Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Professor Fred (“Fidgets”) Digits, who always kept his connection with the Warren Belch Society a secret and, hence, retained academic respectability, finally published a paper in Technology Review analyzing the problem from the perspective of the von Neumann-Morgenstern game theory. The monks, in this context, basically confront a problem in prediction. Each must decide, before speaking, what Vlad’s reaction will be: Will he be grateful for an accurate report or angered by it? Every person in an authoritarian situation faces this dilemma daily, and it haunts corporations, armies, and government bureacracies. “It is the classic disinformation situation,” Digits concluded, satisfied that he had identified the problem, even if he couldn’t solve it.

  Others pointed out the similar logic of the notorious “Snafu Principle” proposed by the eccentric businessman Hagbard Celine in his witty, perverse little booklet Never Whistle While You’re Pissing. According to the Snafu Principle, accurate, honest communication is possible only between equals, and every power matrix is a disinformation situation.

  Since this seems to challenge the very principle of power and leads directly to anarchy, many were sorry that Mad Marvin had ever posed the Vlad Enigma.

  STRANGE AEONS

  Gestorben ist nicht, was fur ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Aonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben.

  —VON JUNZT

  As a scientist, Washy Bridge, of course, regarded Von Junzt as a mental case and the Necronomicon as the ravings of a deranged cannabis abuser. Nonetheless, that one gaunt German sentence found in 1971 stuck with him, taunted him, provoked him, eventually goaded him. He began studying the origins of the Frankenstein idea within the Promethean ambience of the Shelley-Byron circle. He researched the early Resuscitation Society. He traveled to Michigan to talk to H. C. E. Coppinger, the far-out physicist who had started the cryonics movement with his astonishing book The Aspects of Immortality. The idea just wouldn’t let go of him. In 1974 he even, somewhat shamefacedly, looked into the writings of a strange Providence, Rhode Island, mystic who had written much on the metaphysics of the Necronomicon. Washy found in this man’s weird writings a better translation than that of Von Junzt:

  That is not dead which can eternal lie

  And with strange aeons even death may die

  CONTRA NATURAM

  Justin Case, feeling on top of the world and full to the brim with human kindness, gave a lavish tip to the young lady who had assisted him during his Christian Science copulation with Carol Christmas. He went home musing happily on how simple life was really and how easy it was to transcend one’s own little problems with a water bed, a cooperative warm-mouthed lady, Christian Science, and a few good snorts of Marvin Gardens’s incredible coke.

  On Fourteenth Street near Union Square, Justin was stopped by a zombie. The zombie had pale skin, large eyes that never moved, a mouth that didn’t smile, and the unmistakable expression of death. “Do you love your neighbor?” the zombie asked.

  “Pardon me,” Justin said, dodging, “but I …”

  “It is easy to love your neighbor,” the zombie said, dodging with him. “The scientific principles of Christian Love are now known and can be applied by anyone. For one dollar, just one single dollar, you can have a copy of What Religiosophy Means, the book that answers all the questions of philosophy definitely and scientifically.”

  “Please”—Justin shifted again—“I must …”

  “For fifty cents,” the zombie went on, still with no expression and with eyes unmoving, “you can have The Scientific Cure for Depressions, Economic and Psychological.”

  “Oh, go shit in your hat,” Justin growled in Circuit Two territorial language. “Disappear. Get out of my way, you creep.”

  “This is free,” the zombie said, passing him a four-page pamphlet titled “Usura Contra Naturam Est.” “There is no need for competition, brother.”

  Justin looked at the pamphlet when he got home. It was made up of quotations from Thomas Aquinas, Ezra Pound, B. F. Skinner, and Dr. Horace Naismith, founder of the First Bank of Religiosophy. The quotes from Aquinas and Pound condemned the lending of money at interest. The quotes from Skinner said that people could be conditioned to abandon any habitual behavior and substitute a new behavior. The quotes from Dr. Naismith urged everybody to join the First Bank of Religiosophy, or at least to buy one of his books or pamphlets: “What Religiosophy Means,” The Scientific Cure for Depressions, Economic and Psychological, “Jesus Christ’s Secret Teachings About Money,” and Operant Reinforcement, the Bible Alternative to Satan’s International Bankers*

  The streets were full of zombies at that time. The Religiosophists were the most robotic; not for nothing had Dr. Horace Naismith, founder of Religiosophy, spent five years studying with B. F. Skinner at Harvard. The Religiosophists had all been operant-conditioned to be tireless proselytizers, and Blake Williams had even invented a mathematical puzzle based on calculating the probability of crossing any American city without being accosted by one of them, which turned out to be harder than the old problem of crossing Dublin without passing a pub.

  The Ganesha Freaks were almost as android. Led by Swami Mammonananda, they had also been conditioned to be superpersistent hustlers and to believe that the world would reach samadhi on May 1, 1984, if 100,000,000 people were paying funds directly into Mammonananda’s bank account by that date in return for bronze emblems of Ganesha, the Hindu Papa Legba, or Opener Between the Worlds.

  The worst pests of all were the Loonies, disciples of Neon Bal Loon, an English eccentric originally born Albert Pike in Gaotu, Wobblysex, Buggering-on-the-Thames, Lousewartshire, England. Pike claimed to be a reincarnated Tibetan and insisted that Neon Bal Loom was a real Tibetan name, his in his former incarnation. He averred further that the earth was hollow and a gang of naked women, witches, lived inside and were responsible for all the evils on the surface. His followers prayed in pig Latin, while standing on one leg like storks. Pike claimed that was the language of Lemuria.

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood snuggles all comfy and cozy in her bed, swallows a female hormone tablet with water poured neat from a silver-sheened pitcher beside the clock and opens a well-thumbed edition of The 120 Days of Sodom remembering the foot beneath the chin the ropes the nude figure of Cagliostro tied to the bedposts and begins to read, Jesus watching with those reproachful hurting eyes as her hand sneaks back to the table gropes over the pitcher and clock down to the drawer to remove stealthily (Perfect Sin, with Jesus watching) the vibrator Here’s the part tortures especially for pregnant women

  But Marvin reads in total confusion

  Chromosome reduction (meiosis) occurs in early divisions of the synkaryon

  Synkaryon? What the stereophonic fuck is that? Skip a bit.

  from which the sex cells (gametes) are produced (gameto-genesis) which undergo nuclear reorganization (autogamy) occurs in formaniferans

  Syngamy may be between similar gametes (isogamous) or between obviously different gametes (anisogamous) But are they the same amoeba dammit why can’t they tell us in plain words have the extraterrestrials taken over the Britannica too?

  Marvin Gardens is sniffing just a little bit more coke, only a tiny bit, really, turning the FM dial in search of some music as accelerated as his own nervous system, thinking: At the fifth generation you’ve got ah um 64 amoebas a full-blown ecosystem now what I want to know is would they all be permutations and combinations like the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching or would they all be the same like the Creative repeated 64 times? Jesus maybe just one more snort one little tiny teensy-weensy itty-bitty snort yes with cloning now in laboratories there may be 64 of me someday outbreed the extraterrestrials that way maybe Jesus yes but Linda Lovelace oh Christ if I ever did meet her I’d be too shy to say, to say, I mean like with Picasso you could just walk right up and say “I’m an admirer of your work and I’d like to commission a small sketch” perfectly normal an artist and a fan but to say “I admire your work could you give me a personalized blow job” />
  went on to organize

  went on to organize

  “I think the record is stuck,” Natalie said, finally getting a word in edgewise.

  “Um yes my dear just a sec but Ignatz I was saying is very simple-minded he thinks he just hates cats

  went on to orggggprp

  “Whereas Krazy on the other hand knows that each brick is actually a phallic gift [Herriman must have been aware of the Freudian associations of that marvelous monosyllable, brick]. Krazy remembers, or things she remembers, a previous incarnation in which she and Ignatz were lovers….”

  But in the split second of orgasm in the orgonomic plasma, ego dilated to crash wave after wave floating in the astral as taught by Hagbard via Miss Portinari in potentia faster than the speed of light full-blown on each side of the boundary, Joe Malik in terror sees the glaring red Eye and the golden triangular frame 3 × 3 × 3 the sign of Choronzon, 333, whose name and number signified the Great Lie.

  *Terran Archives 2803: Interest was a charge for the use of the circulating medium (money). Primatologists have found similar money fetishism on hundreds of planets where hominid types evolved; money and barter themselves are typical primate behaviors which can easily be taught to chimpanzees and other anthropoids. In addition to Aquinas, Pound, and Naismith, early Terrestrial philosophers who suggested more human alternatives to this apelike economics included Thomas Edison, Buckminster Fuller, C. H. Douglas, Benjamin Tucker, and several others. Since primate behavior changes only under the impact of new technology (Moon’s First Law), the money-and-interest fetish continued until the third stage of the RICH Economy abolished the need for a circulating medium.

  INTERNATIONAL COCAINE INC.

  The debate about the Vlad Enigma gave birth to a general interest in problems of disinformation. The Prisoner’s Dilemma was dragged out of heavy mathematical tomes and popularized. The Turing Machine was reexamined in tabloid newspapers. The Empedoclean paradox even got mentioned on the Johnny Carson show.

  Two Berkeley acid-heads, known on Telegraph Avenue as The Cat and The Dog, dreamed up a more intense disinformation matrix in 1980. “What would happen,” The Cat asked one day in the Cafe Mediterraneum, “if we bought a truck and painted on the side of it INTERNATIONAL COCAINE IMPORTERS INC., and drove it around the streets?”

  “In Berkeley,” The Dog said, “the cops would just laugh. They’d be sure it was another put-on by the Hog Farm or the Merry Pranksters or somebody. But in San Francisco they wouldn’t take a chance. The first cop would stop the truck and search it.”

  “Nah,” said an unsuccessful poet named Robert W. Anton. “They’re more hip than that in San Francisco. But in L.A ….”

  The debate spread from the Med to Moe’s, from Moe’s to Sather Gate, leapt the Bay to appear in Herb Caen’s column, eventually spread from coast to coast as a tag-end poser to cap all discussions of the Vlad Enigma. Finally, taking the logical experimental step, a San Francisco theologian named Malaclypse the Younger actually painted a truck in very tasteful and professional lettering and drove it around the Bay Area for all to see:

  INTERNATIONAL COCAINE IMPORTERS INC.

  LIMA—SAN DIEGO—VANCOUVER

  “THINGS GO BETTER WITH COKE”

  He was stopped and searched three times the first week—once in Sausalito, which is the cocaine and Vaseline capital of Unistat and has particularly suspicious cops. He was never stopped in Berkeley. After the second week he was no longer stopped in San Francisco. Immediately a whole fleet of similar trucks began to appear.

  Disinformation had been incarnated. “All hail Eris,” said Malaclypse, a pious man in his own odd way. Virtually none of the trucks was stopped and searched after the first month. Cops who had made horses’ asses of themselves in the joking phase of this uprising of surrealist politics refused to take the risk of being laughed at again. Nobody cared to guess how many of the trucks were really carrying cocaine.

  It all became academic when victimless crimes were redefined in the Code Hubbard.

  DO NOT GO GENTLE

  Do not go gentle into that good night:

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  President Hubbard’s way of encouraging the Longevity Revolution was characteristic. She established a yearly reward of $100,000 for the nonscientist who made the most important contribution to the fight against aging. Since the scientists engaged in life-extension research were already one of the two most heavily funded groups in Unistat (the other was the space engineers), scientists were amused, but not offended, by this wild idea.

  The first year there were 5,237 entries submitted. A spot check by the Beast showed that 4,023 came from the new leisure class—ex-workers who had invented themselves out of several jobs and had $50,000 to $80,000 annual incomes. The others came from people who had been unemployed by these inventions. Evidently, many of them were getting bored with a life that consisted mostly of fucking, TV, and vacations, even though that had been what most primates imagined they would do if they didn’t have to work for a living.

  The second year there were over 30,000 entries—much as Hubbard had expected.

  The Longevity Revolution was having its inevitable effect. People who were expecting to live for centuries instead of decades were spontaneously taking the Next Step in their thinking. The hominids of Terra were becoming reoriented to the search for Immortality.

  And a second trend was becoming obvious. The majority of practical, testable hyper-longevity proposals were coming in from the colonists in the L5 space-cities.

  The domesticated primates of Terra were beginning to consciously guide their own evolution toward becoming Cosmic Immortals.

  To Justin Case it appeared that the administration was the first government in history to take Beethoven seriously. To him, Hubbard’s whole philosophy was obviously derived from the last movement of the Ninth.

  THE DARLING BUDS OF MAY

  Since a cat has the Buddha mind, even Marvin Gardens had had his own experience of the First Noble Truth. He had made the mistake, once, in 1981, of eating a heavy slice of hash-candy from Afghanistan instead of his after-dinner snort of coke and somehow there was an eruption of activity in the grief circuits of the thalamus. The tramp did not move. He saw the skull beneath the skin, like Eliot; the tears poured and he sat there, weeping for allflesh, for alltormented flesh, for alltormentedfuckingflesh, howling in anguish at the withdrawal of the nipple of self-absorption. He was in Belsen. He stood in the white light as Hiroshima was incinerated. He watched the Grand Army retreat in the snow from Moscow. The tramp fell eternally toward the sidewalk and he saw the wolves close in on the terrified caribou, the smirk of Caligula and all sadists everywhere, the parents of a thousand wars weeping with him over murdered children (“We should be gentle with children,” a Voice said reproachfully from a window in space), and for a minute he had a crazy religious vision that WE HAVE TO STOP THE KILLING there is no other way and it is too late for another alternative it is exactly that simple and you can even repeat it in italics we have to stop the killing and he was so excited at the sudden clarity of it that he could see his whole future as nonstop witnessing to the truth of this vision. He would invent his own TV show and become a supersalesman and sell it to the top network and it would be the Corporal Works of Mercy Hour. It would have no acts of violence or hurting. It would just be decent people doing decent things, as enumerated in the famous passage from Aquinas: visiting the sick and imprisoned, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, aiding the oppressed, comforting the afflicted, and praying for us all.

  It was that simple, beyond all the irony and agony of his tortured humor, and you could even say it in one word: ahimsa.

  Yea-a-a-ay, God! Glory, glory, glory.

  He staggered to his desk to record this revelation, but when he got there microamnesia had already set in and he couldn’t remember what it was that had seemed so clear and
important, but another Voice was coming through and he scrawled rapidly:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

  At that very moment, in Los Angeles, Eve Hubbard decided she was going to run for President.

  THE UNIVERSE DECIDES

  “So that,” Justin Case concludes triumphantly (he is dreaming about giving a lecture to an audience of trans-vestites), “the elements in the montage may be of any number—five, fifteen, fifty, whatever—and there be any emotions you can imagine implicit in each one of them separately. Nonetheless, the total emotional effect emerges from the montage, not from the elements. Film is the visual demonstration of Fuller’s synergetic geometry.”

  “You’re fuller shit!” one of the transvestites yelled.

  Who shit? Justin shit. Bullshit! Who shit? He was being carried around by the time-dwarfs in a jeweled chair wearing the Crown of Thorns. It was Mardi Gras. He was having a swell time. He decided to go on lecturing them.

  “The montage of Chinatown or Chapel Perilous takes us to the Lair of Fu Manchu—the center of Power—the occult Nine Unknown Illuminated Ones who rule the world—the secret of capitalism and ownership—the cruel Cross that separates inside from outside, without windows.”

  But then he wet his pants and they were all laughing at him, laughing mockingly and childishly, as they closed in with the tar and feathers. They had found out he was a no-good shit.

  “In other words,” Blake Williams lectures, “what collapses the state vector and er um determines or ah least ways brings it about that a new quantum state appears can only be a Hidden Variable implicate in the whole system—the biggest whole system.”