FAUST’S SHADOW: A Twice-Told Tale

by John Fast

  More applause.

  “As you know, we formed our company just two years ago with the goal of developing the most advanced eco-simulations on the planet. And we succeeded. Our evolutionary source codes provide scientists with all the tools they need to reconstruct the eco-past and to predict the eco-future.”

  A loud and long applause filled the room.

  “Our company has three goals and three markets: research, education, entertainment. As you also know, we’ve recently developed a home version of Quatix as an eco-simulation game. And I’m happy to announce that we’re offering free starter kits to each student at Highbrid High!”

  The room exploded with a roar and everyone stood and clapped.

  Gray laughed, smiled and waved.

  “Thank you, thank you,” she effused, trying to settle us down again. “You can evolve your own quatecologies on your home portals, and you can enter the local, state, national and international Quatix Tournaments. All the details are available at our company’s streamsite. So, congratulations on your new beginning. And thank you, again.”

  She waved, got another standing ovation, and stepped to the side.

  Professor Alvarez returned to the microphone.

  “Thank you, CEO Gray,” he said, “for your generous donations to the Highbrid Highschool. And now we’d like to invite you to join us at our Opening Day Picnic!”

  The entire room erupted with a collective, “Hooray!” And everyone headed for the exits. I caught up with Xi Zhu and his younger cousin, Xi Zhen, in the lobby.

  “That was pretty cool,” Xi Zhen said, “but what’s the big deal? The Holo-Mars exhibit at the Smithsonian is much better. You really feel like you’re walking on the red desert.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good one,” Xi Zhu agreed.

  “The difference,” I replied, “is that the Holo-Mars exhibit is a direct streamcast from the Martian Outpost.”

  “So?” Xi Zhen asked.

  “So,” I said, “a quatecology isn’t a direct streamcast from the ocean floor, with a few special effect quaticals thrown in, it’s a totally simulated world. Everything you see has evolved from some very sophisticated algorithms.”

  “You mean the fish aren’t real?”

  “I mean they’re not pictures of fish, they’re interactive evolutionary algorithms. As René Magritte would’ve said, ‘Ceci n’est pas un poisson.’”

  “Huh?”

  “In other words, the fish are real as rain.”

  “Cool.”

  Very cool, I thought. The convergence of data-ecologies: brave new worlds.

  CHAPTER 14.

  Incantations

  I returned to Paxton’s Lab many times that fall and winter. I felt like I could talk with him about anything, and he always welcomed me. I walked to his office on a snowy afternoon in December and sat in the chair in front of his desk. The wall screens continued to rain green algorithms, despite the cold weather.

  “I’m preparing for the International Spring Quatix Tournament in Bologna,” I said, glancing at the screens. “I’m also going to enter the International Summer Quatix Tournament in Manhattan. If I win either one, I’ll be the youngest Quatix Master in the world.”

  Paxton leaned back in his chair and said, “Two quatecologies are loaded into the same holo-processor, then it’s winner take all?”

  “It’s a fish-eat-fish world,” I replied.

  “But evolutionary algorithms aren’t toys,” he objected. “They’re powerful computer codes that can develop some very complex forms. What if one of your quaticals escapes into the global stream and destroys every data-ecology it encounters?”

  “Can’t happen,” I declared, waving my hand dismissively. “Too many safety nets.”

  “What if the nets fail?”

  “Not possible,” I decreed. “And, even if they did, the Cyber-Police bleach the global stream every day. They kill every stray virus and bug.”

  “The more antivirals we use,” Paxton reminded me, “the more sophisticated the viruses become. The more antibiotics we use, the more sophisticated the bacteria become.”

  “Fire is dangerous too,” I protested. “But where would we be without it?”

  “Yes, Prometheus,” Paxton replied. “But we must use our knowledge wisely. They don’t call Quatix a, ‘God Game,’ for nothing. And, speaking of God Games, how is your search for the key to all codes going?”

  “I’m still learning how to write these evolutionary algorithms. And when I’m good enough, I’ll use them to evolve some neural nets and pattern recognition programs. And I’ll use those nets and programs to decipher an old sycamore tree.”

  Paxton gave me a puzzled look.

  I thanked him for his time, and hurried home to work on my quatecology.

  CHAPTER 15.

  Fetish Work

  I stood in Alexa’s kitchen a few days later and watched as she plowed through the stack of books on the breakfast table. She had barely acknowledged me when I came in, and she hadn’t invited me to take off my coat, or to sit down.

  “For someone who doesn’t go to school,” I began, trying to break the ice, “you sure have a lot of homework.”

  “Alpha-Gene, Inc. sends me tutors,” she replied tersely as she typed another note into her tablet. “They usually last about a month.”

  “Only a month? How come? You look harmless.”

  “I prefer to work on my own … although Paxton has been a great mentor.”

  “Yeah. He’s helped me too.”

  “With what?”

  “I was just talking with him about the Spring Quatix Tournament.”

  “That ridiculous computer game?” Alexa said, shaking her head. “It’s already a multi-million dollar business. Why do you think they hand it out free in the schools? They’d hand out whiskey and cigarettes if they could get away with it.”

  “In other words, capitalism is evil and Marx has all the answers,” I summarized.

  “I never said that,” she snapped, finally looking up from her work and glaring at me. “I said Marx had a profound grasp of history.”

  “I thought you said he wrote novels?” I recalled, smirking.

  “You think everything is a game!” Alexa seethed. “And you know why? Because you’re a spoiled brat who’s been told since the day he was born that he’s some kind of genius. And because knee-jerk irony is the response of every pseudo-intellectual to every question. It’s the height of urbane sophistication. All you need nowadays is the right mix of irony, cynicism and cocaine to confirm your cosmopolitan credentials. It’s bourgeois narcissism masquerading as modernist angst. Why actually bother to think? Why actually bother to challenge the status quo? Why actually bother to stand up for what’s right when it’s so much cooler to sit down and snort another line? Everything’s absurd, anyway, and don’t I look great in black?”

  “Where … where did that come from?” I stammered, taken aback by her sudden fury. “What did I …? Why are you so angry?”

  “You want to know what I think?” She demanded. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I think. I think Marx was right when he said that capitalism turns people into fetishized commodities. I think when the super-geniuses over at the Turing Institute couldn’t figure out how to build a stable quantum computer, the super-geniuses over at the Genetic Institute and Alpha-Gene, Inc. decided to breed them. And we are those quantum computers. We’re the latest high-tech products of the Corporate Research and Development Labs. We’re the commodities being consumed in our consumer culture. And so is everyone else.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to weather the storm.

  “I mean that goods and services are no longer the primary commodities of capitalism. They’re just fodder meant to fatten up the working and middle classes. We the people are the primary commodities now. The corporations suck the life blood from our bodies during the day, and condemn our souls to wander the shopping malls at night. And when we finally fall asleep, the bankers and financiers insinua
te themselves into our dreams. Why do you think Marx compared capitalists to vampires? It’s no surprise that gothic horror literature has kept pace with contemporary capitalism. Except, instead of making us more aware of the real vampires who devour us body and soul, the culture industry has turned gothic horror literature into just another visceral form of entertainment. Art, music, drama, film, television, literature: they’ve all been commodified. And, like all the other recreational drugs, they keep us amused and they keep us dumb as posts. They make us forget the real vampires who control every single aspect of our public and private lives, from birth to death.”

  “I never thought of capitalism that way,” I said. “Especially how it applies to us … as human commodities.”

  I suddenly realized that my privileged childhood in the wealthier neighborhoods of Princeton, not to mention my very existence, had been bought and paid for. And for the first time I thought about my place in the local and global economy. I thought about the financial implications of how and why I was born.

  “I don’t want anything to do with Alpha-Gene, Inc.,” Alexa continued. “And so we have a mutual agreement: I pretend to be crazy and they pretend to leave me alone. And that’s how I prefer it. They made me, but they don’t own me. Now go away and let me get back to work.”

  “I want to …,” I began.

  “Go away!” She shouted.

  I hung my head and obeyed her command.

  CHAPTER 16.

  Lost Souls

  I was heating some clam chowder in my mother’s kitchen later that morning when Aster came in the back door and dumped her figure skates on the granite counter top. She spent hours gliding up and down Carnegie Lake every winter. Her wavy auburn hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her normally pale cheeks were rosy from the cold and exercise. She pointed her elegant nose into the air, and sniffed.

  “Smells good,” she said. “Is there enough for me?”

  “Yep,” I replied.

  “Mom was wondering if you’ll be home for supper. She’s making a veggie lasagna.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s right good news pardner,” Aster said, unsnapping her down vest. “What’s with the Gary Cooper bit?”

  “Yep.”

  “Ohhh, I get it,” she said as she took a stool at the counter. “You went to visit Alexa this morning.”

  “Yep.”

  “Talk about star-crossed lovers! A Highbrid and an Alpha-Clone: so similar and yet so different. The offspring of two rival institutions, born and bred to dislike one another, and yet some mysterious attraction draws them together.”

  I turned off the burner under the soup.

  “And you had the inevitable argument,” Aster continued. “She’s incredibly smart and incredibly annoying at the same time.”

  I looked up at my incredibly smart and incredibly annoying sister and raised my eyebrows.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Just like me. Let’s face it, pard: you’re surrounded by a passel of woman trouble.”

  “Yep.”

  “The more Alexa withdraws, the harder you pursue her.”

  I got two bowls from the cupboard and two spoons from the drawer. I slid Aster’s skates out of the way, hoping the prospect of lunch would divert her attention.

  “We’ve been talking about this kind of situation in my Advanced Psych class,” Aster said. “Alexa is your impossible subject of desire. No. Wait. That’s redundant, because who and what we desire always recedes just beyond our reach. That’s the essence of desire: the unbridgeable distance.”

  I poured the soup and tried to ignore her.

  “I can see it now,” she went on, staring right through me. “A remake of High Noon. We’ll call it, Desire in the Dust. Gary Cooper will play you and Grace Kelly will play Alexa. We’ll remix the pixels and dub in the new dialogue.”

  Aster knew very well that I despised those Retro-Hollywood Vanity Videos. They were the latest rage, but I thought they were nothing more than identity theft, plain and simple. Imagine using someone else’s pixels to tell your life story. It was narcissistic and perverse. It was exactly why those indigenous peoples didn’t want their pictures taken in the first place–because they knew their souls were being stolen.

  I set out some crackers and cheese on the cutting board, and sat across from my sister. We started to eat.

  “So what was the argument about?” Aster inquired.

  “The Marx Brothers, as usual,” I muttered into my duck soup.

  “Huh?” Aster replied. “Oh,” she added. “You mean those idiots Professor Ashcroft calls the Marx Brothers: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. How can anyone take them seriously anymore? Left wing fascists, mass murderers on a massive scale.”

  “Alexa would agree with you there,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to defend her. “She’s just angry at everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she thinks she was made in a factory, for sale on the market. And she thinks we were too.”

  “We, who?”

  “Highbrids and Alpha-Clones.”

  Aster thought about that between spoonfuls of chowder.

  “You know,” she said after a moment. “She has a point.”

  “That’s what’s so annoying about her!” I exclaimed. “She always has a point!”

  “And you know, she’s not really angry with you. In fact, she said it herself: we’re in the same boat. You just happened to be in the room when she needed to vent.”

  “That’s true,” I acknowledged. “She did include us. We’re in this together.”

  I studied my sister’s face for a moment.

  “You know, Aster,” I finally said, “sometimes it’s not so bad having an amateur psychologist in the family.”

  I swallowed another spoon of chowder and went back to my bowl for more.

  “So how’s your love life?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

  “Yep,” she replied, not really wanting to say.

  CHAPTER 17.

  The Spirit World

  I sat on the couch in my father’s library with André and Jena. My parents were holding hands and still ridiculously in love. I don’t know how many times I had to admit to my friends that, yes, my parents were one of those Highbrid couples who were a couple and, yes, it was odd and, no, I couldn’t explain how it had happened. Anyway, my siblings were sitting in the library with us, in the wingback chairs, and we were all fixated on the large wall screen. It was March 21, 2035, opening day of, The International Spring Quatix Tournament, in Bologna. The screen displayed an intricately detailed quatecology. The caption read, “CARACAL vs. FAST.”

  “Nice work, Johnny!” Michael enthused.

  “Yeah, the ferns, seaweed, plankton … everything looks great,” Isabel agreed.

  “It’s a combination of both our quatecologies,” I said, giving credit to my opponent.

  A group of sharks ripped into a school of fish.

  “It’s a massacre!” Aster declared.

  “Those are Caracal’s sharks,” I said, trying not to sound worried.

  “We tend to forget what natural selection really means,” André noted. “It’s Darwin’s version of Malthusian economics: the ever increasing size of competing populations leading to the ever fiercer struggle for limited resources.”

  An orange tentacle emerged from a crevice in the reef and snagged a passing sun fish.

  “Nice suction cups!” Isabel declared.

  The small octopus shot out of the crevice and swam across the screen.

  “That’s beautiful, Johnny,” Jena sighed with wonder and delight.

  “Thanks, Mom. It took me forever to get those algorithms right.”

  We continued to watch for another hour or so as the simulated undersea plants and animals competed for zetta-bytes. Then we took a break and ate our own dinner.

  CHAPTER 18.

  Monster Lore

  Michael and I decided to get pizza for dinner a few days later. We agreed to meet at the n
ewspaper kiosk, just off Palmer Square, in downtown Princeton, after his piano lesson. As I waited for him, I glanced over at the corner terrace where the bronze statue of a boy, reading a book, sat on the front step. And I recalled my Art History teacher’s critique.

  “In contrast to the spooky surrealism of Segal’s white plaster figures, and the ironic superrealism of Houston’s fiberglass figures,” Professor Juarez had said, “the nostalgic realism of Johnson’s bronze boy evokes the gratuitous sentimentality of a Norman Rockwell illustration. And it’s too small. Realist sculptures are usually scaled up, at least a third larger than life-size, because their immobilized forms tend to shrink into their environments, especially when placed outdoors.”

  A bunch of kids in tee shirts, jeans and sneakers sat and stood on the terrace behind the statue. They were celebrating the surprisingly warm day with guitars and cigarettes. I recognized a few of them from around town, but they were all older than me. One of the taller boys was arguing with one of the prettier girls. At first their voices blended into the traffic noise, then they suddenly got louder.

  “Give it back!” The boy shouted.

  “Why should I?” The girl shouted in reply.

  “Give it to me!” He demanded.

  He grabbed her wrist, but she kept her hand closed. Then he twisted her arm and she yelped in pain.

  “Hey!” I called out, taking a couple of steps toward them.

  The boy stopped twisting, but kept his hand locked onto her wrist. He stared at me, and so did the girl and all the other kids.

  “What’s your problem?” He asked.

  “You’re hurting her,” I said.

  He looked me up and down and I knew what was coming next. In fact, I’d counted on it to distract him.

  “Hey,” he said to the girl, while keeping his eyes on me. “Isn’t he a reflection?”