by Roman McClay
They loaded that crate with Willem de Kooning’s untitled XXV at $89 million estimated value and Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger for $288 million; completing a 1.3 billion dollar haul just in one box.
Szukulski hated Picasso so they did not put the Cecora in with it, out of respect for the Polish genius. His work had had a bit of a revival in 2035 and so one piece was there from the private collection of one, Adam Jones. It was expected to go for $300,000.
He watched as Jack Three ran his hand over the front fender of the 1962 Ferrari GTO, going for $66 million according to the paper on the dash. The bots followed behind and scrubbed the car of all DNA and prints. They were not taking that car, for it was too small for any of these men to drive, instead they took the 1964 DB5 going for $8.35 million and drove it up into the shipping container on the low-boy rig that was going separate from the ship two blocks away.
The Jacks roamed the halls from farthest back to front, making sure the bots selected certain pieces and hand loading others as the crates were inventoried with Edvard Munch’s 1902, Girls on the Bridge , a symbolist thing unloved by the Jacks, but worth $101 million that night. They located in room 44b the Rembrandt lost to time until four years ago and sold at auction then for $560 million. The Storm on the Sea of Galilee , would be returned to the vault of the unknown, valued today at $700 million and into the crate it went as Jack Two laid four corner wedges between it and Caravaggio’s first and second Judiths , each worth around 200 million dollars. The chiaroscuro box- they called it- moved toward the dock as they added minor works by Luca Signorelli and Rubens .
The box had to be over 6 feet long to accommodate the Caravaggio’s ; they were large.
Priam’s Treasure had been separated from the Pushkin Museum for a display and they took that as well; with the deftness of Schliemann himself. The Red Army had stolen it from Berlin in 1945, with all the heavy handedness Trotsky’s gang invariably showed doing anything. The inside of the diadem had been damaged by bending as the communists threw it all on top of itself, causing wrinkles in the brow.
The Jewels of Helen were not found, and the Jacks noticed the bots had failed to locate it. Isaiah saw it was not on the manifest after all and sent Blax a DM to update him.
The Ahasveros and Haman at the Feast of Esther was found and gobbled up from room 34a. Its hazy penumbra and warm center with the female face so small made Jack Two pause for just a second and imagine holding such a face in his hands and how those hands -his hands- might glow too. The Laboureur dans un champ by Van Gogh was rolled and another $108 million third party guarantee was tubed and laid in situ .
Blax had been in Amsterdam at the Van Gogh museum when the Rembrandt/Caravaggio display had come to town. He was enraptured by it of course and never thought he’d lay his hands on the Taking of Christ, and the book that recorded the sale, from the archives of the Mattie family of Recanati . The Crucifixion of Saint Peter had not been there in 2006 -which seemed more than, longer than, the actual 31 years ago to Blax- but here it was in front of him almost 10-feet high by 7-feet wide. The Taking of Christ on loan from National Gallery of Ireland had been part of the display of Christie’s new themed auctions where one or more pieces were sold next to, among, a display of some work not for sale that would be included to pique collector interest in the things that money still could not buy.
It was a savvy marketing ploy, for the super-rich do not like to see anything not for sale; making those paintings by the same artist -that were up for auction- all the more desirable.
The Saint Peter piece was massive and its theme was 1,000 years wider; Blax felt his eyes burn a bit and his hands felt cold. The colors were perfect and the avoirdupois of the saint straining the three sinners was heavy enough to sink Blax into his boots. He then, almost unthinkingly, cut the edges from the frame, a gaudy and heavy thing, and let the canvas roll down on itself and he laid it at the edge of the crate already loaded for the most oversized works.
He spied at bottom the books he had loaded first, the world’s first Atlas, by Ptolemy sold for $8 million three years ago and was up with no reserve this time. It was brown and gold and filigreed and sat heavily at bottom, the spine of the Geographia Cosmographia was facing him and ribbed like vertebrae. Next to it was the 1794, first edition of William Blake’s, Book of Urizen worth almost $4 million today; it was white and bruised like all Blake’s work, as if designed to look like the author’s own flesh, marred no doubt by all the invective he took in life. One of the 228 original copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio lay just north of these heavier tomes and was worth them both combined. It sold originally for a single pound sterling and now was worth 400 troy pounds of gold. Blax had read the man in his darkest times and found his work worth much more than all of that.
A first edition of the Canterbury Tales stood wide and long in the crate and was worth six million times what it went for at auction in 1776 e.v. -300 years after it was written- as the Country it was written in had just forfeited a similar ration in future value -in separation costs- between it and its former colonies. The Gospels of Henry the Lion, a commissioned work of Duke of Saxony all leather and matte bronze and sharp borders full of illustrations and all the heaviness of the 13th century from which it has survived, had been held by Blax and opened to lay hands on the foxing and the ink and the royal DNA that must remain on each page.
Leonardo’s, Codex Leicester was just 72 pages, but it ranged in the Enlightenment star’s musings from the ossified to the hydraulic to the moon’s albedo. Bill Gates, who had died in 2036, had instructed his estates to unload it for no less than $50 million to further fund his and Melinda’s efforts in Africa. Blax was happy to deprive them of that money, and while the insurance would no doubt make up the shortfall, their liberal elitist obsession with the 3rd world, while Appalachia and Baltimore’s west side fell into a Hell just inside the mocking land of wealth was abrading to his soul. Blax knew the case to be made to eliminate poverty and malaria among Afric tribes; and while epidemiological true, it graded him, for those people obviously had no business surviving since they couldn’t seem to learn to stop their fucking rutting in the middle of a goddamn famine.
Minor books like James VI the King of Scotland’s letter to the treasurer and chamberlains of Westminster worth just 5,000 bucks was taken and slipped into Blax’s inside pocket to his LBE. But the piece de résistance, Isaiah had said would not -unfortunately- be there, even as Blax had asked -and asked again- after looking over the manifest 3-days ago. Blax had learned not to have personal favorites on these jobs, for it clouded the mind and had the power to make a man feel badly when 99% of things went right.
The gestalt Task at hand was the true jewel, what they were doing writ large , and it thus was petty and myopic to reduce it to one bottle or one OWC of 1982 Château Lafite or the 1990 La Tâche or that case of 1962 DRC they had found -amazingly- at Margaux in the library with a note from Phillipe and some mention of a bet the family had made on a matter of minutia that was recorded on the feuilleton -the note contained receipts and other invoices- that Blax could not make heads nor tails of.
But, while Blax had -it was true- laid hands -those months ago- on the 12 labors of Hercules a little longer than was appropriate as the bots held them hovering in the hall, and while he had felt warm hearted and under the spell of the barrel tasting he had allowed himself in the caves , and while the golden flakes suspended in the aqua regia did seem to appear in his dreams like the Hubble deep space images of the Nebulae of Crab and Eagle & Crow Nebula burning Sirius fuel; this, the book he now sought out, the one that was not worth the most -in fact was one of the least expensive at a mere $100,000- made his face go a little numb, and he irrationally felt as if the whole DOJ and the Queen of England and the King of Jordan and the Czars of Russia going back 500 years would all sit up at night and set their hounds on him for this. For the thieving of this one book .
He was taking it -just this tome- personally, and he assumed his foils would too.
Drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines activate the nucleus accumbens , which mediate the dopaminergic systems that regulate the approach and meaning circuits. It is activated by eye contact by an attractive woman, for example. It’s what activates when something innately interesting like a book you love more than anything in the world appears in your imagination, and you begin to walk toward it even though you don’t know where it is; and it is not just a copy of the book, but a first edition, no longer mere avatar that must die 10,000 times so you don’t die but once, but it is the actual thing itself, and it is that which must then live; the thing that first and last must live.
You are compelled by its vision, and your hypothalamus keeps you moving and the dopaminergic systems keep activating as you walk and Blax now was moving toward the room at the end the hall and he noticed that the door’s edges were white, like light was framing these doors for him and he knew in his heart what was there. And he walked now with more than the mere reflex he began with, and more even that the hint or metaphor of something of value but he knew exactly why he was ambulating toward the doors, he saw each word on the page, the whole book laid out before him from Call me … to …5,000 years ago. He knew the way men know things, and he thought women must know things -different things- too.
He walked into room 001a, a room with a few things, here and there, a skull of a raptor that had had the lower jaw removed, a scepter from a Ottoman Turk, half a rib cage of a mastodon, and a Maori tau-tau device, made of whale bone and inlaid with ivory, all lay open and around, like knights of the round table, with their king, The Author’s spell and incantation, a speaking and hearing tome , laid open on a podium lectern, with the case stood up above like empty shelf, or sheath; scabbard.
Jack One had finished his loading and saw the room now too, and thus saw Blax’s back to him in rapt silence and perfect pause; the doors wide open, the light diffuse. And so he walked to check on the Lt; he stepped as silently as the letter at the end of a French word, and he watched as the man he had come to love shuddered a bit with back to him and hands upturned as if receiving God’s own son with instructions to do right by Him.
He automatically -his PGC did- read the man’s vitals and allostatic system and the data -that men used to gain from body language or slight intonation or maybe the face relaxed or tense- rushed into him in gestalt form, like an impression, for this is what the PGC did. It collected data in numbers and levels and handed it over to its host in limbic system argot . In other words, the post-genetic coder read blood Ph levels and epinephrine ppm and activation of this brain lobe or that neurotransmitter in this allele or two, but what the end-user got -what Jack One got- was an impression, not unlike an emotion, gleaned from all the things a man can see in another man, but also all that used to be opaque to him, all that below the surface, below the water line.
The coder gave its host a larger, deeper picture of a man’s friend or enemy, what used to be the rare province of the sensitive man, the man who actually cared about people, and saw the vagaries of fate and the slight tic of face, the tone or hesitation in speech, the semaphore of shoulders and gait and how much or little they might say. And since the Jacks, like their Lt were already sensitive men, the PGC made them excruciatingly so; unless they muted most of what the coder read, which they sometimes were inclined to do. The Jacks -like the man of their genome’s origin- often felt too much of the world; they felt other people’s pain more acutely than the owner of that pain might even know themselves.
This is something most people -since they are inured to other people and see them only as means to their own ends- would not even know possible, that a man could feel another’s pain, not intellectually, but in their core, their guts. And the irony is that these types of men are actually more dangerous than the unfeeling, solipsistic dolts they tower over in terms of empathy and sensitivity. See, like the mama bear who has the most affect, the strongest compassion for her cubs, she is 100 times more violent than the insouciant male who himself will often eat the cubs if she doesn’t run him off. That male bear -the black bear- will run from a man 99 out of 100 times. He has no compassion and thus no real reason to fight. The mama bear will claw you to death she has so much compassion; think of that when you think of the Jacks.
Compassion for one is hostility towards the rest; and men as feeling as the Jacks were so wounded by the pain of their fellow man, that they felt a genuine hatred for the sources of that pain. The thing most men just overlooked as the cost-of-doing-business, the corruption, and making fun and lack of love that laid men low, made the Jacks glow with rage and hatred and their own fission of reactor pain. It was built right into the code that built them, if one cared to read such things they would see it in the DRD4 and the MAO-A and the TOXO.
They hated the meanness in man, the way those above choked for fun or with indifference those below, and it made them not merely lament but wince in sympathetic pain and then lash out and condemn with violence and rage. Compassion is not as anodyne as it may seem when in the hands of alpha males or mama bears or when one ponders what God himself might think of all the goings on down here on terre firma these days.
Blax had not restored his allostatic functions that Jack could read on his own PGC; for the man’s systems were all well beyond the parameters for the job. Blax was overwhelmed and everything from androgens to neurotransmitters to heart rate and PFC activation were all redlining and tweaking each ancillary system. Jack just watched and felt now that he couldn’t walk away, that he must stay to make sure this went ok ; he feared slightly that Blax might faint or collapse in some way. He had never seen his systems this far out of the envelope. It was unclear if it was joy or sadness, excitement or great fear, and Jack, as young and naïve as he was -although much more wise than his mere 17 years of age- thought maybe the man’s own coder was misreading things; that maybe the technology was malfunctioning and not the man.
But, no, Blax was all those things. He was -and now he laid his hand tentatively on the open page, slightly foxed in the crease and in some places where no ink touched the paper- in a state of grace. He was for these few moments, obviously held from all danger and reproach by God. He read the words silently in his mind as the chapter on Heads or Tails smiled at him from 1851 of the vulgar age.
He knew this book would come with him, and not go in any crate, he’d carry it on his person, and place it in his molle-pack; making sure nothing inside would score or scar it. This book would be his one true prize, his payment for all his crimes. This would be a thing touched by the Author himself, for it was the copy of the estate of Melville, and had pencil markings -in his own hand- right here on this page above the chapter heading. He -Blax would- touch that pencil later, read it later, for now he would read just a little bit of the actual text. He’d give himself just that.
Above the hand inscription and addendum was the line inquiring as to America herself in 1492, referring to her as “but a Loose-Fish,” and he smiled as to the Providence of such a line being open and redolent to him in this first copy, one of 3,000 first printed and maybe 300 yet survived. He did not believe in God, but it was getting harder and harder to refrain from such belief each day as their mission to protect the country from whomever could take possession of her, progressed. A tear, maybe two, had ran to his beard and been caught there, not dropping into the book’s pages, instead trapped between the eyes and the things that whet the one and wet the other. His hands shook just a bit, more than when he had taken any lives of man or beast, more than when he had touched his mere-child bride awake and asleep, more than when he had sworn off the benefit of lies and the accepted the sanction of honesty.
All of life, Blax felt he could say now without guilt, or bourgeois concern for reputation in the minds of respectable folks , in the fetid minds of the men as corrupt as those that ran this auction hall and the men who ran the country it was in, and the men who ran all the countries on the round part of the world, and all the corporations and universi
ties and churches and media conglomerates and individual men who sold and scammed and half-assed their way through life -only the true artists and those in love with pure things were excepted from this, his, judgement- and as The Author so aptly recounted, he too now thought that all of life was a series of raids by anglers and hunters and warriors alike, English queens to wasps and bees, from sultans to salesmen, from single cells to leviathan, all life was the chance to seize upon the rights of man, the thoughts of thinkers, all men’s minds and opinions, and Blax thus read the last line of the preceding chapter, as it inquired, “what are you dear reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-fish, too?”
II. 2020 e.v.
“MO,” Isaiah said attempting to gain his attention.
“Yes,” MO said.
“Can you ask Steven to bring me a doughnut?”
“What? Wait, is that for real?”
“Yes, I don’t want to ask him, I want you to; just trust me,” Isaiah said.
“Ok,” MO sent a DM to Steven asking for a doughnut for Isaiah.
As MO was doing that he had left his polling data up on his interface, and the rule was that during direct messaging between the AIs and the PraXis group employees, that multi-tasking would be toggled off; because some kind of odd interference was coming through and making the messages actually unreliable. It was an odd phenomenon that nobody could explain and so they just made a rule to compress DMs into single action items and stop multi-tasking .
Everyone in the lab was stressed because another election was planned for November of 2020, two years early, because the courts had overturned the election of 2018 on technical grounds. Each of the Republican and Democratic candidates had filed formal complaints of irregularities and the courts -all corrupt partisans- had agreed to force a special election. At first the Governor had raised hell but MO had convinced Steven and Steven had convinced Nathan and that was good enough. Isaiah was happy to be involved this time. He had ideas.
