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Chapter 26
Ruth Deitch, renegade imagineer, lay with her Dreambox in her hideaway in Hilford Abbots, Cambridgeshire, and calmed down and considered. Clearly, another approach was called for. But where to begin? She had run out of approaches, and very soon now some member of the Zeller team over at Palo Alto, one of her ex-colleagues at ONTOTECH, would finally hit the jackpot. And then, an ontotechnological Paradise? Or the death of meaning? The death of value? Morality? Humanity? Absolute power universally available. Science's ultimate, unspoken goal. Not just understanding but power. The power to do anything. To change even the most fundamental laws of existence, of logic, of thermodynamics. Any or all of the laws of the omniverse. Absolutely everything up for grabs.
The omniverse needed help. The omniverse needed saving. Meaning had to be preserved; what else could be more precious? But she, Ruth Deitch, had failed properly to invoke the Goddess who could accomplish all of that, and so now she would have to try all over again. Her imagination, that mysterious faculty by which she earned her living, but which was, ultimately, outside of her conscious control, would just have to do better next time.
Ruth lay and agonized.
She was sabotaging her own efforts with her Paulie Rayle fixation. But there, that was the path her imagination had chosen. The route of least emotional resistance, and there was no time to stop and get her head straightened out. The world might end at any moment.
There was nothing else for it but to make another attempt. And hope and pray. There was no controlling the Berkeley Effect. The best you could do was influence it to some extent. Once triggered on behalf of the box user, the Effect went about its business in such a curiously intricate fashion, forced into the most tortuous machinations by the vagaries of the psyche in whose service it functioned.
Her head was giving her hell. The PhantAssist chip didn't agree with her; brain implants didn't sit well with anyone, truth be told. An incredibly high percentage of people had them taken back out after less than a week. Granted, most of those were your everyday simple old Mindseyes, but the cerebral cortex really didn't take kindly to any form of electraugmentation. Commensality had vastly improved since the earliest days, but still you got headaches, horrible ones that no drugs could damp down. Still, it was supposed to be worth it. The PhantAssist was meant to to help you focus the full force of your imagination upon one point, a single, elementary conceptual monad: ontosupplantation. The dreaming of a metadream that would become the Real World.
The PhantAssist was, Ruth reflected, quite a biotechnical achievement—two months from raw idea to implantation—even if six of the ten ONTOTECH imagineers who had volunteered for the embed had since succumbed to infarcts and haemorrhages. And of the other four, well, survival, hope's preservation, was more or less their sole attainment thus far.
From time to time Ruth harboured suspicions that the whole thing was one big placebo con trick, that the PhantAssists were mere articles of faith. And the Dreambox itself, too, why not? Sexily moulded plastic, flashing lights, a massive marketing campaign. What if that were the whole of it?
Later, with Kali and Bolo the sheepdog, Ruth went for a walk by the river. Though cold, it was a clear, bright day, the grass crisp and glinting and silvery. As she walked, Ruth reviewed this latest boxtrip, mused over every detail she could recall.
The Effect had this time chosen, with its customary obliquity, to operate through Janko Brauch. Slyly, it had farmed out a large portion of her imaginatory requirements, annexing Brauch's psyche as her subsidiary. The singer had dreamt her second level for her, resurrecting Paul and Frances Rayle. Both of them, as always, not just Paulie. So, Ruth wondered, could she congratulate herself upon her fundamental generosity of spirit in not having eliminated Frances, her rival for Paulie's affections? But she was well aware that Frances's presence had been demanded by her own self-doubts, inferiority feelings; fears that a deceased rival, a lost love, might prove a greater threat; plus desire for the mother she had never known, the woman who had died at her birth.
Evincing all its usual flair for economy and integration, the Berkeley Effect had chosen Frances as the embodiment of SAGRADA. And perhaps, Ruth conjectured, that was what had fucked things up: her conflicting emotions toward the Mother/Rival/Goddess figure. Love and fear.
SAGRADA.
Ruth shuddered at the memory of coming upon the word, her mother's name, glimpsed on the street in Seville. The word's true import had been occluded by her obsession with saving Paulie. The unconscious mind decides its own priorities, what to elevate, what to obscure for some higher end. Sometimes its choices are at one with conscious desires. For instance, UMS, Universal Male Sterility, had not come to pass in her boxworld.
Undeniably, though, in one respect at least, the PhantAssist was functioning as intended: Ruth's boxself, her sanctuary self, had once again assumed the form of that earthy, forthright, somewhat irascible country girl with her woodworker's hands and distaste for the newfangled: Ruth Deitch pared down, psychologically, almost to the bone, stripped to the quiddity, reduced to basics so as to safeguard her boxworld from the disruptive contradictions inherent in a full, rich human personality with all of its dissonant aspects. In theory this left the box user better able to train all her energies upon ontosupplantation, her essential self freed, her problematic complexities siphoned off into a Displacement Persona. In this case the DP had been Processia Roffey, an ungrounded humiliant created with the help of the PhantAssist specifically as a vessel for those elements of Ruth Deitch that made her mind too chaotic a place for any serious imaginatory toil. One such job was the absorption by the DP of Ruth's bitter hatred of Janko Brauch, and its transmutation into a more helpful affinity.
And what, Ruth wondered wryly, if I too am in truth ungrounded? What if Ruth Deitch is merely another Displacement Persona, a repository for the spare constituents of some greater, more complex consciousness? Seeing as I am, even here, still no more than a humiliant. Seeing as this world, even this world, is not Groundworld.
What was it now, almost five months? The split, the precise point in time at which this boxworld had emerged into being, could be traced back to the beginning of last October, when Dreamboxes had been on the market only a matter of weeks. October. Which made Kali a less-than-real baby born to a less-than-real mother in a less-than-real world. And yet, what could possibly be more real than the agony of childbirth?
Prior to October, worldwide reports of inexplicable phenomena had been in a slow, steady post-millennial decline. By November, a sudden sharp rise had been noted. At present, the media were swamped with strange stories: the ever-increasing ranks of Sick Nick copycats committing real murders, ordinary people forced suddenly to copulate with strangers, behaving just like digital images pornographized by erotoroutines, odd little bits and pieces of the environment temporarily vanishing. What could barely, nowadays, still be called the general public—a more accurate term would be ‘aggregated private'—preferred to put it all down to the psychological fallout of widespread box addiction. Surely, people reasoned, only cranks, Dreambox junkies, would keep seeing all about them signs that this world was not the genuine, real, solid, ultimate world it had heretofore been taken to be? Life, pseudolife, went on pretty much as normal. For now.
And yet, even if you happened to be in the business, so to speak, even if you were a professional imagineer, a person of uncommon imaginatory prowess, with a PhantAssist embedded in your brain, and you accepted your own subrealitude for the fact it indubitably was, you were no less prone to the psychic toll this grim knowledge exacted than were those ordinary box freaks who had put two and two together.
At least, Ruth allowed, some slight comfort could be gleaned from the Palo Alto team's apparent failure to concretize the concept of ontotechnology. And yet, at the same time one had to bear in mind, paradoxically, that if ontotechnology could exist, then it must exist already. If at some future moment
in time the Palo Alto team succeeded, the result would be retrotemporal.
And here was the point at which human imagination faltered and failed. Ontotechnology—total, godlike power over creation, over existence itself, even over contradiction and antinomy—absolute power over everything. Erland Zeller had wanted to see if a sufficiently clear, adequately rigorous conceptualization of this most outrageous of human dreams might be reified, brought under the Berkeley Effect, by sheer force of imagination. To secularize St. Anselm's argument: ontotechnology would, by its very definition, make the boxworld within which the concept was actualized into the realest of all worlds—the Grundwelt. As Zeller had put it, “The omniverse couldn't give a damn what we do to it, or with it. Everything is permitted.” The hard part was getting the concept to cohere strongly enough to become Berkeley-amenable.
Like some kids’ game, Ruth thought.
The shrewdest of children would know just what to ask of any genie who offered to grant them three wishes: their very first wish would be for an infinite supply of wishes. Ontotechnology promised even more: wishes without number for all. A more respectable redescription of magic.
Yet was SAGRADA any less of a challenge?
She would just have to try again. And again. And again. How many times already had she tried, tried and failed? As with all of Zeller's Palo Alto people, she went into her boxdreams undethanatized—Zeller had suspected that dethan drugs blunted the imagination—and so, there was nothing to prevent her trips from turning into nightmares.
But really, Ruth Deitch knew, the simple fact was that she could not invoke the Goddess because she had insufficient faith. She liked to think that the Goddess existed, but that was as far as it went. Not enough faith, nor adequate imagination. Her heart was elsewhere, bound up with Kali and Paulie and her desire for more children. Perhaps if she had not been wracked with guilt, the guilt of constantly judging herself a poor mother. Perhaps if she hadn't been allergic to maternosuppressors.
She wasn't the right person to be doing this. It needed someone less fucked.
And besides, what was so bad about ontotechnology? If limitless power would become available to absolutely everyone, what was there to fear? How could it possibly be a bad thing?
That was the trouble, a part of her actively wanted to see ontotech made real, felt sure that ontotech would give her, along with everyone else, all that she had ever desired. Kali would grow up not in a grim, hard world, but in Heaven.
But is that, Ruth wondered, what I truly believe?
When it came down to it, she couldn't truly believe anything about anything. True belief she found an impossibility, being a child of her time.
She would rest, and then she would dream again. Because of Kali. The Goddess had to be invoked, and would mend the split with Groundworld, and would put everything right, and save them all, because otherwise what would happen to Kali, poor little Kali?
Ruth was crying, now, walking along by the river with tears in her eyes.
Greed had made the world unreal. The Dreambox had been rushed out onto the market before anyone properly understood how it worked, what it actually did. Technology had got the world into this mess, and it was going to take more than technology, even technology taken to its ultimate, from the physical realm into the metaphysical, to get them out.
ONTOTECH versus SAGRADA.
But how could you coolly evaluate, judge between two things you found equally hard to comprehend, which left the imagination reeling? ONTOTECH's answer simply felt wrong, whereas SAGRADA felt right. That was why Ruth had quit ONTOTECH, left her job as an imagineer with the Zeller team at Palo Alto and come here to this quiet little village in order to embark upon an alternative scheme for reincorporating this subreal world, this errant offshoot, into Groundworld.
Kali stank. She needed changing.
Ruth turned and headed back toward the cottage. It was so difficult to keep in mind that even this world was not the true one, merely a copy, and she and Kali and, with one exception, every other person were all humiliants in someone's boxworld. But it was no use; you couldn't feel the truth of it in your bones. It was far too counter-intuitive. Unless you had personally undergone an experience that led you to question your own realitude, you could only accept the situation on an intellectual level; much as, in Groundworld, you had to make a mental effort to grasp that you and everyone else were hurtling through space on the surface of a giant rotating ball. Were she to go out and lose herself in the frantic mad rush that was, for most people, everyday life, the burdensome knowledge of her true ontostatus would soon slip away. And, in a sense, that would be merciful. But respite, as Ruth well knew, could only be temporary. Before too long this world, this disintegrating boxworld, would show itself to be ersatz, illusory.
Ruth felt anger. Terrible rage. She hugged Kali close in the sling. Okay, so there was no reason to believe that there was not still a Groundworld in existence, a Groundworld that included their own groundselves, their true selves, alive and well. But how could it possibly be that Kali, this dear warm little thing, was merely a copy of her real, true, genuine baby daughter? That there were millions, literally millions, of such copies, copies of everyone, ready to spring to pseudolife in any one of millions of coexistent boxworlds? Was there any comfort to be derived from the knowledge that she herself, this particular consciousness, this particular Ruth Deitch, was merely one of millions of sentient Ruth Deitch copies, versions, simulacra?
I'm insane, she thought.
I shouldn't, by rights, be in charge of a baby. Maybe that thing stuck in my skull isn't really what I think it is. Maybe it's a sanity chip, installed in accordance with the law to make sure that my maternal instincts don't get warped like everything else inside this fucked-up head of mine, a strict precondition of my being allowed to keep Kali. Maybe this is one of several little intimations of the truth that, thanks to my sorry mental state, get no further than fleeting suspicions. Could it not be that this is the way things really are?
She was, after all, recovering from a breakdown. The breakdown brought on by her work at ONTOTECH, brought on by the irruption into her life of the Goddess who had made it clear to Ruth Deitch that ontotechnology was not the route to salvation. Who had offered SAGRADA as another way. A better way. The only way.
Sane or insane, she had got pissed off with Zeller. He had rejected SAGRADA out of hand, ordering everyone to concentrate instead upon his own pet obsession, ontotechnology. She had tried her best to go along with him, and an obedient, dutiful part of herself had been trying still, via the medium of poor Paulie Rayle, even after she had quit Zeller's team and gone to earth at the behest of the Goddess.
With a loud, unmistakable Bphrrrurrrpppppp! Kali added to the contents of her nappy, then immediately started wriggling in discomfort. Ruth took the baby into the bedroom to change her.
And found Paulie on the bed, hooked up to the Dreambox.
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Chapter 27
Your world was somewhat less than real, and so were you, but there you were, still pitifully vulnerable to nausea, still puking up your guts, responding to stress, extreme stress, in the same old far-from-pleasant human fashion, so faithfully had you been counterfeited. There you were, sick stomach, loose bowels, even though you only quasexisted by the ontological standards of Groundworld.
Paulie emerged from the bathroom to find Ruth sitting in the rocking chair, singing softly to Kali as, her sweater hiked up awkwardly, she breastfed the baby in the candlelight.
“Better?” she asked with tenderness.
He nodded.
He was more than a little frightened of this weird new Ruth who suddenly knew fully as much as he himself did about ontology, technology, the works. This Ruth Deitch who was too good to be true. This awesome new brand of GroundRuth.
For what else could this be but his own boxworld? Who else would have conjured up this augmented, supercompatible Ruth who was the old Ruth
still but much more besides?
“Here.” She held out a glass.
Paulie took it. Water. “Thanks.” He sipped.
“I'm just as bewildered as you are,” Ruth confessed.
It would take some getting used to, the change in her voice. The enriched timbre. This eerie new level of refinement, like she'd been attending elocution classes.
As though able to read his mind—such an ability on her part should not have surprised him, what with everything else—Ruth said, “I know I'm not ... how you're used to having me be. But if you could manage to think of me as a more complete version of myself...."
“I can barely manage to think at all."
Ruth smiled.
There was no physical change; she was no different, no less or more beautiful. And yet, she had taken on something of Frances, in her way of looking at him, of speaking to him, of breaking out into a knowing smile. And, incredibly, something about her now even reminded him of Processia Roffey.
So was that what she was, a composite pieced together for his delectation? Had he arrived at the point in his boxlife where his imagination finally felt safe to ‘improve upon’ his beloved, to draft in additional elements ransacked from others who had happened to catch his eye? In particular, his ex-wife.
“How are you feeling now?” Ruth asked.
“How do you imagine?” His response had come out gruff. He hadn't intended it to. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap.” He sipped again at the water. “How's Kali?"
“She's fine."
“So we're agreed that..."
“...that this is a boxworld? Mine? Yours? Someone else's?” Ruth stroked Kali's tiny wispy head. “No doubt you're of the opinion that it's your own?"
He shrugged.
Before he had vomited up his guts, she had been telling him all sorts of stuff, this new Ruth, this latest quasincarnation served up by his psyche. One moment he had been—what word could describe the experience?—reduced to a hollow jelly mould, yet still sentient; and then suddenly here he was again, being fetched out by his timer and wondering why the fuck his dethan gear hadn't kicked in when it was needed. How much more of this crap could he take? Was this the lot of every Dreambox junkie, this subtle psychotorture?
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