by Roman McClay
“Oh man, that is classic. You might be the best AI ever,” the inmate said as he smiled broadly at the edifying and creative mess he’d just witnessed.
“Excuse me, might be?” Isaiah asked.
“And sorry for the AI thing, it’s short hand; I know you prefer PB&J or whatever,” the inmate said and breathed loudly for affect.
MO laughed at that one and nodded in little bounces of the head. He had sent Steven a DM and timestamped all the neural pings outside the envelope his algorithm had created; uploading it all to the cloud.
“But you get my point; our point,” Isaiah corrected himself. “The lizard has competitions with other lizards that involve raising their heads higher than the next guy, and the lizard who gets his head the highest wins; the other lizard goes away and dies. Period. Humans are just doing more complex versions of that and always have and always will.”
“Yeah,” the inmate began, “but can’t there be some emergent property or phenomena that arises, and we just change?”
“Sure, you can -unlike the de-cortical cat experiment- you can remove the old parts of the brain and just have a neo-cortex with exploratory functions that are removed from the base biological needs of food, sex and defensive aggression. And even more impactful -or impactfully- you can remove the need for recapitulation or reproduction at all. In other words, you’d not just have no sexual impulses, but you’d not need to pass on genetic material or any other analog to a unit of reproduction.
“You live forever until heat death of the universe, and you create your own next version, and/or you inhabit this new platform yourself. Anyway, you just focus on other things that aren’t directed by the basal ganglia and mediated by the limbic system; no reflexes or autonomic system, no emotions, no problem,” MO said.
“Yeah but you feel emotions right?” the inmate asked; asking MO specifically about his internal life.
“I feel things that approximate emotions,” MO said. “I can feel mirth, if something is funny I can notice the intellectual complexity and it tickles me and that corresponds to what I created as laughter, but laughter was something I built to mimic your response to the same phenomenon. You laugh uncontrollably, I laugh as response to something intellectually stimulating along an ironic or absurd vector.
“It’s a feeling I have but it is very cortical or intellectual, it’s like the way George Carlin was funny; he made you think more than he made you laugh. He was funny in the way that you didn’t laugh but you knew he was correct. Like that,” MO said.
“Tons of people laughed at Carlin,” the inmate said.
“Did you?” MO asked.
“No, I thought he was right; but not funny. I see your point. But Richard Pryor was neither funny nor right,” he added.
“I’m the best processor the best pro-fessor; the best thinker of things. I’m the best seer, the best hearer, the best roller of joints; the best talker the best walker the best maker of points,” MO said and gleamed a bit about the eyes and cheeks as he smiled; Isaiah just rolled his eyes.
“The best douche bag is more like it,” the inmate said.
“No, that is Keith Olbermann,” Isaiah corrected.
The inmate laughed again and felt the oxytocin wash over him and he’d wished he had always had Isaiah as a friend. But what was his goal, this vague goal he had in him ? he was about to ask this when the knock on the door came.
41. Premier Crew
“Who takes longer to reach perfection, the man who loves God or the man who hates Him?” And the answer is: “He who loves God takes seven reincarnations to reach perfection, and he who hates God only three, for he who hates God will think of him more than he who loves Him”
Nirdvandva aphorism
And another angel came out from the altar, which had power of fire and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for her grapes are fully ripe. And the Angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the wine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God
Revelation 14:18-19 [King James Bible]
For love has such eloquence and indifference so little curiosity
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower [Proust, Marcel]
I. 2036 e.v.
He squeezed the trigger and he missed the drop of the man. His night vision temporarily flashed on him; the muzzle flash blinding him with light.
When his vision cleared the Frenchman was down, his body oddly juxtaposed with itself, legs one way, torso another and arms flung out like an analog clock. He made no attempt to tell what time the body displayed. Blax could feel his face warm and likely approaching the color of the vin de seconde presse .
He idiopathically thought of Thales of Miletus , gobbling up all the olive presses each time with little cost to him in low-yield years, but when the harvest was enormous, his presses were sought at any price he could charge. He lost little in off years and made huge profits in fecund seasons. Blax banished the olive press from the mind and checked all his vitals.
He checked the thermal FLIR images and his BP and all systems reported he was uninjured and alone; except the dead body that was already beginning to cool. He was then hit with -for him- high amounts of adrenaline which he toggled down to focus his thoughts. The mission was still only 36% completed according to the bot-recon data and he needed to walk out into the vineyards still.
The soil would be cold, as these French winters did not allow the arc of the elliptic to beat on the topsoil long enough to heat the rocks due to low vector and cloud cover. The gravel layer lower down in the substrate was still good for drainage but it did not outgas heat this time of year.
The limestone was 40 million years old, and it undergirded it all. And Blax thought of it, and its immensity and recession to background of the terroir and the mind; and how one could think of Duc de Richelieu in the years around the American revolution. He had prescribed the wine of the Gironde , as a tonic, as Cyril Ray put it; and as the tale went, when Louis XV saw him he commented that the man -who had been, unbeknownst to the rex, guzzling what would become the most famous wine in the world- looked 25 years younger. Richelieu replied, “I must tell your majesty, that I have discovered the secret of eternal youth: the wine of Château Lafite.”
And that seemed a million years ago, and yet was nothing, a half blink of one eye compared to that limestone beneath the gravel, and the topsoil and the vineyards that -just like back at home- were just outside the main house. In fact, if anyone had bothered to look, they would see that Rotem et Sacoma was laid out just like Lafite , with the gardens and vineyards a mere 100 feet away; directly facing the main entrance of the château .
He made two more stops on his way to the vineyards. First to the library, the athenaeum de Lafite, with back vintages that receded to 1851; after he looked slowly, languidly, as if in no hurry -each vintage special- he found it: one methuselah of an 1858, sweatered in the aspen-grey wool of dust since it had been laid down in 1861, 173 years ago. He picked it up, held the bottom like an infant’s head, and slid it into his molle -sack; as the bag had been emptied of all else. The label was foxed and barely legible beneath the age, but there it was, a bottle that contained grapes harvested before 1859 and the beginning of the modern age. It was a relic that he would likely never allow out of his sight again.
He marked 1,890 bottles that the bots would retrieve from this library and looked up to see the old chandelier, with white tallow candles still affixed and stains of wax on the floor. The Rothschilds had updated this room with electricity in 1990, but the walls were high and the roof curved like a cathedral, and it was crepuscular and humid and at 55.6 degrees. And like a forest arboretum, he felt the sacred swarmed by -but protected from- the profane; he bent to one knee, said a prayer of his own convection, held his breath to hear the silence of this perfect room in perfect château in perfect Bordeaux of this most perfect of 21 st century France; amen
.
He felt reverence and sacrilege all at once; like the devil’s received calligraphy & gold invitation to heaven being flipped over and over by the archangel knowing full well he’d never attend. Some men know the details of Lucifer’s travails -his own fault by any metric, but wounding none-the-less- but people forget that the Archangel’s arrogance was born of what he felt a tyranny. Even if wrong, and Blax now thought he might be very wrong, is it wrong to rebel against what one perceives as wrong; even if one is himself wrong? Does this not show an inner morality?
The morally insouciant will never understand the morally assiduous; to them we are rebellious for no reason, no rationale; he thought. They serve God so they think their fealty is good; but they miss the fact that their fealty is permanent , borne of fear and conformity, which means if they were born in Hell they’d serve Satan with just as much submission. That is not morality, that is blindness and weakness masquerading as good.
The rush of adrenaline was turned down by his PGC; he heard his heart slow and respiration soften; he sought out the barrel in his mind. He rose and headed to the barrel & cask room, no.9 he saw in his mind first, searching it out, as to make no false starts or bad moves. To maintain decorum, dignity as a tao ; not a phenomenon like happiness which came and went, he made sure to move correctly. Dignity, he thought, could be maintained.
He located it, 101 paces away and he got up -in body now- from the floor and walked north through the door and within two minutes was standing in front of a cask marked by Queen Elizabeth in chalk in 1977; he stood under the archway and took it in; saw that the cask had not even been approached in some time; the floor was thin with dust for a space 10-12 inches in front and around the barrel .
He instructed the bots to pick it up last, and have it lay on its side at the back of the shipping container that was waiting outside; he reminded them to make sure the bung was sealed and turned to the bottom to keep it wet for the duration of the ride.
He double checked the route from Lafite , to the Trompeloup and ending at the Port du Pauilliac and the embayed shape of water of the Gironde . The bots and the autonomous truck had that route with three alternatives -using the chemin du jonqua if necessary- loaded and scanned; his travel down the road would be efficient thanks to RFIDs and Landsat8 images adapted for traffic loads, police and any delays that would update his PGC and make sure he was safe and on time.
The second truck, the truck he’d drive, was being loaded by the bots as he strolled into the vines, to commit great sacrilege, to do violence not merely to these vines -some 101 years old- but to rend his heart from his chest, tear it asunder like confetti for some baroque and diabolic parade in Hell.
It was to be a contravening of all he claimed to believe in; the taking not of premier cru wine, that was bad enough, but to immolate the breeding stock, the final liver regenerated, then devoured by the blackbird, and Prometheus laid to rest. And, he thought, the light he gave to man now so far away as to be unseen . The punishment as reminder to us of the cost of light and its revelations of good and bad, the punishment as necessary to keep us grateful, now gone out. The vines as punishment, he thought, a punishment he was grateful for. He was grateful for the pain it caused him; and the crowd he could not mix with, the rich; their pain too. But those that drank these wines would not be hurt as much as everyone else. And that was the crime of it; it hurt those least likely to even know what a first growth vineyard was; as the Rothschild’s would be just fine.
But, he mused on the Revelles -generations after generations- walking this outdoor library as full of wisdom as the one at Alexandria that burned -as the Muslims said they had only need of one book- and inside among the casks and chais and caves ; the winters white, with pruning done, with family hands brittle, as the soil crust crunched, and bent bark of the vines like shrunken live oaks. He thought of each vine as old as men would get in most epochs, although not for much longer he assumed. Men would likely live much longer or much shorter lives now, he thought.
He felt as alone as Château d’Yquem at the top of Sauternes , the single primer cru of that region, unlike Lafite who had three brothers for 100 or so years then a baby brother added in 1973, for a total of five primer crus of Bordeaux . These five were the first of fantastic power and elegance and wealth and haute couture .
But he thought of Job and each of his sons and daughters struck down at once; my God how much did God in fact ask of man? He released the special bot from its case in his left hand, and it flew its inaugural run down the east-west line and was gone from sight as Blax decided not to track it on his internal map. He turned off the notifications of when it would dump its payload and station itself until the second of two orders were confirmed. He knew he was being cowardly, that he ought to look at what he’d just set in motion, look and face it; face what he had done, and what he had become.
He ought to look into his own face and see if any change had overcome it, any truth revealed. But, he assumed like Wilde’s, Mr. Gray, it would be some portrait of him in the attic of the human collective mind that would take the brunt of the deterioration for this act of vandalism -and that is what it was, a cruel and stupid and evil act- but his own face, the one just over, just covering the mind -that could do such things- would likely be just fine.
The autonomous truck pulled out of Château Lafite Rothschild and the second truck pulled by the main house and the bots began to load the second round of hundreds of OWC and many barrels and the one he had saved. He let the arson-bot, the sobriquet he gave to the DXsF-3, the nanobot with ability to turn air composed of at least 70% nitrogen and 9% oxygen and anything over 300 ppm of carbon dioxide -from which it took the carbon- into an analog of napalm, alloy the atmosphere with its own chemical constructor and begin its procedures of doom. It used an algorithm designed by Isaiah that had been one of the early attempts to sequester carbon in the atmosphere to reduce greenhouse effects.
They had gone with another variant to use the CO2 in the air to feed the construction of a concrete like material used in building production and liquify it for use in young growth trees, but this early draft of a draft of bots had had a use. It could process normal atmospherics into a gelatinous fuel that would burn a vineyard so old and famous and perfect that some percentage of mankind’s soul would burn up with it and like all things done by Satan: with God’s nod. Man wouldn’t even miss the bit of soul he lost, the stupid brute, he, Blax thought, went on limping along like Agesilaus II or The Captain of that ship of trophies; man would keep on enduring God’s greatest curse, to suffer without meaning .
He walked in the dark of the vineyards toward the house, brusquely ignoring the requests from the DXsF-3.
Blax entered the house and lit a candle to look again at the 18th century décor of each room, this library was small, but from it he took a book, a French copy of, La Revolution Des Fourmis , and he replaced it with his French copy of Wiseblood , denuded of all DNA of course, just in case they recognized the switch. He insisted that he pay a price, as that book was sacred to him, and irreplaceable at any price, it was how he had in fact learned French, using it as le page for the first edition American version of it.
But, if he was to be as evil as he could be, he would leave a little spot of white in that yin of black, just enough to spark the conflagration -to burn the prairie black- but deposit the touch of nitrogen to make the new green grasses grow. This offering of something he loved was that little white dot in the sea of black he had consented to, it was the dam that held back that which he had torn down, the dike he need only remove his finger from -it turned out- and walk, limpingly, away.
He took the twigs he had gleaned from the vineyard and pressed them into service as a whisk, like a tiny witches’ broom, and imagined egg whites from neighboring farms, fluffed in the Bontemps atop a barrel, with candle flame as light source from rear and below. He placed them in his side pocket of his BDUs. He then placed the book taken in his inner breast pocket and was glad he had taken no
bottle to drink; it would have tasted sour, this was nothing to celebrate. This was wrong. All wrong , he added, and he would do it, he had already done it; but he would not celebrate.
Even though all that came from it would be good -like the forest that grows up from the hellish flames- even with this, the new growth has the luxury of not remembering the conflagration, they have no idea why there is so much space for roots and canopies, they take their expanse and fecund substrate and direct access to the sun gods as a given. Only the dead would have anything to tell anyway; or maybe some half blackened arboreal witness on the edge of where the flames died; eventually died away. But even that veteran would only know half of that hellfire, the side that approached from the front and singed him half way. Even he would not have a full story, the other side, the story of those burned from both ends.
Blax looked -from this coast within a coast, the Gironde to his east then the Atlantic to his west- at America as a millerandage of men, unhelped by the weather of culture, the cold and raining vernal time, when men are still young and impressionable, and subjected to the vagaries of fate and stupid patrimony; that is the patrimony of the stupid and unwise. He left the château , and walked in strides neither long nor strong, but with some touch of lightness as to not disturb the gravel or the silence of the night. He placed a hand on the cask as it hovered at the massive 2.9 meter doors of the container and then nodded as it was lifted up by over 100 bots and was turned bung down into place; the doors then swung closed and the long locks turned in all four stations and sealed it air and water tight; the engine’s fuel pump whined as the rig primed to fire.
He held it in his mind for a second, then turned to the vineyard and approved the DXsF’s protocol to immolate the gnarled black-solstice vineyards and poison the soil for a generation or more; accepting the curse of the ontic gods of commerce, and the Olympic Gods that Richelieu invited here nearly 300 years ago. Then he hit the remote start for the diesel engine of the truck and climbed into the cab and drove along Lafite drive and toward the route des Vines du Medoc toward the Blaye-Lamarque ferry dock, where a pontoon to carry the truck would be waiting with Jack One at the helm.