The Possibility of an Island (22 page)

Daniel25, 4

DURING THE NIGHT
that followed my first contact with Marie23, I had a strange dream. I was in the middle of a mountain landscape, the air was so clear that you could make out the slightest detail of the rocks and the ice crystals; the view extended far beyond the clouds, beyond the forests, as far as a line of steep summits, sparkling in their eternal snows. Near me, a few meters below, a small old man, dressed in furs, with a craggy face like that of a Kalmuk trapper, was digging patiently around a picket in the snow; then, armed only with his modest knife, he began to saw through a transparent cord, a meter in diameter, run through with optical fibers. I knew that this cord was one of those that led to the transparent room, the room in the midst of the snows where the leaders of the world gathered. The look on the face of the old man was wise and cruel. I knew that he was going to succeed, for he had time on his side, and that the foundations of the world were going to collapse; he was moved by no precise motivation, but by an animallike obstinacy; I attributed to him the intuitive knowledge and powers of a shaman.

Like those of the humans, our dreams are almost always recombinations of various elements of reality that occurred in the waking state; this has led some to see in them a proof of the nonuniqueness of the real. According to them, our dreams could be insights into other branches of the universe, which exist in the sense described by Everett–de Witt, i.e., other bifurcations of observable phenomena that appeared at the same time as certain events in the day; they would thus not be in any way the expression of a desire or a fear, but rather the mental projection of substantial sequences of events, compatible with the global evolution of the wave function of the universe, but not directly provable. Nothing in this hypothesis explained what it was that allowed dreams to escape from the usual limitations of the cognitive function, denying a given observer any access to the nonprovable sequences of events in his own branch of the universe; besides, I had absolutely no idea what, in my existence, could have given birth to so divergent a branch.

According to other interpretations, some of
our
dreams are of a different order from those experienced by mankind; of artificial origin, they are the spontaneous productions of mental half-forms engendered by the modifiable interweaving of the electronic elements of the network. A gigantic organism could have demanded to be born, to form a common electronic consciousness, but it could only, at that instant, manifest itself by the production of a series of oneiric waves generated by the progressive subsets of the network, and constrained to propagate themselves through the transmission channels opened by the neohumans; it consequently sought to exert control over the opening of these channels. We were ourselves incomplete beings, beings in transition, whose destiny was to prepare for the coming of a digital future. Whatever can be said about this paranoid hypothesis, it is certain that a software mutation had taken place, probably dating from the beginning of the Second Decrease, and that, after first attacking the encoding system, it had gradually extended to all of the software layers of the network; no one knew its extent exactly, but it had to be big, and the reliability of our transmission system had, even in the best of cases, become very uncertain.

The danger of oneiric overproduction had been noted since the time of the Founders, and could also, more simply, be explained by the conditions of absolute physical isolation in which we were called upon to live. No effective treatment was known. The only suggested defense was to avoid sending and receiving messages, cutting off all contact with the neohuman community, and recentering oneself upon the elements of individual physiology. I forced myself to do this, and put in place the main devices for biochemical surveillance: it took several weeks for my oneiric production to return to its normal level, and for me to once again be able to concentrate on the life story of Daniel1, and on my commentary.

Daniel1, 16

In order to hijack netstat, you have to be injected into it; for that, you have no other choice than to hijack all userland.

—kdm.fr.st

I HAD RATHER FORGOTTEN
the existence of the Elohimites when I received a phone call from Patrick, reminding me that the winter course began in two weeks, and asking me if I still intended to participate. I had received an invitation letter, a VIP letter, he made clear. I found it easily in my pile: the paper was adorned, as a watermark, with young naked girls dancing among flowers. His Holiness the prophet was inviting me, along with other friendly eminent personalities, to attend, as every year, the celebration of the anniversary of the “marvelous encounter”—the one with the Elohim, I imagined. It would be a special celebration, where previously unknown details concerning the construction of the embassy would be unveiled, in the presence of believers from across the globe, guided by their nine archbishops and their forty-nine bishops—these honorary distinctions had nothing to do with the real organizational structure; they had been dreamed up by Cop, who judged them indispensable for the good management of any human organization. “We’re going to have a hell of a ball!” the prophet had added, for my attention, in his own hand.

As she had foreseen, Esther had exams at this time, and could not accompany me. Nor would she have had much time to see me, so I accepted without hesitation—after all, I was now retired, I could do a bit of tourism, sociological excursions, try and live some picturesque or funny moments. I had never dealt with sects in my sketches despite their being an authentically modern phenomenon; they were proliferating, regardless of all the rationalist campaigns and warnings, nothing seemed able to stop them. For some time I played, quite vainly, with the idea of an Elohimite sketch, then I bought my plane ticket.

The flight stopped over at Gran Canaria, and while we circled waiting for our place in the landing path, I observed the dunes of Maspalomas with curiosity. The gigantic sand formations plunged into a bright blue ocean; we were flying at low altitude, and I could make out figures forming on the sand, caused by the movement of the wind, sometimes resembling letters, sometimes animals or human faces; you couldn’t help seeing signs there, and giving them a divinatory interpretation, and I began to feel oppressed, despite or because of the uniformity of the blueness.

Almost everyone got off at the Las Palmas airport; then a few passengers who were shuttling between the islands got on. Most seemed to be long-distance travelers, in the manner of Australian backpackers armed with a
Let’s Go Europe
guide and location maps for McDonald’s. They behaved quietly, also looking at the landscape, and exchanging intelligent or poetic remarks in hushed voices. A little before landing we flew over a volcanic zone with tortured, dark red rocks.

Patrick was waiting for me in the arrivals hall of the Arrecife airport, dressed in trousers, a white tunic embroidered with the multicolored star of the sect, and a wide smile on his lips—I had the impression that he had begun to smile five minutes before my arrival, and in fact he continued to, for no apparent reason, as we crossed the parking lot. He pointed out a white Toyota minibus to me, also adorned with the multicolored star. I sat down in the front seat: Patrick’s face was still lit up by an objectless smile; as he waited in the line to insert his exit ticket he began to drum his fingers on the steering wheel while shaking his head, as if he was possessed by an internal melody.

We were driving across a plain that was intensely black, almost bluish, formed of angular, rough rocks, scarcely shaped by erosion, when he spoke again. “You’ll see, this course is superb…,” he said in a hushed tone, as if to himself, or as if he was telling me a secret. “There are special vibrations…It’s very spiritual, really.” I politely agreed. The remark only half surprised me: in New Age literature it is classically accepted that volcanic regions are moved by telluric currents, to which most mammals—and especially man—are sensitive; they are supposed to incite, among other things, sexual promiscuity. “That’s it, that’s it…,” said Patrick, still ecstatic. “We are sons of fire.” I abstained from reacting.

Just before arriving we drove along a beach of black sand, scattered with little white pebbles; I must admit that it was strange, and even disturbing. First I looked attentively, then I turned away; I felt a bit shocked by this brutal inversion of values. If the sea had been red, I would no doubt have been able to accept it; but it was still as desperately blue.

The road suddenly branched off inland and five hundred meters further on we stopped before a solid metal barrier, three meters high, flanked with barbed wire, which extended as far as one could see. Two guards armed with machine guns were patrolling behind the gate, which was apparently the only way out. Patrick gestured to them, they unlocked the gate, approached, and looked at me carefully before letting us pass. “It’s necessary…,” Patrick told me in a voice as ethereal as ever. “Journalists…”

The path, which was quite well tended, crossed a flat dusty zone, covered in small red pebbles. Just as I was able to make out, in the distance, a sort of village of white tents, Patrick turned left in the direction of a sheer rocky escarpment, eroded on one of its sides, made of the same black, probably volcanic rock that I had noticed a little earlier. After two or three bends, he stopped the vehicle on a terreplein and we had to continue on foot. Despite my protests he insisted on taking my suitcase, which was quite heavy. “No, no, please…You are a VIP guest…” He had adopted a bantering tone, but something told me that it was in fact much more serious. We passed in front of about a dozen caves dug into the rock, before reaching another terreplein, almost at the top of the hillock. An opening three meters wide and two meters high led to a much vaster grotto; there, too, two armed guards were posted at the entry.

We went first into a square room, about ten meters on each side, with bare walls, furnished solely with a few folding chairs placed along the walls; then, preceded by a guard, we crossed a corridor lit by tall standard lamps in the shape of columns, quite similar to those that were fashionable in the seventies: inside a luminescent viscous liquid, which was yellow, turquoise, orange, or mauve in color, big globules would form and rise up the luminous column before disappearing.

The apartments of the prophet were furnished in the same seventies style. A thick orange carpet, streaked with violet lightning, covered the floor. Low settees, covered with fur, were placed irregularly around the room. At the back, steps led to a pink-leather swivel-reclining chair, with integrated footrests; the chair was empty. Behind it, I recognized the painting that had been in the prophet’s dining room in Zwork—in the middle of a supposedly Eden-like garden, twelve young girls dressed in transparent tunics contemplated him with adoration and desire. It was ridiculous if you like, but only to the—essentially fairly feeble—extent that a purely sexual thing can be; humor and a sense of the ridiculous (I was paid, indeed well paid, to know it) can only be completely victorious if they attack targets that have already been disarmed such as religiosity, sentimentalism, devotion, a sense of honor, etc.; on the contrary, they show themselves impotent when it comes to harming the deep, egoistical, and animal determinants of human conduct. Whatever, this painting was so bad that it took me some time to recognize the models in the persons of the young girls seated on the steps, who were trying more or less to replicate their pictorial positions—they must have been told of our arrival—yet were offering only an approximate reproduction of the canvas: whereas some of them had the same vaguely Greek, transparent tunics, lifted up to the waist, others had opted for strapless bras and black latex suspenders; in every case, their sex was exposed. “They are the fiancées of the prophet,” Patrick told me with respect. He then explained that these elect had the privilege of living in the permanent presence of the prophet; all of them had been given bedrooms in his California residence. They represented all the races of the Earth, and had been destined by their beauty for the exclusive service of the Elohim: they could therefore only have sexual intercourse with them—once, of course, they had honored the Earth with their visitation—and with the prophet; they could also, when the latter expressed the desire, have sexual intercourse with one another. I meditated for a while on this prospect, while trying to re-count them: there were undoubtedly only ten of them. At that moment, I heard a lapping noise coming from my right. Some halogen lamps situated in the ceiling lit up, revealing a swimming pool hewn into the rock, surrounded by luxurious vegetation; the prophet was bathing naked. The missing two girls waited respectfully near the access ladder, holding a white dressing gown and a towel adorned with the multicolored star. The prophet was taking his time, rolling around in the water, and drifting lazily as he floated on his back. Patrick grew silent and lowered his head; you could hear nothing but the lapping of the water.

The prophet finally got out and was immediately enveloped in the dressing gown, while the second girl knelt to rub his feet; I then noticed that he was bigger, and, above all, more strongly built than I remembered; he had presumably been doing weights to keep himself in shape. He came toward me with arms open wide, and embraced me. “I am so happy…,” he said in a deep voice, “I am so happy to see you…” I had wondered several times during the journey what exactly he expected from me; perhaps he had exaggerated my notoriety to himself. Scientology, for example, no doubt benefited from the presence in its membership of John Travolta or Tom Cruise; but I was far below their level. He was too, if the truth be told, and this was maybe the simple explanation: he would take whatever he could get his hands on.