Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

“I’ve recently been in communication with Lakshmi Ngubo,” she said, “your chief systems specialist in HOME 1. She feels some kinds of computer glitches are themselves messages out of the machine unconscious.”

  “Right,” Seiji agreed. “The ones that have obtained enough ‘psychic energy’ to rise into a sort of consciousness. Now, new messages, new words and images, are appearing in the RAT code via SubTerPost. We don’t know which unconscious they might be coming out of, though. The physical subconscious? Or the higher-dimensional superconscious?”

  “And your brother’s relationship—?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “My brother’s ‘construct’ was the external bootstrapping event,” Seiji said, taking a sip of wine, “that stimulated the appearance in the infosphere of a dynamical state—one associated with introspective consciousness in the ‘artificial brain’ that had developed there. That’s what Jiro wanted.” Seiji paused, as if preoccupied with memory for a moment. “What does your topological voyeur want?”

  Mei-Ling thought about that, her right hand unconsciously stroking the side of her chin.

  “To function in the same manner,” she said. “Perhaps he has even tried to, before.”

  “Yes,” Seiji said with a nod, swirling the wine in his glass. “That seems to be the case, from everything we’ve learned here—and all that you at Interpol have deigned to share with us through Atsuko and Lakshmi. I think that, ultimately, your infosphere killer wants the experience of transcendence that Jiro had. He wants to take the ‘intersection’ of worlds and dimensions, the portal experience at the root of individual consciousness—and push it to a full-blown assumption into heaven.”

  Mei-Ling shook her head vigorously.

  “He can’t do it,” she said. “Not the person we’ve scan keyed.”

  Brandi stared at the two of them, sensing that they were moving off into realms she had no real background in at all.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because a strongly socially-constructed consciousness has great difficulty experiencing Stacean intersection,” Mei-Ling said. “Such a consciousness is necessarily oriented toward the experience of the group. Individuating experiences like intersection make the individual different—even more individual—and prohibit integration into socially constructed patterns.”

  “And your ‘scan key’ of the killer shows something different?” Seiji asked.

  “Absolutely,” Mei-Ling replied. “A need for control, a need to ‘fit in’ that has become so desperate it’s obscene. But there can be no individual consciousness without privacy. Individuals are individuals only so long as their private affairs remain private.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected to hear that from someone in law enforcement,” Seiji remarked.

  “Then you haven’t met enough people in law enforcement,” Mei-Ling replied quickly. “What the topological voyeur killer ultimately desires to destroy is both his privacy and his individuality. At all costs, including murder.”

  Brandi stared at Mei-Ling and Seiji, confused, as the dark-haired woman in the midnight blue gown came quietly into the room.

  “He thinks murder will integrate him into society?” Brandi asked. “That’s more than a little paradoxical.”

  Seiji abruptly laughed.

  “I’m sure it gets worse,” he said. “My brother, even in the depths of his madness, always held tight to the idea that he would rather die than kill—or even hurt—anybody. That’s the main difference between Jiro and this new force in the infosphere. Jiro was, I believe, driven by his better angels. He was a mystic ultimately willing to sacrifice self for world. This new one seems to be driven by his darker demons. He seems an apocalyptic egotist willing to sacrifice world for self, at least so far. Yet that is probably the very thing that has prevented the topological killer from intersecting out the way Jiro—”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” said the woman in the gown the color of the night sky, “but it’s time to face the music, Seiji.”

  “Oh, all right,” he said reluctantly. “By the way—Brandi Easter, Mei-Ling Magnus, this is my wife, Jhana Meniskos—”

  “A pleasure,” Jhana said to the two other women, shaking their hands. Then she took Seiji firmly by the arm. “Come on now, Seij. No more stalling.”

  Brandi and Mei-Ling followed Seiji and Jhana onto the small plaza above the altar-slab fountain. A crowd had already begun to gather there. Mei-Ling bid Brandi adieu and joined Robert, who introduced her to a Paul Larkin and a Nils Barakian of the Kitchener Foundation—and to a Dr. Ka Vang, much to her surprise.

  She already knew much of Vang’s imposing history. He’d been born into a Southeast Asian peasant family, in a village with a shaman and a Neolithic-level culture. Recruited in his early teens to service in a CIA-sponsored guerrilla army. Escaped from Cambodian killing fields after the collapse of the American-backed governments in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Emigrated to California, to culture shock, to retraining via an Intelligence-sponsored scholarship. All-American success in the information sciences. Eventual creator and CEO of Paralogics, at one time the largest specialty supercomputer firm in the world.

  Meeting him now, however, she thought Vang didn’t look quite so fierce or imposing as she’d expected. The short man with thin gray hair here in front of her had to be in his eighties at least. As soon as Vang opened his mouth, however, Mei-Ling realized she had underestimated him.

  “Ms. Magnus!” he said smoothly as he dryly shook her hand, his eyes boring into hers. “I was under the impression that you had retired from your good work. I wondered—what could have made you quit?”

  “Maybe I’d begun to like the job too much,” Mei-Ling said with a shrug, unable to avoid telling the man the truth.

  “And what brought about that revelation?” he asked, still dryly holding her hand, staring at her with the sort of mildly interested inquisitiveness one finds in certain old tomcats.

  “The Jeffersynth Case,” Mei-Ling replied.

  “I don’t know that I’m familiar with that one,” Vang said, still holding her hand firmly.

  “Militia cult centered around a Jefferson-simulacrum AI,” Mei-Ling explained. “I guess I got a little too close. Made me start wondering if running a Selective Criminality, Aberrance, and Non-conformity index on people might not be such a noble calling after all. Especially the conformity enforcing part.”

  “Ah, the temptation of the ‘other side’,” Vang said, letting go of her hand at last. “Always a danger in law enforcement, I suppose. What brought you back in from the cold, then?”

  “Maybe the same thing that keeps you working with Tetragrammaton,” Mei-Ling said evenly.

  “And what might that be, do you think?” Vang asked with only a hnt of suspicion in his voice.

  “A desire to see some good come of my work,” Mei-Ling said, “despite certain aspects of its history and its continuing potential for ill.”

  Barakian, the Kitchener Foundation representative—who looked to be close to Vang’s age as well—laughed.

  “She hit you there, Ka,” the tall, bushy-haired man said, slapping the other on the shoulder lightly. Vang grimaced for a brief moment but then quite completely recovered.

  “I thought Tetragrammaton and the Kitchener Foundation worked the opposite sides of the fence on most things,” Robert said, puzzled by the implications of seeing two supposed opponents buddying it up like this.

  “Any long-term antagonistic relationship eventually turns into a sort of co-dependency,” Barakian replied with a shrug. “Think of milkweed and monarch butterfly caterpillars. Ants and swollen-thorn acacias. The old Soviet Union and the old USA during the Cold War. Tetragrammaton keeps pressing to break down the boundaries between humans and machines, and the Kitchener Foundation keeps striving to maintain those boundaries.”

  “Over the years we’ve co-evolved, to some degree,” Vang said. Mutualized. Become oddly symbiotic.”

  “We’ve worked together for years against the churchstates’ Ope
ration E 5-24, for instance,” Barakian said.

  “E 5-24?” Robert asked.

  “Codename,” Barakian said with a grimace. “Ephesians Chapter 5, verse 24. ‘As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.’ Operation E 5-24 has been after a ‘headship hormone,’ a female submission synthetic, for years. Something to take woman’s consciousness right out of the picture.”

  “Since KL 235 was originally a uterotonic as well as a psychogenic,” Vang put in, “the headshipmen thought at first it might be what they were after.”

  “They got all re-energized over that pheromone control Roger Cortland was working on before the Light,” Barakian said. “Fortunately, none of those things have worked out for them.”

  “You see?” Vang said. “Ours is a relationship of stable instability.”

  “Like the mind itself,” Barakian agreed. “Which is what both our sides are really trying to preserve, in different ways.”

  “What’s happening here and now is bigger than ‘sides’,” Vang said.

  “Really?” Mei-Ling asked, not quite naively. “I thought this was just a housewarming.”

  Barakian laughed again.

  “And I suppose you think the Congress of Vienna was just a dinner party?” he said with a sniff.

  “Ms. Magnus,” Vang said, changing the subject, “who was that young woman with you earlier?”

  “Her name’s Brandi Easter,” Mei-Ling said. She thought she noted a brief flush of color in Vang’s face before he repressed it and looked away, toward where Brandi was standing. “Why do you ask?”

  “No particular reason,” Vang replied. “If she is who you say she is, I suppose she’s probably the person here who would have the strongest motivation for assassinating me.”

  Barakian smiled broadly, as if barely able to control his mirth.

  “Her husband works for me,” Barakian said. “She lives aboard my Freeman Lowell habitat. I gave her her name, if I remember right—so watch your step, Ka!”

  Brandi, meanwhile, had spotted Manny Shaw and Diana Gartner, as well as other late arrivals with them whom she knew at least vaguely. She made her way toward them.

  “—absolutely imperative you retrieve those materials,” said a coppery-haired woman introduced perfunctorily to Brandi as Marissa Correa. Correa quickly nodded to her, then returned to her conversation with Diana. “We want the information about the immortalizing vector to be made public in an appropriate fashion, if ever. Not after an accidental release of the vector itself. I was talking to Seiji about it earlier. We tightbeamed a message to them. The psiXtians should have the all antisenescence work packed up for you to pick up by the time you fly in.”

  “I’ll be sure to get that,” Diana said, casting a smiling side-glance at Brandi. “This is my co-pilot. She’ll be helping me with all of it.”

  Marissa shook Brandi’s hand so vigorously it made Brandi wonder what she’d just volunteered for. She didn’t have time to ask, however. Jhana was calling for their attention.

  * * * *

  Embedded fragment found in code of SubTerPost underground virtual mail system (infosphere origin unknown; original source independently verified as the Paul Koprinos introduction to Spontaneous Human Consciousness: The Selected and Collected Not-Philosophy of D. B. Albert):

  For Albert, the individual’s societal life corresponds, metaphorically, to the “visible light” part of the spectrum. Remembering that both the subconscious and the superconscious are unconscious in Albert’s schema, we can say that the individual’s private life resides in both the “infrared” (from which arise private choices about drug use, sexual activity, and morals generally) and the “ultraviolet” (which includes but is not limited to private beliefs about ideals, ethics, and religious beliefs).

  Societal life, for Albert, is rather like an oil slick, a thin film floating at the top of the sea and the bottom of the sky. That interface of oil may prismatically shatter into rainbows the light falling onto it, but the height of the light (ultraviolet and above) and the depth of the sea (infrared and below) must be unknown, private, nobody’s business—least of all corporations’ or governments’. Law, in Albert’s schema, must be highly restricted and content itself with dealing only in the oil slicks of social interaction.

  * * * *

  “Everyone!” Jhana’s amplified voice boomed from their house’s public address system, calling everyone toward the strange, altar-like shrine where she’d set up something that looked like a cross between a lectern and a temporary podium. “Your attention, please! Many of you already know that there are several other reasons for this gathering besides just a housewarming. One of those reasons is that, tonight, someone very near and dear to me celebrates a birthday at which he finds himself—for the very first time—nearer to fifty than to fifteen. Please join me in celebrating the thirty-third, the ‘Jesus Year’ birthday of Seiji Yamaguchi!”

  Applause and cheers began, then rapidly segued into the singing of “Happy Birthday.” During the whole of the introductory speech, Brandi thought she saw a certain soft glow about Jhana. She wondered somewhat incredulously if it might be an almost intangible evidence of her much talked-of pregnancy. She hadn’t really known Jhana before, however, so she had no basis for comparison.

  The crowd, after singing Happy Birthday, broke again into raucous cheers and applause until Seiji, gesturing both palms downward, quieted them.

  “Thank you,” he began, clearing his throat, and glancing sidelong at Jhana. “Comparing my life to that of the most surprising carpenter in history is mock heroic in the extreme. I’m a lowly solar power engineer who loves landscape, good friends, and good conversation. No interest at all in dying any time soon.”

  He looked around at the crowd of sixty or so people. Seiji cleared his throat, placed his notepad PDA on the lectern, and continued.

  “If there is anyone I’ve known who might bear some comparison to that carpenter, it would have to be my brother. Jiro did some unusual things when he was alive—fasting and purification, isolation and ordeals, maybe to the point of death. When you view it in the right context, though, that’s not really so new, or strange. In some ways the whole history of vision quests and mystic ordeals, like the kind my brother endured, are proof of the model of the mind as we now understand it.”

  Brandi noticed that, as he talked about his brother, Seiji gripped the podium more tightly.

  “Jiro put himself through those ordeals,” Seiji continued, “for the sake of Vision, access to higher dimensional reality, spirit, the realm of the archetypes, whatever you want to call it. He attempted to heal himself through those visionary techniques, but the culture he lived in provided no real framework for that type of transformation.”

  Seiji paused, looking down more carefully at his notes.

  “If mortality defines humanity, then perhaps it does so because it is death that gives life a necessary illusion of the absolute, the certain, the complete. Death gives life a particular sort of ‘weight.’ When death disappears into superabundant life, though, the absolute, certain, and complete also evaporate—into relativity, uncertainty, and incompleteness. Without death, life becomes an endless freefall. Gravity, in the sense of seriousness and significant meaning, disappears into weightlessness.”

  He looked up from his notes again, seeming a bit embarrassed.

  “These thoughts are on my mind not because I am today closer to fifty than to fifteen, or that I am due to become a father, but because, as several of you know, we stand at the brink of a time without death. Tonight I wonder: Can we continue to be human without mortality? Can we continue to be real?”

  Seiji looked up meaningfully from his notes, then, as if relaxing a bit, stepped aside slightly from the podium.

  “One of the traditional arguments against the types of societies we are trying to build in space is that they are unreal. Utopian constructs that betray individuality for sociality. That such utopias can’t handle
death precisely because utopia is unreal and death is the ultimate reality, the final contingency. Death, we are told, is the ‘particle’ to utopia’s ‘wave’. Yet death and emotion and irrationality have all found their place among us, and our ‘wave’ keeps moving along.

  “Contingency, which dooms all static utopias, has not doomed us. Our friend Atsuko Cortland says, on the contrary, that there’s a tug-of-war between population pressure and consciousness and our survival capability as a species. I think she may be right. Schopenhauer says ‘Consciousness is the object of a transcendent idea.’ I think that’s a reality we will have to face, and sooner than we might expect.”

  Stepping out completely to the side of the lectern, Seiji scanned the small crowd

  “We will have much call in the coming hours to be strong in speaking truth to power,” he concluded. “Much call to be strong in our ongoing efforts to transform our world into a place where, though there may be death, there will also be a framework for healing, such that deaths like my brother’s need never take place again. There need no longer occur what an old Irish saying defines as the only real tragedy—the death of the young before their time. We can work toward that goal, whether we’re fifteen, or fifty, or eighty-five, or one hundred and five. And with that work, I am quite content. Again, thank you.”

  Clapping politely along with everyone else, Mei-Ling thought that in some ways his speech was a continuation of their discussion with Seiji, before he had been called out to give his speech. Sacrificing self for world, versus world for self again, Mei-Ling thought. Maybe there had to be that sort of connection, that suffering. Maybe that was why Jesus had to be human to be crucified. The King Who Would Be Man. Angels just couldn’t get the job done.

  A holo began to play in the space above the altar slab fountain. Jhana Meniskos announced that it was a performance by Onoma Verité, the latest discovery by Lev Korchnoi and the Möbius Caduceus music collective.

  As she watched, Mei-Ling was stunned by the images—not so much by their aesthetic values as by the fact that she was sure she knew their source. She was particularly stunned by the image of the band playing before a tank in which a cocooned something—someone?—floated.