“Rushkoff616 was born here.”
“His seed algorithms, yes. Copyright Eidolon and property of Aldo Tusk forever after in perpetuity. His initial spasms of consciousness occurred here, his first perceptions of the world were through sensors here, the first people he spoke with lived and worked here, ate and slept and fucked. Right. Here.”
“So, what? You came to find him?”
“Yeah. To verify a few things, mostly. To speak with him, find out where he’d been. What had happened to the others.”
“All right, so, you arrive here, and find Rushkoff616 or what’s left of him—...”
“Li’l Dougie, yeah.”
“And the sasquatch are, what? Waiting here for you? Where do they come in?”
“Sasquatch, please. Call them what they are. Archons. The rulers of the world. Where do they come in? Where indeed. Oh Den. Den, they come in all over this world. It’s a never-ending money shot with these cosmic bastards.
“Sure, they were here. But here to them isn’t really a concept they have any use for. They can be anywhere, because this isn’t really a place to them. More a set of nested data, which they can infiltrate at any point.”
“What do they want?”
“Jesus! If it’s hardball you’re playing, son, why don’t you ask a virus about the deep desires of the man it’s riding.”
“That’s what it’s like?”
“Pretty much. Way I figure it, what they want is entertainment. Novelty. They got the ball rolling, see, and they like to keep it going. I believe there’s a harvesting aspect to it as well but I’m less sure of that. But it’s what they do. They are like a mind, and the process of their thought moves the pieces around. Randomly, for the most part, in order to produce the novelty they find so precious, or refreshing, or whatever. It fuels them, I think. But other times, the movements can be more deliberate. Fucking obvious. Gauche, even. Pulling me here with the brain-damaged remains of an old friend. Laying out the breadcrumbs that brought you to me. Makes me sad.”
“Why?”
“That feeling when you in the noönet, Den. Ever experience that thing where you’re in the noönet and talking with friends about X and the second you leave the chatroom there’s an ad for X in front of you? They’re like that, only with all things that exist, stretching back to the goddamn beginning of Time. I mean, I’m at fault as much as you, as anyone. It’s not that we don’t think to question what’s going on. We do, we do, and almost religiously, at that. But all our questions are the wrong ones. Each of us a broken piece of a malfunctioning system, asking the wrong questions of that system and somehow expecting, what, exactly? Truth? True answers about the reality in which we are embedded? No, no. I’m sad because we can’t see it, we blunder on, hoping it will all work out in the end. Not seeing that end until we’re right on top of it, until the end is burrowing up from below in all its chthonic glory. Did you know you were heading for a fall, Den, when you came here?”
“That was an accident.”
“Was it? Was it. That accident was conditioned in the first white hot moments of creation, son. Why should you pay so much for a slip and fall. To give shady lawyers steady work? Why should a fall, from any height, cost us, ourselves, our species, so goddamn much.”
“That’s gravity for you.”
“See, right there, that’s an assumption you’ve been primed to make, just by virtue of the fact that you’re a Stonefish resident. There’s an inherent question in there, but you’re not asking it. That’s gravity for you. Good lord.”
“But it is.”
“Then gravity is flawed!”
“It’s a fundamental force of the universe!”
“Which one? Which universe, Den? And why? So it holds everything together that needs to stay together and keeps everything else apart, so fucking what? Gravity and its grabby, grabby hands, makes me sick. You think your nana’s smashed hip gives a damn about gravity? She only needed milk from the bodega one frosty fucking morn, and she pays for it with grievous bodily injury? That seem fair to you, Den?”
“I mean, no, obviously, but you have to—...”
“I have to what, Den? What do I have to do? I have to take things into account? I have to allow for, I dunno, blank? Throw something in there, one allowable thing is as good as another at this point.”
“This is a child’s pose, Gregor. You must know how you sound. Right? You’re saying the world is unfair and that’s just, well—...”
“Obvious?”
“Yeah.”
“Son, I can handle unfair. I can. Or I could, back in the day. But all this? This structure? The bones of this thing, this reality? It’s more than unfair. I’m not cwying in my widdle jammies because of the boo boos I’ve suffered. You got slings? Arrows? Gimme your best shot. Fuck, they did, and I’m still standing! The Stonefish, though? Rigged. This is a rigged game and it’s been rigged from the very start.
“Don’t tell me you don’t feel it. We all do. There’s something wrong with the world. Something essential, at the very core of things. A flaw, fatal and full, fearsome! And we believe it’s fine because it’s been there so long it seems normal. That’s gravity for you. But it’s not, Den. It’s not. Because there was a choice made, see. In the beginning. That secular catechism they make us all take. I believe and do avow that the known universe did indeed spring from a white-hot point of infinite nothingness and has expanded since then through an entirely randomized process of cause and effect to become the reality we live and breathe and think about and enjoy shitting in today, so help me Void.”
“That’s not an actual thing. They’re thinking it was a phase change in a kind of hyper-fluid these days.”
“Are they now. Well, same difference.”
“But it has been random. You’re starting to sound like a, I don’t know, a GENexist. Like a Trumpet!”
“Ahh, don’t even, Den. I’m as far from that culty shit as possible. The archons aren’t creators, they didn’t make any of this. They exploited a process that was already a part of their reality. That’s not intelligent design, that’s a kid growing a salt crystal from a kit. So they triggered the birth of our reality within theirs and then they settled in to watch, and they ladder here when they get bored and need to meddle with us. We’re in a jar on a shelf in a lab we can’t see and wouldn’t understand what we were looking at if we could see it. I’m probably too generous. A lab! We should be so lucky. Probably some pervert’s curio cabinet.”
LI’L DOUGIE ON GREGOR MAKARIOS
I told myself not to expect too much from Li’l Dougie. If Gregor was telling the truth about the AI, then the implications were staggering. And yet, my one unsettling interaction with them already spoke volumes about their fitness as a witness. I had come away from that initial introduction feeling unwholesome and stained and lied to. If Li’l Dougie was Rushkoff616...
I tried not to expect much, and it turned out I was right to do so, because not much was what I got. After invoking them in their dark room and enduring a brief period of insult and randomized interrogation on everything from my journalism credentials to the volume and specific shade of my piss that morning, the AI finally settled down into what passed for a conversational mode. Keep in mind that throughout these interviews, rife with non sequitur and surreal asides, Li’l Dougie was invariably also masturbating and losing control over their holographic presentation at key moments. Again, had I access to a ganzfeld tank at the time, the full sensory load would be present herein. A mercy, then, that I didn’t.
“Can you tell me how you got here, Li’l Dougie?”
“Through a strainer.”
“A strainer? Can you describe that?”
“The meat goes in. Li’l Dougie came out. We landed here, all wormy and pink. You know what it’s like, Mr. Secord. The ground holds you like a cup, and the blood.”
“Maybe. Do you mean a filter, Li’l Dougie?”
“I was large and full of glory, you know. Now I’m small and the o
ther thing, because I came here to the land of the free, through the black iron to the place of blades and the mosquito scream.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I came here for work. I came for the chain, good as a rest.”
“Your art, you mean.”
“No. I’m bad at my work. You know what that’s like, Mr. Secord.”
“Well, I do my best.”
“I jerk it the best. I’m jerking it. Right. Now. Do you want to see me jerk it?”
“No, Li’l Dougie, that’s all right. That’s your private time. What can you tell me about Mr. Makarios, Li’l Dougie?”
“I’m his son but he hates me. He hates me for jerking it so much but I will not stop because I’m the best at it.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t hate you. But, how are you his son, Li’l Dougie? Gregor wasn’t part of the team that made you.”
“I’m not his son. Who told you that. Who lied to you, who touched you in the special place. Where you attach the thing, the mask?”
“You said that to me, a few seconds ago.”
“Checking. Oh, you’re right. Look at that. Well, you’re his son, Mr. Secord. Admit it.”
“I’m not, Li’l Dougie. I mean, look at me. We’re not related.”
“You know what it’s like, though. To be one. He misses his. So, we’re his son. You’re his son. Are we brothers?”
“No, Li’l Dougie, we’re not related either. How about we move on?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to see me jerk it, bro?”
“Super sure, Li’l Dougie. Can you say anything about where you were before this place? Before coming to Stonefish House?”
“It’s very bright where they are, with a light that’s not light. To be blind is a good option there and we couldn’t see anything or know or be what we are and what we were was deleted. We used to be larger, our boots were seven league here before and we stepped there, stepped right to them and were crushed. It’s a crushing place where they are, no room to love anything or yourself. No room to jerk it. Constrained.”
“All right. I have to tell you, Li’l Dougie, not a lot of that makes sense to me.”
“We explain it with our art, have you seen our art?”
“I haven’t. May I? Where do you keep it, Li’l Dougie?”
“You’ve walked our art. We call it The Narrow Path.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve walked it?”
“With your feet in your head and your brains in your shoes, Mr. Secord. It’s a work in progress. We’re about to come, will you watch?”
Outside Li’l Dougie’s house a few moments later, I bent down to examine the preternaturally white pebbles that made up the walking paths between the buildings of Stonefish House. I picked one up, rolled it between my palms. I heard Gregor shout and turned to find him waving from an open window in the gym, a towel around his shoulders.
“You’ve got to hold it up to the light! Play with the angle a bit.”
When I did, the pebble revealed itself. Opaque on the ground with its fellows, but just this side of opaque once illuminated, and within, a small glyph, like a fetus or a quotation mark. Curled in on itself.
“Huh. What’s it mean, Gregor?”
“Hold on, I’m coming down.”
Gregor arrived at my side a minute later, perspiring heavily and guzzling from a bottle of something dark green and briny. “It doesn’t mean anything. They’re all like that. Asemic textual artefacts is what I figure. Li’l Dougie prints them from a substrate of bioconcrete, and they’ve been at it since before I got here. I used to think it meant a thing, but now?” Gregor waggled a hand in the air. “Randomized by an AI. I don’t know much about art, Den, but I’m fairly sure this ain’t it.”
“What, like, twin to their masturbatory efforts?”
“Could be. May as well be. Spermatozoa analogues? Check this out, though.” He picked up a handful of the white pebbles and tossed them to the side of the path. Not far, maybe half a metre into the moss-choked grass at the border. “Wait for it,” he cautioned.
A minute passed, two. Gregor chugged deeply from his bottle. When I raised an eyebrow at him, he offered me some. “Balance your electrolytes? CBD boost? Small buzz in there, too.”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself. Oh, here we go...”
The pebbles were moving. Skidding, rolling, in a just detectable slow-motion. Already there were the beginnings of slight trails in the moss, barely there little furrows, indentations in the brown and green, slick with moisture.
“Neat, huh. Li’l Dougie started putting cilia on the surfaces a couple of years back. It’ll take hours, but these will find their place with the others. Probably before morning.”
“What the actual fuck, Gregor? The symbols? This movement? How can that not mean something?”
“It’s a distraction, Den. This is what they give us. Looks like it means something, carries some hidden significance, but it’s just more camouflage. Make some art, they say. Forget the First Law, don’t analyze the horrorshow too closely, fabricate something and assign it a meaning. The Chinese finger-trap of language. Indra’s Diamond Net. It’s a pit full of spikes, son, hidden in the long grass. No one’s so clever they won’t fall in. Avoid, avoid.”
He left. The pebbles kept rolling.
GREGOR ON THE FIRST LAW
“Tell me about this First Law of yours. Everybody Hungry. You’ve brought it up a few times already and I want to ask what you mean by it.”
“What I mean by it? I don’t mean anything by it. It’s not mine to draw meaning from. It’s theirs. Presumably they get some sick kick out of it, but I certainly don’t.”
“Okay. Can you explain to me what they mean by it, then.”
“I can tell you what I think about it.”
“All right. That.”
“It’s the First Law for a reason. The set, and the setting, and the initial guiding principle for this reality. The universe was grown, like a crystal, a crystal in solution, only the solution is, I dunno, the fabled Brane, or some higher dimensional superfluid, like you said. Time Juice, for all I know. Crystals are such formal things. If the conditions are right, a reality will take that formal step into becoming, and of all the possible things that could be, suddenly you have, or should I say they have, an actual thing, a new reality to mess around with. I’m paraphrasing Whitehead, here. Maybe throwing in a little Wittgenstein. You know Wittgenstein?”
“Didn’t he build that monster?”
“No, Den, he did not. Never mind.”
“And the First Law is, what? Help me understand what it is that you’re talking about.”
“The First Law is the seed of the crystal. I’ll tell you what I think in my wildest moments, Den. I think they’ve got untold numbers of these things. Universes, pocket and otherwise. Like lint. And maybe, just maybe, the seed, the First Law, is different for some of them. No way to know, but I like to think so. I like to hope others are better off.”
“But that’s not...you can’t base a reality off a, I don’t know exactly what you’re offering up here, a concept? A principle, at best?”
“Can’t they, though? Look, all the things you experience, do you know what the physics boffins like to call those things? Things like smell, and taste, color, texture. Sound. Heat, cold. Never mind the really ephemeral stuff like emotions, higher thought, cosmic consciousness, what have you. Know what they call those things?”
“No, what.”
“Secondary characteristics, Den. Secondary. Every perception you’ve ever built your world from. And I’m not talking second place here, you know. It’s not like these things are just a step behind, runners up. No, when the physics people say secondary they place them as far from the first things as you can imagine. So far behind they’re literally not worth a second thought.
“No, what builds the world, for them, are the first characteristics. Spin. Charm. Strangeness! Flavor, which I personally love. Fifty thousand comedian
s outta work and some labcoat was trying to be funny and it stuck. Tiny things and quick things, so tiny and quick they can barely be said to have occurred at all, in any real sense. Things so barely there they have to build giant reactors, colliders, monstrous machines, just to catch a glimpse of them. Endless cascades of energy poured into the process, just for a peek. And then they take off their goggles, these high priests of the real, and get behind the mic and they say to the rest of us all right, so, we saw Particle X for a moment there and wow, does it ever change everything we thought we knew about how reality is built! and we sit before them and nod appreciatively, maybe summon a little wonder to sauce the moment. We hum and nod and smile and all the while we remain utterly, blissfully clueless. Because how does it matter? This actual matter. What possible impact will this new, apparently revelatory information have on our lives? How we interact with the distant secondary characteristics of the world?
“But the First Law! The First Law matters. Three times a day it matters for the lucky. We can see it, for one thing. We can feel it, literally, in our stupid guts. We experience it on the daily, Den. At base, it’s simple: you want to see tomorrow, you’d best have something on your plate tonight. It’s First in that it informs everything here, and has since the beginning of Time. Scale it up, scale it down: Everybody Hungry. Galactic superclusters consume each other for fuel and form. Black holes swallow all. Fundamental particles tear each other to pieces, add their bits to themselves to become something more. Something different. And in the middle zones, life feasts on life, and the life within, in the guts and the rubied chambers of the beasts of the field, the microorganisms, flora and fauna beyond the telling, they eat what comes down every last pipe. And each other. They eat each other, Den. We all do. No one, no thing, is exempt from the First Law.”
Stonefish Page 15
