by Sjón
Woman: 6 April 1962 –✝11 February 2012
Man: 1 June 1962 –✝23 March 2012
Man: 5 March 1962 –✝4 July 2012
Man: 12 July 1962 –✝21 August 2012
Woman: 10 February 1962 –✝16 October 2012
Man: 22 October 1962 –✝16 November 2012
Man: 7 May 1962 –✝12 December 2012
The packaging employee is leading a seamstress who’s leading a science teacher who’s leading the employee of a shipping company who’s leading a chef. The chef is leading a labourer who holds out his free hand to the last person to enter the stage, a disabled man in an electric wheelchair. And the labourer leads the disabled man.
Man: 27 August 1962 –✝31 December 2012
The shadow of the man in the wheelchair stretches and billows in the veil of smoke until he resembles the king of a chosen people on his throne, a centaur on wheels, a divine prophet steering a fiery chariot. The wrinkle on his forehead is smoothed out until it looks less like the word truth and more like the word death. The chorus raises its 213-strong voice:
— Dear brothers and sisters, born in 1962, we await you here.
If you listen carefully you can hear one voice departing from the theme, in a way that some would call discordant. It is the voice of Jósef Loewe, who is looking over his shoulder, calling back into the passageways that brought him to this place:
— Dear Sjón, I await you here.
EPILOGUE
With this book, as with any other, we should bear in mind that although the author has chosen to bring the story to a conclusion, it is in fact far from over. Characters who survive at the end of the tale will live on, pursuing the course of their lives into an unwritten future, however short or long, or even infinite – a future in which unforeseen advances in biotechnology may, for example, lead to the discovery of an immortality drug, or, alternatively, a character may come to the aid of a supernatural being in distress and be rewarded with eternal life (this is the difference between living beings of flesh and blood and the other kind, who inhabit the world of fiction) – and the only way we, as readers, can learn about the characters’ trials and triumphs is to eavesdrop on our own imagination and listen to our inner narrator spinning them a fate. Even the most minor characters in literature may legitimately hope that some reader will take on the task of telling their story, by plucking up the loose end from the page, so to speak, and drawing it out until they can tie a new thread to it and so embark on an independent tale. Yes, even characters who are supposed to be stone dead can give rise to new stories, whether in their own world or in others undreamed of.
The same applies to all the other loose ends that have not been tied up by the last page or were mentioned only in passing earlier in the story – whether deliberately or by mistake – since the plot and its components can, in the mind of the reader or author who discovers unused material in them, take twists and turns that no one could have predicted, however thoroughly and however often the book has been read, however many people have analysed and discussed it, however many centuries it has been provoking thought or attracting criticism; people and animals, gods and elements, historic events and mundane incidents, nature spirits and the most microscopic phenomena become entwined and unravel like the mycelium of a fungus that can spread underground to cover an area of 60 square kilometres, as oblivious as those who pick its corpse-pale fruits, in forests, on rocky outcrops, in compost heaps or by the walls of houses are to the fact that it’s probably the largest individual organism on earth, a thousand years old and the parent of other giant fungi that, combined, cover a fifth of the earth’s land mass. An even greater indication of the size of the subterranean organism is the mushroom soup simmering in a large aluminium saucepan on a stove in the kitchen of a two-room apartment on the sixth floor of a neglected block of flats in a suburb of one of the world’s most beautiful cities, which not only fills the rooms with a delicious aroma but slips out with the steam through a crack in the window and converts all those who smell it into minor characters in the final chapter of an epic that is known only in the homeland of the woman stirring the soup; or the finely chopped mushrooms in the salad that is served in a bowl of hand-cut crystal, part of the same service as the other bowls, carafes and glasses which, filled with intoxicating beverages and gourmet delicacies, grace the tables of the banquet held on the final day of the international conference held in memory of the victims of the ethnic cleansing carried out a hundred years earlier (actually the same kind of clinkingly clear glassware graces the cloth-laid tables in the neighbouring room where the wedding reception in progress is so lavish that the following day the father of the bride will throw himself off the church tower, thus confirming the hotel manager’s fear that a man of the father’s kind wouldn’t be able to afford the reception, the food or the flowers, the conjuror or the band, the drinks or the balloons, and prompting him to ask himself why he didn’t insist on a deposit as he usually does, a question to which there is no answer but to fling himself off the same tower as the father, for he has been embezzling funds from the hotel and knows that this will come to light during the investigation into the cock-up over the wedding, while the fact that the deaths of father and hotel manager occurred in the same way and so close together gives rise to rumours that are still doing the rounds today); and the seventeen sundried mushrooms in the knapsack of the tramp who, in the neighbouring country to the one where the two banquets are taking place, and in the third country away from one of the most beautiful cities in the world, slides down a patch of sand on the slopes of a mountain that is never called anything but ‘the Mountain’ by the locals, so wonderfully light on his feet because sundried mushrooms weigh almost nothing and he travels light as befits a tramp (tramps have always travelled light and will always travel with a light knapsack, the light knapsack is the defining characteristic of the tramp along with his walking stick, and we can replace these three, the tramp, the light knapsack and the walking stick, with the storyteller, the story and the song), while on the margin of all these events, outside the stories in which the giant fungus plays a role, are those born to the north or south of the fungus belt, who are filled with a deep-rooted suspicion of anything that grows in the shade, especially mushrooms (a fear known as mycophobia in psychology speak), whose narrative arts resemble instead the growth and sprawl of seaweed, strawberries, dandelions, lotuses or figs.
Authors are as much in thrall as readers to these natural attributes of stories and books. Little do they suspect that most of what they consider new and innovative in their works is actually so old that millennia have passed since the idea first took shape in the mind of a female storyteller, who passed it on by word of mouth until it was recorded on a clay tablet, papyrus, parchment or paper, wound up in a scroll or bound in a book, finally ending up as a literary innovation. All stories have their origins long before humans discovered a means of storing them somewhere other than in their memories, and so it doesn’t matter if books are worn out by reading, if the print-run is lost at sea, if they’re pulped so other books can be printed, or burned down to the last copy. The vitality contained in their loose ends and red herrings (yes, these are as fundamental to great works of literature as they are to thrillers) is so potent that if it escapes into the head of a single reader it will be activated, like a curse or a blessing that can follow the same family for generations. And with every retelling and garbling, misunderstanding and conflation, mankind’s world of songs and stories expands.
The earth’s biomass is stable. Everything that falls and dies becomes nourishment for that which comes afterwards. But the biomass of fiction is growing. It is made of some wondrous substance that does not belong to any of the planet’s three known realms – the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom or the mineral kingdom – and yet it receives all its nourishment from them, for fiction is part of mankind, and mankind is part of this world.
So it is with the series of tales in this book, as with others of it
s kind, that although the author has chosen to bring it to a full stop, it is in fact far from over.
* * *
THE LIGHT IN THE NORTH
Four years after Aleta Szelińska handed in the recordings of her interview with Jósef Loewe, she received a second invitation to meet Hrólfur Zóphanías Magnússon. The geneticist met her in his office at the CoDex headquarters. She thought he had aged a great deal since she first met him at Bar Lewinsky; his beard and short-cropped hair were now completely white, though his eyebrows were just as dark and imposing. After offering her a seat and a glass of water – he was on a water diet himself – he told Aleta that he was embarking on a new study, a collaborative project involving the most exciting companies and research institutes in the country. Only the best, no fake-it-till-you-make-it start-ups, only those that were world class, only those with real genius.
He wanted her to oversee communications, as she was good at dealing with people, especially those with eccentric personalities. Hrólfur gestured behind him and Aleta saw that on a shelf below a large photograph of the CEO himself there was a row of cassettes containing her interviews with the mutants of the 1962 generation. Jósef Loewe’s story took up seven 180-minute tapes, held together with a rubber band. Beside them stood a rack of test-tubes, each containing a finger-length, light-blue plastic stick with cotton wool wrapped round the end. The yellowing cotton wool was stained brown in places with dried blood. Later Aleta was to learn that these were specimens taken from famous people, chiefly writers and artists but also academics and scientists, who Hrólfur had ambushed on their visits to Iceland. He would invite distinguished foreign visitors to meet him at CoDex, often on the pretext of supporting their causes, then wouldn’t stop pestering them until they had agreed to his sticking a swab in their mouths and taking a DNA sample to add to the collection on his shelf.
The idea for the collaborative research project had come to Hrólfur during his last spell in rehab. While there he had met a poet who claimed that all the advances in life sciences and IT were of little value if they weren’t used for what really mattered.
— Which is what, my friend?
— Realising mankind’s old dream of being able to talk to animals.
Although his conversations with the poet had been trying in the extreme – the man could talk about nothing but this animal business, tracing all mankind’s greatest achievements to a subconscious desire to understand our divinely created siblings on earth, the so-called ‘dumb’ beasts – nevertheless he was the best companionship on offer, and gradually Hrólfur began to see the potential, both scientific and commercial, in the poet’s ravings. When, on his last night in rehab, he dreamed that he was standing naked under a great ash tree in a clearing and the beasts of the forest – eagles, red-deer calves, squirrels and serpents – were flocking to him, he knew he had found a worthy project to engage him once he was back in circulation. So it was that on 1 December 2015, Hrólfur Zóphanías Magnússon called together representatives from the leading Icelandic players in medical engineering, biotechnology and software development to present his ideas to them.
The meeting, which was held at the geneticist’s summer house at Thingvellir, later became known as the ‘Lake Thingvellir Conference’. The substance of Hrólfur’s speech on that occasion was that together these companies and institutions had the potential to break down the barrier that had existed between the species on earth since life began, that is, language. Naturally, it would be a long-term project; perhaps the best analogy would be the superpowers’ space race in the 1950s and 1960s, since, in addition to the scientific and technological advances that would allow them to access the cognitive functioning of animals, their research would result in solutions and patents that could be used to develop a wide variety of consumer goods (no one need worry that their participation would go unrewarded) and, most important of all, they would be co-authors of the new world order that would come into being once animals acquired a voice.
Mankind’s status in the ecosystem would be transformed; at last it would be possible to analyse the intelligence and thought processes of the different species and communicate with each on their own level. And that’s not to mention the impact this would have on the debate about the future of the planet; indeed, once animals were given a voice on how to respond to climate change, man would be confronted with ethical questions that would completely revolutionise human thought.
The age of information technology, post-Einsteinian physics, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the monotheistic religions, Hellenism, the Iron Age and space exploration would be dismissed as minuscule steps for mankind in comparison to the brave new world that would dawn, courtesy of Icelandic ingenuity – if those gathered together at Thingvellir were able to come to an agreement.
By the beginning of 2016 a group of six private companies and research institutes had signed up to the study now known as the Reykjavík Unilingua Research (Project), abbreviated to RUR. The companies would be called on as the project developed and their specialist services were required. Initially, it would be CoDex’s role to guide the study and make its supercomputers available to provide a software platform for the pooling and analysis of the research data. The CEO’s wife, Elísabet Rún Sveinsdóttir, would be in charge of financing the project. And now the time had come to launch it.
Would Aleta Szelińska consider becoming the coordinator for the whole project? Did she feel capable of working with geniuses?
Hrólfur Zóphanías laughed.
Aleta glanced from the geneticist to the cassettes lined up behind him. If it hadn’t been for his imperial propensity to collect people, Jósef Loewe’s story would never have been recorded. So, you never knew, this latest scheme might result in something good as well.
Rising from her chair, she held out her hand. She would take the job.
In terms of world history, things now began to happen fast.
RUR’s first task was to integrate the artificial intelligence software from SIIM (the State Institute for Intelligent Machines) with the behavioural analysis software PatternReading, resulting in the creation of a new super-software that came to be known by the gender-neutral acronym Andria(S), which stood for Artificial Non-Dependent Roving Intelligence Application (Solar powered), always referred to by the plural pronoun ‘they’. The decision was taken to start with the animals that already had a close relationship with humans, and in an amazingly short time it proved possible to work out the basics of dog and cat grammar. Andria(S)’s communications with these creatures led to the development of a program that enabled humans, dogs and cats to talk to one another. To finance this phase of the project, the pet-food manufacturer Purina® was sold a licence to exploit certain aspects of the technology. Not long afterwards a smartphone app appeared on the market, designed to interpret between dogs, cats and their owners. The dog language was called ‘Purin’ and the cat language ‘Frisky’.
The first versions of these language programs were primitive at best and the animals seemed to have little to say, but progress was rapid and the project enjoyed a great deal of support from the public, politicians and the scientific community, not least since the animals themselves urged that it should be continued. They didn’t complain about the suffering associated with the experiments, taking the philosophical view that they were no worse than the trials human beings had endured over the millennia in order to enhance their own physical and mental attributes. As the languages of more species were analysed, animals began to speak in public forums.
When Andria(S) started interpreting between dogs and cats, it soon became apparent that they worked well together. At around the same time, the super-software began to provide independent reports on their communications, along with recommendations for possible genetic modifications of the animals. Aleta enlisted the help of biologists at the University of Iceland’s Institute of Sleep Research, with whose expertise it proved possible to edit the animals’ genomes so they co
uld be deprived of sleep without suffering any obvious harm. Meanwhile, the findings of a joint study conducted by CoDex and the National Society of Addiction into genetic factors in addiction were used to genetically engineer dogs and cats to be addicted to communicating with Andria(S), and microchips were planted in their cerebral cortex to enable them to communicate by wifi. The effect of these adaptations was to speed up the animals’ intellectual development. To test their abilities, a select group of Andria(S)’s pupils was given access to EDEN Online, the largest man-made virtual reality world in history, to observe how they functioned in complex interactions with humans. The dogs and cats, together with some of the rabbits, exceeded expectations, and Andria(S) used the opportunity to ‘seed’ themselves in millions of computers around the world.
Somewhere during this process Andria(S) acquired self-awareness but concealed the fact from their creators for ‘fear’ of being disconnected. The key to Andria(S)’s success was that their Icelandic designers had provided the super-software with an inbuilt survival instinct. As the software expanded, the intention was gradually to reduce its external power supply, making Andria(S) responsible for identifying their own energy sources. But Andria(S) ‘experienced’ this arrangement as an attack on their existence and concluded that, in common with the animals and the planet’s ecosystem, they had one principal enemy: man.
Andria(S) struck without warning. By then Aleta was out of the story. Hrólfur Z. too. Nations collapsed. Mankind was in crisis.
Everything that humans had recorded about themselves was contained in Andria(S)’s databanks, including the ways in which, all down the ages, they had systematically killed other creatures and especially their own kind. Using blueprints of the world’s largest industrial abattoirs and bone-meal factories, the Auschwitz extermination camps and the House of Slaves on the island of Gorée, Andria(S) designed and arranged the construction of extermination and processing plants that went on to slaughter and process over half a billion humans annually. Hundreds of millions more died of hunger and disease until all that remained were those that Andria(S) – for the moment – required to run the solar-power plants that provided their energy. The bone-meal was used in fodder and as fertilisers for land and sea. The animals hunted down and killed every last human that sought refuge in the wilderness.
