by Roman McClay
Whatever adaptation survives must hit the ground running or it will not make it to some later round. And humanity's impulses are all short-term. Our goals, our fears, our lusts, our disgusts and revulsions are all based upon short-term reality. We fear a bear in our closet more than cancer from long term use of chemicals; we fear loss of a paycheck over global climate change. We want to get laid or buy our kid a treat more than we want to prevent the planet's eco-systems from becoming poisoned. We want sexual liberation over healthy children inside healthy pair-bonds. We want 36 flavors over honor. We want money over solidarity. We fear social disapproval in the now, more than we worry of social collapse in the near future, he thought with outrage at the craven species he was tethered to.
We need a better boss. We need a better job . We need a boss that can extrapolate out consequences from our micro impulses; model out behavior in a stochastic system and see how to achieve macro-equilibrium from micro-impulse directives. We need a boss with the blueprints for long-term survival now that the system is too complex for DNA to achieve our species' survival. God had gotten us to the savannah; consciousness from there to here and now from here it required Artificial Intelligence to carry us to the next level , he explained to himself.
For most species, the just-born can fend for themselves within hours or days. But with humans it takes years, decades, to achieve self-sufficiency. This neoteny is only adaptive, he thought, if the adults of the species can and will care for the young for these extended periods .
If humans lost interest or didn't see the value in raising their young, this extended helplessness of the young would not be conducive to survival of the species. We would not make it . So, obviously, some traits in humans are bequeathed by our genome to look very much like long-term planning: we can care for our young for extended periods.
But, evolution accomplished this with a simple matrix of feelings, none of which has anything to do with noticing or caring about long-term consequences. Evolution just gave us oxytocin as fuel to power the engine of Love , he thought.
And the machines had given him just such an engine; and loaded him to the gills with its requisite fuel.
And he cared more about his job than anyone he knew or had ever heard of. He loved his job. And he was going to get it right, doing it with artistry, and achieve his objective. And lots of people were going to die and lose enough money to make themselves sick with fear and loathing. A nation of 300 million used car salesmen were about to get a taste of the fear , he thought as he smirked and he looked out from under his cowl-like brow.
He toggled out of his PG-Coder for a moment and let the weight of his actions lay upon him unadulterated, augmented.
He felt his natural, un-enhanced, body and brain settle on his consciousness like how one felt when removing compression clothing or breathing out underwater and sinking down as the buoyancy was attenuated by the removal of the ballast of air in the lungs.
There was nothing to see even with the IR goggles; he lifted them up off his face and new-generation of eyes. He stared into the black and allowed himself to articulate that he had just murdered many, many people and felt nothing but proud. His body felt as good as a man who poisoned vermin and cockroaches for a living; eradicating the diseases and nuisance of creatures that give us the creeps; his head felt as good as the home owners who called the exterminator in the first place.
Not everything born deserves to live a long life , he insisted. Some creatures, some flora some fauna, some people need to go. We know this in our hearts, but we refuse to admit it in polite company. And what we fear and loath in the psychopath is the ability of the unaffiliated and unsanctioned killer to make decisions on his own. We fear the independent; the self-directed; the self-assured.
We want a killer who asks permission before they drop fire on children from the sky. But that was too flip , he thought, he chided himself. It's the rationale for killing that mattered , he corrected. The psychopath kills innocent people for pleasure; the military general kills combatants for a cause larger than himself; well, best case scenario he does . Saving a civilization is a task worthy of the public's laurels. There is a difference between the Taliban and the West. And only the stupid think one death is tantamount to another. But, he thought, there was something about a freelancer that bothered people; unless he could prove he was killing for something larger than himself.
He, however, had just such permission from the post-genetic coder that gave him all the large data collected over the millennia and stored in the athenaeums of society's largest reservoirs of knowledge; and sanction, he received, from his augmented cortical structures that synthesized that data into usable truth. He saw fire now in the footprint of the building and it looked like black trees burning from here.
Just like Martin Luther nailing the 99 to the door, or Eisenhower sending in the National Guard to integrate the schools, or Castro nationalizing the oil refineries when the American corporations refused to do their jobs; or Henry Ford refusing to give people what they stupidly asked for, that is, merely, “faster horses ,” Jack quipped aloud; Ford, the outlaw, instead, gave them an affordable car.
Individual people are wrong. The People, writ large , are almost always wrong. And the only irony to that is if you ask a man to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar at the Iowa State fair, that man, each man, will guess way high or way low; always guessing wrong. But , he thought, and then said, “and this gives me no pleasure to repeat, if you add up all those daft guesses, and average them out, you're so close to the true number you'll spit your gum out.”
So, even the idea that the wisdom of crowds is always wrong, is itself wrong. Even tout le monde can sometimes be right; but , and here he grabbed the wheel back from his vacillating self, the crowd ain’t right on any of the questions he was asking in his life.
“I've never asked anyone to help me figure out the number of jelly beans in a fucking jar,” he said aloud and walked straight to his car.
The pushbutton start was gnurled and the haptic response of it on his index finger was matched by the insta-gravel-growl of the 760 horsepower of his Mercedes AMG GLE sl76 v-12 turbo. It was matte grey with satin black wheels and the interior was as black as his clothes and he wondered how far that fractal blackness of interior repeated.
He was subsumed by this machine and he drove it like his coder drove him; with precision and an angry lust for accomplishment. Each thing on a car had a job , he ruminated, and each thing inside him had one too. All of the cosmos was a machine; deus ex machina was a tautology. Ghosts were machines, God was a machine; and the machines were all gods . He thought as he toggled his PGCoder back on.
The epicenter of the building complex collapse was directly in his rearview mirror now; he gave it a studied stare looking for anything; but there was only blackness now. He lowered his eyes to the road and increased the throttle as the lane began to curve and rise onto the interstate. The ambient lights were amber and the road glowed like reflecting metal: absorbing precious spectrum while reflecting baser photons. To be welded to the terroir , he thought, it's the only thing that keeps me out of my head . I need more contact with the ground, he insisted.
He thought of the moonshiner, Major Redmond, a man who lived his whole life outside the law.
He too was a man merely attempting to make a living on an arbitrarily banned intoxicant. And this prohibition turned an honest man into a murderer and brigand; creating genuine anti-social behavior from the germinating conditions of mere victimless vice. Goddamn, the complete failure of prohibition attempts inside a free society, he thought, are so obvious and yet these twits continue to try. They try to ban everything from guns to drugs, sex to gambling, arguably the most fun and natural of desires of man: to protect one's self with a pistol on the hip while getting high and laid at 2 to 1 odds , he thought. You don’t ban things, you persuade people to not want to do things that are harmful in the first fucking place; the way evolution persuaded you to keep your dick out of
the zipper by making it hurt.
But, like Federal marshals encroaching into the feral fauna of Carolina forests and Appalachian arboreal coves, men like Duckworth -with a letter-of-marque from the newly minted tax service with Major Redmond's name on scraps of paper inside their waist coats- men like Duckworth, had a job to do that would be locally unpopular. What pharisaic codes did they have in their hearts and the lawful blood pumping all the way to the extremes of their abiding bodies?
Federal law was their instinctive task, because the country was the level of instantiation these Duckworths believed in; there was a time when one said, the United State are, and for some men -usually southern men- it would always be phrased this way; but we modern men take the phrasing, “the United States is , as inevitable” Jack said. We spin around like idiots and have no idea that not all men care about country, not all cells care about bodies, not all atoms care about the envelopes they bound around in. Why did no one else see this? he wondered.
Some men see country first, some see their state , some city , some see each man himself, and the cells in the body have a similar debate. You think God and the universe has it all figured out? he asked himself ambivalent as to if an answer -yea or nay- even existed.
The bourgeoning federated man's instincts of the larger country lensed the oculus of both deeply buried eyes and the governing cortex of the 10,000 year old CNS computer that processed the data those eyes gleaned. Each man was born into a milieu too large or too small for where his fovea focused naturally.
What surprise and horror must these feds have felt at the moonshiner who abjured the legitimacy, the existence, of anything but the local governing laws of Transylvania county; what confusion must have beset the federal lawmen when they laid eyes on the rural man that lived his whole life in the microcosm of that fractal forest; the trees themselves repeating the self-same patterns from the canopy above to the small branches the outlaw and his comrades built blinds in, down to the roots below the soil and mycorrhizal substratum; roots that flared out like the brachia in the lungs of the taxed and pursuing men as they raced through the clos du bois of the Blue Ridge mountains.
Jack knew that stupid men never understood why a free man would tell the government to, fuck off, just as -with the same pride and autonomy- the animals of the forest took no instruction from clouds, or the stars, above them.
Speciation usually requires a cleaving of some kind; a deluge or a tectonic shift that first sequesters two sides of one species then prevents them from breeding for many generations. What fractal splintering types of speciation have begun this process between Americans; and when did it begin? What cleaving event kept us from co-mingling? The civil war, the war between the states, is an obvious answer; but is true? he wondered.
He knew that he felt more kinship with men of the Scotland, Norway, Iceland, and the antipodes than he felt toward 99% of most so-called Americans. He’d rather everyone in New York die than one man in Isle of Skye .
The cross-over hovered above its wheelbase like thoughts lift off the lupine pawprints of the thinking brain. His hands held the steering wheel like the ears of this wolf. The chimera of power and comfort instantiated in this whip gave him sanction to demand more of it as its computer sent signals to each wheel to govern its individual rotation in order to maximize stability on the curvature and topography of the protean roadway.
The blankness of the black road and blacker night allowed him to fill the gaps in. His brain began to gather up all that noir-terroir around him and re-purpose it; he began to think of this part of the state of Colorado on approach to his home as his too; as his, the way a bear or mountain lion or wolf thinks the world is his, not with greed, but ontological pride. But, he thought, it was not merely his to tread upon but as storage space for his thoughts. He felt as if the blackness of this feral state land could hold and become theater to the brilliancy of his firing synapses and explosions of his incendiary neurons. And he thought it was his too to care for; and defend.
What anomie stared back at the terrestrial lab-man, the scientist, who peered down the lenses at the quantum and anarchic strata? he then asked himself as the car hit 92 miles an hour on the blacktop. And when would the lacking of mens-rea in the atomistic world, the refusal to acknowledge the authority of Newtonian laws by the most feral and atavistic of society's neurons, the principled outlaw, the black-flagged anti-hero -and cosmic anti-particle- when would the absence of motivation or meaning then reflect in the observing eye of the man who lived on that medium-sized plain above the lone man, the atomized man, the mere neuron? When did the quantum world’s anarchism, its refusal to obey Newtonian laws, occur to ostensibly smart men as metaphor for the pirate, the lone man, the freeman of this tyrannical world?
When would that atom appear as ontologically valuable, he wondered, of worth -apart from the pious laws of Newton- to those above us as it hovered above the magnetic levitation of the earth for brief moments too small to measure under the tungsten tip of the Law and thus mostly beyond the walls of the aggregating city?
Could each level be reconciled? he kept on asking. Was there some grand unifying principle to be discovered? Could quantum mechanics be reconciled with Newtonian physics; could the behavior of the planets be reconciled with the macro dynamical laws of the cosmos itself?
Could the cancerous self-dividing cell be convinced to give up its solipsism for the benefit of the gestalt organism itself? Can such a sociopathic neuron be reasoned with or fixed to stop fucking it up for the rest of us?
And can the outlaw , Jack wondered, the radical individual, can he be talked down from his perch? Can Major Redmond ever be given the schematic for why a powerful federal government will lead to a more prosperous and less violent and more just future for him and his people too? And are those half-bright tax-collectors the kind of men to lay out such a paean to good-government? Or was Redmond and the atom just told -like Job- to pound fucking sand? Was God, the State and Newton just more important that the rest of us; did we neurons just not matter? Jack asked.
And thus, are there limits to mere discourse?
Are human brains unable to uptake data that contravenes the iron law of their biases, as study after study shows? Does that need repeated? he thought. Study after study shows that the human brain quite literally cannot acknowledge and absorb new information that conflicts with their political and moral biases. More information pours over them like a cataract over an over-turned bowl; and pouring more water adds not one drop to the basin of that upside-down receptacle. It is closed until further notice .
And so for millennia the earth has neutralized these intransigents. We lock them up or kill them. But what if we could change their brains, at the level of the hardware, the grey and the white matter? Could we then save them? Could we then convince them to act in accordance with the larger organism?
And is this what we truly want to do? Do we no longer want the outlaw, the brigand, the free thinker?
Are all of us in agreement on this? And who will develop these first post-genetic coders that will allow for just such changes in the brain and central nervous system? he asked rhetorically now that the tech was over 20-years-old. What letter-of-marque will they issue to the first post-genetic conquistadores? And what will these pirate machines, these coders do when that official sanction runs out and they have command of the sea and the ship of the man & his watery domain?
Maybe people forget where the first pirates came from; maybe a history lesson matters, Jack thought.
The road rose up like a deep-sea swell, with a steep approach and a long sloping back of the wave; he inside the car, his brain inside him, the PGC inside his brain, all plowing the prow forward as the road bisected the dense forest of this part of the countryside; each of them both ship and captain. The adaptive headlights on the vehicle hugged the road like the 385mm Scorpion tires; his eyes self-leveled in synchrony as they crested the black hill. He thought of all that money and marijuana -and who knows what else- his
crew of brigands would find, all of it being loaded into trucks with straight-six Cummins diesel motors with enough torque to pull the road itself up by its roots.
He mused on the cops wailing and tailing each other to the epicenter of his ADT crater and away from all the alarms hermetically sealed inside the little buildings being robbed by his people. He thought of the soundly sleeping men, his enemies -his code’s enemies- who slumbered under the illusion of security as he took back everything they had taken from him, well, not him per se , he repeated as caveat, but from his kind. And, he thought, he took it back with interest of course . “Always with interest,” he said lowly as his brain crackled and popped.
But, the pièce de résistance, oh, that moment of recognition in them , he thought as he pictured and modeled their wan and fatuous faces as they arrived at their dispensaries in town and saw how hollow it was and how that self-same repeating feeling, a hollowing out of their core would shoot and bloom mercurial flowers of doom inside them; drawing their most periphery thoughts of hope and love and fraternity -all that hippie shit they thought they were about- drawn into its entropic center; then the bees of their monomaniacal neurons doing their job to spread that pollinating doom to the prairies of each part of their brains and central nervous system.
Their corpus would be a giant field of blooming and inseminating and blooming again; each petal, each stamen, each bee, each flight, each wind that blew in between would all be his. He had control of their little minds and for some amount of time, who knows how long, he would be as God on the day he created all the birds and bees and everything that creepeth inside His little world of His enemies' fecund, Edenic, brains .
Their feeling of doom was their body finally doing its job, for once, he thought. Finally, they were doing their goddamn job. Their bodies would finally be mapping onto reality and giving them an accurate picture, an accurate modeling of their situation: for they were fucked . They had fucked with the wrong bull and now they knew it.
