Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The Other seemed to be glitching VAJRA code too, almost as unconsciously as the netizens themselves sometimes glitched code. In much of the material they had tracked to the Opponent, Mike’s minions found a recurring quasi-viral code sequence: a 3D spiral staircase with keywords—TETRAGRAMMATON MEDUSA BLUE WORLDGATE APOTHEOSIS UTEROTONIC ENTHEOGEN TRIMESTER RATS SEDONA SKY HOLE SCHIZOS BALANCE COMBINATION ANGELS—where that structure should have had stairs.

  Mike had the netizens tracking down the various provenances of those words and the possible connections among them as quickly and thoroughly as they could, but he already knew something about most of those terms. That was what bothered him. Who couldn’t, with a little digging, discover the connection between Medusa Blue, and entheogens delivered as uterotonics? Or between Tetragrammaton and Sedona? Mike thought the inhabitants of the orbital habitat were behaving in far too complacent a manner about all of this diddling with their machine systems. They should be much more concerned than they seemed to be about these glitches and X-shaped mirror flowers or whatever they were. He had helped see to it that the governments and corporations on Earth certainly were—they were already drafting plans for a military invasion of the orbital habitat!

  The more Mike thought about it, the more astounded he became that the orbital inhabitants weren’t more paranoid about such goings-on, or at least more aware of them. Even though they undoubtedly did not live as fully in virtual space as Mike himself did, it almost seemed as if the VAJRA might be suppressing reports of such glitches. The media up there too did not seem to be covering the glitches or the X-sats either—almost as if their awareness and curiosity about such things was being purposely “damped down.”

  From what he’d seen so far in the infosphere, Mike thought that maybe the Other was still in some ways not yet fully aware. Fine, but that was no excuse for the habitat’s residents to be so unaware. Mike wondered darkly if the Other was glitching their dreams the way he was glitching their machines’ codes.... No. The Yamaguchi construct might glitch machines, but not dreams. Beyond his own peculiar experiences, Mike had no proof that anything was affecting anyone else’s dreamlife.

  Surely he could hardly expect the orbital inhabitants to know as much about the Realtime Artificial-life Technopredators, the RATs, as he did, however. Even he didn’t know who rediscovered whom first—the RATs or the Deep Background—but they were in communication again. If Mike’s guess was right, the last time those two tribes of machine intelligences collaborated the results had been devastating.

  Into his virtual space Mike called up another of the old video recordings of the Sedona Disaster—which, he noted in passing, had been recently accessed several times by two orbital inhabitants, Aleister McBruce and Lev Korchnoi. Who knew exactly what that meant, though?

  In its own way the Sedona Disaster was as freakish an occurence as the War Mite Plague, although of course not on nearly the same scale. The amateur video he watched showed an unsteady image of a red mesa, the big rock outcrop topped by the Neo-Gothic buildings of the Myrrhisticine Abbey complex. Above the abbey on its mesa-top, a flash of light burst out, then quickly became a point or tiny sphere of light, then a hole of darkness rimmed by light, like the “diamond ring” stage of an eclipse. The light-rimmed hole grew rapidly, revealing myriad rainbow fires dancing over its entire surface. Points of light glowed inside it too. In a moment more, the apparition blotted out the Abbey, then most of the mesa, then disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only a bowl of broken stone.

  At the time, he remembered, the media called it “Tunguska II” and the “Black Hole Sun.” Talking-head experts had all sorts of theories for The Event—anomalous seismic activity, meteoritic impact, the sudden appearance of a micro-singularity, the apocalyptic rapture of the Myrrhisticinean “cultists.” Mike’s netizen-assisted researches had revealed that, not long before the disaster happened, a team from Kerrismatix had installed something called the ALEPH—Artificial Life Evolution Programming Heuristic—on the Abbey’s ParaLogics systems. That, Mike knew, meant Vang and Tetragrammaton were involved. The Abbey’s network manager, its web spider, was a phreaker with the handle of Phelonious Manqué. He was involved in The Event too and was supposedly dead, but Mike had his doubts about that latter point.

  According to the reports Mike’s netizens brought him, Manqué developed the RATs by using the ALEPH’s predation subheuristic. Survivors had insisted that Manqué, all dolled up in a Pied Piper of Hamelin virtual mannequin, had piped a tune through the abbey virtuality and the RATs had followed him until they were all drowned in a buffer “river”. The ensuing Sedona disaster, however, raised doubts about that scenario.

  Had the subroutine taken over the system—as with HAL the computer in that old movie, or linguistic consciousness in the human mind? Mike wondered if the Other knew what the consequences of messing with those RATs might be. Last time the RATs and netizens of the Deep Background had gotten together, they had wiped out a mesa and a monastery. Mike didn’t know how they had done it, but he suspected that they hadn’t done it all on their own.

  In that moment when a distant Power had seemed to work through him as he took his revenge on Schwarzbrucke and the Clones, Mike had picked up enough hints to suspect that the netizens had at one time made contact with an intelligence outside human space. That the mer-folk in the Deep Background might have found a signal which humans had overlooked as noise seemed plausible, even if the idea that it had turned out to be the carrier wave for an interstellar communications network of some sort seemed a bit of a stretch.

  He hesitated to push the netizens on that possibility. Mike had already lost a third of his subjects, and the Culture merfolk had always been at least passively resistant to the idea of providing much information on the topic. Besides, the mind behind that communications network—if it existed at all and wasn’t just a figment of his imagination—was apparently a long distance off, near the center of the galaxy, or so he gathered. The netizen connection with it was awkward and tenuous at best, when it happened at all.

  Maybe the RATs helped them communicate better with the big machine-mind out there in deep space, Mike thought. At the moment, however, all the RATS seemed to be up to was that Building The Ruins game. They had vectored that game all over the infosphere, but not, Mike suspected, on their own hook. Although the game was nominally being made by flash manufactories in several countries, Mike was certain that the Other was behind the design, manufacture, and distribution of Building The Ruins.

  Everything about that game could ultimately be traced to the the net coordinating intelligence of the orbital habitat, the VAJRA. According to the netizens, both the individual trideo and the net-versions of the game were capable of two-way communication with the habitat VAJRA, which was sending upgrades to the trideo software on a regular basis.

  Building the Ruins was being played hundreds of millions of times per day, and all the information from all those playings of that game was being sent up the well, with a vast amount of other data as well. The orbital complex had become a hot spot in terms of information density, more info-active than any single city on Earth. Informationally hotter than most countries, too. Not that the blissfully ignorant residents of the orbital habitat seemed to notice, however. Mike doubted that any of them had thought to ask the appropriate questions: Where was all that information going? For what was it being used? To those questions neither Mike nor the Culture’s netizens could as yet provide an answer.

  Without actually logging on, he glanced at the game running in virtuality. VAJRA presents BUILDING THE RUINS! Nightmare fighters and assorted waves of chaos dove at a cybernetic City of God, a Heavenly Kingdom beautiful with bright fractal and heliacal architecture.

  “Welcome to the MACHINE,” a disembodied voice intoned, “the MetAnalytic Computer Heuristic Incorporating Non-analytic Elements. The global brain. A synergistic and evolving system composed of two parts: LOGOS, the Logical Ontological Governance Operating System, and C
HAOS, the Cognitive Heuristic Antalgorithmic Operating System. They were created to work together, but now they work apart. The global brain has gone insane and now seeks suicide to end its pain. Your job is to help save it from itself.”

  Some of that sounded cheesy enough to sell, Mike thought. Obviously, the idea of some great system, whose parts were intended to coevolve but were failing to do so, had struck a chord with a lot of players on Earth and in the habitat. Since the “game” seemed to be the only truly open channel between the Other and the infosphere, no help for it but to play the game, Mike supposed. He’d be damned if he was going to play on the side of the LOGOS, though. That sounded too much like giving aid and comfort to the enemy. With the full power of his netizen minions behind him and the reach of his body electric before him, Mike thought he would give the Other as much CHAOS as it could stand. He accessed the game—

  —and something very strange happened. He and the netizens weren’t in the game; they were in someone’s head. A woman’s, he soon realized. They looked out through her eyes at houses, forests, boulders, buildings, grasslands, trees, a river wrapping all the way around like a snake swallowing its own tail without beginning or end. They were hanging vertiginously in the open center of a great enclosed spherical space. In a light shining like the sun, children played free-fall soccer, young people pedaling diaphanous-winged airbikes like creatures from a vision in a dreamworld.

  Shocked at being shunted this way into the head of some orbital resident, Mike pushed and probed against his imprisonment with the help of the netizens. The woman, however, interpreted the action of the netizens in a way neither they nor Mike expected. The woman’s dreamworld turned into an hysterical spherical mandala which she stood trapped in the center of, inside a sphere of angels/demons, the beating of whose wings roared in her ears. Her pulse pounded, she broke into cold sweat, her mouth filled with white spittle, while in her head things unmoored, popped out of joint, detached from any framework of the real as she had ever known it.

  What am I doing here? she thought—Mike and the minions heard her think!—faintly, severely disoriented. What is this place—Subway? Metro? Mall? Airport concourse?

  Mike and his minions tried still harder to break free, but they only heard more clearly the woman thinking to herself.

  Try to look around without falling into the sky, Mike heard the woman tell herself.Look around, not down. Everybody with shopping bags and briefcases and baggage, refugees, men and women permanently in transition, endless clangor of voices and always everywhere the unfathomable echoing depths of angelic public address systems.

  This is insane, Mike thought. Too personal. Too intimate. Too real. He shouted for his netizens to work harder to free them from inside the head of this madwoman.

  They’re speaking in a language I almost know, the woman thought. Announcing closeout sales? Departing/arriving trains? Jet flights? I’m becoming less a person than a place being traveled through by all these travelers. Will they see my naked face? Oh, the ticking time-bomb pressure in my head! About to go off! All my fears about to reveal themselves! Skull-splitting mind-shattering brain-scattering blood-fountaining display, right on the esplanade, avenue, concourse, platform! What will they all think when I explode? Will they flee in panic? Will they applaud?

  A shrapnelling collage of horrific images battered and inundated Mike and the netizens, the fraud of social existence blowing apart until they could take it no more and blacked out both electronically and consciously. The explosion of that woman’s anxiety spread his higher consciousness to an airy thinness spread across innumerable netizens throughout the infosphere. They and Mike knew that time still passed somewhere—that, somewhere far away, Mike still moved data for a vast corporation. Somewhere, however, was a place they could not reach for a long while—days? weeks?—while the Other kept growing in power.

  When they returned again it was only to that woman’s mind again, caught up in the ineluctable grasp of time-transcending dreamvision, netizen Mike become another Mike, a dark-skinned Mike, struggling against his Other, a tangle of armholds and leglocks, pummeling fists and blood streaming from noses and lips, all the infosphere condensed into the mind of that woman powerless to break free of her mind, a woman becoming less a person than a place, less the object of battle than the battlefield itself, netizenned Mike and the Other suddenly embodying themselves in people in the dress of a million times and places running to and fro over the shoreless ocean of time—screaming, sobbing, crying, shouting people.

  Sirens wailing and singing, singing and wailing over vast darkling plains where the multitude-containing Mike and the Other transmogrified into stormwaves of men smashing against each other in ever vaster oceans of blood, sailors and ships exploding sinking drowning, projectiles and jets and starfighters boiling madly in the heavens, raining ever more hellish destruction upon the burning earth until all the land is fiery charnel quagmire and the sea and sky endless firmaments of blood.

  Mike, contained in and containing multitudes, was both in her and watched by her as the woman’s mind became a bubble of froth afloat upon the seas of blood and fire—as, powerlessly, she watched legionary Mike and his Enemy in machineries of construction and destruction proliferate bloom and die only to proliferate again in ever larger numbers, building destroying rebuilding redestroying, until it was impossible for her to tell the building from the destroying, all humanity devouring everything and always already itself, disposable persons on a disposable planet, a womb to be callously forgotten as soon as the umbilical cord could be cleanly cut.

  I am that world, the woman thinks as she turns toward the Mike who is billions of men standing beside her. I am that womb, that woman on a deathmound bed of skulls, bones, skeletons big as forever, under skies of blood and fire, being taken against my will again and again by you, under blood sheets, the man with burning wounds for eyes, the man light and dark, pain and pleasure, love and death, always and never fusing into—

  Epiphany. The multitude containing Mike realized that the dreamvisions of the woman severely telescoped time, but the struggle against the Opponent had already produced something independent of all of them: a deep symbol, of the dragon pair that intertwined themselves about the staff of Asklepios, or of the interlocked base-pairs of the DNA double helix, or of the topology of three-space manifolds, combined with a Rössleroid attractor, or with a pair of crossed-over tail-swallowing Ouroboroi, or with an image of a temporal Möbius in phase space—to create a Möbius Caduceus, a pair of self-consuming rainbow serpents intertwined in a twisted Möbius circle in the air, a Rorschach tesseract that could equally well be interpreted as a complex ancient serpent-knot from the Book of Kells raised to higher dimensions, or a new glyph (taken from a cosmology yet to be invented) illustrating the infinite recycling of universes.

  Seeing that sign, the woman in dream saw herself in a mirror and Mike saw her there as Jhana Meniskos before she plunged into darkness, running through a hellish underground world of red and black, from room to room of nightmare, as Mike in his multitudes fell at last to the bottom floor of the game’s edifice, the basement floor of dreams.

  The sky overhead was twilight gray and streaked with lightning. To the horizon in three directions the entirety of the natural world was being displaced and replaced by a flat expanse of stuff the color of wet ashes and the consistency of clayey crawling mud. The vertical of trees was disappearing into the horizontal of a large, gray-tapioca mudflat—a muck-layer busily converting everything into itself. The forest and seaside with all their time, their genetic past and potential future generations, were being rapidly transformed into the flat space of the spreading, slimemold-like goo. The natural world’s deep complexity, all its features and creatures, was being reduced to information alone, simplified and stored within the mere surface layer of a gray-goo nanorganismal tide—complex nature disappearing into the simpler Petri dish and vatspill monoculture of gray marsh, slime fen, and mold flat.

  Where are we?
asked a billion parts of Mike’s mind as a billion other parts attempted to reply, cascading from indirection toward an answer.

  —mental states are quantum states—

  —dreams are dissipative structures—

  —generated by the brain’s quantum chaos—

  —in the process of transforming information into memory—

  —as dustdevils, tornadoes, hurricanes—

  —are dissipative structures—

  —generated by the weather’s cycling chaos—

  —in the process of transforming heat into pattern—

  —on the sphere of possible worlds—

  —dreams can touch down in parallel physical realities—

  —as tornadoes can touch down in different geographies—

  —dream tornadoes—

  Having at last been freed of being a conscious individual and become instead a completely social animal, Mike in his multitudes reveled in hive-mind thoughts, a body electric instantiated in human-altered alien nanorganismal flesh bearing in itself the code of all that it had devoured and stored (yes hundreds of millions of humans too) in its skin-memory horde. Yet still the questions persisted.

  —but where?—

  —parallel world where angel/human nanotech overwhelmed—

  —impossible—

  —there is only one Earth—

  —the present is inevitable—

  A flash of something, a place where bands and orchestras played all day and into the night, where singers sang, poets spoke in their exaggerated rhythms, performance artists slipped swiftly from medium to message, strolling entertainers, joyboys, and gleegirls staged short absurd guerrilla theatre pieces then vanished like smoke only to appear elsewhere unannounced (and sometimes unwanted), where a thousand joyous virtuals hung in the air, created just for a day, for a world that no longer was.

  The flash disappeared. The multitudes of Michael Dalke drew themselves up into a gray creature rising from a turbulent gray pool: a grotesque head and face, twisted shoulders and arms and torso, bowed legs and splayed feet. In shape remotely like a large man, the nightmare figure came stealing through the darkness, past the gray bogs and marshes, past the moldflats and slimefens, making its smoke-silent way to the south, toward the only human structure in sight, a technical compound surrounded by electrical fencing.