Unsong

by Scott Alexander

  John was on that spark. They’d arrived just in time. His breathing was getting shallow, and he didn’t seem like he had much time left. And it had been only fifteen minutes to launch, and they’d had to pay extra to delay the countdown a few minutes to get the old priest on board. But the deed had been done, and the dying body of the old man was dutifully loaded on board the tiny capsule and flung into the noonday sun.

  They’d stayed on land just long enough to place a call to one of James’ contacts in New York, telling them to advertise as quickly as possible for a replacement priest and a replacement placebomancer. The plan was to speed to New York City just long enough to get two new crew aboard the ship, then head to Fire Island where the divine boat of Metatron, emanation of God, was due to appear at sunset. The contact had demanded an outrageous price, then said he would work something out. With no time to lose, they’d gotten back on the yacht and headed out.

  The red sail fluttered in the wind, Ana kept the orange going, Tomas still sang to the green, and Amoxiel stayed in back with the purple. He was running low on holy water, but there would be potables enough once they reached New York. The priestly and placebomantic sails hung limp in mourning for their lost keepers, and the black sail as always stood alone and cryptic on the aft.

  “I’m not sure what the proper etiquette is,” Tomas told Ana. They were standing together on the port deck, watching the Virgin rocket disappear into the evening sky. “I feel like I should say something, but it’s not a funeral. Nobody’s dead yet.”

  “Tell me about John,” said Ana. “How did you meet?”

  “It was about three months after we took Not A Metaphor,” Tomas told her. “In those days she was still All Your Heart. We only had four sails working then – just like now – and the Captain told us we needed a priest. When we were in Vancouver on a chase he went ashore and called up a friend who he said would meet us next time we got to San Francisco. A week later we sailed down California and John was waiting for us. A good man. Always did his share. I’m Catholic myself, and he always took time to listen to my confession. Though I get the impression he was kind of an unorthodox sort of priest.”

  “And then, when did you meet the Captain?”

  “Him? That was in Puerto Penasco that first night. The Other King had invaded the whole Southwest and just reached the Sea of Cortez. I was tending my family’s bar, and there he was, drunk as a skunk, saying he’d been on the Not A Metaphor during its maiden voyage and he was going to help us steal the ship. James was an officer, and he and his men were interested, and the rest is history. Things were bad in those days; we were willing to take any way out.”

  “What did he do before? On the ship? Did he know the Comet King?”

  “I think he was the captain, then, just like now. He never mentions the Comet King, but it would have been pretty hard to spend a month on a ship this small without seeing him.”

  “Did he captain other ships before he got this one?”

  The little spark finally faded from view.

  “Ana, the Captain’s a very private man. What he wants us to know, he tells us. He’s been good to us, and we give him back as good as we get by not prying into his secrets. I assume the Comet King wouldn’t have hired him if he didn’t have some experience. But what that is, he hasn’t said and I haven’t asked. I would recommend you do the same.”

  “Just curious,” Ana protested feebly.

  “You know the saying about curiosity.”

  “Tomas?” A sudden thought, more urgent. “If he was on the boat, before, he must have been there when the Comet King met Metatron.”

  “Ana.” Tomas’ voice wasn’t angry, but it was stern.

  “The voice of God! He must know what he said! Maybe even knows the Explicit Name!”

  “Ana.”

  The Not A Metaphor sailed north.

  III.

  The ship had a Medical Officer, tasked with keeping the passengers alive until they reached their destination. Sometimes his expertise was needed for more prosaic reasons.

  “One of the old guys is delirious,” the Commander told him. “Won’t stay in his seat, keeps raving about stuff. I don’t want him to get up and get confused by the zero-g and hit his head on something. You think he’s safe to tranquilize?”

  The Medical Officer picked up a syringe and walked into the cabin. Wasn’t too hard to tell who the Commander was talking about. A dozen old codgers strapped quietly into their seats. And one guy practically flailing. Delirium, all right.

  “Listen,” the old man was saying. “The prophecy said that they would drive him to the priest. Drove, that was the word it used. Not the Dividend Monks’ prophecy. The other one. The long one. They drove the comet to the priest, but the priest would come up dry. And on that day, the righteous grown children would perish.”

  “Hold on,” said the Medical Officer. “It’s going to be okay.” He checked breathing, respiration. A little tranquilizer wouldn’t hurt. He took hold of the old man’s arm and injected the contents of the syringe.

  “I’m the priest,” said the old man. “It was talking about me. And today I’ve come up dry. I’ve failed. You have to warn the Cometspawn. You hear me? Warn the Cometspawn.” Then he went quiet. The Medical Officer watched for a few minutes until he was sure he was sound asleep.

  “All clear,” he told the Commander, stepping back into the cockpit. Ahead of them, the crack in the sky came ever closer.

  Interlude ס: Binary

  “Today I will expound unto you the kabbalistic theory of the creation of the world,” said Ana. “It all starts with Leibniz…”

  We were sitting together on the couch after dinner. Erica and Eli Foss were on the other couch. Zoe Farr was in the armchair. Ana was wearing a blue t-shirt saying “I WENT TO THEODICY CON 2014 AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CRAPPY TSHIRT, AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY A JUST GOD WOULD ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN.” It was pouring outside, and the occasional gust of wind added eerie punctuation to her argument.

  “See, there’s this idea called divine simplicity. People keep asking, okay, so God created the Universe, but who created God? The answer is that God doesn’t need creating. He’s perfectly simple. He’s just a natural thing for there to be. People act like you need God to explain why the universe isn’t just nothing. But why should the Universe be nothing? Why shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, a piece of bread? The only reason people think ‘nothing’ needs no explanation, but a piece of bread does need an explanation, is that nothing is simpler than bread. Well, God is just as simple as nothing. So there.”

  “How is this Leibniz?” asked Eli Foss.

  “I’m getting to Leibniz! Right now we’re at information theory. A well-defined mathematical explanation of simplicity. We can measure the complexity of a concept in bits. The number of binary digits it would take to specify the concept in some reasonable encoding system. We can do it with numbers. The numbers 0 and 1 are one bit. Two is 10, three is 11; those are two bits. Four is 100, five is 101, six is 110, seven is 111; so three bits. And so on. We can do it with computer programs; just count how many bits and bytes they take up on a computer. We can do it with images if you can get them into a format like .gif or .jpg. And we can do it with material objects. All you have to do is figure out how long it would take to write a program that specifies a description of the material object to the right level of complexity. There are already weather simulators. However many bits the most efficient one of those is, that’s how complex the weather is.”

  “And God?” asked Zoe Farr.

  “God is one bit. The bit ‘1’”.

  “I find that…counterintuitive,” was the best Zoe could answer.

  “Well, it’s easy to represent nothingness. That’s just the bit ‘0’. God is the opposite of that. Complete fullness. Perfection in every respect. This kind of stuff is beyond space – our modern theories of space take a bunch of bits to specify – but if it helps, imagine God as being space filled with the maximum amount of power and
intelligence and goodness and everything else that it can hold, stretching on to infinity.”

  “The maximum amount of purple?” I objected.

  “Sure. And the maximum amount of red, green, blue, et cetera.”

  “So God is kind of an off-shade of brown, is what you’re telling me,” I told Ana. “Because in third grade I tried mixing all the colors of paint together, and that was what I got.”

  “Well, what color should He be?”

  “Brilliant golden light,” suggested Erica.

  “Exodus 20:23,” I objected. “You shall not make a god out of gold.”

  “And,” said Ana, “if you don’t think God can be brown, then you’re racist.”

  “But,” said Erica, “if God contains everything alike, then He is evil as well as good. Weakness as well as strength. Sadness as well as happiness.”

  “I know the answer to this one,” said Zoe. “Goodness is the same as existence. To exist infinitely is to be infinitely good. A human who was really human, who fulfilled her humanity to the utmost degree, would be a truly excellent human, one who was good at being a human and exemplified all the human virtues. Insofar as you are less of a human than that person, you exist less than them. God is pure existence, so He has to be pure good as well.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s assuming the conclusion. It’s saying that humans exist to be good. Why can’t humans exist to be bad? There are three numbers that need no justification – zero, infinity, and negative infinity.”

  “Negative infinity isn’t simple!” said Ana. “You have to put the minus sign in front of it! That’s a whole extra pen stroke!”

  “That’s only convention,” Erica protested.

  “SPARROWS CAN’T HAVE NEGATIVE NUMBER OF WINGS!”

  “Aren’t religious people always talking about how the Bible is a source of absolute values?” I proposed.

  “Maybe,” said Eli seriously “existence is like distance. There’s only one direction you can go. God went that direction and we called it ‘good’. Bad is something else.”

  “Bad is just the absence of God,” said Zoe.

  “We’ve had this discussion!” said Ana. “No it isn’t! Nothingness is the absence of God! Hitler requires a design decision! Four arms on the swastika! Two sides to the mustache! One testicle!”

  “I thought that was a myth,” I said.

  “I still don’t get how this is Leibniz,” said Zoe. “Or the creation of the world.”

  “Leibniz was studying the I Ching, and he noticed that its yin and yang sticks, when arranged in hexagrams, corresponded to a new form of arithmetic, because he was Leibniz and of course he noticed that. So he invented binary numbers and wrote a letter to the Duke of Brunswick saying that he had explained how God could create the universe out of nothing. It goes like this. You’ve got God, who is 1. You’ve got nothingness, which is 0. And that’s all you need to create everything. 1s and 0s arranged in a long enough string.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “The kabbalistic conception is that God withdrew from Himself to create the world. I, for example, am beautiful and intelligent, but not so physically strong. God is perfectly beautiful and intelligent and strong, so by withdrawing a little bit of His beauty and intelligence, and a lot of His strength, and some other things, we end up with an Ana.”

  “Except you’re not an off-shade of brown,” said Erica.

  “And also, God mostly just withdrew from the original universe in such a way that made it have laws of physics that generated you,” I added.

  “Same difference,” said Ana.

  “How did God decide which 1s to change to 0s?” asked Erica.

  “And there’s the rub,” said Ana. “To change any 1s to 0s at all is making the world worse. Less Godly. Creation was taking something that was already perfect – divinity – and making it worse for no reason. A wise woman once said that those who ask how a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil miss a greater conundrum – why would a perfect God create a universe at all?”

  We were all silent just a little too long.

  “I have a question,” Zoe Farr said, finally. “If God is just the binary digit 1, and nothingness is the binary digit 0, and the both contain one bit of information – then isn’t neither one the simplest thing? Wouldn’t the simplest thing be zero bits, neither God nor nothingness?”

  “That’s Atzmus and you’re not supposed to talk about it!” said Ana.

  “Okay, jeez,” said Zoe.

  “Any other dumb objections?” Ana asked, play-acting a death glare at all of us.

  “I might have one,” said Eli Foss. “I…appreciate what you’re trying to do, Ana, but I have to remind you that kabbalah isn’t just the word for whatever cool theory you happen to come up with by combining information theory and the I Ching and the doctrine of divine simplicity. It literally means ‘received tradition’. It’s a body of work that’s been designed and created according to specific rules set forth by the rabbis, and it’s within the tradition of a relatively insular religion that’s really strongly against mixing its concepts with those of other ideas, especially ones from different faiths the way that the I Ching is from Daoism. So I think your theory is interesting. But it isn’t kabbalah. It’s not from the ARI, or the Baal Shem Tov, or anybody like that. So when you say that it’s the kabbalistic theory of the world, I think you need to walk that back a little unless you think real orthodox kabbalists are actually going around saying that God is just the binary digit ‘1’.”

  “I don’t just think it,” said Ana. “Every single Jewish person says exactly that, twice per day. ‘HEAR, O ISRAEL, THE LORD OUR GOD, THE LORD IS 1.'”

  “I retract my objection,” said Eli.

  Chapter 49: Terrors Of The Sun And Moon

  December 4, 1993

  Gulf Of Mexico

  Right on cue, people noticed the sun speeding up. There were times when this would have been a cause for concern. As it was, the astronomical community just shrugged their shoulders and said “Uriel’s doing something again”, and there the matter rested.

  The unplanned solar eclipse of December 4, 1993 would reach totality around 11:08 over the Pacific Ocean. The path would continue northeast, until it reached the point of longest duration of totality over the permanent hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico just after 2:30. From there it would pass over Florida before dwindling away in the North Atlantic.

  “ARE YOU READY?” asked Uriel.

  “Didn’t I tell you last month?” said Sohu. “We are going to rock this eclipse.”

  “I AM GOING TO HAVE MICROMANAGE THE MOON FROM THIS POINT ON,” said Uriel. “IT IS VERY DIFFICULT. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB ME UNTIL TOTALITY HAS PASSED. YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO?”

  “Yeah, for the thousandth time,” said Sohu. “When the totality hits, step into Yetzirah, look through – not with – the eye – and report back.”

  “YOU ARE GOOD,” said Uriel. “QUIET TIME NOW.” He started rearranging the glowing letters in front of him. It was a new moon, so Sohu couldn’t tell if the moon was wobbling in the sky or not.

  Sohu took out a book – not the Torah this time, she’d been able to teleport to some bookstores and get some light reading and had developed an appetite for comics – and sat on the edge of her cloud, glancing up every few minutes to check the state of the sky.

  Uriel suddenly broke out of his trance, stared right at her.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “YES. I JUST REMEMBERED. I FORGOT TO TELL YOU. DO NOT STARE STRAIGHT AT THE SUN. IT WILL HURT YOUR EYES.”

  “Thanks, Uriel,” said Sohu, with an eye-roll, and returned to her pasttime as Uriel returned to his.

  Into her head unbidden came a verse from an old poem:

  The moving moon went up the sky

  And nowhere did abide…

  She couldn’t concentrate on the comics. She put it down on the cloud, carefully folded to the last page she had read. Another verse, this one from he
r kabbalistic studies:

  I reign over you, sayeth the God of Justice, in whose hands the Sun is a sword, and the Moon a through thrusting fire…

  The sky started to darken. Ignoring the archangel’s advice, Sohu risked a brief glance at the sun and saw a bite taken out of it.

  She readied herself for trance.

  The sky got darker. A few stars appeared. Now she was sure she saw the sun wobble. Uriel must be working very carefully, giving her as much time as possible for what she had to do.

  She began to drift off. Moon. Yareach in Hebrew. Corresponding to the sephirah Yesod. Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun to Earth, so Yesod reflected the lights of all the other sephirot into the physical world. New moon. New Yareach. Just as New York City reflected all the peoples of the world into America. Give me your tired and poor. Alas, poor Yareach, we new him well.

  She reached out to step into the thing the moon was a metaphor for.

  “It looks like we’re having an eclipse party and I wasn’t invited.”

  She opened her eyes, already knowing what she would see.

  “A solar eclipse is a once in a lifetime event,” Thamiel told her. “And totality only lasts five minutes. I wouldn’t want you to miss it because you were spending the whole time in Yetzirah.”

  Sohu very carefully backed away from him. It occurred to her that if she could get into the flying kayak, she might be able to launch it off the cloud before Thamiel could stop her, then get blown off somewhere far away by the storm.

  The Lord of Demons shook his head, then reappeared in the flying kayak. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not here to torture you. A waste, without Uriel around to watch. We’ll just stay here and watch the eclipse together. In Assiah. The physical world. It’ll be fun. Just small talk. You and me, mano a diablo. The two of us so rarely get any time alone together.”

  Sohu sat back down on the cloud. “Talk,” she said.

  Thamiel picked up her comic. The book burst into flames in his hand, then fell in a spatter of ashes onto the cloud. “Really? Comics? We need to get you some more wholesome entertainment. Do you know what I do for fun? You know those electric fences for dogs? I find a dog with one of those electric fences, and I stand just a few feet outside with a big juicy steak. The dog runs towards me to get the steak, then gets zapped, then runs back into the fence, then tries again, gets zapped again, finally just sits on the edge of the fence while I eat the steak in front of it. It’s not the most efficient way to cause suffering, but you can’t always be all about efficiency, you need to leave some time for yourself, do you agree with that, Sohu?”