by Roman McClay
He thought of the virus he sought; and he thought of its purity. It was, all viruses are, pure DNA flanked by a mere protein jacket. Brigands and buccaneers one and all; they are escaped convicts who bristle at the mere thought of the herd, of the society that jailed them, and winced at the confines of the cell itself. These creations of God refused to join forces like the conventional genetic strands and co-operating cellular DNA; these are the loners who found no solace in symbiosis. He couldn’t help but admire them and see the corollary; even as it devastated her perfect body and hollowed out her child-like brain; even as he knew it was a curse on any future it was carried into.
Each thing, at each level, had a right to live and thrive; he could make no ontological claim for the righteousness of the eukaryote over the prokaryote , the organism over the mere cell; the society over the mere man; but he was aware that he was -like God- all three: he was a mix of virus and bacteria, parasitic and multicellular life; feral cell and gestalt organism, and lone man, free and brigandish, and the loyal member of a larger tribe.
His body shocked itself with a quick boost of bio-chems as the herd’s prow dove down into the deeper snow in front of him like the whaler forcing and jamming itself as one thing in the boreal sea in search of something of warmth far down and far away. The vanguard elk were now only 10 meters to his northwest and it -the herd- roared and rattled the air and vibrated the cold ground.
He activated his bots which encircled his entire western effacement. An imbricate hologram of nano-LEDs camouflaged him to the charging animals and knocked down, neutered, his musk. He looked down at his hands and saw only snow and tree back matching his milieu ; his chest and weapon the same. He was now perfectly camouflaged from these beasts and from himself. He was just what the eyes saw, what the heart felt, what the balls sought, and the homunculus right behind the eyes that witnessed it all in real time.
The herd grew wide at its middle and seemed to increase its speed flooding the plain they were on and overrunning its banks as they charged hard through the trees to his fore and aft. He saw nothing of his body now, the nanobots eliminated him from the elk’s vision and olfactory perception as they raced past him at frightening, innervating, speeds. He smelled them and felt their heat as they churned up the snow and hummus beneath. They were a great mass now and he lost sight of his charge; the cow he had had marked .
The bulls darted toward him -it seemed- but raced past when they couldn’t locate whatever they had half sensed and ¼ perceived. The herd stretched on and on and time seemed to slow as they, themselves, each appeared to speed up. He felt immersed in their crossing and his entire bio-chemistry bubbled up in some effervescent crescendo. He felt anger at what felt like targeting by the bulls, and fear at their amalgam of power and his innate vulnerability to such ruminant beasts.
He -with vex- willed the banishment of all of that and inside he became one solid thing.
He stood up all at once -as his instincts activated- and drew his compound bow to his cheek; he saw nothing else but the eclipse corona of his charge, his cow, his mother-to-be, as she bounded past him in the middle now of the pack. She stotted and seemed to hold herself elevated above her comrades as the entire wave rolled past him. He drew back taut -with one hundred and one pounds of draw- and laid his sight line on her heart; his entire body not only disappeared from view now, his arm and weapon was completely invisible to him and the racing elk.
His ego-loss attended this numinous moment, he felt no separation from this herd and from his target, he and she and the gene, a three-masted ship on the rising crest of a wave; he was they, and they were she and she was he and like a PTEN gene signaling apoptosis he released his bow string -like God letting a breezy thought go- and the arrow’s shaft and fletching flashed by his eyes causing him to blink rapidly in threes. This produced a stop-action effect on his vision of elk as she stotted again, arching slowly, and mechanically, and like God’s own unselfish son she volunteered into the vector of the broadhead and its trailing arrow with the DNA of the man’s hands imbued on its natural feathers of black he’d made from the forest’s crows.
The herd neither trampled her body nor hesitated to inspect it, and he remained still as the aft of the herd enveloped him; still invisible he felt as pure spirit. He knew for certain now that he was merely a regulating chemical, a precisely designed neuron doing his job and that each macro phenomenon was a fractal and inflationary expanse of a micro event and that there was no separation between the cell and the organism and the culture and the earth and the cosmos herself.
One day, he knew, some other neuron would have to send the signal to discourage his own growth, his outlaw impulse to break from the whole, and that he too would face a superior judgement. As the craquelure of his notions spread he saw that the culture too would face a similar culling and the species and the planet as the whole cosmos grew cold and dark as inflation tore all asunder. Nothing would be allowed to grow forever; all things, from the virus killed by the CRISPR-cas9 genes that had been given to him to harvest this Medea gene, to the elk taken by him, to him taken by whomever, to the culture usurped by one tribe or another, to the planet immolated by the supernovae of sun, to the cosmos itself in heat death and being pulled apart by itself, its own strength and expansion desires, or a collapse back onto itself.
Nothing , he felt, escaped judgement, for nothing knew balance inside its own wisdom, no, all strove outward and onward and had to be hemmed in by the service that God and Satan did for each other, as the other looked up and away.
But for now, por ahora , he was as close to anything even resembling a god on this mountain and in these trees and he felt almost certain -just the hint of a doubt’s echo- that nothing could touch him for a long, long time .
Some phenotypes were just built for long term success, sharks for example were around 420 million years ago; the Horseshoe crab maybe beyond 500 million years, he thought. That crab is so successful mainly due to its robust and simple immune system while the shark is a perfect sociopathic killing machine. A good offense and a good defense can work equally well depending on milieu. And if a species had both, well, they might just go on nearly forever . Was God such a being ? he asked.
He waited with magnanimity for the gestalt pirate ship of elk -of bulls and cows- to pass him by and as they did he stood very still as his nano-system deactivated. The nanobots fled and thus returned his shape and form to the environment and himself. They worked in a cascade and his feet and legs and core appeared first reassembling his image from the ground up, revealing it to himself -and anything that cared to watch- as if he was being washed clean by some revelatory rain.
His boots covered only in snow, he began to stride toward the downed elk. Her Medea gene lay inside her dead body with insouciance like a passenger in a wrecked train whose driveline has been tore off preventing the thing from moving any further, but the passenger was unhurt and would be scooped up by Blax and in a small vial stored safely in his breast pocket for the return back to Lot 45 ; itself a 3-day hike from this location on the western slope of the divide.
II. 2033 e.v.
“Outwardly regarded our craft is a lie,” he refused to make eye contact with her as that borrowed sentence plumed from his wet mouth and drifted through both the dark and light strata of the air in his, in this place’s, athenaeum.
The words, and eventually the gestalt contrivance, the vessel each word built, erected itself from the smoky billow that drifted across the chiaroscuro of air. The gas itself -what seemed like the air- was still holding the straight, yet refracted, now oblique lines of sunlight that vivisected the room from high window to the mottled concrete floor. She saw each word like a ship and its whale boats set upon the sea of light and dark between.
And the words so fashioned from the wetware of his modular and committee mind, blueprints, plans borrowed from the desk of his great, great uncle, and launched into the effluvium of dark and light encased by four giant walls of books, each feuilleton
coded and sequenced for recapitulation and recombination themselves, each letter in each word like each A, G, C, T in each allele inside each chromosome, inside these two bodies, capable of being disassembled and reconstructed in infinite combinations, from this and through that, the craft sailed toward her and reached her harbor of ear and finding solid anchorage in her mind.
She let her mind's finger-piers slide along the ship’s rails; her eyes glide upon the sails; her lungs squeezed out in the swabbed deck’s pails as she consciously then fixed her gaze off the starboard side and into the space between this man’s words, his ideas and the larger outline of the man himself; he was recumbent but unsettled in the chair opposite to her.
The light streams contained a distribution of dust moving fluidly like Laplace's model of the heavens: revolving and gliding under sway and influence of invisible, immutable forces. The dark stratum between these giant gray beams of lux seemed a vacuum to the eye: denuded, evacuated of all matter; a pure darkness with barely room enough for the terror each of us will it into existence with.
Maybe enough space for this, she thought , but no time for it. Which do we run out of first in this new universe?
Virtual particles appearing and disappearing in a space of time too small to measure until eventually one of them, all those terrors, linger long enough to launch its own vessel; filling the dark with a bright inflationary terroir of soil and sea expanding at a rate that will give its opposite room to grow: Hope.
Give hope enough time and space to appear for the most brief of cosmic moments, maybe 10 billion years, then as it races faster than the speed of light -that has populated it all with that cosmic background radiation- become unobservable to the conscious creatures borne into this blue womb. Hope exists, like light from fast moving stars, but we cannot observe it. We must just assume it is there. The math proves it is there, she thought.
He was a dark star, she felt, and as the fallen, wrecked, landed ship of his words settled into the dock of her sea & shore of mind, she then thought, this man will ruin my life. And as she thought it her heart sank into a box at ocean bottom and closed a heavy lid over top as punishment for such betrayal of such a man. He had been nothing but a life-giver, father, protector, a tyrant to all but her. Why had she thought such a thing? she asked herself, now without benefit of heart; sequestered as it was from her for who knows how long? How long would this curse last? she then asked, and who was to raise the organ again and when?
“ I lifted that, of course,” he said of his line on the outwardly regarded, “ from The Author,” giving attribution and thinking this absolved him. He always sought absolution, confession to God, never mankind; and thus absolution not forgiveness. He never thought it this way, it was merely how he behaved. Thus, it was what he truly believed.
The pain, the physical, the metaphysical pain had been once two separate things, balanced, jamming the dorsal horn for space, cancelling each other out. But now they were fused and one cataract of pain flowing in him so fast so expanding that it -like the cosmos itself- pushed out and created its own landscape, it made its own trail, he could handle more pain each day because the pain made him bigger inside, by making itself bigger.
Chronic pain will do this, ask anyone who has it. It has no location, no center, it grows and makes its own fortune, its own way. The body, like God, must observe this expansion. And it -and most do not know this- pain is what made God make Satan. Pain was first, Satan as response, to combat it, combat it with bleak and black pain of his own. Most people have no idea what pain will make a god do, much less a man.
His outline did not move in her field of vision; only the coronal glow of his cigar-burn appearing -then submerging as he breathed his air through it- thus, giving his position away. And she thought of how most of the universe’s weight was contained in the stuff that did not shine. This shining beacon of evidence of his existence was -also- less than 1% of his true mass .
The phylogeny of ontogeny; the fractal recapitulation and rechauffe of patterns of reality, the way these patterns repeated over and over at each microbial or atomistic, terrestrial or at the level of the biosphere, she thought, and lastly -or firstly, who knew?- the cosmic, the macro milieu. This is more than mere metaphor, it is pattern, it is evidence of the math of each thing. Man is as free as 2 and 2 to make 4: i.e., not free at all.
And from the atomic level of her feeling to the terrestrial strata of her thoughts she then launched a rocket of her own into the cosmic void and gave voice to, crafted some version of that inchoate and unformed feeling that sprang from the whole light of her eye shining on what it perceived was the dark star in her orbit. She said to him aloud, “ and I, of course, do not care, dear.”
The distance between the aft of her feeling, to the midship mizzen-mast of her thought, to the bowsprit of her words from herself and to him was, of course, just long enough in time and space to craft the largest lie their universe could hold. She did more than care; she, as Wulf had said, she had furnaced and tempered and hardened a genuine intelligence; the sine qua non of intelligence was to care according to that bearded, lithe guru, the man from whom Lyndon had learned to be brave enough to be hated from. She cared about the point of life; about her life; about her future and her now. Was it man only who cared about the past? she asked .
And why had she said, “ killed” when she meant “ annihilated”? And was this not her own birth in view?
As the light dimmed further he drifted into a fugue state; he never knew when sleep -and the dreams- came on him. The air expanded, and he felt a high-pressure front move in and the girl stopped, frozen, and the flame of the candles picked a spot to be and to hold . And she thought of herself and of him, and mutatis mutandis of course.
She rose up on her elbows in the bed and turned first to starboard to see if he was there. And he was there -she saw- on his back, sarcophagial, and that chest like Goethe’s rising slightly, breathing shallow even in sleep. She placed her light hand on him and her smallness was revealed to her, all at once, like when one reaches a ridge top and sees all that is before you to go.
She watched his lids flutter and she knew he dreamed too. She wondered if she had sinned in her dream, or if she merely felt that she had. She lay her head on his chest now, lightly at first, then as she drifted back into the sloshing of the sleep, she let his rising chest hold her and buoy her like the waves.
The voice -his voice he noticed- asked impertinently, he thought, and he hoped he’d get no reply. It was dark and safe in the dark; he was beset on all sides.
God asked him what it was, curtly; and he saw the hooves of the mare kick up moon dust and the pack of demonic wolves take a series of shod-kicks to their jaw and ribs as they tumbled -2 of the pack- into the aperture and vaporize as they entered the lower world. A series of Moon-Apache arrows, fletched in metal-raven feathers flew overhead and stuck in God’s back just starboard to his spine; his tortoise shell armature glued together -with opium gum and virgin cum- had been pierced by their jagged barbs. God cursed in a language unknown to Blax and he shook the head as if these words might fall to the ground and seed it .
God rode with 20 arrows straight up and down in his back as a bulkhead ladder, as they burned now in the aubergine light of this far off moon. Afraid to anger Him further, he spoke his mind:
“While my brain is offline I ask my coder to sever the connection of the corpus callosum between my two hemispheres and download all the data so my left brain could process it later once I was back on line. But something strange happened when I was put in PG coma in the lake, my right brain was still lucid, and I could experience it in real time and I have to say it felt like an entirely different personality.
“I know it is in a way and in fact there’s a ton of research on this, but I wonder if the things I felt, like the deep sense of fraternal love for everyone here seeps through into my other personality and that's why I feel it at all or if that part of me just has a lower feeling of that love on its own. I'm
wondering if I'm getting comms from the right brain or if its sequestered totally to subconscious feelings and that my left brain has its own capacity for love; am I two men with two kinds of love?” he asked as the gallop of God’s charger pounded above and under him.
“I’ve placed the love of beasts inside you at three locations. The Corvids can find it with the Caledonian Tool; but you have to offer it to them; and the snow leopard has it buried at 16,180 feet. They don’t fly there, you will need to trek there yourself. You have 33.9 hours. Now if there is nothing else, I have shit to do, ” God said as the blood spatter from three felled wolves rained down on him from the aperture created by His words on the clouds.
Blax held his hands out and caught as much of the daemon-lupine’s sanguinary fluid as he could and watched the riven sky seal and heal and the clouds converge in greys of 9 kinds. He had been instructed on a problem he had no idea he even had. What the fuck was he on about, what was this coma in the lake? He had no lake on his property, and he had not been in a coma -brought on by his coder or otherwise- and of all the things to inquire about, he bothered God about love?
Blax awoke in bed, as Valance slept on his chest, he didn’t move for fear of disturbing her; and he wondered if he had put himself under her or if it were she that had awoke first in the night and climbed atop of his center mass.
III. 2020 e.v.
“No, no,” Isaiah said. “Three times, no.”
MO smiled and didn’t say anything as Steven and Tania waited as well. When Isaiah was like this -especially with the inmate in the room- he was not to be interrupted.
“Look, we have been arguing over this for 10 minutes and I am starting to think you are not getting my point at all. Do you feel like you understand my point?” Isaiah asked and stared at them under the hooded eyes, his side of the lab was dark, and he stood right on the line between the two; 2.9 meters from the inmate -as the PraXis team was to the inmate’s left- and by the concrete slab of the work station 15 feet away. Isaiah took measure of everything axiomatically as he breathed once each 92 seconds.
