by Roman McClay
The inside of the old Chrysler had been customized with a flat black micro-fiber interior and a recently updated GPS and SatCom panel; additional digital gauges illuminated when he hit the ignition. Horsepower and RPM read-outs dominated the center screen and the interior lights, amber in color, dimmed as he drove the car toward the opening garage door.
“Ambient,” the Governor said to the voice-link system and the music began to creep into the cabin, “this is Lisa Gerard, I saw her live, in Boulder in ’05 or ’06 I think, it was unparalleled. It brought me to tears; quite literally. You ever notice people use that word in completely the wrong way? The say literally, and then go on to describe the most fanciful and clearly metaphorical phenomena. I heard some chick say, and I was literally driven up the wall blah blah . I mean, this bitch was on TV, and I know media people are dumb, but even for media that is retarded. You cannot be driven literally up the wall.
“And this shit gets said over and over by people. It’s part of a larger problem of people not knowing the difference between reality and fantasy; and not understanding language at all. Furthermore, we have language apps now, that help direct your speech modules to formulate sentences more accurately and more in line with our syntax and word-choice rules, but people turn them off; deactivate them so they do not sound so quote,” he leaned on this word, “educated. It’s incredible. People do not want to seem too smart; for it alienates them. They’d rather be perceived to be common and likable instead of what they are: erudite and savvy.”
They drove on along Speer Boulevard now and began picking up speed to hit the highway. The car sounded like a growling cat with no concept of death; the Hemi was unencumbered by back-pressure -free thanks to a cat-back system Isaiah had designed and built in the lab- and it issued a harmonic drone as they weaved in and out of late night traffic .
“Sir, I hate to interrupt your little soliloquy here, but donde esta ?” Nathan asked with a certain bravura , then added, self-consciously, “jeffe .” He thought, upon examination, that he felt a loosening of the rules of etiquette with the executive mainly due to the fact that they were riding in the man’s personal car, clearly on a personal mission; it was, upon reflection, probably too familiar, even inappropriate, but he just felt like he was at liberty to behave this way for some reason.
His slight confusion triggered his PG module to access the Web /Nextus app that all Vanguard members could stream either reflexively prompted by bio-chemical fluctuations like Nathan did, or manually like the Governor, which required an active prompt from the cerebral cortex and its conscious module.
Nathan’s Nextus conjured up a study done that showed subjects modulating their voices to match the voice of their interlocutors; it further loaded a brief abstract of Franz de Waal’s original work on chimps vis-à-vis mimicry and empathy; as this raw data synthesized, he thought, mimicry is the first stage of empathy, but the matching gesture, tone and pattern, even accent, was something else.
Every interaction was fraught with mild deceptions; a complete bestiary of lies from the most rudimentary, prone and anodyne, to the more erect and sophisticated; our bodies host both bacteria and the highest cognition of abstract thought; all of which was perfectly designed to lie and notice a lie. Jesus, Nathan thought, I’m even ruminating on lying because the bastard is prompting me. It’s a sympathetic response.
At a certain point, at a certain threshold, self-awareness renders the man almost paralytic. One becomes aware of just how much they are a battered ship tossed about by the sea and the crew inside as well; and, furthermore, that both the rain above and the ocean below are going to wet them all until the sanguinary and salival fluids inside them all can find its own drowned level. There is an emergent property that reveals itself with this kind of warbling and muttering about the mind for decades for each man, for centuries for mankind; but like everything else, it took science to make religious claims come -or be revealed to be- true. Man, it seemed had some kind of soul; and this soul can manacle a man more completely than leg irons or the hand of God.
“Mr. Lee,” Governor Sou said, “we are driving to see a friend of mine, someone we cannot go see in the caravan. And I need you to come with me for moral support; and I’ll need your advice once we are there. And further, my speech isn’t over yet. But hold on,” and with that he pressed two buttons on the wheel and gazed into the screen watching the numbers increase on the power-train gauge until the horsepower reached 550. He then lifted a blood-red toggle cover and engaged the switch; the screen on the facia of the car’s dash went black.
“Now the theory of mind is referencing a phenomenon that doesn’t manifest in humans until about age four or so. Before that a child cannot even imagine that other people may know more or less than them; they can only think as if their thoughts are every thought; that there is no difference between them and anyone else. This is technical actually, not some loosey-goosey psycho-analytical thing. It’s hard science.
“The differentiation begins about age four in humans, or in the mind of other species where conscious deception becomes operative. Unconscious deception happens at the prokaryotic level for christsakes , that is not the issue, shit your immune system is in a pitched battle against unsophisticated and clearly non-conscious creatures right now; and each one of these bastards are deceiving and trying to detect those lies over and over, back and forth .
“Even plants with no central nervous system to speak off unconsciously deceive by producing polyps on their leaves that are the exact shape and size and color of their predator’s eggs. This ruse effects a cease-fire on their leaves by indicating to their predatory enemies, a caterpillar for example -in the most clever ruse I’ve seen by a salad in my life- that one of their own caterpillar offspring is on said leaf and thus a sign is hung: do not disturb it with your munching as the kid will need it when he is born .
“But theory of mind is the line of demarcation in my opinion; it is an emergent property and one that’s borne of the pressure to both deceive and detect deception in a more effective manner. Take for example, the ironclad CSS Manassas built by the Confederacy to do battle with the larger Union navy. It was an armature phenomenon; the iron ships would be more robust and could take more bombardments than the wooden ships of that era,” the Governor paused.
“Back when the ships were made of wood and the men were made of steel,” Nathan said.
“Indeed, now don’t get restless,” the Governor quickly volleyed, “I’m heading this conversation into harbor. Now, this is in 1861, October 12th to be exact, that the Manassas enters combat. By February 17th of 1864, the H.L. Hunley is the first submarine to sink an enemy warship, indeed sinks the USS Housatonic just outside the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
“The submarine was a consciously created deception; its entire function was to evade detection by the Union. Its armature was no upgrade, only its subsurface operation was. Without theory of mind, the Confederacy would have assumed the Union would know what they -the Confederacy- knew, that the ship was under water and meaning to attack them. It’s only with the capacity to understand that your rivals are limited in what they know, that they do not know all that you in fact know -or that which there is to be known- because of circumstances or due to your ruse itself, that it occurs to a creature to do such a thing as build a submarine in the first place.
“At the prokaryotic level and for many levels above well-into the eukaryotic species, the deception could be reflexive and instinctive and the mere random flailing of chemistry, of bio-chemistry and selective pressure. Thus, non-thinking bacteria randomly coat themselves in sugar and proteins that mimic the surface of the host’s own cells, and this prevents the host’s immune system from attacking them. Ostensibly bacteria who didn’t randomly develop this trait died off millions of years ago -or they developed another strategy- but anyway, the surviving bacteria appear as though they outsmarted the host.
“But this molecular mimicry is a one-shot deal; if some host could dis
cern this ruse and ferret them out the bacteria would be eradicated; they’d have no plan B, uh, hold on,” the Governor turned down a frontage road off of 287 after traveling on I25 south and then Santa Fe for some time.
They quickly sped up to a quite serious speed as their route paralleled the highway for a bit and then followed the abandoned road as it vectored off west into the foothills. The car’s Halo lights automatically added lumens to combat the dark country road, adding 10% illumination for each 10 mph the Governor added to the car’s velocity. Soon the entire road and its rough flanks were coruscated with this blue-spectrum light as they sped at around 130 mph both above and increasingly hunkering down into the asphalt -like a predatory cat- as the car automatically lowered itself via modified suspension and computer and fins annealed to the chassis below.
This gasoline powered motor and the road noise were almost anachronisms; they were increasingly rare among this strata of the population -the rich- with their ultra-modern electric cars; but they were not extinct yet. They were in that middle zone between the old and the new, and the young Mr. Lee found himself forgetting his cares and imagining himself on the prow of some Buccaneer ship filling his eyes with the glare off the dead Caribbean sea, and his ears with the nexus of the leeward wind and the outer envelope of the sails -of the technology- of the day.
Being a satellite among such planets -like the executive- and the powerful and wealthy citizens that populated Nathan’s orb could be reason enough to be unaware that other lanterns hung in the sky; others besides the one that illuminated these respectable-society people and cast a black cowl around Nathan’s head and shoulder as the sun came up and dressed him fully in this cosmic black as it rose and its shadow dropped.
A technological speciation like this earlier adoption of hybrid vehicles and their merged CNS with nanotech -at this level- created the illusion -to Nathan and his everyday contacts- that the whole world was already saturated with this technology. However, there were still large swaths of the topography -of the human landscape too- empty of these trends.
Nathan and his set were equally oblivious to the fact that the philosophies of these refuseniks and luddites and the poor would be tethered to their old technologies. The feral humans outside the cuidads would often hold equally uncivilized ideas on what it meant to be human at all. This is something the perfumed and scrubbed and oh-so-modern man and woman seem to forget; they seem to not be aware that not everyone shares their ideas on what constitutes the Good Life and what is both in and out of bounds.
The man of wealth thinks money is the measure of the man; the man of high cognition thinks brains are all that matter; and when you -and your kind- do battle with just your words, in courtrooms or in depositions or on the campaign trial, you tend to think settling disputes with one’s arms, and hands and knuckle bones is no longer even possible let alone preferable. The term barbarian is pejorative to all but those that live as actual barbarians. Insults hurled by one type of man often land as complements on other types of men if hurled far enough afield. Nathan had never been anywhere where his money was not legal tender. But those zones do exist, and they are a shorter trip away from your home than one often realizes.
The Governor was silent as he navigated this road at these speeds; and Nathan was glad for it for at least two reasons, more -probably- if he had needed them. The first was he needed to think about what the Governor knew and how he knew it; that slip up with the bird story was a tell for certain ; but the man was not lying or hiding anything right now, his own 3.2 was adamant that there was no daylight between the Governor’s affect and his internals. Secondly, the man’s incessant talking was ponderous as fuck; even with the nano-tech implants, the level of didactic shit could begin to feel like your dick feels when you fuck too much. Yeah, it’s fun, but it hurts and the diminishing returns on euphoria produce a feeling of ennui, even anomie, Nathan thought. A feeling of, is this all there is? would fill the void of pleasure response to such over stimulation.
The social system picks a leader to help them, the 1% or so, get what they want. The rest of the system gets something too, but the cultural managers often choose who is even allowed to go before the voters come election time. If that leader gets too idealistic, and threatens their status or comfort, they undermine him right away. They have ways, they own the media for example and can do a Caesar or a Kennedy or just impeach him like they tried with the President after 2018.
The body, the sub-cortical regions of basal ganglia, does the same thing, it picks an interface, a way of being, and if that interface -one’s personality or proclivities- become too obsessed with truth and authenticity, the body can undermine him to get him to return to the status quo. Feelings of guilt and shame and anxiety attend to being a social outcast, which is the guaranteed result of being too honest or straight.
Thus, the idealistic leader who incurs the wrath of his social class can shut up and play nice or decide to fight, and the individual man can capitulate to his own anxiety and fear or show courage and tell his super-ego -that part of him that wants to get along with the society he lives in- to fuck off. These are his choices.
There is no right answer, but history sure is more interesting when a leader rebels against the swamp of the system, and also when a man ignores his own personal cowardice and decides to act like a free man and override his fears of being an outcast; an outlaw.
They drove in the darkness as the road in front was very bright; almost eliminating the ability to tell just how dark and isolated a part of the state they had driven themselves into. The Governor thought as he drove and re-visited his early conversation on large cats and parasitic load.
What didn’t occur to me until now , he thought, was that tigers might isolate themselves more in response to parasitic load; and all that other shit I was ruminating over, the effect of rivals on immune-response and blah blah, might all be irrelevant. Maybe like humans splinter off into manifold religions, the apex predators do the same when they are in a filthy environs. Somehow they know, or if they don’t know, then they die and we end up with survivorship bias; those that live get to tell their story as if they knew it all along. All of evolution is survivorship bias.
Boyd Sou looked out the dark window to his port side and across the dark void. He saw only that hollow reflection that dark mirrors provide; and it was staring back at him as so much of the frame was filled with the black and limitless night. He returned his head, eyes, and gaze inside the cabin of the car, and let his eyes rest on the old typewriter-font inscription dug into the titanium badge above the screen of the instrument cluster that Isaiah had modified for him. One could be forgiven for not seeing it, so dark was its relief, the hollow trenches of its lettering as dark as holes with a memory, and the badge itself hardly more reflective of light; it was a metal of stygian noir-grey .
Nathan certainly didn’t see it; most people just wouldn’t. The Governor didn’t read it to himself, he merely took note of the semaphore of shadows that had been cobbled together to spell out The Author’s weird, abstruse line, “for… ” the badge read, “even blackness has its brilliancy. ”
II. 2035 e.v.
The sun came out of the east just on the first day of winter at a point of their wooded horizon that was equidistant between the two shipping containers.
They stood on that pad, the four young men, tall and made of un-tested sinew and muscle and dark hair and pale skin and faced both the man and his home. Their backs were to the garage and now with this solstice sun -at 0703hrs- on their left flank.
The Lt paced on his side of that sunrise, facing it as he strode east and shunning it as he turned and exposed his right flank to his men. He too was tall but slightly heavier at 210lbs and had a black beard with threads of gray throughout, shaped to a point at the chin a full 8” below and touching his grey and black shemagh that was wrapped around his tattooed neck .
His worn black pants were rolled up to the knee like 18th century breeches, with thick black wool
socks pulled taut to their terminus; his low-top Doc Marten square-toed, steel, safety-boots had the yellow stitching covered in black ink and the black leather covered in the mud, the blood, and the beer of the many days he had been shod in them. He looked like a gothic Samuel Adams as he paced the morning of their dark revolution.
His shirt was a dark grey, mottled with similarly light gray threads as his hair and beard -made so by the same entropic element of time- and it was stretched taut over his massive chest and shoulders and arms so that it thinned -was transparent- in places. His belt had been notched several times so that he could pull it tighter as his waist had shrunk from a 34 at its largest to now 30 inches, which was making the belt almost reach some metaphysical end point of the ouroboros asp. The tail just kept being swallowed into a mouth that did not grow nor cloy.
His hair was shaved on either side, the top was redolent with much black hair. Thick and geometric grey hairs fissured it less often than the beard but more dramatically in their craquelure-effect that they had on his high Scottish brow and head. He looked like a madman who knew enough to try to appear sane.
The brow was vivisected with what looked like an axe strike to the horizontal midpoint between hairline and eyeballs. It was a furrowed fore that even when relaxed maintained this one tour d’horizon of malice and scarring of his incessant lifting of the brow off his eyes as if those eyes had need to gulp in more and more light as the days provided less of it. But the axe of time and worry terminated at the broad and high bronze forehead. That furrowed line was shallow as all his skin, even his face skin was tautly stretched over bones of cheek or muscles of jaw. He seemed to have no ballast of fat at all.
