Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Roger blew on his hot soup, testing it before serving it to his companions. The soup made him feel warmer and cozier in this strange place. The evening was growing chill, and Jacinta’s story around the campfire—or at least the camp stove—was spooky enough, in its way....

  “If everything’s in it,” he asked, “then how did it pass over our whole planet here?”

  “‘It’ didn’t,” Jacinta said. “The contact ships missed us. Everything all those species have learned is in the Allesseh—and more—but you can’t always know where to look. That’s how our history could be inside it somewhere and yet lost as far as all other sentient species were concerned. Everyone who looks into it sees what she needs—or ‘telepathically asks’—to see. Or not.”

  “Doesn’t sound particularly user-friendly,” Roger said, ladling up soup for Jacinta.

  “More user-idiosyncratic, I guess,” she replied, sipping the hot soup. “Always as idiosyncratic as its users. A hermeneutical tesseract. The Allesseh is the Great Co-operation. It’s what makes the Cooperation possible and what is made possible by that harmony.”

  Larkin had been staring away at the darkness growing in the east, but now turned back to them as Roger poured soup for him.

  “What did you see, yourself?” Jacinta’s brother asked

  “Maybe too much,” she said softly. She swatted away carefully the occasional mosquito made sluggish by the chill in the air, and stared half-hypnotized by the play of the flames in the bearers’ fire, not far away. “The Allesseh is not only the eye you look into, but also the eye that looks into you. ‘Idiosynchronous,’ even. Its vision absorbs everything, the way a black hole devours light. I looked at cities and saw fogs of stone clinging to coastlines, mists of metal rolling along river valleys. I saw some old truths: How all the living are ghosts in the fog, all our institutions unjust shadows in a dream of justice. How building a fire is really only building a stack of ashes. How there’s neither noon nor midnight on the surface of the sun, how sunrises and sunsets are only a dizzy local illusion. One of which illusions seems to be occurring right now.”

  They turned to watch the sun, appearing to disappear at the horizon line in a blaze of gold and red and salmon pink. Night began to move like a wave into the living-fossil jungles below. They watched in silence as the Earth spun under their feet, weaving further illusions.

  “Good soup,” Jacinta said to Roger when she’d set it aside, finished. “I was as curious as you are about the Allesseh’s history. I looked into that. Literally.”

  “What did you find?” Roger asked, surprised at how quickly she’d downed the hot soup. He finished his off too, a ward against the cold.

  “As nearly as I could tell,” she began, cautiously, “it started out as the joint venture of a number of expansionist space-faring cultures. Something like ten million years ago. What became the Allesseh began as a distributed structure of self-replicating, self-improving information retrieval, storage, and transmission devices. The only human things I’ve come across that parallel its initial design are what are called Von Neumann probes. Or maybe nodes of an artificial galactic nervous system, only each point along it is a satellite-library vastly more info-dense than Earth’s entire noösphere.”

  Roger stared at her, intrigued despite the strangeness of what he was hearing. In the east the rising moon had begun to glow.

  “A dispersed interstellar brain, then?” he asked, trying to wrap his mind around it. “A galactic computer net?”

  “Much more than that,” she said, glancing about them in the deepening night. “If memory plus perception equal intelligence, then it’s by far the most intelligent entity in the galaxy. It has kept evolving itself, and its linkages to sentient species, for at least nine and a half million years. Nobody knows if it’s still evolving in that sense, though.”

  “Why’s that?” Paul Larkin said, stifling a yawn. It had, after all, been a very long trail day. All the members of their small expedition were tired.

  “About 500,000 years ago,” Jacinta explained, “it became more a sort of higher dimensional cosmological structure than anything mechanical, or organic, or even physical, in the usual senses of those terms. One of its subprograms did develop the myconeural symbiont, the ghost people encountered on their tepui, though. As part of the Allesseh’s program to ‘spread the faith’ of sentience.”

  “A god out of a machine,” Paul said. He finished his soup too, then rubbed his hands against the chill.

  “A troubled god, I think,” Jacinta remarked, thoughtful. “None of the other species have much trouble with the way the Allesseh ‘is’. They’ve all known it so long that maybe they’re too familiar with it. I may be wrong, but I think it’s too ‘intelligent’, now.”

  “How can that be?” Roger asked. He wondered how anyone could ever have too much true intelligence. Most of the world he knew seemed to suffer from a dearth of it.

  “It’s taken in, and is still taking in, so much data that it’s become self-obsessed, solipsistic,” Jacinta theorized. “Part of its original program was a very strong sense of what we might call individual mission—the idea that it and its mission were too important to be absorbed into anyone or anything else’s program. I don’t think that directive prevented it from becoming self-absorbed, though. Encouraged it, rather. A mind that has become its own mirror.”

  “A net of Indra, ensnaring itself,” Paul Larkin said.

  “If this thing is so vast,” Roger asked, his skepticism growing, “why couldn’t we find it, or any trace of it?”

  “Maybe we have,” Jacinta said, “only we didn’t recognize it. Each node, each evolved satellite library, would resemble nothing so much now as a stable black hole. Even before the satellite libraries evolved, they were each probably only about the size of a small automobile. The bigger problem, though—and the better answer—is that the whole system’s no longer following its original exploratory imperatives. We didn’t find it because it’s stopped actively looking for us—or anything else. I think it’s suffering from a malaise, a sort of cosmic ennui. But we’re going to change all that.”

  Roger saw Larkin shake his head in the mixed light of campfire and moon.

  “Now Jacs,” Paul said, disapprovingly. “You looked and sounded so healthy—until you said that last part. How could anyone do that to the thing you’ve described. That’s too overweening to be quite ‘right.’ I remember the way you were, in the times of your troubles.”

  “Really?” she asked, smiling somehow mischievously.

  “Yes,” Larkin said with a nod. “You felt you were such a nobody, yet at the same time you merited this huge conspiracy that was supposedly keeping an eye on you. I hope you haven’t exchanged one set of delusions of grandeur for another.”

  To both Paul’s and Roger’s surprise, Jacinta was not at all bothered by the assertion that she might still be insane. Instead, she laughed.

  “Look into my eyes,” she said to her brother, in her best Bela Lugosi imitation, before dropping it. “See the brown and blue there, like cut agate? Do you remember what that means among the ghost people of Caracamuni tepui?”

  “Full myconeural symbiosis,” Paul said quietly.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve been riding the timelines of possibility for—what? Well over thirty years anyway, off and on. I’ve done my stint in mindtime. Straightened my crazies right out.”

  The mention of “riding timelines” jolted Roger. For a moment it was all too close to his own disturbing, post-Light talent. He thought of it as “backtracing,” the unwanted ability to read the past that always floated behind the present, even in the most mundane situations and most disposable objects.

  Paul shook his head.

  “I never had the guts to let the fungal spawn of their symbiont spread through my system for more than a few months at a time,” he said. “I always zapped it with fungicidal medicines. Afraid it would drive me insane if I let it keep growing.”

  Jacinta l
aughed—again.

  “You know me, bro. You used to tell me, ‘Doing drugs is like a telephone call: once you get the message, hang up.’ That never worked for me. I had to take drugs to be normal. Whether pharmaceuticals or self-medicating, always something—”

  He interrupted them. These two spoke so lightly of their encounter with the tepuians ‘myconeural symbiont’, thought Roger. His own encounter with the Cordyceps fungus had been disturbing in the extreme.

  “So,” he said, as directly as he could manage, “something about the symbiosis with Cordyceps jacintae has convinced you that human beings have an important role in the future of this Allesseh, then?”

  “‘Cordyceps jacintae’?” she asked quizzically, looking at her brother with her eyebrows raised. “So that’s what you named it? I’m touched and honored, Paul, but really, something like Cordyceps caracamuniensis or tepuiensis ‘Larkin’ would be fairer to everyone involved—you and the ghost people of Caracamuni, too, not just me.” She turned again to Roger. “In answer to your question, yes, I’m convinced we do have an important role—precisely because of our strange preterite history. When we were in its presence—more of a tangible absence, really—I felt that the Allesseh almost didn’t want to recognize us. Especially not the ghost people and their core myth cycle, the Story of the Seven Ages. As if that cycle reminded the Allesseh, with all its associated sentient species, of something that ‘interdimensional node’ has yet to do. A part of its mission it has yet to complete but is almost afraid to complete.” Jacinta shrugged, briefly and abruptly. “Just my feeling from it and from the timelines, that’s all.”

  “What ‘something’ could a thing like that be afraid of?” Roger asked, gathering up their dishware and spoons and preparing to clean them with a small ultrasonic hiker’s scrubber. He didn’t want her to keep talking about “timelines.” He had enough half-formed thoughts on his new talent—or curse—in that area already.

  “I don’t know exactly what that something is,” Jacinta said, “and I didn’t get a chance to investigate much further, because then that Light thing hit. The minute that happened, the Allesseh pulled some kind of higher-dimensional hoodoo and we were all back on the rock bus to Earth before you could say ‘Boo!’”

  Roger stopped soundscrubbing the soup cups and stared at her in something akin to shock.

  “You experienced the Light episode too?” he asked. “When you were light-years away?”

  “You bet,” she said wryly. “You didn’t think something like that was ordinary everyday photons, did you? Had to be some kind of vibration from a very high dimension, given the way the Allesseh responded to it. Ever since it happened, the ghost people have been incorporating these meander and maze patterns everywhere into their embroidery. That’s the ‘afterimage’ it left in our minds’ eyes, anyway.” She paused and looked from one to the other of the two men, as if struck by a sudden thought. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know where that Light came from, would you?”

  Roger and Paul glanced meaningfully at each other.

  “We might,” Roger said uncertainly, turning off the burner in preparation for cleaning up and breaking down the tiny camp stove.

  “Was it from somebody Cordyceps-connected?” she asked pointedly.

  “May well have been,” Paul said. “A lot has happened with that fungus since you left.”

  “That’s what we intended,” Jacinta said. “That’s why we left that spore-print in your backpack—yes, dear brother, that was my idea.”

  “That was an awful burden of responsibility,” he said gravely.

  “How badly wrong has it gone?” she asked, suddenly very serious. “They haven’t fitted everybody with headplugs, with neurological implants, have they?”

  “No,” Paul said. “No one’s done that, yet.”

  Jacinta let out a sigh of relief.

  “That was always one of my worst prescient fears,” she said. “Under low-voltage X-ray, the density of the mushroom flesh and that of human flesh were about the same. The worst scenario I saw on the timelines came from that.”

  “Why?” Roger asked.

  “Whatever lipoprotein or polysaccharide allowed the fungus to grow its threads throughout the body without arousing the body’s immune response could, once isolated, be used to coat micromachines and bioelectronic networks for injection into the brain itself. Hardwired thought control, everybody automatized, marching to the same beat.”

  “No, that hasn’t happened,” Paul said, with a small smile. “We still just have the media, education, and the family unit for thought control. We did have Medusa Blue and Tetragrammaton too, though.”

  “Which are?” Jacinta asked.

  “Medusa Blue was a secret project, part of a covert program called Tetragrammaton,” Paul said. “It grew out of a number of ‘depth survival’ studies begun by intelligence apparatuses during the Cold War: CIA, KGB, MI-5, Mossad—”

  Jacinta gave him that quizzical look again.

  “Now who sounds paranoid?” she said. Roger laughed, then quickly went back to breaking down the stove. Paul Larkin looked perplexed.

  “If paranoia means trying to find a pattern of meaning,” Paul said, “then maybe so. Somebody had to start thinking about how to save us from ourselves. I worked with them. How do you think they got our Cordyceps?”

  Larkin stared into the darkness and its night noises for a moment.

  “I’m not proud of it,” he said quietly. “It gave me some money and meaning, at the time. Anyway, even before you took off, a lot of the old intelligence services were gradually going corporate. Interpol was about the only one that didn’t. The others—their human and information assets were being bought out by ISIS. International Security and Intelligence Service. Most of those older intel services already had Tetragrammaton links, though. Those groups were already working on Tetragrammaton’s big project.”

  Jacinta stared hard at her brother in the firelight.

  “Which was?”

  “The creation of a seamless mind/machine linkage,” he said, leaning back on his hands. “To make human and machine intelligence co-extensive. Through that, they hoped to create an information density singularity. A gateway into and through the fabric of space-time.”

  “How’d they plan to do that?” Jacinta asked, intrigued yet obviously familiar with such processes.

  “The plan was to use computers and large-scale machine intelligences,” Paul said. “Generate the levels of information density needed to open the transdimensional singularity and boom! Faster-than-light travel to anywhere in the continuum. Something you and the ghost people seem to have already accomplished, in a different manner.”

  “Yes,” Jacinta said thoughtfully. “More organically, less mechanically. I don’t know how much these people have thought about it, but a seamless mind/machine interface would also, incidentally, make possible an instantaneous, technologically-mediated, person to person ‘telepathy’ akin to what I’ve experienced with the ghost people. Such a technology would free people from the primordial entrapment in the worlds of our own individual skulls.”

  Paul nodded, silent, apparently considering the implications.

  “Then in that way,” Roger said, struck by the thought, “it would be the logical culmination to a long tradition—language, cave painting, writing, all the graphic and fine arts, telephony, radio, film, all telecommunications.”

  Roger felt as much as saw Jacinta nod in agreement in the deepening dark.

  “Strange to think how much of all our human endeavors may have been an attempt to make up for that fullness of empathy we missed out on, because of our preterite history outside the Cooperation,” she said, then turned toward her brother again. “What was the role of human consciousness to be in all this?”

  “Supposedly the transdimensional gateway can only be opened by a chaotic key,” Paul said. “Chaotic acausality of the right type can’t be programmed into machine systems because they are rule-governed. Rule-breaking is
what’s needed. That ‘right kind of chaos’ is the single most significant way the human brain and human consciousness differ from artificial intelligences and simulacra.” Larkin shrugged, briefly and abruptly, so much like his sister’s body-language earlier that it seemed to Roger that it must be some kind of family trait. “Maybe they were just creating a myth of human uniqueness, I don’t know.”

  “Another ‘delusion of grandeur?” Jacinta asked, too innocently.

  “Okay, maybe.” Paul Larkin drew something invisible with his finger in the dirt of the ridge. “But they believed that, if the singularity was to form and the gateway to open, the machines needed that chaos. Medusa Blue was phase one: a psi-power enhancement project aimed at computer-aided apotheosis. Voice recognition and activation proved easier than anticipated, so why not thought recognition, even soul-capture.”

  Larkin stopped his scribbling in the dirt and looked up at both of his companions.

  “That’s why they were so hyped about our fungus and KL,” he said, an odd edge in his voice. “Medusa Blue did a lot of very questionable things. Surreptitious injections. Covert chemical campaigns. In utero exposures—all with the best of intentions. The survival of the species. Earth too small a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in, that sort of thing. But other groups wanted to use Cordyceps derivatives for other purposes. Designer docility drugs. Female submission synthetics—”

  Something like a bird call sounded nearby and Jacinta got to her feet, stretching.

  “Where are Medusa Blue and Tetragrammaton now?” she said, glancing around.

  “ISIS spun them off when it became Interorbital,” Paul said. “The program and its projects are pretty much autonomous. Fronted through a number of independent, non-profit institutes, now. Lots of wealthy backers. Planetary power players. Most of the investigators crawling around up on that tepui top are probably their creatures, ultimately. Your ghost people had better be careful.”