Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  In the middle-range monitors, Aleck could just make out police lights in the distance, beyond the crowds. In a moment more, the stretcher bearers spilled out of the starjet’s belly, the ramp began to close and the vertijets began to flare on. The starjet hovered for an instant, then was gone at speed.

  Aleck slumped back in his chair. The raiders had gotten away with it. They had taken Hugh Manatee hostage—on his shift. It was ridiculous. Why would anyone want to kidnap the Great Tanked One—or “liberate” him, for that matter? And then fly him away! It didn’t make sense.

  The others had by now begun to recover. Slowly they came forward to see if he was okay, and to offer their condolences. All of them were so busy in their relief, and in their reassuring of each other, that they at first didn’t notice the three small brown-skinned people who had wandered into the room. The first of them was elderly to the point of ancient, and addressed as “Kekchi” by the two younger ones. All were dressed in flamboyant clothing of intricate weave—and, incongruously, flipflop sandals.

  Aleck glanced at the members of Onoma Verité. From their faces he could tell that they were all wondering the same thing he was: Is this real, or am I hallucinating? Even stranger, however, was seeing Aleister and Lev smile in greeting at the three interlopers.

  From the monitors in his security hack, Aleck heard police sirens begin to wail. In the room around him, the three small strangers began to sing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Code-extracted SubTerPost fragment (infosphere source unknown; original source independently verified as R. E. Stringfield’s Beyond the Sky of Mind: Quantum Cosmology and Quantum Consciousness):

  The idea of metacosmological evolution raises the question of whether the plenum itself is the “largest individual” or the “largest species” or both, in much the same way as all the daughter cells of an asexually reproducing mother cell are simultaneously a species and nearly identical variants of the same individual.

  This model also invites the question of whether or not this reproduction of universes must be necessarily asexual, all mother to daughter. In the biological realm, there is apparently always an inevitable trade-off between sex and death. If that analogy applies at the level of universes, then “sexual reproduction”—or what might be better called “information exchange”—by universes would necessitate mortality in the plenum of universes.

  * * * *

  “Your attention, please,” Atsuko said, raising her voice slightly. “Marissa Correa was already scheduled to speak next, and it is very appropriate that she should. As the principal developer of the immortalizing vector, she can tell us what implications arise from its release. Marissa?”

  Amid the murmur of the crowd Marissa came forward into the open space around the altar-like fountain. Roger was struck by the strength she was demonstrating, under the pressure of such circumstances.

  “Some of you—though not all—know my research already,” she began, smoothing her coppery hair back from her face with her free hand. “For those who know, please bear with me.”

  She called animation and documentary holo clips from her PDA into public display.

  “My work has involved taking traits from the so-called ‘immortalized cancer cells’ of teratocarcinomas,” she said, calling up images shot through microscopes. “My theory was that I could use such traits against senescence, against aging in human beings. I hoped thereby to perhaps significantly extend human life. After isolating the immortalizing traits from teratoma sources, I proposed that viral, retroviral, and even prion vectors might be engineered to transfer the selected traits into the human genome. I achieved some limited success. Several of my scientific colleagues, however, particularly those in California, have been much more successful.

  “None of us knows exactly how viable these vector organisms might be outside the lab,” Marissa continued, calling a new series of 3D animations and graphs into public display, “but since my colleagues here and on Earth have been working with a fairly broad spectrum of delivery organisms, we may reasonably assume the worst case scenario. There now exists in Earth’s atmosphere a viable organic form—viral, retroviral, prionic, whichever—capable of infecting and bestowing universal immortality upon human beings. Short of murder and mayhem or similar massive damage to organ systems, every human being faces now, or will soon face, the prospect of a radically extended lifespan.”

  Marissa refreshed the PDA images, calling up new holographic material from the system.

  “Such a millennial prospect has its downside,” she continued. “The supply of humans has already far outstripped any conceivable demand for us. We’re the species that invented unemployment—all other species are fully ‘employed.’ Or extinct. Shut down their niche, destroy their habitat, they disappear. Not us. We have proven to be supersuccessful. There are so many of us that sexual reproduction for the vast majority is now redundant, superfluous, virtually obsolete. No need to breed. Sex is dead—at least as far as procreation, as opposed to recreation, is concerned. Even without the release of the vector, human population growth has been steadily moving toward the point of chaotic onset. So much must change, so fast—and it will. Chaotic systems are good at that.”

  Marissa called up a further series of graphs and pie charts with nasty implications.

  “The last several centuries of human civilization has been characterized by the intensification of polarization—the colonizers versus the colonized, East versus West, First World versus Third World, North versus South, high tech sphere versus low tech sphere. Most recently this polarization has begun manifesting itself between ourselves here in space, and the masses of human population on Earth.

  “This Up/Down polarization can only be further exacerbated by the likelihood of the Immortality Plague, which will necessarily intensify already existing population problems, driving Earth’s carrying capacity into a boom/bust scenario no ‘demographic transition’ can hope to head off.”

  Marissa paused as she called up new sets of graphs and images, looking about her to see if there were any questions. There were none.

  “In a world possessing finite resources, you can have either immortality or sexual reproduction, but not both. That’s the scientific restatement of a good chunk of the underlying meaning of the story of the Fall in Genesis. There’s always been a certain solace in the fact of reproduction. Even if you couldn’t enjoy the physical longevity of the immortal, you could at least have the supposed genetic extension of the parent—hence the phrases ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ ‘dominion over the earth,’ ‘have many arrows in your quiver.’”

  Marissa looked up uncomfortably from her notepad PDA, looking at her audience and apparently feeling like both the bearer and the creator of bad news.

  “The immortalizing vector changes all those phrases into virus-words—”

  Jacinta Larkin abruptly interrupted.

  “Religion wasn’t what lowered infant mortality rates and ratcheted up population growth rates worldwide,” she said. “Science and technology did that, through improved public sanitation, immunization, a dozen other technologically-mediated processes. It isn’t religion that has brought the immortalizing vector into being—it’s science.”

  Marissa nodded vigorously.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” she said. “In the past, ‘value neutral’ science has taken little responsibility for the consequences of such changes. At the same time the world’s religions have kept on behaving as if we were all still living in pre-industrial societies, places in which technological and scientific changes are irrelevant. It’s been a very bad synergy.”

  She paused again, scanning briefly the crowd of people around her, most of whom seemed to be listening attentively but withholding their judgment. A small group, Atsuko and Lakshmi and Jacinta Larkin among them, seemed distracted and agitated. Marissa’s future-reading talent too was beginning to act up in apocalyptic ways unrelated to what she was saying—already dire enough in its own right. She thought i
t would be wise if she brought her presentation to a close.

  “Across scale, at all levels, what the immortalizing vector immediately forces us to confront is not just an overpopulation problem of the poor or a hyperconsumption problem of the rich, not just a religious problem or a scientific problem, not even just a male problem or a female problem—but a human problem. The release of the vector means that this is now a problem that can only be addressed by seeing the ways in which our own freedoms and responsibilities are absolutely interconnected with the freedoms and responsibilities of others—including those freedoms and responsibilities associated with sex and reproduction. Only if both organized religion and the scientific method can help us see that will they at last be contributing to our preservation rather than our destruction….”

  As Marissa paused again for questions, Atsuko came forward, looking very definitely worried this time.

  “We’ve received another message from Communications,” she said distractedly. “Just a short while ago, the city of Laramie in the Autonomous Christian States was destroyed by a very powerful nuclear blast. The ACSA is claiming that Diana Gartner’s starjet intruded into ACSA airspace and is responsible for the blast. The ACSA is in the process of declaring war on the USA for serving as the base from which the SHADOW starjet launched its attack. In the ACSA declaration, a state of war already officially exists between the Autonomous Christian States and the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprises. Lakshmi Ngubo and Mei-Ling Magnus have, through their own sources, confirmed this information.”

  Everyone was caught off guard by the news, dazed and stunned into silence, Marissa not least of all. At last, Jhana spoke toward Marissa, frustrated—and perhaps obscurely offended by all the population and reproduction talk, since she was the most publicly, if not obviously, pregnant and therefore “procreatively active” person here.

  “Won’t the destruction that’s impending make all this discussion about your immortality plague a moot point?” she asked, bothered by both prospects. “I mean, universal immortality is about to be bestowed upon a humanity that’s also about to nuke itself to oblivion. ‘Congratulations—you can now live forever! Too bad we’ll have to kill you!’ It’s absurd.”

  Marissa nodded again, doing a series of quick scans of her notepad as she tried to recover from the news of the initiation of nuclear hostilities.

  “Dark clouds and silver linings do tend to get confused, I know,” she said, calculating. “The build-down of nuclear weapons over the last four decades and more, a good thing in itself—a silver lining in the threatening dark cloud of Armageddon—is in this instance itself a dark cloud. The number of nuclear weapons available to be detonated is now significantly below the total megatonnage required for nuclear winter threshold. There will undoubtedly be horrible suffering if this war gets fully underway. The impact on human numbers from this impending conflict, however, will probably not even begin to offset the increase in population the vector is likely to cause.”

  Dominic Fanon spoke up, a black man with a highly cultured accent. Roger knew vaguely as an important rep from the corporate consortia that had built HOME 1 and HOME 2.

  “What about the wave of destruction Professor Stringfield spoke about?” Fanon asked. “Or the wave of concrescence, for that matter? Would one make your immortality plague scenario moot, and not the other, or would they both do that?”

  Marissa gave a shrug.

  “That’s a higher order question,” she said. “Outside my purview. I think it might fall within the scope of what Jacinta Larkin is scheduled to speak about, so I’ll turn things over to her.”

  Mei-Ling Magnus stepped forward.

  “Before you do,” she said, “there’s something else as well. Maybe some good news. Robert and I and our colleagues at Interpol, along with Lakshmi here, have at last positively determined the identity of the Topological Voyeur Killer. His name is Michael Carter Dalken. He is working as a data-minder in Cincinnati, Ohio. A joint task force—international, federal, state and local authorities—are currently on their way to arrest him there.”

  A sigh of relief spread through the crowd at that prospect. Amid so much happening so fast, at least something seemed to be going right.

  * * * *

  After blasting into orbit out of Cincinnati and helping Diana and Witchcraft dodge yet more thickets of laser cannon, Brandi had time at last to feel numb. She glanced toward the back of the cramped cabin of the cockpit. Manqué was there, his machine gun leveled at Brandi and Diana, slowly scanning back and forth between them. Ray Dalken was presumably still communing with the cocooned thing Brandi herself had, at gunpoint, helped load into the big bag-tank in back.

  She had heard Dalken assert that the bloated thing in the cocoon was his brother and Dalken was, undeniably, focused on their newest passenger. He had stayed back there with him almost from the moment they’d lifted off, coming forward only long enough to give them the coordinates of the destination his “brother” had supposedly given him.

  Brandi and Diana had both been surprised to see that the new destination was not so very far away from their original planned end-point, HOME 2. Since their new destination was a point in cislunar space out among the haborbs, both women secretly hoped this might make their escape or rescue from these madmen all the easier.

  They were well along in their journey spaceward and homeward when Dalken finally emerged from his communings with his cocooned brother. Brandi immediately noticed something odd about the man. He was alternately smiling in pleasure and wincing in pain as he spoke to Manqué. Their conversation was odd, too.

  “—voice of God in my head,” Dalken said.

  “So you’re no longer you?” Manqué asked, almost enviously.

  “Not exactly,” Dalken said, slowly, as if in a dream. “It’s just that, through Mike, the Lord is providing me with leadings, which I must follow. ‘I’ have not disappeared from my head. My will is only pleasantly constrained to match his. My mental space is more directed. My thoughts don’t wander so erratically. I’m still here. It’s just that, inside my skull, I’m now more the passenger than the driver. More the audience than the actor.”

  “I’ve heard the command voice on and off for years,” Manqué said, glancing down. “I’ve never been lucky enough to hear it consistently. I used to think it was some sort of monitor they put into our heads at birth. Or when we were anesthetized, getting wisdom teeth removed. What you’re getting from your brother—all that stuff with Wernicke’s area, the micromachines and neurotransmitter releases—that’s new to me.”

  Dalken smiled at Manqué.

  “Talk to him yourself,” Dalken said. “You can use my satlink, if you need to. I find that if I just sit near him and focus on him, I can hear his commands directly, without any mechanical assistance.”

  Manqué nodded, glancing at the women piloting their craft. He smiled, turning over guard duties to Dalken. He disappeared into the back to have a talk with God, or at least His Messenger. Ray Dalken turned his suddenly leering attention to Diana and Brandi.

  “I know a lot about you, techwitch,” he said to Diana, easing himself forward with a condescending sneer, loosely hooking his free arm around Diana’s shoulders and neck. “How you were a Medusa Blue baby. How you were born and raised on that rock down there. How you eventually got yourself trained as a systems ecologist and moved up to HOME 1. How you learned to fly this thing. How you snagged it as your own personal project when your dyke buddies set up their Wemoon’s Eden commune up there.”

  Diana stared rigidly at Witchcraft’s displays. She was trying forcefully to reach out to Dalken with her talent—as she had been off and on all evening, since this nightmare began. To no avail. The man seemed more completely closed to her sendings than anyone else she’d ever encountered. It was almost as if her messages were being jammed by someone else.

  “I presume this little biography has a point?” she said icily. Ray Dalken smiled.

  “Just that I don’
t know nearly as much about your little friend here,” he said, gesturing with his pistol and turning toward Brandi. “Are you a girl-lover too, or one of the ones with a male harem?”

  Brandi stared forward, through her displays, out the cockpit window in front of her.

  “My sexual preferences are none of your business,” she said at last. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of reproductive responsibility—”

  Abruptly Ray Dalken jabbed the barrel of the pistol to her temple.

  “Everything here is my business,” he said angrily. “And, honey, my preacher says the only reproductive responsibility I have is to do it with kids in mind—as often as I please. Don’t you get it? It’s over for you. The Kingdom is coming! My brother told me all about it. We’re going to the haborbs to pick up the headship hormone precursor this guy Cortland developed. Operation E 5-24 is going into effect!”

  Seeing Diana move in her seat, Dalken snapped the gun back away from Brandi’s temple and played the weapon back and forth between them. Diana settled back into her place, slowly.

  “Don’t think I won’t use this,” he said in obvious reference to the pistol. “These flechettes will pierce flesh and bone well enough. They probably won’t pierce the skin of this craft—but then again, they might. I’m willing to take that risk. Are you?”

  The two women said nothing—just stared straight ahead.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said, then turned to Brandi, stroking her hair, speaking very close to her ear. “I’m going to give you a choice. That’s more than you’ll get after the Kingdom comes.”

  “What choice?” Brandi asked quietly.

  “Either you can make lezzy love with your witchy friend here while I keep a careful eye watch,” Dalken said, “or I’ll take you in back and do you myself while Manqué keeps watch on Ms. Starburst Goodwitch here. Either way, we don’t have much time. I want you to start taking off your clothes. Now.”