by Curtis Hox
Masumi blinked and shook her head, as if dispensing with the irrational. That couldn’t happen. She should be able to recall seeing it appear. Except, she couldn’t. One minute she’d been thinking about how the incantation was about to end, with nothing in her line of sight; then she thought she saw something. And it was there.
“I have no idea how that got there,” Towns said.
“This wasn’t your proof?” Masumi asked. “This wasn’t why you called me tonight?”
“I just wanted to show you I could locate in the library. Maybe ask you for coffee.”
“Can you?”
“Every time. My average is forty minutes.”
“Your average.” Under the circumstances she wasn’t willing to challenge such a preposterous claim.
In the doorway between the two rooms, Alice stood with phone in hand, rapidly drumming a finger against her bottom lip. “I have to call Dr. Sterling.”
“It’s late,” Masumi said.
Alice keyed the numbers and waited, phone to ear. “It is late. But she’s probably still at the DKNY mural.” Alice stared at the phone as if she might hang up. “Yeah, she’s up.” She returned it to her ear, then brightened. “We did it, Dr. Sterling. I mean, Towns did it. Tonight, I mean, today and tonight. Three objects. Apples, all of them.” Alice hung up. “She’s coming.”
Masumi stared at Towns, who looked as if he’d been hit upside the head with a wooden spoon by a mean grandmother. “This is better than locating, Towns.”
“Is it?”
“Much better … if it’s true.”
* * *
The door opened and Dr. Hattie Sterling stepped through knowing she looked disheveled. She had been in the city all evening, standing before the DKNY mural, waiting for it to tell her something. The trip through the Holland Tunnel to the university had only taken ten minutes at that late hour. She had come as fast as she could.
“Okay, kids. What’s this all about?”
Three conspicuous apples sat arranged in a nice row on the soundboard. Hattie felt her breath catch in her throat and wondered if the display were a belated April fool’s joke. One look at their nonplussed faces told her they were sincere.
Hattie forced herself to think slowly, to observe, and to hope. She moved to where Towns stood in the corner of the production studio, beyond the sofa, as if he were trying to meld into the wall.
“Do you know what a narrative bleedover instantiation is?” she asked.
He nodded. “I’ve read your books.”
“They could be wrong.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
She gave him a wink. “No, it doesn’t.” The thought her studio had just produced an actual Full Generated Object from her R.D.A. interpolation … “Towns can you do it for me, once more?”
He nodded again.
Hattie stood in a privileged place at the window. She didn’t ask why Masumi was still here, but nodded professionally, happy her opponent’s favorite was observing. To convince someone like Masumi would really stick it to Masumi’s boss, Stephan Ross, and, oh, how Hattie would like to stick it to him.
Masumi pointed where to look.
Towns began, and Hattie thought how young and vulnerable he appeared. She imagined she was watching a Gallic novice under St. Benedict chanting the canonical hours in the shadows of a Romanesque chapel. Then the first horrific sound filled an empty beat, and she stepped back, her hands to her mouth.
She looked to Alice, who mimed “Sorry.”
Towns had been experimenting.
Why didn’t I allow more of this? I always had singers fill the beats with conventional sounds, or none at all!
And here was a child of popular culture with his hellish voice in such a thin, emasculated body. Hattie felt as if he needed mothering. Something so valuable, so Luciferian …
Halfway through, Town stuttered, coughed, and apologized. Hattie waved it away in encouragement. She had watched too many failed attempts to expect initial success. This was a special type of summoning that required the most delicate sensibility, and patience.
Alice hit a button. “Try again, Manilow.”
Hattie frowned at her research assistant.
“Sorry,” Alice said.
Hattie watched him complete the full stitched incantation for R.D.A. 1.1.2., with two new enactment phonemes. These surrounded her three-word interpolation for Red Delicious apple. A locater in California who worked as an auditor for the state had sent it to her. It had appeared in the middle of an Encyclopedia Britannica in a section dedicated to the battle for Guadalcanal. The letters R.D.A. came in a list of infantry killed on a certain day in a certain place and stood out so that nearly anyone would notice. And now she stared at the instantiated fruit, nodding her head, less thrilled than she had expected.
Now it begins.
Hattie watched Masumi stand calmly as if she’d just seen a man perform a curious magic trick. Masumi also nodded a few times, obviously unable to deny what she had seen. She looked challenged, though, or was it denial that her boss’s rival, Dr. Harriet Sterling, had been correct that the N.P.B. was something very real and that Masumi was on the wrong side? Masumi had better realize that their lives were about to change for better or worse, or would eventually, depending how they handled this.
“Things will never be the same,” she said to Masumi.
“I guess not, if it’s true.”
“If it’s true? You still need proof?” And then, with a wave, “Never mind that. I’ll convince you. I expect you’ll inform Dr. Ross?”
Masumi nodded. “How would you like me to proceed?”
“Can you wait until morning?”
“Of course.”
Hattie stepped closer. “Whether you like it or not, you’re now a part of this, Masumi. Get used to it.”
Masumi lifted her chin. “Gladly, if it’s true.”
“Give Dr. Ross my regards.”
Masumi left without a goodbye.
Hattie moved to the sofa and pulled a small laptop from her oversized bag. She connected seamlessly to the university’s Wi-Fi and began typing an historic letter:
Dear Managing Editor, International Journal of Spinner Culture:
I am proud to announce that Riodola University has achieved three Full Generated Objects according to my method for manipulating the New Phenomenon Bleedover …
She gave the date and times of the multiple instantiations and everyone involved, and said she would provide details of the incantation in the full article. Finally, she asked the editor not to reveal anything other than the fact of their success. She planned to announce the details at a press conference.
“Eliot hasn’t called?” Hattie asked Alice. “He said he was on his way.”
Alice shook her head.
“I need some coffee,” Towns said.
“Come on,” Alice replied. “I’ll show you.”
Hattie felt like a little girl again, filled with that precious excitement you get when discovering something new. Here she sat alone, wondering how her life was about to change. She had secretly planned to build on such an event for thirty years. To finally imagine a world where the N.P.B. is accepted as legitimate …
Eventually, the door opened and Biology Chair Dr. Eliot M. Brandeis arrived, followed by Towns and Alice.
Hattie smiled as Eliot stood silhouetted in the doorway, a small, frail man whose clothes hung from him as if on a hanger. He moved with a sure step, though, and entered unperturbed by the late call.
“Thank God you’re here, Eliot.”
“Hattie?”
“Yes. It’s happened: three F.G.O.s. This is our new candidate, Towns Packer.”
Eliot shook Towns’s hand, even though the boy hung his head low like he’d just flunked an exam and didn’t want to tell Mom. “Hello, Towns. You’ve stepped right in it, haven’t you?”
Towns tried to mumble something, but Hattie said, “Oh, leave him alone, Eliot. He’s done superbly.”
Eliot smiled and patted him on the shoulder, “Let’s see, now.”
Eliot sat in the engineer’s chair and stared at the finely rendered fruit. He moved to within an inch of one and hunched over the specimen. He stared at the skin, even removing a penlight and shining it on the smooth yet variegated surface.
“The texture is mostly uniform, except for slight color variation. Imagine, to get something like these sophisticated protein structures formed from networks of gene complexes … the GATC base pairs and their markers.” He scratched at the skin as if it might have an itch. “We know so little about what goes into making such a whole thing as an apple.” He looked over his shoulder at Hattie, a grand banana smile spreading from ear to ear. “No one’s taken a bite yet, I see.” He continued to smile devilishly, then turned back to the fruit. “… has to be differential variation suggesting slight but profound differences in development, from seed to fruition. Each apple’s phenotype can’t be identical, not even with exact genotypes. Just the slightest difference in soil, sun, oxygen, etc., would cause drastic difference in their expression …” He selected one and raised it to within inches of his face. “Even feels like an apple.”
He sniffed, then offered it to the group.
Hattie and Alice gasped at the same time, as if he’d suggested they bite from a dead rat.
Hattie then shook her head, and Alice followed. No words had to be spoken between them. Both women understood how patriarchal systems had been deployed since language first left the lips of men. The Judeo-Christian fiat of laying the entire sinful nature of humanity at the feet of Eve was the worst injustice. Neither one of them would taste, not for all the gold in the kingdom.
Eliot thumbed the apple to make the event real in a tactile way. He opened his mouth and bit.
“Sweet,” he said.
He offered it to the room again.
Towns raised a hand. “I’ve got the munchies.”
Eliot handed it to him. Towns bit as if it were nothing unusual, nodded, then offered it to the others.
Hattie took the apple from her mysteriously gifted grad student and held it in her lap. “What we do here tonight will have ramifications, not just for ourselves, but for the world … and for history. We have a responsibility to the truth, of course, to scholarship and to each other.”
Eliot nodded in agreement. They had talked about this during walks in the quad when they’d imagined what an N.P.B. culture science would look like. She had always wondered how he would react.
“Eliot?”
He grasped her hands, and squeezed. “I’ve backed your ideas, Hattie, because I love your mind. Your meta-universe sometimes seems overly drawn, but if even a tenth of what you see for the future comes true we have to be prepared.”
“I knew I could count on you.” Then she signaled for Alice and Towns to come closer. Alice stared wide-eyed. She looked like she might spin around in a fast three hundred and sixty degrees. “There’ll be people, organizations, corporations, nations that’ll want this knowledge. We have two choices: suppress it or, as I prefer, police it.”
Alice nodded rapidly. “Police it, yeah.”
“I’ll institute a new intellectual order, Socspin, the Society of Spinners. Its members consist of everyone in this room, plus Masumi, if she wants in. It’ll be based on the notion that all human beings should be granted comprehensive human dignity. To that end, culture science should be used to enhance such dignity. It should never hinder. Our job will be simple: to safeguard the secrets we discover while presenting the general knowledge to the world.”
“I refuse to dress up in a gown,” Eliot said, “or mumble passwords at closed doors.”
Everyone chuckled, and Hattie waved the comment away.
“Select members will earn an annual salary of ninety thousand dollars a year, starting, with bonuses.” That got their attention. She knew she could be generous because, eventually, she’d have little trouble finding funding. “Members will also undergo formal training, by me, in the ways to generate the new knowledge.”
Alice shook as if she were being electrocuted. She had pried since the beginning for hints about method. On purpose, little had been revealed.
“How did I do it?” Towns asked.
“Mr. Packer,” Hattie said, “the key is that you did it. Let me suggest what such a possibility means. I’ve entertained many speculations as to the fundamental nature of the N.P.B. What could be its first principle? The universe itself is revealing these secrets because humanity is at a point it understands them. Humanity has always been limited by the ceiling of its own cognitive architecture. Now that ceiling has shattered as the co-evolution of biology and culture elevates humanity to new dizzying heights. Feel proud, Mr. Packer. The cosmos has smiled on you.”
“Does that mean I’m accepted into the program?”
“We have work to do,” Hattie said. She patted him on the back, a schoolteacher giving her favorite encouragement. “We’ll go over that later.” She checked her watch. “Tomorrow, I send the article. We need to plan a press conference for next week. Eliot and I will have plenty of meetings with the administration. We need to contact investors. I’ll get new office space for our department. Also, I’ll move my institute to campus. I’ll run it as a privately funded research facility, just like Stephan Ross and Eliot do with their labs. I even know where to put it.”
Alice’s hands went to her face in dizzying anticipation. “The old library?”
Hattie nodded.
Alice clapped.
“Library?” Towns asked. “So what?”
“The Landash Library,” Alice said. “It’s been closed for a decade. Just a warehouse for old books. When the university’s new research library was built, Landash was forgotten. Shame. It’s so beautiful.”
“It’s a special place,” Hattie said. “And it’ll be our new home. We visit tomorrow morning.”
Taken from a Cable News Network interview with Dr. Harriet Sterling.
Q: What is a bleedover interpolation?
“Any text inserted into a published document, after publication. Impossible? Well, yes. Can I be more specific? The broadest types are random typesetting elements that make no sense. You also find statements completely irrelevant to the original text … and you have, finally, curious insertions that appear part of the narrative, as if the author reaches across the historic divide and adds a line or two he or she forgot. An example? The one that causes the biggest uproar comes from the Gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word cried out for the Image‘ appears in a particular out-of-print edition of the KJV. The Smithsonian has one on display. Still upsets a few people.”
Q: And the meaning?
[Transcriber notes Dr. Sterling’s silence, and her smile.]
CHAPTER THREE
Dr. Sterling, Dr. Brandeis, Towns, and Alice crossed Riodola University’s large, well-manicured quad on their way to the library.
Heavy hickories in full bloom provided shade from the morning sunlight. Goldfinches fluttered to alight on branches where they sang to each other. Students walked along pebbled paths or sat on benches before koi ponds and gurgling fountains. On all sides the halls of the university rose up like barriers protecting them from the outside world.
They stopped before a wide facade buttressed by a seven-story cylindrical tower. Windows within glass-and-iron turrets provided wonderful places for students to sit at wooden desks and read while overlooking the quad. The fieldstone facing had weathered years ago, providing a tableau of long, dark streaks, as if the building itself had shed tears.
Dr. Sterling wore her favorite semi-casual, stylish pantsuit she’d bought last year in a Tribeca boutique. She pushed a strand of loose hair back into her silk, crimson scarf.
“Here, we go,” she said.
“After you,” Dr. Brandeis replied with a comic bow.
Dr. Sterling opened an antiquated door of well-polished bronze medallio
ns and pitted iron bands filigreed in arabesques. It swung wide on greased hinges without a sound.
They entered the old Landash Library and felt a cool rush of air. She said, “The university keeps the place air-conditioned because the main library still uses the stacks. It’s mostly empty, except for the occasional librarian assistant sent to find an elusive text. Come on. Let me show you the atrium.”
They entered a small vestibule. Between two exits on the far side stood a full Carrera-marble statue of Immanuel Kant. He lorded over the entrance with arms held out before him, open book in hand.
Dr. Sterling patted Kant’s cold, smooth shoulder as she walked into the main chamber. Everyone’s eyes moved upward toward a high-vaulted ceiling with wide glass panels reminiscent of clerestory windows. Several galleries full of stacks ran along the top on all sides, as if the books might topple over and fall on their heads.
She turned in a big circle, arms outstretched like a conductor’s. “Here, we’ll investigate the New Phenomenon of Bleedover.”
Alice craned her neck toward the windows high in the ceiling and spun around in a few circles, while Towns did his best to stay out of her way.
“I love this place,” she said. “Just love it.”
“It’s a library,” Towns said. “I guess that makes sense.”
Alice glared at him under her wide-brimmed visor of transparent red plastic. She arched her head forward on a long neck, about to say something menacing, but bit her tongue.
Dr. Sterling sent Alice a look to curb her contempt.
“Great show,” Alice said, nodding at Towns’s black X-Files T-shirt. It had a picture of Mulder and Scully he’d altered with a marker to make them eye each other lustily. “Too bad it had to end.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
The students began exploring opposite ends of the atrium.
Hattie felt a moment of anxiety. “Eliot, do you think we’re prepared for the challenge?”
He moved closer, almost shoulder-to-shoulder. “Your discovery will force the university to allow the Cultural Studies Department in the library. Dean Edwards has promised an official answer today. Your institute will follow. It’s happening. Enjoy it.”
