Unsong

by Scott Alexander

  She stared at me, a calculating stare.

  “…and to this very day, it is known as the Whaling Wall,” I finished, and both of us started giggling.

  “Wait,” said Weird Hair Girl. “Why did I think introducing the two of you would be a good idea? This is the worst thing that ever happened.”

  “And then Ahab died and went to Hell,” she added, “where there was much whaling and gnashing of teeth.”

  “But,” I said, “it was all in accordance with the whale of God.”

  “Wait,” said the blonde. “I’ve got one. Why was the sea so noisy after the destruction of Sennacherib’s army?”

  I thought for a second. Then I thought for another second. “I got nothing,” I said.

  “Because,” said the blonde girl, “the widows of Ashur were loud in their whale.”

  “WAIT NO THAT WAS IT! THAT WAS MY WHALE JOKE! I SWEAR TO GOD, THAT WAS MY WHALE JOKE!”

  “This was the biggest mistake of my life and I hope I die,” said Weird Hair Girl.

  II.

  I remember my first morning there, the morning it all came together. The girls finally dragged me out of bed and insisted on making me breakfast. Weird Hair Girl was named Erica. Girl Whom I Will Someday Marry was named Ana. Together they led me downstairs into an expansive dining room.

  “Welcome to Ithaca!” Ana told me as I said down and plunked my head on the table, still a little hung over.

  “You need food,” Erica stated, and disappeared into the kitchen to fetch me some. Ana went with her. They were whispering to one another. Giggles may have been involved.

  It was a big house, a little old but well-maintained. From one wall hung a sort of banner with a big Hebrew letter yud on it. Tenth letter of the alphabet, representing the tenth commandment, “Thou shalt not covet”, with the obvious implications for capitalism and wealth accumulation. The big yud was a Stevensite symbol. These were Stevensites. It fit.

  But I could do better than that. I turned my attention to the bookshelf on the far wall, tried to see what I could glean. They had the usual sci-fi/fantasy classics: Tolkien, Asimov, Salby. Then some meatier fare: Zayinty the economist, Chetlock the prognosticator, Tetkowsky the futurist, Yudka the novelist, good old Kaf ben Clifford. I recognized a few I’d seen before by their covers alone. Nachman Bernstein’s Divinity. Nachman Eretz’s Alphanomics. Menelaus Moleman’s Letter to the Open-Minded Atheist. Gebron and Eleazar’s Kabbalah: A Modern Approach. Ben Aharon’s Gematria Since Adam. Rachel Sephardi’s Arriving At Aleph. Rav Kurtzweil’s The Age Of Mechanized Spirituality. And…really? The collected works of Eliezer ben Moshe?!

  I stared at the shelf greedily. I didn’t have half of these. I hoped they weren’t too serious about the not coveting.

  It was only after finishing my scan of the books that I turned to the other possible source of information in the room.

  “Hi,” I said to the guy sitting at the end of the table. He was tall and looked like he worked out. “I’m Aaron Smith-Teller. Nice to meet you.”

  “Brian Young,” he said, barely looking up from his paper. “Welcome to Ithaca.”

  “So I’ve heard. This is some kind of group house?”

  “You could say that,” said Brian.

  “Brian’s the strong, silent type,” said Ana, returning from the kitchen with coffee. She poured me a mug. “It’s why he and Erica get along so well. He never says anything, she never shuts up. Yes, we’re a group house. Erica prefers the phrase ‘commune’, but Erica prefers lots of things.”

  “I’m standing right here, making your food!” Erica shouted from the kitchen.

  “So are you guys some kind of Stevensite group, or…” I started to ask. Ana put a finger to her mouth, and whispered “Shhhhhhhhh. She’ll hear you.”

  Erica came in bearing four plates of toast. “I’m glad you asked!” she said in an inappropriately chirpy voice, and picked Stevens’ The Temple And The Marketplace off the shelf. “Have you read this?”

  The early years after the discovery of the first Names had been a heady time, as would-be-wizards had learned the few known incantations and built exciting new technologies on top of them. The Luminous Name had been worked into various prayers and magic squares and configurations to produce lights of dizzying shapes and colors. Clever inventors in self-funded workshops had incorporated the Kinetic Name into all sorts of little gadgets and doodads. The best kabbalists had developed vast superstructures of prayers and made them available for free on the earliest computer networks to anyone who wanted to experiment.

  That ended with the founding of the great theonomic corporations. They gradually took over the applied kabbalah scene in the 80s; their grip tightened in the early 90s after the President and the Comet King worked together to create UNSONG. Suddenly every new Name had a copyright attached to it, and the hundreds of lines of prayers and invocations people used to control the Names and bend them to your will were proprietary material. The old workshops became less and less relevant; the old self-employed kabbalist geniuses were either picked up to serve as drones at the theonomics or turned into increasingly irrelevant bitter old men.

  It was in this atmosphere that Reverend Raymond E. Stevens of the Unitarian Church had written The Temple And The Marketplace. The book was two hundred fifty pages of sometimes excessively dense screeds, but it essentially argued that a whole host of Biblical commandments – most notably “thou shalt not covet” and “thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” – were best interpreted as describing the divine Names discovered after the sky cracked, prophetic injunctions intended to make sense only millennia after they were written. Taken together, these commandments formed a schematic for an ideal economy (the titular “Temple”) in which the wealth-creating powers of the kabbalah were shared by everyone. The modern world was ignoring God’s plan in favor of unrestricted capitalism (the titular “Marketplace”) and inviting terrible retribution upon themselves. Stevens saw himself as a modern-day Jeremiah, warning the Israelites to repent before they suffered the full force of God’s vengeance.

  Despite being by all accounts something of a crackpot (his explanation of the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple as occult references to economic parameters reminds me of Newton’s, only less lucid) he was in the right place at the right time. Stevenism spread among bitter old kabbalists, teenage Marxist punks, spiritual-but-not-religious hippies, and anyone who found themselves unexpectedly locked out of the new economy. It went from oddly specific theory to Generic Badge Of The Counterculture, and the same sort of people who spent the Sixties talking about “vibrations” without really knowing what they meant spent the Nineties talking about the secret meanings of weird Levitical commandments.

  “You guys are Unitarians?” I asked.

  Stevens had been a Unitarian minister, and his work had spread like wildfire across the Unitarian community. After President Cheney cracked down on the church itself in the early part of the new millennium, what was left of Unitarianism was almost entirely Stevensite, little religious communities built along the lines ordained by the Reverend’s books, singing the forbidden Names of God during services. It was part prayer, part act of civil disobedience, and part military training: people who really knew the Names tended to be bad people to mess with.

  “We’re the Unitarian hub,” said Erica. “For all of North San Jose. And I run the Bay Area Unitarian magazine. The Stevensite Standard. Listen!”

  She stood on a chair, and started giving what from then on I would always recognize as The Spiel. The Spiel was one of the few constants of life at Ithaca. Roommates would come and go, intellectual fads would burst onto the scene in glorious bloom before vanishing in a puff of general embarassment, but The Spiel remained. Erica could do it convincingly while sober but spectacularly when drunk. She had converted entire bars full of people to her particular brand of radical theological anarchism on several occasions. Over years of practice she had perfected it down to a two minute, seven second elevat
or pitch which she had so far recited in manners including: blind drunk, on one foot, driving a motorcycle, and while having sex with two men at the same time. The month I met her, she had been working on learning juggling, so she picked up three balls and began to orate:

  “God is born free, but everywhere is in chains! The Names, our birthright as children of Adam, the patrimony which should have ensured us an age of plenty like none other in human history, have been stolen from us by corporations and whored out to buy yachts for billionaires.

  “The Fertile Name brings forth grain from the earth, speeding the growth of crops by nearly half. Children in Ethiopia starve to death, and Ethiopian farmers cannot use the Fertile Name to grow the corn that would save them. Why not? Because Amalek holds the patent and demands $800 up front from any farmer who wants to take advantage of it.

  “The Purifying Name instantly kills eighteen species of harmful bacteria, including two that are resistant to all but the most toxic antibiotics. But two-thirds of American hospitals have no one licensed to use the Purifying Name. Why not? Because they can’t afford the licensing fees demanded by Gogmagog.

  “In the old days, we told ourselves that poverty was a fact of life. That there wasn’t enough food or medicine or clothing or housing to go around. Then it was true. Now it is false. To feed the hungry or heal the sick no longer requires scarce resources. It requires only a word. A word that the entire international system of governance – corporations, politicians, UNSONG – has united to prevent the needy from ever obtaining.

  “86% of known Names are held by seven big cor – damn!”

  Erica had dropped her balls. She picked them back up, then continued.

  “86% of known Names are held by seven big theonomic corporations. Microprosopus. Gogmagog. Amalek. Countenance. Tetragrammaton. ELeshon. And Serpens, the biggest, with $174 billion in assets. Its CEO has a net worth of $9 billion, five beach houses scattered across the Untied States, and her own private 12-seater jet.

  “When Marx heard of such injustices, he demanded we seize the means of production. But today the means of production aren’t factories to be seized by mobs with pitchforks. They’re Names, to be taken in spiritual struggle and spread around the world until the system is seen for the sham it really is and crumbles of its own accord. Thus William Blake:

  I will not cease from mental fight

  Nor let my sword sleep in my hand

  Till we have built Jerusalem

  In England’s green and pleasant land

  And the theonomic corporations will stop at nothing to thwart us,” Erica warned. “The klipot are…”

  “I know what they are,” I interrupted. “I was expelled from Stanford for publishing a method for breaking klipot.”

  Erica dropped her balls, then fell off her chair. “Name!” she shouted. “I knew you seemed familiar! I organized a protest for you!”

  Two years ago I’d been exactly where I wanted to be, a Stanford undergrad studying the applied kabbalah on a nice scholarship. I’d just finished a class on klipot and was playing around a bit – in the theoretical kabbalah, klipot are these sort of demonic scleroses that encrust the divine light and make it inaccessible, but in the applied kabbalah the word is used to describe cryptographic transformations of the Names of God that allow them to be used without revealing them to listeners. Imagine you’ve discovered a Name that lets you cure cancer, and you want to cure a customer’s cancer but don’t want them to learn the Name themselves so they can steal your business. Instead of speaking the Name aloud, you apply a cipher to it – if you want, change all the As to Es and all the Bs to Zs, so that ABBA becomes EZZE – and speak the cipher while holding the original fixed in your mind. The Name has the desired effect, and your ungrateful customer is left with nothing but the meaningless word “EZZE”, which absent the plaintext version is of no use to anybody.

  Problem is, all the Names follow certain numerological rules. The Maharaj Rankings are the most famous, but there are over a dozen. So by working backwards from a klipah it’s usually possible to narrow down the plaintext Name to a very small collection of possibilities, which you can then check by hand – or by mouth, as the case may be. You end up with a race between rightsholders of Names trying to develop better and better klipot, and everyone else trying to discover better and better ways of breaking them. Well, I joined Team Everyone Else in college and came up with a pretty nifty new algorithm for breaking NEHEMOTH, one of the big klipot used by the Gogmagog corporation, with about one percent as much hassle as anyone else had come up with. My advisor told me not to publish and I ignored him. Turned out giant evil corporations don’t like having their multi-billion dollar properties rendered useless. Nothing I’d done was illegal per se, but they put pressure on Stanford to expel me, expel me they did, and a few months later their Applied Kabbalah department had a new professorship endowed with Gogmagog money and I was broke and living with my mother. Not that I’m bitter.

  “Yeah,” I said half-heartedly. “Thanks.”

  “You!” said Erica. “You need to join us! You’re like, a real-life freedom fighter! A martyr! Like the Israelites at Masada! You fought the law!”

  “And the law won,” I said. “Did Ana tell you where she found me? An old Cash for Gold shop on Briar Street.”

  Erica was barely listening. “You’re a hero in the battle against tyranny. And a kabbalist. We need kabbalists. Right now Ana is leading the choir, but she’s an amateur. You’re a professional. You need to join us. Brian is moving out in a few weeks. There will be a room opening up.”

  I rolled my eyes at the “hero” part, then the “battle against tyranny part”, and a third time at me being a professional anything, until it looked like I had some kind of weird eye movement disorder. I stopped when I heard “room opening up.”

  “How much is rent?” I asked.

  “Oho,” said Erica, “suddenly, interest.”

  A brief flurry of awkward glances between Ana and Erica and occasionally Brian, who refused to return any of them and continued reading the paper. Finally Erica spoke.

  “Five hundred dollars a month,” she said.

  I stared her in the eyes. “What’s the catch?” This was the Bay Area. A rat-infested hovel went into the four digits.

  “Um,” said Ana. Erica finished her sentence. “Ana’s family is very wealthy and has kindly albeit unknowingly offered to subsidize the rest of us.”

  “Unknowingly?” I asked.

  “I’m a grad student at Stanford,” said Ana, “and I tell them I need the money for room and board.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Um. A few thousand.”

  “And they believe you?”

  “Well, it is the Bay Area.”

  She had a point. My mind added: beautiful and witty and rich.

  III.

  I remember the day I first saw Ana in her element.

  She was studying at Stanford. I’d checked Stanford when I was looking for her, but I’d checked the wrong place. She wasn’t studying the kabbalah per se. She was a grad student in philosophy. Her area was theodicy. The question of how a perfectly good God can allow a universe filled with so much that is evil. Who even studies theodicy anymore? After two thousand years of hand-wringing, what’s left to say?

  There must have been something, because journals kept publishing Ana’s work, and a few months before I met her she was named the Augustine Distinguished Scholar in Theodicy, apparently a big national honor that came with a heap of money. It was her passion, her great love, her reason for being. “Don’t you get it, Aaron?” she would say, animated almost to the point of mania. “We’re looking at all of this the wrong way. The Divine Names. The laws of physics. We’re asking ‘what’ when we should be asking ‘why’. Why did God create the universe the way He did? Why the Names? If we really understand God’s goodness, then we can predict everything. What will the stock market do next year? Whatever it’s best for it to do. Who will win the next Presi
dential election? Whichever candidate is better. If we really understood divine goodness, we would understand everything, past, present, and future.”

  I gingerly pointed out that the world was terrible.

  “That’s exactly the thing!” Ana said. “How do we square our knowledge that God wants as good a universe as possible with the terrible universe we ended up with? Square that circle, and literally everything else falls into place.”

  Every Sunday night, Erica hosted a dinner party. Every Sunday night, one guest was tasked with giving a presentation. Something they were interested in, something to keep us entertained while we waited for the food to be ready. A few weeks ago, Erica herself had talked about running the Standard and how she was going to get distribution networks going across the California Republic and maybe even into the Salish Free State. The week before, I’d talked about a new paper out of MIT expanding upon Rubenstein’s Sieve, one of the most important methods for narrowing down namespace. Now it was Ana’s turn, and of course she was going to talk about the Book of Job.

  The chairs were all full as usual. I recognized Bill Dodd. He’d been a physics grad student at Berkeley before ending as one of the washed-up scientists who seemed to be everywhere in the Bay these days, the type instantly recognizable by their tendency to respond to things which were none of their business with “As a physicist, I think…”

  I recognized Eliot “Eli” Foss. Calm, quiet Eliot – Erica had picked him up at a Unitarian meeting in Oakland, picked him up in both senses of the word – well, two of the three, she hadn’t literally lifted him. Rumor had it that he was actually religious instead of meta-ironically religious, but no one could tell for certain and the whole idea made us sort of uncomfortable.

  I recognized Ally Hu, who was smiling awkwardly and talking to Eliot in her crisp, overly-enunciated English. Her family had been bigwigs in the Harmonious Jade Dragon Empire before the latest round of purges. They’d fled to California and now they owned half of southern Santa Clara Valley. Ally had only been on this side of the world six or seven years but had already fallen in with a bad crowd – namely, us.