Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The flood of holojections increased, human rain falling to Earth. Children cried alone in shattered and ravaged cities. Laughing children flowed in rivers through the blue bowl sky.

  When a man put his house key in the door lock and turned it, the house and everything in it went up in the usual fireball. The man began thinning out, growing less and less substantial, the stuff of him disintegrating and diffusing throughout an arcane ongoing process. He was swallowed for digestion into the belly of something part enormous special effect, part archaeological artifact from another time, a something carrying a curse out of the past like a pharaoh’s tomb—a killing fossil, obsolete and outmoded, yet still capable of horrendous destruction.

  The cursed thing performed itself over and over via global stage machinery, through a vast mechanism reaching from Pentagon to prison, a stage machine operated by police and soldiers and sailors at the controls of cars and ships and planes and missiles and submarines. A dismal beast cursed with nuclear fire, its breath scorched the human world to moonscape, blistered and crumbled and dissolved human faces to ever-grinning skulls reflected in indifferent mirrors. Its howl made distant telephones ring, then melt lewdly.

  All only for a few seconds, until the man swallowed by the process removed the key, opened the door into the rapidly vanishing flames and saw—

  Nude men and women frozen to statuary in Antarctic landscapes. Gunmetal glistening knights on steel steeds pole-axe youths and maidens into symmetrically bloody halves. Wizened Merlins read the mazed entrails for portents. Monstrous large and ugly men bash down bedroom doors and approach with arms outstretched Boris Karloff fashion, to wrap huge cold hands round the necks of sleeping children.

  A young man watches his male member fall off in the shower. He looks upon it with morbid fascination at seeing that it is neatly machine-tooled, a flesh-colored plastic with a light bulb’s screw-in base. No blood at all in the dismemberment, only absence and disconnectedness. A look on his face of whatever it is a jack feels when the phone cord is pulled out. The expression of empty surprise on the face of a wall socket when its electric plug has been yanked.

  In his fascination the man in the shower slips on a bar of Ivory soap and falls. The unscrewed member bounces out of the blue washcloth he held it in. It rolls away onto the blue and white tiled bathroom floor, a fallen soldier, swiftly snapped up by a little white Scottie dog with a blue ribbon collar, man’s best friend, in its teeth.

  “Psychodrama is right,” Seiji Yamaguchi said, a grimace in his voice, if not on his mannequin’s face. “A tour of someone’s personal unconscious.”

  “My God! My child!” sobs a tearful, tragic mother. “Arrested by the Sex Police!”

  Blue suited officers drag the young man—just a boy, really—fish-belly naked through the snow past his stern-faced and silent father, to hurl him into the cold blue leather interior of a white police car....

  Watching it, Mei-Ling felt painfully voyeuristic. She purposely distanced herself from it, pushed back against the historical present it seemed to demand of her.

  A moment later, down a street of ruins came the same naked young man, pursued by headless convertible drivers. The pursuers were led by something from the Legend of Sleepless Holo Men, a decapitated Iron Horseman in heavy leather armor on a midwinter knight’s mare of a chopper motorcycle.

  The street of the ruined city, piled with the broken pieces of its past glory, with shattered towers and fractured monuments, proved impassable for the headless convertible drivers. The Iron Horseman kept coming, however, snapping overhead a bullwhip black as a necrotic squid tentacle, cracking it toward the naked runner’s red-running flesh, raising great ugly weals. The headless metal biker drew closer and closer, his hands pulling a great long knife to kill the youth. At the last instant the runner broke free, tumbling and crashing through broken-slatted swinging saloon doors, in the archway of what at first seemed a half-destroyed, bombed out structure.

  As Mei-Ling and Robert and the rest followed the runner inside, though, they saw the building gradually reveal itself to be a whole tower, after all. Perhaps the last intact structure in the city.

  “Camouflaged against sabotage,” Robert said, intrigued. “A virtual ruin of a virtual ruin.”

  “Like something worked up by Albert Speer,” Barakian remarked. “Designing buildings with an eye to how impressive they’ll look as future ruins.”

  The youth they had followed disappeared. Before them stood four tableaux. On the far left a serenely beautiful young woman with long blond hair sat combing it before a mirror that distorted her image. At left center, two silver 1940s desk telephones stood on a diamond pedestal. At center right, a snowstorm raged. At far right, a faintly humming rope of golden light reached upward. It rose up and up, through the vast, empty, white-marble lobby of the faceless, chromeshining corporate edifice in which they stood, the ruin awaiting its future.

  “Ah!” Mei-Ling shouted above the din of the amusement complex. “A room of Dreamland choices—see?”

  She turned toward the mannequin she thought represented Robert, but she could detect no dawning comprehension in the generic face until spoke.

  “Then choose the one you think will get us to the Gyre and the Fool,” Robert suggested in a yell over the noise.

  Mei-Ling quickly surveyed the possibilities open to her. The woman at the mirror seemed narcissistic, trapped in her own funhouse looking-glass world. Mei-Ling rejected it. The two silver telephones held out at least the possibility of communication, but with whom? To what purpose? She thought of the melting phones she had seen earlier and rejected that path as well. As for the snowstorm, that made her think of that Antarctic of frozen human statuary she had already seen—a rigorous journey, a wandering in circles in the snow. She felt sure that possibility would lead her nowhere.

  Only the golden chord was left. She would have to be content with that. Quickly finger-walking toward the chord holojection, she reached out her hand to touch it.

  The laughing voice of the Fool thundered around her and all her companions.

  “Your choice always chosen is chosen yet again!” he boomed cryptically. “Very well, ride the Gyre this way—”

  Vertigo startled her as Mei-Ling and all her companions became part of a weightless strand rapidly drawing them up from the floor of the tremendously empty white marble lobby. Up and up they soared, through the last whole tower in that ruined city of mind. Rising through the building’s roof, they soared ever more swiftly into the sky and beyond the clouds. There, a shining black-gold orb of incredible dimensions hung in the evening sky, warping the shape of the stars themselves as they appeared around it.

  Mei-Ling was in the chord and the chord was in her as it came to a stop, fanning into an exquisitely crafted golden tree. The tree’s roots and branches stood, rooted and reaching and floating, in the center of the vast mazed auditorium inside the black-gold sphere. Around the beautiful artificial tree from which she looked out, Mei-Ling saw an audience of glittering mechanicals filling all the space: metalmen and aluwomen, pretty and cold and real as steel cockatiels, applauding like a stormwind rustling the metal leaves of a metal forest.

  The noise of that applause made her and all her companions human again. They stood with their back to the tree now. Before Mei-Ling stood the glittering keyboard of an immense pipe organ, its musical columns miles high, wrought from all the sewer lines, water pipes, fuel tanks, smokestacks and cable conduits of the ruined world from which they’d come.

  As if walking through someone else’s dream and controlled by their dream logic, Mei-Ling felt herself compelled and impelled to perform upon the keyboard. With a will of their own, her hands played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Around them, the entire orb reverberated like a struck gong to the overwhelming grandeur of the piece. The mechanicals, frightened, grew rude and booed like the graveyard shiftwhistle at a coffin factory.

  The auditorium collapsed, the space-warping sphere maze split asunder. She a
nd all her comrades fell down the blue sky, meteor thunder in their wake. Cloud-images broke like wet veils before them.

  A cloud-face stripped down to skull, flashed to electric organelle labyrinth and back again, as that face was smashed about the head with great blunt gunstocks, time after time.

  Blindingly bright light flashed and a city vanished under the fire-white puffball of a tall, swiftly-swelling mushroom cloud.

  Human eyes went dull as an anti-Light of visceral fear drained all consciousness out of them.

  Myriad laser brightnesses, flowing not out of a single point but striking simultaneously into one, forged into existence a bubble to burst the universe, a particle smaller than an electron but booming outward at the speed of light, its birth-scream boiling all space to a steam of elementary particles in a blastwave sphere, obliterating Earth and Moon and Sun and the whole of the solar system in moments—

  —but also something else, something as if seen out of the corner of the eye or from far away: intimations of a latent possibility, emanations of the other form of that eschaton particle, a soliton wave of higher and deeper dimension than the structure of spacetime itself, back-propagating from the end of time, reshaping everything—

  The safety program Lakshmi had discovered in the SubTerPost code cut all of them out of connection, completely, before the virtual machine running on the LogiBox could do anything more to them. Mei-Ling returned to consensus reality with an incredible headache and a number of strong hunches about their topological voyeur killer.

  “We’ve been there—” Seiji Yamaguchi said nearby.

  “—before,” Jhana replied with a weary nod. “At least some of it. But I can’t help feeling that this virtual machine is still hooked into the infosphere somehow. We may have triggered something by interacting with it now. Something both old and new.”

  Robert and Lakshmi approached Mei-Ling, talking rapidly.

  “I just got a message from one of my contacts in virtuality engineering,” Lakshmi said, glancing at her notepad PDA. “I think we’ve finally been able to pinpoint the source location of these infobursts. They’re coming from Cincinnati, Ohio. Robert’s getting confirmation from your people. Lev Korchnoi and Aleister McBruce are already there.”

  Robert stood nearby, typing or low-speaking commands as he checked messages on his PDA. When Lakshmi had finished speaking he turned to Mei-Ling.

  “With that location information and everything we’ve come up with,” he said, “that narrows the number of possible suspects quite a bit.”

  Mei-Ling stared at both of them.

  “Tell your people to be careful,” she said. “From what has happened and what we’ve just seen, it’s a safe bet that this person is probably far gone into deep alienation and violent psychosis. He’s clearly trauma-control cycling and memory fixated.”

  “He also seems to have some very powerful contacts,” Robert remarked, “if what we’ve seen at all resembles reality.”

  Mei-Ling could only nod at that. She heard Seiji organizing a Physics working group—already talking among themselves about “solitons” and “mode-locking” and “chaotics” and “fractal boundary properties.” Jhana was trying to do the same for working groups on consciousness and biology, Mei-Ling began to wonder if this gathering had been intentionally misnamed a “party” for security reasons. Whatever the case, she now knew that this was the strangest birthday party she had ever attended.

  A message light flashed on her PDA. She accessed it, opening a virtual mail message as it was being pronounced by Vasili Landau.

  “—tin Kong, aka Phelonious Manqué, has used his newly granted infosphere access to engineer an escape from Silicon Bay,” the talking-head Landau informed her. “Details are sketchy at present, but he apparently transformed elements of his ‘safe typewriter’ into weapons. Four guards are dead. He is assumed to be at large somewhere in central California.”

  Behind her, the altar with its LogiBox seemed dead as a mausoleum. Mei-Ling felt tired, so very tired. Yet it seemed highly unlikely that she was going to get any rest any time soon.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Code-extracted SubTerPost fragment (pirated from virtual mail message sent from Jacinta Larkin to her brother Paul):

  Everything between the big beginning/end points of the spiral, all things engaging in the ‘dilation of being’, are fairly readily understood from the tepuian myth cycle. In the first turn of the cosmic spiral, for spore and spawn and fruiting body, think Big Bang and superstrings and first generation stars. For the second turn, think of the matter of those stars blown off in the bursts of explosions, and gravity’s configuring of that new matter—some of it condensing into planets. In the third turn, think of the volcanism of some of those planets spewing out early atmosphere, proto-organics threading out and chaining up, eventually developing into the self-organizing life of the cell.

  In the fourth turn, think reproduction, the threading out of DNA and RNA that make evolution and the panoply of life possible—and eventually the knitting of all that into conscious mind. In the fifth turn, think ideas, bedding out into roads, trade, civilization: lines of print and code, railroads and sea lanes and glide paths, power lines and telephone wires, broadcast channels and fiber-optic cables, microcircuits and rocket trajectories, to the point in the spiral where we now are.

  For the sixth turn, think interplanetary and interstellar ships, galactic civilization, eventual starmindfulness. In the seventh and final turn, think intergalactic travel and postcorporeal civilization and at last universal mindfulness, total consciousness.

  This understanding of the myth comes from the full myconeural association I share with the tepuians. We can sense the timelines almost all the time, moving just at the periphery of consensus reality. Shadow vectors—some luminous, some obscure. Alternate presents keep breaking in on this one in their own ghostly fashion, and alternate futures suggest themselves. Nearby timelines intersect the one we’re on, incredibly as parallel lines meeting in space. The myth cycle is what helps us make sense of it.

  * * * *

  Diana Gartner and Brandi Easter came down from HOME and Heaven aboard the SHADOW starjet Diana referred to archly as her “broom.” Once it had had another name, an alphanumeric designation, but she had long since re-christened it Witchcraft.

  Brandi had to admit that, the more she saw of Diana’s ship, the more she was impressed by it. Diana’s “broom” was a dream futurismo machine out of Verne and Wells and Gernsback, the literal shape of things to come. It was the descendant of the sorts of craft that had carried the Earth’s great bomb against the alien invaders in old movies like Pal’s War of the Worlds and Emmerich’s Independence Day, but it was more fluid in its lines. A Zanonia seed, rendered in metal and polycarbon.

  “Every time I see this,” Diana said over the com, as the doors of the docking bay—Diana’s “Broom Closet”—irised open onto space, “it’s like being reborn.”

  Brandi smiled.

  “I’ve thought the same thing myself,” she said, as the railgun kicked them out and Witchcraft’s jets cut in with a birth scream audible only inside the ship. They fell from the ’borbs toward the psychedelic Easter egg of Earth, steadily enlarging below. Witchcraft’s systems hotflashed status reports—epoxalloid surface temperatures, airframe stress readouts, microsecond adjustments to smart material control surfaces. The data displayed and shifted constantly through the pilots’ interfaces as they angled the thrusters hard, windowing in for the long plunge down the gravity well.

  “Calling this ship Witchcraft,” Brandi remarked when most of their course had been laid in, “isn’t that sort of sticking it in their faces?”

  “Why, Brandi dear, whatever could you mean?” Diana replied with obvious faux naïveté, monitoring the deep space radars that were passing over their sylphship’s radar-absorbent and reactive hull armor without even bothering to say hello.

  “What Manny said,” she replied seriously, “about how the traditional religi
onists hate what you do on these flights.”

  “Oh, that,” Diana said nonchalantly, staring out the portal at the brightly colored world growing before them. “I am a Wiccan, you know. I’m not likely to forget that at least eight million women down there were burned as witches over the last two thousand years. For practicing magic. But ‘magic’ is mainly an attempt to reinsert the individual into the pathway between the natural world and the spirit. I follow a religion of participation mystique. We always remind ourselves that participation and conformity are not the same thing. Some people don’t like that idea.”

  The two women began bringing the starjet’s Mach numbers down slowly, dancing the delicate orbital ballet about the planet, falling and catching themselves from falling, falling and failing to touch until they wanted that touch, at the edgeless edge of the atmosphere.

  “More than eight billion people on that rock,” Brandi said. Their sensors and cameras and windows showed them the tell-tales of blown ozone shreds and cyclonic storms, flooded coastlines, deforestation, desertification. The signs were there for all who might be willing to read them. “So many beautiful children. Too many. Why is it that, as the ecosphere collapses, the rigid dogmas that push toward collapse grow more powerful and entrenched?”

  Diana glanced away from a heads-up holodisplay and looked at Brandi appraisingly.

  “That’s a tough one,” she said. “Is this the New Dark Ages coming down, or just the same old Dark Ages come round again? How many women will be burned as witches this time?” She made a disgusted sound as she checked their course once more. “The not-philosophers claim it’s because social control mechanisms have largely dislodged the individual. The result is that, in the absence of a unified ego consciousness, psychoid processes from the id have increasingly taken control of behavior. Violent random crime and acts of massive destruction well up from the Thanatos-process strategy. Reproduction uncontrolled by conscious reflection, a rising population without any clear way of sustaining such a population—that wells up from the Eros-process strategy.”