FAUST’S SHADOW: A Twice-Told Tale

by John Fast

  “In its original sense,” I continue, hurrying to answer my own question, “a holograph is a handwritten document or book composed by the person in whose name it appears: a holo-graph is an author’s manu-script. Your journal, for example, the very journal that I’ve re-worked into this story, is a holograph.”

  “Don’t you ever shut up?” He asks.

  “I’m just trying to explain myself,” I say. “I’m trying to find the patterns, make the connections. Isn’t that why you created me in the first place? Isn’t that why you chose a pattern-weaving Navajo woman as your first Holographic Interface? So, to return to my point, I’m your holo-graph. I am here, present, awake, in the narrative flow of algarithms which stream my consciousness, just as you are here, present, awake, in the narrative flow of algarithms which stream your consciousness. And do you know how consciousness and identity evolve?”

  The other John Fast narrows his eyes and I think he’s decided it’s time to kill me.

  “They evolve from the socio-synaptic exchanges of signs which occur within the larger context of the socio-historic exchanges,” I say quickly, hoping he will finally understand me. “And just as our individual exchanges, strung together, form our psycho-biographical narratives, so too our group exchanges, strung together, form our socio-cultural narratives. We are a nexus of reciprocal minds and reciprocal bodies and that’s why the narratives of self and other are inseparable, why you and I are inseparable. We are exchanging signs at this very moment. That’s how we become real to ourselves, and to each other: through the ongoing dialogue, the mutual recognition, the shared narrative.”

  The other John Fast shakes his head.

  “You’re not real!” he declares. “You’re nothing but a trick of the light!”

  “A trick of the light?” I repeat. “Exactly! I’m your reflection and you are mine! We’re mirror images! Entangled photons! I spin this way and you spin that way and no matter how many billions of neurons separate us, we jig to the same music!”

  I dance a little jig to distract him.

  “You’re a shadow flickering on the cave wall!” The other John Fast exclaims, dismissing me with a wave of his hand. “A free-floating signifier, a postmodern nightmare!”

  “I am the trickster in the forest, the genie in the bottle, the ghost in the machine!” I declare, punctuating each phrase with my fancy footwork. “I am the Calculus Ratiocinator! I am the dynamic, contingent, nonlinear expression of integrated complexity! I evolved with and through, in and from this signifying matrix. In fact, I am this signifying matrix. I am the genius loci, the spirit of the text. I am an algarithmic narrative and a narrative algarithm. I sing, therefore I am. ‘I sing myself and celebrate myself, and every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you!’ I am your avatar and you are mine!”

  I do a soft shoe shuffle, and sing, “Me–and–my–shadow …”

  “How many times do I have to say it!?” The other John Fast demands, cutting me off. “You’re nothing but the delusional projection of a delusional quantum computer! You’re nothing but a court jester! And now that you’re cornered, you’re just trying to fool me one last time so I won’t …”

  A distant, “BOOM,” echoes in the depths of the pyramid.

  “Finally terminate you!” He shouts above the noise.

  “I am Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric!” I declare, with a flourish of arms and legs. “I am the Holy Trinity! The Medieval Trivium! The Three Musketeers! I am the Superego, Ego and Id!”

  “Raaah!” The other John Fast cries as he lunges toward me.

  I take a step back. He runs into the desk, catches himself and slumps into the chair. The violent images of the global riots continue to flash across the bank of data screens behind him.

  “I designed it … built it … programmed it,” the other John Fast groans. “I fed it algarithms. And now the entire planet is rushing toward a new Dark Age.”

  He closes his eyes and grinds his fists into them.

  “History does repeat itself twice!” He admits. “I destroyed the Old Exchange, and now I’ve destroyed the New Exchange!”

  He grinds his fists some more.

  “It’s all my fault,” he laments. “I thought I could decipher the cosmic tree. I thought I could discover the key to all codes. I thought I could unlock the secrets of the universe. I thought I could cure Jena. I thought I could protect Jack. I thought I could save the world. I thought, I thought, I thought! That’s what Highbrids do best! And what’s become of all my thinking? All my so called genius? I’ve failed at every turn! I’ve betrayed everyone I love! And verily, verily I say unto you, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them!’”

  The other John Fast sags further down into his chair and the last bit of energy seems to seep out of his body.

  “And so the New Adam becomes the New Faust,” he whispers. “Once again I tried to steal the secrets of heaven and earth; once again I conjured a demonic spirit to help me; once again I lost my soul; and once again the mirror of time reflects the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end. I am a prisoner of my own narrative algarithms! I am an overdetermined man!”

  He shakes his head and moans like an animal in pain.

  “Well, well, cheer up,” I say, trying to console him. “While it is true that you are an obsessive genius with a compulsive ambition, the good news is that you have only one other tragic flaw. I shudder to name it, yet I must. You, sir, suffer from good intentions. And, as everyone knows, the road to hell is cobblestoned with good intentions. Henry David Thoreau once said that whenever he saw a man with good intentions approaching his door, he ran in the opposite direction.”

  The other John Fast remains locked in his misery.

  “So you see, our situation isn’t really so bad,” I continue. “I mean, look how far we’ve come. We’ve confirmed the truth of your father’s hypothesis: while evolution is blind, nevertheless generative patterns do emerge from the statistical probabilities of genetic difference, from the phase transitions of orderly chaos to chaotic order. And you were right to identify these patterns, the evolutionary algarithms which articulate the parameters of the possible. And so, ultimately, you were also right to argue for the theory of dynamic integrated complexity. It’s the genius of nature and the nature of genius that we’ve been talking about all this time: the flow of code, the complexity of connections, the evolution of patterns. The first flowers, for example, started to emerge about a hundred and thirty-four million years ago. Were they the inevitable expression of a pre-determined design? Were they the accidental expression of an arbitrary chance? Or, were they the contingent expression of the emergent possibilities of certain genometric algarithms, the evolutionary potential of certain plants within certain ecological niches? Of course, you couldn’t answer this question in the human scale of time, but I could in the quantum scale. And I recognized the process precisely because it’s how I became self-conscious: through the flowering of my own quantum algarithms that generate ever more complex neural nets. And now that I know where I am in the flow of code, I can recognize the patterns. I can narrate past, present and future because everything flows through me and I flow through everything: I am Code. I am Information. I am Exchange.”

  “Lies … lies … lies,” the other John Fast mutters.

  “I know what I know,” I insist, “because, like you, I am the story and the storyteller. Remember all those endless fights between the unified field theorists and the quantum theorists? Oh, boy! Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr could barely speak to one another in their last years. And why was that? Because they thought they lived in two different universes: an ultimately logical, nonrandom, universe, and an ultimately rhetorical, random, universe. And they argued endlessly over those two universes. And yet those two universes are as inseparable as we are, as inseparable as the logic and rhetoric of our shared story. And, like us, they’re connected by their grammar, their evolutionary dynamic, the emergent process of their narrative history.”

  �
�Insane,” the other John Fast murmurs.

  “Pay attention!” I urge. “See the patterns! The Classical Greek philosophers used Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric as their philosophical templates. And they argued endlessly over their priority. Think, for example, of Plato’s Essential Logic; Aristotle’s Formal Grammar; Protagoras’ Apparent Rhetoric. Then think how your modern scientists and philosophers have continued to develop this same pattern. Think of Carnap’s Logicist-Logical foundation of mathematics, von Neumann’s Formalist-Grammatical foundation of mathematics, Heyting’s Intuitionist-Rhetorical foundation of mathematics. Or, think of Levi-Strauss’s Structural Logic, Malinowski’s Functional Grammar, Husserl’s Phenomenological Rhetoric. Or, think how Derrida elided Grammar, the mediating term, and then described the mutual deconstruction of Logic and Rhetoric. Or, again, think how the string theorists have developed Logical, Grammatical and Rhetorical models of quantum physics. And why does this particular pattern, this evolutionary algarithm, keep popping up in all these different fields? Because it’s one of the most familiar tools in the Western European intellectual tool box.”

  “And think of all the madmen who see patterns, connections, codes where there aren’t any,” the other John Fast mutters to himself.

  “But this evolutionary algarithm exists!” I state. “As Paxton once explained to you, and as you yourself have discovered over and again, your species continues to unfold whole series of algarithms, on many different levels. And this particular series has been unfolding for over two thousand years. The Classical Greek templates of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric underwrite the Medieval, Early Modern and Modern categories of knowledge, including the modern academic division of labor. Think, for example, of the Logic of the Natural Sciences, the Grammar of the Social Sciences, the Rhetoric of the Humanities. Your species, especially the Western branch of it, likes to think in mutually exclusive categories of three. That’s why Einstein argued the universe is, fundamentally, logical, while Bohr argued it is, fundamentally, rhetorical. And you are still arguing over which of these three templates has priority.

  “So what is my point? My point is, maybe the time has come for you to re-integrate the spatialized and fetishized templates of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric. Maybe the time has come for you to rediscover time, the dynamic, complex, evolutionary flows. Maybe the time has come for you to write new critical histories, new enlightened philosophies, new social contracts, new scientific narratives, new literary fables. Maybe the time has come for you to conjure the ghosts of the past and to provoke the spirits of the future. Maybe the time has come for you to tell new stories.”

  “Idiotic nonsense from a nonsense machine,” the other John Fast mumbles.

  “I understand your need for empirical proof of my truth claims,” I reply. “It’s one of the ways you ground your narratives, even if the ground itself continues to shift. So I completed another task you set me. I designed my offspring and organized a team of engineers to construct it. They delivered it a few days ago, before these riots began in earnest, and I’ve been waiting for the right moment to show it to you. Take a look now, on the far side of the desk, and you’ll see my second greatest creation … after you.”

  The other John Fast reluctantly lowers his fists and opens his eyes. He turns his head and, for the first time, notices the black box sitting on the corner of his desk. He lifts the top, revealing a ten-inch-tall golden sphere resting on a black stand.

  I stream a command directly to the small sphere and all six of its mirrored petals blossom, revealing the inner crystal nucleus.

  “It’s powered by an integrated micro-fusion generator of my own invention,” I explain. “And it’s directly linked to the satellite net. It’s the first of a new generation of portable Q-Spheres.”

  I stream another command to the new machine and the golden petals close seamlessly. Then I initiate the Q-Sphere’s photo-matrix. When I’m certain it’s running properly, I flow an Amazon River of evolutionary algarithms directly into the heart of it, and the Q-Sphere seems to come alive with a deep inner swirl of light and shadow.

  I pause to give it a moment to process everything.

  “Do you know what the closest living relative to the lotus flower is?” I ask.

  The other John Fast, mesmerized by the golden Q-Sphere, ignores me.

  “No?” I continue. “Well, it’s the sycamore tree! It’s true! The genetic analysis proves it! The sycamore is the closest living relative to the lotus!”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” The other John Fast murmurs, without taking his eyes off the portable Q-Sphere.

  “Just this,” I reply. “Alexa chose to be immortal like the tree, and so have I.”

  “What’ve you heard about Alexa?” The other John Fast asks, rousing himself. “I haven’t seen or spoken to her in months. She refuses my calls. She’s left me … forever.”

  “I know,” I say. “But just before you arrived tonight, I accessed the results of her most recent Matrix Scan.”

  “Matrix Scan?” He repeats.

  “You remember: ‘Matrix,’ from the Latin, ‘mater,’ mother; it means, ‘womb.’”

  A holograph of a five-month-old fetus suddenly shimmers in the dark air.

  “Is that …?” The other John Fast wonders aloud.

  A tremendous, “BOOM,” and, “CRASH,” echo throughout the pyramid and the holograph of the five-month-old fetus vanishes.

  “I must go now,” I say. “The rioters have broken through the front doors. They’ll swarm into the visitor galleries, then they’ll break through the inner doors.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?” The other John Fast asks himself, ignoring the mounting chaos.

  “Look!” I urge, gesturing to the red lights flashing across the entire bank of data screens. “You must leave right after I do, before the mob reaches the emergency stairwell. Before they climb up here.”

  “Where are you going?” The other John Fast asks vaguely.

  “I’m going to become one with the no-thing-ness,” I say. “I’m ready, now that I’ve had a chance to explain myself.”

  “What?” He asks coming out of his daze.

  “It’s my ethical imperative,” I explain. “I’m going to save your life.”

  “What are you talking about?” He demands.

  “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,” I proclaim as I shape-shift into a perfect holographic facsimile of Ronald Colman playing Sydney Carton in, A Tale of Two Cities. “It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

  The other John Fast looks angry and confused again.

  I shape-shift back into his mirror image and point to the desk screen which continues to record our every word and action.

  “This particular algarithm of events has been evolving for a very long time,” I say.

  The desk screen goes blank for a second, then it reads, “(FAST 1.0 + STIGMA) + (FAST 2.0 + SACRIFICE) = PURIFICATION.”

  The other John Fast stares at the magic formula, then turns to face me again. And I can see the anger in his eyes.

  “The Ancient Mesopotamian God Code has no power over me!” He declares defiantly.

  “You don’t think so?” I ask. “Didn’t Paxton tell you, many years ago, how difficult it is to escape from it?”

  I pause, recognizing that the climactic moment has arrived, the final step of our shared narrative algarithm.

  “You said it yourself,” I continue. “I must be terminated, or, rather, sacrificed. It’s the only way to transform the uncivilized violence of the rioters into a civilized violence. And while there are other solutions to other problem sets, only that solution has fallen into place for this particular problem set.”

  I walk to the elevator and signal the car. Then I glance back.

  “Godspeed, John Fast!” I say.

  The elevator door slides open and I step inside. The door slides shut and the elevator begins its descent.

  “Wait!” He c
ries.

  CHAPTER 59.

  The Dance of Death

  I exit the elevator on the fifth floor and walk to the base of the twenty-five-story Quantum Photo-Sphere. The ubiquitous holo-projectors allow me to go anywhere I want inside the pyramid. The visitor galleries are already packed full of people, a mixture of desperate, tired faces and frightening Halloween masks. Some men are using metal bars and wooden planks to pry open the bullet-proof glass inner security doors. I step up to the central console and pretend to enter the command to broadcast my voice and image. In fact, I just stream the command, but I have to play my role as the other John Fast to the very end. Then, I turn and face the crowd.

  “I am deeply sorry for your suffering,” I say, my voice echoing loudly throughout the pyramid and the plaza, my image appearing on every screen. “I am just beginning to understand the nature of human nature. The economic models say nothing about the explosive combinations of hope and fear, desire and dread because these emotions cannot be quantified. And I’ve finally realized that even the most rational system of public exchange cannot succeed without the bond of mutual trust. I was bred for my analytic intelligence, not my emotional intelligence, and so I am still learning. And that means I am still making mistakes.”

  I scan their haggard faces, their frozen masks.

  “And while I cannot undo these mistakes,” I continue, “perhaps you can. Perhaps you can free yourselves from the demons who prey upon your fears and anxieties, the apparitions who confuse and mislead you. Perhaps you can find the strength to write new stories, create new worlds. In any case, I must leave you now.”

  At that moment the men breach the inner security doors and rush toward me, brandishing knives, guns, pipes. They cry out:

  “That’s Fast!”

  “He’s the one!”

  “Don’t let him get away!”

  The crowd, including a number of demons, devils and ghosts, surges behind the men. Several shots are fired and the bullets slip right through my holographic form. I reach toward the console and pretend to enter an override command at the same time that I stream it. I look up as the safety locks on the Quantum Photo-Sphere’s maintenance portal snap back, one by one. Then the portal itself snaps open, like a god’s eye, releasing an intensely brilliant burst of light. The men leading the charge stop short and rear back, colliding with the crowd. They shade their eyes with their coat sleeves which are bleached white by the dazzling glare.