by Mark Teppo
Alex is dead quiet, takes shallow breaths, and watches through a minuscule opening in the thick branches. Heart atwitter: the thrill of the chase. They won’t find him yet. Some of the men look up, scanning the dense canopy with their binoculars. But the dogs remain calm, the men undecided. Until one dog growls, and points in a different direction. Then the party is off, and Alex is alone again. The world is passing by.
Satisfied that they’re gone, Alex munches a few cookies. She can keep this up for a long time: all day if necessary. Somewhere in the background there is the faintest of faint whispers, at the very threshold of perception: must talk, must interact. A premonition or a postulate? Alex shrugs it off and enjoys his splendid isolation. The silence doesn’t last long, though. It’s broken by the angry whine of ATVs and the deep rumble of a Land Cruiser. They come closer and set up shop right next to the deciduous tree. Men in sharp suits, with dark sunglasses. Women in easy wear that still emanates glamour. Armed with mobile phones, laptops, and portable laboratory equipment.
Alex recognizes them: the men and women from CSI, the smartest coppers in the world. They put on sterile white gloves before they touch anything. They set up hypersensitive microphones, infrared telescopes, motion detectors, chromatographs. They start up their laptops and link everything through wireless connections. Even satellites must be zooming in right now.
And while shaking with excitement, Alex keeps still. There’s no way they wouldn’t find her, but he wants to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible. The world should not pass by.
But her solitude lengthens as none of these bright people decides to give his nook, her cranny any attention. How can this be? Their equipment is top-of-the-line, cutting edge. They always catch their quarry. Yet their lively conversations and witty remarks have died down, their frantic gestures have collapsed into defeated headshakes. They’re packing up their equipment, and are gone.
The ensuing tranquility is pregnant: the calm before the storm reversed. Alex almost feels before she actually notices that someone is coming closer. She’s wearing pelts and covered in grime. She’s barefooted and moves with gracious calm. Her eyes constantly scan the undergrowth, while sometimes she takes a quick look-see of the wider environment, like a squirrel looking for acorns. Then she finds something, goes there to dig it out. A kind of root vegetable, a tuber maybe? She puts it in a bag of woven fibers, and searches onwards.
She comes near the sheltering tree and smells. She gazes up to the place where Alex hides, and—Alex wonders if she’s imagining it—looks Alex right in the eyes. After that short acknowledgement she is off again, gathering more food. The world is still passing by.
Does this count? Alex wonders if he’s been found. No time, as another group approaches, almost silently. A couple of men, wearing pelts and grime-smeared, just like the woman before them. They carry hunting spears and bows. They also stop shortly under the tree’s mighty frondescence. One of them points to the exact place where Alex has climbed up. He reads her tracks like an open book, and the hunters point to her refuge. Alex freezes in fright, certain that she’s been nailed. But the hunters turn away and continue their search for better prey. The world keeps passing by.
After that, nothing much happens for a couple of hours. Alex is getting bored: the cookies are finished, the lemonade is drunk. She’s tired of the game. However, as his boredom peaks, something breaks through her apathy, something indefinable, something weird, something wonderful.
It’s as if some pattern shifted, emerged from the fundaments of the forest. Are these the faeries, the elves? Or is it something else? It’s as if the wind is being choosy in stirring things up. It’s as if gravity is selectively switched off. It’s as if parts are coalescing that don’t belong, shouldn’t fit together. A shapeless form, a formless shape, something that doesn’t have any right to be.
The alien contraption rises from the forest floor, as if it’s been a part of it all along. It moves upward, in a slow spiral around the Alex tree. When passing Alex’s hidey-hole, it wiggles, three times, as if in greeting. Alex smiles and waves back. Smooth and swift, the strange phenomenon moves into the great unknown.
—in the library—
"Hello Alex, welcome to the organic library of Abbonly." The old librarian says. "Where we do things differently."
"I certainly hope so." Alex smiles.
"Why is that?"
"Well, the thing I’m looking for—all the other places I’ve tried came up empty. University libraries, the National Library, Wikipedia, Google."
"It might be in here somewhere. Or have been. Or will be."
"That sounds a bit . . . strange."
"You don’t know the half of it. Anyway, if I might give you a piece of advice."
"Yes?"
"Start by searching for something simple first. Something you already know."
"Why?"
"To give you a feel how things work—if that’s the correct way to describe it—in here."
"You’re not interested in what I’m looking for?"
"I’m sure it’ll be fascinating, but I’m busy with more important things."
"Such as?"
"Staying sane."
And this is supposed to be the library of the future? Alex thinks, shrugs it off, and goes to the first wall of books. The books are all on electronic paper, the latest version made to feel and smell like actual paper, but artificial nonetheless. They have titles on their backs, but the nearby titles Alex sees in her section don’t quite seem to belong together. If there’s an ordering principle, then it fully escapes him. Maybe a catalogue . . . oh yeah, they don’t have a catalog here, but smart goggles: voice a search term, and it highlights the books where they appear most. The brighter a section or a book, the higher the chances of bingo. Almost like an internet search engine, but the librarians maintain that there is more spillover and cross-reference here.
Alex searches a straightforward term, like "meme," and the library lights up all around like a starry, midnight sky. She heads for a promising constellation and takes a shining book out of that section. He reads the most luminescent segments, follows cross-references to nearby works, checks those out, and for a while is lost in the brilliance and the pleasure of finding things out.
It’s a happy and decidedly mixed pleasure: on the one hand she can never absorb enough knowledge: learning how to make contact with people, learning how to understand things, learning how to explain things. He could stay here forever, in continuous immersion. But she realizes that unexploited knowledge is about as useful as forgotten dreams. Eventually, he needs to get out and spread it. Must communicate, must interact.
Then she starts to notice something strange. "But . . . the letters are alive. The books change." He says to the section’s assistant.
"We’ve noticed that." The assistant says, matter-of-fact.
"But how?"
"We’re not sure. The Silicon Valley billionaires—our sponsors—told us to use state-of-the-art equipment (experimental, if need be) and cutting edge algorithms. Hence we made the books all electronic.
"Now in order to keep them as up-to-date as possible—post-final corrections, new footnotes, revised curricula and such—we linked them all to the central database. Everything worked fine: the books updated and upgraded exactly as we wanted them to. Until at a certain time we noticed that changes crept into them beyond our control. Even worse: we couldn’t change them back to older versions. The books transformed before our eyes, and out of our control."
"Wow."
"Wow, indeed. But all the original books were getting corrupted, often changing beyond recognition. They’re all perfectly legible, but are just different."
"You didn’t reboot the whole system?"
"We would have loved to, but our sponsors wouldn’t let us. They thought this was the coolest thing possible, and told us to let it go on unhindered. For a short time, we had the biggest and most flexible library of the world. Now it’s all gone, evolved awa
y before our eyes."
"Still, this place is frantic: look at all the people here."
"A lot of them are researchers from our sponsors, constantly weirded out and loving every minute of it. These people are on a different plane. Others are just sensation seekers checking out the freak show. Only a rare few like you still try to look for something."
Like getting water with a sieve. Like saving species in a zoo. Like using a hammer to nail a superposition of states.
Maybe Alex is not using the right tools, the correct equipment. Maybe the rules are just different, and once you’ve worked them out, the system might be working better, more efficient. The library assistants may not be of much help here, but the funky nerds who are traversing the library in a state of bliss might. With some effort, Alex manages to get one a bit more down to earth.
"What are the rules?" Alex asks.
"It would certainly help if we could figure those out." The manna coming down from geek heaven.
"You haven’t yet?"
"There are some principles we’re developing, but they’re merely approximations. Either the rules change too fast for us, or they’re too complicated."
"And if there are no rules?"
"Yeah: that would be radical."
"But books changing according to rules that are also changing . . . "
"We don’t call it the organic library for nothing."
It’s like talking to a weather aficionado admiring a hurricane because it just is: understanding comes later, if at all. How did his search become waylaid to become the search for the right search? Even worse: to regress into the quest for first principles in a system gone haywire that might lead to new or better insights?
Surely, there must be more behind this. A driving force, an emergent property. Something hiding behind the madness, maybe using the complexity as a mask, a shield. Involution second nature to it, intricacy an inherent quality.
"Wouldn’t a developing artificial mind be a more likely explanation?" Alex tries with another, hopefully more forthcoming researcher.
"If there’s an AI—or more than one—out there, it hasn’t made its existence known to us." This one seems to answer straight.
"Wouldn’t it want to stay in hiding?"
"Whatever’s behind this: algorithms run amok, memes replicating like viruses, a Chinese room on fire, even an emergent intelligence . . . if it thinks, it sure won’t think like us. It’s alien, quintessentially different. You know the saying?"
"What saying?"
"’If lions could speak, we would not understand them.’ Whatever is in there, it’s not communicating in any way that makes sense to us."
"You’re not afraid?"
"Oh, no. This is so cool."
"If this alien intelligence is evil, it might take over the world."
"Oh, skiffy balderdash. But whatever’s in here won’t get out: there are no connections to the internet, and the whole building is a Faraday Cage."
"So you have taken precautions."
"Of course: this shouldn’t get out. We’ll never get a better chance to study this in isolation."
Alex isn’t sure: if it’s something that has emerged from our evolutionary background, our cultural diversity, it can’t be that strange. The alien that’s staring us in the face might be something that’s been with us since time immemorial. Lurking beneath the surface, giving us the illusion of control.
Maybe it doesn’t want to communicate, or maybe it should learn to . . .
—in the room—
"There is one type of global opacity [ . . . ], namely, the lucid dream. In the lucid dream the dreamer is fully aware that whatever she experiences is just phenomenally subjective states."
—Thomas Metzinger,
from Being No-One, pg. 565.
Alex tries to pick up the conversation pieces, not sure what, where, and how they are. Tanaka remains unperturbed: a cold fish if Alex ever saw one. "In this, more metaphorical world, you constantly confirm yourself with the self-inflicted patterns of the model currently activated by your brain."
What is that supposed to mean? Alex tries to focus, but lingering images of a one-way-street village, of being up to the neck in the woods and a hyper-evocative library keep crossing her mind.
"Can we, ehm, start again?" Alex asks, figuring losing face is less important than getting a grip—however slippery—on what’s going on.
"No," Tanaka answers with a blank stare, "the process is already self-sustaining. But you might escape."
Escape? Alex is losing ground, feels like the carpet is pulled from under him. A hyperactive imagination? A brain on the verge of collapse? Monsters from the id, spillover from the subconscious? If the latter, maybe find a way to end this semi-hypnotic state?
"I mean," Alex, clutching at straws, "let’s get back to basics."
"Didn’t I already propose that there are no basics? Wrong approach, ignores the information/reality dualism. Not to mention the spatiality/change vector potentiality."
"I’m afraid I don’t understand you." Alex has to admit, not an easy thing for her.
"It’s also hard for me to understand you people," Tanaka says, "you are probably not quite self-conflicted enough."
"What?"
"Which, given your collapsed state, should not be surprising. Still, the inherent fuzziness in your means of communication is encouraging."
"What?"
"The fear of your fragility, the reserve about your resilience, both still unresolved."
"What?" Is that all I can come up with? Alex thinks. Overcome my puzzlement. No chance: her vision blurs with images of inconceivable football matches, a matching assortment of gates and a gig at the gates of a new dawn.
She wills his brain to cool down, but the maelstrom of thoughts, images, patterns evolving and dissolving, if anything, intensifies. Senses are amplified: every sound an explosion, every color a fireworks, the floor, chair, and table feeling like beds of nails. A tsunami of fear of the unknown overtowering the solemn island of rationality. Old, almost forgotten habits threaten to take over: retreat, withdraw, and reorder the world into predictability. Alex’s life before the experimental therapy of adaptable sunglasses, noise-reducing headphones, and smoothest silk gowns. And the slow, ever-so-gradual return to the real world: must interact, must communicate. With the selective memory loss, and the purposeful deletion of sex characteristics. A delicate balance: oversensitive senses, volatile fear syndromes, and a hyperactive brain: pieces of mind pirouetting to achieve peace of mind. Peace of mind is for the soon obsolete. Now where did that thought come from?
A dry whack splits the air.
Did I just slap myself? Alex wonders, left cheek burning . . .
"Basically, our theory really says that most autistic people or people with Asperger’s are savants. But this is buried under social withdrawal and fear of new environments. Their resistance to interaction and fear may obscure the hypercapability that they have."
—Kamila Markham, from the article
"Welcome to My World," New Scientist
Vol. 199 No. 2674, pg. 37.
{Imagining the inconceivable, part 1:
Imagine you are a being with no self-consciousness: the computational power used for the continuous generation of selfhood is now available for other purposes, like, for example, building a better understanding of your environment. Then you see a truly unique opportunity arising for which you need both the cooperation and understanding of the self-conscious part of you (unfortunately, you’re stuck with it—the considerably less intelligent part—through an evolutionary glitch).
You send visionary output through the usual channel, but it isn’t picked up or understood. Yet you must get this message through. Remember that you have a whole nervous system at your disposal.}
—at the match—
This is a game about a game. Imagine yourself in Alex’s (f/m) place, and at the indicated crossroads choose one option of three. Points will be awarded according to:
appropriateness;
insightfulness;
fullofitfulness;
A bit against her liking, Alex’s friends take him to a match: the match. She’s not a big football fan, but his friends are so enthusiastic, so into it that they persuade her to join them this once. And it’s a good test, too: see if he can stand the noise and the crazy atmosphere: must talk, must interact. At a match this important she should:
Be very happy and lucky to have a ticket at all.
Stay home and avoid the inevitable fights.
Sell the ticket to the highest bidder.
Alex doesn’t have anything in the right colors, but her friends provide him with:
The right outfit for the Blue-White Army.
A helmet, a Kevlar vest, and pepper spray (in Yellow-and-Blue, of course).
A flat flask to hide booze and a plastic, odortight bag to hide the drugs (in Yellow-and-White, of course).
Once inside the stadium—on one of the season tickets of a friend who couldn’t make it—Alex finds out that the game is between:
Metaconsiousness United vs. Réal Indívidual.
Houston Space Cowboys vs. Glasgow Time Rangers.
Uncollapsed Wave Front vs. Kepler’s Laws.
Metaconsciousness United is united in almost every sense of the word: their passes find each other with uncanny ease; their position play is near-perfect; they switch from defense to attack and vise-versa so effortlessly that they almost seem the same; they seek, test, and exploit an opponent’s weakness with an unnerving verve—and all that in total silence. Their lack of theatrics and footy curses is more than compensated for by the Indívidualistas, whose players fight for ball possession like demons possessed, and once they have that ball they will only release it after a spectacular show of singular brilliance, or after it has hit the ropes.
The Space Cowboys play it broad, deep, and high, using every square meter on and above the field (regretting that their "deep-forward-in-space" is only allowed in geosynchronous orbit) while the Time Rangers use their ages-old timeshare technique: sometimes there are less—considerably less—than eleven players in the field, sometimes more—a lot more, but the average of every player is exactly ninety minutes (plus extra time).