Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The old man stared at her with a bright gleam in his eye, which drew Brandi’s attention powerfully.

  “You mean like heaven?” she asked. “The afterlife?”

  “Not in the traditional sense,” Shaw said. “Once, not so very long after she died, I was exhausted and fell asleep in a self-propagating virtuality I had running in the infosphere. I dreamed I was walking through snow, snow falling light and slow as feathers, as if all the universe were a great bird, molting. I felt like I was walking through fields of white feathers. Before me there appeared this white bird with a golden crown of feathers, wounded in its breast. The white bird was the same digital persona your mother was using when I first met her. The bird rose up and I followed after it, into a world of light.”

  Shaw stopped. He cleared his throat, and tightened again his grip on the bench as he leaned forward. Brandi waited, sensing that he had more to say.

  “When I woke up,” he continued, “I wrote it off as just more of my ‘grieving process’—like I was supposed to. Horrible term, ‘grieving process’. Denies the real, personal pain and uncertainty the grieving person suffers, denies the uniqueness of that pain. Making it part of a ‘process’ supposedly makes your grief just like everyone else’s. Which it never is. Anyway, for years that’s what I believed that dream was—just me working through my grief at losing her. But a white bird with a golden crown had been your mother’s data persona, her masque, like I said. So it still bothered me, though.”

  “Why?” Brandi asked quietly.

  Shaw looked down at his heavy, calloused, limply expressionless hands, now in his lap again.

  “I still remembered her last words to me,” he said. “She was far gone. I was trying to unzip her from her virtuality connection suit, the kind we used to wear in those days. She stopped me, told me to leave her connected. Said it was the only way she could ‘get free’, that she was ‘almost there’. Her final words were, ‘Catch my soul.’ The words didn’t seem to be addressed to me, even though she was dying in my arms. I held her for what seemed like forever, until I called the Kitchener people.”

  A deep silence threaten to swallow up his words then. Brandi, however, still needed to learn more. Getting Mister Shaw to talk wasn’t the hard part. Getting him to talk in a straight line was. He seemed a conversational inebriate at times, weaving and falling out of line.

  “And something’s changed...?” she prompted. “To make you think about those words again, I mean?”

  “Several weeks back, when that Light thing happened,” he said, nodding, swerving back in line. “One of my friends up here, Seiji Yamaguchi, was the brother of the already-dead man who was supposedly responsible for that event. Seiji’s brother Jiro was found dead a couple years ago now, I guess, hooked into an elaborate computer set up. Still in harness, much the same way Cyndi was.”

  “That could be just a coincidence,” Brandi suggested as gently as she could.

  “No,” Shaw said firmly. “Not after what I saw when the Light blasted into me. Hit me like a fireball of perfect information. I saw Cyndi’s white-bird dataconstruct again, just like in my earlier dream. Only this time it didn’t end when we went into the world of light. As we flew, her bird’s wings flared into every color of the spectrum, turned the snow to rain and rainbows shining around us, the world refeathered, reflowered, regreened. We seemed to pass from paradise to paradise until, high in the sky, she became a constellation, a gathering of stars and ideas, bright wings spreading just beyond the edge of Here and Now. Her heart was a thing of flames and feathers and flowers and crystals, indistinguishable from the heart of heaven itself.”

  He paused. A quaver had crept into his voice. He cleared his throat again.

  “I feel now that she has been trying to break through to me for years,” he went on, “ever since that dream so long ago. Jiro’s Light opened up a doorway somehow. Cyndi was finally able to reach me.”

  Immanuel Shaw looked up from his hands, deep into Brandi’s eyes.

  “I felt I had come home,” he said, smiling, though that quaver in his voice was growing. “I knew that Cyndi Easter, your mother and my betrothed, was not dead forever. I don’t know how you happened yet either, Brandi, but I think you might be my daughter.”

  Beside a drained recycling lagoon, amid forest and meadow and field wrapped around the inside of an inhabited bubble floating in space, Brandi Easter hugged an old man who still smelled just a whiff like the rich, organic muck he’d been shoveling. She hugged him and hugged him while their faces streamed with the messy tears of unexpected joy at finding a loved one they’d never known existed—and regretted not having searched for before.

  Beneath the joy, however, remained the questions yet to be answered by, and still to be asked of, the labyrinthine organizations that had surrounded their lives. Tetragrammaton. The Kitchener Foundation. Who knew what others, in the shadows and on the peripheries? All the powers and dominions which had helped them and harmed them, showed them truths and told them lies, changed the telling of what had been, or tried to prevent what yet might be—all those organizations had left them with so much unexplained, like parents they had never really been allowed the chance to know.

  * * * *

  As it turned out, the home of the North London businessman Walter Oliver was the closest and freshest crime scene. When they had determined that Oliver’s place was not far from Hampstead Heath, Mei-Ling’s driver and Interpol watchdog, Sullivan (whose first name she now learned was Robert), talked her into waiting until they got to Hampstead to take lunch. In the snug, three-wheeled blue capsule of his electric car, he was taking her to something called the Crepe Van.

  “What do you know about the company our victim was working for—Crystal Memory Dynamics?” Mei-Ling asked Sullivan as he drove them and she made notes to herself.

  “About their technology, you mean?” the red-haired young man said, glancing at her.

  “You can start there.”

  “Richard Schwarzbrucke was the owner and pet genius,” Sullivan said. “Herr Doktor Interface. Smooth human/machine connections were his specialty. He was working on an experimental self-assembling crystal memory matrix when he died. Extensive research with animals, if I remember right. Injecting packets of crystal memory components and buckytube circuitry into subjects that had had sections of their brains removed.”

  “How’d he beat the rejection problem?” Mei-Ling asked, probing.

  “A fungal derivative,” Robert said, concentrating. “Cordycintane, I think it was called. Anyway, he proved that his crystal memory packages could integrate themselves into the pre-existing neuronal matrix, thoroughly and naturally. I think he had them organizing themselves in accord with some neo-Edelman theory of neuronal group selection, but don’t quote me on that. I know he got legislative approval to work with coma cases and the severely brain damaged. He was apparently making great progress in restoring them to full function, when his research came to an unexpected end.”

  “You seem to know a good deal about this,” Mei-Ling said, intrigued. “Do you recall what ended that research?”

  “His death—under mysterious circumstances,” Sullivan said with a shrug. “Probably drug-related. The investigation that followed Schwarzbrucke’s demise linked a sizable part of Crystal Memory Dynamics’ positive cash flow to the Oregon Blue Spike trade. He had long-standing connections to a motorcycling club called the Mongrel Clones. They were involved in the illegal drug trade all the way back to the days of methamphetamine.”

  “Sounds like an old TV crime drama.”

  “I suppose it does,” Sullivan agreed as he drove. “But it all actually happened. Schwarzbrucke’s bank records showed payouts to high-ranking political officials in Sacramento, California and Washington, D.C. He was apparently providing legal and political cover for a number of criminal types in northern California and southern Oregon. Stereochemical analyses comparing the structure of his crystal memory chips to that of the Blue Spike euphoriant reve
aled some very curious similarities.”

  “Ouch,” Mei-Ling said with a laugh.

  “Yes,” Sullivan said, nodding. “When news of all this got out, Crystal Memory Dynamics quickly tottered and collapsed into buyout.”

  “Who took them over?”

  “That’s why I know so much about this, you see,” Sullivan said, smiling. “One of my boss’s obsessions. CMD was bought out by one of its major stockholders and board member, a Dr. Ka Vang, of ParaLogics.”

  “The Tetragrammaton link?”

  “Right,” Sullivan said with a nod that almost suppressed his surprise. “Landau rides that hobby-horse as often as he can squeeze in the time for it. I really don’t see why he’s so focused on that.”

  “Maybe someday I’ll tell you about what happened in Sedona,” Mei-Ling said. “It’s a bit complicated, but it explains a lot. Do you know why Vasili thinks Tetragrammaton was hooked in with Schwarzbrucke on the crystal memory stuff?”

  Robert hesitated, momentarily distracted from his driving.

  “I can’t say for sure. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s because of the kind of head trauma patients Schwarzbrucke was working with. People with severe damage to the Broca’s area of the brain, sometimes even to the Wernicke’s. CMD claimed the crystal memory implants were to alleviate temporal lobe seizures and amygdaloid dysfunctions. There’s some evidence, however, that the crystal memory structures, once they were grown in, were actually supposed to function as a substitute or replacement Broca’s area.”

  Sullivan hit the brakes as if he’d almost missed a turn, then took a road signed for Hampstead Heath.

  “So?” Mei-Ling asked. “Why would a bionic Broca’s area be important to Landau’s favorite ‘convergence of interests’?”

  “I don’t think it was, in itself,” Sullivan said, navigating a roundabout. “Broca’s area is the center for speech articulation. In conjunction with Wernicke’s, it has a lot to do with the nature of human thought and work. Broca’s is where thought is pressed into words. It’s where commands would most likely be formulated. The CMD records I’ve seen indicate that, after getting a patient implanted, Schwarzbrucke had the patient ‘start thinking at the machines’.”

  “How’d he do that?” Mei-Ling asked. She was following closely what Sullivan was saying, since a good deal of this was new even to her.

  “Through communication hardware links in the patient’s head. Radio, IR, laser, microwave, you name it.”

  “The Tetragrammaton grail,” Mei-Ling said, nodding. “Full thought recognition. Electronically mediated simultaneity and action-at-a-distance. The seamless mind/machine interface for their quantum infodensity structure.”

  “Very good,” Sullivan said “Schwarzbrucke’s notes indicate he was after a sort of computer-aided psychokinesis, himself. That’s the way Vang’s restructured CMD is using a version of the same tech now.”

  “To cure people who are brain-damaged?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “Actually no. They’re applying that technology to coma cases and autisms so severe that they are supposedly incurable. In a few cases the subjects still possess brain function levels suited to distributed data control of large, complex organizations that don’t want to trust everything to machine intelligences.”

  They pulled onto Hampstead’s High Street, again with that almost-missed-the-turn braking by Robert. Maybe that was just the way Mister Sullivan drove? A bit nerve-wracking nonetheless.

  They found a parking space and got out of the electric blue car-capsule. Following Sullivan’s lead, she turned to walk down the street, toward a van even tinier than Sullivan’s car, parked before the King William IV pub.

  From the Breton van-man, Sullivan ordered a wild mushroom and cheese crepe, while Mei-Ling ordered one filled with liqueur-drizzled banana. They sat down at a marble sidewalk table a few doors further down the street.

  “When Hampstead had more money and fewer artsy types than it has now,” Sullivan said, glancing about at the slightly decayed charm of the high street, “some of the property moguls tried to ban the van-men, eliminate them from the local streets. Set up committees to see to it. The committees are still here—and so are the van men. I suppose if you want something to continue indefinitely, create a bureaucracy to eradicate it.”

  Mei-Ling laughed. Delighting in her crepe, she was glad the committees had never succeeded in their stated aims. When they had finished eating, Robert checked the address on his watch-reminder. From the van man they learned that they were within walking distance of their destination, so Robert and Mei-Ling set out on foot for the remainder of their journey.

  Along the way, in front of a townhouse, they stopped to look at a splendid garden full of delphinium and lupines and a variety of other strongly vertical, even phallic, flowers. In the center of the small, dense garden stood a statue of a man, nude except for a helmet-like cap on his head, a sword in his right hand, and winged shoes on his feet. In his left hand the figure held by the hair what appeared to be a decapitated head, portraying the grim and grimacing face of a woman. Beside him stood a bright shield leaning against his right leg, and a large woven bag against his left.

  “Perseus and the head of Medusa,” Robert said, nodding toward it. “An allegory for the scientific method.”

  Mei-Ling stared at him quizzically. They both leaned on the waist-high fence to gaze at the statue.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “Science is that mirror-bright bronze shield there,” he said. “Perseus was the son begotten on the tower-imprisoned woman Danae, by Zeus the Sky Father. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and military industry, gave Perseus that shield. Athena herself was born from the head of Zeus, who had swallowed the Titaness Metis, or ‘Thought.’ Medusa, whose name means ‘Queen’ or ‘Ruler’, was daughter of the incestuous brother-husband/sister-wife coupling of Phorcys, an Old Man of the Sea, and Ceto, the Whale. Medusa was granddaughter, on both parents’ sides, of Pontus the Sea and Gaia the Earth.”

  “Medusa is a nature goddess, then?” Mei-Ling asked, venturing a guess.

  “Right, right,” Robert replied, nodding enthusiastically. “A creature possessed of the terrible beauty of the natural world, with a face so astonishing and amazing that it turned men to stone if they gazed upon it directly. From certain nymphs, or possibly from Mercury, Perseus obtained a cap of invisibility, winged shoes of swiftness, and that big bag or ‘wallet’ of secrecy—”

  “Okaaay,” Mei-Ling said skeptically. “But you still haven’t explained how it’s an allegory of the scientific method.”

  “The scientist is Perseus,” Robert said, “always looking at only the reflection of Nature, not nature itself, via the mirror-bright shield of science. Only by such indirect means is the scientist—the invisible, swift, and secret observer—able to behead Nature and put her terrible beauty to human use, for personal and political ends.”

  Mei-Ling applauded slowly, and Robert made a small mock bow.

  “Bravo,” she said, “though I know some scientists who would very strongly disagree!”

  “The scientists with Project Medusa Blue, perhaps?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow archly.

  His words twitched her head in double-take. She hadn’t been making that connection at all.

  “You’d be blue too, if someone cut your head off!” Robert said, quickly turning it into a joke. They laughed together as they walked on toward their destination, but their laughter proved short-lived. Both of them were deep in thought. That they should encounter just such a statue on their way to the scene of Walter Oliver’s death struck Mei-Ling as entirely too synchronistic. She wondered if the presence of that statue had somehow affected Oliver’s choice of residence.

  A block away Mei-Ling and Robert came to Oliver’s medium-sandstone townhouse. The building’s white trim stood badly in need of paint, but otherwise the structure looked sound enough. Oliver had owned all three floors of it, and the police had cordoned off the entire structure as part
of the crime scene. Robert flashed his identification. The officers on duty wished them luck, but suggested they wouldn’t find much. The place had been thoroughly gone over—dusted for prints, vacuumed for hair and skin flakes and anything else organically relevant. Its walls had been sonared and all the building’s electromagnetic fields measured, everything fully documented, recorded, and catalogued.

  Robert thanked them and he and Mei-Ling made their way upstairs to the top floor work studio where Oliver had died. Once they had entered the death room, Robert continued to walk about. Mei-Ling, however, found herself drawn to the chair in which the man had been struck down.

  Sitting in that chair, she was struck by flash-memories of Oliver’s body flattening then bursting explosively apart, so vivid they disturbed her. To distract herself she donned the deceased man’s connection gear. She was about to turn the system on when a flood of light smashed into her head.

  Remembering things never done, in a place never seen. Slowly and awkwardly at first, eventually with greater and greater ease, learning to make machine systems respond to thought. To think a thought, to formulate it into words and commands in the head, was to make it happen elsewhere, no matter how far away elsewhere might be. Working through strange tests and projects.

  Fascinated. Wondering sometimes which is the peripheral—the distant device thought at, or the thinker—

  Coherent movement in water. Just flashes of light at first but, looking closer, seeing speckled greensilver sleekness nosing against the current—trout? Looking closer still, seeing them growing larger, much larger than trout, becoming porpoiseful, shimmering merfolk, beckoning. So beautiful, so very beautiful. Cannot stop. Diving in after them. Down and down following them, hundred-year flood of the stream of consciousness, river becoming sea. Disappearing into a hole in the bottom of the sea, following them even there, down to a sea which should be sunless yet stands somehow filled by its own clear light.

  Ahead a mandalic city on a plain, maze of what could be streets in strange-towered, electrically bright-shining Atlantis. Following flashing guides down labyrinthine windings into a broad open space or square, guides changing, becoming on all sides innumerable shimmering multifaceted “bodies,” morphing and shifting kaleidoscopically, aloof yet radiant, angels sprung full-blown from the brow of a distant crystalline God—