by Gary Glass
This is as good a way to kill time as any, Marley thought. Until the shooter arrives with his dart gun.
“But your mind works differently?” she said.
“This mind here isn’t my mind,” he said, pointing at himself — then at her: “That mind there isn’t your mind, but it tells you that it is. That is the story of you. This mind here doesn’t tell that story.”
Roger was talking only to Delacourt. Marley was irrelevant. Marley was an eavesdropper.
“What story does it tell?” she said.
Roger didn’t answer for a moment. His eyes focused far away. Then he began: “A long time ago, chemistry began to be alive on this planet. It was probably deep in the oceans, in the mineral columns that form around thermal vents. Of course, at that stage, there wasn’t much to it yet. Senseless molecules mindlessly replicating whenever they floated up against the right kinds of chemical catalysts. Follow me so far?”
Delacourt looked genuinely interested. “Yes.”
“That was the humble beginnings of what you see before you today.”
He smiled and puffed out his chest. The pinnacle of creation.
“Yet, in fact, life has no beginning. Life is just a way of thinking about stuff.”
Marley was wondering how many people were listening to this “story.”
“You were trained as a paleo-biologist, weren’t you?” Delacourt said.
“Astro-biologist,” Marley said automatically.
“You’re not paying attention,” Roger said to Marley. “You should listen. This is the story of IDD. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“You have?”
“Of course. I’m the poster child.”
“The poster child?”
Roger nodded toward the screens behind the bar.
“Yes,” Marley said, without looking.
Delacourt nudged him. “Carl, look.”
Marley looked up. The garish façade of The Purple Pony filled the silent screens. Newsline had picked up the local station’s feed. Running captions gave the muted voiceover:
“Negotiators have been inside for nearly an hour…”
Marley felt something twist in his chest. “Oh, no.”
But Roger seemed uninterested. “Now where was I?” he said. “Life, so-called, begins. That was about four billion years ago. Billion. With a B. A very long time. A lot has changed since then. And it’s changing faster all the time.”
Delacourt nodded.
“That’s significant,” Roger said. “It’s changing faster all the time. The pace of life’s development has been accelerating since the very beginning. Just like those epidemiological charts you have on IDD. A typical geometric progression curve. It goes a long time hardly rising at all. Then the curve gets a little steeper. Then quite steep. Then all of a sudden it’s going straight up.”
“Yes,” Delacourt said.
Despite his distraction, Marley found his attention drawn to Roger’s monologue — not to what he was saying but to the quality of the speech, the clarity and connectedness of it. Roger’s intelligence had always been one of the most striking aspects of his personality, but he’d also always been highly disorganized. Even after most of his previous symptoms had been wiped out by IDD, he had continued to be either unable or unwilling to follow a coherent train of thought.
“Where the break is depends on how you scale the graph,” Roger continued. “Any point in time could be the point at which the graph breaks upward. It just depends on how big your units are. We humans look at things in terms of human-scale units of time — days, years, centuries. But suppose there is an alien creature out there in the cosmos somewhere whose lifespan extends over millennia? Suppose the timescale on their graphs of life are in the millions of years. From their point of view, life on earth is still just idling along, still just getting up to speed.”
“Yes.”
“The earth is such a creature. ‘When did life on earth begin?’ is a human-sized question. But when did the life of the earth begin? That’s a question with an altogether different scale.”
The shooter is on his way, Marley thought. The clock is ticking. Just killing time telling stories until the end.
“What’s all this got to do with IDD, Roger?”
Roger ignored him. “Gradually these self-replicating molecules down in the ocean became more complex. They combined and differentiated and specialized. Cell walls were a critical early development. Cell walls let them escape from the confines of their mineral rock towers and float free, taking their internal environment with them. Little capsules of RNA molecules. Each one a little chemical machine, a molecular mechanism.”
Marley heard something on comm, but it was muted. He wondered if Delacourt had heard. He looked up at the screens. The talking heads, faces profoundly composed, were commenting on the “standoff in Alaska.” What did it portend for the battle with IDD? What was IDD really? Profile shots of Roger and Marley, captured from the video clip, were set up nose to nose. And now they had names too. Marley vs. Sturgeon. The great facedown. The disease and its maker. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Was the Bride of Frankenstein watching, wherever she was?
Roger continued his recitation to Delacourt like he had all the time in the world: “So now that they were floating free, the next big development was environmental reactivity. If a cell could react to environmental changes, it could keep itself together better than a cell that couldn’t. A cell that could snap shut its doors in the presence of toxic substances survived better. Biologists call it ‘irritability.’ Irritability is the humble origin of the five senses. Smell is the oldest sense, most like the original. It was a blind and deaf world in those days. A world of scents and tastes.”
Marley was listening for — and dreading — Benford’s voice in his ear, telling him the shooter was ready. He had no idea how he was going to convince Roger to leave the diner anyway. He didn’t even want to try. But he didn’t know what would happen if he didn’t.
“Why don’t you try Karen again?” he said.
Roger gave him a curious look, a forgiving look, and picked up the phone. But he continued talking as he dialed: “The next big development was motility,” he said, putting the clunky phone to his ear. “We were already mobile, thanks to our cell walls. But we were just floating about in the soup. Motility is deliberate mobility. At first, it wasn’t even directional. But a capsule that could not only snap its portals shut but also move away when it encountered a hostile environment had an advantage over one that could only lie there and wait till the situation improved. For a capsule that could move, the situation would probably improve sooner. Remember what I said about how life is changing faster?”
“Yes, I see what you’re getting at,” Delacourt said.
He turned the phone off again. “No answer.”
“Are you sure you have the number right?” Marley said.
Roger ignored him and continued his tale: “And so it went on. Faster and faster. Many, many improvements were discovered — or invented. Depends on your point of view. Directionality was a big one, early on. Not only to be able to initiate movement, but to be able to move in a particular direction. To be able to move is good, and if you can pick a particular direction, even better! And to be able to pick a direction we had to be able to sense differences in our surroundings in different directions. That led to the development of different kinds of sensitivity. Not just molecular detection, what we now call taste and smell, but light and heat and, eventually, sound. Another advance came as cells learned to join forces. Colonies evolved into symbiots. Symbiots evolved into eukaryotes, cells with nuclei. Eukaryotes evolved into multi-cellular plants and animals. Each new development was an increase in complexity and sophistication. Which means our interactions with our environment and each other became more nuanced, more subtle and differentiated. In the early years our repertoire of reactions was pretty limited: we either opened our mouths and ate whatever came along, or closed our mouths and waited f
or better times. Each increase in subtlety came faster than the one before it. Because with complexity comes flexibility. With flexibility comes adaptability. The more we changed, the faster we could change. Each change provided the foundation for the next one. See what I mean?”
This was far from being Marley’s first encounter with this material. Standard life-sciences textbook stuff. But Roger recounted the history of life on earth as if it were his personal story. His life was the earth’s life.
“Yes,” Delacourt said.
She looked completely absorbed in the story, her pretty eyes big and glassy. She looked almost childlike.
“My story is too tidy, of course. I didn’t talk about bacteria. But they might be the most important part. Or maybe viruses. Bacteria might have invented viruses. But it’s hard to say. Stories are always tidier than realities. They have to be. That’s what good they are.”
Newsline was showing overhead shots of the street now. They must have had a camera crew hanging out a window. Main Street was filled with people. Where were all these people coming from? The wet grey air seemed to blend them all together into one swelling mass — two swelling masses, one either side of the police cordon outside the Pony — like a fat grub cut in half. They seemed to pulse and surge — as if the halves, trying to reunite, were blindly groping for each other.
Marley’s sense of doom grew stronger with every passing moment. He wanted everything to stop. But he wanted everything to hurry.
“IDD, Roger. What about IDD?”
But Roger made no reply. He sat back, watching Marley and Delacourt. Was he finished? Just as Marley opened his mouth to ask, Roger began again: “Fast forward now, a few hundred million years. To the invention of mind. Here’s how it happened. Just the broad strokes. By now we are not only multi-cellular, we are multi-multi-cellular. We have organs, parts, systems. There’s a circulatory system, and a digestive system, a muscular system, a reproductive system, and so on. Earthworms have all these systems. But they don’t have minds. Depends where you want to draw the line, of course, but it doesn’t help us to blur the distinction between any sort of nervous system at all and actual mind. We had to have a nervous system for all these organs to communicate with one another, to stay in sync. The nervous system was a very important invention. Before that, the coordination of our internal organs was pretty rudimentary, mediated by chemical interactions. Each organ lived in the stew of chemical expressions produced by the other organs within the body. That was its environment. It’s not a very good analogy, but Dr. Marley needs for me to be brief.”
Marley started. Had something happened? No. Where had he been? Staring at the screens. Why wasn’t Benford saying anything?
“But the nervous system made these internal communications electrical,” Roger said. “And that—”
“Why don’t you try Karen again now?”
“Why?”
“Maybe she was just in the shower or something.”
“No,” Roger said firmly.
Liar. He knows it’s a lie. — Marley’s head was swimming. He felt hot. — He knows I’m a lie.
Roger continued, unrelentingly, speaking only to Delacourt: “The nervous system made internal communications electrical, rather than chemical. And that meant speed. Things were changing faster again. We call the parts of our bodies ‘organs.’ But organs have parts too. The heart has chambers, for example. The lung has lobes. The nervous system has nerves, ganglia, and, eventually, for some of us, brains. Without brains there is no mind. But without nerves there is no brain. Without bodies there is no nervous system. Each is built up from the other. The brain brings nerves from all over the body close together. This innovation made it possible for the body to coordinate its organs with more sophistication and subtlety. Speed and efficiency. Faster and faster. Then, not exactly all at once, but rather suddenly, mind happened. Though it took millions of years, it was sudden in terms of the pace of change up till then. — Faster and faster!”
The dreaded voice came at last: “The tranq shooter is in position. Can you get Sturgeon out?”
Marley glanced at Delacourt quickly. She didn’t know anything about the plan. She wouldn’t have any idea what Benford was talking about. But Delacourt showed no reaction. She was giving Roger her full attention, her dark eyes shining. Benford must have had them cut Delacourt out of the channel.
Marley didn’t know what to do. Delacourt was out of the loop. Benford could hear everything going on. She knew they’d gotten nowhere with Roger. Can you get him out? Was she kidding? How the hell was he supposed to answer her? Mind rays? Jesus Christ almighty!
Roger was watching Marley now. “The development of mind,” he said, “was as revolutionary as anything that had come before it, but it wasn’t magical.”
He’s watching me, Marley thought. He’s been watching me all along. He knows what’s going on.
“Mind is as natural as anything else,” Roger said. “But it seems different because that’s what it is made to do. It’s meant to make things seem. Complex brains create metaphors, symbols. Symbols are notions that stand for real objects. Symbols allow brains to think about the world without acting on the world. Less developed organisms can’t think at all. They can only act. But animals with complex central nervous systems, brains, can act symbolically. Thinking is acting symbolically. If you can do that, you can make maps of the world, and solve more complex problems. A rat can run a maze because it makes a map of the maze as it explores it. All territorial animals have some kind of map in their brains. See what I mean?”
He was looking at Marley, but he was speaking to Delacourt. Or was he?
Delacourt nodded.
Benford was in his ear again: “Dr. Marley, the situation out here is deteriorating. You’ve got to try to get Sturgeon moving.”
Deteriorating? What the hell did that mean? — Marley looked at the screens again. The crowd, though half obscured by the thin veil of rain, seemed more active, more mobile than before.
“Still listening, Carl?” Roger said.
Marley’s attention snapped back to Roger like he’d jerked its leash. “Yes, Roger! Yes, but where are you going with all this?”
“Well, since symbols aren’t physical they are not bound by physical constraints. Symbols can do anything, be anything. But they are constrained nevertheless by the physicality of the body that thinks them. If the body acts on thoughts that lead to its death, those thoughts die. A new kind of evolution then appeared. Symbolic evolution. Symbolic evolution is very, very fast. And very deadly. You don’t want to just think anything at all, you want to think things that are good for your body. But how do you know what’s good for your body? How do you know what is you and what isn’t you? And so mind discovered — or invented — consciousness. Consciousness is the idea of you. What you are is what you’re conscious of. Your personality, your self, is a construct, an imagined thing. It’s a virtual organism playing by virtual rules. But those rules must be mappable to the real world. Otherwise the virtual organism has no real value to the actual organism. When the map fails, when the model can’t accommodate the actual, you call that a mental disorder. It’s something like a scientific theory being shattered by a major anomaly. So here’s my question for the psychiatrist: what determines what you’re conscious of?”
Delacourt looked at him too. Marley felt like he was being attacked. He didn’t have time for guessing games. And why hadn’t Roger asked Delacourt this pointless question anyway? It was her area! And why wasn’t she saying anything? She hadn’t said a word.
Roger wasn’t going to let it go.
“What determines what a person can be conscious of, Dr. Marley?” he said.
“The brain,” Marley said irritably. “The body.”
Roger smiled. “No,” he said. “Consciousness isn’t physical. That’s awareness. Consciousness applies only within the symbolic realm of the mind itself. True, that’s ultimately founded upon bodily awareness, but consciousness isn’t that much h
elp dealing with the physical world. We were doing a damn fine job of that without consciousness.” Roger looked at him sympathetically. Just a moment more, he seemed to say. Hang on. “It was a trick question,” he said. “Life moves faster now, you see. But it also moves in a much larger perceptual universe. Those early capsules floating about, what did they know about the universe? The range of their contact with it was limited to whatever they happened to float up against. That was all they were capable of knowing. The conceptual universe has been getting bigger and bigger ever since. The invention of consciousness vastly expanded that universe.”
Benford in his ear again: “Dr. Marley, can you bring him out or not?”
“I’m working on it!” Marley said loudly.
Delacourt and Roger both looked at him curiously, amused. The voices! The voices! He wanted to grab Roger and throw him out the door physically. But he also wanted to tell Roger it was all a trap.
“Goddamn it, Roger!” he said. “What is IDD?”
“The earth invented life,” Roger said, unperturbed. “Or discovered it. Both words are wrong. The earth did it. That’s not much better. Let me put it this way: the world is what is happening, and what is happening is alive.” His eyes burned into Marley. “You and I are what the world is doing. Don’t you see? We’re not on the world, we’re in it.”
“IDD, Roger. What is IDD?”
“It’s the next thing. It’s what the world is doing with consciousness. It’s what the world is doing on top of consciousness. Human consciousness has only just arrived on the scene. A few thousand years ago. Maybe a few tens of thousands of years. A blink in time. Faster and faster. Already the next thing is happening. Faster and bigger. Bigger than us. Bigger than what we think the universe is. Bigger than what we imagine.”
Marley felt dizzy. “What’s bigger than the universe?”
“Bigger than the human universe, doc. The world is opening her eyes. She’s looking out. Out.”