*
It’s the future. Deal with it.
Actually, as far as I’m concerned, it’s just the present, and everything I am talking about here is normal, but to your tiny, bounded and distressingly localised self my society no doubt seems like a fantasy. The seeds of it are all around you, but you’re desperate to avoid noticing them. You live in the foundation stones of a city of boundless spires, but you turn your face to the dust.
Did you know that in 2014 two rats shared one mind over a wire three thousand miles long? Have you heard that a man in Japan can read your dreams from your head with a machine? No. You sit reading news that has nothing new in it, telling yourself that because you hold in your hand some glossy skeuomorphic lozenge you are technologically au fait, and that because you know where in the endless repetition of tribal politics and fairydust economics your world is, or have consumed many of those books published in pale cream jackets by university presses, you are somehow informed about what is important.
You are not. Meaning is being made in the saccades and the interstitial spaces you ignore. When the miracles begin, you will declare that the world has taken a great leap forward, and – wearing the amazed expression of a pantomime clown – you will quote Proust as tomorrow’s children make jokes that derive their humour from puns invoking senses you do not have. You will wear your bewilderment first as modish nostalgia and then as politically charged performance art, and finally as a proud, doomed ethical position whose idiot gravity you cannot escape. You will go to your grave protesting that everyone else has misunderstood. Oh, bravo. Bravo.
By way of orientation: I am so far past the moment you consider ‘now’ that the calendar and the continents you know are both gone. The constellations you would recognise have faded as their stars burned out or the slow, inexorable motion of the galaxies shunted them into new apparent shapes from the tiny vantage point of our birth world. When people speak of the cradle of humanity, they no longer mean Africa but Earth, and like any cradle it is left behind, even lost. We’ve probably still got it somewhere, in an attic or under the stairs. Certainly we never actually meant to throw it away. But you can’t use it as interior deco for ever – sooner or later, you have to admit to yourself that those days are gone. They were gone a long, long time ago. Now, instead of your world, we have mine, and it is better. I am considered human now: you would no longer make the grade. In this new world, many people – most, in fact – exist across bodies. That is to say that their thoughts are distributed between a large number of individual brains rather than concentrated in just one. Each individual body has a little doodad in it that sends and receives messages to all the others, and because that doodad is very, very sophisticated and makes use of some properties of the universe that you probably don’t want to think about too much – even if your culture already knows about them and is starting to work with them today, now, your now – there is no lag in the communication. It’s just as if they were one enormous brain. In fact, the slowest bit is the actual biological thinking, because biology takes forever by comparison with computing.
I am not many. I am one. But I am in many places at once, and those places are very far apart. Got it?
You are little and I am big.
I hear your objection, drab and small, that the aspiring serial murderer of cosmoses is not well-placed to judge humanity. Tell me again about your time, so full of compassion and fellow feeling. No? Well, you’re right, of course. We have not transcended wickedness. Even now, in this distant reach beyond everything you know, there are bad people still. On the other hand, the commonplace sins of your time are rather quaint. We are different from you, as you are different from some cave-grubbing ape.
Somewhat different from an ape, anyway.
*
I say ‘we’ but actually the other humans of this age are not much better. I have relationships that are almost like loose friendships: I nod at the woman behind the counter, the man on the park bench – and never mind that they are present in a dozen other places, doing a dozen other things. It is polite these days to frame your discourse as if you were exclusively local. I find that odd, like making love through a hole in a sheet. With the more eccentric people I know, who feel the same way, I play games of Go across light years and smile when I lose. Go is the only game that survives futurity, because it is art as much as war.
Still, as I say, even these transcendent minds feel small to me, perhaps two-dimensional. I do like them. I just feel they’re a bit limited, is all. It’s like how it would be for you if you were still a child and your toys could talk.
In all of the worlds and places that I know, in all the babble of connected post-humanity, there’s really only one person I truly feel is like me: the mad planet called Zagreus.
Zagreus isn’t actually a planet, it’s just that the planet on which it lives is only occupied by Zagreus: a single mind inhabiting every organism living on the whole world. Z receives visitors from time to time, and provides them – myself included – with bright, clean bodies to walk around in as a practical courtesy, but it’s a temporary situation only. When you breathe there, you’re breathing Zagreus, taking in its tiny microscopic selves, and that has consequences. If you stay for too long, you start to bleed into the mosaic of consciousness that is Zagreus all around you. You see visions, hear things. Zagreus sends shoots into you – it can’t help it. I don’t object because the nature of my identity is more resilient than most, but for other people it is alarming, and even dangerous.
I am Gnomon. In the end, that statement is so fundamental that it endures. If the planet swallowed me entirely it would inevitably take on my concern – my obsession, if you like, with the extinction of all things – and in doing so it would become Gnomon. I would be changed, and I would expand, and the resulting thing would be both more me and more Z. I’m sure we’ve both considered what that would be like, the way old friends sometimes wonder if they should try to kindle a romance, but in the end it is perhaps too great a risk for either of us. Neither of us became what we are by accident.
For others … well. They might end up swallowed, inhaled, almost by accident, digested into the stew of Z’s bodymind. Even the Outbound think Z is odd, somewhere between a person and a hive. But then, who knows what they think of me? They’re not saying – at least not to my face.
Zagreus called me today for a meeting. It was like a cloud of butterflies landing on my hand: a strange, soft pressure, an unsettling invasion, an action that is inappropriate and unanticipated. Zagreus doesn’t reach out. It responds, it slumbers, it changes itself. It seems to be obsessed with models, maps and landscapes, right down to the subatomic scale – hence its peculiar physical choices: it wants to get closer to the tiny, to touch the edges of perceptible events. Molecular cognition is still grossly enormous by comparison with quanta, so Z is no doubt looking for ways to invest itself in structured energy, pico-architecture. Most people think that’s impossible, but Zagreus is Zagreus, just as I am Gnomon. We don’t need anyone else. Certainly we don’t need one another – but today Zagreus came to me. Why? For fun? To chat? Or to warn me the world is ending? It’s Zagreus, it could be anything: fungal bloom in the south continent causing some sort of longing for companionship, or an existential crisis apprehended in some unlikely vegetative mode of thinking that touches the basic fabric of the universe. It sticks out, uncomfortable in the loose mutual orbit that is our acquaintance.
No way to know except to answer the phone.
*
The ingenuity of the human mind is one of the qualities we most relish in ourselves, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we achieved new crimes as we evolved. As our technological progress first made us long-lived and then painted us in various stripes of post-mortality, so we found new ways to outrage one another and in consequence new ways to be punished. The strangest of the new sins is perhaps the one called wetjacking, or more formally in books of law ‘disconnection with intent to subsume’.
All right, if you’re still listening, let’s get to the good part, which is about crime.
Living across multiple bodies is, obviously, safer than sole-substrate existence – that’s living in one body, as you do – because it’s wildly unlikely that all your brains should be in an accident at once, especially if you make sure one or two of them are somewhere nice and secure. But this same precautionary approach of putting your eggs in a large number of baskets and distributing those baskets all over the place makes us vulnerable to the peculiar sin known as wetjacking, in which one such body is severed from its overarching mind and held incommunicado, an incapable semi-person with enough awareness to be afraid and alone. The wetjacker then takes advantage of this suggestible state to force a new, alternative connection, integrating the experience and memories of the kidnapped body into his or her own mind, stealing a fragment of personality and selfhood, and swallowing, in primitive terms, a little of the target’s soul. Espionage is sometimes conducted in this way, but wetjacking can also be motivated by simple boredom. It’s a way to get high, and in fact in some rather bohemian societies on the edge of what is termed the Continuance, it’s even a sort of rite of passage, a way of counting coup.
Different legal codes give different weight to a variety of factors in penalising the offence: the number of bodies the victim has remaining and the share of mind which has thus been taken; the brutality of the conditions in which the disconnected self is held; the motivation behind the assault; the difficulty of reintegrating the lost fragment. In one case, at least, the self, once detached from the wetjacker, spent so long in a legal limbo that it developed a unique identity and sued – successfully – to avoid returning to its original. This process is not unknown when units are accidentally separated from the whole, and is called calving, after the same phenomenon in glaciers. A calf is generally regarded as the equivalent of a child, although some see it as a belated twin.
There is a little-known negative version of wetjacking that has no formal name, and this one I find more morally intriguing. It is difficult and dangerous, and in the most profound sense self-defeating. The aspirant criminal places all base thoughts and desires in one body, slowly forcing that brain to accept memories of pain or humiliation, impulses to violence and wrongdoing, collecting all that is unwanted in a life. That body is then ejected from the connection and – mostly – euthanised. One major difficulty is that the memory of how this euthanasia is to be carried out must also be stored in the severed unit – lest the whole process be marred by the recollection of a form of self-mutilation or suicide – and therefore the criminal is first in the position of devising an appalling deathtrap for himself or herself, and then subsequently – as the severed unit – desperate to get out of it. Such collections of wicked selfhood characteristically possess more animus than ordinary lone fragments, and are therefore more aware and more capable. Daring escapes and subsequent pursuits are not unknown, and where both originator and scapegoat are identified there is a knotty question of whether they should be unwillingly reunited.
In the event that they are not, the scapegoat itself presents society with a fresh difficulty: in some few cases the interaction of different pains and rages in their new setting produces an almost saintly character (while oftentimes the thing left behind, remembering, as it were, being raised on sweetmeats and experiencing only love, will prove itself selfish and unpleasant), but for the most part the scapegoats are unbalanced and dangerous. They may assert and find a legal right to their separate existence, but their nature is to build empires, lay low nations and express their anger through the infliction of suffering on those who offend them. The possession of a multitude of physical bodies does not diminish the experience of pain – the twenty other instances of a man whose local presence is having an index finger crushed in a vise will all scream – and so scapegoats are dangerous and frightening even now. Several of modern history’s more ruthless and violent crooks have been scapegoats who somehow eluded capture and then took over someone else’s life, vanishing from society until they were ready to do something truly appalling. We’re mostly past that point now, and it’s hard to define criminality or wrongdoing in a setting where conventional human living is a pastime rather than a necessity, a sort of ongoing theatrical production in which whole populations of humans engage, but to the extent these considerations still apply, it’s one of our greatest dilemmas: what to do with those who don’t fit into the most inclusive environment of which humanity is capable?
To this quandary a solution was inevitably created: a remote place was given over to healing and transcendence, and with equal inevitability that place became a scapegoat in its own right, so that to it were sent not only criminal minds but also anyone else who did not fit, who took actions which – while in no sense illegal or immoral – were too unsettling to contemplate, who pursued thoughts or philosophies considered dangerous by those who did not share them. And finally there went also the outcasts and the drifters, by dint of that strange human gravity which at certain times appoints one place the locus of all that is odd and ill-suited, and from a bubbling pool of psychological toxins periodically ejects genius. Thus it was not only a hospital for the violently insane, but also a skunkworks, a commune and a school of art. We called it the Last House.
Until genius, strangeness, community and criminality combined in a remarkable gesture, and the whole place unified its many identities in an unprecedented melding, the assorted bad and good voluntarily surrendering the distinction between themselves to create a single mind of unheralded capacity in furtherance of a project so vast and arrogant that even persons whose physical shapes were spread across the empty night between stars, and whose perception encompassed atoms and aeons with equal facility, were beggared and appalled by its scope.
In case you haven’t realised, I’m talking about me. I am everything that was in that prison, all bound up and made whole. That’s my crime: I was born different – born out of the Dämmerung into the breaking wave of the Verständnis.
I walk an instance to the nearest transit room and touch in. White walls, clinical calm. In some places the transit rooms look like doctors’ surgeries; in others like magical stagecoaches. It’s the old debate of style and substance, minimalism and embellishment. I don’t find it exciting. A transit room gets you somewhere. It connects you. It’s a misnomer because nothing is really moved in space or time: it should be called an entanglement room. Hundreds of thousands of years down the line from our monkey ancestors, though, the subjective experience of closing your eyes in one place and opening them somewhere else still means movement to us, so there we are. A transit room is a little slice of liminal existence, I suppose, and probably quite profound, but in the real world it’s not much more exciting than a drain cover. Yes, I know: you can learn the history of industry and urbanisation from drain covers. I don’t care.
I touch in, and say: ‘Zagreus,’ and Zagreus responds by opening a way for me, meshing my entanglement with an instance that is already prepared.
It has occurred to me from time to time that Z might be an actual alien, or a machine intelligence that has crossed Recursion Gap and become truly alive. There’s something about it that goes beyond the inherent oddness of being an autophagous planetary consciousness and touches another level of wrongness, something that invokes a deep, skittering fear of the dark. Zagreus is definitely not your average bear.
I open my doors, and let the new instance flow into me and vice versa, knowing that a little part of Zagreus comes too, like flu in a closed room.
‘Hello, Z.’
Come into my parlour.
Z thinks it’s funny.
*
The name comes from the Ionian word zagre, meaning a pit for the capture of live prey. The original Zagreus was eaten by Titans and his heart, gestating in a mortal woman, became the god of wine and madness. It is safe to assume that mothers do not generally call their children ‘Zagreus’. That’s something you do to yourself, if you
want to advertise your terrible socialisation to your peers. Although it hardly needs saying once you see what Zagreus is and how it lives.
I’m in an alabaster cavern full of white bodies, still and quiet. It’s like an underwater cave full of blind fish, yet each and every one of them can see me, and knows I am not like them. Each and every one of them amounting to exactly one, in the end. I think of sea anemones on a coral reef, and clown fish nestling in their stingers, and wonder what will happen if my mucus doesn’t pass muster. Well, I’ll get stung, and it will hurt, and then I’ll be back where I was again, none the worse, save I’ll have to uproot the little bits of Z left behind in me and burn them out. Zagreus has redecorated: there are burning torches on the walls in place of electric light, and they burn with a pale flame that makes everything a little two-dimensional and strange.
I said I like Z, and I do, but that’s not to say I don’t also recognise that it’s a predator, of sorts. They had an outbreak on Marrish, a few years back. The entire north polar region became infected and started building a cave just like this one. The global militia went in and cauterised the place, and Z had to pay a lot of compensation, about which it doesn’t care at all because, being a planet and a thought innovator, it’s very rich. They still have occasional epidemics, but they’ve got a vaccine now, and it works pretty well.
The closest Zagreus says:
‘DoyoufullyunderstandthatwithinthestructureyouareinsidethethoughtofZagreusandallthatyouseeisthoughtmaderealandthatallthathappensthereisdreamingbutthatyouarefleshandfleshcanbeharmedandchangedascanmindbutthat’safarmorenebulousdiscussionfraughtwithvariablesandsubjectivejudgementsthatfranklyembodiesthepursuitofuselessknowledge?’
Not that anyone understands what that means if they haven’t been here before. ‘Yes.’
The instance shrugs, and turns away. I think Z has done something to itself since I was last here, something predictably wrong-headed. I can feel the fraying in its make-up as interference in my own stream of thoughts. I think it has essentially performed a sort of advanced corpus callosotomy on itself; it still shares its identity, its unconscious, across all its instances, but not all of them have access to each other’s immediate thoughts. It’s gone as far towards calving as it can and then arrested the process so that it can enjoy its own company, talk to itself without consciously knowing what it’s going to say next. Seduce itself. Murder itself. That’s just Z. This is something more sophisticated, more bizarre. It feels dopplered, as if it’s coming and going at the same time, compressing as it speaks and then etiolating as it listens. No. Not that. Yes, that exactly.