Paul stopped. What came to his mind next came dangerously close to his worst suspicions about Tetragrammaton. Vang looked at him expectantly. Nothing for it but to plunge ahead.
“Some sites claim Medusa Blue is really a covert project to expose unborn children to KL 235,” Paul continued, scrutinizing the fish on his plate with more care than it merited. “Supposedly, later in life, the kids’ ‘latent’ paranormal talents can be switched over to ‘active’—triggered into what the infosphere sites refer to as direct mind-to-mind ‘shield telepaths’ and ‘empath-boosters’.”
“For what purpose?” Vang asked, finishing his soup.
“Depends whose politics you follow,” Paul said carefully. “According to the sites on the political right, the federal government, or some secret world government, has codenamed these psi-talents ‘starbursts’ and intends to use them to mind-control those who don’t go along with the global order. According to sites on the political left, or what’s left of the Left, the in utero exposure is connected to something called ‘Operation E 5-24’.”
“Which is?” Vang asked, rather circumspectly.
“Ephesians Chapter 5, verse 24,” Paul replied. “‘As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.’ The Left infosphere sites claim Operation E 5-24 is after a ‘headship hormone,’ a female submission synthetic. Something to counteract the gains of feminism by selectively altering female consciousness and intellection.”
Vang finished his soup. One of the two non-steering crew came forward with raspberry sorbets. Paul hurried to finish his fish.
“To which of these theories do you subscribe, Dr. Larkin?”
“None of them, totally,” Paul said, glancing out over the bow, through the occasional wisp of spray that wafted toward them—out to the blue-green sea merging with the cloudless sky at the horizon line. “Any or all of them may have some truth. Personally, I favor another explanation. The FTL theory.”
Vang savored his sorbet a moment.
“Why’s that?” the older man asked.
Because I’ve heard you hinting about it yourself, Dr. Vang, Paul wanted to say, but didn’t.
“Because if you’re on a fishing expedition,” he said instead, “you might as well go after a big fish. Faster-than-light travel is the biggest of them all. The Kitchener people claim a seamless mind/machine linkage is necessary for the creation of an information density singularity. A gateway into and through the fabric of space-time. Use computers and large-scale machine intelligences to generate the levels of information density needed to open the transdimensional singularity and presto! Faster-than-light travel to anywhere in the continuum.”
“One doesn’t need drugs, or paranormal powers, or in utero exposures, or even human consciousness, in such a process,” Vang said quietly.
“No, that’s true,” Paul agreed. “Apparently none of those played a part in what happened in Sedona....”
Ah, Paul thought, I hit him there! Despite Vang’s skills as a grandmaster of negotiation and The Deal, Paul saw a shadow of emotion cross the man’s face.
“Sedona was a pure machine approach,” Vang said in a level voice. “Tetragrammaton has shifted its efforts out of pure machine approaches and completely into mind/machine linkages.”
“What exactly happened at Sedona?” Paul asked, extremely curious.
“Human error,” Vang said, looking back toward land. “One of our Myrrhisticine people went rogue. The ‘black hole sun’ happened because he tried to implement his own agenda. Attempted to simulate a quantum information density structure for his own purposes. It won’t happen again. That, too, is a threat to your ‘great man conspiracy theory of history’.”
“How do you mean?” Paul asked, not quite seeing the connection.
“I am merely one of the inheritors of Tetragrammaton and Blue,” Vang said. “Things were done before I came on board that I had no say in. Over the years the programs and projects have grown far beyond the control, the praise, or the blame of any one individual. Things I don’t approve of still happen, despite my best efforts.”
Hmm, Paul thought. An interesting admission. But before he could follow up, Vang was addressing him again.
“You seem to still have some gaps in your theories, however,” Vang said. “You still haven’t explained how KL 235 and paranormal powers, or human consciousness itself, link up with faster than light travel.”
“That’s just it,” Paul said, an image of Caracamuni tepui’s last moments flashing through his mind. “I don’t understand how they link up.”
Vang suddenly laughed.
“You, of all people, should know,” the older man said. “You need me more than you know. A few years ago, I sent you a memo requesting from you the full circumstances surrounding how you came to be in possession of the Cordyceps jacintae spore print. I appreciated your frankness in providing that account. I believe everything you wrote—about the ghost people, about Caracamuni tepui lifting off and disappearing. I’m probably the only person on this planet with any real power who believes you. And you know ‘why’?”
Paul, finishing his melting sorbet, could only shake his head no.
“Because it fits so perfectly with what we’ve been looking for, that’s why!” Vang said, with a smile of wonder. “Turn off the left side of your brain with its constant questions of ‘Why?’ for a moment—and let your right hemisphere sense the ‘How?’ Of course, in your ‘why?’ bias you’re being typically human. Evolutionary pressures drove perceptual skills out of the left brain, to make room for the development of explanatory and interpretive consciousness, deep pattern-finding, in that hemisphere. But you need both skill-sets.”
“I don’t see what all that has to do with Caracamuni,” Paul said, bewildered.
“Nature is redundant,” Vang said, “but that’s its greatest strength. Repetition times variation minus selection equals learning—or evolution. Mind and nature learn by repeating themselves slightly differently in different times and places. Both are also chaotic. The right kind of chaos is the single most significant way the human brain and human consciousness differ from rule-governed artificial intelligences and simulacra. Chaotic acausality of the right type can’t be programmed into machine systems because they are rule-governed. Rule-breaking is what’s needed.”
“And Caracamuni has something to do with that ‘right kind of chaos’?” Paul asked, trying to get a grip on what Vang was driving at.
“Exactly,” Vang said, warming to the chance of sharing his thoughts on such a wild subject. “Classical mechanics usually ‘works’ for us because the quantum of action is too small and the speed of light is too large to affect our everyday experiences. In the range of extremely small distances or extremely high velocities, however, the walls of intractability close in.”
“Intractability?” Paul asked. The only thing that struck him as intractable at the moment was where Vang was heading with all this.
“Heisenberg says you can’t know both momentum and position at the same time,” Vang said peremptorily, as if in a hurry to cover the basics and move quickly beyond them. “Gödel says no set can contain itself. Einstein says what you see depends on where you stand. Quantum theory is a complete theory that claims all theories must be incomplete. The laws of physics predict that at the singularity the laws of physics break down. Down at the Planck length, out at the speed of light, on the other side of the wave function’s collapse, the tractable universe of the linear and sequential becomes highly intractable. To get around that, you have to bring in higher dimensions, chaos, complementarity. Your sister and the tepuian ‘ghost people’ must have found a way to ‘surf’ intractability! That’s what the lift-off and disappearance of Caracamuni is all about.”
The cabin boys came and cleared away the luncheon things, including the low table. Larkin and Vang stood up and leaned against the railing at the bow, into the wind and spray.
“But how?” Paul asked, distrac
tedly.
“That fungus, of course,” Vang said, as one of the cabin boys arrived with coffee for both of them. “It’s a product of extraterrestrial bioengineering. Spores have been falling in a thin panspermian rain among the stars for millions of years. Some of them survived and took hold in that tepui. The transdimensional gateway can only be opened by a chaotic key. That fungus must provide both the key—most likely an artificial gene ‘command sequence’ embedded in the fungal genome—and the chaos.”
“The fungal supertryptamines,” Paul said, sipping his coffee, catching on. “They loosen up the dorsal and median raphe nuclei’s ‘governor’ on human brain activity. By damping down the DMNs the supertryptamines allow heightened chaotic activity to arise in the brain.”
“Precisely!” Vang said, placing his coffee cup on the rail before him, eyeing it from time to time to make sure it didn’t spill. “The human mind possesses the right kind of chaos to complement the levels of information density that I once thought only computers and AIs could put together. Apparently the ghost people figured out how to do it with just their own heads and a particular kind of quartz. However they managed it, the result is the same. Put together the right combination and the sky opens up. Simulated quantum information density structure. A mathematical model of a gateway so complete it is a gateway.”
Paul stood frozen, stunned as he worked out the conclusion.
“The virtual and the real coincide,” he said. “A singularity of almost pure Platonic form—or formlessness. Much-faster-than-light travel to anywhere in space-time.”
“And more—more, even before that’s achieved,” Vang said, taking another sip of his coffee, then facing proudly into the slackened wind as the ship came around in what was apparently the circular course it was running in the bay. “A mind/machine linkage so seamless that human consciousness becomes machine-mountable. Think about it. Independence from the all that flesh is heir to—and flawed by. A virtualized humanity, conscious software running on machines. Myriad human minds downloaded into robots, or piloting conscious spacecraft. Conscious artifacts dispersed throughout space-time, so that no single event—no war, no alien invasion, no killer asteroid, no ecocatastrophe, no cosmological gamma ray burst, not even the exponential growth of our own numbers and needs—nothing can make humanity extinct. Once virtualized, humanity’s physical needs will be radically diminished and need not every impinge on a biosphere again!”
So that was it, Paul thought as he slowly sipped his coffee. The bridge between brains and computers. The seamless interface between mind and machine. The contingent computer that would be both mind and machine. The final escape valve for population pressure—and also the exit door in the luxon wall. The ultimate solution for the narrowness of the needle’s eye.
“Consciousness theory is theology of mind,” Paul said with a shrug. “A consciousness not embodied in human flesh, however, probably wouldn’t be a human consciousness.”
Vang made a spluttering, half-laughing sound.
“You dualists!” he said. “You’re all the same. You want it both ways. You say human beings are not mechanisms, then you turn around and say the mechanism of the body is what makes us human!”
Vang sipped at his coffee. Paul watched as they came in closer to land. They were definitely headed back toward the harbor, he realized.
“And why shouldn’t consciousness theory be theology of mind?” Vang began again, looking into his coffee cup. “Science and religion, at their best, are complementary. Science is the cup, faith is the coffee, the self is the drinker. Buddha woke up and smelled the coffee.”
Paul smiled at the pun, but Vang was already gesturing at the bay around them.
“Look at the waves on the sea around us, Paul,” he said. “The wave rising out of the ocean is time rising out of eternity, becoming rising out of being, evolution rising out of creation. The wave rises out of the ocean and descends into the ocean, again and again, without beginning and without end.”
Appreciating the heat of the sun, the cool of the spray, the vigor of the wind and the strength of the boat, for a time they lapsed into silence.
“Do you know what Tetragrammaton means?” Vang asked at last.
“The four letters of the Name of God,” Paul said. “Either IHVH, or JHWH, or JHVH, depending on which tradition you follow. Yod Heh Vav Heh. Jehovah, Yahweh. The Endword. The ‘Word To Shake The Foundations of the World.’ The ‘Word That Ends The World.’ The final incantation which, spoken and performed correctly, destroys the universe. In the beginning was the Logos, in the End will be the Tetragrammaton.”
“Ah,” Vang said, “but do you know the tradition of the Lesser Tetragrammaton, the Archangel Metatron?”
“No,” Paul said, discerning the jetty at the harbor’s mouth in the middle distance. “I can’t say I have.”
“An enormous being of brilliant white light,” Vang said, gesturing broadly. “Highest of the heavenly hierarchs. Prince of the Divine Face. Angel of the Covenant. King of the Angels. Supreme angel of death and teacher of prematurely dead children in paradise. Charged with the sustenance of the world. The writer of truth, the scribe who records all that happens in heaven. Youngest and greatest of the angels, because Metatron once lived as the human patriarch Enoch, but was transformed into an angel rather than created as one. That’s the ultimate goal of the Tetragrammaton program, Paul. Angels travel at only the speed of light. FTL travel, virtualized humans, ensouled robots, conscious starships: they’re all about the transformation of human beings into better angels—through technological transcendence.”
Building better angels? The idea struck Paul as arrogant in the extreme. Megalomaniacal. Yet Vang had voiced it so calmly. It made Paul desperately want to shake that calm, cosmic hubris out of the older man.
“Then why have you gone about it in such a hellish fashion?”
Vang looked at him narrowly.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve checked the structure for KL 235,” Paul said, trying to keep his anger and rage from betraying itself in his voice but not quite succeeding to the end. “It’s one of the supertryptamines we’ve isolated from Cordyceps jacintae. How it came to be in circulation thirty years before I turned that fungus over to you I don’t know, but as early as 1982 Medusa Blue began using certain university hospitals and medical centers as fronts for giving selected women treatments with KL 235—as a ‘uterotonic’. Not exactly informed consent. People on the Medusa Blue payroll pumped KL to those women and their wombs during the embryonic development of their children. They turned thousands of women into long-period schizophrenics. Warped their lives, bent their kids, destroyed their families. All for the sake of building ‘better angels’, as you put it. Was it worth it, Dr. Vang?”
Vang looked away. He pressed a stud on the railing, then tapped a few more keys before he spoke. A 3-D virtual, showing a black plaque inscribed with a golden timeline, sprang into space near them in the bow.
“As I mentioned earlier,” Vang said dryly, “I am an inheritor of the world of Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue—not an initial creator. I have a debt to the old intelligence agencies, which I willingly pay. They had their own reasons for doing what they did initially. It was the Cold War, after all.
“This timeline answers some of your questions. The history of the supertryptamine codenamed KL 235 begins here, in 1978. Dr. María López-Renjillián, an ethnobotanist, obtained a much-degraded sample from an Ecuadorian curandero.” Vang glanced at his speechless guest. “You didn’t really think the ghost people of Caracamuni were hermetically isolated from history, do you? They must have left their tepui from time to time. How do you think they got all that Brazilian quartz for the collecting columns, the ‘information drivers’ you mentioned in your report, hmm? Dr. López-Renjillián’s find was apparently a result of that limited commerce.”
Vang pointed further along the timeline.
“The only supertryptamine extracted from the initial sample was the
now much-discussed KL. During the early 1980s, when the synthetic became covertly available, there was considerable secret interest in it, initially as a battlefield hallucinogen. When that didn’t work, emphasis shifted to its affect on paranormal abilities, so-called ‘psi’ powers. That’s when the uterotonic exposures began.”
Vang turned away from the virtual timeline and gazed at the harbor mouth as they approached it.
“The rest you know,” he said. “In the 1990s there was a considerable upsurge in funding for ethnobotanical field research. Much of it was supposedly to find and catalog medically useful substances before the indigenous cultures that possessed them disappeared, along with their rainforest environments. A considerable portion of that funding, however, also had its ultimate source in the intelligence communities. Not least of their concerns was the locating of the fungus from which KL had come. Your sister Jacinta accomplished that pinpointing in ‘02, though Cordyceps jacintae did not become available to Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue until you turned it over to us in 2012.”
Vang watched distractedly as his big boat turned into the channel beside the jetty.
“Medusa Blue, without a doubt, did a lot of very questionable things,” he said. “In utero exposures. Surreptitious injections. Much was learned, but perhaps it could have been learned in other ways. Even you must have noticed, however, that the other supertryptamines we’ve isolated from Cordyceps jacintae—part of what you described as the ‘myconeural complex’, in your report—have not escaped into the world via Medusa Blue or Tetragrammaton. Those days of covert chemical campaigns are over, now.”
Paul shook his head vigorously.
“Only formally,” he said. “The newer supertryptamines, even the mushroom itself, has gotten out. You must have seen my memos on the subject, to anyone who would listen at Lilly-Park. I told them not to let it get loose, but the intelligence commandos and the corporate money-men Tetragrammaton is joined at the hip with—do you think they listen? You know better than that.”
Better Angels Page 14