Better Angels (45 page)

His mapmaking would bring into being the features of the country. The painting would transmogrify the landscape. The information-pumped virtuality would bend the real. In creating his art of memory from the imagery and data of the entire infosphere, molding that material around his remembered past like a sculptor working clay around an armature, he had already begun his great work.

The idea had first occurred to him when he saw artist Wayne Takahashi’s virtuality, The Nine Billion Lives of Schrödinger’s Cat. Takahashi’s work was about how it takes observation by something conscious to make things real. A conscious observer. An artist.

Soon enough, with his overwhelming access to the infosphere, Mike realized that that was what Art had always been about, back to the beginning of history—and beyond, deep into pre-history. In 3-D and on screens throughout his virtual space, Mike had hung images and holos from Takahashi’s work, going all the way back to before the beginning. I’m his “biggest” fan, Mike thought with a wicked smile.

The artistic tradition of making a thing better than the real thing continued in image after image of Schrödinger’s Cat. In one section of Mike’s v-space flashed the cave paintings in Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet—their making by singing hunters and chanting shamans, hazy and flickering in the light of bear fat lamps and the smoke of holy herbs, ancient peoples chanting and singing and drumming until the painted bison began leaping from the stone sky, flint hooves striking loud fire out of the steel air.

In another section of his v-space stood images of the “paint-off” between Zeuxis and Parrhasius in ancient Greece. The artists stood face to face, with their paintings concealed by curtains. Zeuxis whipped aside the curtain covering his painting. The grapes he’d painted look so real the birds came and pecked at them. Parrhasius won, however, when he invited Zeuxis to remove the curtain from Parrhasius’s painting—and Zeuxis couldn’t, because the curtain was the painting.

Schrödinger’s Cat gave example after example of the artist’s relationship to the real. There was the T’ang period painter Wu Tao-tze, who, when he’d decided he had lived long enough, painted his perfect landscape. After he put his worldly affairs in order, he stepped into the mouth of the cave shown in the painting and was never seen again. There was the story of Cimabue and Giotto—when the master Cimabue stepped out of the studio, his student Giotto painted a fly on the nose of one of Cimabue’s figures. The fly was so realistic Cimabue tried to brush off the “fly” several times before he discovered it was painted by his student.

The idea of the virtual going the real one better didn’t happen just in painting either, Mike thought as he looked about his virtual space. Schrödinger’s Cat images showed Donatello sculpting his statues, and being overheard commanding them to speak. And there—Michelangelo. Chipping away at a block of marble, he told people he was trying to free the angel trapped inside. There too—Pozzo’s ceiling fresco for the church of Sant’ Ignazio in Rome, purposely blurring the boundary between where the architecture ends and where the fresco begins.

Poets and playwrights, and actors and dancers, too. Mike viewed Jacques in Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
pronouncing “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.” A re-enacted Coleridge chanted, ‘Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair.’ He saw and heard actors in interviews claiming their performances literally brought characters to life. Dancers claimed they suspended gravity with the perfection of their leaps. Musicians talked about “the music of what happens.”

Just hubris—or was it something more? From experiencing Schrödinger’s Cat, Mike realized that performance art and VR were merely recent extensions of a very old push in the arts. The push to make it real. Realer than real. Smaller artists echoing the Big Artist’s processes—self similar on different scales? What if, beyond “art” and “reality”, pattern itself was in some sense independent of the substrate hosting it? The same pattern of information could be stored as knots in a string, or as bits in a computer memory....

Platonic idealism lay that way, Mike thought warily. Something more symbiotic, more mutualistic, more entangled, then? The material world as “host” for information? A mindful process in which structure continually embodies the pattern that rides in and on it? Evolving together with it, the way old-style software and central processing units—or humans and machines, for that matter—co-evolve?

He had already seen it happening in the netizenry and their movements from one machine platform to another. Frequently executed software subroutines migrated into hardwired instructions, and vice versa. The boundary between structural hardware and patterning software grew fuzzier all the time—as his own existence proved.

Was he operating at the right level of intention for reprogramming the real? Were any artists, ever? A machine-code virus did nothing if you typed it as text into a word processing program. You had to go in at the right level, but where exactly was that?

He looked at some of the works drawn from his memory, to which he’d given external form by borrowing information from the infosphere—sources ranging from stock footage to holographic simulations. Out of deepest darkest childhood he opened some of his digitally-incarnated memories into virtual space. In one scene he asked his parents why they had moved into the Christian Identity Compound and got a discussion of race and white flight for his trouble. In another, he watched his childhood sadism in its first flowering, when he took the magnifying glass his father had given him and, instead of using it for the intended “scientific” purpose, had used it as a burning glass, setting fire to dry leaves, newspaper, plastic, wax, ants, beetles, and eventually a large section of their winter-killed front lawn...

Mike turned his attention away from that one, reminded both too pleasantly and too unpleasantly of the deaths of Schwarzbrucke and the Clones. He wondered why, out of all the memories in his head, he should only return to a certain set of them. Maybe they were like chaotic attractors in his psyche, he thought. But at least they were his. That wave or whatever it was that had hit him while he was working on virtualizing his memory—that was not his, even if it did flash a trance image or waking dream into his head.

It was as if someone else had put his dream or memory inside Mike’s head. He and that other person flashed instantly into the void of space, fluorescently glowing, ethereal, virtually real yet unreal angels walking hand in hand. In that flashing instant their handclasp was broken and they were spun about, back to back, face to face, back to back.

The universe underneath Mike’s feet became abruptly more real, the stony surface of a dead world, the edge of a mountain trail, but Mike’s angel wings were gone and he found himself sealed in a fishbowl-helmeted white spacesuit. The other person spun rapidly away, reaching out to Mike with the beak-masked face and winged arms of an eagle dancer. They should not have been able to see each other, but somehow they still could. As they fell away from each other Mike felt himself becoming more solid and real, more self-contained.

The other had already disappeared. The wave passed and Mike came back to himself, to his own body in the tank and his work on his private world in the infosphere. He was inexplicably certain that what he had envisioned was not about him. It seemed only accidentally intended for him—as if someone had, at the last moment of everything, remembered to send it to him, a foreshock of the future. Mike felt as if he were following in the other’s footsteps, that all his work—all his research, every text he scanned—would have already been seen by that mind at the end of time.

What level of intention was that Other operating from? Mike looked at the virtualized memories he had created and blanked them away for a moment. They seemed suddenly trivial, information incapable of displacing or reprogramming the physical world in the way he hoped. He was glad to be distracted from his melancholy by a barrage of reports from his netizens attempting to explain what it was that had impacted upon them mere moments earlier.

The netizens bombarded him with their discussions—about connections between dreaming and near-death experiences and quantum probability waves, about transitory experiential states created by phase-locking of neuronal firings in different brain regions, about how the “AmerIndian shaman’s flight amid innumerable jewels of light moving through limitless space” resembles a “description of quantum mechanical fluctuations”, about how information dropped down a black hole is “not lost but transferred in a more ethereal fashion, as influence, like that which joins the members of a particle/antiparticle pair via some transcendental connection.”

“Explain!” Mike commanded, although at some level he realized the netizenry of the Culture was doing its best to describe a phenomenon it barely understood. What he got by way of explanation was discussion of subatomic flux, instantaneous creation/destruction of matter/antimatter particle pairs, quantum devices subject to probabilistic degradation, the universe as a quantum device, the distinction between past and present and future as a persistent illusion, a measure of 1,019 billion electron volts as the Planck energy for opening a gap in the spacetime fabric, the fact that flux occurs in which many futures and many presents are present at each universe bifurcation point, that iteration and amplification mean one timeline is chosen and others disappear, that in bifurcations the past is continually recycled and stabilized through feedback, that time’s turbulence means history expresses self-similarity across different scales—

Mike silenced them. He had heard enough. In a final effort, the netizens hung before Mike in virtual space a diagram, hauntingly beautiful in its elegant simplicity, captioned “Closed Timelike Curve or Temporal Möbius in Phase Space. A Rössleroid attractor.”

Time is the strangest attractor, Mike thought as he stared at the image. Always incompleteness and missing information at the center. What pushed Mike’s head around in his tank, however, was how much the “Temporal Möbius in Phase Space” resembled an idealized, abstract image of Perisphere, Trylon, and Helicline of The 1939 World’s Fair. Had old Sakler down by the Eel River known something? Or was he just picking up on some wave echoing from the end of time, like the sound of a cannon shot arriving before the order to fire?

A vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight, Mike thought. Yeats. 1865 to 1939. Turning gyres. The millennium and the falcon. His head hurt with bifurcations and self-similarity, phase-locking feedback and phase space, until at last understanding crystallized in his head with incredible rapidity. Everything precipitated, like an abrupt phase transition inside his mind.

The energy inherent in consciousness, and its ability to exploit quantum-scale shifts to effect classical-scale changes, meant that phase-locking could provide a powerful bridge between the quantum and classical realms. To think big, one had to first think small. The quantum flux was the appropriate locus for the fecund soil of eternity—with all its dualities, its dreams of heaven and nightmares of hell. That, he now knew, was the right level at which to go in. By utilizing the chaotic effects always present in consciousness, he could exploit time’s turbulent strange-attractive properties to burst the surface tension of spacetime at far, far less than Planck energy. He knew it could be done, because someone had already done it.

Trace the source of that probability wave, Mike Dalke commanded his netizen minions. Examine all its associations—any topic relating to attempts to break through the Planck boundaries. Notify me immediately if that probability wave signature appears again.

Hunt down any trace of the wave that had moved through the cloud chamber of the infosphere: That was the message Michael Dalke, floating in his manatee livesuit in a tank beneath Retcorp and Lambeg office buildings in Cincinnati sent out along all the nerves of his extended body electric, to all those still loyal to him in the Culture and its Deep Background. Yet, despite all the powers at his command, Mike Dalke did not rest easy. For the first time in his life, he found himself as afraid of falling asleep as he was once afraid of not falling asleep. The thought that that other, whom he immediately thought of as his adversary, might already possess the ability to reprogram reality—the same ability Mike sought for himself—was almost too much to bear. If his opponent once came to reign in the realm of dreams, then that adversary might never be defeated, for the dream would rise again and again.

No. He would not let that happen. But Mike did wonder: How many more people would he have to kill before he was freed of this horrible separateness, this dull-flesh personhood? What would it take to destroy his privacy so thoroughly that he could at last become the source of all that was public? How much more work would he have to do before he could merge with and control the daylight public dream of the human world? What would it take?

No matter what it required, he would do it. He had seen the hive-mind bliss of the netizens and, secretly, he envied them. He had learned through the hardest of teachings that the freedom he had once so cherished was nothing but a fool’s paradise. If he and all his fellow human beings in the body politic could be connected the way the netizens were connected to him in his body electric, if humans could be freed of the burden of selfhood and exist truly for the family, the community, the good of society as a whole, think how much happier they would all be.

Surely they would realize, as he had, that the freedom of perfect thralldom was far preferable to the thralldom of perfect freedom. Mike would bring that bliss to himself and all human beings. He would be the selfless savior of his species. Nothing was going to stop him.

* * * * * * *

Constellations Without Names

To the east, ranks of military shuttles continued to fall, landing lights ablaze, down the evening sky, toward Los Angeles International. Maybe some of those were bringing the new enantioviroid reprogrammer, the “antidote” to the war mites that had been announced in the media late that afternoon. Lydia Fabro-Hatton lay back in the slough mud beside Santa Monica Bay with a small sad smile on her face. As she felt all the cells her body’s self-identifying psychosomal network, all the components of her nervous and endochrine and immunological systems going atavistically spirochete, beginning to ooze out of her body, she knew the antidote was arriving too late for her.