5 May 2012
After a long hard day at the office, testing and correcting logic structures of our Clima-Control and At-Mos organisms, I like to bathe in self pity, slowly rotting away like a month old vegetable in front of the altar of all that is evil; digital television: An interesting mind-numbing addiction. It’s funny, I purchased this box 2 months ago, and while I’ve been sitting here watching it most evenings, I have yet to find anything remotely interesting or new, save some documentaries on Red Pandas and a biography of Buddy Holly. My room is damp and dark, of the three spotlights above my head, only one continues to pour light into my life, and typically it is the light that lies directly above my head, giving me the eerie sensation that I am being abducted by highly intelligent light bulbs, or aliens, or something….
Sitting here on my ass I think: “Wow, I could actually be doing something right now, this is not life, this is chewing gum for the mind, it’s not real, it’s all just colours and radio waves and tubes and transistors”. I say nothing however, and I do not move. It’s better than work. I can remember the moment she broke my trust in reality. It’s still searing through my mind, wrapping itself around my delicate neurons, attaching itself to my nervous system. Presently I am in a state of shock, but it’s beginning to unravel into insanity. And intoxication is the cure, the disease, the question and the answer. Funny that, funny that insanity and intoxication are linked in that way, as are they linked in archetypal imagery. Synchronicity, serendipity, Dionysus, oh fair Dionysus.
She came into my life like a meteor through the atmosphere, burning and searing through me, leaving me numbed and humbled. And yet, I can’t tell if you are worthy of my innermost thoughts. Those trusted compatriots not beheld by your magic, not turned to mush by your ways, inform me that I am being naive, letting you get to me. The worst part of it is that I suspected as much. Correction, I KNEW. And I slid into your man traps anyway; I let myself be scalded by you, hoping in vain to emerge clean. But now I am worn and battered, the dullest knife in your collection. Sometimes when I sit here in the dark I feel her arms around my stomach, pulling close to me from behind. I can see myself turning around to face her, in all her beauty, her shattered heartbroken beauty.
And I remember, I remember her sitting with me smoking, talking shop about philosophy, psychology. I remember telling her about the collective unconscious, Jung, Terence McKenna, right when she was finishing her schooling in Freud. Right at the time she needed it in my view. She didn’t take it on board anyway, they never do. They think you’re being pushy, but you only want them to view the world through a somewhat similar reality tunnel. You want them to be tuned in to your wavelength but it’s impossible, because your own eyes are your own eyes, and she’ll never want to look through them. If there’s one thing she gave me it was the realisation that everyone is truly alone. Nobody has a soul mate, there is no such thing
Some people get on well, and decide to settle with each other, they have attracted their mate. However, the vast majority of relationships based around two units becoming one single soul are doomed to failure from the start, for when you bond with someone on that level; you are instantly opening yourself up to a world of pain. I felt her pain, I was her pain, and it was all I could to restrain myself from shedding tears of sympathy, as she curled herself in my arms crying. Fie, Pah, all for nothing.
I remember the ecstasy, that forgotten night, that rush of brilliance as our lips met. Chemical embrace, chance occurrence, random weird vibrations, perhaps the cosmic giggle at work, throwing me into situations that I had no idea existed, an entirely new perspective, which I had never known. Sure I had liked her, but that kiss was unlike any other. That kiss had the weight of true emotions. Or at least it seemed to, seemed to me. Robert Anton Wilson derived a language called E-prime, whereby the operator “is” would be removed from the English language. His basis for this lied in the possibility that nothing really “is”, it only seems to be, and all occurrences are merely chance non simultaneously interacting processes…Thus the kiss seemed to have the weight of true emotions to me, hapless in my blinkered state, but further study and analysis revealed it to be shallow and fake. An acute symptom of chemicals and madness, nothing more, her emotions didn’t even tip the scales. I had fallen for Dionysus, in more ways than one. I was now in the clutches of insanity and intoxication by love, and she too represented an earthly embodiment of the crazed god. I knew deep within that cracked frame, was a crying little girl.
Has it really been 15 years? Technology, increasing its formidable power at an exponential rate, gave rise first to space tourism, then to space colonisation. I remember the day they crossed the boundaries of consciousness through technology. The 21st of December 2012. The day machine became organism. It was basic at first, relatively simple experiments when compared with the consciousness development of more recent years. The first project I became involved in was creating an organism using Geneta, new development software. Once scientists finally understood the human genome, they quickly set about putting the resources in place to allow for open source development of behaviours and attributes, which were then hard coded to DNA. Simultaneously, in perfect cosmic symmetry, biologists and hardware technicians were working in cooperation on replicating entire nervous systems, brains and human tissue, resulting in the ability to create complex highly manoeuvrable androids. And after much deliberation, and a few years, the two sciences brought their results together. Life, albeit highly controlled and highly purposeful life, was birthed from the loins of their cold sterile research labs, man-machines to do the work that we don’t want to, organisms formed for our convenience. My own field of development is probably the least important field on earth. I test the organisms that control environment, a complete waste considering the development of renewable resources of late. Earth is a lot cleaner now, and the air doesn’t need to be fed the right chemicals anymore. Mars however, is a desolate wasteland. Angry and dusty and the majority of it muddy now thanks to the faulty irrigation systems.
Emigration is popular now, thanks to my work in part, mostly the people who can no longer take the earth, the fierce overpopulation, the damaged natural environment. The landfill fissures that drive deep into the earth, exposing the vile filth and waste below, are merely a macrocosm for the cracked psyche of your average earthbound human. I know that as well as anyone else here. We can have peace here. Children born here will never have to know the racial injustices, religious prejudices. They can be free, as long as I keep coding. However, they will never know the joy of life on earth, when life was joyful, and oh but so many times it was more than joyful. It was ecstatic, inebriated, lost in thought just by a glance or a smile, or the view, or the knowledge that we are connected somehow, that we are together in a way we cannot understand, but must strive to appreciate. Values and morals are not a merely a Terran responsibility of course, they are what humanity and living is all about, and perhaps we can start fresh here. As of yet there has been no crime, no murders, though that may be simply due to the harsh conditions, and the will to stick together to brave them.
Structuring processes in my head, I receive a holo-vid, Mr. Huxley my boss telling me that an office block downtown just reported a system error in one of the At-Mos organisms. “Damn squishy thing took it upon itself to try and kill off half of the Psychoanalysts and Solicitors in the building, some kind of logic unit failure, forgot what oxygen was, spews out effing co2. Go sort it, effing quickly.” Bloody hell, lucky eff’s… I race out to my jeep and bomb it across the rusty ground. I’m still living in the downtown area, until I get a raise, get out of this dump. To call it a town is to convey a far grander image than that which lies before me. It’s more of a bowl surrounded by a dust storm. The mountains and Clima-control electromagnetic shields offer protection, yet the terrain is still harsh, unreliable and unforgiving to an extreme, when driving at a ridiculous pace. Still, at least you can’t get a ticket…yet…
I enter the block and head straight for the elevator, wing a, floors 5 thru 9. Organism Epsilon is in trouble. Organisms are a lot easier to program than computers used to be. Once you give them a basic idea, a basic set of principles, they can extrapolate on this, and use their own initiative. Examining the Geneta code I see the garbled information, somehow corrupted, which prevents the organism from performing duties as normal. I wipe him clean, and then feed him new updates in the system. Last update was 7 months ago, what do the idiots expect if they don’t keep the bloody things in check? One thing that hasn’t changed since the old days, human error is cardinal.
Walking through the lobby to exit the block and race home to catch the next feed of recycled garbage on the tube, I catch something out of the corner of my eye, and my subconscious tells me to look back. And there she is. She’s walking toward the lift with a briefcase full of research, accompanied by another doctor, no doubt their discussing Jung, McKenna or Wilson, or any of the other great minds of modern psychoanalysis. She looks as beautiful now as then, soft and kind, yet something ghastly and scarred within. Maybe only I see it, maybe I’m nuts, maybe she was right, I can’t help, she doesn’t want me to, she doesn’t nee
Synchronicity. (2008) • Opuss № I