by Denny Taylor
“We are grateful,” Word said to Montaigne in Middle French. “I have learned from ancient texts and from my own experience that human beings are not the center of the Universe, But we are here to find a way, as Lucretius foresaw, to swerve the ancient atoms and change the future for all living things on the planet.”
“Well that should keep you busy,” Cat said, telepathically. “Glad I’m here to take part in this adventure.”
“We cannot let everyone die,” Word said. “We have to stop the Sick-Reapers, the genetic mutants, and the A-I”
“You are truly the last Truth Keeper,” Et said smiling at Word. “How are you going to undertake this great task?”
“We must change the mind of René Descartes,” Word said without hesitation. “Help him feel as well as think. Reconnect his mind and his body.”
“It is the misinterpretation of Descartes’ Meditations by powerful men,” Et said, “that led them along the path to the end of the world.”
“And yet,” Word said, “it was Descartes who wrote, ‘If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
Aisha smiled and giving a knowing look to Word pointed at her behind.
“I know that,” Cat said telepathically, “Aisha’s got that quote from Descartes tattooed on her –!”
“And so the conversation begins,” Montaigne said. “I understand from Eternite that Descartes will be born four years after I die – this gives us time for many conversations before your next adventure begins.”
Dear Readers
Dear Readers,
This is Word. X-it, Aisha, and Jamaal are psyched that you’ve reached the end of Split and participated with us in this dangerous thought experiment. Together we’ve explored some of the connections between the Universe and our consciousness. We’ve named our nightmares and traumatic memories, and if our thought experiment has worked we’ve changed – if only for a split second – the nature of our reality.
Now that we’re in 1585, and the A-I and Sick-Reapers are not after us, we’re trying to figure out how to change the course of human history. Sounds irrational? Doesn’t even come close to the evil irrationality of the rich and powerful men of the 21st century. While our story might seem far-fetched it is grounded in science. X-it has written about the underlying science, which you can read below. The technological ‘breakthroughs’ that are incorporated into the story may also seem futuristic but they are all dangerously authentic – like making new life forms using biogenetic technology to manipulate letters in DNA to create chemical machines that can be assembled from parts. It’s happening – constituting potential end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it existential risks.
The political backstory is also fiction based on fact – the corruption of governments, the activities of our political masters, and the totally insane self-aggrandizement of the richest men in human societies who equate their wealth with sovereignty that bestows on them the inalienable right to determine our fate. They are represented by the Fanatical Eight – the Ginger Tom, the Freaky Geek, and the Posh Boy, composites of wicked men. We all know them.
X-it is going to write to you now, but before I sign off I’m sure you’ll want to know if – given that our circumstances have changed – Et can now see the future after 2022. She cannot. But she says she hasn’t given up hope, which she calls the best of all human characteristics, perhaps even greater that love. What I hope is that X-it, Aisha, Jamaal and I will find a way to change the future by changing events in the past, but what we all hope is that you will find ways to change events in the year in which you read Split. Go back and read the quote at the front of the book from Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky. I met him once before the fall of New York City. Eating chocolate cake in Café Luxembourg, Noam said, “It’s not that there are no alternatives. The alternatives just aren’t being taken. And that’s dangerous. So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture. Unless people do something about it. We always can.” This is our message to you – we always can. It’s up to you.
This is X-it. Word didn’t tell you she’s okay and our baby is safe inside her. Aisha and Jamaal are also well. And the bird is here with Et. We’re all getting used to 16th century garb, which is made up of many pieces that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. We see Michel Montaigne once or twice every day, Et not that often, and Cat has abandoned us for her Michou, who she follows around playing with the buckles on his shoes or sitting on his lap purring. She says she has taken care of all the dying and dead for the next 500 years, so now she wants to rest and get ready for what happens next.
None of us are quite sure what’s going to happen now we are in the 16th century. We do have access to Michou’s library, and when he is not there we climb the stone steps and sit on the floor, surrounded by his books, reading the quotes on the joists, trying to figure out how we get back to the 21st century and what to do when we get there.
We wish you could help us. The one decision we’ve all made is to include in this letter some references to the science that underlies Split. Don’t laugh. What we’ve done is copy some of the quotes tattooed on Word from a book we hope you can get. It was – or rather will be (isn’t that weird?) published in English in 2016. It’s called, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. It was originally published in Italian under the title Sette bevi lezioni in 2014.
Don’t be put off because it’s physics. Many of us were schooled to reject the idea that we can be scientists. I never felt that way because of my Dad, who you might remember was an astrophysicist, but also because after I was eight I didn’t go to school. I learned what I know for myself. You can too. Here’s a cool trick. You can read Carlo Rovelli as if I am him or he is me. Seriously. Turns out Einstein’s equation was/will be correct. Here’s me being Rovelli on Einstein:
In short, the theory describes a colorful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea … And all of this, which emerged gradually from my mice-gnawed book, was not a tale told by an idiot in a fit of lunacy or a hallucination caused by Calabria’s burning Mediterranean sun and its dazzling sea. It was reality.
Rovelli’s ‘mice-gnawed book’ fits with our story, don’t you think? And, more importantly, our story fits with Einstein’s theory. What’s really wild is that Split also reflects theories of quantum mechanics and the ‘hot box’ calculated by the German physicist Max Planck. Once again, here’s me as Rovelli:
Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.
Don’t you love the ‘continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities’? Doesn’t it remind you of Et – the Old Crone becoming Botticelli’s Venus, larger than life, beautiful, with extraterrestrial powers, and blue? Also, the switched-on hippy world of the 1960’s is reminiscent of Death as David Bowie and his 1969 Space Oddity single and his 2015 Black Star, recorded at the Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios in New York City, which by 2022 will surely be gone.
Again, this is me as Rovelli, for when he asks, ‘And what then are our values, our dreams, our emotions, our individual knowledge? What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?’, these are my questions too. And my response would be the same as his:
We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed—especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the danger
s that we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.
It is in this dangerous space that the Split Second Solution takes place. However, unreal the fictional story may seem, the underlying scientific and political circumstances are real. Rovelli writes:
We are born and die as stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality …
This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore—where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere—is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.
Our thought experiment will have worked if you think about the frontiers of human learning differently. It will have worked if you begin to see yourself as woven into the fabric of space, connected to the origins of the cosmos, reimagining the nature of time and the ways we think.
We leave you now. Aisha and Jamaal will write the letters to you in the next book. They send their love and will have much to tell. Will we change the future? Possibly. It will be up to you – what you do – when you read the Split Second Solution.
With love from Word and X-it
Library of Michel Montaigne, 1585
Table of Contents
Who Rules the World?
Dear Readers
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Epilogue
Dear Readers
