Another World is Possible

From Distributive Passions

Twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and eighteen years, and change…

Kali smiles, and she hopes that it is a nice smile, painfully aware that, nice or not, the smile is not entirely her own.

Twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and eighteen…

The number threatens to become a memory—and she honestly has enough on her plate. A filter defers processing of that particular train of thought.

“Is there something the matter…?”

Something about the lips, about the way the corners of the mouth hinge…

They have stepped out into the street, strikingly quiet, now that the morning parade has concluded. She allows herself to scan the avenue, and is awash in data. Perfect detail piled on perfect detail, ad infinitum, and all ultimately alien. There is no fold of fabric, no leaf blown from a tree, no birdcall or musical note, no texture, not even the texture of her own skin, that does not demand of her a context

Twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and…

that she is still unable to supply.

“It’s all rather much,” she says. “But beautiful…”

Sensors fire belatedly, and everything slows.

Visual filter engaged. Downsample: 1/1,000,000.

--Ease off a little. OK?

Her hosts give off a distinct…—?—?—?—…of relief,...

(Here we go again. Which sense was that?)

...giving Kali a chance to play a little catch-up, do a quick redesign on the sensory filters. Backbrain response seems normal—or as close to her notion of “normal” as she’s likely to experience again. Whatever… For the moment, she’s functional. Hell, she’s almost enjoying herself. A child skips by, an ornate and unlikely confection in, and all over, his hand, and—for the first time, really—Kali is able to see it.

The trick is not to see all of it.

A minor creation ripples down the street. From her sensory blind, she catches glimpses of progression and subversion, as they unfold. The whole process feels somehow like autumn, tastes like that soft drink they used to buy at the Mainer stores…

Moxie.

Yes, Moxie. But…

Channel ID, last msg?

PRIORITY channel. KRONOS/Central. last active...

She cuts off the reply.

Twenty-eight thousand, four hundred…

Still another of the change-waves rolls over the party, much stronger than the one that struck just a few moments before. The little boy is still dancing across the flagstones, still clutching his preposterously perfect and perfectly sweet treat. Still…

“Shall we go?”

If the “wave” were water, they would be standing shoulder-deep in the flood, but her companions seem blissfully unaware.

Probably just as well.

She is fairly sure she is drowning.

VERIFY channel ID, last msg?

PRIORITY channel. KRONOS/Central. last...

She cuts off the reply.

Twenty-eight thousand…

We’ve got to get you caught up somehow.

“Bastard!”

Oh, gawd, she thinks, and she smiles. Not a nice smile at all.

Miss me?

You bastard!

…

.…

..…

Oh, gawd… Yes, I missed you…

__________

She’s surprised when the tears come, when the sobs shake her.

Anything you do for the first time in twenty-eight thousand years is going to be hard.

And the laughter isn’t any easier than the tear.

And then the meltdown—so obviously genuine, so obviously alien to this best of all possible worlds—carries her away, rescues her in a moment of really maximum vulnerability—shields her from the scrutiny of her hosts, from the relentless shimmer and gossamer rustling of this maddeningly beautiful world, from the scattered, shattered memories of (Can it really be?) two hundred and eighty plus centuries spent so thoroughly in-between, and inexplicably alone, subject to everything (Everything…) that nature, time and an increasingly restless creation could throw at her.

__________

She comes to in her quarters, wrung out in ways she won’t yet confront, and physically weak. And for a while there are good days and there are days when all she can do is batten down all the sensory hatches, while her backbrain plays soothing simulations. The voice

PRIORITY cha...

Hnn. Nuhn-nnn…

does not return. And slowly she begins the work of self-repair, consolidation. She sets a new memory filter.

__________

Her hosts do not seem inclined to rush her, nor, in most instances, to pay her much mind, as long as the vague problem that she represents remains voluntarily confined to quarters. She is a disquieting object for speculation, at a time and place, and among a people who seem, despite their formidable capacities, to have very little talent for disquiet.

They will learn.

She is quite used to be a source of disquiet, and has been such at almost every phase of her varied career. In her time she was a very dangerous woman—a very dangerous weapon. At the moment, however, she feels rather like a spent cartridge, and she knows that her power to disturb, here at the Apex of Harmony, is entirely a matter of her atavistic alienness—her inappropriateness, really. She would be a rude noise, in a world which has forgotten how to fart or burp, was it not for the fact that the promise of decline—the atavism to come—was beginning to teach the people of Harmony how to worry again.

__________

She spends whole days refining filters and developing interpretive routines, shunting various spectra of sensory data to her backbrain for analysis. Gradually, she develops an experimental methodology for “upgrading” her processing of the input from her much-augmented physical apparatus. The public information networks are open to her, and in them are accounts of the various creations which her body has undergone without precisely experiencing. She searches the data on sensory disability and its response to therapy, and models backbrain routines accordingly. And gradually she learns to listen with her new ears, touch with her new fingertips. . .

__________

The functions and enjoyments of the Solarians are of so superior an order to ours, that it is not yet time to give a glimpse of them. It must suffice us to reason about the well-being of the great cardinals, Jupiter, Saturn, and Herschel, whereof we are going to share the lot. I cite Jupiter in preference, because it will be the proximate cardinal, and very visible to us. With the glasses of the fourth creation we shall be able to see, as in a magic picture, its amphibious inhabitants, their industry by land and sea, the numerous docile and superb animals that serve them in the water as on land, the unity and ardor that reign in their public assemblies, without any arm, any policeman being employed to keep them down. We shall there see the relations of the phalanxes carried on for thousands of years, and. arrived at a degree of wealth and wholeness from which ours will be still far removed in a beginning, when they will have but few means, being only aided by the ingrate creations, one and two. The fourth creation, which is going to yield us a new furniture, will not be able to be completed before a century at least. We shall see in that planet, as in Mercury, magnificent plants, whereof each family, each fruit, each flower will be depicted to us in colossal forms. We shall there see the cultivators lodged in immense palaces, each of which will contain in the body of the buildings twenty colonnades and domes more stately than the master-pieces of the Louvre and the Pantheon; we shall see in the heart of these palaces and of the richest landscapes, these giants of a rosy alabaster color, transform into a perpetual festival that labor which is the perpetual punishment of the unhappy civilizees. At the sight of so much weal that is about to become our portion during 70,000 years of consecutive resurrections, we shall already have a foretaste of Paradise.

__________

She pulls herself from the stream, an old, old favorite translation from the Secondary Teachings, rendered into English in the mid 19th century. A bit of a curiosity, even in the series of heresies, she treasures it for its rustic charm, its Swedenborgian divergences, its bold, if slightly bewildered approach to the bold, and so often bewildering propositions of the great prophet’s thoughts. Here, among the “splendors of the combined order,” she often leaves it streaming for her auxiliary “operations brain,” which, lacking specific mission duties, has begun an overhaul of her strategic libraries, as a step towards rebuilding long-outdated basic operations protocols. She has no desire to override. Quite frankly, the “Apogee of Happiness” makes her nervous, more nervous than she has ever been in her so-long life. (Face it. Frightened.) She will not shy from even that much frankness, if only between herself and her backbrain. It is not a feeling to which she is accustomed, despite all that she has been through,—and, of course, it is not one of the passions.

__________

Wolves and tigers, crocodiles, and swarming vermin are only necessary in the swamps and deserts, barren wilds and rank fermenting jungles of uncultivated regions in the natural world, and damning Words of fear are only necessary in the swamps and deserts, barren wilds and rank fermenting passions of uncultivated regions in the spiritual world, or in the soul of man, and in those texts of Scripture which relate to evil as a perishable thing. . . . There are then perishable truths in the Word as well as in the Works of God, and man has power to co-operate with God in modifying both; not by caprice and idleness and ignorance, but by reason, industry, and science. . . . Man does not destroy the truth of a living animal, which he exterminates; he merely puts an end to its bodily power and presence. The type exists in nature still, and in man’s mind, and may perhaps exist in spirit for ever, in certain parts of the universe where its presence is useful and necessary, at different times and in various places.

The stream—insistent. She recognizes the passage, foregrounded, and not for the first time recently, according to some unconsciously invoked protocol. But she cannot yet put it to use in any way. And again…

To set aside and neutralize a text of Scripture, therefore, as Christ substituted the law of love and meekness for the law of retaliation, is not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil. True love casteth out all fear. To exterminate foul vermin and ferocious animals, is not to destroy their truth, but to fulfil their destiny, which is, to disappear from this globe as fast as man replenishes the earth and substitutes higher truths, more useful breeds of animals, and his own wisdom and activity in lieu of their perishable natures and temporary services. But then we must observe that not one race or family of animals and vermin will pass away from the earth until man has civilized the regions it inhabited: “ Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, until all be fulfilled.” What are heaven and earth in this case? Are they not the present state of man’s mind, and the present state of man-s body and the earth? These will pass away as man progresses in truth and goodness, in obedience with the Christian law of Love, which gradually supercedes the usefulness of the Jewish law of Fear, without impairing the truth of that law which it extinguishes or casts into the shade of death.

Dismiss. Reprocess.

There is nothing else for it, for now.

__________

And so it goes, through days and nights. She keeps her dealings and experiences simple, spending much of her time in her room, entertaining occasional visitors. She spends hundreds of hours, awake and asleep, connected—literally hard-wired at first—to the central Cosmos computer network, her backbrain processing a seemingly endless series of queries in an attempt to find means of adaptation to this sensation-rich environment.

It shouldn’t be so hard, she thinks. After all, I was designed to be just what they are now.

“K-as-in Kombat,” Series 51. The pride of the Federal Expeditionary Forces, at least until their existence became know. “Mollies,” they were called in the service, after some character in a science fiction novel, if she recalls correctly, the “martial Madonnas” of the Church.

Query: “Conflict Life” + mollies

Working...

__________

The Federal Corporation officially divested itself of its Conflict Life Technologies unit in 1984. In practice, this meant the transfer of equipment, staff and intellectual properties to a number of ostensibly competing firms, outside of Federal jurisdiction and beyond the reach of Territorial law. The scandal surround the Madonna Project demanded that some heads roll, in order to preserve the cultural and moral capital of the Federals’ chief contractor, and there followed a rather predictable period of enquiry, inquisition, ritual humiliation, castigation, mortification of the flesh, confession of sins, religious reeducation, and, in most cases, resanctification. A few incorrigibles spent the softest sort of prison time, two related suicides were reported, and one technician went mysteriously missing. Congressional and Cardinal Court investigations subsequently confirmed this technician, a Mongolian immigrant by the name of Wang, as the chief architect of the mental modeling project, while they claimed that the project itself was not specifically authorized by either the Federal Government or the oversight committees of the Church. In the popular media, Wang gathered around him a dizzying array of legends. He was an Uyghur separatist, or a spy for the Marxist faction of Chinese syndicalism. The Madonna Project was some kind of Trojan Horse attack on North American interests. Speculation of the wildest sort continued. Cold War-era stories of Chinese brainwashing experiments made the rounds of the tabloids, while a New York Times investigation found no record of any employee of that name in any of the heavily redacted project records it could obtain—though it did uncover the still-unexplained murder of one Chesterfield Wing, an employee of a related technology unit, in 1977. The President and Federal Pantarch both seized the opportunity to attack the Times for supposed ultra-Paineist leanings, and, in time, records were produced (quite literally produced, some sources claimed) showing Wang to be a participant in a classified technological exchange program. The Chinese Council denied the existence of the program, which meant little under the circumstances. It was generally understood that such programs existed, despite persistent denial on both sides. The President’s admission of the existence of the exchange was followed by his condemnation of it as an unauthorized, black budget affair. A few more heads rolled—mostly laterally or even uphill into cushier positions connected to the Federal Corporation’s various offshore “competitors.” The Russians made threatening noises, but the days of the Russian Union were nearly over, and nearly everyone could see it. Wang appeared periodically in the news, the subject of official intelligence reports, semi-official rumors, and tabloid Elvis-sighting style tomfoolery. He was in Dubai, reunited with elements of the old CLT. He was collaborating with rebel techs in breakaway Free Turkmenistan. He had allied himself with the Taliban, or with the ETA. Half Fu Manchu and half Where’s Waldo?, The Technician, as he came to be called, was a particularly versatile, even whimsical threat. But the White House took every occasion to remind us that it was indeed a grave threat that had been averted (the details of which were, naturally, kept confidential for security reasons) and that the danger, both technological and moral, still “out there” somewhere.

The Madonnas themselves—and all of the various Mollies—posed a severe problem for the administration, as well as for the Corporation. The Church and its Pantarch struggled to find words to condemn the experiments involved, without resorting to those, which might have condemned its victims as well,—abomination chief among them—so common in the Fundamentalist churches, particularly in the Dixie Confederation. The Pantarchal College (Federal) was asked to rule on the question of whether or not Mollies had souls. Those worthies deferred judgment, pending Federal investigations into the nature and origins of the project. Those investigations proved largely fruitless. Crucial documents, it was said, had been lost or destroyed. Apparatus had been allowed to transfer to foreign concerns. National security concerns got their play in the ensuing debates, and were made the pretext for demands to the Territorial governments for the return of Mollies decommissioned and abandoned at the end of the FedEx excursions of ’82 and ’83. Resentment of FedEx and renewed sense of Territorial pride gave vehemence to refusals based largely on more humanitarian concerns.

The decommissioned Mollies were largely left alone, for good and for ill. “Decommissioning” seems to have been a haphazard process, and one which left those subjected to it unpredictable, restless, prone alternately to impetuous action of various sorts and to an obsessive haunting of old posts, parodic performances of duties no longer required.

__________

The source is a mid-21st-century weblog, some kind of pop-history site. Roughly accurate, but certainly not deep. There seems to be a lot of this sort of material. The Federal Corporation had a cyborg program. The program was abandoned after the last territorial wars, and blame pushed off on the Chinese. Not much detail though. And all the sources buried deep, deep in the past.

It’s not just her vanity that’s hurt by the lack of information on the Conflict Life program. Anonymity may well be a blessing, but she has need of technical information if she is to get on with her life.

__________

Series 47 had been the “breakthrough batch”—she remembers Chet Wing using just that phrase—the series in which the next group of evolutionary traits, as predicted in the Teachings, had been artificially induced. With the exception of Series 49, all the “40s” were “hurry-up” series, piecemeal developments of the basic combat Molly, intended for short service at best. The goal was to develop all the components of the Series 50 “super-Molly,” and perform any necessary system-integration in the 49s.

Murphy’s Law got a lot of credit—or blame—for the bloodbath that ensued. Better to invoke the Peter Principle or “military intelligence.” Too many suits too eager to “make a point” in New Hampshire, or to bring the Beaver Flag down a notch or three, making too many promises and too many demands—and too many corporations too closely tied to Church and Corporation to know how to say “no.” And something else—something that would explain the death of Chesterfield Wing…

Still “unsolved”...

Hmmmm. A “cold case” indeed…

A bloodbath—not that the true toll was ever made public. Everything went wrong. Human Duplication, pushed to its limits, provided flawed “blanks,” some so flawed that a “soul” could not be anchored to them. The pneumatologists, perhaps distracted by their specific involvement in the failed longevity experiments of Series 44, pretty well fell apart, leaving it to others, and other technologies, to make the “advances” in duty-life. And, to be fair, it was probably their mistakes which doomed the first implementation of the Combat Supplemental Processor, since that, at least, did not fail in the 48s. Self-repair technologies proved incompatible with existing biomodifications—horribly incompatible—and the Series 40 shop seems to have been in denial, as it burned through blank after blank. Disposal had become an embarrassing problem, and even the starchiest of the suits was starting to wilt a bit, when Chesterfield announced he had solved the problem—and the CSP incompatibility issue—in the 43 shop, where they were working on aquatic adaptation.

All before her time, of course. But the Wings had been happy to share their version of things, particularly after it all came apart.

Much less chance of my return to the bosom of the Church, if I knew what went on…

But none of this information appears to exist in the main public networks. She forms a series of terse queries for the central COSMOS engine, and drops them in the queue. She’s vaguely aware of a loose filter, shunting off some memory or reflection.

Hold that thought…

She manages a rather serviceable smile, and can’t help but be pleased with herself. (Signs of life.)

Her queries come back—negative—and again she feels the filter fire.

Give it to me, slowly.

By a preset protocol, the feed begins with an emotion.

Puzzlement.

You’re telling me. Now tell me something I don’t know.

. . .

Sorry. Make that something I didn’t want to know. Why, specifically, am I surprised at the lack of data on CLT in COSMOS?

Because you know the data should be there.

And I know because... Hold on. Let me guess. I know because I put it there.

Correct.

And if I put it there, that means that…

Another filter. Tight and disorienting, like a momentary faint.

Priority A filter activated. Memory tagged as “disruptive;” associated with “meltdown.” Your tags. How do you wish to proceed?

She shuffles memories—some of which she has suppressed the old-fashioned ways—and feels herself on the edge of realization. But realization feels like something wide and deep, something she is not yet ready to confront. She’s a step closer, but it’s the only step she’s ready to take—in that direction.

She settles herself down in a comfortable chair, plugs herself physically into the network, and settles down to constructing a new set of queries. She has plenty of keywords, plenty of very specific data, and this sort of intensive data scouring was one of the things the CSP was designed for. She makes some decisions, charts out some rough rules, and sets the processes running.

OK. See what you get with that. Wake me when there’s news.

…and not before.

__________

The wake-up routine is gradual, and homey, as she designed it to be. Sensory filters gradually ease off, to the sound of a twentieth-century alarm clock, with a morning bird chorus faint in the background. Threat-level: zero. She senses the search process still churning away in the background, so apparently there is other “news.”

You have a visitor.

__________

She has few visitors. She is not entirely sure why—whether her novelty has worn off, or whether perhaps novelty has considerably less appeal for the Harmonians than it did in previous eras. She gives off, she is aware, quite a range of strange. . . “radiations” or “emanations” is something like the right word. Sensations. She strikes the senses in an unusual and not entirely pleasant manner. In her day, the Fourierists—particularly the Freefors—were renowned for their easy embrace of virtually any form of difference, their talent for incorporating what others considered the most perverse of tastes into the fabric of their society. But it is one thing to perfect tolerance in a very imperfect world, and another to encounter an odd or off note in a world where everything (Everything?) else belongs to Harmony.

The Historian is the only one of her acquaintances who does not seem at all perplexed or repelled by her “odd note.” Indeed, he seems rather attracted by it, or her, for reasons which she has not successfully divined. She suspects some of the interest is occupational. She is, after all, a living piece of history. And perhaps she is wrong to concern herself too much with untangling the various passions, here at the height of Harmony.

In truth, she hasn’t concerned herself much, outside the context of some very general observations of Harmonian individuals and attitudes. In a world peopled by the perfect, perhaps John—John+, she thinks, with the “+” being one of those sensations to which she cannot quite assign a sense, but which seems to refer to him uniquely and distinctly—perhaps something about John is just a little flat or sharp. Or perhaps she is failing to see some aspect of Harmony. In any event, though she has no particular desire to see anyone, it is something of a relief that her guest is the Historian John.

__________

“I have heard that you are improving.”

He stresses that last word strangely, and she finds herself unwilling to pursue all the ways that “improvement” might play for a historian at the ultimate turning point in history. She makes something of a production of not unplugging from the network, entertaining in an impatient way while trailing the data tether behind her. The Historian does not seem to be offended, and she tries not to be disappointed. Cybernetic bio-enhancement is not unknown in Harmony, although it is, as she understands it, uncommon. Neither common or uncommon enough to matter, she thinks. Like running around with her hair up in curlers.

She fires off a quick query.

A practice generally limited to knowledge workers. Librarians. Archivists.

Interface.

Interface appears to be related to csp.

Bingo.

“Are you finding the open network interface unusable? I know that working wired can be cumbersome.”

“Do you…?”

He stretches the collar of his shirt to show what appears to be a datajack.

“Archival researchers nearly all opt for the hardware.”

“I’d like to ask you some questions…”

“Over dinner, perhaps?”

She nods, and tries to improve a bit on that serviceable smile.

“And then a movie?”

Dinner and a movie. It’s certaintly been a while…

__________

The film is called “Universal History,” and it is every bit as ambitious as its name, the product of a thousand series, laboring for a thousand years, and it is to play, continuously, for a year and a day. The artistic centerpiece of the Apex Festival Years, the High Work of the Narrative Arts Series, it aims to capture the full sweep of Humanity’s upward climb in its carefully selected episodes and abstract—some say too abstract—connecting montages. It is to provide a sort of closure for this phase of human history, and, perhaps, some glimpse of what is to come in the long epochs of decline. Part history, part dramatic recreation, part visual poem and historical fantasy, it is nothing if not a controversial project; but it has won, through years and then centuries of negotiation and struggle, the consistent, if not uniform and unreserved, support of the Historians, as well, it seems, as the general assent of the people.

Kali is not sure if she’s really up to this. Her head is full of dinner conversation, and that conversation was full of hints and possibilities. But she has allowed herself to be swept along. John seems quite eager that she should see some part of this epic work. And as they have made their way into the Theater Park, they have gathered first a tail and then a crowd, her “odd note” apparently suitable for a diversion. They make their way into one of the smaller enclosures, and John assumes the role of host and Historian as perhaps a hundred Harmonians settle themselves in for the show.

“Each showing is individualized, within certain limits. For fairly conventional history, you can choose an individual or event, or a year, and then COSMOS will provide you with further options. Multiple and complex queries may spin out other sorts of storylines. Small crowds sometimes “play” the film, like a piano piece for multiple hands or a musical ensemble. But I doubt anyone here would begrudge you a chance to pick on your own this time.”

“2005.”

“Phrase-choice.”

And at the Historian’s command a series of phrases appear in the viewing field. Some are familiar, while others seem entirely random. One, however, catches her eye.

“The Distributive Passions.”

And the film begins…