The text she had chosen to counterpoint her remarks continued behind Jacinta. Roger still couldn’t fully understand why, of all the possible materials she could have chosen, Jacinta had chosen this sequence. It was talking about how shared religion and its shared songweb fostered cooperative interactions, particularly information-sharing, among widely separated Upper Paleolithic groups. Why was she calling up programs that talked about the beginning of human time, when here they were, very likely discussing the end of it?
“You still haven’t answered Paul’s question,” Atsuko Cortland said. “Why does this Allesseh fear what you’re calling ‘total consciousness’?”
Jacinta nodded quickly.
“Because the single point closest to completely dynamicality is the Allesseh itself,” she said, “but it doesn’t want to take that final step. It is a divided self. It’s like a bodhisattva that has done so many incarnations she has grown fond of the world again. The Allesseh does not want to accept its own final enlightenment. In accepting that, it would become the point that brings total consciousness to all the universe. The universe would become ‘at one’ with itself. The Allesseh, if it allowed that transition to occur, would thereby end its existence as a separate self.”
The program in the background muttered on about how a general Paleolithic intercommunication conferred a survival advantage to hunting groups. It made accessible to these people information about game movements over a wide area. It also mapped the terrain in song and story and thereby humanized the landscape.
“The Allesseh perceives that moment of at-one-ment as an end rather than a transformation,” Jacinta continued, “and the loss of the separate self as death. That condition in which the consciousness of the individual and the world are united is called ‘authenticity,’ by the philosophers. The Allesseh, however, has apparently decided that it is better to have an inauthentic and divided self than no separate self at all.”
In the background, the counterpoint program elaborated how in various forms the caves’ sacred complex, with its red-ochre burial rituals, extended back at least through the Neanderthals, ninety or a hundred thousand years ago, and arguably much further, even back into the time of Homo erectus, given what appeared to be ‘meander’ symbols on a 300,000-year-old piece of bone.
“To block that final enlightenment,” Jacinta ventured, “the Allesseh has seemingly relied on the fact that authenticity requires absolute self-consciousness. Consciousness conscious of itself. That’s an apparent impossibility, because consciousness always must keep itself apart, in introspective distance, from the thing of which it is conscious. No dynamical system, including the self, can be fully complete and fully consistent. No system can be absolutely comprehensive and absolutely coherent at one and the same time. The result is that the self, whether human or universal, includes psychoid processes of which consciousness cannot be aware. The ego can never fully comprehend the self. The existential dread that arises from this is what keeps microcosm and macrocosm separated.”
The background program seemed to have shifted emphasis slightly. It was saying that culture is a survival tool. The much younger parietal arts of the caves, it said, embedded in their broad magicoreligious context, functioned as a very specific sort of tool. A hymnal, but also more than that. The cave art ceremonial centers, according to the background program, were information storage and processing devices—sacred computers, the first virtual reality systems.
“If the universe should become conscious, however,” Jacinta said, “the distinction between microcosm and macrocosm—between individual consciousness and universal consciousness—would be utterly and finally obliterated. The universe becoming conscious is the one and only condition under which full existential authenticity is possible. It is the condition under which absolute self-consciousness would actually exist.”
The background program was espousing the idea that, in these consensual hallucinatoriums, the shaman and the group tried to program the natural world to meet their requirements. In doing so, they also inevitably programmed themselves to meet the requirements of the natural world.
“Its strong sense of individual mission,” Jacinta said, “has led the Allesseh to become self-obsessed, solipsistic, self-absorbed. I think, however, that the Allesseh is somehow still aware of the difference between authentic and inauthentic being. In order to keep itself from having to face the moment of its own enlightenment—which it perceives as death, remember—the Allesseh appears to be willing to sacrifice the enlightenment of the entire universe. To trap the universe immortally in entropic time. Even to wipe out sentient species—our species—if need be.”
Jhana spoke up, almost dazedly.
“The cosmic brain has gone insane,” she said, paraphrasing a song she had first heard not long after she initially arrived at HOME 1, an eternity ago. “And now seeks homicide to ease its pain.”
Jacinta nodded. Behind her the scholarly program remarked that, if the idea of a computer in a cave seemed odd, it ought to be remembered that in both fact and fiction people had been placing modern computers in caves almost from the moment computers were invented.
“An artificial cosmic brain,” Jacinta corrected, “and more than homicide. Genocide. Ecocide. Solarcide. The Allesseh has fallen in love with time, and with the society of all the minds of all the creatures it has come to know. It has, paradoxically, fallen in love with its ‘social self.’ That psychoid process has dislodged its personal consciousness from control of the system.”
“I can se how that might relate to the parallel killer,” Mei-Ling said. “But what does this have to do with the nuclear blast at Laramie? Or the destructive potential of the instanton? Or the release of the immortalizing vector?”
“All of those,” Jacinta said, “killer, blast, instanton, vector release—you might want to think of those as constellations of the Allesseh’s Thanatos and Eros processes, as experienced in our region of spacetime. The whole dynamic of immortality versus enlightenment is part of it, and part of us. Yet, by our mere existence, we have already reminded the Allesseh of its real self. Our mission, I think, is to help it complete its mission. By helping it become an authentic self at last.”
Seiji stood forward, while in the public display the program showed images of the Batcomputer in the Batcave, the world dominating machine of Colossus: The Forbin Project, the WOPR computer in Wargames, the Strategic Air Command’s war-fighting computers deep inside Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War period.
“What happens then?” Seiji asked. “The end of the universe?”
Jacinta looked piercingly at him.
“Only in a manner of speaking,” she replied. “The evolution of the universe has been toward universal consciousness. The end toward which the universe moves, and from which the psychic energy of the archetypes comes, involves fundamental transformation. Something like the Big Bang. Nearly every religious, spiritual, and mythological system makes reference to such a transformation—‘union with the divine,’ ‘Second Coming,’ ‘Return to the Goddess,’ ‘End of Day.’ All those prophecies are shadows cast forward from the end of time. They are apocalyptic not so much in the sense of ‘catastrophic’ as in the sense of ‘ecstatic.’ The universe becoming totally conscious is an ecstatic transformation of existence.”
The background program was asserted that, when human beings think of security, something deep in the psyche harkens back to the cave. To the liminal space between the open space of light and life and the no-space of darkness and death. The enclosed space of the womb and the tomb. The cavernous space where, as the Aboriginal Australians claimed, humanity comes up out of the Dreaming and goes back into the Dreaming.
“Our human consciousness,” Jacinta continued, seeing from the expressions on the faces of Seiji and several others that they hadn’t found her answer completely satisfactory, “has evolved in spacetime. That’s why we can’t fully envision that transformation. From the hints we’ve managed to pick up over at least three hu
ndred millennia, though, it seems likely that at the moment of universal enlightenment, the time of our universe will be rewritten. It will be changed utterly by a standing wave propagating from the eschaton instantaneously back through all history—and before and after history, beyond all time’s devastations, so that all pain and suffering, all beauty and ecstasy, will be seen to have been entirely appropriate. Indeed they will have proven indispensable to the creation of something other than we have ever known. We will have passed into singularity. From that point we will appreciate the instantaneously back-propagating standing wave for what it really is: the event horizon of a universal singularity.”
Roger heard also the background program’s claim that symbols are technologies and technologies are symbols. That current technologies of genetic engineering, mind/machine interphasing, and drug design had the same goal as the art and rituals of the ancient caves. Roger found himself curious in the extreme, with a childlike and impious curiosity. Something about the wildness weirdness of the place they had come to—where physics became metaphysics, where psychology became parapsychology—impelled him to play devil’s advocate. He couldn’t help it.
“How can you be sure of all this?” he asked. “And how do you expect to influence something as powerful and distant as the Allesseh? Isn’t that a bit anthropocentric?”
Jacinta paused thoughtfully, glancing at him, then smiled broadly. The scholarly program voice went on, describing all those symbolic technologies, both primordial and contemporary, as attempts to bootstrap ourselves up that fraction of a dimension so that our truly fractal consciousness might then have access to the eternal. From that vantage point, we might have some hope of gaining perspective on—and understanding of—life and death, space and time.
“From our myconeural associates,” Jacinta explained, “the tepuians and I have access to travel on the timelines. Though it’s annoying at times, it’s also a helpful ability, allowing us to access as much as we can possibly assimilate of that other realm.”
“Which is...?” Roger asked.
“Holographic plenum, higher dimensionality, spiritual or entelechial or noumenal system,” Jacinta said, sounding a bit tired. “Whatever name you wish to give it.”
Roger nodded. The background program asserted that, though millennia upon millennia have passed, life and death are as much a part of contemporary humanity’s hardware—and hope and fear as much a part of the software—as they ever were in the ancestors. Distant though those ancient ancestors might be, they also seemed never very far away.
“So you can read the future?” Roger asked, thinking of Marissa’s postLight talent.
“We can read many futures,” Jacinta replied. “We can never know exactly which one will undergo the formality of actually occurring, however. The probability distributions are denser in some areas than in others. That’s why some of the tepuians have stationed themselves here in this habitat. Others in the psiXtian compound in California, still others in Cincinnati. We’ve been in all those places, though perhaps not at exactly the right time or exactly the right place.”
“But you do have a good idea of how time ends?” Mei-Ling asked.
“Not quite,” Jacinta replied. “The exact nature of how time ends is occluded by the bowshock wave of the eschaton particle, the event horizon surrounding the singularity that is both the ‘void of endings’ and the ‘spore of beginnings.’ If that’s what it is. But we’re a fast wave. We’ll catch up.”
“But to do what?” Roger asked again. “Isn’t the Allesseh still too big and too far away?”
Jacinta shook her head vigorously.
“Not at all,” she said. “The Allesseh is never too far away, nor too strong. All we have to do is realize the depth of our interconnectedness. Our interaction with the Allesseh is synchronistic with innumerable events and minds throughout spacetime and beyond—all working toward the same end.”
“If we do not come to it,” Ka Vang asked, “it will come to us?”
“Yes,” Jacinta said, confident as ever. “Its imprint is everywhere. As long as the Allesseh is ruled by a social psychoid process, however, its strength is ultimately limited. The archetypes with which we can counter it partake of the energy that sustains the entire cosmos. Those can fight on forever, if need—”
“Let’s hope so,” Seiji said, interrupting. “I’ve just received a virtual note from the ASGuard tracking stations. It informs us that Comet Hsiu-Johansen has stopped dead in its tracks. It appears to have done so in response to sensory probing from Swallowtail. It seems to be in the process of shedding its coat of ice and rocks. We may not have forever.”
“It will not matter,” Jacinta insisted, forcefully. “The dread at the heart of its continued existence has driven the Allesseh far into fragmentation. We can be sure of that. The psychoid process which has taken it over can be banished. The darker things get, the brighter they must turn. The Allesseh and its associates may well have to be on the brink of total collapse—consciousness itself might have to be nearly gone—before the archetypal forces can successfully intervene and discharge their healing into our universe. If we, here, were turned into statues, the stones themselves would rise up.”
Roger would have liked to believe as firmly as Jacinta obviously did. In all honesty, however, he feared turning to stone less than he feared being blown to a wisp of elementary particles by the instanton version of the End.
“Where will these archetypal forces come from?” Roger asked, thinking incongruously of cavalry coming over a hill.
“From a higher realm,” Jacinta said. “From the superconscious, if you like. Or from a higher energy, higher dimensional universe of the plenum.”
Seiji apparently shared Roger’s suspicions. After Jhana showed him something on her PDA, however, he exchanged a very meaningful glance with her and quickly spoke up.
“Some ‘help’ from the superconscious, as you call it, may have manifested itself,” Seiji said quietly. looking rather dazed at something that had appeared on his notepad PDA. When he spoke again, it was as if he were thinking out loud. “Among the rants associated with the infosphere killings, some materials strangely inappropriate to a killer have been appearing in the SubTerPost. SubTerPost, too, is somehow a divided system. Not everyone who has worked in it, for instance, has been blasted by this topological voyeur killer, Michael Dalken. Jhana and I have often wondered how the ‘ghost’ of my brother existed for us to meet him. If there can be a personal un- or sub-conscious, filled with the contents of one’s own experiences, then a personal superconsciousness might logically also exist, filled with personal experiences that relate to that other realm—”
“Yes,” Jacinta agreed. “A personal superconsciousness continuing beyond death as a dynamical system, independent of the physical body. Given sufficient psychic energy, that system could continue to manifest in the physical world.”
Seiji nodded, thoughtful. He still looked a bit bewildered by the way the pace of events kept tightening around all of them.
“That, I suppose,” he said, “is as good an explanation as any Jhana and I can think of for what you’re about to see.”
Seiji quickly deactivated the fountain and reactivated all three Boxes contained within it. Jhana spoke a series of commands activating the Boxes’ links to each other and the rest of the infosphere. The usual matrix appeared holographically, but after Seiji spoke a further series of commands, a black hole image opened in the infosphere.
The hole turned out to be a trap door program, leading them onto a virtual spiral staircase, then downward, deeper and deeper to a level below the matrix.
“Welcome to SubTerPost!” said a voice and caption at last.
Seiji spoke a further series of commands and something quite extraordinary happened. Another spherical, spiral-wound, electric organelle labyrinth appeared, like the infoburst virtual machine they had seen earlier. This golden orb now was dark with excess of bright, however, where the black-gold of the previous one h
ad seemed bright with excess of dark. This was the other’s dual, its photo-negative, its anti-image.
As Roger watched, he saw a face form inside the orb, backlit by the sphere’s brightness the way distant mountains are backlit by the sun setting behind them. The face had prominent cheekbones and eyebrows, a visage thin and tight and ascetic. It was framed by long, rather unkempt dark hair restrained only by a single braid. It seemed haunted still by eyes lost in a premature, ghostly otherness. After an instant, Roger recognized that it could only be the face of Seiji’s brother, Jiro.
“Hello,” said the face in the mazed sphere. Upon hearing the voice, Roger at last fully understood how body, mind, and spirit could intersect. He saw fully how being conscious was always to be standing in the gate between worlds. “Ah, hello, Diana! Here comes everybody!”
In that moment, Roger understood how the collective unconscious was not only a collective subconsciousness but also a collective superconsciousness. What amounted to the same thing: the virtual and the real became one, superposed states aligned, he and all around him were translated beyond every dream of utopia and nightmare of history.
* * * *
HOME 2 was visible in their monitors when Ray Dalken hurried back into the cramped cockpit cabin, looking flustered. Brandi watched him intently, her previous shining sense of relief corroding as he spoke.
“Mike’s on it back in the tank,” he said to Manqué, somewhat relieved. “He’s using satlinks and everything else to send bursts of information out to his higher powers. He’s communicating directly through the crystal memory structures in his head. He’s in touch with this mass of machine angels. They’ve formed a groupmind we can hardly imagine. They’re his worker bees and they have just been biding their time, until now. Armageddon is joined!”
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