Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “—as in any human system where there is competition for scarce resources, some people will be rewarded and some will be denied. Those who are denied find they must distance themselves from identification with the system. Accepting the system uncritically would also mean accepting the system’s evaluation of themselves—and therefore denying at least a part of their own worth and dignity as individuals. Participation in the rewards granted by the system breeds commitment to the system. Denial of participation in the rewards granted by the system breeds alienation from that system, even resentment and hatred of it. So it is that any system created for the distribution of scarce resources must inevitably alienate some or even most of those who would participate in it.”

  Picking up his pace again through dappled light and shifting air, Ray wondered what kind of system these people thought they lived in.

  “—that all things partake of the natural life-force, the natural life-force is divine, the divine is multiple and diverse, like all things—”

  Strange to think that these psiXtian settlements were in their own ways “arcologies,” Dundas thought. Though of course the psiXtian hamlets were grown from the anarchic roots of back-to-the-land movements, temporary autonomous zones, and ephemeral paganistic festivals. From social disorder rather than the order that had built the other arcos.

  “—though it is an assumption believed by many scientists, materialism is not itself part of science. Materialism is an assumption about the way the world is, not a testable hypothesis nor a provable theory. Since no experiment can prove or disprove materialism, it cannot be an item of scientific data any more than can any other strictly metaphysical thesis, like belief about the existence of gods or demons—”

  The emphasis on what passed for “education” here was amazing. The psiXers claimed it was the opposite of indoctrination, that its purpose was to provide a framework for critical thinking, conscious decision-making, informed consensus. Ray had serious doubts about that claim.

  “—the narrator in the poem enforces the logic of the story, the narrative in the poem enforces the story of the logic. Narrative pushes centrifugally toward comprehensiveness, narrator pushes centripetally toward coherence—”

  What a waste of time: all this secular education, with so little time spent on moral education. Souls were more important than poems. Even the psiXers should realize that, no matter what bizarre consistency/completeness “linked interdisciplinary theme” they were working through this week.

  “—when Noise is free, Silence is expensive—”

  Emerging into the aboveground world with an almost audible sigh of relief, Ray Dundas found that at least he could agree with that last statement. Sunderground was noisy with free and perverse and heretical ideas—and the silence that was coming to it would be costly indeed.

  He was glad that the Sundergrounders seemed to be keeping themselves busy below ground today. He saw no one as he trekked to the cairn of stones hiding his satlink. He made sure no one had spied him, either, before he took out the device once more and activated it. He inserted the Gartner disk. He had long since realized how powerful a focus it was, not only for data, but also as a highest-access security clearance code key.

  On the satlink he looked into the history of these C3I satlinks themselves. His infosearch reminded him of what he’d already been warned: the neuro hook-ups were particularly sensitive to maser jamming. The military had largely stopped using them because of something called the LIMBIC Effect—Low Intensity Maser Barrage Induced Catatonia.

  Was that what he had experienced when he’d had that vision of Mike? But how? Using the binoculars he kept out here with the satlink, along with the system’s own detectors, he’d long since scanned this area. No masers to be found anywhere for a county’s distance at least.

  Through the binocs Ray looked around yet again, as he’d done that first strange day, searching again for any evidence indicating someone might have zapped him with a maser. Nothing.

  Yet the effect he’d experienced was so much like what the historical background described. Had his unit malfunctioned so as to produce a brief burst of septal stim? But then why, Ray wondered, had the figure of his brother appeared to him? If what he’d experienced was just a random pulse of stimulation to his central pleasure zones, then why would he have imposed that imagery—white light, his brother’s smiling visage—onto it?

  Ray wondered too if the vision might have something to do with the strange dreams he kept having. Those had been growing in intensity for the last month. He’d better find out soon. Time was running out. Although the pain from his outbreak was still very much with him, tomorrow his “shingles respite” would be over. After that, his time would not be nearly so much his own. He would be much more constrained by the psiXtian initiation schedule, their ridiculous meditating and rhythm-driving and temporary art performing.

  In his virtual space a message light began to flash. He unfolded the icon. He saw immediately that it was great news. Diana Gartner’s flight plan at last! Scanning it, Ray saw that she would be flying in on her big bad broom tonight. This very night!

  Also embedded in the message, sieving and fast Fourier decrypting as he watched, he saw his orders spieling out into virtual space. His exaltation at finally getting a shot at Gartner again proved to be short-lived. Reading the orders, he became more and more concerned.

  This was very peculiar. He had thought he would simply capture or, if necessary, kill the starburst Gartner and fly her super techtoy back to the ACSA. That was not to be the plan at all, however. He was specifically ordered not to terminate Gartner, except in the event of the most extreme circumstances.

  Her flight plans were going to change, but not in a way he could have foreseen.

  His orders informed him that, once Gartner’s SHADOW was on its way, he would receive another code key by satlink. His mission was to commandeer Gartner’s starjet and proceed at maximum speeds into ACSA airspace. During fly-over, he would tightbeam the code key information at the fully automated nuclear devices stored at General Brees Air Base, beside Laramie, Wyoming. That would activate and detonate said devices.

  That blast would take out the military facilities extending from old Bamforth NWR to Hutton Lake, not to mention the city of Laramie itself!

  He wondered for an instant whether his superiors had lost their minds. Was the message fake? Had security—his, or theirs—been compromised? He checked all the clearance codes for the message. Point for point, the orders appeared to be absolutely genuine. No denying it. But, good God, why would they want to wipe out a key strategic corridor and a city full of unsuspecting citizens—the city he himself and his parents and brother had once known well?

  Unless....

  Unless it was the Reichstag option. Diana Gartner’s SHADOW would be traceable back to both the psiXtians and to the HOME 1 habitat, whose relations with the Christian States were cold at best—

  Could these orders mean he was the one chosen to push the first domino?

  Ray saw the fires of Armageddon rising at the back of his eyes: ACSA retaliatory strikes against the psiXtians here and throughout the world, strikes and counterstrikes from and against the US and UN and Corporate Presidium, all the secular allies on Earth and in space. Who knew where it would go from there?

  I have been chosen to turn the key, Ray thought, which my father was never allowed to turn. The appropriateness of it all hit him with an almost physical force. He thought of images from Genesis, from Daniel, from Revelation. Images of apocalyptic falling-star destruction. Yet he also thought of Yahweh’s testing of Abraham’s love, through His commanding the death of Isaac. Was this to be Ray’s own testing? Would the Lord accept nothing else but such a holocaust?

  He was a Christian soldier. He knew his orders and his God. He would follow them utterly, in the assurance of his own salvation. And yes, the salvation of the world. Wasn’t that the real message of Abraham and Isaac? To preserve the future you must be willing to sacrifice
the future?

  These times of tribulation were foretold in the Bible. Such trials would have to be suffered through, so that the race mixers and perverts and mind-twisters would be destroyed and the world made new. So that the Kingdom of God on Earth could come, so that Jesus could reign as its king for a thousand years. So that His servants, the Elect of the Autonomous Christian States, might take their rightful places as immortal servant-kings in a new order of the ages. For that greater glory of God, any sacrifice would be worth it.

  Although it would have seemed more than enough, that was not the entirety of his orders. After his appointment over Laramie, he was then to fly or command the hijacked SHADOW on an easterly heading, and wait for further instructions.

  Abruptly, after being absent day after day, bliss opened inside his head, as if he had unhitched himself from the universe. The bearded, light-haloed image of his brother appeared in virtual space around him. This time, the apparition not only smiled but also spoke into his head.

  “Hello, Ray. I hope you appreciate the gravity of your mission.”

  “Mike! No. It can’t be you. You were in a coma box in the Northwest. The euthanizers pulled the plug on you!”

  “Not quite, little brother. I’m not dead.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “You must. All things are possible with the Lord. Would you put limits on His Power? Do you not believe that God can work in mysterious ways?”

  “I do, but—”

  Images flashed into virtual space around Ray, taken from the image-stream of the world but sculpted into a story Ray knew could be his brother’s alone, and which he now experienced from his brother’s subjective point of view:

  Mike at age six, crying because he can’t sleep, crying because he fears he’s the only creature left awake in all the universe. The most frightening thing in the world, this insomnia—a terrible burden, to be so awake and so alone, a haunted solitary freefall down the well of night, the fall growing worse the longer it goes on, growing faster and faster, meters per second per second, until he fears he will overshoot sleep completely, never rendezvous with it again, just crash and burn on the surface of some planet of madness—

  Mike, poised over an ant-hill, burning ants with a magnifying glass—

  “Mommy, why’d we move to the Compound?” Mike asks.

  “Because America’s too multi-colored,” Mommy replies, soundwashing the dishes. “The yellows and browns started hi-teching and there went the neighborhood.”

  “Mother, don’t tell the boy that!” says Daddy in his docile way. “He’ll think we’ve got the white flight fear.”

  “And why shouldn’t he?” Mommy asks.

  “Because it’s not fear of others that brought us here, but a desire to be with our own kind”—

  Mike reads from plump blonde Tanya Stautberg’s paper. “‘I think Earth’s impoverished masses are poor because they want to be. If a person wants a job bad enough, they can always find one.’ No, Ms. Stautberg—you can’t say that.”

  “Why not?” she squeals, political bristles rising.

  “You can’t say ‘a person...they.’ A person cannot be a they. ‘Person’ is singular, but ‘they’ is plural. A person can be he, or she, or he or she, but not ‘they’. Confusing singulars and plurals makes any language less exact. Also it’s not ‘bad,’ it’s badly. “

  “I thought this was tutoring for a course in history,” Tanya says, peeved, “not grammar.”

  “It is. But unfortunately for you, I also have a background in languages, too—”

  Mom is enraged, irrational. Dad watches quietly from his usual evening prescription tranquilizer funk.

  “What do you mean you’re moving out?”

  Mike puts down his rucksack and faces the blonde fury of his mother moving to physically block his path.

  “Just what I said, Mom. I’m moving to the west coast. I’ve transferred from Christian Heritage University to California State University at Humboldt. I want to do my graduate work there.”

  “Well you can just ‘untransfer’ yourself right now!” she spits. “You’re always thinking of yourself—what you want to do. Think of your parents and what we want you to do, for once!”

  “I never stop thinking of that,” Mike says with a weary sigh. “No more. I’m going to live my own life now. You can’t live it for me, and I won’t let you.”

  “Your own life! Your own life!” Mom mocks, suddenly brandishing a quarter-meter kitchen blade before her. “I’ve given my whole life for you boys! Waited on you hand and foot! And this is the kind of gratitude you show me? Oh no—no son of mine is going to move out until he finishes college or gets married!”

  She jabs toward Mike with the kitchen knife.

  “Honey!” Dad cries, startled, but Mike’s already moving, deflecting and taking her cutting hand, using her own momentum against her the way the Christian Martial Arts teacher at school showed him, then bringing his fist up and slugging his own mother hard on the jaw. She crumbles against one wall, bursts into tears. The blade skitters across the floor. Dad puts a restraining hand on Mike’s shoulder. He shrugs it off, bends down to pick up his rucksack, and leaves. Behind him, Ray is witness to it all—

  Driving out of the state, his car scares loose a swift-running mob of pronghorn antelope from beside the road. They are so beautiful. Tears come to his eyes. He has never seen them like this before. He fears he will never see them again—

  “The heaven of faith is disappearing into the night sky of commerce,” Mike says, the last time he does KL together with his friend (but probably never his love) from back home, Lizette. “Nature is disappearing into Culture. Reality is disappearing into Simulation. Response is disappearing into Stimulation. Time is disappearing into Space. Death is disappearing into Life. Neanderthals like me are disappearing into Homo sapiens sapiens—”

  “It’s not good for me to be around people right now,” Mike tells his work supervisor in Arcata. Then he quits—

  “I still feel ridiculous about it,” he tells the now KL-free Lizette when she comes to visit. He talks at her fast, fast, like someone who doesn’t see people very often. “Keeping everything locked up like this when I live in outback Oregon. The nearest town is the mighty metrop of Takilma.

  “Still, though,” he says, unlocking his trailer, “someone did break into my trailer a couple weeks back. Stole my holobox and sleeping bag. But, since I’ve been blissfully unemployed for the last month, I’ve had time to turn detective. I hung out in the local bars, pieced together whodunit. For an amateur sleuth I think I did pretty well. I’m already making a name for myself as a local hero. Just yesterday I turned over to the sheriff’s office the names of the likeliest suspects in my trailer break-in. Low-lives with connections to the Mongrel Clones bikers—”

  Gun butts slamming into his skull, again, again, arms raised helplessly in his own self-defense—

  “The first phase has gone very well,” a man with a tag that says RICK SCHWARZBRUCKE informs him, some time later. “Anything else to report?”

  Mike hesitates.

  “I’ve been having strange dreams,” he tells Schwarzbrucke. “Been hearing voices occasionally too.”

  “Dreams? Voices?” Schwarzbrucke says, stopping in the doorway, running a hand lightly over his perfect hair. “Most likely it’s the right and left hemispheres developing new pathways for communicating with each other. Once the crystal memory components settle into your neuronal matrix, we’ll get your mind occupied with our projects. I’m sure it’ll fade then....”

  Mike stares around at the kaleidoscoping crystalline angels filling the virtual universe about him.

  “No, this is just too paranoid. Why me first, of all people?”

  “—crystal memory interface—”

  “—the Great Net Allesseh’s insights from broadcasts—”

  “—you are the first ‘one’ we can speak to directly—”

  War in the infosphere, the surging tides of b
attle masquerading as a game, the victory of the so-called Light, himself falling, crashing down the burning sky of mind—

  “Stop!” Ray said, almost in a shout. “I believe! It’s you. My older brother, Michael Carter Dalken. It’s a miracle. But how?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Mike’s light-haloed face said to him. “We have been chosen to do God’s will. The Lord has spoken to me, Ray. My old mental world had to be destroyed before a new one could arise. I wouldn’t have heard God’s voice in my head if I hadn’t gotten the crystal memory implants. I wouldn’t have gotten the crystal memory if I hadn’t suffered the head trauma. It was a fortunate fall, like that of Adam and Eve in the Garden.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call that fortunate,” Ray said. “Yours—or theirs.”

  “On the contrary,” Mike said, into his brother’s head. “The original sin made necessary the incarnation of Christ. One world must end before another can begin. You are part of it too, little brother. The world that now is must pass away, so the world that ought to be may come into being. Your help will be instrumental. Like the Israelites in Egypt, I am in bondage—and you are the one who can free me. Which you will do. Your satlink will inform you of the exact time and location of Gartner’s arrival. We will have realtime satellite and radar tracking, rest assured.”

  Ray felt himself nodding in immediate agreement, the force of his brother’s will stronger now than he ever remembered it being.

  “First though,” Mike continued, “there is something you must do among the psiXtians. In the lab described on the virtual insert here, your hosts are working quietly on something they are calling a ‘retroviral antisenescence vector.’ Memorize the lab’s location and description. Before you detour Diana Gartner and her craft, you must either obtain a sample of this vector, or see to it that it is released into the atmosphere. This was attempted previously in HOME 1, around the time of the so-called Light, but the vector was never released and the effort failed. You must not fail this time.”

  “With God’s help,” Ray said, “I’ll succeed. You can count on me.”