Unsong

by Scott Alexander

  I spent the BART ride home leafing through the book. I read about Teller’s invention of the bomb. I mused over his retreat into an almost fanatical patriotism – self-justification? A patch over the horror of what he had done? I learned about his war against communist sympathizers in the physics community. And I read through one of his interviews, where someone asked him about being “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb”:

  REPORTER: “Is ‘father’ an appropriate label?”

  TELLER: “Well, I made some essential contributions.”

  I couldn’t help imagining the same exchange an hour earlier, back at the Burger King. “Is ‘father’ an appropriate label?” I would ask. “Well,” he would tell me, “I made some essential contributions.” So much for Adrian Teller, and so much for my heritage.

  More interesting was the poem. My great-uncle had written a traditional kabbalistic alphabet poem. I don’t think he did it on purpose, I don’t think he knew he was working in a genre beloved by sages for centuries, I think he just sat down one day and thought it would be funny to write a poem on the different alphabet letters. It started:

  A stands for atom; it is so small

  No one has ever seen it at all.

  B stands for bombs; now the bombs are much bigger.

  So, brother, do not be too fast on the trigger.

  Then the book – the nerve of it – moves on! As if there was something more important than my great-uncle’s correspondences between the letters of the alphabet to the aspects of the destruction he had unleashed. Oppenheimer might have been a Hindu heathen, but Teller must have been, deep down, a kabbalist. Since then I’ve searched high and low, but I have only been able to find two more of his couplets.

  H has become a most ominous letter;

  It means something bigger, if not something better.

  S stands for secret — you’ll keep it forever

  Provided there’s nobody else who is clever.

  I obsessed over these when I was younger. Part of me thought they were secret messages to me. Part of me still does. The reference to “brother” on the B, for example – his brother was my grandfather. Don’t tell me that’s a coincidence. Nothing is ever a coincidence.

  “What are you thinking, Aaron?” The telepathy was weak – Ana had never been able to follow when I started brooding.

  “S is for secret,” I said. “You’ll keep it forever. Provided there’s nobody else who is clever.”

  “That’s such an Aaron thing to say,” she said. I don’t know if she was thinking of my cryptography work, or just accusing me of always thinking I was the only clever person around.

  “You think so?” I asked. “It’s actually from my great-uncle. Maybe everyone who told me to grow up to be just like him got their wish after all.”

  “Aaron,” said Ana. “I like you, but you’re not the kind of person I want to see inventing doomsday devices.”

  We didn’t even need the mind-link for this one. Obvious response was obvious. What did she think we were doing?

  “So,” asked Ana. “If you’re going to be the new Comet King, does that mean you’re going to go declare war against Hell, kill Thamiel, and save humanity?”

  “Yeah,” I said, although I hadn’t thought much about it. It did seem like the right thing to do, although I remembered reading something about how Thamiel was a facet of God and couldn’t actually be killed. I figured a new Comet King would part that sea when he came to it.

  “Oh,” said Ana.

  “What about you?” I asked. “You know, the Comet King’s wife was…”

  “I’m not your wife,” said Ana. “The whole marriage ritual was a test. I’m glad we did it. It’s interesting. But I’m not your girlfriend and I’m not your wife.”

  “Gah, I didn’t mean – ”

  “But to answer your question,” Ana said, “I don’t know.”

  I waited.

  “Theodicy…is really hard. I didn’t expect to run into practical applications this soon. There’s lots of evil in the world, and everyone wants to run out and fix it, in fact there’s this immense moral pressure to run out and fix it, but whenever someone tries, something goes horribly wrong. I mean, that’s what Hitler tried to do, and the Communists. Trying to fix the world, any more than just the boring kind of fixing the world where you hold a bake sale to support your local school – that’s hubris. But refusing to do that, when you know people are starving and dying all around you – that’s monstrous. So which are we? Monstrous or arrogant?”

  “Me?” I asked. “Arrogant. All the way.”

  “And I understand the impulse. It’s tempting to run out there and play Joan of Arc – ”

  “Jonah whale,” I corrected. “Noah ark.”

  ” – but I’ve read enough history to know how that ends. So to answer your question – what do I want to do with this discovery? I think I want to do experimental theodicy. I want to know why God created a universe filled with so much evil. So I guess we can try to…gradually start removing evil from the universe. Then if something goes wrong, that was probably the thing God was worried about.”

  I blinked. That was kind of terrifying even by my standards.

  “I don’t think it’ll come to that,” said Ana, still looking serious. “I think we’ll reach some point, and then God will intervene. I want to see what that point is. How far we’re allowed to push before our plans start mysteriously failing and any further efforts are to no avail – ”

  “Noah ark,” I corrected. “Jonah whale. I thought we just went over this.”

  Ana swatted me. I dodged.

  “What’s the chance that either of us is getting back to sleep tonight?” she asked.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said. “But I’m going to Bill Dodd’s house.”

  “What?”

  It was, I had realized, the Comet King thing to do. I’d got proof of concept that our Name generation plan worked. The next step was to get more computers. Llull only worked on Apples. Eventually we’d have enough money to hire someone to make a Windows port, but for now we were limited. Ana and Erica had Windows machines. But Bill had been boasting of his new computer incessantly for the past couple of weeks. It was expensive. It was lightweight. It was blindingly fast. And it was an Apple. I was going to convince him to let me borrow it. I wasn’t sure how. But I was.

  “I,” said Ana, “will hold down the fort.” She climbed back into bed. “You’re going to either need the Wakening Name or a lot of coffee tomorrow.”

  “You really think I’m going to work tomorrow?” I asked. “Besides, do you think the Comet King would have delayed one of his plans for the salvation of the world just because he expected to be tired the next day?”

  “God, Aaron, you’re not the euphemism Comet King. You are being way too gung ho about all of this.”

  Okay. But I was descended from the guy who invented the hydrogen bomb. Thinking through the implications of our discoveries was not exactly a family strong point. And the Comet King hadn’t been wishy-washy. He hadn’t been filled with self-doubt. They say that whenever someone asked the Comet King why he took the weight of the whole world on his shoulders, he’d just said “Somebody has to and no one else will.”

  Was I arrogant to even make the comparison? Maybe. But I had crossed out of the realm of normal human life the moment I heard the Vital Name and realized it was a shortcut to omnipotence. Where I stood now there was no model, no track to follow, save one. Only one person had ever had access to the sheer volume of Names I was going to have, ever stood alone and seen the future of humanity stretch out before him, malleable for the shaping. Well, what had happened to him was better left unsaid. But now there was another chance.

  “I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” I told Ana, and then I strode out alone into the cold night air.

  Chapter 7: The Perishing Vegetable Memory

  Sleep like nothing is watching. Gaze at the stars like it will never hurt.

  — Steven Kaas
>
  Early morning, May 11, 2017

  San Jose

  My watch read 5 AM. Bill Dodd lived an hour’s walk away, close to the weird morass of swamps and mud flats that passed for the San Francisco Bay in this area. He woke up around six and left at seven for some tutoring job up in the North Bay. I figured by the time I got to his home, it would be just about morning and I could catch him while he was getting ready.

  The streets were deserted, the houses dark. The cracks in the sky were barely visible through the hazy glow of the Silicon Valley megalopolis’ united streetlamps. I could see a few stars.

  There was a time when the stars had meant something. Blake thought they were angels. Byron called them the “poetry of Heaven”. The march of science transformed but did not lessen them. They became burning suns trillions of miles away, around which humankind might one day find new worlds to colonize.

  Of all the scientists, only Enrico Fermi had come close to the truth, and in the end even he had recoiled from it.

  One day back in the 50s, Fermi was having lunch out with my great-uncle out in Los Alamos, and the topic of conversation turned to where all the aliens were.

  If there were truly billions of stars with billions of planets, and the Universe was billions of years old, then there had been ample opportunities for life to evolve on other worlds. Earth’s sun was a cosmic infant – other stars were incalculably older. Why in those billions of years had their civilizations not overtaken us, reached and colonized Earth just as Earthly civilizations had reached and colonized their more isolated neighbors?

  Maybe life was incalculably rare, a spectacular fluke? Nonsense; even in those days scientists knew that if they stuck hydrocarbons in a jar and shook really hard, they’d get some very biological-looking compounds. Maybe it was multicellular life that was the bottleneck? Unlikely – it evolved three separate times on Earth alone. Sapience? Dolphins are practically sapient, so it must also be as common as dirt. Civilization? Developed separately in the Near East, China, Mexico, Peru, et cetera et cetera. Space travel? You’re trying to tell me that of a billion civilizations on a billion worlds over a billion years, not one would think of taking a really big rocket and pointing it up?

  Fermi crunched various numbers and found that even under the most conservative assumptions the Earth should have been visited by just about a zillion extraterrestrial civilizations, instead of the zero that humans actually observed. He figured there must be some unseen flaw in his calculations, and it bothered him a little for the rest of his life.

  He could have avoided a lot of anguish if he had just followed the data to their obvious conclusion and admitted the stars probably didn’t exist.

  Then maybe things would have turned out differently. People respected Fermi – always a good idea to respect the guy who invents the atomic bomb, just in case he invents something else. They might have listened to him. The Space Age might have become more subdued. They might have wondered whether whatever was up there, whatever wanted people to think there were stars and was powerful enough to enforce the illusion – might be best left alone.

  But humans can’t leave well enough alone, so we got in the Space Race, tried to send Apollo 8 to the moon, crashed into the crystal sphere surrounding the world, and broke a huge celestial machine belonging to the archangel Uriel that bound reality by mathematical laws. It turned out keeping reality bound by mathematical laws was a useful hack preventing the Devil from existing. Break the machinery, and along with the Names of God and placebomancy and other nice things we got the Devil back. We’d flailed around like headless chickens for a while until the Comet King had come along and tried to organize a coordinated response. Now we were back to the headless chicken thing.

  A car sped down the street, the way people speed at five AM when they know no one is around to stand in their way, the way assholes speed when they don’t care how much noise they make on a residential street when people are trying to sleep. I stepped out of the way just in time.

  In a way we were lucky. Reality was still mostly law-bound, because Uriel was burning through his reserves of mystical energy to keep the celestial machinery working. You can still run a car on internal combustion, if for some reason you don’t trust the Motive Name. You can still usually use electronics to run a computer, as long you don’t overdo it and Uriel isn’t having one of his periodic fits.

  But once there had been a time when we had looked up at the stars and thought “Yeah, we’ll go there someday.” That dream was dead. Not just because there were no stars. But because the idea that Science could do anything, that it was this genie humankind could command and turn to our most fantastic whims, was gone. If we were lucky we could keep the power grid and the Internet running, but the thought of building our way into a chrome-and-plasma future of limitless possibility had passed away sometime during the seventies. Now we just looked for useful Names of God and hoped Uriel kept Science from failing too spectacularly until we got ourselves killed by something else.

  It was getting light by the time I reached the apartment and a half-dressed Bill let me in. The “what are you doing up so early and in my house” was so obvious it could be left unspoken, so it was.

  “Hey Bill,” I said, plopping myself down on the couch. It was probably some kind of faux pas, but in my defense I’d been walking an hour. “Ana and I were wondering if we could borrow your gaming computer.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “We’ve got this really interesting search function going on,” I said, “trying to match the fractal patterns in the Song of Songs to paleoclimate data. I know it’s a little weird, but we’ve actually got some good preliminary results, and I think we’d be able to finish in a couple of days if we had some more processing power, and you keep talking about how impressive your new Mac is, so I was hoping…”

  “Why would the Song of Songs have fractal patterns?” Bill asked me.

  I had forgotten the most important thing about Bill, which was that he liked to think he was smarter than everybody else, and would pretend to know more than you about everything. Problem is, I was making this all up myself, so on the off chance he did know something, it was going to very quickly become clear that I didn’t.

  “It’s the Song of Songs,” I said. “Of course it has fractal patterns. In fact – ” I decided to go for broke, “I think there may be multiple levels of patterns in there. Songs of songs of songs.”

  “That’s not what Song of Songs means!” Dodd objected. “Hebrew uses ‘of’ as an intensifier. Like ‘King of Kings’ or ‘Holy of Holies’!”

  “But consider,” I said, “the words of Rabbi Ezra Tzion, who said…

  Then I started speaking Aramaic.

  Around 200 BC the Aramaic language started catching on in Israel and most people switched from Biblical Hebrew to the new tongue. Some people started praying in Aramaic, or trying to translate the Torah. The rabbis, who wanted to protect the sacred language at all costs, waged a passionate campaign against Aramaic penetrating into the liturgy, and in the midst of their zeal, they might have kind of told the populace that they had to pray in Hebrew because the angels don’t understand Aramaic. Some people wrote this down, one thing led to another, and it became part of the Talmud. Have I mentioned that the Talmud is kind of crazy?

  Couple of centuries later, the Romans destroy Jerusalem, the Jews are scattered to the seventy nations of the world, and now they’re speaking all of these foreign languages like Yiddish and Arabic and Ladino. They don’t know a word of Hebrew, but they still want to pray. The rabbis want to let them, but there’s this old ruling standing in the way, saying that you should pray in Hebrew because the angels don’t understand Aramaic.

  So the rabbis declare that actually, the angels understand every language except Aramaic. This actually happened.

  And everyone thought it was a joke, but then the sky shattered and we met the angels, and by golly they spoke every language from Albanian to Zulu, but Aramaic was nonsense to them
. They couldn’t learn it no matter how hard they tried. It was some kind of fixed mental blind spot. Why did the rabbis’ weird ad hoc decision so perfectly correspond to reality? I don’t know. Nothing is ever a coincidence.

  But perhaps there are things humans were not meant to know. And when people started asking the angels – was Jesus Son of God? Was he the Messiah? – the angels answered – darned if we know. We couldn’t understand a word he was saying.

  One night, Ana and I were thinking thoughts at each other – gossiping about Bill, actually, since he’d just made a hilariously ill-fated attempt to seduce Erica – and Ana started feeling guilty, because gossiping was a sin.

  I asked how anyone would find out we were gossiping, when we were doing it telepathically, and there were no other telepaths in the world – some said the Comet King had been able to read minds, but he was dead – and she said that we didn’t know anything about kabbalistic marriage, maybe the angels could listen in on us or something.

  This was a pretty reasonable concern. Somebody had added that section to the Bible, the one in John that Ana had taken SCABMOM out of, and angels sounded like the sort of entities who had the power to edit the Bible. For all we knew, Heaven was wiretapping our private channel. So we decided to learn Aramaic, so that we could gossip as much as we wanted and the angels couldn’t listen in.

  Neither of us was very good at it yet, but that didn’t matter, because I was saying the practice sentences from “Aramaic Made Easy: A Beginner’s Guide.”

  “The dog is in the house,” I told Dodd in the cadences of first century Judea. “The dog is big and brown. Simeon is going to the synagogue. The dog is not going to the synagogue.”

  Bill Dodd watched me intently as I spoke, wrinkles forming on his face. He had only two choices – accept what I had said as accurate, or admit he didn’t understand Aramaic and therefore did not know everything. I could see the wheels turning in his mind.