Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Marco had only an electronic drum pad. Janika had brought something that looked like a cross between a flute and an accordion keyboard. Hari’s instrument was the most stripped-down of all: a modified Chapman stick, like a guitar from which someone had removed the soundbox body, leaving only a fretted fingerboard neck and strings.

  Sam, heeding Aleck’s warnings about noise, had them tuning up into virtual space, channeling music to each other’s ears but not into the surrounding air. Rather surreal, Aleck thought, watching them in their electrode armbands and lightweight, fret-netted circlet gear, each circlet unit equipped with personal earphones and eyescreens and throatmikes. At the moment the band members were hearing only their hummed pitch approximations—and virtually nothing of the sound of the instruments themselves. Aleck heard Sam singing, almost sotto voce, the lyrics “Human bein’s, human bein’s, we breed beyond our means/Human bein’s, human bein’s, we breed beyond our means,” then laughing.

  Aleck recognized the notes behind the band’s original little tune-up lyric. The tune was from Sam’s collection of popular songs of the past century. The original was a paean to a movie star who got killed in a car accident, a ditty sung by a band called the Beagles, or something like that, if Aleck remembered correctly.

  “Hey, Aleck,” Sam said, breaking out of tune-up mode. “Show me how to access Hugh’s stuff, will you? So we can have some visuals to play against.”

  “Okay,” Aleck replied. He put on the circlet gear and channeled three-dimensional displays of R & L’s corporate data indices to Sam and his people for a brief instant. Then Aleck air-touched a little manatee-character icon.

  The manatee grew to life size and swam out of the underwater anteroom of a high-level R & L corporate index. The animated sea mammal led them into deep, open water. There, all about them, floated numerous shifting three dimensional icons around a glowing underwater fireball—a red-orange sun dropped into and burning deep within the dark blue ocean.

  “Hey, great graphics!” Hari said, very impressed.

  “Thanks,” Aleck replied. “It was a lot of work, but it was the best way I could picture it. The central fireball is the icon for how Hugh interfaces with R & L’s corporate electronics and the infosphere—generally bioelectronics, untouchable through this system. A sun, too hot to touch, see? The things that look like solar prominences are internal communications within Hugh’s system, as near as I can tell. The things that start out as solar flares, then become cooler and turn into schools of silvery fish—and vice-versa, from moonfish to solar flares—those are datastreams moving from Hugh into the infosphere and from the infosphere back to Hugh.”

  “What are the larger icons floating around the fireball?” Sam asked. “The geometric things that keep fluctuating—”

  “The stuff I already showed you back at the apartment is part of it,” Aleck said. “They seem to be made out of ‘found’ data and images, but they’re shaped and wrapped around structures that originate with Hugh, as far as I can tell. The fireball seems to spew them out from time to time, anyway.”

  “Can you open one?” Janika asked.

  “Sure,” Aleck said, reaching forward and tapping at a tesseract cross shape, a hypercube represented in three dimensional space. Abruptly the cubes of the cross fell in on themselves and became a landscape through which all of them were moving, each of them experiencing it from subjective camera point-of-view.

  In sunset light, getting out of the car to unlock the driveway gate. Footsteps crunching over the driveway gravel to the gate. Inserting the key in the lock. The lock clicks open on the gate. Suddenly the sound of shotguns, three, dialing in. Memory flash of 9 mm Glock rail pistol in glove compartment. Turning to see three figures striding swiftly out of the trees and brush beside the gravel driveway, their hair and lower faces covered with bandanas. Feebly raising fists as assailants set about methodically head-bashing with shotgun butts.

  “You fucked with the wrong people, kiddo.”

  Black out.

  Then hospital tomographs, images of a disembodied head—close-lipped, shut-eyed, naked of hair and consciousness—turning in space, a strange silent movie. Just back of the left temple, cranium dented inward deeply, in the perfect impression of a gun butt—

  Abruptly the scene disappeared into screen at the back of a cube, then into the wall of the cube, then the cube birthing other cubes until it was once again the shape of the cross of cubes, the unraveled hypercube tesseract.

  “That’s a horrible little story,” Janika said.

  “Maybe it’s real,” Marco said flatly. “Maybe that’s what really happened to the mummy in the tank. How he ended up where he is.”

  “But the images are adapted from stock footage,” Sam said.

  “So?” Marco said.

  “I see your point,” Aleck said slowly, catching on. “Maybe the found images are used to put flesh on the skeleton of what actually happened. A sort of disembodied memory.”

  “Or an autonomous psychoid process,” Janika said, surprising the rest of them with the phrase. “We talked about them when I was in the studio audience for my AI class. Researchers are using them in some of the big machine intelligences, as a way around ‘monolithic’ machine selfhood.”

  The rest said nothing for a moment, until Hari’s voice came on line.

  “Possibly,” he agreed. “Computers in general have been functioning as a sort of collective electronic unconscious at least since the creation of the infosphere.”

  Sam laughed.

  “You think Hugh’s unconscious is making them—so he’s not even aware of it?” Sam prodded. “That’ll save us some intellectual property hassles, if we decide to use any of this stuff in our show!”

  Show? Aleck wondered. Use?

  “Open up another one,” Janika said. “That weird thing made out of spheres over there.”

  Aleck reached out and tapped open the unraveled hypersphere, a thing shapeshifting like a clockwork bee-swarm. The spheres fell into each other and filled their surround again with subjective-camera imagery.

  Fields of snow, untouched, pure and sweet as a blank white page. First one out in it, laying down and writing a winged figure into those pages again and again until jittery-shivering, body cold as a snow angel’s, snow angels—

  Glass calling for a brick the way still water calls for stones, tossed skip thrown stones, mirror smooth pond surfaces beckoning then breaking into wet shatter—

  Throwing rock and mud dams across streams. Ponds. In the trickle leaks from the dams, flatworms, small black slow, move over the sand. Planaria. Cut them in half, watch them regenerate, neat trick—

  Handed a rubberband airplane. Winding the propeller, knotting and twisting the band again and again. Paternal voice says, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that people are like rubberband airplanes. The more twisted they are, the farther they fly—”

  Ant wars. Red ants, black ants. Putting them in matchboxes, shaking them up so they fight. Stare fascinated as they battle to the death, mandible to mandible, biting off legs, antennae, thoraxes, abdomens. War in a box—

  Handed magnifying lens. Examining leaf structures, flower parts. Diagram in school science program showing hand lens becoming a burning glass, focusing the light to a tight combustion point. Dry leaves, bright sunny days. Shrinking the comet-tail diffusion, making the bright point. Pale last fall’s leaf grows a spot dark with excess of bright, glows a rim of ash, smoke rising, leaf solidly afire. Newspapers, plastics, wax hearts, burning. Waiting for ants, crouching beside anthills with burning lens in hand, bewildered victims twisting, smoking, catching pismire fire—

  Aching sizzling blue burn scar of winter sky. No snow on the ground but cold enough to make ice lenses from two bowls of water freezing. Trying to put them together into a single lens to start fires with a lens of ice but too ungainly to use. Going to dammed creek in the woods, breaking chunks loose of thick flawlessly clear ice, lugging them home, setting them on
the front porch beside the ice lenses already there—

  Hunkering down in the dry grass of winter-killed lawn, amid the scattered punky sections of cut-down beetle-infested maple tree, amid scrap wood rotted thin as paper. Trying to start one of the rotted lengths on fire, succeeding only in dotting it all over with blackened burn spots, only getting it to smolder never to burn. Turning, walking away, hunkering down beside another likely candidate for burning—

  “Good God!” shouts paternal voice, “What the hell are you doing? The lawn’s on fire!”

  Looking quickly over right shoulder, seeing the piece of wood so long labored over has, unbeknownst, caught fire, the lawn too, paraclete tongues of flame licking toward the maple stump, all the wood scraps scattered around—

  Man charging from the house, ample-stomached figure in white undershirt, gray work pants, immense flopping unbuckled black rubber galoshes snatched in haste, moving with otherworldly motion of ungainly Styrofoam robots or angels traveling incognito as Americans walking on the moon saluting the starred flag, the speed of charging man hampered by weight of two huge prized ice chunks he’s carrying, one in each hand grabbed from off the porch—

  Flames shining up through the flawless ice crashing down upon them. Ice blocks landing with hiss and sizzle, flames like tortured snakes fanning out around them. Again and again the fire shines up clearly through the ice descending upon it, until the flames are no longer visible and the ice is ordinary water seeping into the steaming, smoking, scorched, winter-killed lawn—

  Blank staring eyes in the face of a silenced youth. Seeing the reflections of shop windows upon the deed. Hurling a brick through their witness. Dry glassy snowflake shatter. Sirens sounding law and order. Disappearing into alleys, running maze of streets, jumping barricades, dashing down Möbius Highway going nowhere taking forever to get there, highway stretching like rubberband, knotting twisting. “The more twisted they are, the farther they fly.” Rubberband airplane, twisting propeller, tension growing, rubberband snaps, rubberband snaps, rubberband snaps—

  They fell out of the re-swarming spheres and into the sea of represented data again.

  “Fantastic!” Marco enthused.

  “If you like childhood sadism,” Janika countered.

  “True,” Hari said, “but it’s not as dark as the first one—and more complex too.”

  “We can use some of it,” Sam agreed, “but not the stuff at the back end. It’s too narrative. Too much like that big-arena stuff Möbius Caduceus did, up in the orbital habitat. Aleck—you still there?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is there any way we can make this system jump randomly from icon to icon?” Sam asked. “All the accessible ones? Say about every ten, fifteen seconds? So it’ll produce a montage effect?”

  “I suppose I can plot that kind of sequencing,” Aleck said. “It’ll take me a couple minutes.”

  “Great,” Sam said happily. “Hey, you mind if we project the images and the sound into real space a little? Just so we can get a sense of how it all looks put together?”

  “I—I guess not,” Aleck replied warily. “Just give me time to fool all the nearby sound pickups again.”

  Moments later, the band members at last had their own private after-hours nightclub gig, with Aleck in the solo role of audience. Throughout the space of the lab played the images taken from Hugh Manatee’s disembodied memories, or his autonomous psychoid processes, or whatever they were, surging everywhere through the room, even glowing submarinely in Manatee’s own tank, a tangential, chaotic counterpoint to the flowing and pounding of the band’s music as Sam and Janika sang:

  Battlefields become bus stops.

  Massacres melt into folksongs, freeze into marble.

  The king divorces, the abbey dissolves.

  Yesterday’s cathedral becomes this morning’s rock quarry.

  The sheep don’t care.

  Ancient stones conspire in silence on a windswept plain.

  Their secrets are safe. The sheep have other concerns:

  Consume that grass, produce that wool!

  No fleece without dags, no dags without fleece!

  With lambs to bounce teats at lambing time,

  All are perfectly content—

  So long as, now and then,

  We get to rub our shaggy flanks

  Up against a monument.

  The effect was both disorienting and hypnotic at once. Aleck sensed that, even before they finished the song, the band members were pleased with what they were creating.

  He was going to have a hell of a time getting them out of here before the daytime security guards came on duty.

  * * * *

  Roger Cortland glanced at the sleeping figure of Paul Larkin two seats over, space and stars showing from out of the portal beyond Larkin’s gray-haired and gray-bearded head. Roger envied the older man. Since his odd experience at the time of the Light, Roger himself found he could no longer sleep on orbiters like this one, or on jets, either—something he had accomplished with no difficulty at all, before the Light happened.

  Oh well. He supposed old Larkin deserved the rest. The old man had masterfully harangued the security personnel surrounding the tepui into giving them an airlift back to Amianac and Caracas, claiming it was the least they could do, after he and Cortland and their guide and bearers had hiked all the way to the shoulder of the world and then been denied access to their goal. The security people and the bureaucrats had nervously agreed, at last—apparently out of a combination of guilt and a desire to have them out of the area as quickly as possible.

  They and their party and all their gear had found its way aboard a big VTOL plane on the helipad the occupying army had hacked, lasered, and ’dozered out of the surrounding brush. The flight back was tense, at least as far as the military personnel with them were concerned, but it got them to Amianac in hours instead of days.

  After settling up on the guide’s and bearers’ charges and dropping their locals off at the vertiport outside the busted boomtown, Paul and Roger flew on to Caracas, landing at a military base connected to the airport. The flight back north—then followed by more seat-time up the well on the single-stage orbiter McAuliffe—had been pleasantly uneventful thus far.

  Despite his best intentions, Roger found himself growing disappointed as he gazed out the portal at the deep navy-blue of cislunar space. Larkin’s stories had primed him for seeing the tepui top, supposedly covered by an eroded-rock labyrinth or maze as convoluted as the surface of a human brain. He had hoped to descend into the cloud forest that Larkin claimed bisected the tepui top into neat hemispheres. He had planned to enter the cavernous spaces that riddled the tepui, to see the indígenas Jacinta had “electronified,” hooking them into telecommunication with the rest of the world.

  He only now realized how much he had been intrigued by Larkin’s reminiscences. The idea of people in loin clothes hooked into the global satellite network, pumping everything they pulled down out of the infosphere straight into their bemushroomed minds, shaping it and casting it from “mindtime” into space-time, zapping it into the tall quartz collecting-columns of the “information drivers” and “intelligent crystal technology” which floated serenely in the vast underground chamber of the Cathedral Room—that was all so wild it almost had to be real.

  The skeptic in him had wanted to see it all first hand. He’d wanted to test scrupulously the idea that crystalline materials of proper lattice configuration and sufficient size could receive and amplify mental energies. He’d wanted to strenuously examine the even more dubious claim that such crystalline structures could translate those energies into motive forces, in a manner supposedly analogous to piezoelectric effects. He’d wanted to observe the manner in which Jacinta and the indígenas supposedly sang and thought critical information densities into the floating crystal columns in the big subterranean cave chamber. He’d wanted to understand the exact physical principle—no matter how subtle or “holographic”—by which those coll
ecting columns could translate and amplify information itself, in such a way as to dissociate the tepui from the gravitational bed of local space-time, or tunnel through higher dimensional space, or whatever it was they had supposedly managed to do.

  True, Jacinta Larkin had been a wealth of information in the brief time she’d met with them—no denying that —but so much had still been left unexplained. Roger particularly wanted to know more about how the history of the tepui and its journey fit in with the Light, particularly his experience of that phenomenon.

  The Light had done him much good, no doubt. He and his mother Atsuko were getting along better than they ever had. If penance could grow into love, then he and Marissa Correa were drifting toward something that might someday go by that name—despite his injury to her. He couldn’t see exactly what it might be that Marissa still saw in him after the slapping incident, but he was glad she did see something worth continuing.

  He was still deep in therapy, still prone to remembering or even sketching out images of the strange angels he had seen, but the Light seemed somehow to have lifted and rolled a heavy stone away from his heart.

  Roger recalled coming out of that peculiar dream-coma or near-death experience or whatever it was the Light had plunged him into, to see Marissa and Paul Larkin looking down at him. That was about all he remembered, at first. Talking with Jacinta, though, had triggered something. He had begun to access memories from that lost time again. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that the “wrong place” at which the tepuians’ primordial contact ship had popped back into normal space had involved a red giant star, an ancient uncharted black hole, and even the cometary sphere once inadequately described as the Oort Cloud.

  He remembered too, what that ship had looked like. A sphere of “angels,” advanced myconeuralized creatures wrapped in the brightness of solar-energy wings and the glow of protective fields of force. He remembered crashes and deaths, and suspected the presence of angelic survivors still out there, still quiescently alive all this long slow time, these hundreds of millennia. He had recurring flashes of a universal myth cycle explaining in grand architectonic fashion the growing informational subtlety that rose out of energy, through matter, through life, through mind, through worldmind and starmind and universal mind.