Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  He took out his notepad Personal Data Assistant and began to make notes to himself on the small computer:

  —Consciousness merely a more subtle/complex form of information than matter and energy?

  —E=mc2 explains how a lot of energy can be released from a relatively small amount of mass, but also vice versa, how an awful lot of energy is required to make a relatively small amount of mass.

  —Matter can be made to “degrade” into energy more readily than energy can be made to “upgrade” into matter.

  —On continuum of informational complexity, if consciousness is more subtle/complex form of information, can consciousness be made to degrade more readily into matter/energy than matter/energy can be made to upgrade into consciousness?

  —Shannon information theoretics. Wheeler’s physics. Three dimensional encoding of color spaces actually a single information state, the simultaneous embodiment in both physical processes and conscious experience, like matter and energy as two states of same underlying “something”.

  —Matter, energy, all states physical: “physicalia”

  —Mind, thought, all states psychophysical: “qualia”

  —Physicalia and Qualia: two forms of the same underlying informational continuum?

  —Q=pe2, where Q is qualia, p is physicalia, and e is a constant. What constant? Speed of information processing—squared?

  Roger puzzled over his equation, wishing his maths were better. The equation disappointed him—just a transmogrifying of Einstein’s original terms. Still, there seemed to be some truth in it, and it fit into the overall structure of his theorizing. He left it unchanged and jotted further notes:

  —Teilhardian idea that increasing physical complexity is mirrored by increasing complexity of conscious experience.

  —Theological and teleological memes: incarnation, Omega Points where consciousness becomes so ramified it must sacrifice itself so that a new cycle/recycle can begin, Big Bang, Death/Resurrection, Boddhisatvas who, though enlightened, continue to exist in the cycles of incarnation until all and everything is fit for Nirvanic Bliss.

  —sacrifices always a metaphor for something much larger, but “what” is hard to define.

  —goal of the universe is—enlightenment?

  —final enlightenment: not possible in isolation?

  —at brink of universal enlightenment, nowhere left to go but to spread it around

  —universe itself boddhisatvic: none are enlightened until all are. Ultimate enlightenment therefore is spontaneous everywhere at the moment of its achievement anywhere. And vice versa reversion.

  Roger wondered if he was making this up—or remembering it. Curiously, it felt rather like both. For a moment he also wondered, “Why me?” He had never been particularly religious or given to cosmological speculation. All this stuff was undeniably in his head, but it somehow wasn’t his, or him—at least not who he had been the rest of his life, before the Light.

  He didn’t want to consider implications yet, though. Just get the discoveries/memories jotted down as they came.

  He looked back over his notes, thinking that “universe” might be too small a term for what he was trying to get at. The word “plenum” arose unbidden into his consciousness, along with the image of a great, golden, flashing, branching thing, like a cross between a sphere and a tree and a bonfire. Into his head came images of a voice speaking from a burning bush, of infinite branching timelines, parallel universes, wormhole-connected mycelial spawn, each universe a fruiting body, a mushroom on the mycelium of the plenum.

  Where was all this coming from?

  He knew where in the Bible the burning yet unconsumed bush came from, but what that image might be describing had been made new for him now, fresh. Revisionable, rethinkable.

  He knew the theories of the cosmologists, of course. The concept that all the “other universes” were dead—that only one, our own, had the right set of physical properties to allow life. Ever since his experiences surrounding the time of the Light, that idea had bothered him. It struck him as a narrow anthropocentrism, like the idea that Man was specially created, or that the Earth was the center of the universe, or that Earth was the only planet on which intelligent life, such as it was, had arisen. Then he remembered why he’d been struck that way and jotted it down.

  —Those other universes aren’t dead—they’re virtual.

  —In the infinitude of the plenum, every universe is real to itself and virtual to all others. All universes parallel to one’s own appear virtual; only one’s own is “real.”

  —cf. Virtual (particle/antiparticle) pairs, Hawking radiation.

  —Boundaries between universes correspond to role of Schwarzschild radius in generation of Hawking radiation.

  —Mirrorings: Views from different sides of the boundary are what constitute the real/virtual distinction.

  Has somebody else come up with this? Roger wondered. He was remembering as well as discovering, after all. He racked his brain, but all he could come up with was other ideas from quantum cosmology, scaling “particle” up to “universe”. He thought of how quantum theory had, even by the late twentieth century become almost a form of dance notation: more and more arcane, abstracted from, perhaps dictating to, and definitely implicated in, the dance itself. He thought of orbifolds, of the superstring theorists with their talk of ten and twenty-six dimensions—and the odd coincidence that the number of dimensions should so reflect the physicists’ own cardinal systems: base ten numbers and the number of letters, twenty-six, in the alphabet used by most of them to communicate. He thought of numerology, magic numbers, Ramanujan functions. What did the existence of such numbers, implicated in both Mind and Nature, say about the relationship between the physical universe and the consciousness of its observers?

  The velocity of the orbiter changed noticeably. In the portal out of which he had been staring but not really seeing, HOME 1, the first (but no longer the only) High Orbital Manufactured Environment, floated into view, growing slowly larger. Roger recalled the last time he had seen this view. How had his fellow passenger Jhana Meniskos described HOME then? Like an “antique ribbed transformer that had swallowed a crystal ball, then been run through by a pole along its long axis”—yes, that was it.

  He smiled, remembering. Before him now he saw HOME’s solar energy systems, docking, transport, and communication facilities mounted along the axis, its mirrors shining the sun’s light into (and radiation shielding keeping the bad rays out of) the central habitation sphere and the agricultural tori. He saw its reflection of fields and forests and streams and lakes just barely visible at the “poles” of the central sphere that swelled the overall toroid like a pig in a python. Yet for all that, ungainly as it undeniably looked, and for all the aesthetic criticism that could admittedly be leveled at it, Roger found himself warming to the prospect of this home in space and his homecoming to it. HOME was where his heart truly was now, in this place where lived the mother he loved, and Marissa, the woman he hoped would become his beloved for the rest of his days, no matter how corny and old-fashioned and sentimental that all sounded.

  He called up a virtual-connect to Marissa and sub vocalized a quick hello to announce his return. She shot him back a brief message—“Missed you much. Can’t wait to see you”— followed by the canned signature afterword, “Your toes are plump grapes/Summer wine hot in taut skins/I will bite them now”— the obscure, foot-fetishist haiku that had become a private joke between them since they’d discovered it together.

  Roger chuckled, thinking of how they had come across that haiku, at the beginning of his long and on-going “rehabilitation.” Like that haiku, everything had its history—a fact he’d come to realize more and more deeply.

  As they maneuvered for docking with the usual excruciating care, Roger saw that Paul Larkin was awake and scanning a holographic virtual a couple of seats over—apparently an image of the infamous Cordyceps.

  “H’lo, Paul,” Roger said. “I see you’
ve rejoined us among the living. What’re you working on there?”

  “Trying to work up a rationale for getting this ’shroom renamed,” Larkin said, causing the three dimensional image of the fungus to rotate and enlarge. “Something to call attention to it as a primordial form. See the bluish gray color where the convolutions whorl, forming pits? Those are the principal spore production sites. The asci are carried in flask-shaped perithecia ‘nests’, so they’re pyreno- rather than discomycetes. Overall the shape resembles a morel, but watch—” He tapped icons to display the fungus in cross section. “—and you see it there? The inside is dense and filled, like a truffle, not hollow like a morel.”

  “It’s a living fossil, all right,” Roger agreed.

  Larkin scanned out of the mushroom virtual, calling up one with human skulls on it instead, and turned toward the younger man.

  “Everything about that tepui culture is a synergy of two living- fossil types,” Larkin said. “One human, one fungal. Jacinta tried to tell me about it all those years ago, before they sang that tepui mountain to the stars, but I just wouldn’t listen.”

  “Two types?” Roger asked.

  “You probably didn’t get that good a look at the ghost people, given the way they stealthed in and out of our camp,” Paul said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Roger agreed.

  “Well, seeing them again made me remember some things I didn’t want to, I suppose,” he said. “Skulls and corpses on their fungal burial island, inside the Cathedral Room at the center of the tepui’s main cavern. Neither of us Larkins are forensic anthropologists, but Jacinta saw the obvious, even if I refused to.”

  “Which was?”

  The gnomish older man stroked his beard then pointed to the pair of skulls rotating holographically before him.

  “The occipital ‘rose’ or ‘bun,’” he said, nodding toward the skull on the left. “The emphasis on cerebellar development, the large supraorbital ridges. I remember Jacinta talked about the ghost people’s semi-nocturnal lifeway. Their focus on aural over visual, their lack of left-brain dominance. ‘Strong archaic Homo traits, Neanderthalensis traits, soloensis traits, troll and wild man traits.’ That was how she put it.”

  Roger glanced about the cabin of the orbiter, thoughtful.

  “Pre-Cro Magnon, then?” he asked. Paul Larkin nodded.

  “Much the same way some anthropologists once claimed Australian aboriginals had traits indicating they might be partly descended from developed Homo erectus,” Larkin said. “Only the case is more so, here. Jacinta claimed, back then, that the tepuians are a people whose universe is bound together by threads and webs of song extending all the way back to Europe and Africa a hundred thousand years ago and more—the same songweb differently echoed in the Aboriginal songlines.”

  Roger cocked an eyebrow quizzically at that.

  “But human beings have been in the New World only thirty thousand years,” Roger remarked, trying to make Larkin’s theorizing fit what he knew of paleontology, “and the Neanderthals were already dying out or dead by then.”

  Larkin laughed.

  “That’s exactly what I said! I’ve had this exact same conversation with Jacinta, only I was playing your role. See, the thirty thousand figure works only if you buy the idea that the first humans to cross into the New World were hunters following the herds across Beringia. But it’s far more likely that fishing groups began following the coastline out of Asia and into the New World much earlier, long before the inland parts of Beringia were even free of the ice.”

  “Then why don’t we find proof of their settlements?” Roger asked.

  Larkin laughed again.

  “I asked the same question, all those years ago. Jacinta parried it with an argument about ‘preservation bias.’ She believed those ancient settlements were primarily along the coasts. But the oceans have risen four hundred feet since the last ice age. Any artifacts or traces in those settlement areas would have been destroyed when the intertidal zone passed over them—all the quicker if such artifacts were made of wood or bone.”

  “I guess archaeologists are a bit stone-biased,” Roger said, thinking about it.

  “Exactly,” Larkin said with a nod. “For much of the twentieth century, archaeologists believed there were no tool-using cultures in most of Asia during the Paleolithic—simply because they found almost no stone implements there. Then someone did contemporary ethnographic research among low-tech peoples in those areas and discovered that most of the toolkit there was bamboo—and since bamboo doesn’t preserve well, the scientists had erroneously assumed there was no tool use going on.”

  Larkin stared out the window a moment as the bright orb of Earth flashed into view.

  “Even today you can walk into museums all over the world and see the scientific racism perpetuated against so-called Neanderthal man,” he said, turning back to Roger. “Claims that those ancient people—who had bigger brains than we do, who probably invented the concept of life after death—had no art and only a very simple material culture. All because they supposedly couldn’t make as wide a range of vocal sounds as we can. Linguistic chauvinism if I ever heard it. Do the experts have any proof that bone, antler, and wood were not exploited before the Upper Paleolithic? Have they considered that maybe little remains of ‘Neanderthal’ art because much of it was done almost exclusively in wood and bark, like Aboriginal bark paintings? You’d think someone would wonder, especially if that’s what they’re getting paid to do.”

  Now it was Roger’s turn to laugh, hearing the passion with which the older man spoke.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m an old crank, now,” Larkin said, somewhat sheepishly.

  “Not at all,” Roger said, growing quickly more serious. “But what’s all that got to do with the ghost people?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Larkin said. “It was probably much the same with the fisherfolk who first crossed into the New World, and for most ‘Homo sapiens neanderthalensis’ outside Europe. Toolkits centered on the heavy use of plant fiber and wood, less bone, much less stone —just like the ghost people. After all these years I guess I finally agree with Jacinta’s old contention that the division into sapiens sapiens versus sapiens neanderthalensis doesn’t work. We’re all just developed Homo erectus—not just the Australian Aborigines.”

  Roger noticed that they were very close to the Orbital Complex now. Their conversation would be coming to an end soon, of necessity.

  “So absence of stone evidence in the New World,” he said, “is not evidence of human absence from the New World?”

  “Exactly,” Larkin said with a nod. “I think Jacinta’s right. The ghost people of the tepui are a remnant population going back over 100,000 years. Bigger brained than the rest of us too, I’ll bet—”

  The docking of the orbiter finished while they had been talking, and a recorded voice interrupted them as it made its anachronistic “deplaning” announcement. They exited the transat orbiter, into a reception area outside the orbital habitat’s Docking Bay 5, where Marissa Correa and Atsuko Cortland were waiting for them.

  Amid the hugs of welcome, Roger thought that yes, it really did feel good to be home. He also wondered, though, if and when Jacinta, and the arguably “bigger brained” tepuians with her, would arrive—and how, and why.

  * * * *

  When his dreams began to crowd with images of himself holding a gun to his own head, then with recurrent visions of himself floating, transfixed like Christ on Calvary but crucified on a cross of air—that’s when Ray Dundas knew he needed a break from the psiXtians and their Sun Underground city. Fortunately for him, he managed to volunteer himself for a delivery run over the coast range to Santa Cruz—not so difficult a job to wangle, really, since most of the psiXtians seemed to be homebodies.

  He was planning to make the most of the trip. He had already covertly satlinked up to his minders back home in the Rocky Mountains and the Northern Plains. They had relayed very terse instructions so th
at, once in Santa Cruz, he would also be able to covertly approach his Intelligence contact. The contact, he gathered, was working in a restaurant with the almost unpronounceable name of “Cthulhutessen”.

  The day came that he found himself in standard psiXtian all-natural-fiber workman’s coveralls, loading recycled kenaf and hemp paperback no-electrons-required editions of Light Livelihood: Ecoholism in Everyday Life, and Minimal Impact Economy: A psiXtian Sustainability Primer—along with optidisk audio and visual versions of the same—into the back of a Solectric truck. The disks were made of grain plastic, or “grastic,” as the psiXtians called it. The same material made up most of the locally manufactured truck he’d be driving too, which had also been ZAPped, certified as zero air-pollutant producing.

  Of course. Naturally.

  Dundas bid the psiXtian media co-op gang good-bye, then drove the purring vehicle out of the underground and onto Biola Road, where it led to Route 152. Both the truck and Highway 152 were smart, full of embedded sensors, and his route, through Los Banos and over the coast range to Santa Cruz, was not particularly challenging. He faced only a few places along the way that might require the presence of an actual human behind the wheel.

  Dundas programmed in a two minute warning to sound before each of the human-behind-the-wheel spots, then programmed in his destinations: the psiXtian Outreach and Retreat Center in Aptos, and three stores—AUM Depot, Ohmage Homage, and Apokatopia Ethnotek, all in Santa Cruz. The names of the stores in themselves made him dubious as to what kind of wares they proffered, and to what clientele. The fact that they were in the notorious Santa Cruz area only mad his expectations worse.

  The truck had neither radio nor air conditioning. The lack of air conditioning wasn’t such a big deal. Although the day was sunny and warm, it was still early and the heat was far from unbearable. The lack of radio or sound system was more of a hassle, however. The biggest drawback of this run—as he realized twenty minutes into it—was likely to be boredom.