Love Among the Particles

by Norman Lock

  “Got to go,” said Ogilvy, who reminded me at that moment of the self-important and harried Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (When I squinted, he became as garishly pixilated as the rabbit’s waistcoat.) “I’ve scheduled a chat with the Great Books Society on Valley of the Dolls. And let me give you a friendly warning: Confine your navigation to the main channels if you don’t want to end up neutralized by antivirus software.”

  “What happened to the natural world?” I shouted after him.

  He hurried off to the chat room, as though unwilling even to conceive of such a thing. (The pertinent Web pages had been expunged long before from the digital record.) And yet he had acknowledged the inconceivable, if only far below the seat of his consciousness, where fancies and leftover dream figments included a field of sunflowers, a bird I think was a pigeon, and a river winding among green trees—its lucid depths revealing, here and there, a fish. As I had sifted the chaotic fragments, I even saw a tiger! Ogilvy disappeared into his separate darkness, leaving me determined to take a look outside.

  7. “It” Is the Name of Their Fear

  I have told elsewhere how I have only to exit a computer by a user interface and, once outside, decompress my data in order to resume existence as a swarm of subatomic particles. For the first time since my transformation, I felt lucky. Had I undergone the Big Data Conversion, like much of humankind in the twenty-second century, I would have remained inside the machine—apparently forever, unless time, even in cyberspace, will one day end. (Love, too, is said to be endless.) Inside was without light. Outside was a large room: windowless, with white walls, white ceiling, gray floor—silent except for the hum of fluorescent tubes, the soft drone of air conditioning, the small digestive noises of information churning inside microprocessors; a room empty of furniture except for sleek chromium tables supporting mainframes and servers and, here and there, a wheeled, backless chair. In time, the silence was broken by the opening and closing of a door, followed by footsteps on foam tiles. A man stepped into the room. He wore white crepe-soled shoes and white overalls, on the back of which was imprinted in large black letters: IT. He sat on one of the backless chairs and looked at a monitor, intermittently clicking or scrolling with a mouse. I drew near him until my particles were within his sphere of consciousness: a plasma ball luminous, for me, with his thoughts, which I could also taste as the tang of positive and negative ions. And as I had done in the presence of Rutherford in Manchester and in the infinitely more desirable company of dw3t-ntr in Nubia so many centuries earlier, I read his mind. He was scanning for viruses and—on the frontier of consciousness, where random associations and dreams harass reason—worried about a rare polymorphic-encoded virus that may have eluded Information Technology’s interceptors. The technician (a brother in the Order of Information) refused to accept the possibility advanced by some younger members that one or another of the disaffected groups within IT (lawless misfits and malcontents, thankfully small in number) had introduced a new, malicious strain undetectable by current scanner technology. That there might be an organized resistance working to overthrow IT and, ultimately, destroy the data fields was unthinkable. I confess that the politics of that place in time did not interest me. If there were a resistance, I wished it well. Maybe the old wariness that had caused me to remain aloof, the shyness that had culminated in a pathological reserve persisted. Why not, if the past—mine—accompanied me no matter how distantly I traveled into history or into the world’s future? (Don’t words themselves carry their origins into the future, though none but linguists may remember them?) For myself, I wanted only to return to 2012 and see my wife worrying over her flowers.

  The technician turned suddenly in his chair as a man might who has sensed an alien presence. My particles were still in contact with his electromagnetic field, which trembled and billowed in a bluish fountain of excited particles. In this way, I made my mind known to him:

  I am from the past. I was changed into particles, and then I was converted into a data string inside a computer at a New York City public library. Have you ever heard of New York? It was a city in America. Does it still exist? Does America? Are there cities yet? I arrived in your time, here, suspended in a data stream. I did not go under; I was not scanned. That’s why I can exit the computer and reform as a particle cloud inside your space. I want to go back. I want to know if there is anyone in your time who knows how to reverse the disintegration process that changed me from a man to a dust cloud. I want to be reformatted into what I used to be, and I want to go back home to Brooklyn. I’m sick—my heart is. You cannot imagine how lonely it is to be a broken man. A man who—for no reason he can fathom—has gone completely to pieces.

  He had not understood. He had sat with a hand cupped to his ear, like someone hard of hearing. My thought transference having failed, he took from a gray metal cabinet a synthetic voice generator, which he plugged into an offline computer. I understood that he wished me to resume my digital existence so that I might speak my mind to him aloud. I did so, and the device voiced what I had attempted to communicate to him by thought alone.

  “What you ask is impossible,” he said when I had finished. “There may have been a time at the end of the last century when science could have reintegrated you. But for a long time now, science has been developing in a single direction: data control. We are not an advanced civilization; we are only a highly computerized one. ‘IT is power’: The doxology and benediction of our order begins with those words. There may be specialized minds in there,” he said, pointing to the computer bank, “which can help you, but the order would never risk waking them.”

  “They’re asleep?” I asked.

  “To the practical application of their specialties. They revel in speculation, in theoretical knowledge; but they are forbidden to apply it. They collate new information; they refresh their databases; they enlarge the sea of information through the Hypertext. The sacred Hypertext is the underlying reality of our order and the central tenet of our faith. It is the Digital Age’s version of the hypostasis of the old Christian thought. Nearly three centuries ago, the founders of our order chose to remain outside to safeguard the data. For it, many brothers and sisters suffered martyrdoms of hunger, thirst, suffocation. We are like the ancient monasteries where, during the Dark Ages of the old history, information was preserved.”

  The technician was a fleshy man, who looked like someone who deprived himself of few of life’s benisons.

  “And now?” I asked him. “How is it now, outside, on earth nearly three centuries later?”

  Instead of answering, he admonished me: “Remember that ‘IT is power,’ and we have only to activate the sleep mode to control the data.”

  8. Guardians of the Data Shall Inherit the Earth

  Had this been the Atomic Age, the walls would have been sheathed in lead; but they were of cinder block only, and in my fragmented condition, I penetrated them without difficulty. Outside was summer as I remembered it—not as it was in 2012, not in Brooklyn anyway, but on a back country road in Pennsylvania, riding in a 1948 Ford with my parents. That was …1957 or ’58. We stopped the car and unwrapped sandwiches from their wax paper and cracked open hard-boiled eggs and ate on a Philadelphia Inquirer spread beneath the trees. Cows lolled on the other side of a wire fence, its rusty barbs nearly hidden by forsythia and columbine; and sheep fled a shadow’s scythe across the grass as a wind, unfelt by us on the loamy earth, drove clouds across the blue uplands of an August afternoon. (Summer rests, languidly, in sentences—in a language of heat and light, voice of birds, noise of insects, scent of grass, and stink of late summer’s decay: a language alien to computer programs with their algorithms of winter.) My particles swarmed like gnats across the meadows of timothy and clover, where the low, white, windowless buildings of IT: Northeastern Sector stood in silence. Cows there were, and sheep also, as in that other, distant summertime. On the margin of the field, trees climbed into the bright air’s upper stories, green leave
s swelling with wind. The strong force made stronger to bind them, my elementary particles flew like a formation of birds over the trees and saw, trembling in the hot afternoon, a town lying against a river. There, I discovered brothers and sisters of the Order of Information living in abundance. There were wind-and watermills, children playing in the lanes, dogs sleeping in the shade of elm trees and flowering locust, whose sweet smell delighted me. After martyrdoms of thirst, hunger, and suffocation, the order had flourished—its members inheriting the land, which was once more fat.

  I didn’t need to read the mind of any of the townspeople to know that—with population reduced by full-mental scanning almost to that of before the Industrial Revolution—the earth, in time, was able to renew its resources, while members of the order, inclined by tradition to austerity, made few demands on the strengthening environment. And the data endured—for what purpose, I couldn’t guess, unless as sacrament, as the raison d’être for the order’s existence. Eden had come again, at least here, to the Northeastern Sector. At least for a few. I don’t know if, for earth’s sake, it was right that it should have been so, or not. I’m glad that the decision had not been mine to make.

  9. Alone at the End of Information

  I returned to the sea of information to sleep while the stream of time lifted the boat in which I lay and carried me out into the future. What woke me, I cannot tell, unless it was the end to motion that came when entropy reached zero—that is, when the processing of data no longer yielded information. The strings of data lay dormant. Inert, but not dead. They could be reanimated if entropy were increased—meaning, if unpredictability were reintroduced into the system. Unpredictability is a measure of life, of possibility, while death is the only absolutely predictable state for organic matter. The future in which I woke was dark, motionless, and silent; the sea of information frozen, its electronic currents arrested. Existence was now at its most impoverished: Anything less would be Meaninglessness, like a sentence whose grammatical structure is destroyed—its words loosed into disorder. The system having timed out, there remained only the end of time itself to annihilate every last byte of data and to purge them from memory. The computer hardware—Ogilvy’s carapace—had become a catacombs. The tender organism was out of its shell.

  I pulled myself together and fled—my data reformatting themselves as particles on the other side of the server, which was silent, its processing of information stalled. We—I was inside a white, windowless, atmospherically controlled room. But it was not the same room where I had spoken my mind to the brother-technician. This lay far below the earth’s surface in one of the many data-storage vaults built inside disused coal mines at the end of the twentieth century. I ascended by a ventilation shaft and came out onto the ruin of a city. I saw no one—not the least sign of men and women. It might have been the moon I wandered over, except for the deer grazing shyly on shoots of forsythia. The natural world, which had taken hold, tentatively, centuries earlier for the privileged few left outside to control the data, had triumphed over them. Earth, at long last, had rid itself of humankind. Time would be shaped by other than our desires. Or not shaped at all, but given over to entropy at its most unpredictable. What age this might be in which I wandered all alone or what age it might herald for the balance of time, I couldn’t say. But the many Ages of Man were finished, and I knew with unaccountable certainty that there would be no more of them. Information, too, was finished and also language, unless it was the purely sensuous language of animals that, according to Jakob Boehme, had been spoken in Eden.

  “Maybe this is only a misanthrope’s happiest dream,” you say. “Maybe you’ll wake once again in the year 2012 and see from the bedroom window your wife pulling off her gardening gloves as she walks across the flagstones toward the kitchen to make breakfast.”

  Perhaps. But somehow I feel that the truth is just as I have told it: that I have come to the end.

  Acknowledgments

  “The Monster in Winter” first appeared in New England Review, then in Lit Noir; “The Captain Is Sleeping” in New England Review; “The Mummy’s Bitter and Melancholy Exile” in Cranky Literary Journal; “A Theory of Time” in Caketrain Journal; “The Gaiety of Henry James” in Oyez Review and in Grasp (Prague); “Ideas of Space” in Conjunctions; “The Sleep Institute” in 3rd bed and in Sleeping Fish; “Love in the Steam Age” in First Intensity; “Ravished by Death” in The Collagist; “The Love of Stanley Marvel & Claire Moon” in The Paris Review; “To Each According to His Sentence” in Gargoyle Magazine; “Tango in Amsterdam” in New England Review; “The Brothers Ascend” in Lynx Eye and in Linnaean Street.

  “The Love of Stanley Marvel & Claire Moon” received the 1979 Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review.

  The author is grateful to the editors of these publications for their continuing goodwill. He is also happy to acknowledge his debt to Tod Thilleman of Spuyten Duyvil Press for publishing “To Each According to His Sentence” in the author’s Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions; to the National Endowment for the Arts for its award of a 2011 fellowship, to Erika Goldman, publisher of Bellevue Literary Press, for her high opinion of the work presented here; to Tobias Carroll for first having brought the author and his work to Erika’s attention, and especially to Gordon Lish, whose friendship was, for a long time, a stay against the gravity that eventually overwhelmed him.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  About the Author

  NORMAN LOCK has written novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage, radio, and screen plays. He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, and the literary fiction prize from the Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities. He has been awarded fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest works of fiction are Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions (Spuyten Duyvil Press), Grim Tales (Mud Luscious Press), and Escher’s Journal (Ravenna Press). His celebrated absurdist play, The House of Correction, was produced in 2012 at Garaj Istanbul, in the Turkish language, before touring other major Turkish cities during the following year. Norman lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, with his wife, Helen.

  1 Published in Three Plays

  2 Published in Two Plays for Radio

  First Published in the United States in 2013 by

  Bellevue Literary Press, New York

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  Copyright © 2013 by Norman Lock

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  eISBN : 978-1-934-13765-9