FAUST’S SHADOW: A Twice-Told Tale

by John Fast

  Jack was too smart to have done something so stupid for no reason at all. In fact, I knew very well what Jack had been doing. He wanted to get super powers, like his superhero idols. And where does a superhero get super powers? From the source: light, radiation, magnetism, electricity. My son, the child I’d neglected day and night as I pursued my own dreams of super power. Jack, his father’s child. Jack, who shared my obsessive drive and compulsive curiosity. Jack, who did the opposite of what he was told to do. Jack, who deliberately stuck a paring knife into an electrical outlet to make the connection, to pursue knowledge, to defy the universe that said, ‘No, you cannot evolve beyond the level I have assigned you. No, you cannot become more powerful. No, you cannot fulfill your dreams.’ I stood with Jack in death as I’d not stood with him in life and swore my revenge on the universe of no.

  If Jena’s death had been arbitrary and pointless, Jack’s death was beyond pointless–purposefully beyond pointless. It was the universe’s way of trying to stop the Highbrid Protocol in its tracks. It was the universe’s way of saying that no man, no woman, no boy may go any further than here. And I said no to that no universe. I promised I would break down the door to its innermost sanctum, strip its machinery bare, expose its secret workings. I promised I would stab my paring knife into the heart of that universe and claim its power. I promised I would defy its no along with Jack, my double, my scapegoat, my superhero.

  We buried our son in his red cape and drove away from the cemetery with our three remaining children. And that, in fact, was when and where I left my boyhood and youth behind forever.

  *************

  I worked in my office the next three days and nights, more determined than ever to build my quantum computer, run my quantum algarithms and find my way to the key to all codes. Late on the third night I popped yet another pill and raised my coffee mug into the air. I made a toast and took a swallow. My hand shook from all the previous doses of amphetamine and caffeine that were already coursing through my veins. I’d started taking the pills when I was racing to save Jena, working through the long nights of her illness. I called myself, “John Speed,” after the famous mapmaker to Queen Elizabeth I. Jena loved the way Speed used the borders of his maps to portray the people, costumes and culture of the land. She had inherited an original print of his, “Map of the British Isles,” from her mother, and she had hung it on our living room wall. So whenever I needed to wash down another pill, I raised my coffee mug into the air and made a toast: “Welcome, John Speed, Mapmaker to the Queen!”

  That night, however, three nights after Jack’s funeral, when I put my shaky mug back down, I sloshed some coffee on the window sill. And I watched with fascinated horror as the unnervingly black liquid seeped under the window frame, spread across the dark lawn, swept over the silhouette of trees and obliterated the stars. The universe vanished. All that remained was my ghostly reflection staring back at me from the blank window of my mind.

  Apparently, Takla came into my office the next morning.

  Apparently, I was still staring at nothing.

  Apparently, Takla called the paramedics.

  *************

  I opened my eyes many hours later and saw Jena standing next to my hospital bed. I wanted to tell her all about the cosmic tree, but I couldn’t find the words. I closed my eyes again and heard my heart beat: “What’s that! What’s that! What’s that!”

  I opened my eyes a second time, after several more hours had passed, and saw Aster standing next to my hospital bed. She put a straw to my lips. I sipped some ice water.

  “Your brain is rebooting,” she said quietly. “Give it time.”

  “Chaos … Entropy … Chance,” I muttered. “The stuff we’re made of.”

  Aster nodded.

  “I couldn’t save them. With everything I know … I couldn’t …”

  I closed my eyes.

  The next evening I sat up in bed and had a few bites of dinner. Takla, André, Isabel and Michael had come to see me that morning, but I’d been sleeping. Aster had left a note saying she would be back in an hour. I had two spoonfuls of chocolate pudding for dessert, then I sat back and watched the evening news on the wall screen. After the anchorwoman read the headlines, she introduced a prominent psychologist and asked him about the current status of the Highbrid Protocol.

  “You simply cannot breed people as if they’re animals,” the psychologist replied. “It’s unethical. And what’s the result? Three generations of mental deconstruction: a mother who died of brain cancer; a son who had a psychotic break; a grandson who had such a severe learning disability that he electrocuted himself. It’s tragic, tragic. But what did the Genetic Institute expect? The mind is a delicate mechanism. It can’t be re-engineered on a whim. And don’t forget …”

  I shouted, cursed and hurled my chocolate pudding at the screen. Two nurses rushed into the room and tried to calm me down. They paged a doctor who ordered a sedative. And, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of murder.

  *************

  Two weeks later I sat in Dr. Atgar’s office at Newton Commons, the psychiatric finishing school for Alpha-Clones and Highbrids. The large-boned, bearded doctor sat behind his desk.

  “I visited Alexa Pavlova when she lived here,” I said listlessly.

  “Yes,” the doctor replied impatiently. “So you’ve said. Many times.”

  He waited for me to continue, but I remained silent. So he picked up the broken thread of the conversation.

  “And as I’ve said, you’ve had a double dose of grief, compounded by overwork and drug abuse. I’d like you to stay with us for another two weeks, maybe longer.”

  “I’d like to get away,” I said, slowly enunciating each word. “I can’t think. I can’t work. I can’t console Takla. Her sorrow is so deep she can’t even speak of it.”

  “Is she getting some counseling?” The doctor asked.

  “Yes. I think so. I don’t know.”

  The doctor waited another moment to see if I was going to elaborate.

  “Where will you go?” He finally asked.

  “We have a cabin. On a lake. In Canada.”

  “I’m concerned about you being alone right now.”

  “I’m not suicidal.”

  “That’s not what I’m concerned about.”

  He paused again.

  “You’re addicted to speed,” he said.

  I stared out the window.

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  I said nothing.

  “Keep in touch with your father,” he urged. “And come see me as soon as you get back.”

  I turned to leave.

  “And don’t forget to take your meds,” the doctor ordered. “The ones I prescribed.”

  CHAPTER 42.

  The Zodiac

  I stood at the end of the dock as twilight settled over Loon Lake three days later. A few tendrils of mist rose from the mile-wide expanse of glassy water. In the stillness of the tranquil evening I still heard the relentless noise of civilization buzzing in my ears. I knew it would take several days before the buzzing stopped and I could hear the silence. I took a deep breath of the crisp, clean, pine scented air. I glanced up at the blank sky. Then I walked back to the cabin, went inside and drew the heavy curtains across the picture window.

  The next morning I split firewood, went for a swim and toured the lake in the bright yellow kayak that I’d strapped to the roof of my car. In the afternoon I dragged the old wooden rowboat out of the storage shed and flipped it onto a couple of sawhorses. I scraped, caulked and sanded the bottom of the boat until the sun began to set. Then I walked to the end of the dock and contemplated the lake. I glanced up at the blank sky. I returned to the cabin, went inside and drew the heavy curtains.

  After dinner I stoked the potbelly stove that squatted in a corner of the room. I didn’t really need a fire on that cool Canadian summer evening, but I wanted the comfort of it. When I was done, I scanned the bookshelf behind the cou
ch and found a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, Collected Essays. I pulled it out and settled into the armchair next to the kerosene lamp. I opened the book and flipped through the first section. The foxed pages smelled a little musty from all the long winters they had weathered in the cabin. I turned another few pages and discovered a passage that had been lightly marked in pencil. I started to read it aloud.

  “In the woods …”

  I stopped short and stared at the page. I heard my mother reading the same passage, the one she had marked.

  “In the woods,” Jena began, “we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, no disgrace, no calamity … which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

  I looked up from my book and stared into a dark corner of the room where I heard Jack humming his superhero anthem. I leapt out of my chair, ran outside and kept running through the moonless night until I reached the end of the dock. I dove straight into the chilly black water and swam to the middle of the lake. I stopped, turned onto my back, spread my arms and legs, and floated. I kept my eyes shut tight. When I opened them, the brilliant starry sky exploded in my skull. I scanned the Zodiac, searching for the Sign of the Macrocosm, but couldn’t find it.

  “Cosmic tree?” I shouted.

  “Ridiculous!” I replied.

  “Cosmic code?”

  “A farce!”

  “Cosmic complexity?”

  “A joke!”

  “Cosmic perception?”

  “A trick!”

  “Cosmic consciousness?”

  “A fraud!”

  “Cosmic genius?”

  “A hoax!”

  All these theories, I realized at long last, were nothing more than childish myths, narcissistic delusions, reflections of imaginary minds projecting themselves into an imaginary sky. I had traced the patterns of these reflections. I had drawn the pictures on the cave walls and watched the shadows flicker across them. And then I finally recognized what I had repressed for so long: science and philosophy and art were nothing more than aesthetic glosses on the terror of existence. I was blind with fury. I’d been tricked, duped, lulled into complacency along with everyone else. I lowered my legs and torso straight down into the black water and raised my fist to the indifferent sky.

  “THERE IS NO COSMIC TREE!” I screamed. “THERE IS NO COSMIC CODE! THE UNIVERSE WRITHES WITH CATACLYSMIC FORCE - AND WE REVEL IN BLOOD!”

  After the echoes died, I floated on my back again and felt my anger and strength seeping away. I grew infinitely tired. I lost track of the passage of time. I closed my eyes and wondered if the cold liquid darkness of the lake was sustaining my life or draining it from me. When I opened my eyes again I saw a few green ribbons of the Northern Lights washing across the upper atmosphere like the loose strands of a phantom seaweed. I rubbed my eyes with my wet hand, wiped my glasses and squinted at the starry sky. I followed the bright arc of a passing satellite. Then, suddenly, the black lake seemed to swell beneath me and I felt my entire body levitating straight up into the air. I floated far above the earth. The horizon vanished. I floated within a mirrored sphere of stars.

  And then the autopilot of my subconscious mind kicked into gear.

  “Do you see it?” My autopilot whispered.

  “Yes!” I replied. “The stars! The brilliant stars! Everywhere! The quantum nature of light! The photo-matrix at the heart of the cosmic computer!”

  I felt as if I’d died and been reborn. I felt young and strong and powerful again.

  When I got back to the cabin I put on some dry clothes, made some hot coffee and took an upper to keep my edge. Then I dug my tablet out of my duffel bag and started to work on a new schematic, with a new heading: “QUANTUM PHOTO-SPHERE.”

  CHAPTER 43.

  The Celestial Sphere

  I dimmed the lights in the small conference room on the first floor of Turing Hall four weeks later. Then I hit another key on the remote and a ten-inch-tall holograph of the gleaming titanium Quantum Photo-Sphere appeared in the center of the table. Krishnapur, Paxton, Mayakovsky, and Brickman, the Faculty Research Co-ordinating Committee, leaned in for a closer look. Mayakovsky was a skinny Russian computer scientist, Brickman a stolid British mathematician.

  “We’ve been focusing our efforts on Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics as the best hope for a stable quantum computer,” I began with the rapid fire breathlessness of a month-long amphetamine jag. “And yet, what if, instead of a box of mirrors, we build a sphere of mirrors? What if, instead of using photons to excite electrons, we exploit the quantum nature of light itself?”

  Mayakovsky looked intrigued.

  Brickman looked skeptical.

  I hit a third key on the remote and the virtual titanium shell of the virtual Quantum Photo-Sphere became translucent, revealing the inner dynamic.

  “We can shoot a laser beam straight up through the crystal nucleus,” I explained. “The lattice gratings etched into the nucleus will split the beam into countless pairs of entangled photons. Then, the directional micro-mirrors plating the inner surface of the Sphere will organize these entangled photons into a programmable data matrix.”

  I hit a fourth key and an infinitely complex geometry of light formed inside the translucent Sphere.

  “The Quantum Photo-Sphere will be the machine that transcends machines,” I stated. “It will q-flow the global stream; it will run my quantum algarithms; it will evolve generation after generation of neural nets and pattern recognition programs; it will discover the key to all codes.”

  I looked at the intelligent faces of my colleagues and wondered if they knew what I knew: that the key to all codes was nothing more and nothing less than a necessary delusion. What was a scientific hypothesis, after all, but a necessary delusion? And how many great scientific discoveries had been made in pursuit of these necessary delusions? Isaac Newton devoted as much time to alchemy as he did to physics. And who could say that his alchemical experiments didn’t open his mind to new ways of thinking? And who could say that my search for the key to all codes, my quest to avenge Jack, didn’t do the same? Show me a man who has abandoned his necessary delusions and I’ll show you an empty sack of potatoes. Urge and urge and urge toward the horizon of impossibilities–that’s the human condition. Or, we could sit around with the analytic philosophers and dissect the games of truth we employ when we perceive ourselves as mad. As if, somehow, we could get outside our games of truth; as if, somehow, we could get outside our madness. Instead, I had decided to embrace my madness, my necessary delusion. After that night on Loon Lake, after I had re-imagined my quantum computer as a quantum photo-sphere, I also re-imagined the key to all codes as a necessary delusion that would help me complete my quest. I had returned from the wilderness and I had returned to work. And the words I used to describe my work were exactly the same as before that dark night on that dark lake, and they were entirely different. I made no distinction and every distinction between the real key and the imaginary key. I played that one key in two keys simultaneously. And I renewed my pursuit of it with grim purpose.

  Everyone on the Committee was mesmerized by the brilliant matrix of light, but I had to look away because it hurt my bloodshot eyes. After a moment, Krishnapur cleared his throat.

  “A fascinating proposal, Dr. Fast,” he said.

  Then he turned to the others.

  “Any comments?” He asked.

  “How do you plan on connecting the Quantum Photo-Sphere to the global stream?” Paxton inquired.

  “We’ll need a dedicated meta-computer to upload and download the Sphere,” I explained. “And we’ll need a dedicated crystal eye to laser link it to the satellite network.”

  “The Engineering Department can work out the specs,” Mayakovsky said ex
citedly.

  “I wonder what Turing would have thought of it?” Paxton added.

  “He wouldn’t have asked how much it will cost,” Brickman replied, practical as always. “But I will.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it will cost,” I said. “It will pay for itself, once it’s up and running.”

  “Yes, but we live in the meanwhile,” Brickman reminded me.

  “First things first,” Krishnapur interjected. “We should congratulate Dr. Fast on his innovative design.”

  He applauded enthusiastically and the others joined him.

  “Yes, congratulations indeed,” Mayakovsky said.

  “Second,” Krishnapur continued, “we will ask the Engineering Department to evaluate the feasibility of this new concept. Then we can think about the cost.”

  The detailed technical discussion that followed my informal presentation lasted another three hours, the first of many such meetings to come. When we finally broke for a late lunch, Paxton took me aside.

  “I’m glad you’ve made this brilliant recovery, John,” he said. “I hope you’re taking care of yourself?”

  I gave him a jittery nod and assured him I was fine.

  CHAPTER 44.

  Little Demons

  I woke to a loud knock on the front door of my row house, on Faculty Road, in Princeton, the following week. I’d moved into the narrow house just before I graduated from the Turing Institute. I checked my alarm clock. It read, “7:27 AM.” I’d slept, on and off, for about four hours. I opened the front door in my tee shirt and shorts, and blinked at the two men standing in the bright morning light. The short stocky guy wore a black windbreaker. The tall muscular guy wore a gray sports jacket that looked bulletproof.