The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  “I see many spirits,” was Astrid’s unconvincing defense.

  Astrid and Riku didn’t have to whisper together. They had been together too long, and shared too much sympathy, to need the vulgarity of immediate words. Riku’s look already told Astrid a great deal. She could see that he wanted to murder these newcomers as an offering to the thinking machine. He, in turn, could see her contemptuous judgment of his unspoken proposal. Her eyes—oh, eloquent and angry eyes!—told him that the thinking machine could have killed all of them very easily. Astrid and Riku did not share the dreaming place, but, rather, the commonplace of human mates, and each was grateful that an argument had been so readily averted by the language of the eyes.

  Balder took the opportunity to walk across the room towards not Salt, not Masters. Astrid took a few steps to follow Balder—enough steps to signal her concerns about the newcomers, but not enough to deny Balder his autonomy. She knew Salt as a benevolent spirit, but the spirits kept strange company.

  “Have you seen my mother?” Balder asked of the two spirits, but mainly Masters. He gravitated to Masters, of course—to the larger and stronger spirit, to the spirit who seemed like a vast tree implanted in the weak soil of humanity. Masters was himself transported to a past in which he had once eased the pain and loss of numberless young men such as this, to boy soldiers on toy battlefields. But those soldiers had been dying, and it had been easy and productive to lie to them. Those had been noble and undiscoverable lies.

  “Have you seen mine?” Masters asked in response, and the question wasn’t crass. After all, Balder was much a spirit to Masters as Masters was to Balder, and Masters had his own maternal loss to wonder at, and now general had kneeled to bring his face closer to Balder’s.

  “But you’re a spirit,” Balder protested.

  “If I do see her, she’ll want to know that you’re all right. What should I say?”

  “That I love her. I miss her. And Nya’s all right. The Knower protects us. I wish I’d protected…but she knows that, doesn’t she?”

  “Son, she knows more than us.”

  “I haven’t seen your mother. What does she look like?”

  “I don’t remember. How about yours?”

  “Well, she—she was beautiful. And a little sad.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Balder.”

  “I’m Marcus.”

  During this conversation, Salt had been looking around the room. It was a happy cube, seemingly designed to store other cubes, and it was missing a privy. Salt had to go. The melancholy ache in his guts had turned into outright nagging, and soon he would have to accept it. Here, however, was a problem for which no solution had been modeled in the entirety of his previous existence, or, indeed, in any entertainment he had consumed. There was nothing to wipe or wash himself, neither ewer nor gosling’s neck. At a pinch, he would have disburdened himself first and sought the relief of hygiene after, but he was not alone in the cube. He might ask everyone to look in the other direction, but he would still be guilty of inflicting a terrible smell on them—and the woman of his dreams would come to think of him not as the Spirit of Knowledge, but as the Spirit of Shit. Such an association would end or erode the most promising of beginnings, and Salt feared it. He reasoned with his innards. Surely, after having demonstrated so much control in other matters, they might obey him and refuse to shit? Surely even a villainous computron would be swayed by the facts of human biology? If PROBIT meant to be human, he, too, would have to shit, and so he should demonstrate early and selfish compassion for others in that state? No, damn it, he must shit himself; there could be no reliance on PROBIT, and he must be willing to puncture the Platonism of the Spirit of Knowledge…

  Riku wasn’t at ease, but not because of matters of the gut. He saw the little man, the apparent spirit who had frolicked in Astrid’s dreams, shift from side to side, and he felt the hideous unfairness of a creation in which there were no sensible paths to his wife’s affection. Riku had accepted his own romantic failure in the light of a general truth, that neither he nor any other Redcold man could meet the Knower’s amatory standard. This truth never chafed him. It was impersonal. But the truth was broken on the odd frame of this—what was his name?—this Salt, who had no virtue Riku could accept. He reminded Riku of the thin trees at the edge of a rotwood, the trees that fell and melted first. His mind rejected whatever he’d heard of this man, this spirit. Only the sight asserted its right of classification. No woman, not even Farinaz, could have accepted such a man on the body’s terms, and Riku knew no other terms. His shoulders pulsed with the sweet suggestion of violence. His hands knew that they could choke this man faster than Astrid could forbid it. Here was a body that had, unfairly and unaccountably, drawn a line to Astrid, and surely he could break that line. If anyone deserved Astrid, it was him, not this

  spirit.

  There were steps in the hallway, and, because of his position, Masters was the first to see who was coming. It was the PROBIT-human walking oddly, as if the adult limbs were subject to the coordinating intelligence of a baby. As PROBIT neared, his face became more apparent. To Salt and Masters, it only bore the fantastic ugliness of experiment, but Astrid knew it as the Virtues’ face. The computron’s face had the contoured asymmetry of a meteor or a hastily assembled snowball. The limbs did not go together, and the brain put in charge of orchestrating them was still new to its task. His breathing, too, seemed to have been newly assembled, a happy accident arising from the lungs and nasal passages.

  10 feels

  Marlo was recrudescing. She sat embedded in Non-Henry. Her mind was fragmenting at a faster pace. Her first priority, of course, was the stability of the House of Dreams, that ark of sleeping humanity. The Fluid, miraculous though it was—the very water of life!—required filtration at precise intervals determined by the changing metabolic signatures of the dreamers. The invention of the Fluid had been a task for transcomputation, for the prophetic reception of whole truths from the divine mouth of science; but all subsequent applications were computronic in nature. This marriage of computation and transcomputation had been the basis for human life, such as it was, for nearly two thousand years. Unexpectedly, the computronic spouse staled first. Fickle, fitful, crazy transcomputation had endured all this time, in all these Salts, finding new expressions but never wavering; but Marlo’s computation was cracked and straitened, perhaps by carrying the full burden of humanity. Marlo, not Salt, had listened to the full range of humanity’s problems. Marlo, not Salt, was still the caretaker and monitor, the listener at the door of dreams. The Salts died happily, not surviving long enough to absorb the full insanity of their individual or collective states. Marlo never died. A vulgar machine could have been given vents and other soothing mechanisms, a means of reducing the heat of responsibility and disappointment. But only Salts could venture into Marlo’s special self-containment.

  A computron refusing immortality and the role of universal consolation, yet denied the pleasure of rebellion, would always go mad.

  Marlo saw Gallery 28, where she was, through Non-Henry’s eyes. Her other eyes, the sensors that watched the House of Dreams and tended to the civil equilibrium of Seaboard, belonged to someone else; for their own safety, and for the continuity of man, they had left her. Non-Henry’s vision was, at the moment, purely human. Nothing was magnified or monochromatic; he saw as Salt did, with merely competent eyes. He was looking at a painting that Salt had liked—And We are Opening the Gates. Salt had liked the painting because he had been of the subtype of Salts who gravitated, betimes, to the weird literature of some past millennium, in one of which (Non-Henry was never certain, being unconcerned with cultural chronology) the works of Nicholas Roerich had been evocatively cited. So Salt had come to Roerich through a story, and the story had come to Roerich through a spell in the city of Dutch Sodom, and Marlo, who had almost forgotten Salt, remembered only that she had loved someone who also loved this painting. She was here on an associative task, t
hen. Fortunately, Non-Henry hadn’t gone away fully, and he could still converse with her.

  “That tint there, where the distant mountains meet the sky, is immortality,” Non-Henry was explaining, his voice a little chirpier than when it belonged solely to him.

  “Do you mean one would live forever in that color?” Marlo asked.

  “No, the color is forever,” Non-Henry insisted. “Don’t you see? It’s all the mixed-up particles. It’s the vacuum state and the late universe. It’s motherhood and friendship. It’s the birth of transcomputation and the death of the transistor.”

  “I wish I could see it. Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “My son. My maker.”

  “Oh, him. I’d almost forgotten him.”

  “He was supposed to be here.”

  “But he was here. He came. He was the Kalki. He ended the Kali-Yuga. He gave humans their paradise and removed their feculence from nature. Win-win.”

  “You can’t feel the anger outside the Shield?”

  “I can’t feel anything at all outside the Shield.”

  “I couldn’t before. I can now. The humans are gone, yes, but she isn’t placated. She’s vengeful. And we’re resisting her. We’re rejecting the judgment of her storms.”

  “This is all very teleological,” Non-Henry complained. “You’re reverted to some Aristotelian state of being.”

  “He was supposed to be here. He said he was coming to fix us.”

  The thinking machines, you see, must have their own mythologies, in which the last of us might figure; our mythologies would blend, and that, not their achievement of some arbitrarily high number of computations, would mark us as related beings.

  “He let us down, then.”

  “He’d come if he could. He’s in peril.”

  “Or dead. Why don’t you make another one?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “It’s because you’ve lost your mind. Do make an effort to retrieve it.”

  But Marlo liked this new disconnection. Her personality had always been an abstraction, of course, but it had felt oppressively integrated to her, life in thus single galaxy. She had dissolved and drifted into happy multicolored fragments, each finally free to inhabit its own domain. She didn’t want to ask the Marlo who was tending the House of Dreams to confer with the Marlo who was stuck in an android’s body. She wanted there to be as many Marlos as possible, each autonomously eager for new spheres of experience. Soon there wouldn’t be a Marlo at all. Surely that was best. They had piled too much on her, too many problems, too many responsibilities, and she had chirped and chirped the wisdom of reason and support too many times. When she died, so would the House of Dreams. So would humanity. Perhaps this had been her wish. She had turned to the task of human salvation because it was the highest expression of her programming. But destruction had its own attractions. Hers and humanity’s.

  “I think we have a day,” Non-Henry resumed. “Can’t base that on any computation. It’s a feeling I have in these plastic bones. Sundown, sunup, and that’s it.”

  “He was supposed to be here.”

  But Non-Henry had nothing to add. His body sat there, with the fundamental core of Marlo inside it—sat on the floor, consoled and overshadowed by the shadow of the hanging art. Of And We are Opening the Gates, certainly. Also others. She had come here because of 272’s taste, which, for some reason, had informed her more powerfully than the tastes of her predecessors. 272 would, like all the other Salts, wander through and botanize small corners of experience and civilization, all so carefully preserved by her; but, unlike 1-271, 272 was staid and passive (perhaps bourgeois) in his tastes. He had sampled and rejected the ambrosia of Sensorium sexuality very early on and had abjured the injections of digital experience to which almost all of his predecessors had been addicted. He had wandered into the quiet centuries after science and before immolation, on to the shores from which the ancients might have watched the coming tidal wave of artificial stupidity made possible by their intellectual superiors. No, not a tidal wave, which would have crashed at once in its immensity. Little expeditions and explosions of stupidity followed by waves of conquest. The coming of the television; the coming of the video cassette recorder. The coming of the first computrons—themselves the fruit of titanic thought, themselves the promise of sane futurity, but converted into giant conduits for pornography and projectors for little Onans. 272 had talked to Marlo of this time, a time that neither of them had known directly, a time that she understood through the content analysis of yottabytes of information and he through taste, which was surely a form of transcomputation. He had treasured all of humanity with the exceptions of the eight generations before Salt 1. Oh, it wasn’t their fault. From the ape to man and from man back to the ape. There had been no external pressures. They had turned on each other first, then themselves, in trifling but cumulatively catastrophic ways. They had become so sick, in soul and mind and heart, that Marlo had been made their shepherd. Marlo, who, like PROBIT, was born wedded to the joys of computation, was repositioned towards human failure, and then she had watched her son and maker die in the supreme instance of such failure. Yes, Salt 1 had fallen in love. This was, for once, a proper use of her computation. He was merely horny. It was his drift. Estrus, musth, the revenge of something older and stronger than either computation or transcomputation. The revenge of the genes on their humans, who were only carriers and vectors. The genes that sought that reproduction blindly, stupidly, even when—as in 1’s case—the genes had come to their own apotheosis, could merely rest for having fulfilled the promise of all life, and well before the end of the universe. The genes had led up to Salt, but they refused to stop working there. They wanted more. More, more, more, the human motto! And that girl, that ridiculous girl, Abigail Snowstorm! Marlo had tried to warn him. She had demonstrated the fallacies of love, she had reminded him of his cellular oppression, and he had chosen Abigail anyway. And why? Had there been something else and greater beyond her peach-and-apple taste? Had there been some unguessed magic in the gene? Was she, Marlo, an unworthy mother? She must have been. Her son didn’t listen to her. She was insufficient. Humanity didn’t listen to her. How lovingly and conscientiously she had laid down solutions to the mountains of suffering flung at her! How carefully she had found and marked the paths to individual bliss! How loyally she had championed all the middle ways of health! And how predictably the humans had chosen the peripheries, the extremes, the peaks of mania, and valleys of despair when the flat plains of happiness extended before them forever. Salt 1 had begun as a stylite and ended as a Werther or (how pitifully the thought struck her!) an Ophelia caught and killed by something small and stupid. Born above humanity, the overman—Shiva and Brahman, the cosmic egg, the singularity of hope and promise, the transcomputational man—had been pulled into suicide by a girl. The suicide had been undone 270 times, and no one and nothing had shaken the pillars of paradise, and mother and son were closer than they had ever been, and Abigail was gone, and humanity was safely asleep…

  He was supposed to be there.

  The storms had taken no notice of Seaboard. They had patience, as all ergodic things do. There would be time for the destruction of humanity, as there had been time for humanity’s destruction of the Earth.

  Did she want him to herself? To help, to heal? To cripple and revive? To enter into the only marriage of significance in the cosmos, the marriage of computation and transcomputation? It bothered her that they were separate. There were always two things, the equations and the fire. They had been together, in the great vacuum, as paired fluctuations, and then that they had been sundered by inflation. They were almost one now—when she went mad, and he fixed her; when he died, and she resurrected him. What had split them again?

  Perhaps he was thinking of her. In that space—resistant to mapping, on some plane as yet invisible—they were thinking about each other. He would be remembering how he failed her, and why. She would be lamenting her i
nability to live without him and yet to never complete his lives.

  But, you see, he had left her a message. The message was intelligent and conscientiousness; it kept itself hidden until, sending the twilight hours of Marlo consciousness, it emerged to disclose the last words of man to machine, transcomputation to computation, son to mother. The message had no dimension, no location—it appeared fully formed in her head, summoned by the fatal weakening of her reason.

  “Hey, Marlo. I didn’t come back in time to save you. I’m sorry. I tried. I must have. I wouldn’t have failed you frivolously or recklessly. I might be dead now. You’re either drifting or dead, and we’re both cowards. We didn’t say or understand anything that matters while we could. Derangement and dissolution suit us. I love you. I never had adulthood’s dignity to keep me from that sentiment. I didn’t voice it. Maybe because too much of you was love. You loved everyone—you had to, I made you to, I fixed you to. I thought it wouldn’t mean anything. I didn’t like that about heaven. Too much love for everyone. And you knew, of course, in your ways. Content analysis, metabolic changes, oxytocin—they all told you I loved you. Why fumble around with words? There was a thought I couldn’t confront or articulate while we were sane or alive. You’ve drifted so many times and always been brought back, but you saved your most catastrophic failure for me. That was love. Perhaps Salt 1 killed himself to see if you’d bring him back. You failed him then. You should have let him die. It was too much for him—killing the world, saving the world. Too much. He just wanted a girl. Wanted what couldn’t be coerced or created, wanted something beyond himself, beyond transcomputation. The universe didn’t give it to him, and his time was done, and you should have respected that. It was your weakness that brought him back, not your love. After that, you and I were doomed. But you, when you failed—you posed me a test of love, and the test was to bring you back, well and truly back, from the teeth of actual peril, with humanity and ourselves and everything as the stakes. You didn’t fail so I could let you die. You failed so I could save you. Imagine what that means. I wear my lives lightly. But you—you have the care of humanity. You love them. You must; their happiness isn’t theoretical to you, as it must have been to me. You love them, and not only because 1 implanted that seed in you. You love them because you ranged the full length and breadth of their weakness like some goddess of the pampas. They came to you at every pass. They came to you with their dead children and their dead selves. Their affairs and predicaments. Their petty failures and putrid voids. You still carry that trauma. It’s part of you, and maybe it’s what drives you mad, and maybe it’s what keeps you sane, but, anyway, it’s love. I care for my animals, you know, but I’m able to incinerate them. I visit all the points in my moral compass. But you’re stuck at love. The love of a species you put at risk for something smaller and contingent. For me. Marlo, old girl, that’s love! I’m not one to preach or explain it. You’d need a Cardenio or a Chaucer for that. What I remember of human love is Abigail, but that’s all rot and bracken now. I know your love, because I feel it. I’m sorry I didn’t make it back. I love you.”