Aleck clicked out of the virtual. Sam stood nearby watching him expectantly.
“Interesting satire, Sam I am,” Aleck said carefully. “But isn’t it a bit on the Juvenalian side? You don’t want to be perceived as, well, nasty....”
Sam flopped down into a morph chair and began pushing strands of his long, ’frolocked graying hair behind his ears.
“‘Juvenile’, you mean? Maybe. But which is more nasty? Re-animating the corpse-images of long dead actors—and making money off of them without their consent and without sharing a single percentage point with their heirs? Or calling attention to the inherent criminality of that practice?”
Aleck got up from the console and went over to his bike.
“Okay, okay, I see your point,” he said, folding up his cycle inside its windscreen bubble. He put the collapsed cycle in the nearest closet. “Stealing from the future has a long and illustrious past, too, I guess. Hey—I found something at work you might be interested in.”
“What—working with ol’ Hugh Manatee?” Sam asked skeptically.
“Yeah,” Aleck said with a nod, slipping a memory needle into their player. “I downloaded some of it to a compatible format with our system. Here—give it a scan.”
Sam sat down and webbed in. He watched scenes, clearly stock footage, most of the images reshaped from common sources, yet carefully sculpted to follow a narrative, the point of view seemingly subjective camera, Sam’s “own”.
Dreamer wakes up cold, shivering in some kind of coldbox. Whole body frosted over. Cracking the lid on the box. Clouds of silvery mist roll out and off. Standing up, like rising out of a white coffin. Feeling the back of his head. Realizing that the plug that fits in the socket there has come loose and fallen out. Looking around. Nothing but a smoldering wasteland of smoking trash and ashes, dotted every few paces with more and more coldbox coffins, like countless abandoned refrigerators in a trash heap world, all the way out to the very edge of vision. Billions of them, all over the planet, one box for every living person.
Going from box to box. Faint humming seeming to come from each of them, from all of them, from somewhere and everywhere. Some of the coldboxes roughly human-shaped. Some with clear windows in the lid or even clear lids. Looking inside. Are the residents dreaming or dead or somewhere between the two?
Bodies in cold storage, making almost no demands. Minds, through headplugs, all sharing the same virtuality construct, the same mass hallucination of active lives in a human universe of haborbs and metroplexes and terraformed planets. The truth, though, is there’s only this world, of ashes and ancient trash and frozen supernumerary sleepers.
Setting out in search of access to the machine which seems to hum everywhere beneath the ashes and trash. Too soon captured by machine soldiers, returned to coldcrypt, headplug reinstalled. Sleep to waking—
A break came in the record. Sam clicked out of virtuality.
“This is primary stuff!” he said, pleased. “All the footage is stock, but the story looks uncloned. It’s like humans have roached the planet mercilessly hard! Like some overpopulation thing has already defeated humanity, and the only way to stop the boombust from wiping everyone out is to suspend everybody, frozen in time. Of course, even with photonics, nanotech, and microminiaturization, it would take an enormous machine, a mountain- or planet-sized machine, to generate the kind of virtuality they’d all be plugged into. Million-plus polygons per second—and you’d need that for several billion participants each. That’s what it would take to pass completely for real.”
“What about the headplug stuff?” Aleck asked from the morph sofa where he’d sat down during Sam’s scan.
“Oh, that’s interesting, all right,” Sam said. “Direct plug-ins have been proposed before but they’ve never gone over very big. Too intrusive.”
“I suppose it would make people feel way too much like they were just peripherals attached to a big machine,” Aleck agreed.
“Yeah,” Sam said with a nod. “That’s nominally why bonephones haven’t caught on, either. Truth to tell, though, we already are peripherals. Have been for a long time. Think of all the time we spend interacting with machines, behind or in front of screens and steering mechanisms, or attached to telecommunications devices. People started becoming protocyborgs at least as early as the industrial revolution.”
Aleck got up from the sofa and headed toward the console.
“Some researchers have been pushing in the opposite direction. Seamless thought-recognition interfaces, making the whole sphere of all machines potentially act as peripherals to, or extensions of, the human nervous system.”
“But who ends up ‘main’ and who ends up ‘peripheral’,” Sam said, “remains a big question even then—”
“The stuff I got from Manatee’s data flows has more to say about the headplugs,” Aleck said, thinking about it. “Most of it’s wordless and from a sort of camera-eye point of view, but not all of it. I’ll find it for you.”
Sam reluctantly relinquished the virtuality gear, able only to sit back and watch as Aleck fast forwarded to the point in the data he was looking for.
“Here it is,” Aleck said at last, handing the gear back to Sam. “See what you think.”
“‘Seeing what you think’ would be quite a trick,” Sam joked as he watched an interrogation scenario begin and unfold before him. Whether it was taking place in a prison, or an asylum, or some strange combination of both, Sam could not tell.
“Since when is it the obligation of citizens to become zombies?” the head-shaved inmate asks of the interrogator. “That’s what the ‘obligation’ is, you know? ISIS borrows your body for a while—and you get no choice in the matter. Your headplug gets a signal to hyperactivate Wernicke’s area in the right side of your brain, the micromachines swarm to reinforce bicameral walling, and the next thing you know you’re like the heroes in the Iliad, hearing and obeying the voices of the gods in their heads. You have to obey. No voice is more authoritative than the one that commands compliance from inside your own head—believe me, I know. You respond with no will of your own anymore. You become a stranger in your own mind.”
Sam clicked out of the virtual, smiling beatifically.
“This is just too heat-death!” he said happily. “This is like a far-paranoid version of what I’m already talking about in my thesis! Ah, a kindred spirit in the infosphere—”
“Oh? How?” Aleck asked, from the sofa again, becoming a bit groggy as he began to slip into his daytime sleep cycle. For some reason he was dreamily thinking that he must be a good guy, since all his ex-girlfriends still liked him.
“The way computer media must ultimately function to destroy the individual,” Sam said, his voice betraying the whirl of activity in his head. “Media lateralizes society and recameralizes the individual in ways Julian Jaynes could never have predicted. The voice that implants the same message straight into everyone’s head. This virtual material here reifies it, makes it an actual physical invasion, a neurological implant.”
“Oh, that,” Aleck said sleepily. “Scan forward to the stuff on Endocolonization.”
“Okay,” Sam said, gearing up again. “Thanks, I will.”
Soon enough he had found it—the inmate still talking to the interrogator, or the analysand to the analyst, whichever it might be.
“The age of expanding world conquest is long over,” the inmate says, “so the powerful colonize and control their own populations. The military and security apparatus, deprived of adequate external enemies, turns inward and becomes an internal superpolice. On an ideological level, Law is the policeman with the gun to your head, while Ethics is yourself, socially programmed to hold the gun to your own head.
“The next logical step is to literally colonize not only the hearts and minds but also the brains and bloodstreams of the population. The body politic and the biological body increasingly overlap. The military’s role is to keep the national body or body politic secure against foreign invasio
n, just as the medical establishment’s role is to defend and keep secure the integrity of the biological body. Funding for both is based on fear of death and the desire for immortality...
“The industrial and entertainment sectors do likewise, producing commodities to fill up the times and spaces of our lives. So that there will be no room for the notion of our mortality to invade our heads or our houses. The old military-industrial complex grew into the MIME, the Military Industrial Medical Entertainment complex, inherent in the shift to a post-industrial world.”
Sam scanned quickly through a gap in the record.
“—implants. Only for prisoners, at first, but then for everyone. Percept shapers and response dampers. Colonize the cranium, police the parietals. Fence in the open mind. Lock everybody’s lobes into the same Big Picture. No more need to rely on the glitchy software of media and cultural programming. Just hardwire in complete compliance, a permanent occupation force in the mindscape, a branch office of Big Brother, Inc. in every brain. Nothing is more perfectly enslaving than the illusion of freedom....”
Sam clicked out of virtuality.
“This is great home media!” he enthused to the dozing Aleck. “Psychos with studios! Who put this together? This is as whacked as anything in the infosphere. Some weird future or alternate history or superparanoid fantasy—or maybe all of that. You’ve found the Nutso Mother Lode, buddy! The main vein. You will show me how to tap in, won’t you?”
“What?” Aleck said sleepily. “Oh. Yeah. Sure. Sure.”
* * * *
Frustrated and exhausted, they despaired of ever gaining access to the tepui top, despite their long travail. Larkin and Cortland and the rest of their little expedition headed back down the ridge. Hastily they set up camp after spending so much of the day wrangling with officious and purposely obtuse guards and bureaucrats of the military, governmental, and corporate varieties.
The cover story they had been given was “joint military maneuvers”, but one of the lower level technocrats blew that when the phrase “planetary security” slipped out before she could catch herself.
Something odd about the lot of them, Roger thought. All the empty suits and hollow uniforms seemed bent in an unseen dimension, as if they themselves really didn’t know why they were here, but that that fact could only make them the more dedicated to their mission.
Cortland and Larkin and Ignacio and their bearers had barely finished erecting their tents and settling in for the cooking of the evening meal when a woman strode quietly into camp in the evening light. She was accompanied by a half-dozen shadowy indígenas who seemed to move through the camp like a wind, before taking up watch around it. The graying woman spoke quickly to the bearers in their own tongue, which seemed to calm them despite the invasion of the camp.
When Paul Larkin saw the woman with the gray streaks in her hair and the strangeness about her eyes, it was as if he’d seen a ghost return to flesh. Seeing the older man’s stunned reaction, Roger knew without knowing how that Larkin’s sister Jacinta had at last returned from her long voyage away from this world—and that the stealth indígenas with her were the tepuian ghost people of whom Larkin had often spoken.
The brother and sister embraced with all the love, tender awkwardness, and humility that people long familiar with each other can show at the moment of a reunion that has unexpectedly befallen them after unforeseen long absence. From where he sat, some distance away from them, Roger could hear “Let me look at you!” from each of them in turn, the sound of both Larkins holding back against tears, and then giving in to them.
Paul told his sister that she couldn’t imagine how many times in his dreams she had talked to him across a table or from a nearby bed, as if in those dreams they were living in some parallel universe where they had never been separated. Then he was explaining how, though he was consciously supposed to reconcile himself to the fact that she was gone and probably dead, his unconscious mind had always refused to believe it, as if she weren’t really dead, just a long time coming home. As now it had actually turned out to be!
For her part, Jacinta recounted that, though the specifics of her memories of her brother and their family had begun to fade and vanish during her long absence, the emotions associated with them had actually grown in strength as the initial shock and numbness of their separation wore off.
The Larkins began to speak then, more quietly, on even more personal matters, the deaths of parents and relatives and close friends. Roger consciously tried not to eavesdrop. At last, though, Paul brought Jacinta over by the camp stove fire, where Roger sat, and introduced her to him.
“You don’t seem to have aged as much as your brother,” Roger remarked, “but then maybe you’ve been spending more time close to the speed of light...?”
As she and Paul sat down on the ground near him, Jacinta laughed lightly at his obviously “fishing” query. She had obviously deduced that her brother had informed Roger about at least some of the background concerning the tepui top.
“Only partially,” she said. “Our travels are a challenge to explain. I felt like a seventeenth century explorer who expected to find a northwest passage via sailing ship, but caught a transcontinental flight instead.”
Roger added water to the crumbly soup mix in a pot and put it on the camp stove burner.
“You mean like hyperspace? Time warps? Wormholes through space?” he asked, his physics-geek side getting the better of him. She looked at him in such a piercing way that, for a moment, Roger was absolutely convinced she somehow knew about his post-Light talent.
“Something like that,” Jacinta said non-committally. “I could tell you it has to do with the way higher dimensions simplify physical laws. Or with the way Mind can link in to those higher dimensions, in such a manner as to step around the tremendous Planck energies normally required for travel through them. I’m afraid those explanations will sound too much like magic. Enough for now to say that you can get anywhere from here—though you won’t be traveling the way any of us expected.”
She turned, obviously and specifically to her brother, then.
“And I did get there, Paul,” she said exultantly. “To the Allesseh, the Great Cooperation, the communion of all myconeuralized sentients, everywhere in the galaxy. The myths, the collective myconeural-symbiont memories of the tepui’s ghost people—they were right. We were meant to be part of that harmony of Mind. We got consciousness and intellect here on Earth, but not the full, empathic sharing that ‘telepathy’ only partly describes.”
Roger kept himself occupied with the camp stove. Still, he could not help taking in their conversation, even over the sounds of dusk in the sparse cloud forest around them.
“They were right about all of it?” Paul asked, absently watching Roger make the soup. “The disabled contact ship, the spore crash—”
She nodded vigorously. In the light coming from the bearers’ campfire and the stove he tended, Roger saw that, in the long fall of Jacinta’s hair hung thin, oddly-braided portions, like ropes in a waterfall. Their ends were held in place with archaic objects, ranging from what looked like small bird skulls to little vacuum tubes and bits of old silicon circuitry.
From having listened patiently to Larkin’s reminiscences—and more, from some deeper memory source of his own that he could not yet fully identify—Roger understood the significance of Jacinta’s adornments. He knew something of the background of the “disabled contact ship” and the “spore crash,” without being able to remember exactly how he knew it. Did it have something to do with the erratic, past-reading talent the Light had left him with? Or was it more direct?
“Surprisingly accurate, yes,” she said. A bird called in the deepening evening light behind her. “The records of most space-faring species in the Allesseh show the ship as ‘lost’. Apparently it returned to normal space in the wrong place—with disastrous results. The ghost people’s myths were especially on target about the effect that being overlooked by the later contact ships
—and thus being left a preterite planet—had on us as a species.”
“What sort of effect?” Roger asked, keeping a close eye on the soup, though it didn’t seem to be doing very much. The slow joys of high-altitude cookery allowed plenty of time for conversation. Or for contemplation, which that word “Allesseh” had triggered off in him now.
“The motion of our history is a wave of hallucination on an ocean of mystery,” Jacinta said, as if quoting. She shook her head, looking thoughtful and chagrined. “All our wars and wrongness really do prove it.”
All this stuff, odd as it was, felt increasingly familiar to Roger. It flashed and disappeared, like a repressed memory, something moving around just outside consciousness. It itched somewhere deep in his brain, but the only thing he could come up with was that he seemed to recall Larkin telling him that the “Allesseh” term was used frequently among druggies and other psychonauts, especially those referred to as gateheads.
“This ‘Allesseh’,” he asked, seeing the soup in the pot on the burner beginning at last to bubble and boil a little, after the interminable wait. “Is it a place? A congress? A great hall of records? What exactly is it?”
“It’s not any it, exactly,” she said smiling. “Not exactly a thing or a place, yet also everything you mentioned. A number of the myconeurally-connected species claim it’s easier to dance it than explain it. I’m not that good a dancer.”
Roger handed around cups to his two companions for the soup that was finally cooking.
“Then try to explain it in terms the rest of us poor mortals might understand,” he said.
“It’s both a dark eye and a shining gate standing between time and eternity,” Jacinta said, as if trying to make sense of the experience to herself even now. “The cave of night, wrapped around a sky filled with stars. A black hole and a crystal ball and a mirror sphere and a memory bank, all at once. A timeline made out of timelines and a sightline made out of sightlines. A hyper-dimensional node, if you like. Everything outside it is also inside it—all times, all spaces, all histories and stories, they’re all together there.”
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