by Неизвестный
She had also read many of Jundo’s works. His discursive style, like power held in check, made her wince sometimes. But beneath the bizarre embellishments, the lyricism and touching poignancy of his imagery were unmistakable. Alice loved the undercurrent of loneliness that pervaded his writing like the coolness of new sheets.
Before he mounted the cross, Jundo had said, “I want to disappear from this world, slowly but surely. I regret my crimes. Now the sentence must be carried out. Layer by layer I will be pared away, stripped away, and gradually I will diminish. I will die at some point, but I don’t want you to know when that happens. When the last shred falls from this cross I will be gone, but my sins will not go with me. That is why I want to inflict suffering on myself that is commensurate with my crimes.”
Bullshit.
Alice was certain of that instinctively. He is so lying.
Not like this public suicide was fake, and he’s actually alive someplace. Saying he wants to disappear—that’s phony. I’m surprised he didn’t stick his tongue out at the end to let everyone know he was bullshitting them.
It’s not that he wants to disappear. It’s more that he doesn’t want to. As an equally gifted writer, Alice had a feeling she understood.
He wants to escape to somewhere, she thought. He’s not giving up, but he’s not running away from anything either. Is this—dispersion?
It’s no use, that’s the way it is with words. Look away for a moment and they fall apart. Try to ditch you.
“But still … You left us a little too soon, Jundo,” whispered Alice.
The figure’s winglike flaps of skin had by now been carefully detached, and the pectoral muscles were being dissected. The massive chest, like a martial artist’s, convulsed in agony.
Alice stopped the video, stood, and took off her pajamas. Clad in her underwear, she went to the window. The day promised fine weather. The sky was already light.
This was the one time of day when Alice shut down her CASSY links. Silently she watched as the sky brightened. Far above her, a long contrail caught the sunlight coming over the horizon.
That high up, the wind must be strong. As she watched, the contrail twisted on itself and morphed into illegible handwriting.
When she was a little girl, her parents told her, you used to pester us no end to read the contrails to you.
Little Alice had been certain they meant something.
Those were words up there, twisting in the wind.
6.
The flat-panel monitor in the corner of the cell now shows only the rock and the void.
At the halfway point, the movie buckled inward and became a pulpy mass, a weeping moon, and finally a tightly clenched fist, floating in utter solitude.
“That is Imajika.”
am explaining to a jumpsuit-clad Jundo Mamiya.
“The phenomenon isn’t limited to text. Any GEB-readable work may come under attack. Often Imajika isn’t satisfied with attacking a single work but propagates to any content with associations to that work. The damage spreads very fast, then stops, as if Imajika is trying to decide what to do next. The attacks keep happening. They’re eating holes in GEB’s data that can’t be repaired.”
Jundo doesn’t seem too interested in either the video or my explanation. He’s fiddling with the tape deck. He played the tape twice; he must be rewinding it again.
“Christening it ‘Imajika’ was inspired. Whose idea was that?”
“GEB’s system software did the naming. But Mr. Mamiya—it’s the title of one of your works.” I must look ecstatic. “Remember? The series of short stories about a book that has a different plot each time you read it. You started by quoting the narration in the movie we just saw. The letter that the mother of those little girls was writing to someone who doesn’t appear in the movie.”
“Hm. I forgot that one.” Jundo’s listless tone is mystifying. “But just because these works are being attacked, like this video here—it’s only within GEB, right? Is that worth panicking about?”
“Many works now exist nowhere else. But the situation is more complicated than that. As a business entity, GEB was dissolved long ago. Now it’s a shared public space, jointly maintained and administered by lots of nonprofit entities.
“GEB has huge numbers of CASSY-enabled users, all trailing data wakes after them in the course of their activities, the services they like, you name it. CASSY search results are stripped of personal data, so they’re of no individual interest to anyone. But more than ten billion users are on the system, and everything gets translated. GEB generates networks of relationships between data. It takes in fresh, living detail about things happening all over the planet. Over time GEB has become the body of the world, free from notions of artistry, self-consciousness, or celebrity.
“That’s what GEB is for people today—a garden where vast numbers of data trails are stored up. CASSYs are the gardeners, tilling their ‘output’ to make multitudes of flowers bloom.
“If the garden falls into ruin, the human spirit will wither as well. No—GEB is already part of the human spirit, the way sunrise and the sea and mountains of cloud used to be. The way the hustle of crowds or a warm fire or books and plays used to be. We’ve got to protect GEB from Imajika, whatever the cost.”
Once more Bach flows from the deck in Jundo’s hand. The work opens with a quiet theme—the aria—followed by thirty variations, and finally the aria again.
“There’s something I just need to confirm.”
Jundo finally speaks as the opening aria draws to a close. I expect the first variation next, but what I hear is number thirty, the so-called quodlibet.
“Wait a minute …”
“I tried reversing the playback order. What you just heard was the closing aria.”
I’m about to explain to him that magnetic tape can’t be played back that way. Then my jaw drops.
It can.
If we write it that way.
But who …?
I keep my voice calm. “What did you want to confirm?”
“Everything you write is in response to search queries, correct?”
“Yes …” This final variation combines melodies from different German folk songs. What were they titled …?
“Answer me. Who is the searcher?”
I don’t intend to respond. I should conceal the truth to the end. But for some reason my mouth opens. The words flow.
“The searcher is Imajika.”
is not a first-person pronoun. Within GEB there is no subjectivity, no self, no awareness. Nothing but chains of letters, numbers, and symbols. am not writing . am—is—simply a proper noun—according to—yes, according to something written somewhere.
“Imajika is querying GEB?” Jundo’s calm hints that he had it figured out from the beginning.
“Yes …”
“Properly speaking, what you CASSYs decided to do was to try interpreting Imajika’s contacts as queries. You surmised that the damage he was doing was questions—search queries—and you responded to them.
“I’m not surprised. Everything on the Pequod was optimized for whaling, and everything in GEB is designed to handle queries. Any system stimulus you detect evokes a search-and-results response. As many substructures—agents like you, all of you—as needed can be generated on demand, like an organism’s immune cells. Imajika queries, you answer.
“Therefore everything written until now, including this little speech of mine, is Imajika ‘interviewing’ GEB.”
Then Jundo gives me the order.
“Recite the emergency escape passcode. The one you were given when you came down here.”
The red mishmash of letters and numbers that flashed by on the floor indicator. I recall them. In order. Jundo commits them to memory.
“Thank you.”
The prison morphs, and somehow I’m trapped behind the glass barrier. Jundo is standing in the corridor in a trimly fitted suit.
“I’m very grateful to
you, all of you. You’ve completed me as Jundo Mamiya. But not because you searched my works. Because it was you who did the searching.”
I can’t find the words. Is it possible that he knew? About us?
“Of course I knew. Don’t you think I’d know my own characters? They are all only myself. You probably analyzed my novels and absorbed my narrators’ speech patterns. Which makes you my alter egos. I am you, searching my works.
“I think I also recognize the novel and the character. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
If only CASSYs would let me feel emotion.
“Incidentally, that shabby outfit was what my mother wore to my first day of elementary school. Hand-me-downs from my grandmother, unfortunately.”
An unbelievably gentle smile crosses Jundo’s face.
The quodlibet flows again from the cassette deck in his hand.
Quod libet: What pleases.
My body suddenly feels light. I return to the position of narrator.
Jundo turns away and gestures lightly in farewell. The variations play back in reverse order as he walks off down the corridor. I’m guessing that about now, multitudes of Jundo Mamiyas are commencing their escapes from their respective domains.
But we anticipated this too.
By reading Imajika’s contacts as search queries, we’ve already output a huge volume of results—so huge that individual works are spontaneously interacting to build a complex structure. By joining that structure, the sequence where I am now can be stable without writing Jundo.
Alone in the cell, I turn to the display panel again.
Imajika floats in the ash-gray void.
If I had known Jundo was that compassionate, perhaps it would have been okay to reveal Imajika’s true nature to him from the beginning. Or perhaps his compassion is precisely why it was better that I didn’t?
Embedded within this stone is a thing people have long yearned to understand but could never reach out and grasp. Something strong enough to overwhelm humanity’s works. The works that humans created could not endure that force. They metamorphosed, crumpled, and transformed to stone.
That is why it has no name.
Not Hate, not Love.
Neither Life nor Death.
No one can read this stone. Not or or anyone alive.
Except—
Except, just maybe, this structure that is slowly coming to life can read it. Like an embryo weaving a new organ, in that space, with Imajika’s queries as its pulse.
An indestructible, Intelligent Textual Organ.
This is our project.
#The Spirit of the Beehive
Alone, Alice trudges along. Suddenly she emerges into a huge open space. She’s at the top of a small rise. The ground below slopes gently away to a broad plain with the dim peaks of mountains in the distance. The scenery reminds her of a film she saw once, with one big difference. The ground beneath her feet is not exactly ground. It flexes. There’s a grain to the surface, like knit material. It almost feels like flesh, and it covers the surface as far as she can see. The slope, the plain, the mountains—everything is made of the same material. If she were to look closely, she would see that the surface is a lattice of tiny hexagons.
“Jundo, how could you?” Alice purses her lips with frustration. “This was my poetry collection!”
Managing Alice’s collection required an immense calculation space. An educational foundation recognized her gifts and helped her borrow the necessary server capacity. But Imajika was growing more dangerous when Alice died, and afterward her space was appropriated to help deal with the threat.
Now thousands of “Jundo Mamiya” emulators are arriving here from all over GEB. Recursive correlation across incalculable volumes of Jundo Mamiya tweeting is slowly generating an exquisite structure of minute hexagons and truncated octahedrons. A honeycomb structure.
Our textual organ—spawned and ripened by Jundo’s ideas, desires, and literary genius intertwined with the framework of Alice’s collection—is generating this awesome landscape. “You’re around here somewhere, aren’t you? I promise I’ll find you.”
Alice felt sure that the landscape’s resemblance to the famous sequence in The Spirit of the Beehive must mean something.
The heroine, a little girl, finds a fugitive soldier hiding in the house with the well, not far from the foot of the hill. And later, she has her encounter with Frankenstein’s monster in the woods, by the lake, in a place where dreams and reality are indistinguishable.
In the center of the plain, where the little house should be, is a sphere half embedded in the ground, a gigantic Imajika.
“So you’re here too? Just you wait.”
Alice runs down the slope, digging her heels in to get traction on the soft ground, arms flung wide to keep her balance. Imajika is a deformed sphere that looks carved from a mountain’s worth of rough stone, flinty and dense. Its rocky skin is cold and still. Alice doesn’t sense danger here, for the moment at least.
From a distance the sphere appeared to be buried in the plain, but now Alice sees that the ground around it has buckled and risen up, as if it were slowly pulling the sphere down into itself. Ropelike strands of some mineralized material extend from the ground to the sphere, like mooring lines holding it back. The strands end in massive hooks that bite into the stone. The rock is riven and gashed around the hooks, traces of a mammoth struggle before the sphere was finally contained.
Those mooring lines are probably more remains of Imajika’s victims, turned to stone. The ground around the sphere is slowly fossilizing the same way. Imajika might burst its bonds and run amok again at any moment. As she realizes this, Alice’s eyes travel warily across the rock.
As she works her way across the undulating terrain, she finds herself on the other side of the sphere. What she sees makes her gasp with surprise. She stops in her tracks.
A battered wooden sailing ship leans against Imajika as if run aground. A man stands on the deck.
Jundo Mamiya.
But Jundo is not the reason Alice gasped.
From where she stands she now sees that Imajika, which looked at first like a stone sphere, is without a doubt the head of a gigantic whale, lunging from the ocean.
“Didn’t Ahab have a wooden leg?”
“You think I’d put up with the way I was written?” Jundo Mamiya stamps loudly on the oil-stained deck with his thick, short legs. “See? I’ll do this the way I want.”
“Well, you go right ahead. Listen, this thing isn’t going to wake up, is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s quiet now. Spooky.”
“But why does Imajika appear in the form of stone?”
“This outer structure is not Imajika. It’s an aggregation of all the works Imajika has vandalized, the mutated corpses of books and films. Imajika is inside. It armors itself with the corpses of its victims. Some of the original texts might still be readable if you look at the surface carefully.”
“Texts like my poems?”
“Your poems …?” Jundo stares up at this young girl who is taller than he is. “By the way, who are you?”
“Allow me to introduce myself.” Alice smiles, flashing those white teeth. “I’m your landlady. Except, as you can see, I’m a ghost.”
If Jundo Mamiya is a monster stitched together from the corpses of words, this Alice Wong would have to be described as a ghost without even a dead body.
After contact with Imajika killed the physical Alice, the multiple Jundo Mamiyas that were written into this space acted on one another to create a complex new structure.
But then Alice’s poems—poems too precious to be dispersed—where have they gone?
“Wouldn’t you like to harvest Imajika’s oil?”
“Oil?”
“I mean Imajika itself, under this armor. There’s so much buried in what people have written, meanings they never even noticed were there. The reason is simple. Hundreds of people separated by hundreds of years have been writ
ing about the same things in hundreds of languages. And there was no way to connect those dots until GEB’s algorithm—its high-speed, multilanguage intertextual semantic relationship generator—stumbled across them.
“But GEB couldn’t deal with these relationships because there was no way to assign them names. Whatever GEB can’t deal with, it discards, and GEB discarded millions and millions of these relationships. It just went on finding and discarding them—until they returned, bringing a dynamic system with them. Imajika.
“That’s what the head of this whale holds. Without names, they are outside the ‘written’ domain. The only alphabet that can write them is the wind.
“The wind is invisible. You can only see it when it leaves its imprint in a twisted contrail. It’s the same with Imajika. You can’t see it, but when it twists texts and turns them to stone you can see that power. You can see that yearning.”
Alice points to the stone. “What do you think, Jundo? You can’t find that anywhere these days. It ought to be amazingly valuable.
“I suppose it would. As valuable as an oil field,” Jundo says.
“Even if that treasure is wasted on GEB, I bet the people who created this domain are hoping you’ll extract that oil and bring a barrel of it back for them.” Alice smiles her best smile.
“I see. And what’s the next interview question?”
“Hm?”
“Drop the pretense. I’m not your enemy. Alice Wong—you’re here to help Imajika, aren’t you?”
Imajika devoured Alice’s poems. For the embryonic Imajika, Alice’s collection—huge and always powerfully moving forward—must have been a towering presence. And Alice herself became collateral damage.
As Imajika absorbed them, Alice’s poems were deformed, crushed, and fossilized. Now they were probably part of this wall of stone.
Jundo Mamiya walks to the gunwale, stretches out his hand and puts a fingertip against the frozen rock.
“I told you,” Alice says. “I’m a ghost. Your words were laid safely to rest in GEB, muscle and bone. CASSYs can dig them up and drench them with electricity. But my words got turned into whale hide.”
Jundo had phenomenal profiling ability. He could draw inferences from almost any behavior and assemble them into a complete personality profile. That gift was now distributed throughout this plain, throughout the Intelligent Textual Organ. With Imajika lashed securely into place, Alice can be read directly from the surface of the stone.