Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “You should see the site rose for it,” Roger said with a laugh. “One of the most complex I’ve ever seen. Most homes in the ’borbs don’t even bother with careful window placement or solar gain, much less a full description of house and location aesthetics and energetics.”

  The doors, having scanned them, irised open and they entered. Atsuko, who was in the central sitting room, offhandedly waved them into the open airy space. She appeared to be in the midst of a holophone interview with a young blonde woman in a pink suit—calling from Earth, judging by the slight transmission lag.

  “—not what we’re about here,” Atsuko explained patiently. “If you’ve read D.B. Albert’s work, then you know that one of the consequences of his theory was that human society as he knew it—urbanized, technologized living—was not compatible with the further development of what he called ‘spontaneous human consciousness’.”

  The holographic interviewer leaned forward.

  “How does that tie into types of societies?” she pressed.

  “Because,” Atsuko explained, “though social action is possible for such a consciousness, the traditional notion of utopia as a fixed, ideal society is impossible in the presence of this kind of consciousness. Consciousness is really all about dealing with contingency, and both contingency and consciousness conspire against a fixed and static utopia.”

  “And the orbital habitat is not that?” asked the pink suit.

  “Not at all. What we have always been about here in this habitat is the creation of something that is not fixed. What we’re after is a sustainable, continually changing pursuit of the ideal. An ongoing approximation that is a process as consciousness itself is a process. That’s what we mean when we say, ‘If it’s not fixed, you can’t break it.’”

  Roger and Marissa took their places on a big morph sofa discretely out of range of the holocamera. In the time it took them to sit down, Atsuko and her holographic interlocutor had moved on to other topics.

  The interviewer flicked back a strand of hair made of blonde light.

  “But how does that explain Albert’s ranting against media and hypermedia—both mass and targeted?” asked the interviewer.

  Atsuko shifted forward slightly, causing her holofied image to trace and waver for a moment before it settled down.

  “Again, that’s consistent with his view of consciousness,” Atsuko explained. “That’s why Albert was so opposed to not only scientific materialism, but also to what he called ‘social-ontology’. Remember, his ideas arose partly in response to the linguistic totalism coming out Geertz’s work. He also rebelled against the extension of cultural materialism elaborated by Jameson and others.”

  “Could you explain their theories for our audience?” asked the pink-suited interviewer.

  “Certainly. The argument of the social theorists was that consciousness is essentially all words and concepts. Words and concepts are all social. The consciousness of any individual, therefore, is inherently and absolutely a social construct, a mere nexus or space where social forces play themselves out.”

  “And Albert objected to that?” asked the interviewer.

  “Strongly,” Atsuko said with a nod. “He traced those ideas back to Skinnerian behaviorism, ultimately. The society we’ve tried to create in HOME 1 is in some ways the opposite of the behaviorist society Skinner hypothesized in Walden Two.”

  “But why should we be afraid of an outdated twentieth century concept like behaviorism?” asked the pink and blonde interviewer.

  “Because the upshot of crypto-behaviorist ideas,” Atsuko explained patiently, “at least in academic circles, was a generalized denial of the actuality of individual consciousness. Albert countered with an elucidation of ‘portal experiences’. He emphasized the importance of mystical and spiritual experience, the necessity of non-physical events which can’t, at the moment of experiencing them, be put into words. That was all part of his attack on social-ontology. He was attempting to restore a proper valuation to the idea of individual consciousness, which he felt had become endangered to the point of extinction.”

  “And the media’s role—?” the blonde and pink interviewer persisted.

  “Albert criticized media,” Atsuko replied, “because he felt they had become a powerful force for the new extinguishing of individual consciousness.”

  “What do you mean?” the interviewer asked, apparently trying to sound sly but coming off instead only as suspicious.

  “He believed they had become global town criers,” Atsuko continued, “sending the same message at more or less the same time to millions and even billions of viewers and auditors. According to Albert, the media apparatus was priming the fear machinery that drives societies back from individuality to mass ‘voices in the head’. He felt mass communication pushes us away from conscious, written, defined Law—and toward an unconscious, oral, ill-defined Morality. He called that process ‘recameralization’.”

  The interviewer quickly brought the interview to a close, thanked Atsuko, and disappeared. Atsuko sighed and turned to her guests. Roger thought, with a pang, that his mother looked older than when he’d last seen her—grayer, more tired, more worn under the eyes.

  “Do you think she got what I was getting at?” Atsuko asked.

  “As much as she wanted to,” Roger said, shrugging. “If she was a ‘she’ at all. Those machine-generated interviewers are getting pretty lifelike. A good enough expert system and we probably couldn’t tell.”

  “One can only hope,” Atsuko said, looking slightly wistful, “that they won’t just take the most sensational or confusing sound bite, use that, and dump the rest.”

  “She—or it—sure closed things down fast when she finally got that answer about Albert’s critique of the media,” Marissa said. “Like she didn’t really want to know what she thought she wanted to know, after all.”

  “Yes,” Atsuko replied. “Like Oedipus’s detective work. But come along—we can discuss all this over lunch.”

  Atsuko stood up in her flowing pantdress of black and silver, a perfectly hologenic match to her gray-white streaked black hair and her pale coloring. Marissa and Roger followed her into the living room, feeling a cool breeze blowing in from the garden, fragrant with green and floral scents. They sat down to salads, crisp and green and laden with myriad vegetables and tofu and mushrooms, with glasses of water and wine before them. Clasping hands in a circle, they meditated in silent blessing over the food, then began to eat.

  “The more they know about what Albert thought,” Atsuko said, enjoying a savory new strain of shiitake, “the less the media people like thinking about it.”

  “I really don’t know a whole lot about his ideas,” Marissa said, sipping at her wine. “What really was his gripe with media, other than the fact that it tells everybody pretty much the same thing at the same time?”

  Atsuko sipped at her wine, thinking.

  “He felt that the more infodense media became,” she said, “the more it made consensus reality into an abstracted virtual reality. For Albert, media that strongly mimicked the physical world leveled the distinction between public and private. It filled up with public messages the private space of individual consciousness. To the extent that media ‘virtualized’ consensus reality on a broad scale, Albert felt it also recameralized the individual mind. That process deeply eroded the individual nature of consciousness, or so he claimed. He may well have been right.”

  Marissa paused in cutting up of her salad.

  “But would he agree someone can be too individualistic?” she asked. Atsuko fell inexplicably quiet.

  “I read a fair amount of his work when I was in school,” Roger said, his fork poised over his plate. “He felt we shouldn’t value individual freedom so far above social responsibility that we become anarchic solipsists. That wasn’t his primary concern, though. He was more worried about the threat of group ‘unconsciousness’ to individual consciousness, than vice versa.”

  Atsuko glanced
toward each of her companions in turn.

  “A lot of people up here in the habitat have found his ideas liberating,” she said. “Admittedly, we are much more technologized than any pure Albertian would care to be. We haven’t carried those ideas—particularly their ‘appropriate technology’ aspects—as far as some groups on Earth have, like the psiXtians.”

  “Really?” Marissa asked. She had long felt that what was going on in the habitats was as cutting edge as one could get.

  “They adhere pretty devoutly to Albert’s contention,” Atsuko explained, “that the mind is a co-evolutionary project between physical and non-physical elements. A cooperation between biological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. They spend a lot more time looking for portal experiences than we do, for instance.”

  Marissa chewed a mushroom thoughtfully.

  “‘Portal experiences’?” she asked.

  Atsuko sipped and nodded.

  “Self-consuming events which point to the existence of realities beyond what we experience via the ordinary senses,” Atsuko said. “Experiences that create upon the mind the impression of a transcendent realm—one in which the individual directly experiences realities outside the ordinary physical world of space-time.”

  “Like drug states?” Marissa asked. “Or religious ecstasies?”

  “Both,” Atsuko said, pausing to swallow what she’d been chewing. “There are lots of ways to have such experiences. Rituals, breathing exercises, fasting, drugs, many more. Such experiences are ‘portals’ in the sense that they are gateways. They stand between the dimensions of the physical world with which we are familiar, and other dimensions or non-physical realms with which we are much less familiar.”

  Marissa sipped her wine. A thought, highly speculative, occurred to her.

  “What happened to Seiji’s brother,” Marissa asked, “the Light and everything around it—was that a ‘portal experience’?”

  Atsuko exchanged a glance with her son, an expression of pleased surprise on her face, then turned her attention back to Marissa.

  “I hadn’t really thought of it that way, myself,” Atsuko said, “but you’re not the first person I’ve heard that idea from. I was talking to one of our pilots the other day. Diana Gartner. She has a lot of friends among the psiXtians. They seem to believe that Jiro Yamaguchi’s apotheosis was a sort of ultimate portal experience—a complete translocation.”

  “In what sense?” Marissa asked, before sipping her wine once more.

  “According to them, Jiro not only stood in the gate, as many mystics have,” Atsuko said. “He walked through. It’s a very important omen for their faith community. I don’t know how many of them my office has communicated with lately.”

  Marissa looked over at Roger, who had already finished his salad and wine and was sitting back from the table with his hands clasped contentedly behind his head.

  “See?” Marissa said. “I told you Jiro and the Light must be having more of an affect than we’ve been seeing.”

  “No doubt,” Roger said, fighting off a post-prandial lassitude. “No doubt.”

  Atsuko, who had been eavesdropping on their exchange, politely returned her gaze to her salad.

  “My policy is to refer the psiXtians and their questions to Lakshmi and Seiji and Jhana,” Atsuko said. “After all, they were the only ones who were right there. They were the last ones to communicate with Jiro Yamaguchi, as far as I know.”

  “How are Jhana and Seiji?” Roger asked. “Did they finish moving to HOME 2, like they’d planned?”

  “As far as I know,” Atsuko said. “I haven’t heard from them in a while. I’ve been hearing a lot from Lakshmi, though.”

  “What about?” Marissa asked, curious.

  “It seems not everyone has been as pleased by the light as you and I might be,” Atsuko said. “In my liaison status, I’ve been getting a number of queries from a Vasili Landau at Interpol. It seems someone or something has been killing people in waves throughout the infosphere. Lakshmi has confirmed it.”

  Roger leaned forward, resting his arms on the table.

  “But why should that concern Lakshmi,” he asked, “or this habitat?”

  “For a couple of reasons,” Atsuko said, staring into the table. “The technology the killer, or killers, is using are those RATs that Jiro Yamaguchi also made use of—”

  “But, if I remember correctly,” Marissa said, finishing the last of her salad, “weren’t those things developed by some guy who got killed in the Sedona disaster years ago?”

  “True,” Atsuko said, “but there are other issues. Most of those who were killed were looking into Tetragrammaton data. Or ParaLogics and Crystal Memory Dynamics. Or investigating what happened to Jiro Yamaguchi and the Light. We’ve lost a couple people in the habitats on this already—a disproportionate number in comparison to Earth, considering how few we still are in number.” She paused, frowning. “Horrible, brutal deaths, these waves of infosphere-linked murders. You don’t want to know what the victims look like. And these waves of murders, as far as we can tell, all only started after Jiro disappeared.”

  The three of them sat in silence for a while. Atsuko, who had been talking the most, got caught up on finishing her salad and wine.

  “Are you saying,” Marissa asked at last, “that all of us who were involved in Jiro’s disappearance into the Light are suspects?”

  “Apparently,” Atsuko said with a nod. “Along with Jiro himself, according to Mister Landau. Fortunately, Lakshmi’s already way ahead of me on this, as usual. She’s got Lev and Aleister poking around in it, on Earth. I gather that Interpol is going to be sending up a pair of investigators too.”

  “Quite a brouhaha,” Roger said quietly, his hands in his lap. “Any ideas as to what’s motivating these killings?”

  Atsuko looked carefully at her son.

  “Landau’s message has references to all kinds of things,” Atsuko said. “Even a passage on ‘the killer’s individual consciousness breaking down under the impact of mass-mediated reality while at the same time seeking authentication from that reality’. That would have done old D.B. Albert himself proud. Even Lakshmi has a theory, but it’s rather wild.”

  “What’s her point of view?” Roger asked, curious.

  “Jealousy,” Atsuko said with a bemused smile. “She thinks that whoever or whatever is doing this is jealous of what Jiro was able to accomplish—and is trying to duplicate it.”

  “By killing people?” Marissa asked, horrified.

  “Maybe the killing is just to cover up what’s really going on,” Roger suggested.

  “Insufficient data,” Atsuko said with a shrug, standing to clear the table. “If it’s not one thing, it’s three. Diana says the churchstates too, particularly the Christian and Muslim ones, are getting very touchy lately.”

  “Why’s that?” Roger asked, pushing his chair back from the table.

  “New visions, new messages from angels and prophets and saints,” Atsuko said as she picked up her plate and glass. “Lakshmi’s started sending me copies of these odd messages. She keeps finding them, embedded in the code of some pirate virtual mail system. Your names have come up there, too. What a mess.”

  Marissa and Roger rose from the table with their plates and glasses and utensils too. They took them into the kitchen and began to sound-wash them.

  “Might we see that message?” Marissa asked as they worked.

  Atsuko reached for the kitchen PDA.

  “Sure,” she said with a shrug. “For all the good it’ll do you. It’s just a list. Here.”

  The material Atsuko had received from Lakshmi she called up into display for them.

  Initial list (fragmentary), partition-prime decrypted from code of underground virtual mail system SubTerPost. Initial source unknown:

  Brandi Easter, Mei-Ling Magnus, Roger Cortland, Diana Gartner, Robert Sullivan, Marissa Correa, Immanuel Shaw, Paul Larkin, Atsuko Cortland, Seiji Yamaguchi, Jhana Meniskos, Lakshmi Ngubo
, Jacinta Larkin....

  “See what I mean?” Atsuko said. “Just names. Some are for people I’ve never heard of. And the list keeps growing. It probably means nothing, but there you have it.”

  “I hope it’s not a hit list for this ’infosphere killer you mentioned,” Roger said with a wry smile.

  “Oh, it’s probably nothing of the sort,” Atsuko assured them. “It is puzzling, though.”

  Roger and Marissa admitted it was indeed. Atsuko turned the display off, as if not wanting to think of it further. When they had all finished cleaning up, they took their tea and coffee out onto Atsuko’s small moon-pebbled patio.

  “This is a new patio table, isn’t it?” Marissa asked, staring at the table’s surface.

  “Actually, no,” Atsuko said. “I just felt like putting a new inlay into its surface. It’s called a Greek—”

  “—key. Or a standard meander,” Marissa said with a nod, a glance passing between her and Roger. “I know. I’ve been studying spiral waves and mazes. You know, there’s a latent optical image in the Greek key.”

  “Really?” Atsuko asked. “I’ve never heard of that. Where?”

  “Here,” Marissa said, trying to trace it with her finger. “See the slanted rectangle? Its boundary is incomplete—implied. The rectangle is tipped sideways, like this, in the rectilinear wave of the Greek key.”

  “I don’t see it,” Atsuko said, staring at it.

  “It takes a while,” Marissa assured her. “You have to learn how to see it with crossed eyes, sort of. Once you do, you’ll see that, in a long border of Greek keys, the latent rectangles aren’t independent of each other. They’re linked in a sort of zigzag latent wave that runs ‘under’ or ‘within’ the blatant, obvious waves of the Greek key. Only the latent wave takes a different, more dynamic shape. Like linked stylized lightning bolts, or cardiogram pulses. The two waves are inseparable, though. One is possible only in relation to the other.”

  “I still don’t see it,” Atsuko said, trying to cross her eyes until her head ached. “I just put the shape into the table top because I liked the way it looked!”