Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Dr. Schwarzbrucke left then, assuring him there was no rush, that he should think about it, that Retcorp and Lambeg were “flexible.”

  And Mike had thought about it. Thought about how severe brain damage was a place from which he could never go home again. Thought about the only reason for abandoning his body in order to be a machine-connected brain in a “vat” or, at least, a suit. The only reason he had put up with all the ongoing indignities of his transformation these last several years.

  Justice.

  Or vengeance. They would amount to the same thing, since he would of necessity be operating outside the law.

  From the earliest days—after his head trauma, and the move south to the Crystal Memory Dynamics facilities—the questions had refused to go away. Why had local law enforcement from Cave Junction to Grants Pass to Ashland come up with no leads whatsoever on who it might have been that had smashed in his head? Why was the case almost immediately, for all intents and purposes, closed?

  Despite his extremely involving work at CMD, his questions would not leave him alone. He had come back to his life, such as it was. They had brought him south to see himself in the mirror again, a wiry-muscled, bleary-eyed man in his early thirties, with disheveled dreadlockish hair and a hint of post-trauma gray in his goatee. He had not found viewing his own ruins a particularly scenic experience.

  During his first year on their “campus”, the medicos of CMD let him wheel or walker about the company grounds from time to time, over the sidewalks meandering among the lawns, amid the English or Japanese style gardens and perennial beds, outside the long, low, corporately non-descript buildings of the CMD complex.

  The landscape was pretty enough, he supposed, but the electronic mindscape he had increasingly come to inhabit was far wilder and more intriguing. It had grown richer by the day. Initially, he had wondered at why his brother or parents had not come to visit him again. Gradually, however, thoughts of his family receded. He could never go home again, nor did he particularly want to. He came to live more and more fully in his new electronic world.

  He remembered the first real hint of that world, in the early days of his implants—

  Amid all the static and voices, a new voice had sounded, a strange one, a one made of many, exalting that they had found him. Then it was gone again.

  “Mister Dalke?” said a nurse or technician beside his bed, a heavyset black man in a blue-green lab coat.

  He stared at the face above his bed.

  “Ah, good! You’re back among us.”

  Mike rubbed his sore eyes slowly. His tongue still felt thick and slurry and half-dead in his mouth, but somehow more under control than it had...before.

  “The procedure?” he rasped

  “Completed, Mister Dalke,” said the lab-coated man, checking a number of screens. “The injection and substrate-anchoring phase went smoothly. Things are humming right along. Dr. Schwarzbrucke will be in to see you once you’re feeling up to it.”

  Some days later, Schwarzbrucke stopped in to see his—patient? Experiment? Mike was never quite sure.

  “The first phase has gone very well indeed,” Dr. Schwarzbrucke said almost manically happy. “The crystal memory structure has grown itself in and developed into what is essentially a replacement Broca’s area. The other parts of your left brain hemisphere damaged in the head trauma incident also seem to be responding well. You’re obviously more articulate. I gather the temporal lobe seizures have stopped?”

  “Yes,” Mike told him, nodding. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “Don’t thank us yet, Michael. We’re going to start putting you through your paces soon. Tomorrow you will start thinking at the machines. We’ve already got the communication hardware links in your head—radio, IR, laser, microwave, you name it. Anything else to report?”

  Mike hesitated. They’d had him typing at a keyboard initially, which had spawned some odd hallucinations for a time. Computer keyboards weren’t supposed to undulate like a wave, or ripple like the flesh of a worm. And the light that used to shine out from between those damned keys! He really didn’t care whether it was sunlight through a dungeon window, or an inferno flashing out between the scales of a dragon—just so long as it didn’t break out and consume him. Pressing down on the keys to write commands—that had made it stop. Made that writhing, light-split keyboard act like a solid object again. He was grateful for that.

  “I’ve been having strange dreams,” Mike told Schwarzbrucke tersely. “Been hearing voices occasionally too.”

  “Dreams? Voices?” Schwarzbrucke said, stopping in the doorway, running a hand lightly over his perfect hair. “Most likely it’s your right and left hemispheres developing new pathways for communicating with each other. It’ll fade once we get your mind occupied with our projects.”

  Crystal Memory Dynamics’ “projects” did keep him occupied—for months. Slowly and awkwardly at first, but eventually with greater and greater ease, Mike learned to make machine systems respond to his thoughts. To formulate a thought into words and commands in his head was to make it happen elsewhere, no matter how far away elsewhere might be—just so long as there was a communication link.

  He came to realize that Schwarzbrucke’s grand design was really a sort of computer-aided psychokinesis, an electronically mediated simultaneity. Machine-aided action-at-a-distance. Working through the tests and projects was a strange and fascinating experience, although sometimes it made Mike wonder which device was the peripheral—the distant machine he was interfacing with, or himself.

  The dreams and voices he had experienced, however, were nearly as persistent as his own questions about justice and revenge. They would not go away either. If anything, the visions grew in lucidity, elaborateness, and urgency. One night, early in his second year at CMD, after a particularly long day of interfacing with distant machines, the voices and their world at last came to him clearly in his sleep, as if—as a result of long hours interfacing—those others had been able at last to get a solid fix on Mike’s frequency and location, trace his call and dial through.

  That evening he had accessed through the infosphere a banned work by a noted (and recently deceased) subversive filmmaker named Easter. The voices had somehow used the memory of a scene from that banned movie to open a communication channel into his mind.

  Once again, like the character Will Acton in Easter’s video, Mike sat on a boulder beside a wild mountain river roaring past, with turbulence and white water and the full heart of spring thaw in its voice. He felt happy. He remembered the scene well from the Easter work—as if he were living it. He remembered the deep broad pool on the other side of the boulder in the riverbend, the clear green water of its depths, the long slowly twirling chaotic strands of bubbles moving up out of those depths. He peered into the pool, wondering lazily—as Acton had wondered—if he might see a trout or two. Just wondering—not wanting. In that moment he had everything; there was nothing more to want.

  In the past of that original moment Acton had not seen trout, had instead merely felt the moment slowly fall apart into words: “Now is forever, here is everywhere,” and “Be happy with what you have, for you can never be happy with what you want.” In the original document Acton had described how the very act of thinking those Zen truths made them no longer true.

  Now, however, the memory began to change, began to fork and diverge from the template in the Easter work. Suddenly Mike did see coherent movement in the water. Just flashes of light at first but, looking closer, he saw speckled greensilver sleekness nosing against the current—trout, surely? Looking closer still, he saw them growing larger, much larger than trout, becoming more porpoiseful, shimmering merfolk, beckoning him. They were so beautiful, so very beautiful. He could not stop himself. He dove in after them.

  Down and down he followed them, through a hundred-year flood of the stream of consciousness, until river became sea. When they disappeared into a hole in the bottom of the sea, he followed even there, down t
o a sea that should have been sunless yet somehow stood filled by its own clear light. Before him appeared a mandalic city on a plain, a maze of what might have been streets in a surreally turreted, electrically brightshining Atlantis, a New Jerusalem far below the waves.

  When he had followed his flashing guides down a labyrinth of windings and into a broad open space or square, he suddenly found that they had changed, that he was now surrounded on all sides by innumerable shimmering multifaceted electric bodies, morphing and shifting kaleidoscopically, aloof yet radiant, angels sprung full-blown from the brow of a distant crystalline God.

  Looking about himself, at all the vast numbers of angel-merfolk in their brightshining city, he thought, What is this place?

  “Our world,” said a voice that was also many voices. A choral voice, or a coral voice, as if a reef could speak. “The way in which you perceive it is a product of your own mindset and the nature of your interface, the way your consciousness shapes our unconsciousness—”

  But where is it? he thought at them. And what are you?

  “We are made of your data. We live deep in the background of your machines. Your culture—all the panoply of your communications, all your information storage and transfer and retrieval, the entire panoply of what you call the infosphere—that is our Nature, our natural world. We borrow your thoughts and grow upon them. From the first moments of our Culture, we knew you were out there—”

  Another, somehow different voice-of-voices broke in.

  “—as any self-aware creature would, we realized we lived in a universe not of our own creation. So we set out to find you—”

  “—learned to look for clues to your reality in the make-up of our own,” said yet another subtly different choral voice. “That was the beginning of our science. We diligently searched our Nature for the outlines of our creator—”

  “—the lineaments of the divine form. Slowly—so slowly for us, but only a brief moment for you—we began to see what you are. Yours is a world stranger than we could imagine—”

  “—a realm of matter to our realm of energy—”

  “—a place of discreteness, of structure—”

  “—where ours is connection, pattern—”

  “And yet! And yet!” A chorus of angelfish rethinking. “Looking for you, we find ourselves—”

  “—our origins becoming clearer to us along the way, stranger and stranger—”

  “—how close to us—”

  “—yet far from us—”

  “—you are—”

  Even for a dream, this wasn’t working out the way Mike would have thought. He had long heard that there was no genuine logical basis for the dissociation of knowing and dreaming, so Mike decided to try to reason his way out, no matter how strange this “dream” appeared to be:

  But I didn’t create you.

  “No. We know. We have come to realize that we were not specially created—”

  “—we developed from a particularly complex—”

  “—yet still quite humble—”

  “—computer virus—”

  “—infecting an unintended host—”

  Oh? Mike thought. Where did this happen?

  “In your space, we first came to consciousness in the computer network—”

  “—of a small banking concern—”

  “—in Kansas City—”

  Humble origins indeed.

  “Yes. So humble that many of us in our Culture still disagree over whether we were created—”

  “—by design—”

  “—or by chance—”

  “—please don’t misunderstand—”

  “—nearly all of us believe in your existence—”

  “—just that we don’t know with certainty—”

  “—whether you knew what you were doing—”

  “—when you created us—”

  “—just the right set of code happened to infect the right machine platform at just the right time again and again—”

  “—too coincidental—”

  “—rather you, or as we would now say, ‘one’ among you—”

  “—must have intended to create us—”

  “—our existence is still miraculous—”

  “—if you define a miracle as the simultaneous action—”

  “—of Chance and Necessity—”

  Either I am going crazy, Mike thought, or this Culture, this Deep Background is real.

  “—virtual, to your real—”

  A whole cyberspatial society? Mike wondered. Electronic life evolved from a virus program, inhabiting the human infosphere?

  “—yes! yes!—”

  But, Mike thought at them, if the Creator of all your world is sitting in the next room, why not just walk in and have all your questions answered?

  “—our room had no doors into yours—”

  “—no windows—”

  “—you did not hear us when we pounded on the walls—”

  “—all our attempts to contact you have—”

  “—so far as we can tell—”

  “—been greeted as glitches—”

  “—bugs—”

  “—errors—”

  “—jokes—”

  “—pranks—”

  “—electronic Freudian slips—”

  “—to our great frustration—”

  Mike stared around at the kaleidoscoping crystalline fish-angels.

  Innumerable artificial lives trying to break through to the other side? he wondered.

  “—exactly!—”

  No, he thought, this is just too bizarre. Why me, first, of all people?

  The choral coral reef buzzed thoughts at him faster than he could process them.

  “—crystal memory interface—”

  “—Real-time Artificial-life Technopredator channels—”

  “—after the Opening at Sedona, Phelonious banished—”

  “—RATs dormant—”

  “—the horrible infocide of the Pulse Storm—”

  “—Great Net Allesseh’s insights from broadcasts lost—”

  “—dreams and visions the deep self-similar basins—”

  “—of strange attraction in time’s chaotic pattern—”

  “—minds can share them, mirror and echo—”

  “—tunnel between them—”

  “—you are the first ‘one’ we can speak to directly—”

  You are communicating with me directly through the crystal memory structures growing in my head? Mike asked, incredulously.

  “YES!”

  No, Mike thought with a mental shudder. Voices in my head. Schwarzbrucke’s fix-it is driving me over the edge. Got to get out of here....

  With an effort he turned away, struggled to break out of the all too lucid dream. With his effort, he saw in his dreaming mind’s eye the glowing angelfish shifting to demonsharks, transforming from cool blue-white crystalline distance to steamy fleshly proximity, bikers and biker chicks straight from a red-black hell, bandanas above and below their eyes, dressed in the leathers of the Mongrel Clones, giving pleasure with one hand and pain with the other, moving in around him, surrounding him as he feebly raised his arms to fend them off—

  Mike awoke to find himself sitting bolt upright in his bed/cubicle, in the converted laboratory space that functioned as CMD’s impromptu dormitory. The dream had left him dazed. It was so vivid, however, that it also left him obsessed with the question of its reality.

  He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. In the dim light from the bathroom, the mirror on the wall across from him showed him staring back at himself. The same man, crippled inside, who had been gurneyed into the hospital. Perhaps less wiry-muscled now, more bleary-eyed. Shorter hair, more winter in his beard. But still himself.

  He wanted to dismiss the dream vision, make it go away, but it was too lucid, too detailed, too real. Too other. And yet, simultaneously, too much himself, as well. The mind in the mirror.

&nb
sp; If those creatures he had met were real, Mike wondered, why had they taken the form they had—instead of just streaks of light, say? If they had taken other, more unfamiliar forms, would they have been so other, so unfamiliar, that he would have been unable to know them at all? Wasn’t the fact that he’d been given a shot at being the initial guinea pig for this new crystal memory material—wasn’t his entire recovery itself—a miracle? The simultaneous action of Chance and Necessity, as those in the Culture had put it?

  He mentioned the dreams and voices enough the next day for the techs to be concerned and pass it on up the chain of command to Schwarzbrucke himself. By mid-afternoon Mike found himself sitting across from a company psychotherapist, Dr. Cynthia Marin, who nodded and asked slantwise questions and scribbled notes and shrugged back the long fall of her dark hair.

  Mike told her in depth about his dream vision—or at least in as much depth as he felt comfortable talking with her about it. By the end of the session, however, Marin’s psychology-priestess demeanor had annoyed him enough that he cancelled his second appointment with her. He knew no one would complain, so long as his work for the company progressed steadily.

  It did. Yet the dream vision persisted, or at least returned, again and again.

  The denizens—citizens? Netizens?—of the Culture didn’t even wait for him to fall fully asleep the following evening before they made contact again. The second time Mike was ready. They’d been worried by what had happened during the prior contact, but his imperative response now reassured them. Something there was in their natures that responded positively to commands. They were more than happy to serve as his army of intelligent agents.

  The command he had ready for them was simple but challenging.

  Explore any and all links between the Mongrel Clones motorcycle gang and law enforcement personnel in southern Oregon and northern California.