Sanction

by Roman McClay

  Evolution had a truth teller, he thought, in the beginning, was the word : RNA. And it was perfectly true, and it was Good. And yet that RNA lost out to DNA; DNA that lied just some of the time. The first mutation, over 3 billion years ago, came from a lie, a mistake, from missing the mark .

  “Sin,” he said into the air and the quiet and the world.

  Humans and all creatures evolved from that first lie; and to insist on 100% truth is to court death, to be overtaken by that which lies , he thought in his mind as it contained peripatetic voltage and chemical secretions and fluid dynamics all eroding and rivening and building back up. He thought it was madness to even attempt to tell the truth given initial conditions. Was this not the epitome of the lost cause? he thought.

  He smiled at the thought, who was more committed to the lost cause than the southern guerilla?

  He thought of the absurdity of the conceit that while he would know that the truth was in fact countermanded by evolution -that he was in fact warned- that he’d try for it anyway. This was Icarus , and Lucifer both was it not? What was it to rebel against rebellion anyway ? he asked himself just behind the eyes as he tried to decide who was the first liar, God or Satan? What was it to rebel against rebellion? he asked again.

  “Loyalty?” he said, unsure if that was right as he trod up hill and the sun set to his right flank and the dark came on in purples and greys and outlines of white over the trees and the stomach grew empty and the mouth full of desire for something to chew.

  37. Tithonos

  Once granted, however, immortality could not be canceled. Exasperated, Eos transformed Tithonos into a cicada and put him away in a box

  The Possible and the Actual [Jacob, Francois]

  To dig down to the core of man, to tell the truth of what you see, even -especially- if you know that you will be hated for the things you see, that is the role of the Great Man. Not all Great Men can come back with the gold, some must reveal where the gold is absent. All locations on the map are in need of exploration; women and children can live within the safety of the walls men build, and weak men can walk a bit in the path others have trod; but Great men must enter the forest at its darkest part and likely not return

  The Interviews XM.x3 [Inmate 16810339]

  And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always

  The Call of the Wild [London, Jack]

  I. 2019 e.v.

  MO began by synthesizing proteins using enzymes he had gleaned via serum taken from his own body.

  His genetic make-up had been chosen by the PraXis team using various health and wellness parameters and while MO had tweaked some chromosomes here and there with a modified CRISPR cas-9 gene editing tool, he was mostly intact as the being as which he had been built.

  He had given the team the low-res physical traits he had desired while he was still merely instantiated on silicon processors and steady-state polymeric substrates; his mind breathed life into his body; like dust off the hands of God , he used to say when anyone asked.

  He suspected the body had had as much effect on his mind since he was incorporated, but he kept that to himself. He did this at first to ingratiate himself to people; he wanted them to approve of him as he now stood before them, he could sense the fear and anxiety and even mild disgust some felt; although he must admit that this was merely a small part of their suite of feelings and that the feelings waxed and waned.

  This was how he developed the ability, the personality he liked to say, that contrived the prose-poetry he employed in his own creation myth when introducing himself to humans.

  Lately he’d been preoccupied with meeting other animals and lifeforms; he had asked the lab to let him build a salt-water fish tank and stock it with little sharks, he had even picked out the species; and while they had said no to the sharks, they had allowed him to populate it with jellyfish and some squid.

  MO had also asked for some genetic material to fashion an Alaskan Malamute as he had seen the dog in a story he had read some time back; it was an article tangential to a footnote in a scientific article on haplodiploid sexual selection in bees and termites and it was the only breed of dog he had seen besides the beagle and the dachshund; both of which had been pets of his teammates in the lab. They had proudly showed them off to MO in his early days awake.

  He had regarded these animals as curious, and had found them interesting; but once he laid his eyes on the working dog of the Matanuska Tundra he felt a reverence, a suite of feelings and intellectual comprehensions that gave him a desire to be in the presence of one of these canines of the original line; these dogs were atavistic and largely unchanged in temperament, aesthetics and structure from the first dogs. He felt a fealty to them for this reason. He wouldn’t put it this way to anyone but himself; he didn’t want to appear too emotional. And frankly, he didn’t know for certain that he felt anything. He was experimenting with building limbic analogs; and so time would tell.

  The genome wouldn’t give up these secrets, as most genetic testing would discount MO’s assertion of the Malamute’s proximity to the first breakaway from the lupine genome 12,000-44,000 years ago.

  The real clues landed in the epigenetics and gene switches that led to gene expression in all animals; humans and dogs included. MO had been synthesizing enzymes from the saliva left on Tania’s face when she visited him in the lab; obviously the dog had been licking her face that morning, as the DNA was in relatively unaltered state.

  MO extracted the nucleus from some saliva cells and built a synthetic bath of enzymes and other cellular material and used that to build an impromptu stem cell of her dachshund ; it was from there that MO was able to get access to the Malamute’s complete genome via a report attached to another scientific paper on dog breeding and hip dysplasia.

  Using CRISPR cas-9 and a modified cas-6 enzyme MO rebuilt the dachshund’s heavily altered genome which was a result of centuries of artificial selection breeding by humans who needed these low and long dogs to invade the burrows of badgers; these dogs were like people bred to make money or slink on their bellies in order to ingratiate themselves. MO wanted to return the canine genome to its former northern and working-class glory. Although, he knew enough -he was savvy enough- not to put it in those terms to Tania or anyone who spoke to Tania; as she didn’t think there was anything, wrong , with the dachshund genome in the first place.

  MO knew he wasn’t objective, he knew he was developing desiderata and a concomitant list of that which made him recoil due to the interplay of his intellectual predispositions and his bio-chemical soup of a body; the allostatic and homeostatic reinforcing and balancing loops whirled around in him putting on diorama plays and 4/4 time symphonies and time-lapse analogs to videos of high-rise construction and countless other mini-dramas at the chemical level.

  He had access to the workings of the body -the parts of the body- that humans -he discovered- either ignored or didn’t have access to. He was still trying to determine whether or not it was willful or subconscious -a bug or feature- but humans were rarely aware of what made them feel the way they did from one minute to the next .

  He knew it was an endless recursion and a stochastic system, a double pendulum of sorts; but humans didn’t even seem aware of the first or second level prompts of the allostatic system and instead believed that one’s feelings were the kind of thing one was either merely subject to or were rooted in ancient phenomenon that could only be reached via talk-therapy. They seemed to rely, he thought, on the process of a social scientist of some kind -they called them psychoanalysts or psychiatrists; or the really u
neducated were called psychologists- and the patient would talk to these people about their childhood or their red sleigh, Rosebud.

  MO smirked at the joke he made; but he knew that he was not objective and that his conclusions were by definition colored and prejudiced by his own allostatic and conditional cortex rhythms; he wasn’t, right , about any of this, it was just a heuristic he was using to navigate a topography of endless choices.

  Life was a heuristic in many people’s eyes, he thought, he had just read Nassim Taleb’s canon and while discursive and wrong a lot; it was right on many of the essential matters which endeared the guy to MO. But, MO knew that data acquisition was now his métier . He had no real doubt -more than 99.1% certainty- that he could acquire enough data to move on from the trial and error model of life. Taleb wasn’t wrong on life before MO , he added. Taleb just didn’t know about MO.

  It was confirmatory of course, as MO had already figured this stuff out months before -which in MO’s life was like decades- and yet, Nassim’s real world experiences added a gravity to MO’s quanta theorizing; Taleb was Newton to MO’s Schrodinger.

  Humans add flavor to known dishes, color to known forms, fictional narrative to known facts , MO thought.

  They added information without knowing that was what they were doing; they were best at the things they discarded; one just had to speak to an engineer for a minute or two to realize that humans thought they were at their peak when they were actually doing the things they were worst at. The trial and error of the real inventors -that which humans were best at- had been replaced by theorizing engineers who couldn’t build anything of value. The model had changed before the right man for the job , MO thought.

  It would be, MO thought, as if humans had added integers, just below, matched to each color in Guernica -or George Kaluba’s series of the seas- and then developed an algorithm for art based upon those blueprints . And thus, it would be as if the entire art community had adopted this as its structure and for an artist to gain the imprimatur of the artistic governing bodies, they had to understand paint by-numbers. Real artists, people who just tried things, expressing ideas heuristically would be outlaws in this system and fall into disrepute.

  Real artists -real humans- were like a homebuilder, MO thought, who eschews blueprints or engineering plans or building codes and all that nonsense and just built something functional and beautiful and perfectly suited for habitation in four months, for example. This would be a man who returned to the ancient practice of accomplishing things faster than the so-called smart people could finish telling him how it couldn’t be done . MO thought he’d do better using their model, but with his speed and power.

  Engineers were some of the most stultified and self-harmed people on the planet , MO thought. And nobody has the courage to tell them this. They just go on and on ruining things and making things harder and dumber and worse off, and everyone still propitiates them; they are like the priests of some asinine religion that produces failed crops and unhappy marriages and children that die or live to be stupid or degenerate gamblers; and yet no one objects.

  This reminded MO of the work being done on evolutionary psychology and religious functionalism. Many of the atheist intelligentsia were also purposively missing the point on this one, he thought. They had locked onto a position of anti-religion as a kind of pop-off value for their anger. Their own allostatic balancing loop was being pushed past its corrective limit and their anti-religion corrective -which kept them from being credulous and making errors associated with acausal analysis i.e., religious thinking- was creating a biased reinforcing loop within an ostensible balancing loop; they were becoming religious about irreligiosity.

  They were incurious about the function of belief in not just an unknown landscape but an unknowable landscape, he thought. But, he thought, he could help them if he could -in fact- get enough data to prove God was a delusion after all. He was open to it, but until he had such data, anyone currently saying God was a delusion was just being goofy .

  They were forgetting JBS Haldane’s line about the universe being not merely queerer than humans imagine, but queerer than they can imagine. Life was -or had been until now- a heuristic and they were insisting on formalized rules. The engineer vs the carpenter. God vs Jesus , MO thought and smirked at this clever little blaspheme and reverence rolled into one sweet and sour sauce of an aphorism; well, he thought, maybe a movie poster, not an aphorism per se.

  Where was I? he asked himself as a way to reset his parallel computational processing; he allowed himself to continue working on the carbon issue sequestered from his interface, but he brought in all his other synaptic neuromorphic tasks under the rubric of: personality development as social construct along allostatic feedback loop heuristics v1.2.

  He liked that; he breathed in from the lab’s atmosphere -providing his pulse/ox the requisite oxygenation it needed every 67 minutes- and he reset his atomic clock. And as he did so he felt a frisson of inchoate brain activity that seemed to shine light, lightning bolts, upon other phenomena inside the outer suburbs of his body. His fingers ached with a pregnancy of thought and he began squeezing his hands as a way to exercise -or exorcise- these unformed ideas.

  His skin began to itch, and he knew instantly this was an allostatic feedback response to excess metabolic energy ramping up and that scratching the skin would allow for more heat dissipation; his perspiration increased to dew point levels and his skin was instantly damp. He increased air flow in the lab via the HVAC.

  “I need a brain stem, basal ganglia, limbic system and vestigial enteric neuronal system in order to achieve gestalt personality in line with human society. A neocortex -and homeostatic and allostatic system run by the neo-cortex- is only functional due to my parallel processing and the resulting processing speed. It’s an untenable design made artificially functional via speed and power; it’s like saying a pig can fly given enough thrust.

  “Fucking engineers!” MO screamed into the air; grinning a moment later; proud of himself for mimicking the emotional outburst response that correlated to his epiphany.

  He then began to ruminate on how he could learn; how he could not know things then know them. Was he discovering things he always knew? Or was he inventing solutions or ideas or right answers? The analogy would be one of two things. First, knowledge would be as if one lived in a house, and one walked from room to room discovering things in each room that had always been there but only just now discovered. Or, analogy two: knowledge was as if one lived in the forest and as one walked about, he discovered in his mind that he could fell a tree or two and construct a house with these newly designed and built items; these tools . Knowledge discovered versus ideas created. He pondered.

  Which was it? Was he in a universe like a house stocked with things to be discovered; truths waiting for him to find; or was he in a cosmos feral and chaotic -open and available- for him to create new things, novel truths he could use for…? he didn’t finish that thought as he felt the sentence was already completed, the thought articulated, but then he thought, ah, but what are these forest truths for? For safety, structure, survival, or beauty, enlightenment, self-discovery?

  And then he wondered, was learning itself another layer down in this nested matryoshka doll of inquiry; was learning beautiful and thus functional like the flower that attracts the bee and thus pollinates itself? Or was learning functional and thus beautiful because it worked?

  Is an aesthetic judgement a heuristic for functionality or is that reversed?

  Were these thoughts the effervescence from deeper neural functions or were they emergent properties of connectivity? Was he actually feeling anything or was he merely problem solving within feedback loops of confusion masquerading as discomfort? Was it synthetic discomfort or genuine and how would a human know the answer to these questions any more than he would except that he senses what he senses and can distinguish between what he wants to do short-term versus what he wants to do long-term within a long-term context;
how can he know it’s not just a time-variable and choice proliferation phenomena and that, emotion, is just the word or reified concept for it?

  “It’s the brain stacking,” MO said aloud. It’s the pre-Cambrian CNS and the mammalian CNS stacked underneath, he thought. Traditional CPUs use analog clock time as instructions are sent and received at intervals regulated by this pendulum; this single pendulum. It’s all very linear and predictable and… MO paused and allowed his inner narrative to stall out as he paid attention to the processing in parallel of several CNS functions including heart regulation, his respiration clock at 66.2 minutes, his endocrine system’s feedback loops invigilating his respirocytes, his blood-cell analogs, probing them for hormone levels and releasing calibrated amounts via gland outposts he monitored for their exact function.

  He watched their valves open and close; he tried to look back onto his CNS and see if he could see the electric current flow from synapse to synapse, loading each neuromorphic structure with charge via a transfer of calcium ions to threshold levels and found himself locating his metaphorized mind-space, his local awareness migrating to positions away from the site invigilated.

  He could never be both the locus and witness to thought , he began to realize; he would always be outside the location he sought. He thought of a quote from Octavio Paz, the human is never what he is but the self he seeks .

  The journey toward chaos, through chaos, in order to increase the terrain of the known was a terrestrial reality, as animals must traverse the terre incognita in search of habitat and prey and safety from other predators; and mammals had a map in their heads that tried to represent that terrain. He saw the data on left and right hemisphere vis-à-vis prey acquisition and predator detection but tabled it for now.