Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Good, good,” the apparition of his brother said, nodding. “Keep your satlink with you at all times now. Through me you’ll have instantaneous access to any information you could possibly need. May God speed your journey and our efforts, little brother.”

  Michael’s image—and the deep bliss that always accompanied it—slowly began to fade. With a sigh, Ray left virtual space. Looking around him into the pallid “real”, he saw only the scrubby gray-greens and golden browns of shallow, semi-arid valley easing toward hills, punctuated at a very few points by the off-white sand of dry washes. A warm wind was blowing strongly out of the west. The weather was going to change, no doubt about it.

  Ray got up from where he’d been sitting cross-legged on the ground and brushed himself off. Jesus, Mohammed, Moses—all of them found their visions in the desert. Perhaps it was only appropriate that he should have had his own visions in such a place, too—even if those visions had been helped along not by fasting but by fast telecomputing.

  He inhaled deeply, readying himself, then began to remove the weapons from his cache—flechette machine pistol, ceramic knife, collapsible smart-mortar. Then the ammo that had lain hidden beneath the satlink in its cairn. The knife he slid into a slot in his boot. The small pistol and mortar packet he slipped into the waistband of his pants, under his loose shirt, under which he also belly-taped the ammo.

  Weaponry thus concealed, he began making his way back toward Sunderground, his satlink in plain sight under his arm. He wondered if anyone would hassle him, though he no longer much cared. It wasn’t as if the psiXtians themselves used no technology, after all—just tech they deemed “appropriate”.

  He was now fully convinced of the reality of his vision of his brother, and of his brother’s continued presence in the infosphere. Ray trusted his brother’s experience of God’s voice was likewise real, and that his brother’s body—wherever it might be found—could be liberated.

  He had much to do. So preoccupied was he with thoughts of his mission’s escalating demands that he almost didn’t notice the tree-pruning crew, cloudforest-Indian boys idly watching him as he came back down the ramp to the underground.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Code-extracted SubTerPost fragment (infosphere source unknown; original source independently verified as doctoral dissertation of Marissa Correa, The Cancer of Immortality: Population and Longevity in a Global Context):

  “The Wages of Sex is Death” is perhaps the most concise way to state biologist T. B. L. Kirkwood’s disposable soma theory. According to Kirkwood, senescence or aging is the price paid for sexual reproduction. Kirkwood theorized that organisms must always divide their physiological energy between sexual reproduction on the one hand, and maintenance of the body or ‘soma’ on the other. The optimum fitness strategy involves an allocation of energy that is less than that required for perfect repair and immortality. Aging and death are the inevitable consequence of defects in the cells and tissues left unrepaired because the organism has allocated its energy to sexual reproduction instead.

  The most ancient life on Earth, the single-celled prokaryote protozoans, are essentially immortal in that a cell of that type will never stop dividing and die unless something kills it. For single-celled organisms, cellular immortality means survival. For multicellular organisms like humans, however, the uncontrolled cell division of cellular immortality means myriad cancers—cellular immortality means death.

  The invention of sex had the great advantage of providing for greater mixing and variability of genetic material. It also meant, however, that the cells of multicellular organisms had to become mortal. Cell death had to be programmed into the multicellular organism, so that uncontrolled cell growth wouldn’t kill the organism through cancer before the organism had a chance to reproduce through sex.

  If a human immortalizing vector were developed, then Progress would truly be the disease of comfort. An immortalized human world would force us to new realizations. If people continued to believe that growth is always good, then logically they would have to consider cancer a blessing. Many religions and ideologies proclaim humans alone are created in the divine image, that we deserve dominion over all living things, that we, by right, should indulge our fruitfulness and multiplication without constraint, regardless of consequences. In light of the release of an immortalizing vector, none of those religions or ideologies could be considered a fit doctrine for human beings. They would be seen for what they are: religions for cancer cells, belief systems which turn the sin of species pride into the basis of faith.

  The release of an immortalizing vector would forcefully present the truth to us in a way we could no longer deny. As the quantity of human lives goes up, the quality of human life must go down. Any scientist who claims that scientific or technological progress can prevent this eventuality has either forgotten the distinction between finite and infinite, or is simply lying. Any religionist who claims this situation hasn’t occurred or won’t occur has already made a decision to value the quantity, the sheer numbers, of people over the quality of the lives they lead. In so doing, that person inherently condemns billions of present and future human beings to lives of misery and poverty.

  * * * *

  “I’m sorry I don’t know you already,” Brandi Easter said, introducing herself awkwardly to Mei-Ling Magnus. They stood beside a table overflowing with hors d’œuvres and their various makings, among which various types of exotic fungi seemed to predominate. “Everybody seems to already know everybody else here.”

  “Not me,” Mei-Ling said, noshing on a cracker topped with faux sturgeon roe, looking at the sheltering sky above her. “I just flew up from Earth. Everything’s started happening so fast it’s been like a whirlwind really. I feel like Dorothy in Oz. I’ve never been in an orbital habitat before.”

  “Well?” Brandi asked. “What are your impressions of this one?”

  Mei-Ling and Robert Sullivan had only been here in HOME 2 a few hours, but her feelings about the place were already quite complex. Certainly it was impressive: an enormous tunnel-cave of sky hidden in heaven, a sky within the sky. Staring at the upward curving tunnel of the haborb’s skyline an hour earlier, the dimming quality of the light in this sector of the vast cylinder made her think of lines in an Emily Dickinson poem. “A certain slant of light on winter afternoons oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.” Not long after that, though, it had rained for ten minutes, steadily and strongly, until now everything had a clean-scrubbed look, a fresh glow and sparkle to it.

  “It’s a bit like Camelot,” Mei-Ling said at last. “I gather the rain falls mainly after sunset—on schedule.”

  Brandi laughed lightly as they walked together through the mingling crowd. She glanced back at Diana and Manny. Her fellow travelers on the way over in Gartner’s SHADOW, they now stood talking to people they knew. She was surprised to see how many of the guests had those new, winged “machine manifestation” PDAs perched on their shoulders. Diana claimed they weren’t really new at all—rather a retro revival of a personal computing style popular twenty years back.

  Mei-Ling saw Robert ahead. He was looking upward and gesturing animatedly along with an Asian Indian man. As they passed, she overheard her traveling companion remark that “the toroid is the attractor-shape of ordered systems.” She was growing to appreciate his company altogether too much—but God, sometimes he was such a techie!

  “You were expecting something a bit more rugged and frontiersy, then?” Brandi asked, returning Mei-Ling’s attention to their conversation.

  “I suppose so,” Mei-Ling said, glancing about. “Partially-buried geodomes connected by partially-buried concrete conduit corridors—like on Mars, or in some of the psiXtian settlements on Earth. Instead, you have this.”

  Brandi’s gaze followed Mei-Ling’s toward a building of incredible delicacy yet also sturdiness. The small structure—orderly as a crystal, organic as a mushroom, and hand-crafted as a medieval church—was Seiji and Jhana’s hous
e. The two of them made their way toward the residence, past a Mennonite-bearded Asian man talking about gardening.

  “—not look like it yet,” he said, “but before long these will be tall green walls of golden goddess bamboo on that side and Oregon grape holly, sweet olive and Carolina cherry laurel on the others. Smell that apricot scent? That’s the sweet olive, Osmanthus fragrans. These all form green fences enclosing front and side and backyard spaces. In those spaces, we’ve put in thousands of bulbs, hundreds of flowering perennials and herbs, and at least a dozen trees. And not a blade of grass to be mowed in the whole space!”

  The small group around him smiled and laughed politely. Mei-Ling wondered if he might be some sort of local master-gardening volunteer. They were needed, she thought. Certainly there was a newness that was also a rawness here—one that, she suspected, only time and growth and further colonists would overcome.

  Brandi and Mei-Ling walked on toward the house, past a highly polished, square, pale-granite slab, an art altar of sorts, atop a cone balanced on its truncated nose, with water sheeting smoothly over all of it in a thin film. Brandi and Mei joined a small group of people tracing, with their fingers through the water, the dark chiseled shapes of spirals and vortices, meanders and filigrees, nested curves and zigzags, dots and flecks, parallel lines, hexagons, lattices, crosses and stars. Brandi saw Paul Larkin and a woman who looked like his younger female twin standing there. Beside them were four short, dark haired and dark skinned people, dressed in spacer coveralls, all of whom seemed particularly intent on the slab altar’s decoration. Larkin’s younger female twin was speaking animatedly about archetypes with an older Asian woman, whom they referred to very formally as “Mrs. Cortland.”

  Mei-Ling and Brandi turned toward a speaker who had just begun, a woman dressed in a midnight blue gown, cascaded over in back by the long thick fall of her darkly shining hair. With a dancer’s grace the woman moved confidently about as she explained the sculpture to those gathered round it. She described it in words Brandi could not quite place in the context of art: “entoptic phenomena”, “altered states of consciousness”, “shamanic ritual”, “Lewis-Williams’s San rock art studies”, “upper Paleolithic cave works”, “Coso petroglyphs”, “Rhine cards.” Fascinating stuff, and the piece was undeniably impressive, but Brandi didn’t think she really needed that much detailed information to appreciate it.

  “What brings you to the haborbs for your first time?” Brandi asked as she and Mei-Ling walked together into their hosts’ organocrystalline house. Like the altar slab, the house too was etched with the same “entoptic” marks.

  Before Mei-Ling could answer, though, she found her attention captivated by a piece hanging on one wall. It wasn’t a painting, but rather had the hardsoft appearance of something photographed and enlarged from a computer monitor, then cast into 3-D.

  The depth-image inside the frame was perplexing: a large screen holovision in a room empty but for a single tall candle “seated” in a chair. On the screen was a freezeframed image of a hurricane over the Atlantic—a colorized radar or infrared scan from a weather satellite. The candle, occupying a “viewer” position before the tv set, appeared recently blown out, its smoke columning almost straight up in a windless and windowless room. The sole remaining light in the room emanated from the stormwhorl represented on the screen. Mei-Ling and Brandi found a small title-caption card to the right of the frame, which read As Above, So Below—and Closer Than They Appear. That was rather cryptic, but the artist was at least clearly listed as a “K.S. Gunawan.”

  A dark, attractive young woman, a Parvati dressed in Western attire, watched their reactions to the work from a doorway. Mei-Ling suspected that their observer was the artist herself. She had seen the image in the popular media somewhere before, though she couldn’t remember exactly where. The man with the Mennonite-style beard and the gardener’s work clothes entered the room with a nod of recognition to the woman in the doorway, then he too gazed steadily at the art piece.

  “Work brought me here,” Mei-Ling told Brandi at last, as they sat down on the morph couches in the room. “I’ve never met anybody here before, though I know some of them by reputation. I’m part of an investigative team from Interpol. We’re scheduled to meet with Seiji Yamaguchi and Jhana Meniskos here, as part of our investigation. They head up an infosphere-consciousness working group.”

  “Is that how you got invited to this party?” Brandi asked.

  “I suppose so,” Mei-Ling said. “I haven’t met the hosts yet. I gather that they became a ‘couple’ not long before the Light.”

  Brandi nodded.

  “On the flight over, Diana Gartner told me Jhana is already pregnant,” she said. “Diana says they seem to want to assure everyone this will be their one and only child. I gather they’re big ‘low population growth’ advocates themselves.”

  Mei-Ling hunched forward a bit.

  “I guess the rapidity of conception has surprised some people here,” she said, nodding. “I haven’t met them, but just walking around the party, I’ve heard a number of jokes about ‘Mister Sure-Shot’ and ‘Ms. Target.’”

  Brandi nodded and laughed, settling herself more fully into the couch. The man in the gardener’s coveralls, who had been looking at the artwork, took notice of them and, drink in hand, began drifting their way.

  “You mentioned an investigation,” Brandi said, intrigued. “What kind of investigation? If it’s not too hush-hush to talk about, that is.”

  “I suppose not,” Mei-Ling said, sipping at the drink she had been carefully carrying since the hors d’oeuvre table. “I’m investigating what’s been referred to in the media as the topological voyeur killings. We’re looking particularly at their connection to a number of previous anomalies. Tetragrammaton projects, the Sedona disaster, the Light—”

  “The Light was a lot more than just the visible spectrum,” the bearded gardener said, extending his hand. “Ms. Magnus, I presume? I’m Seiji Yamaguchi.”

  Mei-Ling rose from her seat, as did Brandi, who introduced herself and shook Yamaguchi’s hand.

  “Ah, Ms. Easter!” he said with a slight bow. “Mei-Ling here should get to know you better. Paul Larkin tells me you’ve learned quite a bit about Tetragrammaton.”

  Mei-Ling gave Brandi a slightly puzzled look, but then turned back to Yamaguchi.

  “What did you mean before,” Mei-Ling asked, “about ‘more than the visible spectrum’?”

  “It’s from Jung, via D. B. Albert,” Yamaguchi said, as the women took their seats once more on the morph couches. Seiji sat down in a similarly body-responsive chair. “The ‘visible spectrum’ corresponds to ego consciousness—mental processes we are aware of and think of as our own. The psychic ‘infrared’ is generally invisible to awareness. It’s where body meets mind, where biological processes take on a mentally representable or even conscious character, if they attain enough psychic energy. The psychic ‘ultraviolet’, on the other hand, is the realm where the individual mind meets the other world, or higher dimensions, or ‘undifferentiated spirit’, whichever term you prefer. The contents of that normally have too much psychic energy to be apprehended by consciousness.”

  “And this metaphorical spectrum is what you meant?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “Partially,” Yamaguchi said, somewhat cryptically. “The key thing to remember is that both the biological and instinctual level on the one hand, and the realm of higher or other dimensions on the other, are made up of unconscious processes.”

  Brandi struggled to remember the psych courses she’d taken as a teenager.

  “They both can influence consciousness though, right?” she asked. “The infrared corresponds to the id, and the ultraviolet to the superego?”

  Seiji shook his head and leaned back further in the chair.

  “Not quite,” he said. “That’s more Freud. Albert says the id reduces too easily to a sort of philosophical materialism, and the superego to social-ontology. Neither of th
ose ultimately describe individual consciousness. Psychic energy manifests itself as will in the individual consciousness. Free will derives from the opposition of body and spirit, the conflict between instinct and archetype.”

  Mei-Ling smiled, flipping a loose strand of hair over her right ear with her hand.

  “Angel on one shoulder,” she said, thinking of a man she’d seen among the guests, who had one of those new/retro winged Personal Data Assistants on each shoulder. “And devil on the other.”

  Seiji gave her a surprised but piercing look.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” he said. “Angels may very well be how our minds ‘make visible’ to consciousness the autonomous and independent psychoid processes of the ‘ultraviolet’, of superconsciousness. Demons may be how our minds make visible to consciousness the psychoid processes of the ‘infrared’, of ‘sub’consciousness. Think of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The demons start out as angels. They are indistinguishable—equally unconscious, as far as the mind is concerned. The war in heaven between the angels and demons is also a psychomachia. It’s about free will in the individual mind. The interactions of the serpent and the tree and Adam and Eve down in Eden are mainly about that, too.”

  “And all this has something to do with why I’m here?” Mei-Ling asked, a bit skeptically.

  “And with Tetragrammaton?” Brandi asked.

  “You should already know some of the answers to both of those,” Seiji said, looking down at the polished mooncrete floor. “The Tetragrammaton program has always been after a seamless mind/machine interface, but I don’t think they expected such an interface would include the unconscious too. Even in my brother Jiro’s case, we found words and messages prime-factor embedded in the RAT code at the time—the precursors of the messages now being found in SubTerPost. They were ‘Freudian slips.’ Voices from the unconscious, in essence.”

  Mei-Ling took another sip from her glass.