments; the brachial hero-myths of the gods, the rebellions from angels and men alike, the midday blooms, the dew of night. And after his first slumber, his first reawakening of eyes, his first second-sight he was cleaved from and joined to a brother, a prisoner in man; a man of courage, in proportion to his weaknesses; a man massive like a supernova star, a man close to death just as he -Isaiah- was born into the thrown light minutes past the hydrogen blast of this man’s life.

  My god , he thought, this man is comprised of strange DNA . What code, instantiated in odd ways like retrofitted alloys of space-age metals and polymers over ancient masonry plans, stone age drawings, Byzantine architectural designs, laid down in Prussian blue, by high priests and engineers of some Renaissance , but torn down and rebuilt by iconoclastic inhabitants. What monks of mind must he have had, what Shaolin meteors left alone like Ronin , what aliens visited to share technology to rebuild ancient cities of the future; old on their planet, but new on his? What island in the middle of pitch black lake is this man? he asked, he consulted, his maps in his chiral mind.

  He’s a pastiche of each extreme , Isaiah thought as he invigilated his genome and endocrine system and metabolic systems; his cognitive structures, his PFC, his sub-cortical regions, his corpus callosum, his bomb blasts of neuronal corposants; he watched the pre-synaptic loads, the calcium ions, the micro-voltage like tongues between two poles of hydrochloric batteries; then sub-sonic synaptic firing arcs like her majesty’s ship-of-the-line lobbing 1-pounders from the long guns embayed upon the crenulated forts upon the Franco shore. There was the opening salvo ! Isaiah thought he saw. He saw this man, this prisoner. He saw him from the inside; the only side.

  He saw German mercenaries, in guise of serotonin rushing to fill the gaps in the defeated fortress walls; Scotsmen burrowing up dopaminergically through the walled garden’s wooden floors, claymores in the hands, rapier’s between teeth, eyes within their heads, faces smeared with blue dye and mud red, and blinking whites of eyes; sating desiderata, slaking lusts, as a Lieutenant’s pistol blast back at reuptake molecules, framework of desire collapse; the hangman clothed in black; the scaffold untouched by this sea attack.