Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Not good for me to watch too much of that, Jiro thought. It called to him, a basin of strange attraction, some other ground state of his mind. Yet that dreamvision was also an echo of a future—one he hoped to prevent, even as it provided him with the idea for his own plan. If ending one life by freezing to death in a coldbox would save countless billions from entrapment in an endless, frozen, living death, then the risk was well worth it, at least as far as he could determine.

  Making sure that all his systems were ready and that he was fully connected and webbed in, Jiro thought that he and Seiji had both thoroughly learned and discussed the terms for his “condition.” He knew about psychosexual dysfunction arising from “incomplete gender identification.” He knew about depressive disorders and Messiah complexes and long-period paranoid schizophrenia. Maybe what he was doing now was all just his final Corpsicle Messiah delusion. He couldn’t know for sure. That was always the problem with everything he knew: Being comes before knowing. He actually had to be crazy before he could know he was crazy.

  And now he would actually have to be—or not to be—dead before he would know if his plan really worked. He had done to himself what he had most feared a government or corporation would do to him. Over the year since he had silently taken with him from the Page Museum the alien nanotech he had been working on, he had extensively modified that tech, reprogramming it to suit his needs. Within the last hour he had ingested a sizable dose of that customized nanotechnology. If the submicromechanisms were working as planned, the angel tech was following neurotransmitter gradients across the blood-brain barrier into his brain. He had put things into his own head.

  Now he would put even more things into his system, he thought as he popped into his mouth a couple of tabs each of Kava kava and Ibogara, both of which he took in a precisely predetermined dosage—the Kava kava for its enhancement of the potential for lucidity in the dreamstate and the Ibogara because it would allow him to dream while conscious. If he were going to lucidly dream the Big Dream, he figured he needed all the help he could get.

  Carefully he unwrapped the Cordyceps fungus he had obtained from a defrocked Brother of the Ascended Order whom he’d met at a truck stop in Banning. It was a good looking specimen—full of the bluish dust of spores in the pits covering its surface. He began to chew the strangely shaped mushroom. Swallowing, Jiro remembered to send to those names on his infosphere list the design schematics and application scenarios for the antidote enantioviroid he had envisioned. He eyewalked SEND from his heads-up display, hoping someone out there might be paying attention.

  That sudden flash—of recalling his planning, of remembering his memory of the future—was that the Kava kava kicking in? It felt like much more than that. Was the angeltech accelerating the spawn growth from the mushroom’s spores in some manner? So that he was managing a particular and focused attention now? Despite the general lassitude he felt enveloping the periphery of his thoughts? No answer to those yet. The point was to stay aware in the Big Dream, so he might perceive and understand. Maybe what he was experiencing was yet another result of how he was weird-wired, his awareness preceding his perceptions once again.

  The message-sending done, he lay back on the pillowed floor and waited for the Cordyceps jacintae to bring on its deep dream, its heightened brain chaos. From his research he understood a little more clearly why the scientists who had isolated the fungus’s most prominent supertryptamine had named that extract Ketamine Lysergate 235, even if that naming had been somewhat tongue-in-cheek. While not that similar to either ketamine or lysergic acid in terms of its stereochemistry, the altered state of consciousness produced by KL was a dreamlike condition full of vivid visual imagery, not so very unlike a combination of the two, though more deeply dreamlike than either of them.

  The fungus itself was even more dreamy than the KL, however. The little available information Jiro had been able to find in his psychonautic research suggested that the mushroom, much more than KL alone, did interesting things to a number of areas in the brain—particularly the pontine cells and the dorsal and median raphe nuclei. At least one result of its complex of effects was that, on EEGs, the ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) waves demonstrated an extra upward deflection. Jiro suspected that this upward deflection in EEG measures of brain waves was a demodulation effect, a second “J wave” very much like the upward deflection of the J wave scientists had already recognized in ECG measures of heart waves demodulating in hypothermia victims.

  EEG wave demodulations were important because they meant the brain was functioning in a more chaotic fashion. Chaos was important because the transdimensional gateway Jiro hoped to open could, he suspected, only be opened by a demodulation, a chaotic acausality of the appropriate dreamlike type.

  More importantly for Jiro, however, was the fact that, quantum mechanically speaking, the brain in this altered state was encountering the waveform of the universe in an altered holographic pattern of wave interference—one which allowed for access to a level of reality beyond spacetime.

  And, he hoped, beyond death. That was the point of all these psychonaut preparations, here in this refrigerator capsule—the Kava kava, the Ibogara, the Cordyceps, the angel nanotech, the liquid nitrogen. He had calculated the escape velocity of the soul, the speed of the unique light that cast bodies and shadows. The brain itself, he reasoned, was a transducer, converting input energy of one form into output energy of another form. Only the “energy” it worked with was more blatantly patterns of information. The brain converted information patterns of one form into information patterns of another form. Its entire structure, at all levels of complexity, was the structure of a transducing substance or device.

  As he closed his eyes behind their eye-movement monitoring screens, Jiro thought that he now understood the mechanism by which that transducer functioned. A laser, like a dream, was a dissipative structure arising in a system far from equilibrium—one that bridged the gap between classical and quantum worlds. DNA emitted photons of biological origin such that it electrochemically produced highly coherent but very weak light—biophotonic waves that operated like an extremely low-power laser. The master molecule was a completely symmetrical yet “aperiodic” crystal—though one with long “redundant” sections that were as periodic as any piece of quartz. Jiro thought of the way that structure mirrored the paradoxical nature of the cosmic plenum itself: the symmetrical product of asymmetry, possessing no boundary but completely self-contained.

  Jiro understood the brain’s ionic Schrödinger waves, their relationship to probabilistic Schrödinger waves in general—and how both functioned in the creation of the “brain hologram” and holographic consciousness, the mind’s “process” to the brain’s “structure.” He understood temporal lobe quantum superposition and its relationship to that ontologically-ambiguous realm between the material and the mental. He knew it, he understood it, at least conceptually. He had done his research. After all, he was an infojunkie. Yet understanding it wasn’t enough. He had no choice but to experience it, in ways the theorists had probably never imagined.

  Many of the same theorists who had discovered those relationships had done so while engaged in the long work of finding what was alternately termed the “interfaceless interface” or “mind/machine link” or “proper information pattern.” In all cases what they had been looking for was the energetic wave, both medium and message, which could be beamed at a human brain in such a way that the brain would convert that wave instantly into information useful for thought. What Jiro was working toward, however, was in some ways just the opposite. He did not want his mind to translate the wave, but the wave to translate his mind. Consciousness too was both medium and message, structure and pattern. The datastream had embedded in it its own dictionary for the interpretation of the data. What Jiro had to perform was not another split brain experiment, but a split soul experiment.

  Looking at holograms and at DNA’s holographic style of replication, he conceived of bifurcating his
being into two beams of coherent “light,” an object beam and a reference beam. These would not be beams of ordinary light, however, but waves of probability. He would split his consciousness into its object “data” wave and its reference “interpretation” wave. Data plus interpretation, recombined, yielded useful information. He planned to transfer to a new machine all information that might be transferable from the old machinery of his body. Then and only then might the energy of thought act in transient fashion, transferring a functional consciousness to a platform outside his body.

  The unsplit soul could not be holographically reconstructed, however. Resurrection by holographic reconstruction required reification of the death, or at least the near-death, experience. No getting around it: If he hoped to get there and come back again—only different—what was the same would have to pass away. To go into the Big Dream, he would have to go into the Big Sleep, first.

  Cold sleep. He was reminded how, in mountain hypothermia, the freezing victim not only lost heat due to the cold environment but, because the thin mountain air contained a decreased amount of oxygen, the victim’s body was also prevented from generating adequate heat. The dry cold air quickly induced a dehydrated state, so that the victim suffered simultaneously from low oxygen levels, dehydration, and cold. It struck Jiro that this situation bore a curious similarity to diver’s hypothermia, in which a diver became hypothermic due both to the external cooling of his or her skin and to breathing cool dry air from tanks. Divers in the cases he had studied, maintained that they became cold “from the inside out”—thus shortcircuiting many of the body’s natural safeguards. Jiro too would be flash-frozen from the inside out and the outside in at the same time. He would be both climber and diver, peak and trough of the wave at the same time, making his way to the divine ground state of all being.

  Data plus interpretation yielded useful information, he thought again. Yes. What was the datastream—zeroes and ones, yesses and nos—but changes in state of being? What was interpretation, but awareness of changes in state of being? And what was consciousness but being, changes, and awareness?

  Maybe the Guajiro Indians and the other dreaming-god tribes were right, he thought. Maybe everything in the universe came into spacetime, into “becoming,” when the dream-being became aware of the fact that it was dreaming.. Which was another way of saying everything in the universe embodied the consciousness of the universal dreamer.

  Jiro had more faith in the idea that he would come back a conscious being, however, than that he would come back a human being. He was confident that his modifications to the alien angel nanotech would allow those mote-machines to function as new neural automata that would leave his “trace” in this world. Before the cold and dark of the liquid nitrogen and his own crossing of the wave membrane kicked the mote-machines down to default and dormancy, the tiny automata would together send out their complex soliton probability wave—their wave of translation, assembled from all the holographic wave patterns of his brain and consciousness—to the LogiBoxes, where the wave interference pattern of his consciousness would be stored holographically, a “brainless” yet cognitive artifact, a big slice of the process of his mind, frozen in time until the right kind of light could shine through it once more.

  His “black boxes”—the three top-of-the-line LogiBoxes—were in fact “light boxes.” Each contained stacked arrays of microsupercomputers, massive parallel computation power boxed in one piece of quantum hardware, all the processing connected by spatial light modulator switches that had been bred with cellular automata arrays, in order to operate at nanosecond speeds.

  Modulation and demodulation, Jiro thought. That was what it was all about. That, and quantum computing. And spatially-embedded algorithms. And coherent quantum superposition. And phonons. And tuned laser pulses affecting electron states, evolving the initial superpositions of encoded numbers into different superpositions.

  When—and if—someone reactivated the machinery he had transferred himself into, that someone would by that reactivation be allowing the “object” and “reference” beams of his consciousness to constructively interfere with each other again, to make a mind of light. The holographic consciousness of Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi would be functional once more—as more than just a very clever automaton, he hoped, although probably not as Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi. Odds were that he could not escape what he thought of as the Dualist’s Dilemma: Human consciousness is not just a product of the mechanisms of the human form, but there is also no human consciousness divorced from the mechanisms of that human form.

  Maybe it was true that everything in the universe embodied consciousness, Jiro thought, but he would still miss the idiosyncratic human style of consciousness, all the sensations and perceptions of a particular embodiment in the flesh and blood and bone and tissue he was heir to, which he had grown to know, and sometimes to hate, but mostly to love.

  Although his eyes were closed, they were full of visions. He was dreaming yet without any loss of consciousness. He felt euphoric but mentally focused, stimulated yet peaceful. He wondered again at the effect, as if the angeltech was interacting with the Cordyceps spores in ways he had not fully anticipated—perhaps vastly accelerating the growth rate of the mushroom’s spawn.

  With a soundless laugh he thought of pronouncing some magical “Abracadabra” from his magician’s “closet”, or of doing a countdown to the launch of his “capsule”—but no. Incantation was not necessary for such magic. The capsule wasn’t going anywhere. He was—from one dark/light box to another.

  The motionless chaos in his brain should now be readily detectable by the mote-machines. Time to go. To the voice-activated servos controlling the valves and vents for the liquid nitrogen, the psychonaut spoke a single ironic code phrase:

  “Only a change of worlds—”

  Instantly liquid nitrogen flooded the compartment. J waves bumped from his heart and head as every system in his body promptly demodulated. With a tremendous feeling of peace, he fell up into the Big Sleep, sensing his mind separating from his body. In an instant his consciousness was out of his body, flowing skyward through the lid of the coldbox.

  He had panoramic vision through 360 degrees of arc and more—a full sphere of vision. He looked down and saw the lid of the coldbox and his motionless body beneath it. He heard a music much stranger and more beautiful than any he had ever known, coming from every direction at once.

  A wave of profound meaning lifted him up, propelling and pulling him swiftly through vastness. He moved as if on train tracks, on rails, on a rocketsled, yet he was standing up, on a pair of girders that coiled and uncoiled like entwined snakes before and behind him but were forever stiff and straight beneath him.

  As his speed went superluminal, the vastness he rushed through became a mirror bridge, which in turn began to rotate like a cylindrical vortex, a flashing tunnel of mirrors and helical rainbows spinning around his standing form on its shining unsnaking and resnaking girder tracks, always arrowing toward a spot of growing brightness.

  The distances he moved through grew ever larger as the units by which they were measured grew ever smaller. The brightness became an all-encompassing white noise of wave interference. He looked down at his feet on the shining girder tracks, long parallel slits above the white noise, and he understood. It was time to interfere with himself. He leaped forward and fell through the slit-girders in their white noise surround. He fell up into higher dimensions, into the unity beyond wave and particle. Time froze to static image, then vanished entirely.

  Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi disappeared into the world of light.

  From inside the flash-frozen coldbox, the motemachines rippled their wave of translation into the world, and into the LogiBoxes, where they pulsed the lightswitch memory media with a rain of ripples, not so very different from the way lightwave interference stains photographic emulsion on the glass plate of a hologram.

  After their flash, the motemachines went dormant, reverted to default, died. As did J
iro’s body. The sudden spike in power diverted from the satellite beamdown immediately flattened. The flash flood of drained power reduced to its usual, almost undetectable trickle.

  Inside the orbital habitat, in cislunar space, Jiro’s brother Seiji, just at the shadow-edge of a dream, woke with the image in his mind of Jiro’s corpse being found in the Trashlands by a man on horseback at twilight.

  * * * * * * *

  The Freedom of Perfect Thralldom

  What the hell was that? Mike Dalke thought in his tank when Jiro’s probability wave burst from the coldbox and into the universe. The most electronically and digitally connected human being still in the flesh, Mike was the only living person to note that wave’s passage. He more than noted it, however. That wave interrupted his art, lodging a mind-fractal in his memory that wasn’t his own.

  Interpreting Mike’s impulsive query, his remaining netizens loyally searched everywhere in the infosphere to discover what it was that Mike Dalke had felt pass through his machine-linked mind. While he waited, Mike pondered again what had happened since he exacted his revenge on Schwarzbrucke and the three Mongrel Clones.

  In their world of watery light more fantastic than any hallucination, nearly a third of the shimmering angel-merfolk had abandoned Mike, had withdrawn themselves from him. Call it apostacy, call it mutiny, call it treason, it amounted to the same thing. A sizable minority of the netizenry had shunned their god and commander-in-chief:

  “—realize what you have done—”

  “—used us—”