by Grady Ward
Xtance nodded to Margaret that she should take over the countdown as Xtance was guiding Joex away from the building. “Into the sewers we go!” She turned left with Joex outside the corner drapery but before the emergency exit doors to the outside. “We are going a different way. About twenty feet down the back hallway there was a square corrugated iron cover bolted to the internal wall and continuing onto the floor. The floor appeared seamless and the wall mounting had two large bolts with nuts apparently welded to the bolts. “That’s just a dummy. Watch!” Xtance pushed hard sideways on an eyehooks attached to a rectangular painted block that matched the faded wall, the block was hard to move at first, but then slid right off. “Neodymium” Xtance said. She then slapped it down on the smooth flow plate, which it attached with a solid clang, and Xtance used the hook to lift off the cover into a hole that contained a metal ladder going steadily into darkness. “You first!” she said cheerfully to Joex. It goes down about eight feet. Just wait for me at the bottom.”
She watched Joex lumber down the ladder somewhat apprehensively, and then went down several rungs of the ladder herself, sliding the magnetic grip off the plate and refitting it carefully above her. She and Joex were now in total darkness, with a foul miasma rising to them. “Just one more second, Mr. Baroco,” Xtance cheerfully spoke into the darkness.
Standing in the echoing concrete fusty darkness, Joex suddenly remembered his father again. Joex was about four or five, insignificant compared to the powerful grip that was hanging him over the edge of a pier in Old Town. Joex could remember the dark green water lapping at the creosote and barnacle piers ten or fifteen feet below. Joex could also remember his perfect helplessness and fear as he shut down everything in order not to provoke what was going to happen. But what Joex remembered most clearly was not the cold indwelling of air off the morning sound or the petroleum sheen gilding the wavelets, but it was the barely perceptible shifted glance over this shoulder of his dad before the set of furrows in his face weathered over and he reluctantly brought Joex back to the pier. Later in the day, his father took him down to Commerce Street to buy a new Rolex Submariner for himself. One with the crown and the real radium paint on the dial that would flash and flicker no matter how long it was kept in the dark. Joex thought of his sister. “YOU GODDAMN COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCKING CUNT,” Joex shouted into the dark.
“What?” said Xtance. As virtually every other MIT student who had thought about such things, she carried a knife, a loupe, a monocular, a lighter, a compact skein of high test Dacron fishing line, a folded sheet of mylar, and a flashlight. She turned on the tiny flashlight and illuminated Joex’s feet. “See—nice and dry. Let’s go to the next building over. What are you shouting about?”
At the instant that she spoke this, a tall woman dressed in what appeared to be a black suit with long shiny leather gloves accompanied by a serious-looking man in a Brooks Brothers off-the-shelf pulled open the rear door of 765, against the tide of those who were leaving. He was openly carrying the small gold badge of a Special Agent along with his service Glock .40, while she just displayed her compact Glock, still warm from its holster. They were grimly looking at faces of those streaming past them as then went in.
Chapter 49
Manager Hu rarely had visitors in the evening and it took him a while to stand, reach for his cane, and shuffle to the door. “Colonel Hu! Stand down!” It had been a long, long while since Manager Hu had heard his rank, but it didn’t affect his pace in reaching the metal door and unlatching it. The humidity had turned to a chill in the evening and quickly ushered in Commander Ji while his driver, rather than waiting in the car, was standing attentively with his hands slightly lifted to his hips as if he were going to lift something..
Manager Hu urged the Commander to sit and have a mug of tea to ward off the evening air. “Please, Colonel. Have you shut down the computer strike?” Commander Ji insisted.
Manager Hu said nothing as he prepared the hot plate and the mug of cold water that he poured from crockery. He then asked, “So, my brother-in-law has changed his mind?”
“The Council and the Central Military Commission are opposed for now, as well, Colonel. It is not the right time.”
Manager Hu selected a pinch of tea from a tiny cubical paper box and crushed it under his nose, seeing if he could sense all the subtly of the history of this particular leaf. “From our history before we were China until I crushed this tea, they have decided that this instant is not yet right? Is that the message, Commander?”
“Please, Colonel. Have you shut down the strike? I am to take over this facility now. It is time for you to rest, Colonel.”
Manager Hu noticed the steam beginning to rise from the water in the aluminum pan he had set upon the hot plate. “No, it is done. The thousands of years of history focus on this spot, at this instant. It is too bright for us. But it shines regardless whether we blink or squint or shy away from it.”
Commander Ji a good thirty years younger than the elder man as well as taller and much more powerful, rested his good left hand on Manager Hu’s wrist as his twisted right touched the leather flapped over his 9mm QSZ. “Let us shut it down together, Colonel.”
As if cued to a choreographic memory, Manager Hu drew away slowly from the Command, smartly snapped the center of his cane on the corner of his desk. The cane broke and the bottom third hung by a thread from its body. Commander Ji, not alarmed, even amused by the elderly man’s anger—even breaking his own cane—just waited for it to play out and to give in to the inevitable.
Manager Hu, lifted his cane, took the hanging piece with his left hand and tore it off. It had broken cleanly on its elliptical ceramic groove. Now with a piece of the cane in each hand, Colonel Hu thrust the longer piece, whose breaking had produced a hollow spear as sharp as freshly broken glass, into the groin of the Commander. The Commander involuntarily bent over as if respectfully greeting thousands of years of history. Colonel Hu then drove the shorter spear, whose elliptical blade mirrored the one on the right, into the right carotid and subclavian arteries and through the tough gristle of the Commander’s pharynx. The titanium cannula gushed blood in heavy pulses. Commander Ji fell to the floor, fetally, gurgling. The Manager turned back to his tea, putting a generous pinch into the mug, which he filled with water not quite yet boiling. He cupped the mug in both hands to enjoy its warmth. Noting that the Commander was not in line-of-sight of the open door, Manager Hu opened the flimsy aluminum door stepped outside and offered the steaming mug to the driver. The driver accepted the hot mug with pleasure and with a slight twitch of his shoulders gave his respect to the older man as generous host. Manager Hu smiled and returned a barely perceptible dip of his head.
“The Commander and I will be talking for a while, please stay warm while we do,” said Manager Hu. The driver said nothing but blew the hot vapor off the surface of the tea as if it were a soul that was being freed.
Manager Hu then returned to his office, closed and latched the door, sat down on his cot and began speaking to the corpse. “Inevitability. We should be glad that we are connected so closely to history. Manager Hu rubbed his thighs and consciously took a breath that was full of the smell of tea and blood. He thoughts flickered to Michael Voide, then he thought of the Chinese people as though they were a leafy covering a in a late summer forest. “Commander, I am you. And we both are the Chinese people. It is too late now to turn aside the plough; after midnight, we are done. But the Chinese people cannot be obstructed: while each leaf turns into a rotted net of veins, the fall color binds fast.”
Chapter 50
Xtance and Joex reached the end of the sewer that connected the 765 building with its neighbor, virtually a twin of the warehouse. Unlike 765, its neighbor had not been used since it had been closed months before. She decided that rather than waiting it was best if Joex and she put as much distance between them and the authorities who were closing the ring on the twin building. Xtance pointed the way to the second floor and to the window
with the vintage wrought iron fire escape. With both their weight on the vertical ladder within a cage, it rattled and scraped down within six feet of the pavement where both Joex and Xtance simply let themselves drop to the ground.
“Let’s go.” Xtance led them north, away from the shadow lab and toward the thoroughfare that led back to Cambridge. They walked quickly and did not turn back. On the way, Xtance spoke to Joex. “Why would we believe you. There are so many outlandish stories in the world, which not surprisingly, turn out to be false. True stories are beyond outlandish; they are absurd, even impossible, until their logic is incorporated into a new world-view. In particular, there are many outlandish stories about the Church of the Crux. Who knows what the facts are? Perhaps so-called apostates seeking revenge for imagined internal attacks. You, homeless, just out of the blue a target for a Crux assassin? Even if they are only a church in the same way organized crime is a church, or a major bank stripping their stockholders of value in exchange for outrageous executive compensation is a church. Perhaps these organizations seek out the weak that lack the fundamental strength to keep the same opinion from one week to the next.”
“But we do know Mark and Sinder, they were two who committed suicide after associating with the Church. I knew Mark personally, he is the Prophet who led me to the shadow lab my first time. Mark loved learning. Mark loved technology. And he loved learning new skills that would entertain or help people. Juggling. Shadow puppetry. Bicycle mechanic. Copy editor. Tailor. He was recruited into the Crux in his first year on campus, it was socially challenging for him to go from home-schooling several thousand miles away to the urban MIT campus. Especially for a beautiful gay man. The Church of the Crux seemed at first to provide that support, and simultaneously challenge his intellect.
He told me of the wonders of the Games Machine, which he described as the ultimate video game. A game in which you wanted to learn every detail and allusion, to know every answer including those which changed depending upon context and semantic ambit. For more than a year it seemed to be helpful to his academic achievement. He was brilliant even by school standards: he matriculated at 13 and taught algebraic topology in a novel manner at 15. He had inherited the soul of Alan Turing. But eventually despite the intense growth he felt from using the Games Machine, he was always troubled after his sessions at the Crux. He would shy away from people, he began to be afraid for apparently no reason of new people he met. He was always looking for signs that he would be attacked in the motions and words of those around him. ‘Paranoid semiotics’ we mocked him at first.”
They got on the Red Line going west and Xtance continued.
“The word ‘intervention’ started being mention in reference to Mark. But despite the signs of emotional disturbance, he without question was benefitting a great deal intellectually from his time at the Church. He began to work on a project to replace the Games Machine. Called the Cataract, it was to be a free alternative to the Crux, which Mark was beginning to find oppressive despite the euphoria of the Church. But the Crux owned him. I guess that was our failure: we worship learning and discovery so much that the worship exceeds our better judgment about safety and proportionality. But to know that is once again “knowledge” to be “known.” It is maddingly self-referential.
Once before a woman I knew died of a heart attack, which I should have known was brought about by forgetting to eat or drink while gaming for 72 hours straight. The piss pooling at her feet ought to have been a clue—but…it was a time in which we thought that friends left each other alone to make their own decisions. Even ones which might kill them.”
“Mark was churning out papers in his field, in both depth and breadth and somehow…intensity…they were some of the best work I’ve ever seen. We have these cubbyholes at the math department. It is traditional to leave copies of your unpublished papers in them so that bored faculty and students can read and mark them up. Of course, being anonymous, they were viciously but at the same time effectively attacked, criticized, and…perfected. I remember one weekend Mark had filled every cubbyhole on the width with a new paper to submit for publication. It was unimaginable.”
“But then things got worse. Mark had trouble sleeping. More than once, he would call me at 3 or 4 AM and complain of people rattling his windows and making his floor buckle. I urged him to see a campus counselor, but he said that there was counseling—he called them ‘interviews’—within the Church. At any cost, he could not give up the Games Machine. But he was working feverously on the Cataract to replace it. The cost did turn out to be a heavy one. After being served a cease and desist demand from the Church, he asphyxiated himself on the toilet.” Xtance furrowed her brow. Her lips grew white.
“I was asked to fetch his papers and to submit the ones that were sufficiently completed to warrant peer review. I got three of his papers published posthumously, I am sure I would have gotten many more published if I had known where he kept his research notes. But then I stumbled on his greatest work, the Cataract.”
Xtance was silent for a while. The train passed Charles.
“You know, the shadow lab had a Games Machine project going at one time. Or what I imagine a secular Games Machine would be like. Self-adapting. Constantly improving. Faster than real-time. Inclusive. Emotionally non-judgmental. Wholly focused on activating every cognitive circuit in your head. Integrating your senses with your newly awakened intellect. Yes, it sounds like pretentious or platitudinous tripe. Orgone energy. But we knew it was possible. Mark and Sinder were proof-of-concept, at least to me. But we dropped it.”
The train passed Kendall/MIT. “Next one” said Xtance to Joex as he looked at her questioningly.
“We decided that the exercise was not yet human, or humane. It’s my view that people are differing projections of the same entity skipping through time and dimension. It is a family resemblance in which we don’t necessarily share any particular traits with any other being, but yet, we resemble one another—for want of a better term—morally. That is the family trait. A moral sense. But not a pre-packaged sense of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but the on-going inquiry into mutually benefitting the world and the multiverse. What evokes a networked diversity. Imagine an exponential version of Metcalfe’s Law. A powerset of cardinality. Anyway. If I am speaking gibberish, I apologize,”
“Each one of us, and that include beings we may discover in the future from other worlds both inside and outside this planet, is an aspect of one another. Like a photon with its coupled magnetic and electrical component in differing domains, or perhaps as gravity may appear attenuated because of its skipping and churning through parallel dimensions, we are each as important as a component’s description of something in aggregate that we can’t yet name.” Xtance saw that she was losing Joex. “Or, in another way, I believe in the saying: ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you,’ except—there are no ‘others.’”
When the train went under an underpass, its windows reflected ectoplastic people swaying around them.
Learning is non-sense if it is not in the context of other people, or proceeding by your own volition. Machine learning as practiced by the Crux produces freaks of nature as much alien to our species as silicon beings from dead red dwarf.
Then, are we left with a bare room, an instructor with a piece of chalk and the student? With no benefit from our machines? We now have a new project, but one that is not for everyone. The Cataract.
“The Cataract is now the persistent project of the shadow lab. It is paradoxically both the most permanent and complete exhibit of our human culture yet at the same time the most forbidden, illegal, and troubling. To work on the Cataract is as painful as a blind man reading a cactus. I hope you can learn more about that project someday, especially since the Crux has thrust itself upon you.”
The train stopped at Central, Xtance got out with Joex following her. On the platform, despite the crowd ebbing and flowing around them, she continued.
“I am Xtance, or extan
ce, or emergence, or, the intelligent and reflective thing that appears from apparently nowhere from the quark soup of the world. How is this not the most amazing thing in the world?” A drop of condensation dropped on Xtance’s cheek and as if it were the most natural thing for him to do, Joex wiped it off with the back of his index finger. Xtance didn’t flinch.
“I am not afraid of submerging back into the soup because another perhaps more complicated and nuanced being will emerge, just as billions of billions of moral entities have already coalesced from insensate physical law. We decided—at least I carefully considered and adopted the belief—that if the technology wasn’t moral then it wasn’t suitable. And its morality had to be teased out at the same time as the technology itself. It is no good to develop an atomic bomb and only then develop an idea on when is it just and moral to use.
Morality is like the atmosphere, it gets thinner as you get away from the surface, away from the people.
My father taught biology in a high school in California when I was growing up. He would tell me this story again and again, changing the details this way or that to reflect—I realize now—the inflections of my growth from a child, to a little girl and then to womanhood. He would always ask me at the end when he kissed me good night, what I think the story meant? I had answers then and have a fresh answer now. My answer may be different tomorrow.
This is one version that he would tell: “Once upon a time there was a Sultan who after years of fighting and privation, succeeded in uniting the seven eastern lands under one law. His advisors urged him to establish a harem, but he insisted that he would be happiest with a single lover and wife.”
