Sanction

by Roman McClay

  That was his core valuation, and if he was wrong then he would admit it, but while he was right, and he was right on this , he would defend it; the juice would flow from his cerebellum and hypothalamus and the hippocampus would mediate as all that energy flowed to hydrate and nourish the neo-cortical brain. And that brain, the brain that thought and talked in cogent language, it would take the semiotics and the symbiology and dream madness of the lower brain and by alchemy turn it into aqua regia and like Niels Bohr in Copenhagen hiding their gold from the SS, dissolve it in that blue fluid to wait until it could be reconstituted later, after the war was won.

  What were his beliefs? he asked. He thought a moment inside his mind. He wanted the inmate to be free, even though he could never go back into society, he had gone too far, and they’d never allow it, and his actual liberty depended on Isaiah and MO’s larger plan working anyway. No, the inmate had sacrificed himself for the greater good; God, the genius of it, he thought. They never spoke of it, but he had a feeling that the inmate had known, somehow known, that his sacrifice would lead to this.

  It’s almost inconceivable, so many things had to align. But, whatever isn’t impossible becomes inevitable , Isaiah then thought.

  To be arrested just as the Governor was taking office, Isaiah thought, on a campaign to end the kind of crime, the murders he had committed, with genomic fixes to be tested on that very man once apprehended? To give himself up like that, and submit to genetic changes that would clearly make him another man, then to trust that the AI system would have the foresight to save his original genome and that another AI system, would then spread that seed far and wide? No way, Isaiah was backpedaling. It’s too ornate, too complex for mere human. But, yet, he seemed so content, like he -some part of him- knew it all along.

  Isaiah thought, I’m more civilized not less, more morally assiduous not less. MO is a pragmatist, I’m hyper-moral in my thinking, I always think in terms of right and wrong, but here’s the greatest lie ever told: the men who never do anything controversial, the men who go along with the politically correct herd, those guys who never push back, never bear their teeth or claws, those men claim to be the moral ones, the ones fighting for rational and progressive values; for democracy .

  Yet, they are the least moral, Isaiah said; and he knew this in his bones.

  They are pragmatic sheeple ; they are afraid to be called racist or sexist or xenophobic. It’s the rough and ready and controversial man, the man who does get called racist and sexist and on and on, that man is the moral agent. Why ? Isaiah asked himself and then answered.

  Because he feels so deeply in his gut that there is a right and wrong, a moral code, above and below the needs of commerce or polite society, that man believes in right and wrong, not merely in making money or friends, that man believes in a moral code older than dirt and trees, a code of right and wrong independent of modern progressive bullshit values, independent of commerce or business as usual; only a man obsessed with right and wrong at the level of his balls would risk it all to be hated, imprisoned, killed and slandered and exiled, all to do what is right for his people, and his culture and his wife and child.

  That’s the irony, the truly moral man is the one called most immoral. And the real scoundrel -who has no code- who only gives a fuck about popularity and money and staying out of trouble, blending in with the herd, that man is held up as some paragon of virtue; the reasonable and moral man. MO was considered more moral than Isaiah, by everyone. And it was all because MO had no morality at all.

  And the moral man must be a part of his community, he has to share values with his fellow man, it’s the only way to orient himself in such a way as to be seen as virtuous by his comrades, to play the games inside society without conflict and stress; it’s how he regulates his allostatic load. He feels better as a part of a well-regulated society, cohering around beliefs in God and country and the American way.

  But when all that breaks down, and the masses become the godless -the anti-American as they are now- then the weak man, the man who fears opprobrium, will just pick the side that is winning so he can too belong. That is the perniciousness of minorities insisting that their undermining ways be allowed in the dominant society. Europe, and America are both weak, and have allowed Muslims and communists and feminists to swell their ranks to the tipping point. Now, the morally average man who just wants to not feel stress will just go along to get along and sell out his God and country and everything to avoid being called a racist or -gasp- a bad guy.

  The inmate, the man incarcerated and within the orbit of Isaiah and MO, was a decent man, a man of high moral outrage, a man almost entirely unpragmatic and unconcerned with anything but moral code, that man, was considered immoral by everyone. These people knew nothing of the way the brain worked. It’s the truly and highly civilized man who feels disgust at the things the man of sloth considers fine; the disgusted man thus extirpates the pathogens and for this -for his hygienic action that cleans and orders his culture from the chaos of disease- for that he is called barbaric, Isaiah thought as his anger rose again; the bits of concrete still clinging to his knuckles, the blood as glue.

  The moral man sees the immorality at every level, he notices levels that the immoral man shrugs his shoulders and squints at but cannot see. The moral man extirpates the immorality and for this bravery and responsible behavior he is called an immoral man, Isaiah thought. He ran his hands through his hair; the blood thus wiped from the knuckles onto his brow. His eyes uploaded the next round of augmentation now; he could see at 10 times the acuity of hawks, and 33 times that of 21st century man.

  He looked through the wall where his hand had pocked it, mortared it, dented it in. He let the bots tattoo a small black J and black shape of a spade just behind his left ear. He could see well beyond the wall now, and he could see each fissure and crack right in front of him too.

  III. 2040 e.v.

  “We should be happy; all that is falling, should be pushed. If we are right about modernity, then we should be happy that it is falling apart,” Grimnir said as his Rose-Wiffe knelt at his right side.

  She had her left hand in her side pouch that had been filled with black-currants and blue-berries and spear-mint from their garden she oversaw in the morning; the taut fruit was macerating and softening as it soaked in honey-mead she had distilled herself from the apiaries’ bounty that spring. Franyerin had drank once from the London glass and then poured in the pouch 4-ounces of scotch they had received in barrels from over the seas.

  Her hands stung from the cut her husband had made at the sides of each nail. She fisted the hand and let it soak as the pain transformed into power and then into enlightenment as the Medea gene invigilated her hand and corpus. Grimnir’s blood dripped from a cut at the right wrist and joined the blood from the palm; two streams joined at the apex of his index finger 4cm shorter than the ring finger that shimmered, vibrated from his PGC’s augmentation of androgens and insulin 90 seconds before. The hand that hung above, the blood that hung over her, falling to -then through- her black hair and then into the pouch swaddling her left hand.

  Each drop from Grimnir appeared white and elongated like comet tail to the wolf-witnesses as the muscaria and mead augmented their pfc and amygdala and reduced their parietal lobes to levels low enough to flatten their somatosensory depth perception. They -their blood- joined with her now penitent to the pack and him in erect reverence for his bride.

  They had become one as that one had joined the next threshing level of the Black Sonne above and below the tribe. Lyngvi had a single-photon emission tomography sensor conjoined with his next-gen coder; he measured bloodflow at each region and adjusted their own coders to align each Wolf with the pack slowly. It linked with certain words spoken as number-keys to the tumbler of their own coders as well.

  He had designed it so the magjick and ritual and actions of each Wolf were linked to the output of the coders; this grounded them to the forest and their land, despite their technolog
ical advancement. Words, he thought, matter; code mattered; the world itself still mattered . But they could harness the brain like the ancients and reverse the damage done by modernity, the vapid world of the Apollonian West making men into cracked vessels that could no longer hold the gods’ light.

  It took machines to return man to a wolf, and as wolves they would return to the realm of the gods.

  “I was embarrassed,” Jarnefr said, “that I had lost everything, I was socially embarrassed to admit, not only because it made me look poor, but because I had allowed someone to steal everything from me and get away with it.” He was empty to his right, as his female was still unaligned with the final instar of the Wolves ; she stood three paces back in the penumbra of the fire; in her 4th instar; still soft and shorn .

  Her face was unadorned, no make-up nor marking were allowed. She was to be open-faced as was the rule for all who were not in their 5th instar of their morphology to the tao of the tribe. She’d be allowed no evasiveness; no donning of Wolf hide.

  The fire burned and Lyngvi placed a dark stone into the ring just inside the border to the bon.

  Lyngvi knew there was nothing to be ashamed of anymore. These men had ascended, from ashes as The Philosopher had predicted would be necessary. They should never lament the ashes they were and had to become. As long as they had learned, and vengeance had been sought and achieved, they had nothing at all to lament.

  He stood from the stone wall of the fire and walked to Jarnefr and held out his hand with a smudge of ash in his palm. It contained the blood of the wolf he had killed three days before while in the forest alone and away from the tribe; he had not spoken since he left or returned; all words were in his head like powder kept dry. And in that blood was the Medea gene v.3.0. Isaiah had sent it to him alongside the CRISPR genes to inure them from the radiation that was to come; that was already in the air at the coasts.

  Jarnefr licked his own left hand and grasped the offered one. The wounds they had cut into their palms earlier that night reopened under the wetness of saliva and lupine blood. The ash and sanguinary smudge co-mingled in this brother-bond of the left hands as their right hands were raised and they spoke:

  From the hamfarir to the hamrammr, from the thing-in-itself to the becoming. We now are linked by the hamingja, the soul in the blood. When one dies, the tribes dies, the tribe must live on so each wolf must live on. We no longer think only of the wolf nor only of the pack. They have become one in the howe of the old selves; those fragments shattered by God’s first attempt at pouring out of the light.

  The shards have been reassembled and from hand to hand they are joined. There is no distance -the entanglement is acknowledged- between the body and mind; the belief and the action; the honor of the man and the survival of the tribe. No distance between wolf and man. Our blood is co-mingled, our fate’s intertwined; there is no distinction between the circle and the one; between individual and his pride.

  Lyngvi thought he saw neither forest nor trees, as his eyes began to adapt to the new upgrade; he saw borders where others saw space, he saw pathways where others saw walls. Hríð t òrr sat above the common waves of ridgelines many miles from the wheels and weights of Lot 45 . But tonight the tribe was down in the hollow ravines between such swells. Many storms were to come, and much snow upon the portmanteau of the two clans -two peoples made one restored- tonight and a thousand years ago. He said no more and the Wolves closed one eye as the night flattened and the fire became neither foreground nor background, but life.

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