Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “What did he say?” Marissa asked, between savoring bites of the faux Rouladen.

  “Only a small minority were troubled by the implications,” Roger said, sipping at his beer in its big awkward stein. “More of his colleagues had elaborate reasons for why they were not troubled, but their explanations tended to entirely miss the point. The remainder had no thought-out explanations, but absolutely refused to say why the philosophical implications just didn’t bother them. It’s just our luck that we should be among the small minority who should be troubled by the implications of the Light.”

  “Everything changes,” Marissa said with a nod, flicking her long red-gold hair back from her shoulders, “but then no changes are permanent.”

  “Right,” Roger said, nodding enthusiastically. “It looked like everything was changing for good, and for the good. I guess we should have known better. Just look at the history of the last century’s wars. Russia and the US, Japan and Germany—winners lose, losers win.”

  Marissa nodded, glancing up from her plate.

  “I know that, but in the first days after the flash I felt a genuine euphoria, I must admit,” she said, then began ticking off items on her fingers. “The citizens’ movements. The collapse of morally bankrupt governments. The boycotts of corporations. The consumer and stockholder revolts. The nascent bioregional and decentralization movements. Increased interest in alternate lifeways. The focus on long-term species preservation planning. The new work on diverse governmental styles. All of those flared up all at once. Now they’ve begun to die back down again. The Light was like some sort of brain wave sweeping through, a flash of enlightenment, but the changes it brought on don’t seem to have been lasting.”

  “No, not for everyone,” Roger agreed, working away with knife and fork at his schnitzel, “or at least not yet. I’m still troubled, myself, though my troubles are of a happier kind than they were before the Light. Maybe that’s all we can hope, for now at least.”

  “That’s just the problem,” Marissa said, with a barely audible sigh that turned into a sip at her stein. “That initial euphoria fooled me. During those first unbelievable days I began to inform some of my colleagues about the immortalizing vector I was working on before the Light happened.”

  Roger nodded, remembering that research. Marissa had done preliminary experiments on a plan to take traits from the so-called ‘immortalized cancer cells’ of teratocarcinomas, and then turn them against aging. Using engineered viral vectors to transfer the immortalizing trait from teratoma sources into the human genome had been her very novel approach—but also a potentially dangerous one, given the inherent cancer factors in the materials with which she had been working.

  “At the time, you told me you didn’t think I could overcome aging and death quite that easily,” Marissa reminded him. “In some ways, I hoped you were right—that my theoretical work was compelling, but wrong. The colleagues I told about that work have been doing their own investigations, though. We’ve been running tests, here and in a psiXtian ecolab in California. Preliminary reports strongly suggest my immortalizing vector, or some minimally modified version of it, actually works.”

  “Uh-oh,” Roger said, quite soberly, remembering the moment when he had returned to Marissa the vial of the vector he’d earlier stolen from her—with rather apocalyptic intent. After Marissa and Paul Larkin retrieved him from where he’d lain, floating comatose in space, he had been quite purged of such intent and was more than happy to return the vial to its rightful owner.

  “Right,” Marissa said with a nod. “The vector appears to be both effective and humane, in a narrow sense, so far. We may be standing on the brink of a radical extension of human longevity. Only we’re not the universally enlightened people I thought we were in those first days after the blast of that Light.”

  Roger nodded, staring into his beer.

  “A necessary, co-extensive decrease in birth rate,” he said slowly, “or in the rate of survival to sexual maturity, does not seem to be forthcoming. The genie is straining at the cork of the bottle.”

  “Exactly. Despite our best intentions we may be about to unleash the Immortality Plague upon the world. Life without the balance of death. You know how that’ll make the population problem spiral up.”

  “Yes—to full-blown catastrophe,” Roger said.

  Such thoughts had occurred to him before. Finishing the last of the schnitzel and tucking into the red cabbage on the side, which grew steadily more tasteless in his mouth, he desperately wanted to deny the possible reality of this scenario, now.

  “But how can you be so sure?” he asked. “Your vector might prove to have massive side-effects, might even be fatal. Its existence might never be made known.”

  “True—all true. I wish I could believe in those other outcomes. But that’s all they are—possible outcomes. I have inklings of my own, and they’re more certain than just possibilities and probabilities.”

  “Oh?” Roger asked, looking curiously at her.

  “I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that, since the Light, I have memories of what has yet to happen. Somewhat like a precognitive dream, only I usually have them while I’m awake.”

  “You’re kidding!” Roger said with a laugh.

  “What’s so funny about that?” Marissa asked, a bit annoyed.

  “Oh, nothing. It’s just that my experience with the Cordyceps fungus and the Light left me with an unwanted ability too. I can ‘know’ an object’s full history just by touching it or concentrating on it carefully. It’s a form of psychometry. I would never have believed it possible, if I hadn’t experienced it myself.”

  “What?” Marissa asked, astonished.

  “I’m serious,” Roger said, laughing again, amazed by the almost absurd synchronicity of it. “It’s a relief to finally be able to talk to someone about it comfortably. Without being thought a nutcase. You see, I remember pasts everyone has forgotten—and you remember futures no one has experienced yet!”

  “Your, um, talent,” Marissa asked, trying to make sense of this revelation. “Is it getting stronger or weaker with time?”

  Roger pondered that one a while, finishing nearly all of his sauerkraut as he did.

  “Weaker, I think,” he said at last. “Or at least easier to control. The pressure of time from the talent is no longer as overpowering as it was when the fungus first opened me up to that unfading history of things. I can restrict its occurrence better, now. I have to carefully focus on something to call the talent into play. How about you?”

  “Just the opposite,” Marissa said. “My flash-forwards are becoming more and more unpredictable—and stronger.” She took up another morsel of her disappearing rouladen, then turned to him. “When your talent acts up, what’s it like?”

  “Objects cease to be inanimate,” Roger said. “When I experiment with the talent now, I can sense the interconnectedness of everything, but without the fear and the grief, the pain and the meaninglessness, of the ‘actualized history’ I experienced in my first Cordyceps encounter. And yours?”

  “The impressions started out vague and detached,” Marissa replied, “but now they’re becoming clearer, more detailed, more involving.”

  Roger took a healthy swig of his beer, then nodded thoughtfully.

  “Since I began to get a rein on this talent,” he said, “every object seems to be filled with its own kind of consciousness—and more. Something like a deep memory connected to the thoughts of every person who has ever come in contact with it. A welter of connections to the ‘presence’ of every animal or object that has come into contact with it as well.”

  Marissa pondered that, finishing her rouladen.

  “Your talent’s just connected with individual objects, then?” she asked.

  “Ultimately, no. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve done some research too, trying to explain it to myself.”

  “And?”

  “It seems that, when this psychometric ability is in pl
ay, it’s not only that I seem to be able to read the ‘traces’ of the past of an object. I seem also to be able to tap into some deeper, holographic level of reality itself, where the history of everything resides in some sort of enfolded form.”

  “Yes!” Marissa said, pleased. “I’ve experienced something very much like that too—only in the opposite direction. Like I’m picking up on realities, possible futures, that are already inherent in that deeper level. Real, but latent. They have not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring, of unfolding into the present.”

  Roger mopped up the remainder of the sauces on his plate with half a dinner roll.

  “I don’t really know what to make of this new ability yet,” he confided to Marissa quietly. “So far it’s mainly been a nuisance.”

  “Bingo,” she said with a laugh, between bites of cabbage.

  “I was glad to return to the orbital habitat, I’ll tell you. Earth just has too much past. I had to keep this new talent thoroughly locked down while I was there. I was afraid I’d be inundated with the history of peoples and species and a planet itself that stretched far away into the past.”

  “The shorter history of the space habitat is more manageable?” Marissa asked, toying with the sauerkraut.

  Roger nodded.

  “Even when I open up to the levels of information the talent makes accessible, it’s not nearly so overwhelming. I was secretly glad Larkin and I didn’t make it to the top of that tepui, what with all the history that was supposed to have happened there.”

  Marissa pushed her plate away from her slightly, her meal finished.

  “But why us?” she asked. “I mean, aside from the fact that we’re obviously made for each other—”

  “Or just the opposite,” Roger said in response to her sly, teasing tone. “Me with my back up against the future and my mind’s eye flooded with the past, you with your back to the past and your mind’s eye full of the future—”

  “That’s one of the things I love about you, Roger,” she said, interrupting him as she lightly placed her hand on his. “You’re always such a poet when you think you’re being so rational and scientific. Romantic, when you’re trying to be ‘just the opposite’.”

  “Well,” Roger said awkwardly, afraid he might even blush from the look she was giving him. “My guess is that we’re not the only such talents, by any means. My talent, and yours, and others, might be rudimentary forms of what the Larkins and the tepuians refer to as ‘mindtime’ and travel on the ‘timelines’.”

  “How is that?” Marissa asked.

  “The Larkins claim that their Cordyceps mushroom functions like a transducer. The way those X-satellites that the Light blasted out from did, too. Only as organic transducers, in the case of the fungus.”

  Marissa frowned.

  “I just can’t believe the transcendence of Jiro Yamaguchi hasn’t amounted to more than this,” she said. “Even if we’re not the only ones, our latent talents and his e-space escape can’t be the whole story. All this stuff has to be having a bigger effect than we’re seeing.”

  “Dead iron stars go supernova,” Roger said, nodding, glancing down at the table.

  “Pardon?” Marissa asked, not understanding at all.

  “In the life-cycle of stars, a point comes when the star can no longer continue fusing elements to keep burning,” Roger explained, taking out his Personal Data Assistant notepad, placing the PDA unit on the gray mooncrete table, then calling up diagrams to show her on the unit there. “The curve of binding energy goes from the fusing of ‘light’ hydrogen to heavier helium to still heavier lithium, eventually all the way down toward iron in the most massive stars. No matter how big the star, though, it can’t fuse iron atoms together. No more energy from excess mass. The fusion furnace shuts down, the star crushes itself in its own mass, the iron core collapses, the outer layer blows off as a supernova. Dead iron stars go supernova.”

  Roger glanced up to see if Marissa was beginning to follow his argument. Seeing that she was, he continued.

  “Socially and politically, I think of it as a metaphor for what happens to outmoded systems—governments, corporations—that are large and powerful and long-lived, but which have finally exhausted all their options.”

  “Okay,” Marissa said, nodding. “I see what you’re getting at. There are a lot of dead iron stars in the human constellation.”

  “Right,” Roger said. “Some of us, like you and me, were hoping the Light would be the particle that broke the iron star’s back, as it were.”

  Marissa stared thoughtfully at his diagram depicting the curve of binding energy.

  “I have a different way of describing it. I came across it in an infosphere salon discussion. I think of it in terms of the ‘mouse-shaped’ meme wave pattern. Are you familiar with that diagram?”

  Roger admitted he wasn’t. Marissa took out her notepad computer and called up an image on that, which she then shot to Roger’s unit. On the screen of the unit, in faux 3D, floated a graph vaguely shaped like the silhouette of a mouse, tail toward the x,y intersection, head away.

  “I’ve seen it applied to situations ranging from species distributions and extinctions to the history of the monasteries in England. One of the salon discussants was big on applying it to those. The mouse that roars: a key image of data behavior, a description for the way memes and genes distribute themselves.”

  “But what exactly does it mean?” Roger asked, finishing his beer.

  “Initially it resembles the classic sigmoidal or S-shaped curve. This section sloping up from the lag-phase ‘tail’ of the mouse is the foundational period where the idea or sect or species is ‘pure’ because it has just differentiated itself from its surroundings. The arched-back part of the mouse is the expansionist log phase of a meme. Or the niche exploitation phase by that particular cluster of genes that goes into making up a particular species, say. The period of greatest success and vigor. Up here is where it begins to deviate from the classic sigmoidal, here at the brief plateau then the long downsloping part, from the mouse’s ‘back’ toward its ‘head.’ That’s the period of decline.”

  “And this is pretty much the same in a wide range of systems?” Roger asked.

  “From ideas to species to empires to stars,” Marissa confirmed. “The success of a paradigm paradoxically renders that paradigm increasingly useless. The discussant who was big on monastic history said that the monasteries began in reforms of earlier traditions, but gradually they themselves also became increasingly worldly, corrupt. Your stars keep moving down the curve of binding energy, fusing heavier and heavier elements. The solution exacerbates the problem. This final spike here, the ‘ear’ of the mouse, is the false quickening, the supernova, secondary decadence, reaction.”

  “Fascinating,” Roger said, staring at the diagram. “What finally kills the ‘mouse’?”

  “A number of things,” Marissa said, leaning back in her chair. “If there isn’t enough competition in the expansionist phase, the wave can go into overshoot and decline or crash more steeply. The woman I met in virtual chat—May or Lee, or some name like that—she said to think of the meme or species as being like a soliton, a standing wave. DNA is a chemical soliton, a double-helical whirlwind that passes over a junkyard and builds a starship. A whirlwind is an atmospheric soliton, a structure built by things falling apart together. The weather is full of them. Even the heart, like the weather, is a maze for structuring turbulence—”

  “Your mouse does look rather like a cardiogram of sorts,” Roger said.

  “Right. What kills the meme, or the star, or the species, or the heart, for that matter, is that it eventually stops structuring turbulence. It loses coherence and disappears back into the overall flow. In all systems, it’s comprehensiveness versus coherence—or completeness versus consistency, if you prefer. Antithetical vectors. This mouse shape is a description of the ultimate irreconcilability of comprehensiveness and coherence, at least among all human and natura
l systems we’ve ever encountered.”

  Roger leaned forward in his chair.

  “How does all this tie into Jiro Yamaguchi’s apotheosis and the Light, though?”

  “I’m not sure,” Marissa admitted, calling up a list on her notecomp, “but, in my flash-forwards, mazes and waves are figuring more and more prominently. I’ve been searching the infosphere for their recurrences. The Greek key and maze symbols have radically increased in number since the Light happened. I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. The infosphere salons on those topics have been growing steadily in popularity since the Light.”

  “Maybe so, but why are they important?”

  “Again, I’m not certain,” Marissa said, flashing images up in faux 3D from her PDA. “In their own way, the keys and mazes resemble two-dimensional, flattened-spiral representations of DNA. Or attempts to represent curled-up higher dimensional space in lower dimensions. Or circuitry. Or intestines. Or waves of peristalsis moving through the maze of the digestive tract—”

  “Please, Ris,” Roger joked. “I’ve just finished eating.”

  “Okay—hologram interference patterns,” Marissa continued, undeterred by his attempted witticism. “Peano curves. Golden means. Fibonacci series. Spiral waves of Belousov-Zapotinsky reactions. Vortices. Spiral Galaxies. Superstrings—”

  “You’re casting your net rather wide, don’t you think? I mean, even the Yellow Brick Road that Dorothy goes dancing down in Oz begins in a spiral. Is that significant too?”

  “Maybe,” Marissa said with a shrug, finishing the last of her beer. “Somehow all these things are linked. Why else would the Light have left that pattern, that trace, in so many minds? You should spend some time in those infosphere discussions. It’s a good way to get a handle on what is going on out there in the massmind. I learned a lot from them.”

  Roger stared narrowly at her.

  “Such as?”