by Exurb1a
A lifetime of almosts. Almost kissing Abigail Payne only to go back inside. Almost giving his father a piece of his mind just before the old man died. Almost pursuing his true dream of becoming a railway driver, only to go into academia instead out of a stupid sense of duty.
Humans must be the only animals who build zoos for themselves.
The woman next door, Penny, was pretty. Judging by her excellent taste in books that Berkhamsted and I had spied together, she was clever too. They were perfect for each other.
I would not influence Berkhamsted’s life, I decided. I would only forcefully better it in places.
A month of lecturing, reading, and sleeping. I became somewhat knowledgeable about his field, courtesy of his own reading. I also became somewhat knowledgeable about how boring a single life can be if lived without extravagances.
One day Berkhamsted was staring out the window of his empty lecture theatre, idly thinking. Consciousness is a pattern, he mused. An ocean of sorts.
My interest was piqued. Yes, I said to him softly — so softly he thought it his own mind. And if so?
Consciousness is a pattern. An ocean of sorts….he mused.
Yes, yes, yes, I said. And if so?
Then why is it always so whole? Can't it split off from itself on rare occasions, the way an ocean might be diverted off to form a river?
Yes! I shouted. And then? What would happen then?
He took a deep breath. I had spooked him, just when the trumpets and fanfare were coming.
He regained himself and collected his things.
He mused about it still on the train home however.
Consciousness is a pattern, he thought — looking out of the window. An ocean of sorts…
An ocean of sorts…I thought. God, yes.
And still up the stairs to his apartment — consciousness is a pattern….key out of his pocket…an ocean of sorts…key in the door.
Yes, I decided. For this new idea of his I would do him a kindness in return.
I jolted his hand. The key broke off in the lock. Success. He let out a whimper.
Ah, I said to him softly. That's unfortunate. Penny probably has a crowbar though.
He ignored this and marched downstairs to the caretaker's office. It was locked.
Hey, I said. Penny is bound to have a crowbar, jackass.
He marched back upstairs, stopped outside his own door, knitted his thumbs, then slowly crept towards Penny’s door. Finally he tapped on it.
Harder, I said. Else she'll think it's a mouse.
He knocked properly. She appeared wearing reading spectacles, bright-eyed.
“Shsmmmmsmm,” Berkhamsted said.
“Hi,” Penny said.
“Berkhamsted,” Berkhamsted said.
“What?”
I took over and tried to imitate his accent. “Hello there. I appear to have locked myself out of my own apartment.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. I'm Henry, by the way. I teach philosophy at the university.”
“Penny. I don't teach philosophy at the university.” They shook hands. I felt Berkhamsted writhing about inside like a snake in a suitcase.
“Maybe you have a crowbar or something?”
“Ah, hm, I don't think so. Hang on, I'll check.”
She beckoned us inside. It was like a bookshop but with more books.
“You like the classics?” I said.
“I adore them,” she said.
She disappeared into the kitchen. “You want a drink?”
“Yes please.” Berkhamsted was struggling so hard I thought I was going to lose control.
“Got any Earl Grey?”
She emerged with a bottle of wine and two glasses. “No,” she said.
I let go of him somewhere after the first glass when she'd gone to the toilet. He made a sound like he was drowning, panicked, then calmed down. He tried to explain it away with logic. When that didn't work he tried religion. Penny came back in. He decided he'd think about it tomorrow.
I wouldn't say it was a world-class sexual performance on his part, but it wasn't terrible. They began rendezvousing in that disgusting traditional way, eating breakfast off of each other, spending long mornings in bed, pretending they were the first humans to ever discover sex. I would usually just try to keep my thoughts elsewhere while all this was going on.
I don't credit myself for the thing, but Berkhamsted slowly turned into an actual person, meeting the eyes of shopkeepers, tending properly to his personal hygiene, and occasionally even opening up to Penny about his inner life.
Most humans were not malicious, only drastically misguided and desperate in their loneliness. They learned at some point that there was an eccentric core to their personality and that it was possible no one else shared their own brand of eccentricity. They put up screens around that core to shield from embarrassment and shame. For all the pompous forms in which writers and musicians have described it, love was surely that moment when the screens might come down in front of another human, if only for a moment, and freely give them a long, unfettered look into the true middle where the fear and anguish lives.
Berkhamsted began spending most of his free time with Penny. They bought each other books, took long walks through the city, opened up about their parents and ex-lovers after a few drinks. She was a book editor and took him to the office to introduce him to her friends, quietly proud of this man. (God knows why.)
There are certain unspoken rules to love and they must be learned silently. Berkhamsted knew almost none of them.
A month in, when they had tried all the standard sexual positions and had their first few little spats about nothing, they were sitting on a park bench, her head on his shoulder.
“Have you ever seen a ghost?” Penny said.
“No…” he said.
“Me neither. I've heard lots of stories though. Maybe it's all just a myth.”
Though Penny would never know it, this was a pivotal moment for our philosopher. His theories on formalism, his obsessions with philosophy of mind; this was the gooey secret middle of his reason to be. An intellectual values ideas above all else, and if he or she is lucky enough to stumble on what might be a genuinely new idea, that is not so dissimilar to a mountaineer striving to be the first to climb some treacherous peak.
“I don't think it's so impossible,” Berkhamsted said. “Spirits, I mean. I happen to think consciousness is a sort of pattern, a collection of relationships. If the brain can do it, why not something else too? Who knows what a spirit is? Perhaps just consciousness transferred onto some other medium.”
This was a big and strange idea, but Penny was smart (smarter than Berkhamsted by miles) and hooked onto the thing immediately. She said, “Well a table has legs, but that doesn't make it a horse.”
I took Berkhamsted over for a moment and said, “No, but one could lay things on a horse, and ride a table if he employed sufficient vigour.”
Berkhamsted was horrified, but rationalised the little hijacking in his usual after-the-fact way: the summer must be affecting me.
Still, I felt I had a small piece of the Puzzle of Me then. Naught but a fragment, but it was a beginning fragment at least.
Four months later, after days of deliberating, Berkhamsted proposed to Penny. She accepted and they were married in a small church with a few family and friends present.
I was proud of him, almost as a father might be of a son. Not long ago he'd been a pariah, convincing himself he didn't need company, when really it was a primitive cover for his own inadequacy.
However.
There is an innate nature to each being, built into the very architecture of his mind, and Berkhamsted’s nature was predisposed to the blackest strand of worry. Here he was then, in love, loved, sharing a private mental plain with this divine human, his wife, with whom all anxieties and longings and deliberations might be freely shared. If he were to break down like a baby, even, she would no doubt coddle him until he slept and he'd wake
rejuvenated and ready once again to do battle with the great injustices of the world.
Instead he just lived in constant fear that she’d leave him.
He withdrew inside himself again after six months or so, when the marital routine had been deeply entrenched in them both. He spent longer hours at the university, then retreated to his study. He lived with a constant sense that he was deeply, deeply pathetic and if she were to find out she would take flight at once.
As spirits in this story, of course, we can clearly see she would not have, that she was angelic to the core, and the only thing that might have steered her towards a departure was this neurotic and absurd hiding of his emotions.
I watched the dance for a year. I had much time to think on my own condition, not just Berkhamsted’s. With a little bit of gentle influence from myself, he took to work on a new metaphysic, Mentalic Ontology.
It was an ugly term. Neither of us were to know then, but the idea itself would live on for millennia.
The central tenet of his metaphysic consisted in declaring that mind as a stuff is not some property native to brains, or not necessarily native to them anyway. Mind is rather the product of a very particular complexity. This of course opens the door to all manner of entities being conscious then, not just humans, and not even just creatures rooted in biology.
With no help from myself, he also declared that self-consciousness was the product of a positive feedback loop between perception and reflection, the two eventually amplifying each other into a cycle that occurred so quickly neither could be separated from the other.
With his metaphysic complete, and the formalisms drawn out, I could not stand to watch the charade of his life any longer.
We were on the bus to the university. It was a fine day and Berkhamsted was staring out of the window wondering why things grew smaller as they pulled away.
Listen, I said to him. He straightened up. You're not going mad, I swear it. I have been living rent-free in your mind for some time now. It's okay, I'll leave in a minute, but I thought we might have a quick parting chat. I want you to know that I'm taking your metaphysic with me on my journey. Even if you're forgotten one day, I promise I'll try to keep your idea alive. I want you to know that your metaphysic is correct, even if no one else will believe you, that I'm living and evidential proof. It is the reason I chose to live in you.
He sat very still, gripped the seat.
With more than a small effort of will I left his mind and stretched out through a void and entered the man sat in front of Berkhamsted. He was much shorter and fatter and it was like being squeezed into a suit four times too small. I turned the man around to Berkhamsted and said, “You see? This is the proof if ever you needed it. Make your life Penny now. Your legacy will live on, I'll protect it. Don't waste your time trying to live beyond your time.” I put out the new packet’s hand. “It's been an honour. You're not a brave man, but you are a good one. I will always, always remember you.”
Trembling, he took the hand and shook it.
I exited the packet and threw myself, once again, at the mercy of a could-be.
I was not thrusted into that room with many doors again. Instead I found myself in a space of smeared light and vortices, of dancing spirals and celebration. There was some sense given to me that this was that very same place as the room with the doors, though closer to its actual appearance.
I listened to those lights and eddies blazing past. They were muttering to themselves, singing, screaming for joy. They were like me, minds based on nothing but a formalism, patterns in the black.
When is this? I said.
But it was an absurd question. These creatures hailed from all times and this was a place between durations.
Please, I said to one of them, but it only rushed past urgently and muttered, Not ready. You're not ready.
I had the smallest taste of the other mind’s structure, the scale. It was as though trying to fit an ocean into a teacup.
Where should I go? I called out.
I felt they were watching me, a few of them. Had they mouths then the mouths might've smiled a little. That was the feeling: a man who has climbed the mountain looking down on another who has yet to even take his first tentative step upon it.
It was possible in that space to explore history, the done and the would-be-done. There was human history of course, and the history of other strange creatures which were far too foreign to even begin to understand. I would stay with the species that had birthed me, I decided.
Their timeline, if you will, was magnificent, stretching several hundred thousand years ahead. It became impossible to follow the strictly human sequence of history as the species soon diverged in other, more mechanical, more esoteric directions. But humanity itself persisted throughout.
I dived in without intention, without discretion.
Now, where was I?
In an old woman, watching some kind of rocket launch. Jenny Dunne was her name; a simple lady, having travelled from her small village, Wilthail or some such, to watch a historic event: the first men and women to attempt to reach Earth's nearest alien star. The passengers would be asleep many hundreds of years, but that moment was a delicious one nonetheless. The rocket was all-white, elegant, a history torch. As the thing ascended she wished them well, all of the expeditionists, hoping that they might find a more serene world than the one they had left.
But this was early, too early.
I exited the packet, stumbled about in that nether-space, found myself in the mind of one Mitchley Chang. He was standing among several other humans before a great porthole, space beyond it. There was trepidation in him. He was thinking that with one meteorite, with one clod of cosmic dirt travelling fast enough, their little endeavour would be over in moments.
This was five hundred years from Jenny Dunne's age, nearing the beginning of what humans would later call the Expansion Age. Humans were building great vessels that could weather the cosmos for millennia if needed. Travel was slow and men and women were still being put into machines to keep them asleep for the duration.
Many of these vessels were racing towards worlds impossibly distant, travelling at absurd speeds, bound for colonisation.
This was the building of an empire, though I supposed it would not be called that for some time.
I took a little walk through Chang's mind.
The technology of the age was miraculous, I'll say that much.
The moral landscape though, what a thing.
As the human species expanded its scope, so too did its moral considerations widen; towards light corners, towards dark corners.
Gone were the days when the narrative of the world could be controlled by one human, by one organisation.
Now Earth was spreading its tendrils slowly through creation, and the game was becoming impossibly complex.
Worlds had been lost already, gone dead in a night. Others had chanced on some miracle technology and gone silent also, enlightened, or trying for enlightenment at least.
There was a successful science of man. There was a tree which grew books. There was a breathing technique that could genuinely remove stress in just under two minutes.
Brave new worlds, brave new weapons, brave new amplitudes of endeavour and tyranny and curiosity.
But these humans were still children, it felt like. I was still a child myself.
I drew back from this time into the no-time again. I wandered longer then, took deeper consideration of the history river.
An eternity elapsed.
Yes.
I had found my packet.
It was a long jump across ages, two thousand years ahead of the colonists I had left on that perilous starship.
I came to in the mind of K. Pasternak. He was a very tall man (by his father’s request to a geneticist, it seemed) and was wearing a toga that cycled slowly through light and dark hues of blue. Such seemed to be the custom of the age, as the men and women around him also wore similar garments, though t
he hues were quite different — several shades I had never seen before.
By the titles of these men and women I knew this was an alien era.
The room contained a temporal physicist, a wiremind engineer, and a hypergeometrist. Then there was my packet, Pasternak. He himself was a nootician, a curious discipline apparently trying to marry theoretical physics, and yes my fellow omnipresent observers, consciousness.
They spoke in a combination of short grunts and whirling hand gestures, a language called ‘Mandala’.
The grammar was intricate.
Tense was communicated with the degree to which the right index finger was bent and could signify anything from tomorrow, to today, to possible yesterdays which had never been actualised.
Objectivity and subjectivity were demonstrated by the bending or unbending of the left index finger. This language had found a difference between the opinions of a human and the facts of the world. I was impressed.
Finally, and most curiously, the speakers had an extra finger on their left hands, there to denote what I suppose we could call the case of a proposition, or the manner in which the proposition was being made. For example, 'Highly' denoted something was being said in a polite manner and may not be entirely true. 'Mix' denoted that the speaker was combining their own truth with the truth of their speaking partner. And 'All Surrender' was a special movement performed by the finger which would call a vote from all present to decide whether to discontinue the conversation or not in the event that there were too many fractured realities present.
It was worse than that though, I learned. This mode of communication had been created in response to the growing trend of humans joining their minds with one another through some kind of mechanical process. Many were disgusted by the concept of this sort of telepathy, especially in the halls of high-empire where I found myself now, and had chosen to respond with another, less invasive method of deep communication.
Sweet Jesus, history is strange. When trying to see into the future, one always forgets that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. To every discovery, a parry. For every dove, a bullet.
