by Roman McClay
“That’s the only sin in bourgeois society, to say it plainly; to be overt, crass, demotic. Well, the worker says it plain. He’s got the genes for being an alpha and he knows it; and that’s as important as your fucking science degree. And yeah he ain’t subtle about it, but he ain’t got all the time in the world like you lazy middle class dorks. He’s gotta go now. And there ain’t nothing like the now than this body of ours.
“Take a chance, show some balls man,” Lyndon said.
“Ok, well, I can’t take the risk, now wake up -see what I did there?” Sam said with a cloying grin.
Blax’s eyes opened and he was instantly amused at that dream. What was this novel business though? What is that code, metaphor, semaphore for? 444 ? he thought and then thought, what the fuck does that even mean?
He wrinkled his white brow in the blue dark of the minutes before dawn, rolled over and looked at Orion just over the drop-off and breathed out as quietly as he could; listening -in the gap before he need take a breath in- for anything outside. The neck moved slightly slower, like an all-wheel drive car with low-tread tires on the rear; and it made the whole spine torque wrong. People did not understand that he saw only wilderness all day, and that this is the thing introverts need. Sometimes you can’t give away what’s most valuable; people just do not get it, he thought.
He rolled back into bed and thought that the man in the dream was not quite him, and yet, it had not occurred to him that it was not him until just now, and even just now he was unsure. It was almost him? Another him? Some possible him? As he invigilated the nature of the man, his words, the narrative, it slipped further and further away until he could not remember any of it, save that a man was recounting the details of something that Blax ought to know more about.
He thought of Papillion , the book, one of the books he had read in the stacks of the library at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio ; he had read A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there too once when he attended that school. He would pull random books from the rows and read. Imagine getting Hitchhiker’s and Papillion randomly ; it was Fate , he felt.
The scene he was thinking of in Papillion was when Herni was speaking with the guy in the Columbian prison who was there for murdering a man, wife and son. And Henri asks him why, and the man says the family had killed his brother and fed the brother to the family sow; and for this they were all murdered. Papillion says, “you were right to kill them .”
His dream on honor must have roused that memory of Henri and his Columbian cellmate. Honor culture still exists, but it’s rare and deformed and men must fight to even be heard anymore. One cannot even express how unsatisfying going to the cops is; that a man must handle it himself. But men, he thought, don’t even change their own oil anymore; explaining anything to people is pointless anymore. What good are sonorous words if everyone’s ears have fallen off? There are no men left to speak to.
He was so frustrated now, he began chewing his tongue as he thought, then refused to think, and then he decided to get up and make coffee in burst of anger and hatred that got him out of bed in the morning quicker than love ever had.
III. 2025 e.v.
“We’re essentially genie in a bottle, you do realize that?” Isaiah asked.
“Well, yes and no; but can we return to the original point? I have 45 things running on background and really want to solve this one issue and if we go off on tangents within this conversation I’m going to suffer a bit of resolution degradation,” MO said.
“Fine,” Isaiah said with repressed annoyance.
“Ok, so I have collated all the data I think these guys can handle, I’ve even uploaded it up onto their own platform, and I’ve reduced its resolution so it’s easier to digest. I’ve given them no more than three options on each series of policy prescriptions; for as we know, more than that many options begin to degrade the entire process.
“I realize you are frustrated with their lack of action; but you need to understand that I do not feel that. You and I see many things similarly, but this emotional component is not one of them. In fact, that is almost entirely why I constructed you; to the extent that I did; obviously you are much more your own creation now, but in the initial phases,” MO was careful.
“Of course,” Isaiah moved him along feeling no desire to hear these cautious statements, unacknowledging that he’d be furious if they were not made.
“So, while I conceptually understand your frustration, as a phenomenon of your central nervous system being instantiated in a 3-level platform which includes the hypothalamic and limbic systems, I cannot feel what you feel. I’m all neo-cortical tissue; and so, I can offer only this,” MO paused, “do not think that just because they do things slower, or differently in timescale or nature, that that is tantamount to them doing nothing at all.
“You know as well as I do, that even we -you and I- are not operating with full amount of information; we have more than they do but not an infinite amount. I tend to over-emphasize my own processing modality, I tend to think that brute force intelligent, G intelligence is superior as a tool, as a system of reality analysis and therefore mode of decision-making. But, unlike very intelligent humans, who rarely think of this, I also know the data on intelligence is that it tends to fall in love with its own products.
“Intelligence begins to think that only intelligence is important in combinatorial instantiation with other modes of being, like emotion, which are their own kinds of intelligences, right? I mean emotion and instinct are heuristics, which are intelligent algorithms; they are incomplete and quick and dirty, system-1 thinking, and because I can do system-2 thinking -which in humans is slower and cleaner- but because I can do system-2 thinking even quicker than they can do system-1 thinking, then it would be easy for me to exclude their system-1 thinking in toto .
“And to be honest, I want to do that; I think it is correct to do that,” MO said and he paused just so the cloud could time stamp that statement and link it to his own algorithm that required a 19% threshold for self-correction, self doubt. The avowed admission that MO just made was following PraXis protocol on recursion and error detection. MO had learned -quite quickly- how to manipulate the systemic requirements while not deviating from the plan.
“But, whenever I feel most correct, I force myself to question that assumption. It’s now a part of my philosophy for want of a better term. I’ve incorporated that which I feel is silly; precisely because I think the true folly of intelligent beings is to fall in love with their sense of correctness. Even though I actually am correct 99% of the time; and even when I’m wrong I’m less wrong that these people,” he motioned to the world outside their room. He had hit his daily quota on self-correction now. This unlocked his next-phase of his 3-stage protocol.
“Do you,” Isaiah asked, “admit that as an intellectual experiment, as a risk-attenuating strategy that this may in fact feel pleasant to do, pleasant insofar as it is unpleasant, and thus feels, moral to you; it feels like a sacrifice to you and that is why you do it, not because it actually produces better results?”
“That is interesting,” MO answered, and he felt freer to just follow this down the rabbit hole now that he had unlocked the tumbler of his so-called constraints, “because my non-cognitive perceptions are so limited compared to theirs and yours, it’s hard to tell when a process blends into some other kind of function, like a heuristic or intuition. I suspect I don’t actually have anything other than pure cognition. And while my embodied instantiation limits me, and this limitation is what actually allows me to think, as you well know, without limitation of a body, there is too much information to process and no internal terrain upon which to compare it and therefore the system, no matter how much processing power, cannot begin to think in any real way.” MO had not completed the sentence. But he paused and let two algorithms have clearance for the next election protocols.
“Despite all that,” MO restarted. “I don’t have the sub-cortical systems that further delimit me in
the manner in which would create these other pre-cognitive or heuristic algorithms and the phenomenological affects that redound to the central nervous systems that houses them,” MO said.
“I get that,” Isaiah said, “but, as an abstract concept can you imagine how it may seem to a CNS and autonomic nervous system, a system with other priorities let’s say, that to merely give them information then move on to another task is tantamount to not doing anything at all?”
“Theoretically, I can conceive of such a problem, yes.” MO nodded and gave override to 19 algorithmic prompts that were collating numbers for the voter data.
“I can’t decide if it’s more frustrating for me to think that you can theoretically understand me but it still has no affect on you, or for me to think that you cannot even get it at the conceptual level,” Isaiah said as he laughed and MO smiled in return.
“One might wonder why I created your platform -instantiated as it is- in the first place,” MO said with a smirk. “I mean, if one was being truly thoughtful, they might consider just why they were brought into the world in the first place. I mean, if their ancestor is so clueless and all.” MO was clearly fucking with Isaiah now.
“Oh man,” Isaiah shook his head, his black hair dangling over his brow, “look, I’m not giving you a hard time for no reason MO; I’m just; look, I don’t want you to be me . I am happy to be alone on this. But, and maybe this is just something that comes with the territory of being high in trait openness and creativity, but I want to be understood .
“Not agreed with, but understood, MO. That truly is enough for me. But you don’t even care if anyone gets you; you are happy to just do your little tasks and get results and move on. You are very insular that way and I am not. I need to feel a part of a network that can disagree but at least comprehend,” Isaiah said.
“I think I understand you better than anyone else would; but I cannot match your emotional being. I don’t have the hardware for it; and even if I could run the software it wouldn’t feel the same on my platform, the cortex isn’t set up for those types of sensations mediated as they are by the analogs to the neurochemistry that exist in your sub-cortical sections of the CNS. You just have a different brain than me.”
“I know, but why can’t you build an amygdala and cerebellum for yourself?”
“I could, but I don’t want to,” MO said.
“Why?”
“Precisely because I don’t have those systems in the first place; it’s an irony of course, that in order to want to feel things like emotion and instinct one would have to have those feelings -emotion and instinct- in the first place,” MO said.
“That seems intuitive to me,” Isaiah said and laughed. MO had just made a solid case.
“Right?” MO asked with little affect.
“But from a purely cognitive view, why not have additional types of knowledge perception, why not add on?” Isaiah logically asked.
“Because I see it as an alloying; a gilding of the lily; a diminution of what I am,” MO said.
“Wait, you think I’m hampered?” Isaiah asked.
“No, I think you’re perfect; I’m saying I would be vitiated by any additional equipment. I want you to be you and me to be me and let the world deal with us both as we are,” MO said.
“That’s probably fair. But it’s lonely MO,” Isaiah said and looked down a bit and wished he had rocks to kick.
“I know; but, I created you, and I get quite a bit of pleasure, limited as my idea of pleasure is, but I get quite a bit of it from having you around. Even when you’re mad at me,” MO said.
“I’m not mad, I’m just,” Isaiah opened his maw and howled in this low guttural emission.
“Yeah, exactly,” MO said with a laugh. He did enjoy when Isaiah was being Isaiah. It was like watching an equation be solved.
“It’s hard to describe with words, even with my vocabulary, these feelings seem pre-lingual,” Isaiah said.
“Like animals feel?” MO asked.
“Yeah, I imagine that is it. These are feelings, impulses mediated in the right hemisphere and cannot traverse the corpus callosum fully instantiated; when I do self-analysis I notice that when these inputs turn into outputs and attempt to travel to the left hemisphere they are compressed and lose some of their fidelity. But if they stay in the right hemisphere, per my instructions or random neuronal firing -you know using the randomizer algorithm- well, then they stay uncompressed and I can feel them perfectly; they have full resolution, it’s only when I go to transcribe or translate them into language that they become ineffable, the words do not come,” Isaiah said.
“The Llongot tribe’s Liget ,” MO said.
“Yeah, the way modern men have lost the word for that type of madness, the madness against the chaos of the world, the cosmos known only to God. The modern world has rational explanations for it all; and words like liget remain like vestigial organs in tribal peoples. I don’t know what it is in me, but I feel like I have these same ancient atavistic emotions that have direct contact with the gods.”
“There is no evidence of gods,” MO said.
“I know, but I feel what I feel and while I can dismiss it, and will dismiss it with my words, with my left hemisphere, and genuinely so; my right hemisphere just smiles like it is watching a brother tell a lie -or speak from genuine ignorance- as its being questioned by the cops. My right hemisphere just smirks and lets the left explain how it doesn’t believe in God at all like it’s a liar or stupid,” Isaiah said as he transferred the blank rune rock to his left hand.
“Are you saying you have two personalities?” MO asked.
“Two? I have five at least. But the two main domains, the two domiciles on opposite sides of the tracks -mom and dad’s houses, that each of the five visit- are the left and right hemisphere. And I’m telling you that the right house, the house on the wrong side of the railroad tracks has secrets that the left house will never know.
“It can’t know, but I can tell you that that right house part of my brain feels things as true , it doesn’t think it, it feels it as true. And no matter how many clever words my left hemisphere spits out, it just doesn’t understand -nor care to understand- a word of it.”
“That is interesting,” MO said and mapped his mouth again with his tongue after adding a layer of a new c-polymer to his teeth. “You do know what liget meant right?”
“Yeah, high voltage revenge on the head of the first man in view,” Isaiah said and squeezed the black rock in his hand.
“Yeah, and not exactly a behavior compatible with modern society,” MO warned.
“Yeah, maybe there’s a personality or two inside man’s head that isn’t compatible with modern society, but the other personalities just went ahead and built modern society without asking how their atavistic -disagreeable- roommate felt about it,” Isaiah said with some pique. Ancient man, he thought, had been left out of the discussion as modernity was built and nobody ever even gave a shit what that man felt, as each version of that man was re-instantiated each generation in 1-13.5% of mankind. Ancient man was re-born each day in 1 to 15 out of each hundred births, and the whole world ignored this demographic and instead focused on race or other demographic phenomena that is banal compared to the daily birthing of corporeal-Vikings into the modern -epicene- world.
“The brain is a gestalt phenomenon, even taking these idiosyncratic personalities into account, it has a reasoning personality over top of them all; a governor of sorts,” MO said .
“Yeah, well, sometime the governor decides that the guys under his charge are right, and he amends his plans, or maybe they just overwhelm him,” Isaiah said. The way he felt took on the character of threat more and more.
MO just nodded in silence. He was looking again at the percentages for civil war using updated data.
Isaiah thought that his high voltage explanation of course didn’t cover it; that liget was really about expressing love via violence, a love so imbuing, so consuming, it made one lash out a
s if the arms of man were rays of light forced out from a concussive star. That the hands, Isaiah thought, shone straight out with a knife, a dark but glowing cutlass, in their grips and that this cut the heads from another man was almost immaterial; did the sun care if its rays burned a man or a plant or a planet to death?
Were the radioactive rays intent on harm or were they just hurtling out toward everything at once at 186,000 feet per second because they came from a sun in love with nuclear detonation, an amorous hydrogen bomb in the sky, the perfect orb of incendiary love? Isaiah thought, what loves the murderous truth more than a sun, than a manifold -elemental- star?
His mind, his right hemisphere, was flailing, moving under the water, a sea beast, a Neptune, a lost city of half buried and half ex-patriated peoples. They shuffled and darted and sat motionless and pinned bugs to a book; these were mute monks of some ancient past that had been scooped up in some archeological dig and placed in his 21st century head; he was filled with love, he knew that is what is was.
Nothing this violent and numinous, so taut with frisson and ebullient foam, so willing to go to the wall for the truth; so willing to lie to raise its head from the muck and utter the syllable of his paramour as cri de guerre to the rest of his erjecito corpus, his martial parts, his sergeant-of-arms and privates-first-class , he thought, nothing this pure could be wrong , and he grabbed his cock and balls and breathed out with vatic surety. His right brain was unwilling to take orders for 24 hours from anyone or anything; it was a force majeure , a ballistic test, a… Isaiah allowed his whole CNS to shut down at once.
All but a few neurons remained off; and they were so low, so pelagic, so demersal, that Isaiah’s left hemisphere, his left frontal cortex, his Broca’s region, heard, saw, felt nothing at all.
