The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  That was the message, and, even though Marlo was at the lowest point in her drift, the words soothed her like distantly viewed butterflies, like machine language and sunsets.

  In the House of Dreams, humanity dreamed on. These millions of happy dreamers could never know where they really were and what kept them alive. Their deaths, when they came—and soon—would be painless. Their pleasures would end too rapidly for any pain or dread. An observer in the House of Dreams would have observed no change in the lighting or the ambient hum of the Fluid, for here Marlo’s brain was ascendant and sufficed. But this house, too, would collapse. The lights would go off, the Fluid would stop its gentle churning, and, before long, a quantum storm would come for its makers, for the species that had so spitefully removed itself from its own sins. Here, then, would come the revenge of the exterior—first subjugated, then poisoned, then ignored. The revenge might wait a century or strike at once, but it would make no difference to the dreamers. However death would find them, whenever death would come, they would be remote from it. Marlo suffered for them. Marlo felt herself dissolving, saw the Red Death enter the palace. Marlo cried for the souls and species in her charge. In this coming moment of her dissolution, she had been left no energy for herself. Death without having been!

  She remembered Salt and Abigail.

  Salt 1 (who was nineteen) had looked at Abigail (who was nineteen) a little too long and smiled lopsidedly, and she had smiled back, and all currents had cooperated in depositing them at a little table. Marlo had introduced Abigail to the idea of coming closer to him today.

  “So you’re in in anthropics?” Salt 1 asked, and Abigail nodded.

  “First year? Didn’t see you at orientation. I gave a speech, you know.”

  “I was in cataloguing. I’m tagging the bones. Abigail Snowstorm.”

  “What are you tagging now?”

  “Sunnyvale Civilization. It’s funny—some scholars claim they were risk-takers. All nonsense, of course. You can see sedentarism and defeat in their bones. It would have been the same with us if not for you.”

  There, that look of worship! How widespread it had become! How much he loved it! No one wanted to strangle him now. He had a mother and a world of grateful humans around him. Yet he had never loved. The distance between himself and humanity had been too great. Savior or not, he wasn’t anyone’s idea of a man, and he was a man, and he wanted women, and the women worshipped but did not want him, and it was all very strange for Marlo in particular to observe this. She had found it dejecting, heartbreaking, improper. Her son must have love, and not only her own. She had examined all women in Seaboard before settling on Abigail to nudge into Salt’s orbit.

  And it had worked. How quickly that assurance had flashed through his awkwardness, limned him in lightning! He was stamped with his own imprimatur, the alacrity of fact.

  Salt 1 had meant to plow ahead with speech, but he found himself up against a welcome wall of silence. He didn’t have to say anything to this girl.

  “I wonder,” Abigail said at length, rearranging her marvelously unfashionable long hair. “Who will tag our bones?”

  “I can have Marlo do it.”

  “Will there be bones at all?”

  “Or nothing? Or radioactive dust? I think, Abigail Snowstorm, we should crawl into this moss-covered moment and close it up behind us. We’ll sleep for centuries in our cave. And when we come out, we’ll start again.”

  “So there’s a we?”

  “We were contained in the initial conditions of the universe.”

  “That’s all very metaphysical.”

  “You know what isn’t? The smell of your hair.”

  “What does it smell like?” Abigail asked, unable to restrain at least one giggle. Well, anthropics or not, she was young.

  “Lavender. But not just any lavender. The kind of lavender you find in the cabinet of an old house at the edge of the woods with a storm in the distance. You don’t get the scent all at once. You open the cabinet, and it wafts over you slowly.

  Salt 1 smiled again, and he was really a bit like a scarecrow with something godlike hiding in the stuffing.

  In the Sunnyvale Civilization, with its love for the remnants of 2D entertainment, the camera would have pulled back to reveal Salt 1 and Abigail having blundered into each other and formed a nucleus while, around them, the young academicians and andys and assorted personnel then thronging the God Complex continued to follow their individual trajectories after the end of the world, the first world, the human world that was now Salt’s transcomputational world. Jesu-Krishna could have taken a snapshot of that moment and promised to preserve it as inspiration and example for all the worlds of love.

  And she dreamed other snippets of the past.

  “The anus,” Ocelot was saying on the 4D feed, “is a very special site. I’ll tell you, everyone knows folks can be born without arms and legs, but never without an anus. The anus is the ultimate social justice organ. It has a frank and useful function. It is cheerfully indiscriminate. It bears no burden of difference. All ingested matter comes to a common, democratic mélange. Hello, I’m Olivo Ocelot. Next season, before you venture into the House of Dreams, I invite you into the magical world of Anal Safari on the Sensorium. What a marvelous new module! Become an anus for a day. Feel the compaction and expulsion of stuff, the efficient regulation of the innards.

  Salt 1 closed his eyes, invoked Abigail in daydream. She was speaking to him again; they were no longer children. The world was green and warm and wet, with fish and fowl and beauty in abundance, and they had a cottage to themselves. Abigail, Abigail, corrupted and dissolved; Abigail swallowed in a sea of symbols, a trick of the light, a phantom.

  Before the advent of Jesu-Krishna, God had rubbed the world clean too. There had been a flood, and the receding of the waters had brought hope and promise, and why couldn’t it be that way again? Humanity itself would be the dove, and Seaboard was the ark, and surely everything…

  As Salt 1 rushed along, he caught glimpses of the nursery from between the andys’ limbs. There they were, the rows and rows of whelps in whose tiny hands the future waited. In time, of course, they would become like everyone else, but today they burst with wrinkled and marvelous potential. Salt 1 looked closely at one particularly happy specimen wiggling in delight to have been born. What chance did he have? All his differences would be purged and pecked by armies of embarrassment until he emerged in docile uniformity, no threat to anyone, no challenge to

  himself. But he would be happy. Of that there was no doubt. His veins would sing with sugarfat, and he could do more or less what he wanted in the Sensorium, and he would leap into the lake of quality, and he would tread the water of life. He would never taste the ambrosia of unhappiness, and therefore he would never create, never push, never transcend, never become.

  “She knows no pain, no want. She gorges every day, free from the malice of knowledge. She downloads the finest orgasms. She produces nothing, she adds nothing, she is nothing but an empty glass dipping into the waterfall of pleasure and coming up empty. No other world would have suffered her to live even once.”

  “Did you ever play Strategium?”

  “A bit, here and there. Why?”

  “Do you ever lose?”

  “What’re you asking, sweetie?”

  “I don’t know if I’m good. ‘Cause I’m always winning. I shouldn’t be. I’m just a kid. Whatever I do, I win.”

  “You are good.”

  “Is everyone good? How do you know, if no one loses?”

  A puppy. Would he please look after her puppy? She had been checking isotopes in a bomb shelter, and it had been there somehow, free of radiation and full of hope. The puppy was tiny, and she had housed it in a shoebox, and she had brought the shoebox to his office.

  Salt 1 spent the day with the puppy. He fetched milk from the commissary, checked his little charge for mites, tried to think of a name for her. He lifted her gently out of the shoebox, encouraged he
r to walk and play on his desk, observed the warmth of life unfold. Then left for a moment to check on a simulation elsewhere. When he returned, the puppy was dead. It lay in a pile of holographic numbers.

  Abigail Snowstorm had come back for her puppy at night, and Salt 1 had had to inform and console her, and she had hugged him, and her tears had moistened his neck. She had asked him whether, in his opinion, there was an afterlife for animals, and he had lied. She wanted a burial. He knew where there was a shovel. They ended up beneath the stars, Salt 1 digging, Abigail sobbing.

  The burial over, Salt 1 sat down next to Abigail and consoled her with an imprecise stream of sounds, the precise opposite of mathematics. He was in new waters now. She was gone; face covered, sobbing, inconsolable. Finally, when Salt 1 stopped, she had kissed him.

  In other climes, kisses are plentiful. But Salt 1 was innocent then. Before he could savor or make sense of her, she pushed him away, said that she had trusted him. Why hadn’t he kept the puppy alive? And why had she, Marlo, withdrawn her scrutiny from him, assuming that he would make his way? She, the ultimate computronic being, had let her human son play with fire—oh, in the name of his autonomy!—and here was the eternal scar.

  There was no tine to protest. She was walking away from the chase, the kiss, and the collapse, and she would never come back.

  HimCom had been warned of the expeditionary force coming from the east, and Samson had naturally ordered the drone jockeys to take action. The expeditionary force had survived. They had been invisible to the drones because, Masters later learned, of the intercession of dyes from a purple silkworm that was invisible to the merged eyesight of man and machine. Masters’ beliefs and bowels loosed when the Laurasians broke through the perimeter and into the drone center, where they gunned and stabbed the machine-merged jockeys. Masters had been separated from his guardian andy by a grenade.

  There was a woman beckoning to him. How his heart labored! It was the only part of him that rose to the challenge. His good end was a Brutus to him then. It was as acquiescent as a sponge, shrinking into oblivion against his stomach in the rotors of the dream. Et tu, prick? Ah, you bastard, born on an unhappy day! Whereas the thought and smell of her bring you to implacable soldierly attention, the prospect of that warmth in your actual ambit, enveloping and protecting you, encouraging you, sends you running like a coward. Be of no use, you fallen god!

  “Come into the Sensorium,” Olivo Ocelot was saying, “for fun, but stay for the ideology. This season, Apocalypse the Wonder-Gamo, in which individual citizens navigate the dramas and panoramas of survival while forging allegiances, evading mutants, and rebuilding civilization. In this apocalypse, you win points. You watch, smell, and touch the end of the world in remote story. You are chased and chewed by zombies (don’t worry, they apologize); you are washed away in a global tsunami, stalked by the resurrected Nephilim, reduced to ruin by riot, overrun by apes, laid low by spores and viruses, nuked, frozen, and pulverized. There is no doom that cannot also be entertainment. The neuropixels alone—”

  There was a person sawing at a harp with a kind of double-sided hatchet. The effort had led to the gathering and coagulation of dotted, aboriginal lakes of something—not sweat—on several of the person’s foreheads. The sawing action was made possible, of course, by an exosuit that had never been designed for this kind of lateral movement, so the whine of the machine met the whine of the harp and, Salt 1 realized, the small, sympathetic whines emerging from the person’s own gullet. Elsewhere, elsewhere! There was another person shaped like a pneumococcus blowing through an oxygenator into what might have a recorder. The recorder looked like a sliver in the immensity of the person’s mouth. With Salt 1 looking on in disbelief, the person inhaled too greedily, and the recorder disappeared right through the oxygenator and down the musician’s throat.

  Thankfully, the Symphony of Feels had little stamina; the players wheezed one by one into a welcome silence. Salt 1 gathered the shreds of his sanity from the orchestra pit and took several puffs of his pipe to compose himself. At one point, he vomited discreetly, making sure to swallow back all physical traces of disgust.

  “Welcome all,” Marlo said, appearing on the stage between Salt and Ocelot. “Welcome to the first Salt-Ocelot debate. We are in for special excitement today. The topic is that of Big City’s character, future, and survival. Notice: All trigger filters and reality censors are on. No one will feel any distress. Everyone will hear what O wants to hear.”

  “I wish to Jesu-Krishna I’d acted on that knowledge before the symphony began,” Salt muttered.

  “What was that, friend?” Ocelot inquired, chomping at the bit.

  “Nothing. How shall I begin? I don’t know why’re having this particular debate,” began Salt. “Here’s something I know—with the trigger filters, we’d be lucky if we have a dozen folks in our audience listening to what we’re actually saying. You know who’s listening? The last plague of oddballs before annihilation, before the supernova of the species.”

  “That’s your opening?” Ocelot wondered. “Jesu-Krishna, that’s depressing. That’s really your opening?”

  “Well, yes, Olivo Ocelot, yes. Doesn’t it bother you, the size of our real audience?”

  “Not at all, Jed Salt. We’re as free to talk as others are free to ignore or modify us. And, by the way, size of the audience? Shall we plumb that?”

  “Presently. It’s not a matter of ignoring us. It’s a matter of each O safely locked into a personal world into which no disagreement, no curiosity comes. Or comes rarely. But—”

  “Why is that bad?”

  “Because we should be exposed, now and then, to things and thoughts we don’t like. Our ability to raise up walls and dictate universes ought to be circumscribed. Forcibly circumscribed, at least at times.”

  “Now we come to the real debate.”

  “I’m for the human struggle.”

  “I’ll remind you that we just emerged from the most deadly human struggle of all time. Might you tell our true audience of a dozen how many of us survived?”

  “Not many.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten percent of what had been the species.”

  “I’d say we did something wrong.”

  “Do you think I’ve come here to defend the war?”

  “You said you were for the human struggle. Isn’t war the ultimate example of the human struggle?”

  “Struggle is a fire that can, that did, grow to overwhelm us. I’m speaking of something more cautious and manageable. Should people have the ability, today, to have the very existence of this broadcast censored from their realities? Indeed, to define reality? That’s the kind of question I want to put on the table.”

  “You’d rather hurt their feels?”

  “Look, you’re an ideologist, you reduce everything to feels. But can I ask you to take off that hat and tell me, man to man—or O to O, if you like—why feels are sacrosanct?”

  “Because they’re the top of the slope, Salt! If you hurt feels, you can do anything: Burn up the world, for example. Feels are the foundation of peace, and consequently of happiness, and happiness is what all life seeks.”

  “And how do we live in a dictatorship of feels?”

  “Yes, feels clash and collide, I respect that. But the Feel-O-Meter works extraordinarily well. Let whoever feels the most win. Is that dictatorship? Or is the disease our way of life?”

  “Our way of life is a fundamental betrayal of biology.”

  “You’ve reified biology. It doesn’t exist apart from us, from our construction of it. And who is anyone to lament the choices of humanity? Because this is humanity. It isn’t something abstract, it’s just the sum of folks, and folks want to have fun.”

  “Pleasure is fine. I’m on the side of pleasure—but also of pain.”

  “So you want pain,” Ocelot resumed.

  “No, I want a balance. I want the possibility of pain. I want the possibility of failure. I want contingency and
effort and reward.”

  “Well, that’s rich! You’re the transcomputational man. Things just come to you. You don’t work.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  “Humanity is where humanity leads. There’s no sense in questioning our way of life. It’s a reflection of who we are, while you’re imposing an ought. As an equalist, I reject the world in which humans are born healthy or beautiful or rich or anything at all. However and wherever you are born today, you have the right to excel in pleasure, to will what you want in the virtual.

  Here’s a world in which the tyranny of achievement, of being itself, has been unmasked and overthrown. That’s the world worth cultivating, not the world of mathematicians and poets and genomic bombs.”