“I’m all right,” she started to say to her students, anxious to reassure them, although the word “I” felt inaccurate. But as she started to say it, the village woman who had been holding her spoke the next word, and someone else said the next, in their own dialect, so that the sentence was complete. She felt like the crest of a wave in the ocean. The crest might be considered a separate thing from the sequence of crests and troughs behind it, but what would be the point? The impact of such a crest hitting a boat, for example, would be felt by the entire chain. The great loneliness that had afflicted her for so long began, at last, to dissolve. It was frightening and thrilling all at once. She laughed out loud, and felt the people around her possess, lightly, that same complex of fear and joy. Gazing around at the enormous tapestry, she saw it as though for the first time. There was no concept, no language that could express what it was—it was irreducible, describable only by itself. She looked at it and heard her name, all their names, all names of all things that had ever been, spoken out loud without a sound, reverberating in the silence.
She found, over the next few days, that the conjugal groups among the people of the settlement had the same fluidity as other aspects of their lives. The huts in the rest of the compound were used by various groups as they formed and re-formed. It felt as natural as sand grains in a shallow stream that clump together and break apart, and regroup in some other way, and break apart again. The pattern that underlay these groupings seemed obvious in practice but impossible to express in ordinary language. Those related by blood did not cohabit amongst themselves, nor did children with adults—they were like the canvas upon which the pattern was made, becoming part of it and separate from it with as much ease as breathing. On fine nights the people would gather around a fire, and make poetry, and sing, and this was so extraordinary a thing that the archaeologist was moved to ask her students to remove their caps and veils and experience it for themselves. But by this time the young man was worn out by unfamiliarity and hard living—he was desperate to be back home in Bamako, and was seriously considering a career outside academia. The older, female student was worried about the news from town that violence in the region would shortly escalate. So they would not be persuaded.
After a few days, when the archaeologist showed no sign of rejoining her students for the trip home—for enough time had passed by now, and their Tuareg guide was concerned about the impending conflict—the students decided to act according to their instructions. Without warning they set upon the archaeologist, binding her arms and forcing her to wear the cap and veil. They saw the change ripple across her face, and the people nearby turned around, as before. But this time their faces were grim and sad, and they moved as one toward the three visitors. The archaeologist set up a great wailing, like a child locked in an empty room. Terrified, the students pulled her out of the building, dragging her at a good pace, with the villagers following. If the Tuareg guide had not been waiting at the perimeter the visitors would surely have been overtaken, because he came forward at a run and pulled them beyond the boundary.
Thus the archaeologist was forced to return to Bamako.
Some years later, having recovered from her experience, the archaeologist wrote up her notes, entrusted them to her former student, and disappeared from Bamako. She was traced as far as Tessalit. With the fighting having intensified, nobody was able to investigate for over a year. The woman to whom she had left her notes returned to try to find her, guessing that she had gone to the settlement, but where the settlement had been, there were only ruins. The people had vanished, she was told, in the middle of a sandstorm. There was no sign of their belongings, let alone the great tapestry. The only thing she could find in the empty, arid, rocky wasteland was a small, round pebble, shot with a vein of rose quartz.
In the notes she left behind, the archaeologist had written down her conclusions—that the machine generated a field of a certain range, and that this field had the power to dissolve, or at least blur, the boundary between self and other. She wrote in French, and in Arabic, and in her mother tongue, Bambara, but after a while the regularity of her script began to break up, as a sandcastle loses its sharp edges and recognizable boundaries when the tide comes in. Thereafter her notes turned into intricate, indecipherable symbols reminiscent of the great tapestry that had hung in the main chamber of the settlement. These continued for several pages and finally, on the last page, she had written in French: I cannot bear it. I must return.
Thus end the three accounts.
Candidates will observe the requisite moment of contemplation.
The candidate will now consult the Compendium of Machine Anomalies, the Hephaestian Mysteries, and the Yantric Oracle, which will help put these accounts in context. Having completed its perusal, the candidate will make the requisite changes to its own parts in order to generate hypotheses on these questions. Is the negative space of ambiguity machines infinite? Is it continuous? Are the conceptual sub-spaces occupied by each machine connected to each other—by geography, concept, or some other as-yet-undiscovered attribute? What can we make of the relationship between human and machine? If an engineer can dream a machine, can a machine dream an engineer? An artist? A mathematician? An archaeologist? A story? Is the space of ambiguity machines set like a jewel or a braid within the greater expanse of the space of impossible machines? Is it here, in the realm of dream and imagination, that the intelligent machine might at last transcend the ultimate boundary—between machine and non-machine? To take inspiration from human longing, from the organic, syncretic fecundity of nature, the candidate must be willing to consider and enable its own transformation.
Begin.
Ambiguity Machines: An Examination Page 3