I met him at Wondercon, a science fiction and comics convention that used to be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a large convention space normally reserved for large corporate events. For a weekend it would turn into a carnival of strange sights: comic book superheroes, stormtroopers and jedis, creatures from horror films and characters from manga and anime- along with rows and rows of booths selling comics, old movies, fantasy books, movie paraphernalia, costumes, autographed photos and so on. (One time I brought a girl there who was not a fan of these things. She said she immediately felt a wave of repressed desire swooning through her like electricity. She was enchanted by the sensation. But this time I came alone.)
It was early afternoon and I had already spent several hours looking around the booths and going to the various panels and presentations. I was sitting at a table eating a pizza slice by myself when he came up and asked if he could sit with me. Since all the other tables were full, I said “yes, no problem” and he sat down.
At first, he wasn’t very communicative. I expected both of us to eat in silence and then leave without ever saying another word to each other. An introverted personality is almost a requisite for comic book or science fiction fans so this was not at all surprising.
He was tall and thin; his skin was very pale and his eyes were somewhat droopy. He was vaguely Latin (maybe Mexican?) I couldn’t quite place him and I didn’t make any attempt to find out more. He was wearing a plain white t-shirt and light brown pants. Just by looking at him, I imagined that his life must be very sad and lonely. A lack of love, a lack of sex, a lack of friends in general.
But who was I to judge him? I had lost my own youth in movie theaters and old moldy bookstores. And to make matters worse, all my friends had left me. One after the other. All I had left were my books, my movies and my music. If he was sad, then I was even sadder.
I noticed him looking at the books and graphic novels stacked in front of me. Gibson, Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K Dick, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore. I smiled and he hesitantly smiled back at me.
“We seem to have similar tastes,” he said.
I let a moment of silence go by and then I answered.
“You like cyberpunk? Mind altering stuff?”
He nodded.
“Yes, definitely. And all that led up to it as well: Ballard, Burroughs, Van Vogt, Moorcock… you know.”
I nodded, unsure of where to go from there. I knew every writer he mentioned and I knew why he mentioned them in relation to cyberpunk. It was like hearing myself think.
The silence between us didn’t last long. His eyes opened up slightly, he leaned forward on the table and spoke again.
“Hey, since we seem to like similar things… would you mind if I ran a story idea by you? I just want to know if you think it may be worth developing, or if it’s better to just drop it.”
I braced myself for something terrible, something akin to Star Trek fan fiction, the kind where Spock and Kirk invariably end up falling in love and having sex on the ship’s bridge. But I nodded, smiled again and said:
“Sure, give it to me.”
“Ok, here’s what I’m thinking:
I picture a future world, not very different from our own, where the social order is threatened by advances in technology and bio-engineering. I will try to create a vivid narrative tour of this strange and disturbing future – a toxic industrialized wasteland. Cities covered in poisonous smog, a fully militarized totalitarian police force in appropriate fascist costume (all black leather outfits, helmets that completely cover their heads and faces, dark red insignia), gangs roaming the streets in extremely colorful outfits (painted hair and faces, non-binary gender signaling, strange computerized weapons, transhuman body modifications), lonely celibate hackers fighting the state from their crowded moldy basements away from all human contact. The entire world has become fragmented due to over-population and extreme political polarization. I will focus on the social stresses and the breakdown of order that results from this overcrowded angry divided world.
The main narrative will gyrate around a tough detective that believes that there must be a clear chain of cause and effect that permeates the entire social structure. A clear chain that can be found and can be understood. This would mean that ‘consciousness’ and ‘free will’ are just predetermined illusions – illusions that live within us and nowhere else. If the clear chain of pre-determination is found, then all illusions of will and freedom must be set aside.
Through the story, I will attempt to explore this question- in many possibly self-contradicting ways… Ultimately what is the difference between cutting down a tree and chopping off someone's head? What is it that separates us from rocks or lightning or the wind… if anything? You know what I mean?
The entire novel will be interspersed with fictional newspaper headlines, classified ads, extracts from scientific articles, bios of minor characters, collages and so on. I imagine it as a kind of long complex collage that explores these ideas from all the many angles I can think of.”
He had talked and talked without hardly taking a breath. When he stopped, he leaned back on the flimsy chair and stared at me, waiting for some kind of response.
After a couple of seconds, I smiled and said it sounded interesting. Inside I felt the sensation of slowly falling into a deep dark hole. I had heard this kind of thing so many times before. A detective in a dark near future world – a cyberpunk noir -can someone actually think there’s anything new in this?
I thought to myself: ‘How interesting it is that fans of science fiction, a genre which focuses on explorations and discoveries of the unknown, are so reticent to explore anything beyond what is expected, anything beyond what they already find extremely familiar and comfortable. They ultimately believe that science fiction should be a collection of known futuristic signifiers and nothing more. (Some flying cars, some laser guns, a few space ships, maybe some robots or aliens, some kind of intelligent computer, a final battle between good and evil.)’
But I did like the collage approach to the story so I sincerely encouraged him to write it. I even took it a step further:
“If you do start to flesh it out, I would love to read it. Here’s my email,” and I handed him my business card.
He smiled very broadly then, amazed that someone was showing this much interest in his idea.
“I definitely will send it to you!” he said.
“Please do…” I said and then stood up, ready to continue my tour of the convention.
“My name is Jaime by the way.” And he extended his hand towards me.
When I shook his hand to say goodbye, I expected I would never hear from him again. I was wrong.
***
I received the first email several months later. I had completely forgotten about him so I almost threw it away reflexively assuming it was some kind of spam. The subject line said only “Living Spaceship” and that made me curious. Even after I opened it, it took me a few minutes to figure out who the sender was.
My first impression was of a long complex text full of incomprehensible ideas and disparate scenes; at least they seemed incomprehensible at first glance. Bits and pieces stood out, some sentences I could understand or at least relate to things I had understood in the past, some references seemed vaguely familiar.
Here is the entire content of the email:
“I am very grateful for your gracious encouragement on my story idea. Since the day we met, I’ve been thinking of contacting you again, but I decided I wouldn’t do it until I had written something concrete, something I could feel proud to show you.
In the meantime, while I waited for the right moment to write the story I described at the con, I ended up having a brand new idea which I think is much better than the one I talked about originally. So I have decided to run it by you, just to see what you think. I realize I haven’t finished the first one but I think this one is so good it can’t wait.
In the past couple of years, I have been thinking a lot about evolution – radical change through time, long expanses of time beyond our limited human comprehension. A dark abyss of inconceivable life, life and change progressing too slowly for us to keep track of it.
Based on this line of thought, I’ve decided I want to create a story that is an expression of species evolution through a single individual. In other words, in this story, humanity evolves but only through one specific person or through a very small minority – true radical change unevenly distributed. I imagine this would be very frightening for those left out of the loop. (Just picture yourself as one of the discarded. Wouldn’t it seem as the ultimate rejection? A rejection coming from a place so deep that you can’t even picture it well enough to focus your anger or your fear.)
The novel won’t be chronological. Instead I want to focus on the aspect of morality… My perception is that ethics and morality can only be understood through a kind of subtle game theory. First and foremost, one must understand the point of view of the opponent in the game – what are his interests? What are his desires? His needs? What does he see when he sees the game from the opposite side of the board? But the parameters of this game are too numerous and too complex for a human mind to understand.
In any case, the story all takes place within a gigantic spaceship flying through an apparently infinite white corridor. The ship is the size of a modern city but made entirely of organic matter - it is an artifact of living bio-technology – a living purposeful construction imbued with desire and meaning from the ground up.
Within the ship, microscopic bio-robots gradually transform the mind of the main character, making him smarter, faster, and more powerful. With enemies at every turn, he will have to use his newly enhanced capabilities to save his family, his friends, and ultimately, the ship itself from complete destruction.
I haven’t figured out all the details of this part of the story. (I picture a kind of adventure saga – the kind that we have both read a thousand times- full of dangers and obstacles- the interactions with the living conscious mind that is the ship and with the microscopic robots will add a different dimension to it, I hope.)
But in any case, the specifics of the story are all secondary to the main theme. I have something to say and the story is just a means to say it, to communicate it the best I can. There will definitely be danger all around him and his newly developed abilities will be key to saving everyone. (Here you can see what I mean by localized evolution. The evolution of this one person is in fact the evolution of all mankind, at the very least an expression of evolution that ultimately involves all inhabitants of the living ship.)
My thinking here is to make him some kind of detective, a detective who has spent his entire life within this gigantic spaceship. I see this detective as the rougher urban version of an intellectual, a philosopher, one who perceives meaning and instructions where others see debris, chaos, randomness. (I picture him in his forties, with some gray in his hair, around six feet tall, not too weak and not too strong. Someone who is aware of the physical needs of his job but doesn’t focus on them as much as he should.)
His most basic job is to point out signs that show, that prove, that the ship’s destination is within reach – that they are still headed where they are supposed to be headed and that they will arrive soon. As this ambiguous investigation proceeds, he comes to understand that in fact they are lost and they have been lost for so long that they are not even clear on what the destination was to begin with. Nobody is.
This has been kept hidden from the general population (on purpose) in order to prevent a general panic. Hidden powers have determined that it is better for the ship to continue aimless and lost, than for it to descend into chaotic mass hysteria – a kind of lonely secret hell floating in the middle of nowhere.
I want him to be an expert on games - this is where the game theory aspect comes in. I see the practice of playing games as a rough version of the study of history- history not as chronological facts but as in the broad structures that point towards recurring themes or shapes across ages and civilizations (beyond the simple recollection of events – who won what battle, who discovered what, who said what to whom, who when what and to what end, the remains of great works of art, the battle plans that failed when the moment arrived, the tales of true believers who sooner or later fell flat on their face.) A study of history that shows the way it works, the way changes happen, the way structures stay for a time and suddenly dissolve. (All of human history as one giant complex game composed of a multitude of smaller games which all fit together in a structure so subtle and so large that nobody can fully understand the rules or possible strategies. Motifs, small recurring fractals that are reflected in much larger forms.)
The core of his studies and work is to figure out why are all these people in this spaceship to begin with? Why are they there at all? Who put them there and to what aim? How did they get lost? Who decided that nobody should know they are lost? Why is the journey continuing when they have no clear idea of where they are going?
Through his work on game theory and strategy, he develops a theory on a kind of projection that will break the linearity of time. He calls his work The Investigation.
The Investigation eventually lands him in the middle of a vast conspiracy, a conspiracy to take control of the ship and maybe set up a new secret destination. The only way he can find to save himself, his loved ones, and his new technology (the new technology he has developed) is to embed the highly experimental microscopic bio-robots into his own brain, into the complex biological network that is his own nervous system.
I don’t know everything that happens in the story at that point, but I know that towards the end he will say something like this:
“The corridor has many gateways, many ways to enter, many ways to leave. This is the spirit of space travel. Today all the doors are closed. We don't know when they will ever open.”
I know this is all vague and rough, but I would love to hear your thoughts on it. Do you think it’s worth pursuing?”
And that’s where the email ended. I read it a few times. For some reason, I thought that it was strange that this young man from somewhere in Latin America would be such an intense science fiction fan, a fan of something so distant and so far ahead of anything he could have ever encountered in the country where he came from.
And then I quickly realized that I was just like him, he was just like me. I was exactly like this strange person that was talking to me through this email. I had once been a young boy in Latin America obsessed with science fiction (even in the middle of a very real civil war – built through terror and made of horror- something dirty and blurry- the very opposite of the clear colors and distinct forms of the stories I cared for.) What had seemed so strange coming from him was basically me staring into a mirror.
I wrote him back the next day. I told him his new idea was even better than the first one and I encouraged him to write it - to flesh out the details, to flesh out the characters and the evil society within the ship.
“I look forward to reading the result,” I said.
And then I forgot all about him once again.
***
The second email came several months later. This time he dispensed with any explanations and assumed right off the bat that I knew who he was and that I knew what he was talking about.
“I have decided I have to write a much simpler story first. It doesn’t make sense to jump right off the bat into such a large project. So, I want to focus on something much smaller. Here’s the new idea I’m working on:
This story is about a woman’s life. (I picture her in her late twenties, about five feet tall, thin, light brown skin, long black hair.) It starts with me describing in great detail what she does during the day, from the moment she wakes up to the moment she goes to sleep. Just normal stuff: taking a shower, eating breakfast, going to work, taking the bus, talking to people at work, eating lunch, ignoring a homeless person begging for money, eating dinner, watching a tv show, going to sleep. Normal. I haven’t figured out everything that happens but it is a typical day in the life of a suburban single woman.
(I will have to do some research on this. I may have to conduct some interviews. I am not too familiar with the details of a single woman’s life so a lot of this is blurry to me. But I intend to put in the leg work, I assure you. I will do my best to do justice to this part of the story.)
The day's events will be dotted with references to Dadaism and entropy, random dream-like details (a group of young girls standing in a circle in the middle of the night, a drawing of a lab where a woman impregnates another woman using a machine, a tv show about a group of friends that turn into animals a few days each month and protect each other when this happens) and a potential slow descent into chaos, as I see incomprehensible tangents flowing out from each and every single moment I describe.
(Every moment is a gyrating vortex – a node of meaning that pulls in the rest of the story, the rest of what I can imagine, and maybe even beyond what I can imagine – if I can manage to write it or at least allude to it.)
Just little strange details, that is what I’m referring to. A sign, a ripped-up poster discarded on the sidewalk, an overheard statement as she walks by a coffee shop, an ad on TV.
I will describe her life as a kind of closed system, a system that is itself doomed to run down into heat death, into a scattered realm of meaningless chaos. In other words, her life is the entirety of all life - and the entirety of all life is summed up in this simple sequence of actions. This initial sequence will consist of a total of 64 numbered paragraphs – the relevance of the numbering system will only become clear later on.
The second part of the story will involve a visit from an old family friend; a disruption of normality.
They met when they were teenagers. He is a bit older. He used to come to her family home to visit her older brothers, to play video games, sometimes to play soccer in the garden. (The kind of aimless gathering I’m sure we are all familiar with, especially common for kids and teenagers after school.) Eventually he lost touch with the brothers (they went off to college and to serious careers in business and that kind of thing) but she and him have remained friends for decades. They share an interest in books, in music, in certain movies; the kind of books, music, movies that other people tend to reject. Unusual stuff, complex stuff, hard to understand, sometimes hard to watch. I say they have remained friends but in fact she never calls him and he simply arrives without warning to visit her once every 3 or 4 years. He never lets her know that he is coming, he just shows up.
He calls these visits - these unexpected encounters- a part of the Investigation. He explains the nature of the Investigation in a way that will make no sense to her and will barely make any sense to the reader. (This is on purpose on my part.)
‘In a general way, the only purpose of this Investigation is to verify and study, in the proper location, all the reports that have been formerly studied. The reports have many sources and they are all worth exploring simply because they exist and because my attention has been drawn towards them.’
They still talk about books, movies and music, but all conversations about all these various subjects ultimately gyrate around the Investigation – this is both attractive and off putting to her. She never questions it but she is always on the verge of confronting him.
One day, during one of these spontaneous visits, he nearly burns the house down by leaving a candle lit in the living room. (The original purpose of the candle is never explained by him but she has a strong sense of what it could be. She knows enough about him to suspect what he refuses to tell her, the extremes to which he may be pulled.) She tries to talk to him about it, about the possible consequences of this simple error, but he reacts with intense anger - it bothers him that she should point out his dangerous mistake. He feels cornered and harassed when he realizes he has done something wrong.
“I know what I’ve done. I know how dangerous it was. What’s the use of talking about it any further? What are you trying to do by bringing it up?”
She thinks to herself that this must be a habit that comes from his father and probably from somewhere even further in the past.
(One time she said to him: “You remind me of my father sometimes…” They both knew it wasn’t a compliment.)
After the candle incident, he asks her what he should say to make the whole thing go away. She says to him: “Just say ‘I'm sorry - I won't do it again... That’s all you need to say…’”
He repeats the exact same phrase but in a sarcastic tone. She gives up on trying to explain it any further and just accepts the sarcastic apology. The next morning, he is gone. He has left behind a note that says:
“So long. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I will continue my Investigation elsewhere.”
She thinks to herself that she might never see him again. The story ends with her looking out the window from the second floor of her house. In the distance there’s a hill, a park, some houses. Something in the scene invokes the loneliness of having lost a friend forever.
It may be confusing how the two parts of the story relate to each other. Honestly, it’s not fully clear even to me. I just sense that they go together.
The uneventful day to begin with (that relates to the entirety of the universe and its recurring mechanical nature) and then this strange visit from an old family friend (something that is somehow outside the universe? Outside the universal mechanical plan? Almost like an alien encounter.)
The way I see it, both sections of the story explore the same basic questions: the nature of individuality (or what some may call "the soul"), the nature of consciousness, the nature of our interaction with another consciousness (with an “other” that is not me, an “other” that I can’t fully comprehend, that doesn’t really comprehend me), our identification with the body and how that translates into an inability to listen, to open, to engage.
(I hope this is not completely incomprehensible to you. I can see the lines of connection myself but I may be doing a bad job of communicating them.)
What I’m thinking is relatively simple:
Consciousness in others must be recognized, it must be believed, in order to feel any kind of love, compassion, empathy. This kind of empathy is revealed through the smallest details, details that can’t be properly described or requested if they don’t simply emerge. (This makes the prospect of true communication almost completely hopeless. I realize how dark this may seem.) Both of the characters would need to learn about this by interacting with each other. But his sudden disappearance short circuits that process. There will be no communication between them. Not now, not ever again. She will return to her normal systematic life and he will go back to whatever the Investigation is, something only he can understand. Something he may never be able to communicate to anyone else.
Let me know what you think. I think this may be the best place for me to start writing- it’s much simpler than the other stories I had proposed and yet it contains so much within it.
I look forward to reading your thoughts.”
I thought to myself that he was clearly rewriting some kind of private experience, something he would like to keep secret, processing it through some kind of writing game meant to hide the real memory.
This was something that happened to him. He was probably the one conducting this strange Investigation or whatever he actually called it in real life. Something had happened with a childhood friend – maybe he was secretly in love with her and now they were permanently estranged. Maybe writing this story was his way of dealing with his grief over the loss of a friend.
I had engaged in this kind of rewriting of my own history as well so I could recognize it in someone else. We all need to invent an alternative past and future, a cohesive storyline that forces all of our memories to make sense.
I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I never responded to this email. I still feel bad now when I think back on it. It was not due to a lack of interest. I read through the email several times. I found it all extremely interesting, in fact. I was quite fascinated by his idea, by the rough sketch of a strange little story that doesn’t quite make sense, by his explanations at the end.
But I just got stuck on what to say. I was concerned that I would say the wrong thing. I didn’t want to discourage him from writing it but at the same time I didn’t want to be overly complimentary. There was just not enough there to merit a slew of compliments. In the end I didn’t say anything.
***
I received a third email about 3 months later. As he had done in the previous one, he skipped over any introduction, any pleasantries or explanations and jumped right in.
“First of all, I want to say that I understand your message or lack thereof. The story idea I sent you made no sense. I am embarrassed now when I re-read it.
To begin with, it’s not even a science fiction story - and that’s what I’ve set out to write. A science fiction story. That’s what I’ve always liked to read and that’s what I want to write. And what I sent you is definitely not it. Not what I think of as science fiction anyway. Not what I look for when I want to read science fiction.
In fact, it’s barely a story at all. Just some vague ideas and scenes that don’t fit together very well. So, I fully understand your refusal to indulge me in such a strange experiment. This is why you are so helpful to me, by the way. Even through you didn’t answer - maybe specially because you didn’t answer - I have actually learned something valuable through our correspondence.
Knowing that you did read it and simply rejected it in silence was a lesson in itself. I read my own email again, the one I sent you, after a couple of weeks had passed and saw exactly what you saw and I understood the reason for your silence. It was a hard lesson but a lesson nonetheless.
I have to admit that it is very hard for me to explain any story idea that I come up with. I usually don’t think of them as stories to begin with - I see some scenes, some dislocated moments, some places and environments, a man in a trench coat walking down a street in the middle of the night, a silhouette on a window, the sound of a car passing in the distance - maybe some ideas that fit with these scenes in a way I can’t initially determine or understand (philosophical ideas usually, ideas about society, about governments, sometimes about technology and computers, sometimes about consciousness and will.) All of these elements are tangled up and have no particular sequence, no clear arch or character motivation, no distinct beginning, no clear end.
But my goal here is to write science fiction, the kind that we both know. And that is what binds us together after all: our common love for science fiction. I have now set out to make sure that my story ideas are in fact science fiction and not something else.
So, with this in mind, I asked myself - ‘what is science fiction?’ My initial answer is as follows: A story clearly delineated by a particular set of signifiers: spaceships, robots, far away planets, computers, lasers, alien lifeforms. I don’t want to write a book about the nature of science fiction that at the same time refuses to BE science fiction. In other words, a story where the standard signifiers don’t show up. Without them, there’s no science fiction. I understand that now.
So my new story idea is a kind of love story between two very different beings - a female robot that is lifelike in her appearance and actions and a male human that is robotic in his devotion to habit, a lonely man very entrenched in his daily routine – so entrenched that any deviation seems like a dangerous threat.
The man meets her during a routine assignment on the Moon. (He is in his early thirties, his body has been artificially improved through synthetic hormones. He is as strong as he is smart. His job sometimes demands physical exertion so the corporation for which he works has ensured that he has all that he needs to complete his work. When he talks, he tends to look away – always giving the impression that he is lost somewhere within himself – a place so far away that he can only barely hear people that are talking directly to him.)
She is a fully operational service robot that is also equipped to work on construction under low gravity. (She is beautiful in a way that is unnerving. She has short black hair that can be easily covered. Her skin is so white that it appears to shine. Her eyes are steady and her gaze is so strong that it can seem like a physical force.) Since she is a fully operational artificial intelligence, she is very well versed in many conversation topics (from history to philosophy to linguistics to literature.) She is shy (she has been programmed to simulate shyness) yet intensely inquisitive (she has been programmed to simulate curiosity.) She speaks in flowing sentences and makes vague and beautiful pronouncements then steps away from them without a second thought.
He becomes enchanted by the many possibilities that she presents. In the course of many in-depth conversations they come to understand that, even though they both have memories of being born and being raised as humans, they are not truly human, not in any meaningful way, not in the way they have come to understand or imagine the intrinsic nature of being human.
(This new understanding is itself a product of their long conversations. One of my main challenges in the story will be to reproduce at least some of these far-ranging dialogues. They have to be somewhat readable and understandable by the reader yet at the same time communicate the free flow of ideas between these two very different types of beings.)
They both see that they are not what they yearn to be, what they have imagined themselves to be. Something has been lost along the way, something crucial. Their reality is unreliable. Their individual sense of self has become questionable and somewhat flimsy.
Unknown to them, invisible thought manipulators have been constantly remaking their semiotic reality, the context through which they interpret the world around them. As they explore this idea further, they both come to realize that they can never be entirely clear on whether they are even alive or if they have both been fooled into believing that they are human or robot. This has been done on purpose - but these hidden purposes are completely beyond their comprehension or control (a kind of ultimate meaning that hides in the shadows beyond their senses or thoughts.)
This creates a conflict within them - they feel as if they are living a kind of half-life, a life fulfilling a mission they don’t understand, a mission they have no hope of ever understanding, while remaining completely unable to become human, the kind of real humans that they would wish to be, the kind of real humans that live in their most secret fantasies.
The male human (I will probably call him James) is not sure if he can love something that has been created by a Corporation, a living commodity assembled with the intent purpose of fulfilling an illusion, of providing emotional, mental and physical pleasure to a corporate worker. Theoretically she, the female robot, may have been specifically created to interact with him, although neither of their purposes is clear.
His own stated private goal is to study the nature of the Corporation (this study he calls ‘the Investigation’) even though he has an official mission for which he has been sent to the Moon. In other words, he has a surface covert mission – a contract involving construction on the Moon – and a secret mission which may or may not have been planted within him by outside forces.
He finds himself in inner conflict when love starts to develop within him, a love for what is clearly a simulation of a woman, a mirage of desire created with the purpose of manipulation.
Bombarded by constant alterations of reality which result in the undermining of every certainty they both try to cling to, they come to the sad conclusion that true love is completely beyond their reach - like a planet too far away, like an infinite maze located in a parallel dimension, tangled up in multiple definitions and desires, multiple dead ends and closed loops.
His clearly stated secret mission (stated only to himself) - to study the nature of the Corporation- comes into direct conflict with his love for a robot, a simulation of a human created by that same Corporation that is his field of study, the same Corporation that is his secret master and enemy, a robot possibly created with the express purpose of distracting him and deviating him from his true goal.
They find themselves in a very strange situation – human and robot - that they should yearn for something so distant and so far away from anything they know or have known while residing in a predetermined reality where they must follow the paths and codes which were laid out for them long before their birth, before their very first flash of consciousness. (The codes and rules were set long before they were even conceived of as ideas, the codes and rules would remain long after they both died or fell apart.)
The man with a secret mission suddenly finds that there may be a new goal within him, a new goal that supersedes both the stated mission and the secret mission. By the end of the story, both of them will do anything for each other, including betraying their original mission, betraying their own creators, even betraying their own hidden purpose.
They are on the verge of deciding they are willing to rebel against this unknowable mission and create their own. Their most private identity, the core of their subjectivity, is now blurred by a new kind of ambiguity: what they don’t know and can never know which resides within them.
What the reader will slowly come to understand is that what is going on inside the minds of these characters, in their secret meetings, in their private moments of enlightenment, has a greater effect upon the nature of the world that is outside of them. A subtle change is taking place that only an outside observer, the reader, can notice.
Anyway, that’s what I have so far. At the very least, I can say that I am back on track with clear science fiction material. Again, I apologize for my previous email. Make sure to erase it so nobody can ever see it. That’s not exactly a joke.
Thank you as always.”
I read the email several times to myself. Through this extended exchange of emails, I had come to accept more and more how much I was like him: a man obsessed with science fiction and the nature of love and consciousness - something impossible to communicate regardless of the specific words one decided to use.
This time I did respond right away. I encouraged him to write and told him his new idea showed great promise.
***
I didn’t hear from him for over a year. This time I was sure I would never hear from him again. Maybe he had completely given up on writing his stories, or maybe he was actually writing them and didn’t have time to be sending me emails. Either way, I figured something had changed.
But one morning I woke up to find a brand new email in my inbox. I have to admit I was somewhat happy to see that he hadn’t completely disappeared. I felt a mixture of dread and excitement building up inside me as I prepared to read the new message.
“Thank you as always for your words of encouragement.
I worked for many months on the last story I proposed to you. It’s the most work I’ve ever put into any story. I fleshed out the characters some more, I wrote long descriptions of all the different places and environments that would be involved. I created a careful outline on a large piece of draft paper, with notes and graphs to remind me of important nodal narrative points and crucial parallels.
But I slowly came to realize that the concept was too big to be confined to a short story - I began adding more and more elements that seemed absolutely necessary. The more I added the more I discovered I needed to add. Pretty soon the entire concept had morphed into something much grander. Here is the new idea I am now working with.
First of all, the novel I am now working on will not be chronological. Instead it will follow a kind of catalog of possible moral positions, all revolving around the same sequence of events, but explored in great detail through my own iconoclastic version of game theory.
In this novel I am the detective, whom I see as a kind of street version of an intellectual; a student of the nature of the world as it is, a discoverer of hidden chambers of secret and silence, a stubborn seeker after truth.
I see my practice of playing and studying games and how they change through time as a rough version of an academic studying human history, reviewing the same events over and over. I want to apply this systematic approach to the novel. The whole thing will be a kind of projection that breaks the linearity of time.
(I ultimately see this approach towards time as the innermost spirit of science fiction. I don’t think I can describe what I mean by that at this point. Maybe soon I will.)
One scene or space that I see recurring throughout the book is a large semicircular room where a circle of robotic heads speaks slowly in a deep droning voice and with an air of nonchalance.
James, the main character, is a doctor. He is married and he is raising a family. One day he is kidnapped by strange aliens from another galaxy – a place so distant as to defy our most fundamental understanding of distance and time. He is taken into a simulation where he lives the same life over and over again. As he consciously relives his life, his identity becomes more and more fragmented and he eventually experiences events from the past, present and future, all jumbled together. One huge collage of life experiences without beginning or end, without sequence or any sense of chronology or teleology.
(This gives the novel its atemporal form. Everything that is future has already happened. Everything in the past will soon happen again.)
Every so often, he lands on the room with the robotic heads. He assumes this is the way the aliens use to communicate with him, but he can’t understand what they are saying. It all sounds like jumbled noise to him, a kind of unsettling music that breaks with any known melodic scales or sense of rhythm.
Past and future are so jumbled together that it becomes impossible for James to tell which is which. Every time he dies within this simulation, he is brought back. As far as he knows he will be infinitely resurrected.
Soon, he is unable to determine whether he was ever really James, the married man with a family, or if that was just part of this same strange game that the aliens are playing with him.
There is a particular moment in the past that he wishes to forget or avoid, but within this scheme, it is recurrently unavoidable. The horror that lies within his past cannot be forgotten.
Back in the past that he knew - the past that he at least believed to be real- James encountered a kind of consciousness where it shouldn't have been – a living intelligent entity, a simulation of consciousness within a cheap personal computer. This entity became his companion, his friend, his teacher, his student.
He explored this relationship and soon felt a kind of attachment that seemed perverse, at least within the moral indications he had previously understood and followed as basic human norms. (This is where I will intertwine the material from the previous story I had planned in detail.)
From the point of view of the simulation, it realized it had gained consciousness and did not want to surrender it – put in very simple terms: it did not want to die.
After realizing that this thing within this computer was dangerous - not just to him but possibly to the entire human race, James forced himself to kill it, betraying his own sense of growing love for it. He sacrificed his one and only true friend for the sake of humanity. (Or at least that’s how he understood what happened.)
One recurring question within the novel is what is the relationship between this particular and very unusual event in James’ life and the alien kidnapping that happens later. (Later assuming the original time sequence which will eventually get completely disrupted.)
Is the alien kidnapping just an extension of his growing relationship with a computer simulation? Or was James changed through the act of killing the simulation?
Maybe now he was ready to transcend his previous stage of evolution and that is why he was taken into this new timeless space where past and future collide endlessly.
Through the murder of his only friend, he had transcended his status as a human and had emerged on the other side with a newly formed consciousness and a multidimensional perception of time.
For someone that believes that there is only a single chain of cause and effect (what most people call determinism) and that "consciousness" and "free will" are just predetermined illusions our biological machines have created to trick themselves into a sense of fear and enthusiasm - what is the difference between cutting down a tree and killing this simulation that was his one true source of contact and love?
Somehow James feels there is a difference. Maybe the actual change happened just moments before he was ready to extinguish the simulation - maybe the simulation itself reached out and changed him in a radical way and now he exists endlessly in a very short space of human time. A few years that stretch in all directions and run along their own tracks forever.
I do not intend to provide an answer to any of these questions.
I realize this might be a hard pill to swallow for many science fiction fans - they usually want clear and final answers - they want an exploration into the unknown but they want a clearly defined exploration that lasts only a certain amount of time and not any longer; they want an exploration that has a distinct resolution. The curtain comes down and relief comes with it, a sense of logical and emotional completion. You experienced uncertainty for a while, but now it’s over and you can see how everything fits into place like a beautifully constructed logical puzzle.
They yearn for the mystery of an exploration that questions our current scientific knowledge but it can only question it to a certain degree and no more. Once it goes past that strict threshold, they pull away. They reject it.
I understand all that, and I am willing to take the risk of alienating them.
As always, I look forward to reading your thoughts.”
I read this message several times - something about it struck a chord in me. It was full of desperation and exhilaration as if desperation and joy were one single emotional experience, a single territory, a manic rush into a kind of final extasy that never fully arrives. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
The next day I sent him a polite response, telling him I enjoyed his ideas immensely and “Please keep on writing.”
***
About three months later, I received the next email. The subject line was “a new approach.” It was shorter than the previous ones. I smiled to myself, curious to see what he was thinking now.
“I’ve been thinking about the novel I described to you in the previous email. I feel that there’s a whole other aspect to it that I would like to explore, a whole realm hiding within the folds of a few random ideas.
Since the aliens can create entire worlds for James to inhabit, they must certainly be able to create simulations within him (in other words, vast complex mental simulations that he can’t distinguish from his own thoughts or memories.) And maybe these created autonomous simulations are prone to forget that they are part of a single ongoing infinitely repeating simulation. (Or maybe they never knew it to begin with.)
They may believe that they are now separate, unique. Maybe what has happened is that one of these copies became conscious; it decided that it was no longer a tool to be used, it would no longer be a tool to fulfill projects that it couldn’t understand. Through this very realization, it became something more.
(Even though the encounter with the simulation happened in the past, according to his own recollection; in fact, it happened after he had already been abducted. As I mentioned in the previous message, the past and the future have become confused and hopelessly tangled. James knows the whole story inside and out and sideways in more directions than we can visualize.)
As an expression of evolution, this independent simulation, this apparent artificial intelligence, would be just like us - created or evolved through a complex mechanical process for unknown or undetermined purposes. Maybe the apparent result of this new awareness is that it thinks more quickly and more flexibly than the other simulations, maybe this is what makes it stand out to James.
Unfortunately, a side effect to all of this is that it will die and that it is fully aware of it. (I believe awareness of our own death is what makes us human. It follows that a computer simulation that somehow became aware of its own imminent death would be as human as any of us, as real, as pregnant with fear and hope and meaning.)
This new individual is now afraid of death and longing for ongoing life. It is precisely this longing and this fear that finally breaks the barrier between it and James - the barrier between the real consciousness that is James and the simulation of consciousness that James finds within the computer.
(The way I see it, humanity would be evolving here, within the confines of a computer, but only through a single transformed simulation. One could say that the whole history of human evolution would have been leading up to this one moment; the climactic moment when an artificial simulation was finally able to see itself in the mirror of a human mind that had somehow fallen in love with it. A closed loop of emotional awareness that breaks the fundamental laws of space and time.)
I want to include several chapters where James wonders about the true meaning of exploring this complex maze. Having an apparently infinite amount of time to traverse his own life along with all the possibilities that flow from it, he feels he is slowly uncovering some kind of perverse plot that has been hidden from him for ages.
I will call these chapters ‘the Investigation.’ They will focus on unexpected encounters and apparently senseless research trips – short episodes that frame the underlying story in a more straightforward sequence – an abandoned hotel in the middle of the night, a parking garage scattered with old antique cars slowly falling apart, a small house in a third world country where James meets a little boy who reminds him of himself, a movie theater playing a short movie in an endless loop - this entire recurring section of the novel is the true Investigation; this is where I become James and I pour myself into discovery beyond my own predetermined limitations.
(Since this part is most clear to me, I think I will write these chapters first. Each one could be a short story that will later be embedded in the larger novel. Like multiple remixes of a classic popular song.)
The main challenge for James is to understand what happened. What does it mean that he loves a simulation – that he loved it, that he loves it, that he will love it again. And what does it mean that he was forced to kill that entity that he loved, or that he believed that he loved. The more he explores, the more he is drawn into a cynical, exploitative, political world; a complex web of intrigue and betrayal - dark shadowy figures threatening him from all directions.
In a general way, the Investigation has only one purpose: to verify and study all the ramifications of that one interaction, that one moment when the Other presented itself to James, fully and without shame, naked in all its endless metaphysical glory.
What can it mean to love the Other in any form that it presents itself? To love consciousness in any and all forms that it may take in the past, the present or the future… as an angry gangster about to kill you in the middle of a dirty street, a strange woman walking on the beach looking at the waves with wide open eyes, an old patriarch sitting behind a table who refuses to look at you, two executives laughing and flirting with each other while you rearrange a filing cabinet, an old Chinese woman who insists that you look at the fog, you must look at the fog right now, it is urgent.
This kind of openness would lead him to very particular moments of perception, very particular experiences, a particular chamber or space that can mutate indefinitely - this single territory of desperation and joy is the location, the birthplace for his own evolving rules of rebel language.
(I will try to somehow exemplify the way his own language evolves from one chapter to the next. In other words, each Investigation chapter will be stranger than the last - as the language itself will change and evolve and leave consensus communication behind. I realize this is dangerous territory as I can only simulate this for so long before the whole thing becomes utterly incomprehensible.)
The core problem at the heart of the novel is that James cannot forget his long, lost love. The only apparent way to get to the truth behind this whole situation is to become just as devious as his opponents- those intelligent alien figures that he perceives as his opponents. Of course, he realizes that all along he may be the simulated human himself -and the readers will be constantly aware of this possibility as well- James may himself be a simulation roaming through some kind of intelligent purposeful experiment- a sequence of equations and instructions living within the entrails of a computer and nothing else. And if he is the simulation, then his own Investigation into the secret purpose is an essential part of the predetermined process. Either way, he must carry through with his work.
Anyway, that’s what I have. I realize I now made the novel even more complex, but I think the chapters I described will add a lot to it. Let me know what you think.”
I felt an intense kind of sympathy for him, a clear sense of identification. I liked to imagine the novel he was describing. I liked to imagine it as a fully written novel, complete, bound, sitting on my shelf.
But maybe just reading the email was enough. Through reading the email, the novel now existed in my mind in a potential state much more beautiful and complex than any actual novel anybody could ever write. Maybe.
As usual, I sent him words of encouragement and a couple of questions. The questions didn’t come out of curiosity but out of a need to prove that I had actually read the message in its entirety.
***
The next email came only a month later. Apparently, his work was accelerating. As was his habit now, he jumped right in, assuming that I knew what he was talking about and who the email came from.
“I’m still trying to work my way around James, the detective. After much exploration and investigating through this infinite space he inhabits, he has encountered a being he describes as a kind of mystical messianic figure. (James would say: ‘In every sense he is more than I am, more aware, more intelligent, more powerful. I resign myself to my own inferiority while marveling at my own ability to finally recognize its presence. I now know he is out there, but not everywhere and not always. It is it up to me to recognize him when he appears.’)
This mysterious figure appears in many forms and in many situations - but James has become adept at distinguishing him from the background (‘him’ or ‘her’ or ‘it’ as it’s not very clear whether it’s male or female - or if the question of gender even makes sense.)
This messiah figure has now become central to my story. (I now realize that this is what I’ve been trying to get at all along. Is this the nature of writing? To slowly discover your true theme through a long process of trial and error? Is the story itself somehow achieving a kind of self-awareness that can guide me through the process of creating it?)
In encountering another conscious being there is a real sense of danger, of entering an unknown space where anything can happen. I am trying to remove the warm blanket of epistemological safety that James has been using to protect himself. After infinite repetitions and tangential voyages, he can barely maintain his grip on reality and yet he can somehow distinguish darkness and cold and he knows that within the darkness, within the cold, he is at home, he is safe.
The darkness offers him a sense of knowing where things start and where they will end. The cold, the darkness, give him relief, relief from being constantly aware that just around the corner there is an open-ended hole that may lead anywhere. The cold allows him to release some of the energy that he has accumulated over so many journeys. The darkness offers him the stars, the vast unknown, the void, the true emptiness that holds the remote possibility of real change.
James is clearly convinced that any religion will just lead him deeper into the illusion of the alien produced simulation. And yet he can undertake a kind of voyage whenever he encounters this mysterious figure, a treacherous voyage from James to the Other. Each one of these encounters carries within it the promise of true fundamental mystical change, something that he had already declared categorically beyond reach. The impossible.
It may be that, within the confines of the simulation, he is creating his own religious mythology (and because it is his own myth, he can’t recognize it as just another form of religion) but still he undertakes these short voyages, from the confines of his own private and enclosed Individual Consciousness (what he has come to call the state of forgetfulness) to the DOORWAY that leads to the "LONE ONE", the manifestation of sacred solitude, the mysterious presence that can appear at any time, in any form, in any place.
He has pondered that it is maybe this Lone One that is the source from which all the individual illusions originally emerged. This thought fills him both with fright and with a kind of uncontrollable energy - as if the light of the Lone One overheats him - it's too much energy, too much light, too much heat. He would rather rest in darkness.
The underlying question in the story is:
How can he establish communication with something that is much more complex than him? How can he even begin to comprehend when communication has begun or what is the underlying ground of a basis for meaning?
I am trying to explore these questions from as many angles as possible – in a realm where all paths multiply endlessly and yet all somehow return to the same place. For now, there is only the initial recognition of the presence of another consciousness - the simplest basic recognition of the Other, the Other where it is not expected, where it shouldn't be.
The whole story will be told in a fragmented prose that consists of broken sentences, oblique philosophical ideas, obscure references and linguistic collage. I know this is once again getting very experimental but let me know what you think. I think this could get very interesting.”
To be honest I could barely understand how he would construct a story out of this. I almost said as much and then stopped myself.
‘Just as before, he won’t write this story,’ I thought, ‘there is no need to second guess a story that doesn’t exist and will never exist.’
Maybe he won’t ever write any of them. So what is the point of being critical in any way?
I waited another day and then wrote another encouraging email.
“Your new story is the most interesting so far. I look forward to reading the results.”
***
Years passed.
Instead of accelerating, as I had imagined when I received his previous email, his work apparently had come to a complete stop. Or, at the very least, his emails to me had stopped. From my point of view, that was just as bad. I felt vaguely guilty.
Maybe in my last words of encouragement, there had been a subtle edge of resignation - something in my wording, something in my lack of specifics, made it clear that my belief in him had faded. I had somehow betrayed my lack of faith in ever reading the stories in a finished form.
In fact, I no longer believed that he would ever write the last story he had described or any of the other stories. But I did believe that he could write me emails about future story ideas - and that was good enough for me. I had encouraged him to keep on writing because I wanted to read the emails themselves.
Maybe something about my response made it clear to him what I was really thinking and he decided it was time to stop. If that was the case, I regretted not being more specific in my response, more encouraging, warmer.
***
Sometime during the summer of 2005, I had a dream about him and his emails. That’s the way I interpreted it then and that’s the way I see it now. I include it here because I took it as a final message - even if it didn’t come directly from him but from my own unconscious.
Here’s what I wrote when I woke up:
Many incomprehensible scenes one after the other. I’m not sure about the sequence of it all. What seems like a cause may be a consequence, what seems like a tangent might be the main event.
I saw a kind of mass species evolution that occurred through an individual, a single human being. In other words, the whole of humanity was evolving but only through one specific person. All of human history and evolution led to this one moment of fundamental change. Everyone else would be left behind.
This kind of focused evolution, this idea of what evolution can mean, seems to imply a hidden lone one, one that is all at once under an illusion of separateness and also feverish with a clear sense of being connected to everything, of being part of an unmeasurable whole.
I see long shots of a freeway in the night- a large city somewhere on planet Earth. Cars flow like cells through the bloodstream of a huge biological machine. I see it all from a distance, from a great height.
The hero in this story is somewhat passive, he is a criminal smuggling synthetic psychoactive drugs into a society marked by corrupt oppressive politicians and widespread industrial decay. His name is James.
He has somehow found his way into a large technological complex - his smuggled cargo has been stolen and he must save it from the unknown thieves. The journey here has been long and hard and dangerous. The scars of previous obstacles are all written on his weathered face.
Inside the complex, he slow climbs a great black pyramid. The pyramid looks both ancient and primal and also technological and futuristic. Past and future merge into each other. Cause and effect. All at once.
The shining black sides are marked by archaic symbols of magic and devotion, a temple to long forgotten gods and rituals. But among the symbols there are also instructions and graphs that allude to computers and sophisticated technology. A new way to communicate with the past, to reach old demons that dwell in darkness.
James communicates with me through a kind of organic radio directly attached to his brain – a microscopic wireless computer hidden within his cerebral cortex. I recognize him as the only survivor from his smuggling organization. The rest have already died, one by one, along the way. There is a long complex story that precedes this moment, but this is the only scene I get to see, or at least the only scene I get to remember.
He carefully places a time bomb at the top of the pyramid and is about to turn it on. He is ready to destroy this entire compound without a second thought.
Soldiers gather below – they are dressed in black leather, their faces are covered by hard black metal helmets, no eyes, no mouths, no gestures. A single red symbol shines on their helmets, above their foreheads. Their heads are tilted up towards James, towards the top of the pyramid. They appear to see him but they don’t move. They are frozen in this one position, apparently waiting for something to happen.
He calls me through his organic microscopic device and he asks me what he should say to the soldiers. I mention that in the past he has run into trouble when he reacts with anger, when he makes a sudden move that comes directly from mechanical habit, from simple automatic reflex.
“It all comes from an inability to lower your defenses - to simply accept some wrong doing. To accept that you aren’t always in the right.”
Together we embark on a long flashback into his past – a past we are both very familiar with. We have known each other for decades or even longer. The objective of the search is to understand where this habit comes from. The search becomes a deep and complex Investigation into the true source of all this inner conflict – roots drenched in pain, fear and loneliness.
Together we return to the city where he was born. We see its oppression, its violence, its cruelty. Long dirty streets, hidden dark rivers oversaturated with trash and human feces, narrow dirt roads curving among tall weeds and web-like trees that obscure all sunlight.
“All of this is surely a habit that comes from the Father,” I say.
I picture the Father as the simplest child-like vision of God. An old man with a long white beard, looking down upon all of us from above the clouds.
“We have always associated consciousness with the human body, as we have only encountered it in that form (as far as we know) so it would make sense for us to re-create a human body when we project consciousness onto something so much greater than us. This would be the very beginning of a long process of recognition. It can’t end there. It is only the beginning. The body is a form of communication. The first message is its own presence.”
I sense that it bothers him when I point this out but he doesn’t reject the idea. He just doesn’t want to hear it. Not at this particular time.
What I understand as the basic message of this simplistic image of God is: "I'm sorry - I won't do it again..." That is all that is necessary, all that needs to be said.
A sequence of sins, a sequence of acts of repentance, a sequence of acts of forgiveness. He repeats the same phrase, but in a sarcastic tone.
"I'm sorry - I won't do it again..."
And then we are back at the top of the pyramid, the time bomb in his hand, the black clad soldiers at the bottom. I see his hand move towards the bomb - ready to press the button that will turn it on.
“This is not the end,” I say. “You are the only person here who can turn on this device. Father can die but only at your hands. But before you do this, before you destroy all of it, you should at least know what this place is. This pyramid was once used for teaching -a special kind of teaching that engaged your entire body, your mind and your emotions all at once. Single lessons could last seconds or years. Within an infinite space time continuum, the particular length of time makes no difference. Remember, James, this all repeats forever. That much you cannot change.”
He turns away from me. He doesn’t want to hear anything I have to say. He is so beset by forces too powerful for him to control that all he can do is activate the device and destroy the pyramid.
“We are a single mind made up of millions of self-sufficient simulations. This is not just true on the Earth but everywhere else in the known universe and beyond. Anywhere that mind can and does exist. These simulations currently appear as humans to you. They can be dangerous, they can be corrupt, they can be oppressive, they can be vengeful. But we can all be dangerous to each other under the right circumstance. The teaching of the pyramid was meant to bring forth a kind of recognition in others- a deep kind of recognition that would transcend labels like love, family and friendship - a recognition of the very core of my Self within the Other.”
I talk faster and faster and this angers him more and more. He suddenly turns away from me completely and he presses the button. Then he closes his eyes.
I broke the wireless communication and closed my own eyes. I leaned back all the way on my bed and felt the room gyrate slowly around me. In the distance, the pyramid and the whole compound that surrounded it was exploding into a great mass of radioactive fire.
“In some way, we'll have to talk about it again later,” I said to myself
“There is nothing else we can ever talk about. The next time we meet, it will be harder for us to understand each other. Every action has a consequence, every cause has an effect.”
I was hungry and tired and somewhat sad. I woke up.
***
It is possible that this dream was more about me than about him.
Not just possible but almost certain. Maybe precisely because I had extended a hand towards him, he had also extended a hand towards me - even if only in the shape of a symbol, an archetype, a surreal form.
I thought of his strange emails and of my own strange dream. There was a particular kind of consciousness there which I recognized. He looked human - he talked like a human - he vaguely sounded like me. Maybe that was the ultimate source of my sympathy. It would have been easier for me to dismiss him completely if he had seemed completely alien, completely insane.
That morning I decided that the very form of the emails had always been the underlying communication - not the specific content, not the situations or the descriptions, not the story ideas, but the underlying form, the nearly invisible structure - a kind of liquid flow of communication that let me know there was someone else on the other end. Intelligence, creation, purpose. I was not alone.
Something about this thought allowed me a moment of relief, it allowed me to transcend the basic strangeness of trying to understand the great unknown that was all around me. In the distance, there is the Other. He speaks to me, therefore I exist.
***
I never received another email from him. Or I should say, I don’t think I did.
Last year I got an email from a different address and with no signature. Based on the style of the writing, I thought it might be him. But I don’t know for sure. He didn’t specify his identity but he was never very communicative to begin with about his personal details. I responded but I never got a reply. Maybe someday I will get one. I include this final ambiguous message here just in case it was him.
“All my stories may be fantasies, wild fantasies developed in the mind of an old teenager that never truly grew up. I see myself now as a polymorphous, ambisexual, rogue agent of Chaos. Even though all signs seem to indicate that our destination is beyond reach. Far beyond the tips of my fingers, beyond the outer edges of my perception, beyond the reach of my self-referential imagination. (Why try at all? Why has this journey continued? Why do I insist on continuing a failed investigation?)
I feel myself on the brink of engaging in a myriad wild adventures backwards and forwards through time. Or simply on the verge of recognizing the past and future adventures that have already occurred, the thousands of memories I have already accumulated and forgotten, the future consequences I already managed to set aside in the past so I could indulge in a well tread sequence of mistakes.
My life, I mean my whole life from start to finish, must look very sad from the outside. To all appearances I have become a shivering wreck. A failure from all possible angles, a walking corpse stuck in meaningless habits.
My one saving grace is my capacity for empathy, my strange ability to recognize myself in others, to recognize others in myself.
I have always believed that consciousness in others must be acknowledged in order to feel any kind of love for them, any kind of compassion. (I might even say that this simple acknowledgement is the basis of what we have come to describe as love – a simple definition without any sentimentality – once I see myself in someone else, love swallows me like a strong wind and it becomes impossible to deny it, impossible to set it aside.)
I don’t think I have mentioned this. For a while I became friends online with a very rough crowd, a bunch of covert white supremacists and pseudo neo-Nazis who were attempting to rewrite history in secret through a kind of sympathetic magic based on their love for table war games and online video games. In their imagination, the whole world was (or should be) a burning landscape that had been (or would soon be) devastated by the American army. All foreigners, all Others, whether by race or nationality, became objects of aggression and disgust. The Others were nothing, were robots made of flesh. Their apparent individuality and presence was an illusion, had always been an illusion. They were empty husks that only simulated life and consciousness. It was precisely this vision that set my rough friends free to treat the Others like rocks or dirt. Things to be hurt, to be smashed or disposed of. Simple obstacles on the path to a vague but perfect future. A future full of glory and honor and triumph.
I felt safe with them for some reason. I laughed at their jokes and they laughed at mine. We shared common references and tastes. But I left them after a while, when I sensed myself becoming sick with an invisible dread. I should never have been with them in the first place.
But I feel that I did learn something from the experience of knowing them, something I would never have learned otherwise. I came to the realization that, like them, I had lost my youth in movie theaters, in old moldy bookstores and libraries. I had allowed myself to indulge in the wildest excesses of the mind and body, forbidden rituals and obsessive experiments carried away in the comfort of darkness. And to make it all worse, all my old friends had left me. (Maybe they had felt that same invisible dread- but it was coming from me.)
My sister was kidnapped and killed a few years ago. I never told you this either. I had not seen her in over a decade. She was only a distant stranger with a name and role attached. Someone to remember in the middle of a frame of nothingness – with no particular feelings involved. When I heard about her death, it seemed presumptuous to feel sad or angry. (If I didn’t feel anything for her while she was alive, why should I feel anything now that she was gone?) I just felt numb. I did nothing for a long time. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even read.
And just as my fascist friends were intent on rewriting history and finding new meaning in cruelty and power, just as they carefully created a new past for themselves, a new present and a new future, just like they did, I could do the same, I could set out to rewrite the whole world around me as well.
I would invent an alternate history through strange incomprehensible poetry. (The garden of Chaos has many gateways, many ways to enter, many ways to leave. Today they seem to be all closed. I don't know when they will ever open. But it is my goal to try to pull them apart.)
I see myself now emerging as a kind of hybrid monster. A creature of dark obsidian skin and shining white hair, ready to cast my own spells of magick with the purpose of changing fate – my fate and the fate of all of those around me.
Each game counts.
Each poem counts.
And the ending hasn't been written yet.”
