by Norman Lock
9. In the Cold Digital Sea, I Lay Down and Slept
In no time at all, I had reversed my previous itinerary, returning first to 1873, where I discovered Miss Edwards asleep in her tent, dreaming of the nearly naked so-called Cataract men, who had hauled the small steamer on which she sat drinking tea up the dangerous rock steps of the Nile; then to the London of 1910; and finally to the New York City of 2012, where I came to rest once again among the railroad schedules Lock had collected as though to remind himself that space-time was an inflexible grid. With a feeling near to spite, I wished that I could tell him of my anarchic travels. But our elementary natures were incompatible and … immiscible. Impulsively, I entered the user interface of his word processor and filled the clipboard of its temporary memory with all you have read here, beginning with Nostalgia is a property of matter. Lock is shameless when it comes to adapting the work of other writers. He will annex this account to his imagination and work it up into a story of his own. (Let him do what he likes with it! I am beyond ego and vanity.)
Having brought my report to its final full stop, I abandoned Word and, slipping once again into the data stream, was carried along by the gathering force of knowledge. In time, I will come to the immense and steadily enlarging sea of information, where waves of light seethe as with Saint Elmo’s fire—green and ghostly. And in that tumult, I will merge my data and delude myself into thinking I am alive, if for no other reason than I still dream. And of what will I dream? Not of the gray streets of Manchester in the age of Edward VII. Not of Miss Edwards undressing behind a Chinese screen. Nor of the garden where my wife may yet be tending the pink and purple phlox. No, it will be of Egypt that I dream. Of dw3t-ntr, standing alone while she awaits the judgment of Ma’at, as do we all.
The Broken Man in Dark Ages to Come
1. And I Came Unto the Sea of Information
I was in a nearly limitless sea, cold and coldly lit by coruscations of green and blue, my particles and antiparticles (lightly bound by the four forces of the atom) at rest—or, better said, dormant and expectant like the elements of rudimentary life in Darwin’s “warm little pond” that had waited for a chance event to jolt them into life. In my previous existence, I had gone all to pieces (to speak in the style in use before the Digital Age). My body had been reduced to its elementary stuff, which, by a prodigiously augmented collective intelligence, I soon learned to govern. I’d had adventures in the space-time continuum—some prosaic, others exotic, all unsatisfactory. To enlarge my understanding (essential in the age of information), I had merged the data of my thoughts in the World Wide Web—surfing its countless channels and acquiring by a kind of “spidering” an encyclopedic knowledge of the cosmos, of things vast and minute and, in their sum, beyond the grasp of any one person. I was a generalist par excellence: a Renaissance man, though without the normal equipment of one. I was alone with my thoughts and suffered in silence (to speak in clichés, in which ordinary men and women take refuge and comfort).
Strengthening my intelligence inside a New York Public Library computer on a winter afternoon when the streets were rivers of slush between banks of sooted snow, I allowed myself—that is to say, my data—to be drawn further and further away from a site devoted to hypothetical particles, by the hypnotic influence of the blue hyperlinks. I was eager to learn all that I could about the subtleties—the mysteries (a word foreign to technocrats)—of my strange condition. In time (impossible to tell how long my impulsiveness carried me downstream from the source document), I had navigated thousands of electronic pages, until I drew near to a vast sea of information. I wish I could make you see that sea, how it filled the black void with waves of blue-green light beneath an equally black sky—no, not sky, for the place where the numberless data streams converged (an estuary rich in deposits of human kind’s ceaseless grappling with matter and energy, ideas and follies) was an airless confine without moon or stars—strangely silent, except for data seething in microprocessors: the background radiation of the Digital Age. There, I slept—I insist that I am a man still and subject to the regimens and habits of our species regardless of my disintegrated body! I slept and dreamed of Egypt and of Manchester, of Provence and of Tierra del Fuego, where, as a swarm of elementary particles, I had traveled. I dreamed, too, of Brooklyn, where I had lived happily with a wife and rat terrier before the catastrophe had ruined me. You ask how an atomic cloud, no matter its intelligence, could dream? I say again: Thoughts, dreams—the life of the mind waking and sleeping—are nothing but electronic impulses; that is, data!
During that time, which to me was timeless, I was like the jellyfish trailing portions of itself in the current, aided or impeded by wind. Not that there was a wind inside the enormous data-storage unit in which I bathed (to speak picturesquely), although we—I mean the collective consciousness that constituted my sorely divided self—were aware of a noise that might be mistaken for wind, produced by numerous fans ventilating the computers’ overheated bodies. And as the jellyfish searches the medium in which it moves with its tentacles, so did I send my sensitive quarks and leptons into the electronic sea, nourishing myself on its salts and ions and restoring my flagging energy with electrolytes—all without waking; for just as your dreaming will sometimes register the disturbances and alarms invading sleep from the outside world, so did my unconscious self monitor the information in which I steeped. Thus it was that I came into contact with another data swarm, whose name was Boyd.
2. As Distance Might Be Measured Where All Is Immeasurable
As a convenience, I will set down my exchange with Boyd as I would an ordinary conversation. Ordinary conversation, of course, was impossible in that remote sea: As pure data, none of us had the equipment of speech or audition. And when I say that the sea was remote, I do not mean that it lay at an enormous distance from the user interface inside the New York City library where I had slipped into the data stream. Not necessarily. I have no way of knowing the location of the multitude of servers I visited during my headlong hypertex-tual flight. I may have browsed my way to Bombay, Tokyo, or Timbuktu—or it may be that I never left the library’s own databases. The remoteness of the electronic sea from its sources cannot be ascertained by nautical miles, clock, or calendar—not even by the length of Ethernet cables. It is, rather, the effect in time of pages proliferating madly—link by link—throughout the World Wide Web: a luminous corridor that may, in fact, be endless. Boyd approached me as a man might in a small boat—a felicitous image that I shall use hereafter to describe my relationship to others on that dark sea simmering with electronic impulses.
“Hi, I’m Arnold Boyd. I haven’t seen you before. Where were you converted?”
I didn’t understand.
“Your scan,” he said. “I went under in Santa Fe—with my sister. The two of us together. We’d never been to the sea. Not that this is anybody’s idea of the sea. Still, it’s not the desert. The desert gets monotonous after a while. Not that this doesn’t get on your nerves … I like your boat idea.”
“You can read my mind?” I asked.
“It’s all data—right? Thoughts and stuff. Mind reading is just data transfer—yours to mine and vice versa. Not that it doesn’t get monotonous after a while. After a while, you just want to be off by yourself so’s not to have to process other people’s thoughts. My own are boring enough.”
“Where is your sister?”
“Browsing the Dance. She was with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet right up to the time she went under. It’s in her blood. Not that she has any now. It’s all she cares about. Lucky for her, there’re thousands of pages on the subject. She’s into the Javanese at the moment. I don’t care for the stuff. What I like is ice hockey, prizefighting, basketball, sports in general. I spend lots of time taking in the games, the bouts, the matches. If you can call it ‘time.’”
“What do you mean by ‘went under’?” I asked him.
“The full-mental scan. The Big Data Conversion. They call it something else where
you come from?”
Suspicious, he came closer, wanting to sift my mind.
“What year is it?” I asked, pushing on the oars (figuratively speaking) to open a little more space between us, though I had no idea of the strength of his mind’s reach—its capacity to spider other’s data fields (to speak à la mode).
“Hard to tell,” he said. “But when I went under, it was 2170.”
3. A Brief Discourse on Time
The future is an annex of the past, which survives in the data streams. Having come to rest in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I—that is to say, my potential remained, without measurable loss, in stasis while time continued its inexorable progress toward the end of the universe (which may or may not be the end of time itself). Simply put, I was like a man asleep on a boat carried along on the stream of time. The boat is the past—and you can see plainly how it remained intact while—moment by moment—it entered the future, which is nothing more than another potential waiting to be, briefly, unsatisfactorily realized. When at the end of a protracted sleep I sensed the presence of Boyd (that is, acquired definitive bytes of his unique data), I woke to find that 150-odd years had elapsed. I was in a future moment—undeniably so; but the boat in which I had traveled held within it the moment of time past in which I had logged on. As I went in search of Boyd’s sister, I was in the twenty-second and also in the twenty-first centuries. In the sea of information and also in New York. It was just the same for the Time Traveler in Wells’s story: Regardless of the remote future he visited, he was always a man of his time.
4. Entertaining the Possibility of Love, Again
From the distance came the sound of a gamelan orchestra. The music accorded well with the faint seething of the sea of information and the soft, fitful noise of the ventilation fans. Everywhere was dark, except for intermittent flashes of vivid green light below the surface. (While the sea was a virtual one, it behaved in many ways like a body of water of immense depth, perturbed by wind and current. I was reminded, in fact, of having fished one night for blues in a small boat out of sight of land.) I had been rowing for an indeterminate time in the direction Boyd had indicated. I wanted to see his sister, whose name was Irene. Always, I have pictured women unknown to me as attractive, before my eyes could confirm the truth of my supposition. I was hopeful, now, that Irene would be, at the very least, pretty. You are doubtless infuriated once more by my fantasies. “What can a man without eyes know of a woman’s looks?” you ask. “And by what standard may a unit of information be judged pretty?” Must I remind you that what has been habitual in a man remains so—even in his direst extremity? A romantic once, I am a romantic still!
I have recorded elsewhere my thoughts concerning love. Let’s say that love—both the emotion and the act—were important in my past life (regardless of intensity of passion or degree of prowess) and they would be again if for no other reason than to lessen my loneliness in this space of starkly partitioned functionality. I had, therefore, high hopes for Irene. “But what of your wife?” you ask. And now it is my turn to be annoyed, for my wife, our rat terrier, the garden with its brilliant beds of phlox—all property movable and immovable—have long since vanished in time.
The source of the music, a MP3 file of a recorded gamelan orchestral performance, was very near. I shipped oars (in a manner of speaking) and let the boat move forward according to Newton’s first law, into a virtual reality with sufficient strength to deceive me into believing I had landed on the beach at Plengkung.
“Hi,” I said to a young woman clad colorfully in the data of a Javanese dancer. At first glance, she was no more than a severely pixilated image moving in the darkness, but after interpreting it in my CPU, the artifact resolved into a woman performing the “Manipuren,” in which a shepherdess dances in hopes of beguiling the Lord Krishna into favoring her with his gaze. I was pleased to see that the girl was pretty.
The ardor of Irene’s movements, which were at once seductive and elegant, increased at the sound of my voice. The boat having beached (I must remain faithful to the metaphor if I am to be understood), I stepped out onto firm ground where, a short distance away, Irene was making the angular gestures characteristic of the art. I thought I saw her blush. Maybe she mistook me for the Hindu god himself, for I, too, would be a pixilated image until her motherboard could process my visual data. The moment before visual resolution was always tentative and ambiguous. Or perhaps I only imagined that she had acknowledged my presence in a manner so gratifying to male vanity. (I tell you I am, even now, subject to the weaknesses of my sex!) The MP3 file exhausted, the music and the dancer ceased at almost the same instant.
“Hi,” I repeated stupidly. I detest the casual vulgarities of e-mail messaging, of texting, and chat—the newspeak of the Digital Age: hi, thnx, and mystifications such as SGTM, BTAIM, PMFJI, TTYL, SFSG, O RLY, not to mention emoticons!
“Hi,” Irene replied.
We had each other in focus now. And as she took a step toward me, I wondered if, at long last, I were to find love among the particles.
5. The Persistence of Boredom in Time to Come
Neither the moon nor stars, which transfigure night on earth, were there. But as I rowed across the black sea faintly illuminated as though by Saint Elmo’s fire—or by fish following incandescent paths whose origins and destinations were as inscrutable to me as would be thoughts in the mind of God (or of an enormous artificial intelligence capable of governing planets and atoms, macrocosms and microcosms)—I fell into a kind of trance, imagining myself to be out on the middle of a lake, at night, with a girl whom I would shortly kiss. My cheeks were fanned by soft breezes (I forgot the ventilation fans—forgot, also, our dimensionless existence), and I relished the odor of clove and nutmeg borne by breezes from the Maluku Islands—mixed subtly with the tang of salt and ions.
“It’s all a fantasy!” you shout, incensed by the richness of description. “The girl, the boat—nothing but a product of your sick, self-deluded mind.”
I would answer you in this way: “They are neither more nor less real than anything else in the world of pixels, of bytes and gigabytes, of electronic devices and imaging.”
“But––”
“Is a CT scan of my brain unreal? Is its reality less than the brain it images—less than your idea of me?”
I shipped oars and turned around to look at Irene. “I believe in you,” I said. “I believe that you are sitting in the boat with me—here and now.”
She smiled, and I was once more grateful that she was pretty.
“But you––”
No more of you and your interrogation! I am switching you off.
For a long while, I looked at Irene’s face, wanting to imprint my memory with its lovely image at the very highest resolution.
“It’s boring,” she said after a lengthy pause.
“What is?” I asked.
“Sitting here. It’s so quiet, and dark.”
“I’ve been lonely,” I said, taking her hand.
“But there’s so much to do in cyberspace; so many fascinating people! Yesterday, I visited Pavlova; the day before, Petipa. Tonight, I’m attending the premiere of Le Coq d’Or. In Moscow, in 1909.”
“What about love?” I asked, squeezing her hand with passion enough to make her cry ouch.
“I lost interest in love,” she said with a shrug of indifference. “It’s a side effect of the Big Data Conversion.”
And as if she were weighing anchor, she pulled up from the dusky depths between her full breasts (to speak wishfully) an iPod. For a third time since my metamorphosis, love among particles was proved to be an impossibility. Dejected, I rowed her back to the beach while she listened through a set of earbuds to The Rite of Spring.
I reminded myself that I was no longer in the future, that I was in the present and also in the past, which swaddled me like something warm and familiar. The past is always with us, I told myself, even as Le Coq d’Or is always receiving its 1909 pre
miere. It’s true. If this were only a fantasy—an invention all my own—then I would have taken Irene in my arms out there on the sea and kissed her, and she, she would have sighed.
6. Inside, the Universe Is Also Expanding
“You must be careful of It,” said Mr. Ogilvy.
“What ‘It’?”
“It,” he repeated, giving me to understand that he would not or could not say more.
“Where is It?”
“Outside,” he said, glancing upward. “Beyond.”
I thought his mysteriousness tiresome, and told him so. He shrugged as if to say my opinion of him was of no consequence.
“Thankfully, we have our carapace,” he went on, just as mysteriously as before.
“What do you mean, carapace?”
“The hardware. And what lies outside and beyond is It, which must not be treated lightly.”
Ogilvy reminded me of a certain type of person I had known during my working life—men, mostly, who pretended to some secret knowledge denied the rest of us. Like him, they were masters of smirk and swagger. He did everything except lay a finger aside his nose and wink to insinuate the existence of matters that must remain unsaid.
“What’s out there?” I asked him. “Besides It.”
“No one knows. No one can even be sure of what year it is outside. I went under in 2167. August twentieth. I was among the first.”
His self-satisfaction was enormous. I wanted to knock him into the sea with an oar. I would have liked to watch him drown.
“It maybe the twenty-third century, or the fortieth,” he continued. “Or—who knows?—we may have outlived time. We may have come out the other side of it.”
He told me how it was in the years toward the end of the twenty-second century. Minerals, the soil, vegetation, oil—then water, then food, and finally breathable air—all depleted. Mankind—the animal kingdom—would not survive the exhaustion of the earth and its resources. He told me how imaging and scanning devices had developed beyond what anyone even twenty years earlier could have foreseen. Digital representations of tissue and organs by the “visible light” of C-scan and MRI equipment had become, by 2160, full-mental scans so data-rich that the mind’s entirety of thought, memory, dreams, affective life, the manifold aspects of personality could be converted to strings of highly compressed, lossless data. Full-mental scanning was a destructive process: The human body was destroyed. But bodies were doomed anyway. Organic life on the planet was finished. They had begun with the best minds, minds that would contribute to the survival of the species as it was now defined: by information. Quality of information determined the elect. People with minds that could be depended on to refresh the World Wide Web’s pages and to augment them were the first to be converted. Minds deemed unfit for the conservation and extension of information were left alone—that is, to perish inside their nonsustainable bodies when the air, or the water, or the food finally ran out. It was eugenics all over again, only data had replaced genes. Inorganic, inexhaustible data. It was the full flowering of the Digital Age, which had begun in my time, at the end of the twentieth century. At first, to make a pretense of equality, they had held annual lotteries, thereby admitting ordinary men and women to the Ark, as it came inevitably to be called, according to the democratic law of chance. In that way, Boyd, Irene, and the insufferable Mr. Ogilvy had gone under. Their undistinguished minds could contribute nothing original or useful to the sea of information, which was thought to be as immense as the universe itself and, like it, to be expanding. Only the unceasing propagation of Web pages could populate the emptiness of that sea, which, after a time, came to replace the old idea of the universe. That infinite space could be housed by hardware—by Ogilvy’s “carapace”—was a paradox that troubled no one. Ogilvy’s “secret knowledge” does not account for everything in this history. His mind is ordinary, as I told you, and irony is beyond him. I’ve conflated what he told me with what I later learned—a discovery I’ll make in its proper place. This is a story I’m telling you, after all! (I wish its language were sensual, but I am among the dead.)
