The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  ‘Let’s go back outside then.’

  We are at the end of a road outside a brick building. Around us is the forest. A stream flows out of the building (which I imagine to be old brick, says Eve, because it makes me think of that building in Venice, which the architect brought the tide into. The building she is remembering is the Querini Stampalia, its ravaged brickwork rising out of the sluggish ratswim of the Rio Santa Maria Formosa. The architect was Carlo Scarpa. It was an amazing thing he did. The guardians of Venice face a losing battle against salt and tides, foundations nibbled away faster than new layers of stucco can be slapped on; when the wind blows up the Adriatic, backing up the tides, you get a storm surge, the canals flood and this is every Venetian architect’s nightmare, the feared aqua alta. When Carlo Scarpa redesigned the palazzo as the Querini Stampalia museum, he made a water gate which, instead of shutting the flood tide out, welcomed it inside as an important guest and invited it to flow in elegant marble channels through the building) and down a gully.

  ‘Let’s go this way,’ says Eve.

  ‘Okay.’

  We’re in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed.

  ‘Keep going south.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Whoops, where did the stream go? Downstream there’s nothing but dry rocks and the bleached bones of trees.

  I catch up with her peering down into a twenty-foot depression at the bottom of which is a sturdy steel grate mounted in concrete.

  ‘It’s locked,’ she says. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Obviously, we need the key.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘not all the way back?’

  We’re standing outside a brick building. Around us is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building (through delicately jointed water gates, the salty tides of the Rio Santa Maria Formosa ebb and swell through Scarpa’s marble and Istrian interior. Remember, Eve, how we discovered Carlo Scarpa? We saw that statue of a huge nude woman washed up by the sea on the steps by the Biennale. The waves were teasing round her body. You said, ‘How original, to make the sea part of the sculpture.’ Monument to the Partisan Woman, that’s what it was called, we saw it from the vaporetto on the way back from the Lido and next day we walked down to look at it. It was Rîves who told us that Scarpa had set it there in the sea. Do you remember Rîves? We’d walked for hours by the sluggish canals of Cannaregio, through the Ghetto Nuovo, and were making our way tiredly back to our hotel. It started raining, hammering down. We took shelter in a café on the Grand Canal, near the Rialto bridge. One moment we were sitting, drinking coffee and the next the wind was kicking along the alleys, picking up scraps of paper, the first fat drops of rain were falling – watery phials that burst, releasing the scent of rain on dry ground, just like the monsoon – then all hell broke loose. Lightning, thunder, waiters at cafés up and down the banks dismantling their awnings, bringing in tables and chairs while we sat stolidly and watched the rain rifle down onto the canal. The vaporetto captains kept going, but afterwards we let the San Marco-bound boats go and decided to walk back via the Fenice to find the studio of Matteo lo Greco who, we’d been wrongly informed, had sculpted the wave-stranded woman. Our feet left wet trails through the labyrinth of Venice, in alleys with names like Calle dell’ Assassini, and at last we came across the gallery, a darkened stage where ballerina-like sculptures hovered in the shadows. Right at the back sat a young man with a huge music score spread half across the desk, half on his lap, playing a guitar. He put down the instrument as we came in. You said, ‘Don’t stop.’ He replied, ‘He doesn’t like me playing when there are people here,’ and this was Rîves. We talked for an hour about sculpture and Scarpa, whom Rîves quoted as saying: ‘In these times you should not expect any words of my own from me, none but those which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted.’ Rîves could talk on any subject: details of brickwork in Bellini’s paintings, the orchestra at Florian’s; somehow we found ourselves discussing the Venetian sewage system and how the city’s architects had hollowed cisterns under each piazza so that the rain would run in) and down a gully

  Eve picks up the keys. Turns to go. Stops. Takes the lamp. Ten minutes later we’re deep underground. Eve finds a small songbird in a wicker cage. The fittering lamp reveals we are in a splendid chamber whose walls are frozen rivers of orange stone.

  ‘Like Pêche Merle,’ says Eve.

  Memories crowd forward out of the shadows as Eve presses deeper into the cave. Why do these games, which are played in the mind, need caves and tunnels? Shades is the same, even the Vortex encourages troglodytes. Do they somehow reflect the innerscape of bowels, veins, stomach and heart, leading to the mazes of the mind where neurons make more connections than there are stars in the galaxy? Or do the tunnels and caves of multi-user games, meant to evoke thrills and danger, rekindle distant memories of humanity’s first homes? At Pêche Merle, Eve had been moved by the prints, outlined in lampblack, of a woman’s slender hands, left twenty-five thousand years ago.

  In a few minutes, we find a rock into which is carved the word ‘XYZZY’. No, Eve, don’t . . .

  ‘Xyzzy?’ says Eve.

  There is a vivid flash and we find ourselves standing at the end of a road outside a brick building. Around us is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building (whose unremarkable exterior hides passages that descend to lampless depths. A coder once told me, ‘You can’t have a proper game without a castle. The castle stands guard over the labyrinth.’ Every game maker is a labyrinth builder, and every architect is a castle builder. Castles are edifices erected by reason above the caves and tunnels of the subconscious. Are they meant to keep intruders out, or monsters in? And what is the ultimate purpose of any labyrinth but to bring you face to face with the monsters that lurk in your own psyche? That’s why you must experience death, in these games, so you can feel your own life more fully. Rîves told us that Scarpa used to play tricks on his – what would you call them, a writer has readers, what does an architect have – experiencers? For example, the paths in the garden of the Querini Stampalia end abruptly, some of them deliberately obstructed. At Treviso, Scarpa designed a cemetery where ropes block the paths. He wanted people in that place of death to stumble, because when you feel your body, you feel most intensely alive. Venetians, of all people, should know about masks. Scarpa wanted to strip away all the layers that mask direct experience, to bring you face to face with what’s left when all the masks are down and how I wish, how achingly I wish the masks were down between us Eve, you and I, watching the years and yes, tears too, flow away) and down a gully.

  Immortality for sale

  ‘We are so stupid,’ says Biffo. ‘We try to grab hold of a little bit of immortality. We don’t realise that we are already immortal.’

  I try not to argue with Biffo about Scientology. Instead, I tell myself that it’s a privilege to know someone who is going through something so extraordinary . . . if only it didn’t cost so much.

  ‘You shouldn’t think of it like that,’ says Biffo. ‘It’s not a great deal for transforming your life. It’s less than you’d pay for a house, or a wonderful car.’

  He reckons to have spent about £70,000 on Scientology training.

  Biffo says, ‘If you acknowledge that the world is in a terrible state and getting worse – crime, education, drugs, insanity, everything – well, let’s predicate a state of affairs that could account for this decline. If we are utterly logical, we come to the simple but enormously far-fetched idea that once, we used to be godlike. Since when we have declined, hahaha . . . It’s valueless writing this.’

  He means it’s pointless my writing down what he’s saying, which I am doing, as fast as I can.

  ‘We are immortal,’ Biffo tells me. ‘We are spirits trapped in the universe of mass, energy, space and time. We need to free ourselves. We are spirits who find ourselves in bodies, which is a most unpleasant and dangerous place to be. Life is a game on this planet. Sciento
logy is an escape route from this planet, from being trapped in a meat body. Sounds absurd, I know. Outlandish. Everyone thinks you’re mad if you go along with it.’

  The net, I tell Biffo, is full of immortality seekers: Kabbalists who claim immortality is a state of mind attainable by meditating on the letters ; cyborgians who want to replace human bits with robotic spares; extropians seeking to evolve beyond the mortal and human. I tell him about the cryogenists, who immure themselves in Tutankhamun-chambers of liquid nitrogen, hoping that a doctor from the future will reverse their deaths; the mind-uploaders who dream of transferring their brain contents to a hard disk and live forever in the silicon vortices of the net. There’s the ‘immortality’ of the roleplaying games (Jarly peddled immortality: for £100 he would play your character to wizard for you), and of virus buffs writing themselves epitaphs capable of infinite survival.

  ‘Well of course that’s all nonsense,’ says Biffo. ‘But immortality is infinite survival. We are spirits and a spirit is a “static”, meaning not material. Ron Hubbard understood this. He is a tremendous human being. A fantastic scholar. A man who discovered by his own efforts how to increase the IQ a thousand fold, how to operate as a spirit.’

  He looks at me and says, ‘Look here, I think you’ve got rather the wrong idea about what I’m up to. What we’re doing is deeply, deeply, scientific. We’re not just buggering about, you know. It’s work. Bloody hard work. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked. And we’re doing it to save the world.’

  ‘When I came across Dianetics,’ says Biffo, ‘I felt it was either profound philosophy, or utter nonsense, hahaha. If there was any truth in it, it had to be the most important book ever written. So I decided to check it out. I confess that at first I didn’t find the people as impressive as I’d expected, but the tech worked. It was utterly electrifying. It was electric, about ten million times more powerful than anything I’d ever thought of. At the age of fourteen if you’d asked me “What do you want to grow up to be?”, I’d have said “Brave and honest and true”. Not a stockbroker. I wanted to be a genuinely good man . . . Sometimes, in auditing, you have the feeling of tremendous goodness coming into you.’

  The scientific side, so far as I understand it, is the use of what he calls an ‘E-meter’. Biffo takes me up to his bedroom and shows me what look like two shining soup cans connected to a galvanometer.

  ‘When you hold these, a tiny current flows through your body. The stuff going on in your mind causes fluctuations and the needle measures them . . . I’ve been eating vitamins to try to put on weight. I was afraid I’d be too old to shift the needle.’

  I ask how auditing actually works.

  The first time he was audited, Biffo was asked, ‘Can you recall an incident from your past that you are willing to talk about?’

  He thought back to his first parachute jump, something he had always remembered with pleasure. He had just been seconded to Force 133 of the Special Operations Executive. ‘Our parachuting was not the same as for regular troops. We did it from high level – Parachuting from great heights at night. It was David Sterling’s [the founder of the SAS] idea . . .’

  ‘On the morning I hadn’t slept too well. We were up by six and went to the airfield, Latifia near Haifa, in Palestine. A bright, clear, beautiful April morning in 1943. I was ready. We’d already done a lot of drill. Were very muscled up. Once we got up there was an extraordinary contrast in the aeroplane, a good deal of anxiety and noise – it was a Halifax bomber. I’d noticed how even the most overconfident seeming parachutists, just before going, looked very white and was determined to put on a good show when my turn came. When they throw open the door it doubles the noise, plucks your testing finger away in the airstream. The red light goes green. The despatcher is yelling at you, ‘Go go go go’, at the top of his voice. The static lines are banging against the inside of the plane. You push yourself out. I looked out and felt ‘My God’. I never dreamed of not going. Outside the plane, I blacked out for a few seconds. When I came to I was tumbling high above the earth. Ground far above me. I was absolutely alone. Not a sound. When the chute opened, I was so delighted. It was so peaceful in the wide blue. I was really enjoying myself. As the ground neared, I began to get out of the harness. People were yelling. I thought they were applauding me, but they were shouting “You bloody fool! Get back in your harness.” I felt tremendously bucked.’

  ‘I got a very very vivid reaction – reshowing of the incident – during the auditing. I started to blubber – that’s the only word. I could feel my face twisting up and was making sobbing noises. I felt embarrassed. I’d been taught not to blub. Tried to stop it, but couldn’t really, so I just carried on. I was amazed. I thought, it’s not nonsense, there’s something very important going on here.’

  Threat to sue all internet users

  ‘Use the internet a lot, do you?’ asks Biffo. ‘Well I’m sorry to say it’s going to have to close down.’

  He glares at me. ‘People have been using it to spread lies. And they’ve taken copyright material and published it illegally.’

  Biffo is referring to a row, of which I am vaguely aware, that has been rumbling along in the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup, where a number of people have posted things which the Church of Scientology insists are confidential, violations of its copyright. Among the hijacked materials is a story about an intergalactic being who chains human souls together, dumps them at the bottom of volcanoes and detonates nuclear bombs on top of them. This is claimed to be a secret of one of the higher grades. A Scientology lawyer called Helena Kobrin starts issuing threats of legal action to people in the newsgroup. With a few deft touches, an unknown hoaxer transforms one of these into a threat against ‘all internet users’.

  Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology

  Date: Wed, 9 Aug 1995 12:19:04 -0700 (PDT)

  From: Helena Kobrin

  Subject: NOTICE FROM RTC TO ALL INTERNET USERS

  Distribution: world

  . . . It is essential that you take immediate and effective action to remove the unauthorized copies from your Web pages, servers, net news groups and any other places or means of distribution . . . I will expect immediate responses from all of you with a statement of your willingness to comply with these demands.

  Unfairly, but most amusingly, this wins Helena the Usenet’s Kook of the Month Award for September 1995. Meanwhile the spoof is spreading itself across the net with her email address on it. How will Helena cope if every one of the estimated fifty million internet users immediately sends her a personal statement of contrition?

  The Scientology thing, which initially we had all treated as a joke, has turned sour. Biffo has a right to spend his time and money on whatever he likes, but his absences at the Scientology centre in London and the headquarters in East Grinstead are growing longer and more frequent. Molly hates being left on her own and among his children there is a resentful if unspoken feeling that he is squandering their inheritance. Biffo, meanwhile, interprets any criticism as hostility to Scientology. I try to tell him that none of us knows or cares anything about Scientology. It may or may not be a marvellous thing, the issue is Biffo himself.

  One day Biffo announces he has decided to take lodgings in East Grinstead with a Scientologist family, so he can be near the library where he studies. This time he is gone for weeks. Christmas Eve arrives, Biffo doesn’t. East Grinstead is only a dozen miles from us. On Christmas Day, Eve and I drive across the bleak, otherwordly landscape of Ashdown Forest – snow flurries and white patches in the bracken – with our three small children bearing gifts for their grandfather.

  It’s bitterly cold. Wrapped up warm, they present themselves at the door of the house. A shimmering shape materialises on the other side of the frosted glass door.

  ‘He’s not in,’ says the unsmiling woman who opens it. ‘You can leave the presents on the hall table.’

  Ostriches and the moon

  On a warm night early in the summer, Biffo’s ques
t for immortality turns by mysterious alchemy into our search for Gliomach. The moon, which had been hanging like a lamp in the apple trees, has floated free into a clear sky. I am out with the children trying to catch its slippery disc in a telescope. As fast as I focus, it slides out of view. A yellow blaze low in the sky is Mars.

  Later, when the children are asleep, I go up to find Eve sitting on the edge of our bed taking off her make-up. She has nothing on, her back is like an Ingrès woman’s, cello-shaped.

  ‘Are the children in bed?’ she asks in a dull voice, not turning.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to my mother.’

  ‘Biffo?’

  ‘He promised her he’d stop Scientology when he got to some level called “clear”. But now he hasn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t seriously think he would?’

  ‘He’s more involved than ever. He never stops talking about it. She says they can’t have a normal conversation any more. Most of the time he sits in his room listening to tapes of Hubbard.’

  ‘There’s no way he’s going to stop. It’s become his whole life.’

  ‘She asked me to talk to him, but I’m too angry. Now there’s some other level he wants to reach before stopping.’

  ‘She’s got to face it, Eve. He’ll never stop.’

  ‘You think there’s no hope at all?’

  ‘None.’

  After a considerable silence she says, ‘She wanted to talk to the children, but I told her you were out moongazing.’

  ‘You should have said we were looking for Biffo,’ I say, trying to lighten the mood.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘With the telescope. He once told me that as a spirit he was not subject to the laws of gravity. Perhaps he’s floated up there. There’s a poem of Coleridge’s that puts it quite well . . .’