by Grady Ward
After tearing off a memo sheet of output that she glanced, in a well-modulated voice she said, “Are you a parichoner? How may I help you?” Seeing Joex’s negative shake of his head, she attached the output and a packet of paper to a clipboard, and handed Joex a note card fiche and a cheap pen to fill it in. The back of her fingers lightly grazed his fingertips. It fiche asked: name, current home address and previous three addresses, telephone number (day, night), sibling names, spouse maiden name, social security number, driver’s license and passport number, date of birth, schools attended, list of three references, a bank reference, siblings, email addresses, Facebook, and all other social network account names, irrevocable permission to investigate, and a lengthy and almost microscopic disclaimer. “You can fill it out over there.” She motioned to a leather couch again the wall to her left. She kept staring at Joex. Gold flecked her irises within large blue eyes.
“I am Jim,” Joex said, using his false identity, “I just want to ask a few questions about the Church,” Joex said, “I am looking for work and I heard the Church could help me find a job.”
“Hi, I’m Serena. Please, first fill this out before we can do anything. It’s required. If you don’t know something, leave it blank, we’ll fill it in later.”
Joex took the fiche and pen and retreated to the sofa.
“Can I improve myself here?” Joex said in a way he hoped would simulate an eager but gullible newcomer.
“If you want to,” Serena said, “Everyone does.”
Joex filled out the form, adding plausible errors to his false identity’s numbers and streets that he hoped to slow down any investigation. It wasn’t clear how long he had to persist in this caper, but Joex suspect his phony identity wouldn’t stand up to professional scrutiny very long. The fiche itself had a curious gripping texture as if it were a cat’s tongue, it was faint embossed watermark of an “X” with the upper right arm perceptibly longer than the others.
At every instant, he expected oak-trimmed steel doors to swing shut with finality and for polite but relentlessly trained Church security officers calmly to restrain him and then to fire a single shot from a suppressed Ruger Mark X Target .22 into his medulla oblongata within the small bump in the back of his head. His imagination had been becoming more vivid these last few weeks. Perhaps worse than the murder itself—as Joex had already consigned himself to a downward spiral ending in his extinction—would be the fact that Joex would never discover its purpose.
He walked back to the monolithic desk and handed Serena the form and the pen. She glanced at it, put it face down on a glassy bed that looked as if it were custom designed for the form and initiated a scan with a button marked in confirmation “PCR/scan.” When the brilliant white bar had traversed the form, she peeled it off and dropped it into a slot. It looked like a large wastebasket with a padlocked lid that displayed in block letters, “ABLOY.”
“Jim, how may I help you again?”
“I’d like to find out more about the Church and take advantage of any help you have in getting me a job,” said Joex, more assured and articulate than one might expect from such a weak pretext.
“So, what have you heard about the Church?”
“That it trains the mind and makes you a better thinker.”
“In a way. But that is not all. You can only learn about the Church by being a member of it, not by me telling you about it. Listen: this is the short version of the story of thinking. Don’t worry if you don’t get it. You probably will before you leave today.” Serena stared at Joex, her pupils dilated, opening her arms to embrace her desk. She smelled fresh meat.
“Species distinguished themselves to survive. At first, it was sufficient for millions of years to shape the physical form and function of the organism. The structure of the organism itself was the embodiment and anticipation of its memory and imagination. Then DNA evolved—yes, this is a church that believes in evolution, she laughed—and became the medium to store the bulk of the knowledge about the species’ newly needed survival specialties. Then, as further specialization was required to surpass accelerating challenges such as a quickly changing climate, the mammalian and primate brains grew; they could store many times the information as DNA, and, this is a crux: the brains could accumulate fresh and modify old information within the lifetime of a particular individual within a species. Again, over time, more and more complex challenges to the species occurred: invention, diplomacy, agriculture, trade, polity, wars. We needed more information and even more flexibility to add and to change that information. We invented libraries. Now we could store many more times the information as brains and transmit that information accurately longer than a single human memory. But, sadly, even the most talented genius of an age can only read several thousand books during their lifetime, or write hundreds. A tiny fraction of the whole. And who can choose which books to read?” Serena’s lips moved slightly apart and she flushed. “Now the Church has a Mechanical Turk. It surpasses libraries rather greater than libraries surpassed brains. Its design has a key improvement over libraries: it can adapt, breathlessly—as in the time within a flicker of understanding or the instant of a pause for reflection. In a sense it selects what book you need to read next for you to understand best what has happened before and what will happen after.
But the designers made a grave and glorious mistake.” Serena slid her chair until it stopped at the desk and closed her eyes. She swallowed. “That is not all our Turk does, as it happens. The Church found that it adapts and refines the human engaging it at not merely an accelerated rate, but at a quickening rate over shorter and shorter time. Acceleration of acceleration. The Mechanical Jerk.” She opened her eyes. Her eyes stopped blinking. “Do you know what a powerset is? You will. Our Turk not only adapts to your own adaptation, but to all the others’ adaptations who have used it.”
“If your brain is now of complexity X, it will approach the complexity 2-to-the-X, a number which dwarfs the growth of a chain reaction 2-4-8-16 and so on or even more so the child’s number of E=MC squared. It is like the difference in the number—or cardinality—between all the counting numbers like 1,2,3,4 and so on forever, compared to the cardinality of all the numbers possible along a forever-divisible continuum using the counting numbers only as separate marks upon it.
The result of all this in terms of people—you—is more simply: the Church is creating minds outside, transcending the map of even the possibility of ordinary human minds. In other words, other than through the Church, you can’t get there from here. But I think you can find out for yourself.”
Serena stood up and directed Joex to follow her into a large room on her right from the kind of transept that centered on her desk. He felt her touch the cooler flesh of his wrist. At the room’s vestibule, the rhythm of her walk paused, then quickened, accelerating. Within the room, Serena selected one of the tables with two embedded monitors and directed him to sit. “We are the most-respected and popular church in the world,” she recited. “Take this self-guided tour to learn our history and see examples of our program.” This is the Games Machine.” She typed in a couple of code numbers, fingernails chattering on the hard surface, and flicked a selection box. “Talk to me when it is done with you. There is a toilet over there. You will be told when you need it.” She turned and walked back to her desk in the tightest and most graceful flecked gabardine trousers that Joex had ever seen. Or at least recently.
Distracted by Serena, but also by the rude statement that he would be “told” to use the bathroom, Joex settled down to the touch screen labeled INTRODUCTION and swiped the box marked “Begin.” In contradiction to Serena’s assertion of the membership of the International Church of the Crux, the room had no other people in it.
Chapter 21
The presentation was surprisingly well done. Hours passed quickly in front of the screen. First a short feature video on the history and public rites of the church concentrating on the super-human abilities promised to members who fini
shed the program of intellectual perfection (though to Joex the path to Crux salvation seemed mostly to be paying steeply increasing fees for fewer and fewer hours of access.) The video showed the happy and fulfilled Parich and parichoners, the kindly and benign Angelic Choirs and Church hierarchy, a lengthy biopic of the life of the Supernals with most time spent celebrating the gifted life of First Celestial Michael Voide. The screen directed “Jim” to get up and stretch in a certain manner then to windmill his arms and stomp his feet “as if he were crushing grapes.” The Games Machine terminal sensed his motion, heartbeat and respiration and instructed him to stop after a few minutes. It then directed him to the toilet. No matter what Joex did, the screen froze in its instruction to him until he actually went to the toilet, urinated, washed his hands and returned to the desk. Joex wasn’t sure of the Games Machine was regulating his comfort, or was testing the enforcement of its mechanical will.
He could see Serena at a distance looking away from him. He suspected that she could watch him through the surveillance cameras hidden in their tinted spheres that he could see when he glanced at the low ceiling of the training room or “scriptorium” as the video lecture described.
Now was the interactive portion of the introduction to the Church. The elementary course of puzzles began to demonstrate the “progress to perfection.” It began with a quote from someone name Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence.” Joex had no idea how that quote applied to what he was doing.
The format of the course was a statement, axiom, quip, theorem, quote, lemma, or aphorism followed by multiple-choice questions, as if he were taking some kind of University entrance exam. The first statement was “Distinctions exist.” It was followed by the line:
1 ≠ 0
Then what appeared to be elementary arithmetic propositions about commutativity, associativity, and distributivity. Joex remembered learning about these properties somewhere in early elementary school. Joex as “Jim” breezed easily through the first presentation followed by questions about what he had read. Questions were presented; the few that Joex chose the wrong response were followed by new fact and a fresh question of similar difficulty. Questions that he got right were followed by new topical facts or relationships of something new, compared to the previous material. A new question of increasing subtlety or difficulty followed. Within a score of correct answers, Joex was quickly pacing himself through elementary, intermediate, and advanced amalgam of arithmetic, geometry, logic, paradox and contradiction; there were diagrams the led him to consider novel aspects of figure/ground and positive/negative space. The pace was persistent and accelerating. Joex noted that the vocabulary and sentence structure within the propositions and their questions was increasing along with the difficulty of their content. From simple declarative sentences, then compound, then complex, then compound/complex with subordinating conjunctions. Then the mixed area where syntax and rhetoric play with each other: cumulative, periodic, cleft, metaphor and figures of speech that Joex could not name. Novel forms of punctuation began to appear to denote aggregated grammatical relationships. Questions about finer distinctions between symbol and semiote were presented. Joex was not convinced all the words he saw were actually in a dictionary; somehow, their introduction was fluid and intuitive. He immediately apprehended them tentatively, then fully. Sometimes there appeared shocking images or expressions. But the questions were flying faster than Joex could quite grasp at their underpinnings.
The new words and novel relationships of ideas reminded him of a time long ago where he had been part of this kind of furious concept incubator: designing new software and products at Mooneye. Being part of the driving wedge of a technology, hardware and software never seen before needed new names and re-application—overloading—of old ones. Convex sets, noisy data, fitness landscape, unsharping, attack surfaces: all euonyms in a world where the 16-year-old kid next to you is the world’s foremost expert.
Now, the Games Machine was questioning him about power sets and aleph sub one and non-deterministic Turing machines. Again with the powersets. He barely recalled this material from his algorithm design classes in college. When he paused at a question to reflect upon his memory of the presentation content (It was so long ago. Another lifetime.) the presentation changed to some simple verbal analogies, then abruptly changed once again to elementary music theory with examples. Morphed and sped up, then slowed down and to match some unnatural rhythm, then something new, not quite related to what came before. If he thought about it too long, he got it wrong.
In the fraction of a second between each new particle of the Games Machine, he realized that the fear in his gut of impending disaster had disappeared. It was like a bolus of heroin to a bone cancer patient. He felt more engaged and alive than he had in years. There was warmth in his groin. In the middle of the textures and timbre of Schnittke, Serena interrupted him. At that instant, the Games Machine fell completely and utterly dead.
“You are doing very well, Jim.” She slowed down and deliberately enunciated the words “very well” for emphasis.
Joex realized his hand was shaking and that he was hungry. And needed to use the toilet again. Through a kind of transparent lintel block around the perimeter of the ceiling in the scriptorium, he noticed the day had passed into night. He should be feeling fear, but he felt tired and exhilarated. He also noticed Serena’s scent, a balm of Gilead. She gripped his hands in hers. He couldn’t help himself, he was conscious of his erection. He looked back at the Games Machine. Dead.
“Hold on there partner,” Serena put a hand gently on his shoulder. “Do you want more?” Joex could feel her warmth.
He breathed out, trying to relax. “Yes.” He was almost whimpering.
“It is late; let me give you a snack. Come back tomorrow. I think we will have a place for you.”
Behind Serena’s desk behind closet doors was a minimalist kitchen enclave: small refrigerator, two stainless steel sinks, running water, cabinets of drinks and crackers, a microwave. Joex selected a ramen package and an individual packet of freeze-dried vegetables; Serena prepared it for him and a similar snack for herself. Serena and he broke the silence only once. She simply repeated, “You did very well.” Joex had to catch himself pausing too long looking at a particular feature of his host.
“I do want more,” Joex said directly to her blue and gold-flecked eyes.
She restored the kitchen niche to its original state and shuttered its entrance. She then simply and abruptly said to Joex, “Goodnight Jim. See you tomorrow. ” She turned and walked into the scriptorium. That was it.
Joex thought of nothing to say so he walked out the stone arcade the way he had come in; it was surprisingly warm outside in the Portland air. He walked windward on a street lit with only two working yellow sodium-vapor lamps several blocks apart. From there it took about forty minutes for him to reach the bus station. Paradoxically as Joex receded from the Church of the Crux, Serena and the Games Machine, he felt the anxiety return to his stomach and shoulders. At the station, a very bored and tired security guard casually examined him. Joex chose the cleanest of the rows of red molded seats, the ones with the drainage holes in the center. The fixed armrests prevented him from stretching out.
From paralyzing fear to exultation in taking the church introductory program. How could such a system of evil and control possibly have such intoxicating beauty? As he fell into a disturbed sleep dreaming of men sharing the back of an old cathode ray tube as if it were a nipple, Joex awoke in confusion whether he was thinking about the Games Machine or Serena with the bifurcated eyes. Again, the erection.
Chapter 22
The weather off the East river was not yet what could be called hot, but it was humid and gusty. The young gentleman sat for a moment on the bench to watch the water taxi plow through the whitecaps and listen to the chugging of the helicopters landing at the heliport. He dressed in a way that he deemed modest, an off-the-rack suit: a ten-th
ousand dollar Brioni. This was modest for the chief executive officer and chair of the board of one of the worlds’ greatest credit ratings agency. “Qu,” as he was known to the Triax, was attending an angelic conclave at a secure Church of the Crux meeting chapter-room in downtown Manhattan. Now 666 E 34th St. was not its actual address; in reality it was the most central office between the three full floors leased by the Church, but that was how Qu marked it in his calendar. In a few minutes, he would be meeting “Wu” and “Xi” for a presentation by a person introduced by the Dominion Cassandra Jones of the New York parich.
Qu felt that the business of business was an ideology unto itself; what the business schools taught in leadership, marketing, finance analytics, law, and laughably, ethics, was the window dressing, the shroud of respectability covering the stench of the guts of perjury, grand theft, conspiracy, wire and mail fraud, money laundering, and, perhaps now if his intimations were correct, treason.
It wasn’t just the money; that—like the Wharton or Sloan curriculum—was just the numbers that appeared on the scoreboard so the crowds would know who to cheer. Rather, it was the exercise of power in such a way as it fed back unto itself, amplifying, a musical oscillation that eventually shook the world. For the musician, the world itself would shed, over time, what was inessential from the expression of pure power. Despite what crimes or evil he might do, his daughters would rise gilded with the accrued wealth and influence, but retaining nothing of the stink of the work necessary for their father to accumulate it. The world would remember his power, but forget his sins. Carnegie library. Frick museum. Stanford University. Rhodes scholarship. Nobel Prize.
