by Roman McClay
The hominid penis senses temperature and threat level and adjusted its surface area accordingly. The inmate had told him that during his own vasectomy, as the knife was coming at his genitalia, that his own penis had shrunk so small that it seemed as though it were trying to crawl back into his corpus to avoid -the inmate felt- the danger that was clearly on the way. The inmate had laughed it off; but MO had tested this theory. Penises showed -with a .8 correlation between threatening images shown to the organism and reduction in surface area- a real ability to sense doom. The body knew when something was likely going to catch the dick in the spokes of the wheel, so-to-speak , MO thought with a grin. And length of that body part was a decidedly bad feature when anything dangerous or sharp was whirling around .
He was reminded of the notion that some cars look fast, and some are fast. And while some cars both looked and were fast, there were sleepers that most people were not aware of at all.
He began running algorithms for engine designs and horsepower and weight ratios and comparing them to the improvements in other systems within certain timeframes. He was wondering if the slight hesitation that turbo diesel engines manifested could be cured with a pre-ignition hack that pre-charged the cylinder. He began building porotypes in the virtual realm at four different points in rise above sea level and with nine different power-to-weight ratios. After 4.4 seconds of collation he managed -in seven seconds- to design a new diesel motor with 990 horsepower and 1560 foot-pounds of torque with a primary aspirate fuel injection that eliminated pre-turbo lag.
He sent the design to Isaiah to see if he wanted to build one; and as Isaiah shifted into Horse stance he took the DM onto his interface. After deconstructing the design in avatar, Isaiah agreed -via DM to MO- to build it; he then sent CAD files -that he had built from the designs- to the cloud. As each piece began printing out -using an aluminum analog they had invented 72 hours before for the lab’s suite of 3D printers- Isaiah morphed into Kun Tao , Tiger stance and MO focused on the new algorithms for their illegal-alien tracking system.
1. COG И
“More than any rational argument, more than any patriot explanation,” said Carrage’s niece, “those glasses of heating oil adulterating a fine Pouilly-Fuisse swung winegrowers of the Macon hills to the resistance.”
Wine & War [Kladstrup, Don & Petie]
And Joseph dreamed a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him yet the more
Genesis 37:5 [King James Bible]
Sun means decreasing, losing, or damaging. Surely something is to be lost. The structure is the Mountain above; Lake below. Evaporation of the lake precipitates the Mountain
Hexagram 41 [I-Ching]
I. 2039 e.v.
Chen walked the long corridor of the Southwestern cog toward the center of the compound.
The concrete walls rose up sufficiently above him that he could ignore their terminus; he felt these bursts of information appear and disappear in his conscious mind like the physicists’ universe, ab initio ; the virtual particles that every once in while stayed open long enough for inflation to tear the fabric of the void open and give birth to new cosmos. How many, he thought, other times had this happened or even was still happening; multiple universes being born from similar miracle pangs?
But today these ideas, these conceits just kept appearing and vanishing so quickly as he traversed the long hall of his friend's compound; his friend was more a benefactor, he thought. Like Francois-Marie Aruet in 1750, he felt as though this rex of the Colorado high-country had sent for him -and doled at a stipend and the Chamberlain position- with slightly unnerving excitement. It had come on all at once, he thought as he realized he couldn’t exactly remember how he had arrived or traveled, or what criteria he’d used to agree to this arrangement.
Of course, the fear of being suspected a fraud, like many people in many epochs, was part of his wobbliness. But, it was the natural entropy of relationships that Chen knew from history; the King of Prussia did in fact tire of Voltaire by 1753 of the common era. Chen also mused of his own more recent record of fast friendships and slow dissolutions. They had Zendik in common and this was a more tenacious adhesive between people he had noticed; like war buddies, as Lyndon liked to say when the topic of why ex-Zendiks seemed to pardon the sins of their comrades so easily.
In the trenches together they had been, there was no doubt. That place, Zendik Farm, was on a war footing from day one in 1963; down in the entropy basin of Topanga Canyon were a panoply of anarchists and outlaws denuded of ideology and fealty to any one cause. They wanted survival and knew they were the bacteria kept in check by the more dominant eukaryotes in the colony i.e., the country writ large ; so, if they wanted to rise they had to leave the colony and wait for some anti-biotic to wipe humanity out. It would be an antibiotic that would leave them -these Zendiks- newly dominant and positioned to start a new strain of the race in the absence of the once hegemonic paradigm of Man. This was the idea, anyway.
Goddamn, what recursive muscle spasms those narrative memories brought , Chen thought. I've been gone from that place for 10 -or more, it felt like more- years and it still covers each trench my mind digs away from it with a dust, a fallout from some super-pollination . He heard what sounded like wind outside now too. He then thought of the throws of the I-Ching he had done; and he thought of the next morning when Lyndon had thrown his. Chen’s throw had read:
Hexagram 11: The wall falls back into the moat. Use no army now. Perseverance brings humiliation. The hour of doom is at hand. When matters have come to this pass, we should submit to fate and not try to stave it off by violent resistance. The one recourse left to us is to hold our own within our intimate circle. Shall we preserve in trying to resist evil in the usual way, our collapse would only be more complete.
Hexagram 11 was his, and Chen read it for three days before sharing it with his friend. After a sleeping day, Lyndon returned to the common areas of the home and read his own thrown stalks; Lyndon received the double-throw of 41 and 7:
Multitude. Where there is contention, a multitude is sure to arise. Multitude, Steadfast and upright. For a person of noble spirit, No Fault. Persistence is for righteousness, to persist to bring peace to the world. Firm and central. Taking the risk of dangerous action, He maintains public order; What mistakes should there be?
Water contained under earth.
Sun Decreasing. Losing, damaging. Mountain above; Lake below. Evaporation of lake precipitates on the mountain. Being sincere and Truthful. Steadfast, upright. No fault. To decrease what is lower, to increase what is above.
Lyndon had spoken briefly on what this meant to him. He saw water as the subconscious; it was evaporating finally to wet the mountain -which was- his Logos ; his conscious mind and its articulate language. The subconscious would populate the conscious and dissolve and be less now. He was to become a massive megalith of speech, true speech, sincere, noble, and he would come with an army of 1 million men, and 1 million words , he thought. He said all this, but he said less than he thought.
Chen felt what he had heard was both unintelligible and likely true. But their throws had been opposing; each man facing like a mirror. Reversal, but not opposed, he corrected. Each man doing their duty, even if duties opposed, like the lion and the antelope, wolf and deer, God and man; each behaved as ordained.
Chen thought of the mind’s trenches of thought, the newly dug soil, the mise-en-scène of worm trenches within the man-holes, all voids slicked lightly with the soft seemingly unobtrusive burden of that germinating dust. What eusocial bee of thought will land on that trench; what hornet will fly into those wormholes and scrape the sides; what flying ant of the mind's eye will dig its legs into that skinned soil? And what fecund flower of memory will be sullied by the tempted Apiformes as it lands and inseminates that old guard of the mind's flora & fauna?
What new conceits will spring forth from that incestuous and recursive cross-pollenization of epinephrine-welded memory, those mem
ories most acute, most hardwired now from the bio-chemistry of adrenaline dumped like the memories of stains sealed in by epoxy; the insect in amber; the preserved corpus of Pharos by natron-baths and linen wraps? The tattoo ink healed and sealed over by the skin, he added.
Would his daily thoughts always be infected by that place? How long would each recapitulation, each new generation of idea retain the genomic stamp of that lowly origin? he asked the dust. Ah, Darwin, he though as he looked about the concrete home, and noticed the diffuse light from above and how shadows didn’t really appear.
Jesus, Chen asked himself, how fucking long would it take to purge that Zendik gene from his lineage of thoughts?
And how often, he began, as he forced his mind into a new vector, did the grandchild look more like the grandfather than the father ? Lyndon looked more like Herman Melville than anyone else in his family. Over 12 generations -and through the Maori of New Zealand- had Melville's genome passed before it bloomed in Chen’s benefactor. What a tawdry -and yet poetic- story had been told with those lineal blue-prints and schemata Lyndon had impregnated the Great Room's wall with. Chen thought of the wall. The concrete wall. The massive stele that dominated that room.
Lyndon had had the family tree carved into the monolithic wall; carved into the enmojecido and brackish-black and dark-earth-brown stained concrete wall of this, the largest hall in the compound. The tree’s brachial roots, axons, falling down from the trunk of The Author himself into a conventional root ball of legitimate children and grandchildren, then the huge wall had a second brachial route, lines from him showing the long-throws of Herman's wind-blown seed, tendrils reaching to the antipodes , and the Polynesian scions he gave western sun to; a higher arc of the elliptic than the native equatorial star.
Chen then came into the hall itself and began -standing at the wall- to trace those branch roots further now and notice the names and genome handles for each mulatto offspring scribed into the concrete. The first name he saw was, Kaylee-Typee, with an addendum of, AAGGTTAGTCC, and then an allele rubric -short chain 16 serotonin 1.1 - stamped below with tiny LED lights beneath that would bloom too. They were -each allele, each child- like spinning pulsar stars in Poisson distribution along the wall. It all looked like 26 cards of chaos half ordered, wrangled and then abandoned. It was a mystery that was just coherent enough to make a man want to solve. It gave one just enough to confound, but hook, and compel.
He knew it, Chen knew it was no random populating; his friend had made a map and each glow of an adenine A or thymine T would correlate to a chromosome or allele further down into the next generation; the traits of face or body or behavior or proclivity linked from the Author down to Lyndon himself. It was both the art of DNA and the DNA of art , Chen thought. The family tree overwhelmed like a giant 200-year redwood in the forest, and it was 200 years, Chen thought, for The Author was born in 1819 and here it was 2019 of the era vulgari and Lyndon was 45 years old .
Chen -as he stood here in the concrete bunker- was 65 years of age, and he still wondered -at times- how he had arrived here almost one year ago. Numbers often prodded him to think of time. Words made him think of space.
There were terabytes of information on this wall, but one had to follow each brachia, each letter, each genome, each man or mother and follow too each incipient study, as they updated on the wall, until one found the correlate in feature or bug, each transitional gait or steady-state monomania. The family tree was moving, phototropically, and each allele updated over time. From what source? Chen asked as he stared at the wall.
His friend was the only man he knew to take the task of thinking on these issue so seriously as to hew stone and draw water for such a project; it was clearly an obsession for him and while it could be seen from the doorway, the entryway of the home, and seen as beautiful, and while it could also be stared at more thoughtfully by an interloper and thought as mere map and mere genealogy to a legacy they already assumed and assented to; it would take a much more careful reader to live here and study it and follow each thread until one realized just what one had.
The clues were at the borders of the slab itself. Like air-pruning roots the wall left room for merely one more generation after his host; a generation that spread out at his flanks and refused to go in any other direction but laterally: his progeny was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him and making no advancement nor retreat; and the nucleobases all glowed in all the same places as his; a super-symmetry; a fidelity that changed the point of reproduction.
The gene was no longer the replicator; now, here in stone, it was the organism itself; the man himself, Chen saw.
Like Melville had sneered and scoffed at Christian pieties as he enfeebled Starbuck and made Stubb an unthinking dolt -not to think is my 11th commandment , Stubb had said- and the sarcasms laid at the feet of God by the catbird tongue of his Ishmael: the center and circumference of all democracy ! Ishmael -and thus Melville- had spoken with derision.
Like this, Lyndon was mocking the religion of modernity, the selfish-gene theory from Watson and Crick to Dawkins now. Lyndon was saying, all my men will be the loci of reproduction and thus evolution, and I will be the endless man, the thing traced back like DNA. No longer will the chain be broken, the tablets smashed, no, this letter, this word, this sentence will remain. Intact.
It was haughty, arrogance instantiated before grand words were even uttered, it was the kind of thing done by the insane or the godlike. It was beautiful but first terrible and hidden under the ground.
Chen wandered the hall; tried to spy on the bas relief from each angle as the Earth's sun washed in via these opaque high windows that while themselves well below ground allowed light to flow like a cataract over the top of the family tree; the photons invigilating the carved trenches of the root lines, the names, the genomes and instantiations; flowing and filling so the alphabet in man grandly glowed and sparkled.
The floor of this room rose in spots with knee high monoliths atop of which grew air-plants, each one a Tillandsia Aristocrat of exploding outer framing verdancy and inner imbricate sanguinary rojos ; they looked like still frames of coruscating -if weathered- fragmentary grenade blasts; a concussive singularity of life at the core and a death penalty at the periphery. In the Queen’s Knight 1 position, the seamless concrete pillar held up a clear bowl which encased a Tillandsia that itself made way for an artist's pointed-round paint-brush covered from the ferrule south in an old oil-based pigment with curry-powder hues that hemorrhaged its darkest color on the horizon of its circumference from whatever angle the eye took.
The lacuna between the frozen drips contained the craquelure of the disintegrating original brush's lumber; and Chen wondered how the wood of the brush looked beneath the paint. The tapered handle was stuck at an oblique angle in the tangle nest of the terminus point of the plant. It fell into the madness of the plant's omphalos and on top of its worn fibrous head was another skein of hurricane modeling: a nest of a woman’s aubergine hair ignored by the light and holding its color and sinew in the shadow of the tall shards of the plant that rose in green concussive rings around and above it.
Chen stood between the monoliths and stared further into the bas relief . The home had a proximity device that picked up his position -a series of photo-receptors as motion detectors were arrayed around the room to detect movement of men- and a recorded voice that described the monolith and the wall’s context -like a helpful and modern museum- began to play into the air.
“... the little lower layer: All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks, ” said the low hold & grasp and rumble of a man's voice-imbued phlogiston as it plumed like smoke and poetry inside the ring of these solid concrete pillars; pillars that circled him as Chen had stepped back inside their perimeter. The room was arrayed to draw the visitor into the center -swaddled by the waist-high pillars and plants- to gaze upon the monolith at eastern edge. It was only once inside this ring that the voice would speak and explain. And it was the perfect spot
from which to gaze on the family tree carved into the giant wall of concrete.
He was in the center of the room, and the concrete caissons were of five, around him, each with a plant -without soil- in clear bowl; each lit up; each with white air-roots coiled below just like the leaves above them that swirled like springs.
Chen didn't jump or start to the emergent sound as the voice was so low and sonorous it seemed as welcome as the blown air off a piquant flower bloom; he listened absently to it more as music than language and continued to let the visual of the hall's wall box him in. He had heard it each day for so many days, each time it said something new and something familiar too. He was fine with being confused, as he felt he had endless days to acclimate, to catch up, to figure shit out.
The stele was packed with so much aesthetic and -particular- genomic data, that it was like something giving birth within a nest of eggs. The man's recorded voice continued to speak on the wall’s meaning in this prose poem and Chen studied the flanking names and 4-letter sequences beneath their nom de guerres embossed on each side of his friend's own ornate jumble of genomic letters; his friend had obviously had his own genome sequences and stamped into the wall. On each side were two names, two sets of chromosomal stampings and the two sets of corollary physical and behavioral instantiations that mapped onto that enzymatic coda. Each name had letters of the genome, each letter-set had human or animal traits described, each trait led to roots that moved and glowed and each crack in the stele breathed in black & grey.
The audio file continued to embalm him as it spoke into the room; he began to see some kind of gestalt organism writhe and pose in different stages of some natural morphology; a kind of embryonic stop-action film that documented the stages of the lineage from The Author to Chen's friend but also seemed to be building a case for what might all that information, all that DNA and all those recombinations -what might all that code- mean. It hinted at what purpose might it all be for.
