One of the doctors pulled aside his mask and spoke.
“Good afternoon. Mr Lyons, my name is Cater Gustafsen, I am the head surgeon for the neo-cortical unit. My colleagues and I have looked forward to meeting with you and want to thank you for your forthright honesty in coming forward and volunteering for this procedure.”
“No problem,” I said stoically.
“What we’ve concluded is essentially this,” continued the doctor. “The multisensor’s location, embedded as it is in the prefrontal cortex, gives us two choices. Traditionally, if the desire is primarily to curtail its function, shut it down so to speak, we’d be compelled to perform an intervention, go up through your eye socket and destroy the unit. At the same time, and seeing as you have had previous insertions and removals in the manner of the Democravian augment, (as we can see by the remaining scar tissue), any further work could lead to severe impairments in your own function, rendering you essentially a vegetable for the rest of your life.”
“What’s option number two?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. Our second option, and in your case the preferable one obviously, instead of disabling the multisensor by destroying it physically, is to render the information unintelligible. The way we can do this is by stimulating the neuronal connections in the cortex while locally impairing in the vicinity of the unit, so that in effect the unit is processing constant unfiltered impulses.”
“Useless mental activity,” mumbled another of the doctors under his mask.
“And what are the side effects?” I asked.
“For the patient, you may experience unusual levels of thought patternings, a limited ability to make decisions in your daily life. On the other hand, you may feel a heightened understanding of your context, or a more precise ability to determine your dimensional relationships. It’s a little unpredictable,” answered Dr. Gustafsen.
“Let’s do it. I’ll take my chances,” I said.
They put me under with some intravenous anesthetic. The next thing I knew I was dreaming. I remember vividly there was a baby crying and going room by room in an empty house until I found it. The baby was whimpering. I picked him up and rocked him, but he was hungry and wouldn’t be soothed. Instead, he was twisting his little head around looking for his mother, staring at me with limpid pools of misery and anger. Then I was walking in a garden somewhere, and he was walking by my side. There was a statue of some winged figure, perhaps an angel, a guardian angel, and by the statue there were beds of flowers. It was the full sun of summer, and the flowers were wilting in the heat. The boy cried out and pointed at the sun. A black ball streaked across the sky, and everything turned dark. A woman’s voice spoke and offered encouragement. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. I wondered if she was my mother, but when she appeared her face was different. She wore a veil of scarlet and deep blue over her head. She had skin darkened by her time in the sun. She seemed capable and merciful. We were now inside some labyrinthine chambers, and she walked with us, going from room to room, getting us to our destination. There were stacks of books piled from floor to ceiling, and eventually she reached the right room and picked a book off the floor and handed it to me. I couldn’t read the title, but it was the book I needed. She asked me to open the book, and I did. The pages came to life, one by one. There were golden butterflies, long-necked herons and sharply darting swallows. They all flew windingly up into the sky. The room became a meadow filled with long-stemmed wildflowers, and days and nights became a living carousel.
The boy and I walked to the ocean and boarded a boat. We came to a distant shore with no signs of life. Under the white cliffs, we searched for a way inland, but instead we found the mouth of a cave, with broken shards of pottery and the bones of some long ago meal littering the rocky ground. We explored back into the depths of the cave. The boy was scared, hesitant to go on, but something drew me forward. There was no light. I felt my way along the rough walls of the cave. At last there was an opening into a hall of stalactites that emitted a strange glow. Below, and lit by its own pulsing lights, was an immense machine of many facets. It looked as if it was ready to ignite, as the light’s pulsations became gradually more intense. The woman’s voice could be heard again, encouraging me to not be afraid. I looked around. The boy appeared unfazed, as if he had not heard. Then the woman stepped forward, appearing suddenly before us. I could see she was very old, although her voice was strong and unwavering, like a young woman’s. She was wearing a veil, and she told us her name. “We are the path makers,” she said. “What is it that you fear?” She asked and waited. Her wide eyes invited me to see with their light. I looked down at the boy and realized that I feared for his safety. What would happen when I was gone? She said: “Do not fear. When you die, the path is already made.”
This was the end, as far as I remembered. The next thing I knew the doctors were making weekend plans to get together for some card games. That sounded fun. I mumbled something, and one of the doctors, I guessed it was the head surgeon, Dr. Gustafsen, asked me if I played cards.
“I guess so,” I said, mumbling. They laughed. The doctors thought it was funny. I never discovered why.
After that I was assigned a supervisor. Her name was Esther Mattelier. She met with me twice weekly to make sure I was adapting and understood my assignment. I went with my black box every day to the 17th floor, the main entrance to the library, and made a systematic search for the book, my father’s opus, in the vast rooms of uncategorized works that extended from the 21st to the 27th floors of the tower. I would take notes and make audio clips and video notations to remember where I was and where I had left off the previous day. Here are some of the names of the books and my initial categorizations as I read through them: The War of the Ecocide, by Roy Doodwin - code red for some intrinsic literary quality that demanded further study; How to Conquer, by Damien Hais - code green for some anthropological interest; The Bottleneck of Exile, by John Erwin - code blue for narrative gold. I made my way through hundreds of these a day, piling them in my wake with just the audio and video clips uploaded to a file in my name. The job was accorded the highest priority of the St. George Society, and Esther Mattelier was always careful to make sure I was feeling well and realized the importance of my search to the greater aim of the society -- “to ensure the survival and propagation of the Saint’s work and the strengthening of the organic base of the noosphere as a resource for future generations of free, unaugmented humans,” she would say. She was a prim, almost joyless woman who would constantly fiddle with the pens and papers on my desk.
The funding for my search was headed under the tranche of hedonometrics. It fit into the work of the computational division of the technical offices. Narrative structures that I identified as being of potential merit would be submitted to further study of the emotional valence of their wordscapes. Here was the most important aspect: subjective feedback from expert readers, which differentiated the Saint’s library from most of the Repho/CUA Augment in this most, variable, refractory, but rich human dimension.
Every day I ploughed through hundreds of texts in the stacks of the tower with the treasure still eluding me. Esther’s messages on the black box were urging me forward with greater stridency. I took breaks and ate the pastries from the Portuguese bakery across the street from the rooming house and listened to Esther’s messages along with the official statements from the Bureau of Pronouncements.
The news coming from the intelligence service was not good. Spies were everywhere, and the incursions of the cartel’s irregular mercenary gangs, along with bot cavalry troops of the Mexican state into the periphery of the valley were becoming bolder, as if softening up the defenses for some major assault. The newspapers on sale in the city’s squares were full of predictions for the day and manner of the coming battle. But according to Esther, several of the outlets were tools of our enemies, spreading fear and dissent wherever they were read. It was in this atmosphere of uncertainty, like a cloud descending on the city, that
we balanced like hydrogen atoms under intense pressure.
Nothing like this, no treachery could be foretold or deciphered in the air of the evenings and nights of the valley. Lovers strode purposefully along the sidewalks. Vehicles buzzed with the sound of electric engines, like stop and start dragonflies. Children played in the suburban blocks. Elder siblings flirted with adulthood by the iron gates and the ditches running with the dirty runoff of a recent winter storm. The moon waxed. My dreams, more in tune with the underlying reality of the earth then my waking hours, were blank slates, like fields ready for sowing. I drank mojitos in the Cantina El Viejo, spending the allowance from Esther and what was left of my cache of Repho dollars, trying to induce sleep in my thirsty and questing mind.
Then one day I saw her. She was turning the corner on the Avenida Martires with a group of people. They were singing a song and laughing at familiar jokes. I rose immediately from the park bench, dropped my copy of a broadsheet and strode as fast as I could, but it was too late. I looked everywhere that night. I walked all night, looking in windows. Lank-haired Indian men in cowboy hats crossed the empty streets like wraiths, silent and guarded. Perhaps there were bots among us. Perhaps it had been a dream. From the greatest triumph, I was slammed into despair. I doubted my sanity and listened for a voice to guide me, but all I heard were the old doubts, the youthful fears that had assailed me and then gone into hiding. Like a pack of wild dogs, they reformed in the wilderness of my brain. I was not good enough, they snarled. I did not deserve the visions that I had received. Had been handed things throughout life and then lost them, unable, not strong or capable enough to learn how to hang on to these gifts. In the morning, I found an empty bottle in the ditch and smashed it against the curb. The noise woke up the sleeping hobos in the park, recent arrivals, seeking resettlement by the city administration somewhere in the project.
“It’s a fraud,” I said. “Don’t believe it.
Several of the hobos approached me. They were red-eyed, but indignant and clear in their words.
“What’s your problem, man?” one of them asked.
“Everything is fraudulent. Even the underlying reality,” I cried.
“Is that it? You figured that out? Congratulations, asshole. Now go back to bed and sleep.”
Forgetting everything seemed like the promise of an eternal balm. I tried. I went to work every day, told myself who I was and what I wanted. Like a metronome, I rode the days like the back of a whale without wonder or joy, looked the other way while the people played. I was focused on the books of the library and spent as much time as I could there. The almond pastries from the Portuguese bakery kept me going, along with cups of strong coffee. These were my only concessions. I told Esther to stop worrying. I knew what was good for me: to forget the past, forget my life. Only the texts mattered. I would find myself and save the world. Destiny had assured me. My father’s book was mine, and then the Saint and all his followers would call me home for good. A version of this dream played in my head at all times. I was feverish and sick with it.
The girl pulled on my arm. She was insistent and troublesome. I had no time. She had been following me for days, maybe years. I’d lost track. I wanted to forget. The girl’s problems, her desires, were an obstacle, designed like the dogs’ braying to bring me back to my pain, remind me of my recurrent failures. I was the man of the old curse, acquainted with constant sorrows. I laughed. She pulled me by the arm, digging in her heels. We were on the corner of the Plaza de los Desaparecidos. I decided it was late. I shrugged her off again, as I had been doing all my life.
“Mister, I’ll tell you a story.” This was her eternal refrain. Her story. Why did I care? Why should anyone care? I had no time. The stacks of the tower, an entire day beckoned, fourteen or sixteen hours, perhaps twenty. I had my pastries and a coffee in a bag for later on, for sitting under the metal spirals of the escalator, a refuge from the deadening, sickening reality represented by the little girl’s insistent digging in of her heels and assaulting me with her need to tell me her useless, trite little story. Finally I was free, riding the coiling escalator up into the tower’s bowels along with my fellows -- the acolytes of the new age: discoverers, buccaneers, saints, warriors and golden-hued beneficiaries. None of them had little girls tugging at their arms all day and every day when they returned to the street.
The books came in waves. Some of them were horrible, deserving nothing less or more than the ignominy in which they had so inelegantly been reposing in their cardboard boxes or scattered on the floor by the tide. But then there would be five or six in a row of pure lightning, with language that reinvented the original fire of the cave dwellers, casting their images on the dank walls of my injured brain in golden-hued glory. The black box brimmed with insight. My hand felt heavy, and my head was temporarily soothed.
“Mister. My story.”
The days flowed like a brackish, tidal river at the end of its run. My father’s book was still out there. I was on the 21st floor. There were only so many left. The girl was getting bigger, her body lengthening and swelling, or was that my imagination?
It was raining, one of those summer rains when the air suddenly chills and the fog seems to roll in from the sea even in the valleys of the interior, as if the land and the air were reverting to some primeval order when all was watery and vague.
I was struggling. I couldn’t believe any more that I would find the book. Everything seemed dull and pointless. The wind had stalled. I was adrift in a swirling current of mindless words, verbiage without end. Ideas and images bounced around in my head, propagating themselves from the endless pages, the black ink swelling in my imagination until there was no blank space left, no room for connections or insight. The words, paragraphs and pages insisted on an order that was no longer underlying, as if the sense had literally been pulled out from under them. I had the distinct impression, in the humid, stultifying rows of the library, that God had jumped ship, shut down operations and left his Promise to founder in the wake of his disappearance. It probably pained Him somewhat, but like all pain, the edge tended to dull as the stars pulled apart, leaving the trails of fire in their wake.
The girl was grown up now. She tapped me on the shoulder.
“Are you ready now?” she asked. I mumbled something, too ashamed to look up and see her face. She sat there in front of me and began to talk. I believe we were on the 24th floor. In the end, I could tell she was done by the look she gave off, staring into the distance with satisfaction. I could have sat there forever. The look on her face was that illuminating. It transported me with the speed of her transformation and wisdom, reflections of her wildly spinning story.
“I love you, Dad,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
There was a jolt. The tower had been hit. I could smell smoke. The books were burning around us.
“The battle has started,” she said. “Can you hear it?”
A rumble came in the distance, an echo or a reflection back of a corresponding enmity, as the walls of the tower shook for a second time. But we had won through.
Chapter Eleven -- December 20, 2072
Sierra de Périca,
Valle de Uapar
The camp was in the high desert at the southern edge of the Uapar highlands. Below them stretched the undulating, corrugated desert out to the blue-hued mountains and deeper blue sky, interlaced with streams of crimson and gold in the clouds of the northern horizon. It was the evening of the sixth day. He had counted. It was too late for some of the people in the camp. The female Brigada Frontera militia officer in charge of the resettlement, standing in a small cleared space at the edge of the rehydration tent, repeated back into the transponder what she had been saying for the last ten hours.
“Please. We need the water now.”
Carolina and Arthur looked at each other. The words coming through the thin, mountain air were in the island patois of the refugees, the boat people that they had come across when they reached the c
oast. Arthur remembered the way the refugee people had looked at the two of them in understanding and sympathy and generously shared what little food they had, the foraged mesquite beans and fried corn meal packed in plastic bags, mildewed from the passage across treacherous water. And now, here on this rugged, unforgiving spine of land, they seemed to have all foundered. One day they’d slaughtered a feral goat and the Brigada soldiers had joined the migrants in forging a grill out of rebar in the rubble of a village. That was last month. They’d been in this camp now for a week or so. The drones had been absent from the skies. Most of the people believed they were on their way to the distant tower. Everyone could see it on the clearest days from the high rocks behind the camp. They wanted to live with David in the tower. Arthur could tell by the looks the soldiers gave each other that it was a simple story nobody would dispel. There was probably a grain of truth to it, like most stories the people told each other.
“Status request. Where is the water you promised?” asked the militia officer into her transponder.
“On the way,” came the response. Arthur could make it out from his vantage point, seated in the dirt a few feet away from the officer. Under the tent, the temperature was cooler than out in the sun. Mothers with weary faces tried to calm nervous, restless children. Not many were crying. They’d learned that tears were useless. Outside the tent, on the rock that served as a center in this temporary camp, an old woman in a multi-colored headdress sat in the full sun, facing the mountains they’d crossed. She sat very still so that it seemed she was listening to everything. Her physical attitude was depressing to Arthur, speaking to him of desperation, useless mysticism and superstition, the kind that had always plagued the island people. He recognized it as a curse, and it made him angry, angry at all people that would allow themselves to be abused by powers seen or unseen.
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 19