Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  “I like that you’ve brought this film to me, honestly, Den. Really. It’s part of your charm, I think. Quaint, even.

  “There’s so much wrong with the thing, though. I mean, once you get down into it, once you’ve done your due diligence vis a vis classic film crit. Really engage in a decent analysis. The fact that it’s taken on such legendary status in the decades since its revival boggles my mind. That fucking remake back in ’33. That was some godawful shit and no mistake.

  “But so was the original trilogy. All that red pill blue pill dualist sideshow cornball crap. I get it, I do. It’s a goddamn revelation if you’ve never heard of Gnostic thought, but Den, Den, it’s part of the system, their system, of oppression. The concepts in the film, and the film itself, and the directors, and the woo-woo machinery that ground it into being, that put it in front of eyeballs planet-wide. How is that not immediately suspect, Den? A magic lantern show on the walls of the cave, son. Their only interest is selling you back to yourself in a neutered form. I mean that literally.

  “Shit. They probably novelised it while they were at it. For the intellectuals.

  “Okay. But here’s the thing. I don’t think the Wachowski Siblings knew what they were doing, what they were writing and building. Or rather, they knew, on a lot of levels, because they’d have to, that’s just part and parcel of the creative process and fuck me, I know a thing or nine about that process! I get them, on that level. But the nature of this stuff is such that a good deal of other material got in there unnoticed. Material from the actual Simulation, here. Us, and the archons. It gets in there because it’s part of the code, of reality.

  “There’s a scene in the first one that kills me every time. Every time. And it kills me because it so thoroughly fucks the entire narrative. Did the Siblings know what they were doing? Did they write it that way and then forget what they’d done? Who knows, they’re long dead, and they never said.

  “So, you’ve got the character Cypher. Played by an actor called Joe Pantoliano. This guy, I remember him, because the scene, Jesus. Anyway, he, the actor, Mr. Pantoliano, he’s significant, because aside from a decent turn in a serial around the same time, he was in this film and then nothing. Career, done. Vanished. Why? He was good. Anyway.

  “Neo’s been rescued and he’s learning deep truths about the machines and Zion and what a newly free human being can get up to in the simulated reality of the machines, I can do kung-fu, all that tight leather and straight-edge superhero leap-of-faith garbage, and one night he’s not sleeping well, what with the standard issue messianic nightmares and so on, so he goes for a wander through the ship and he meets Joe, right? Mr. Pantoliano, sorry, Cypher. Cypher’s chilling in his control booth because he’s the Operator, right, he’s the guy the warriors call for extraction when they’re in the simulation itself. And he’s drinking, because shit, who wouldn’t.

  “He’s drinking, he’s watching the screens with the cascading green code, the stuff that builds the simulation, and he points to three of the screens. Blonde. Brunette. Redhead, he says to Neo. Tells him he doesn’t even see the code anymore. Throwaway line, really.

  “Then Cypher engages Neo on the whole messianic trip, negates it. Speaks truth. Calls it a mindfuck, and we know he’s right. Joe’s right. Sage nodding all around, let’s toast the mindfuck, Neo retreats to his bed and dreams, and Cypher goes back to his screens and then! Then! Next scene. Cut to Fancy Restaurant, Int. and there’s Cypher, sitting down to a delicious steak dinner with Agent Smith across the table from him. And he goes on about how he knows the steak isn’t real but it still tastes fucking amazing. Harps play in the background, Agent Smith smiles. Cypher’s wearing a nice suit, maybe a little sleazy, but, y’know, still nice. Fine white linens on the table, crystal stemware, subdued lighting, beautiful people, and that’s what he wants, Cypher. He wants back in, back into this place that, note, he’s already inside, at that moment.

  “And he wants to be important, he tells Smith. Cypher wants to be famous, an actor. An actor. Joe wants to be Joe. Joe Pantoliano. He’s painted as the betrayer, the Judas to Neo’s Christ. They come to an arrangement, they come to exactly that. Thirty pieces of silver exchanged. Standard interpretation, okay? Super clever, everyone gets a chuckle, and you can tell Pantoliano’s enjoying it. Okay. So what if he dies less than an hour later, as befits a Judas. We applaud, and we move on.

  “But later, in the second film, we learn that only the One, Neo, the Christ Messiah Buddha hybrid critter, only he can enter and exit the simulation at will. Recall that the Operators are required to jack a person into the simulation, and to pull them out. It’s a complex rig, too: crash couch, hefty straps for that industrial kink vibe, and of course the fucking giant metal spike they jam into the port at the base of your skull. It’s basically a two-person job...

  “So how does Cypher access the simulation?

  “He can do it because he’s the One, Den. It’s him. Not Keanu, bless him, but Joe. And he dies at the tip of a nifty lightning bolt generator wielded by Marcus Chong, an actor so irritating to the production cast and crew and the Siblings themselves that they killed off his character between the first and second film. Chong was not invited back. Career, done. Vanished. Why? He was irritating, and he wanted more money, a bigger role, and made verbal threats. Unprofessional. But Joe? Joe was dead. Anyway. Thus endeth the lesson.”

  “Really?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem like you.”

  “Yeah? All right, smart guy, how’s this instead?

  “None of them ever left the simulation. Ever. Not the superheroes, not the agents. Not the deified programs or the hardscrabble inhabitants of Zion. The blasted earth, the charcoal skies, all that grit and toxicity, the birthing fields, the machine utopia, and everything that led up to it, none of it was true. A shell game, only there’s no pebble beneath the shells and the shells aren’t real in the first place. All of it just another layer of skin on the stonefish. All right?

  “There endeth the lesson, Den. Right there.”

  The wind clawed over and into itself, feeding on itself with incredible appetite. We were pinned to the sketchy ground, clutching at the ideas of tree roots, bracing feet and knees on rocks made of dream. I heard Gregor shouting but couldn’t make out any of his words over the sound. The windy part of the day, my ass I recall thinking. This was a hurricane.

  Then came the thumping of their feet. The archons were moving past us, adding the deep bass drumming of soles on simulated soil to the windstorm. Screeching and hooting as well, screams of pleasure and triumph, and a kind of miserable wailing that carried with it an unsettling disingenuous quality. As if these beasts could ever be miserable. I didn’t dare open my eyes to see how close they were to our prone bodies. I was back in the farting tent with a whole mind and a decent knee again, and realized with a sob how far I’d come. How far I’d actually fallen. This was the basement of the world, the seeping cellar of reality. A place of mould, rot, and madness.

  I felt a hand on my lower back. Gregor was shaking me and speaking.

  “Open your eyes, Den. Come on.”

  I did, allowing a sliver of pink light through. Gregor’s Numpty Lite frothed and bucked as it resisted the passage of the archons but could not hold against their dominance: the world was embracing its full sensory load like a long-lost lover in their wake. I shook where I lay and watched their concrete slab feet pound the earth into wakefulness, Gregor’s voice almost ecstatic beside me with a roll call of the ridiculous names he’d assigned them. The Laird and Horvemoan were already ahead, warping through the consolidating trees and assuming their camouflage with distance. Then came Ol’ Dirty Bastard in a shuddering wavefront of stench. As You Know Bob followed, almost skipping, while Anal Andy shuffled by. A slimmer pair of feet came down on either side of my head.

  “Gregor?!”

  “Don’t fucking move.”

  It was all I could do not to jump out of my skin when the hot stream of liquid hit my back. It felt like a l
ance going through my guts, pinning me to the earth. Urine.

  “That’s Babayoko, Den.”

  Because of course it was. It was marking me. Later, I’d examine my clothes, the jacket, and the shirts, and find nothing there at all, no sign I’d been pissed on at all, no stain or residual smell. You know when you’ve been pissed on, though.

  Its business done, the feet of Babayoko moved on, and were replaced by others. Feet freshly formed and fizzing at their ragged edges. Two sets that burnished the ground before us with heat, identical in their imprints, simultaneous in their movements. Gregor named them as they passed, pulling nomenclature out of thin air, and I doubt I will ever hear a voice as pathetic, in the true sense of the word, as his at that moment.

  “Double Ramsey,” he said. “The Twins.”

  Named, Double Ramsey moved on and away. I looked up a little more as they did, and saw an archon that was two archons. A sharing of outlines, of essence. Then my view was blocked by the last of them. Legs like columns of negative light, crawling with filaments that became opaque and thick with blinding color. White hair. Muscle like coiled snakes.

  “Mandibole.” Gregor was weeping. “This one is called Mandibole.”

  The beast stepped forward until it stood in full view. Mandibole: a tower, a planet, a white hole as big as the world. It smiled at us, and from a place that was beginning to approximate the guts of the thing as it acclimated to reality, to the Stonefish, came its awful voice. And Mandibole’s voice was the voice of the earthquake, the voice of a god, and that god was great and known instantly as Pan, and the voice told us to run, to run for its pleasure.

  So, grateful and maddened and obedient, we ran.

  GREGOR ON THE FERMI PARADOX

  “I dunno, Gregor, I keep thinking there’s a big problem with your Stonefish.”

  “You don’t say! Well, I’m here to teach. What’s your ask.”

  “Space. Specifically, the outer type. And beyond.”

  “Ah. The stars, planets, gasses, galaxies. Clusters of galaxies. Superclusters. Laniakia. And so on? That space?”

  “That’s the one. The universe. How, given the Stonefish, do you account for the size, scope, and density of things beyond Earth? The variety, and the complexity? Why is it there at all? I mean, to me, it seems wasteful.”

  “Stick a pin in that variety item for a moment because we’ll come back to that after we talk waste. Den, it’s not waste. You can’t waste light. You know what the problem was with our economies in the last century? We insisted on making things out of stuff. That’s what we do, as a species, so we can hardly be blamed. Living on the crinkly fractal edge of novelty, of course we took the raw material of nature and converted it into toys pulled shiny and screaming from the primal world of forms! That shit sells! Of course we made things, things from stuff. We made so many things from stuff that we depleted the source of that stuff, and now we’re here, chilling with our sweet gear in the winter of the planet.

  “It wasn’t until we started to make things from light that the possibility of survival beyond the consequences of our own hubris arose, son. Still too late, natch, but at least it was something, right? Little ray of hope on the blood dim horizon? It costs to make things out of light, sure, energy has to be harvested somehow, but there are gentle ways to do that. Have you been upstream to the vortex turbine?”

  “No?”

  “Tusk had one installed. Easy to miss, but that stupid concrete pot generates upwards of ten megawatts a day. Turbine plus geothermal and we’re supplied with more than enough power here. Anyway. My point is, there’s always a cost to the making of things, but at least when you’re making those things from light, it’s less. The cost is less.”

  “But you’re saying it’s too late.”

  “Oh, far too late, and too little, yeah. We’re still incredibly fucked, son. When we pass from here or the archons go full Numpty on us, whichever comes first—and you know I’m betting on the latter!—whatever unlucky critter comes up to consciousness and industry after us is going to find itself similarly hooped due to lack of resources. Can’t use what’s not there. No, we have stripped this mudball clean, and gone miles deep to do it! Maybe beetles. Beetles, or some kind of burrowing mammal.”

  “I’m sorry, what? Beetles?”

  “The next sentient species. Again, I doubt it will ever happen, but I love to speculate. Back to space, though, and variety. What a term. There used to be a paper out of Hollywood that called itself that. Now those people could make things out of light! Gone now, once we figured out how to make things out of consciousness. But I miss movies. Sitting in some dark cavern with strangers, smell of butter-flavored petroleum syrup and stale popcorn, every eyeball soaking in light and the stars dancing and gurning and bleeding all over the screen? That’s heaven, right there, sitting at the right hand of god, watching the big show. Den, how many actual things do you own? Physical items, besides clothing?”

  “Maybe a dozen?”

  “Right? We used to own houses full of stuff. Houses, Den. Where’s it all now. Compost. Repurposed. Returned to the planet. Anything of value is in the noönet now. We stopped with the light, even, now it’s all made of mind. Or it always was, and we’ve only just caught up to that. Lessons. We can be taught!”

  “But that’s good. That needed to happen.”

  “Sure it did. Sure. We were too late to make any kind of real difference, but hey, points for the eleventh hour effort, yeah? Only they don’t award points for that kind of thing, do they.”

  “No. I guess they don’t. Gregor. Space?”

  “Right, right. I’ve been told it’s the place. My question for you, though...is it?”

  “The place?”

  “A place. Is it there. Is there anything actually up there.”

  “I don’t follow. I mean, I do, but that’s...that’s stupid, Gregor. The entire universe is up there.”

  “The entire universe, as you call it, is a lot of nothing, you know. Vast gulfs of emptiness and if the boffins are to be believed, emptier all the time as the thing expands and cools.”

  “Okay, but even so, there’s a lot of, you know, matter up there. In the nothing.”

  “That’s what our instruments tell us. Do you know how much actual energy from all that matter, the stars and nebulae and galaxies and I dunno, goddamn comets and random debris, explosions, implosions, collisions, do you know how much of that cosmic dance has actually deigned to grace our instruments, our dishes and radio telescopes and satellites? And I don’t mean over a single day, I mean for the hundred years and change we’ve had those instruments in place. How much.”

  “I really couldn’t say. I’d guess a lot.”

  “You’d guess a lot. A lot.”

  “You’re going to give me some vanishingly small number, aren’t you?”

  “If you’re going to build or grow or, I dunno, somehow trigger a simulation, make it out of actual stuff but also make sure it’s mostly empty, Den. The amount of energy that has drifted down from all that something floating in all that nothing to land on our sensors and give us a picture of the universe in which we find ourselves embedded could power your crèche for about a week. Just yours, understand. A single crèche. And that’s at the outside.”

  “You’re saying...wait, you’re saying it’s a, what? A screen? But that’s primitive. That’s like pinholes in the night sky. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Yup. Never said it wasn’t. But I don’t mean, as you say, that the stars are dots of light. Or at least, not merely dots of light. They may in fact be what they appear to be, what our eyes and our instruments tell us they are, but I will ask you to consider what our eyes are. Consider our instruments. Consider the phenomena of sight to begin with. Remember where we are, remember what it is that we’re embedded in.”

  “The Stonefish.”

  “The Stonefish. The skin of it. A simulation. A real simulation, as real as anything, to us. Their simulation, the archons, built up from their code, follo
wing their laws, following the First Law. We live here. In all the ways that count, we are the Stonefish, part and parcel, conditioned by and through the Stonefish. It doesn’t have to actually be complicated, the simulation, it only has to appear complicated to the entities trapped within it, grown inside it. We’re the part of the simulation that looks at the rest of the simulation and says, with wonder in our eyes, how glorious! how marvelous! how beyond anything we could conceive of or create! Hallelujah! Incidentally, speaking of whom, He was one of them, too.

  “So, outer space: is it there? That’s your question. But I say unto you, lift up your eyes to the heavens and see. And know that we cannot know what it is that we are looking at. Not really. The viewing modules are necessarily flawed. We look and we measure and we draw our conclusions and yes, for all we know there are black holes and supergiant stars and dark matter and horrifying voids a billion light years across and humming galaxies bunched like grapes on the vine. And it all checks out, right? All of it. It’s legit, it’s available to our instruments, our perception, it is what it is, but have you been there. Have any of us actually been there?”

  “Well. We got to the moon? And Tusk put those people on Mars.”

  “Uh huh. Tusk? So, wait, you mean my old boss Tusk? Aldo Tusk, the guy responsible for this place? That Tusk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did those poor people get back.”

  “No.”

  “Damn straight. Look, Den, I’m not saying there’s nothing out there at all. I’m not saying we’re living in the hollow centre of a giant cosmic marble and there’s nothing but a black eternity of solid iron beyond the inner wall. I’m not saying the night sky is merely spots of glowing mould on the living rock three hundred thousand clicks out.”